Author Archives: cheng.620

Unmanned Drones

Posted on April 14, 2014 | 8 Comments

Saw this the other day on the web, thought it would be very interesting to talk about.

Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle also known as a drone that has no on board human pilot. They are usually under real-time human control. Stuffs that would be required for a human on board would not be needed for the drone. This would reduce weight for the drone and would require less motor power.

Drones can be used to hold strikes on other countries without the possibility of losing allies’ human lives when shot down. These drones can be used to kill enemy armies, buildings, and even civilian.

This raises a lot of ethical concern. What if a drone kills a lot of innocent people in places like Afghanistan. Who is at fault? the commander of the soldier? the soldier? the army? the government? “it takes a team of about 180 to run and service a Predator”

Who do you think is at blame?

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XP upgrade/Discontinue of Support

Posted on April 5, 2014 | 6 Comments

Are you still running XP?

Well if you did not know, Windows will stop supporting windows XP starting from April the 8th. A little back ground on XP. XP started release to the public on October 25th, 2001. It was preceded by Windows 2000 and Windows ME. It was succeeded by Windows Vista. Due to Vista’s terrible public reception, Windows XP was still much liked and used more by the general public until Windows 7 was released.

Windows XP has been a very stable piece of OS for a lot of users for a long time. Even now a lot of Ohio State’s departments still use XP and a lot of companies uses XP. Now is it ethical and fair for Windows to say that they will stop supporting XP? These companies that uses XP might have to update their computers unwilling just because of the stoppage of support.

What if a person has important stored information on their XP computer, but suddenly next thing they know, they have viruses on their computer. What can they do? Maybe they can bring it into a computer shop to take a look at it, but what if It is so broken that the shop can’t fix it, only Windows can. Is it ethical for Windows to say: Well I’m sorry we don’t support XP anymore, your on your own.

What do you guys think?

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CyanogenMod

Posted on February 19, 2014 | 2 Comments

CyanogenMod is an open source OS(Operating System) for android based tablet and smartphones. All of its code can be found on a common open source site, Github. Common neat features CyanogenMod has are supportsare  native theming support, FLAC audio codec support, a large Access Point Name list, an OpenVPN client, revoking application permissions, support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB tethering, CPU overclocking and other performance enhancements, soft buttons and other “tablet tweaks”, toggles in the notification pull-down (such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS), apppermissions management, as well as other interface enhancements.

CyanogenMod was started by Steve Kondik who goes by the name Cyanogen. He started this project back around February 2011 with the Android 2.3 GingerBread.

Since then CyanogenMod has slowly developing. It is becoming more and more stable. There are three parallel and active major versions: CyanogenMod 10 (Android 4.1), 10.1 (Android 4.2), 10.2 (Android 4.3) and 11 (Android 4.4). Which are split into different categories such as Stable, Release Candidate, M-series and Nightlies.

This leads me to my questions, what do you guys think of CyanogenMod versus the rest of the mods out there. Is is better than the Android Stock? How does this tie in with what we are learning in class about open source? Could open source software like this be easily exploited by hackers?

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Posted by in Classroom discussion continuation, Uncategorized.