A potentially very lucrative market.
The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.
If you ever wondered why many people say the US and Europe are irrelevant targets for new and existing technology companies compared to China, just watch this Le Web interview with Hugo Barra - who recently left Google's Android team to join Chinese device maker Xiaomi. In it, he compares China's most popular internet services with their western counterparts - and 'our' services pale in comparison to China's.
The most impressive number? China now has 500 million smartphone users. Six months ago, it was 'only' 250 million. That's the scale and growth we're talking about here. I often hear people say "yeah, but China is mostly poor people with a few rich ones on top" - well, these figures prove otherwise. And the growth is far, far from over. That's why I always chuckle whenever a major western company only highlights US figures. It just means they missed that huge, fat, Chinese boat."His later life was overshadowed by his conviction for homosexual activity, a sentence we would now consider unjust and discriminatory and which has now been repealed," said Mr Grayling.
"Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man."
Finally.
USB cable developers have announced that a forthcoming version of the connector's plug is to be reversible.
It means users of the Universal Serial Bus cables will no longer have to worry which way round the part is facing when plugging it into a device.
The specification is due to be completed by mid-2014, and the first product on the market by 2016.
Spend only a few days using Apple's Lightning connector, and you'll realise how small things like it being reversible just makes life that tiny little bit less frustrating. About time USB did this.
We're excited to share Prime Air - something the team has been working on in our next generation R&D lab.
The goal of this new delivery system is to get packages into customers' hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles.
On the one hand, this is insanely cool, awesome, and scifi.
On the other hand, with timeframes like this and the big 60 Minutes reveal, it smells like a marketing trick during the holiday shopping season.
So, The New York Times has updated its style guide, and the most intriguing change - for me - is that NYT editors are now allowed to spell e-mail as 'email'.
"By popular demand, we're going to remove the hyphen from e-mail," wrote Times editor Patrick LaForge in a post on the newsroom's internal blog, he confirmed in an email. The Times had been one of the last holdouts still using the hyphenated "e-mail," a vestige of the "information superhighway" era of the Internet. The AP stylebook removed the hyphen in email in 2011. But the e- prefix is not completely dead at The Times; e-book will maintain its hyphenated status.
E-mail is actually a very problematic word in Dutch as well. Technically speaking, 'e-mail' is an abbreviation of 'electronic mail'. In Dutch, compound nouns consisting of a loose letter or acronym combined with a regular noun are always hyphenated (for instance, we write 'tv-zender', which means 'TV channel'). This means that the the noun 'e-mail' is always hyphenated in Dutch. This is where it gets interesting.
Many Dutch people, especially in casual writing, spell 'e-mail' without a hyphen. Personally, I would never do this, since correct spelling and grammar is a huge part of my job (I'm a translator with my own little translation business), but it's still quite common. This is quite problematic because 'email' without a hyphen means something completely different. 'Email', in Dutch, means 'enamel', as in tooth enamel. For language geeks such as myself, reading "Ik stuur je wel even een email" ("I'll send you an enamel") is weirdly hilarious.
The hyphenation rule regarding compound nouns with single letters or acronyms is a very solid rule in Dutch, and it's unlikely an exception will be made for e-mail.
We can go even deeper into the intricacies of the Dutch language. Obviously, 'e-mail' can function both as a noun and as a verb - which, obviously, can be conjugated. This is where the idiosyncrasies of the Dutch language really start adding up, leading to what can only be regarded as one of the biggest abominations recently added to Dutch. Here's a summarised present tense/paste tense conjugation of the Dutch verb 'e-mailen':
| ik e-mail | ik e-mailde |
| hij/zij e-mailt | hij/zij e-mailde |
| wij e-mailen | wij e-mailden |
So far, so good - this doesn't look very weird to native Dutch speakers. Now let's take a look at the past participle, used in a present perfect (as a sidenote: I'm not sure I'm using the correct English grammatical terms for all the tenses - I purposefully unlearned those years ago because I found they interfered with my instinctive ability to form proper English tenses).
| ik heb ge-e-maild |
Double hyphen! Even though this is correct, proper Dutch verb conjugation and spelling, many language experts will actually advise against using this, urging people to come up with workarounds ("Ik heb een e-mail gestuurd"; "I have sent an e-mail") instead. The weird thing is that in speech, 'ge-e-maild' sounds perfectly fine; in writing, however, it looks like you're stuttering while choking on a chili pepper. It's just... Wrong. Even though it's correct.
There are more instances like this, where the rise of computer technology and the dominance of English has spawned some seriously disturbing Dutch verb conjugations (my personal favourite: 'ge-ftp'd'). These clearly look alien and foreign to us Dutch today, and only time will tell if they ever get assimilated into Dutch spelling in such a way that they will lose their alien nature.
Efforts to reboot one of the oldest surviving mass-produced computers are under way in Milton Keynes.
The National Museum of Computing has taken delivery of what it believes is the last ICT 1301 computer to ever have a chance of working again.
Cool.
Happy Hangul Day! October 9th is a South Korean national holiday held in honor of the invention of the Korean writing system, which experts have called the most "scientific" (also "ingenious," "rational," "subtle," "simple," "efficient," "remarkable") writing system ever devised.
It's a bit outside of OSNews' regular stuff (although not unheard of), but as a language specialist myself, Korean, and Hangul in particular, has fascinated me for quite a while now. In contrast to other writing systems, which have developed over centuries - or millennia - without clear guidance, Hangul was more or less designed and set in stone 600 years ago, specifically for the Korean language. It is an absolutely beautiful alphabet, with a clear structure, and a unique way of organising letters - they are grouped in square morpho-syllabic blocks. To the untrained eye, Hangul may resemble e.g. Chinese characters - however, each 'character' actually consists of several letters.
Even though I'm not a programmer myself, Im pretty sure those of you who are will find Hangul fascinating. Due to its structured nature, it's incredibly easy to learn - I taught myself to read and write Hangul in a matter of days - and once you do take a few hours to grasp the basics, you'll surely come to appreciate its innate beauty and structure.
Twitter, the 200 million user microblogging service, has filed for its initial public offering. Fittingly, the only public acknowledgement came in the form of a simple tweet.
"Long-awaited"? Wait, people actually waited for this?
Must not have a lot going on in their lives.
Victoria Espinel, who until recently served as the White House's first intellectual property enforcement coordinator, will now head one of the most powerful trade groups in the tech industry. She's been tapped to become the new president and CEO of The Software Alliance (or BSA) starting September 3rd. In her new role, she'll be tasked with pushing the anti-piracy interests of major players like Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Oracle, and Intel. And while the BSA spends a large part of its time lobbying Congress and other governments to push that agenda, Espinel will be barred from engaging in such practices herself - at least initially. According to Politico, an ethics pledge Espinel took to secure her "copyright czar" position under President Obama prevents her from lobbying for at least two years.
No corruption here. Nothing to see. Move along.
The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."
During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention.
The newspaper told the government that even if they did comply, it would be pointless - all the materials related to Snowden had already been spread throughout the world, the actual editing was done in New York, the journalist in question (Greenwald) lived in Brazil - but the British government stood fast.
And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.
Yeah.
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