Decorating Natural Light on Your Home

The benefits of having abundant daylight in our homes are well documented. Studies show that students learn better, adults suffer less Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.), and older adults have less trouble moving around safely when rooms are filled with natural light. In addition to psychological and physical benefits, it is clear that living and working in naturally lit spaces generally makes us feel better.

Natural light comes into most homes through doors and windows. But if you want to add beauty, style and natural light into your home, while visually expanding rooms, consider additional daylight from skylights.
Light from above makes rooms more functional and livable. With venting skylights, kitchens become more enjoyable for families because they are brighter, cheerful and free of cooking odours, heat and moisture which escape through the opening. In bathrooms, skylights can light up a room and offer a degree of privacy impossible to achieve with vertical wall windows. As a bonus, extra decorating or storage space can be used on the wall that may have been occupied by a window.

http://www.homerenovationguide.com

In addition to the "feel good" and decorative reasons for adding light from above, homeowners will also benefit from added energy efficiency.

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Proview Escalates iPad Name

The press release continues: "To further this deception, Apple used an intermediary, Farncombe International and its Managing Director, Graham Robinson, to create an elaborate but false pretext for the purchase of Proview's IPAD trademarks. Apple created a special purpose company named IP Application Development Limited ('iPAD Ltd.'), the concealed the fact that this company was acting as an agent of Apple."
"Graham Robinson further concealed Apple's involvement by adopting a false alias, Jonathan Hargreaves, which he used when negotiating with Proview," the statement says.
Proview also claims that Apple and Robinson misled the Chinese company regarding its intentions for the trademark.
Apple would not comment on the matter, but has repeatedly reiterated the company's stance that it bought the rights to the iPad name three years ago.
Apple has also threatened to sue Proview for making misleading statements to the press that could damage Cupertino's reputation in China.
The Mac maker faces several challenges in this battle. First of all, intellectual property laws are much different and much broader in China. Apple won a case in Hong Kong, but lower courts have ruled in Proview's favor.
For more, see PCMag's full review of the iPad 2 and the slideshow below.

At issue is who owns the rights to the iPad name, which Proview has been using in China since 1998. Apple bought the rights to the brand from Proview, a computer monitor maker, in 2009, but the Chinese company claims that only applies to Taiwan, not mainland China. A court ruled in Proview's favor in December, and that reportedly led to the seizure of iPads from stores in cities throughout China.
Proview also alleges that Apple was "pressed for time" when it bought the iPad brand and alleges that Apple was "predisposed to deception" considering Apple knew Proview was against its use of "similar trademarks." 

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Windows on the iPad for Speedy

The free version of the OnLive Desktop service arrived in January. It gives you Word, Excel and PowerPoint, a few basic Windows apps (like Paint, Media Player, Notepad and Calculator), and 2 gigabytes of storage.

Plenty of apps give you stripped-down versions of Office on the iPad. But OnLive Desktop gives you the complete Windows Office suite. In Word, you can do fancy stuff like tracking changes and high-end typography. In PowerPoint, you can make slide shows that the iPad projects with all of the cross fades, zooms and animations intact.
Thanks to Microsoft’s own Touch Pack add-on, all of this works with touch-screen gestures. You can pinch and spread two fingers to zoom in and out of your Office documents. You can use Windows’ impressive handwriting recognition to enter text (although a Bluetooth keyboard works better). You can flick to scroll through a list.
Instead of clicking the mouse on things, you can simply tap, although a stylus works better than a fingertip; many of the Windows controls are too tiny for a finger to tap precisely. (On a real Windows PC, you could open the Control Panel to enlarge the controls for touch use — but OnLive’s simulated PC is lacking the Control Panel, which is one of its few downsides.)
OnLive Desktop is seamless and fairly amazing. And fast; on what other PC does Word open in one second?
But the only way to get files onto and off OnLive Desktop is using a Documents folder on the desktop. To access it, you have to visit OnLive’s Web site on your actual PC.
The news today is the new service, called OnLive Desktop Plus. It’s not free — it costs $5 a month — but it adds Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer and a 1-gigabit-a-second Internet connection. Your iPad can’t play Flash videos on the Web. Mine can.

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Love and Death Story Opinion

This might be taken to mean that a limitless future would allow for even more intensity to love than a limited one. Romantic love among immortals would open itself to an intensity that eludes our mortal race. After all, immortality opens an infinite future. And this would seem to be to the benefit of love’s passion. I think, however, that matters are quite the opposite, and that “Groundhog Day” gives us the clue as to why this is. What the film displays, if we follow this interpretive thread past the film’s plot, is not merely the necessity of time itself for love’s intensity but the necessity of a specific kind of time: time for development. The eternal return of “Groundhog Day” offered plenty of time. It promised an eternity of it. But it was the wrong kind of time. There was no time to develop a coexistence. There was instead just more of the same.
This is not true, however, and romantic love itself shows us why. Love is between two particular people in their particularity. We cannot love just anyone, even others with much the same qualities. If we did, then when we met someone like the beloved but who possessed a little more of a quality to which we were drawn, we would, in the phrase philosophers of love use, “trade up.” But we don’t trade up, or at least most of us don’t. This is because we love that particular person in his or her specificity. And what we create together, our common projects and shared emotions, are grounded in those specificities. Romantic love is not capable of everything. It is capable only of what the unfolding of a future between two specific people can meaningfully allow.
Sooner or later the paths that can be opened by the specificities of a relationship come to an end. Not every couple can, with a sense of common meaningfulness, take up skiing or karaoke, political discussion or gardening. Eventually we must tread the same roads again, wearing them with our days. This need not kill love, although it might. But it cannot, over the course of eternity, sustain the intensity that makes romantic love, well, romantic. Many readers will probably already have recognized that this lesson about love concerns not only its relationship with death, but also its relationship with life. It doesn’t take eternity for many of our romantic love’s embers to begin to dim. We lose the freshness of our shared projects and our passions, and something of our relationships gets lost along with them. We still love our partner, but we think more about the old days, when love was new and the horizons of the future beckoned us. In those cases, we needn’t look for Groundhog Day, for it will already have found us.

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Agreement on App Privacy

The announcement comes on the heels of the news that applications on smartphones routinely transmit people’s address book entries and other personal data, often without their knowledge. The practice came under scrutiny last week from members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, which regulates the use of consumer data on the Internet.

Google, which makes the Android operating system, requires developers to ask users upfront for permission to obtain their personal data, but users often are not told why developers need the data, how they plan to use it or how it will be stored. Likewise, Apple has said it prohibits and rejects any app that collects or transmits personal data without permission. But in practice, developers of some of the most popular applications for the iPhone, iPad and iPod have taken users’ contacts and transmitted them without consent.

In a statement, Ms. Harris’s office said that only 5 percent of mobile apps offer a privacy policy, leaving smartphone owners in the dark about what developers, advertisers and analytic services do with their “location, contacts, identity, messages and photos.”

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Always been to make life easier

I was but a wee lad of four years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984 and first brought a graphical user interface to the masses. “Look,” Apple said, “computers are powerful, useful tools, but they’re clumsy and inelegant. Let us show you a better way.” There was no shortage of resistance, especially from those who had gotten comfortable with typing their instructions at the blinking cursor.
Of course, the Mac was derided as a toy and not a tool for serious work, its mouse-driven approach deemed silly. While the Mac’s market share remained small in the following years, the impact of its revolutionary interface was felt throughout the world—because every subsequent personal computer operating system followed the Mac’s example.
And now, 26 years later, we’re still interacting with our computers in fundamentally the same way: a cursor-driven interface in which we point, click, drag, arrange windows, use drop-down menus, and so on. Sure, the trappings have changed, but compare your Mac running Snow Leopard today with an original Macintosh running the first version of the Mac OS and the similarities largely outweigh the differences.
While PC makers tried to push computing forward by adding extra buttons and controls to try and provide more options for telling a computer what to do, Apple went in entirely the other direction, asking itself: how do we remove a layer of abstraction between the user and the computer?
That question eventually yielded the iPhone and the culmination of Steve Jobs’s war on buttons. And it couldn’t have come at a better time for Apple. As others have suggested, I suspect that the iPad was the device Apple had long wanted to release: a touchscreen replacement for the computer interface to which we’ve all become accustomed. But launching directly into such a product, even given the resurgence of the Mac and popularity of the iPod, would have been an uphill slog.
This is the next phase of computing. Apple’s not the only one to realize it, either. The approach of Google’s Chrome OS is pretty different from what Apple is doing with the iPad, but it’s not hard to see that it’s aiming at the same target: making computing easier for the average user. I wager that we’ll see a touchscreen tablet running Chrome OS within a year of the software’s release, though I am skeptical of how effective that combination will be.
The iPad won’t kill the computer any more than the graphical user interface did away with the command line (it’s still there, remember?), but it is Apple saying once again that there’s a better way. Regardless of how many people buy an iPad, it’s not hard to look forward a few years and imagine a world where more and more people are interacting with technology in this new way. Remember: even if it often seems to do just the opposite, the ultimate goal of technology has always been to make life easier.http://www.macworld.com

Apple Ipad

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