Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging. This is perfectly sufficient,
he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. Perfectly sufficient
In 1969, an aeronautical engineer at North American Rockwell http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30456930/: Every hour, he was being overpaid by roughly 2 cents, or one-third of 1 percent of his pay. Spurred by an incentive program that rewarded employees for finding wasteful spending, Walter T Davey submitted the discovery to his superiors and suggested a simple fix. It was so simple to correct,
said Davey, a 79-year-old retired Air Force colonel now living in Newport Coast, California, just change a few digits in the coding software
. A surreal experience followed: For decades, Davey has attempted to correct a calculation that he believes has cost taxpayers several billion dollars. He has alerted contractors, legislators, and federal auditors — all to no avail, even though a 1981 federal report seemed to confirm his calculations. Through it all, he said, no one has challenged the numbers
From the end of May, eBay Australia is trimming the time you have to complain if goods don’t match their description from 60 days to 45 days. Granted, if you did receive goods that didn’t match what you’d seen described online, you probably shouldn’t wait two months to make a complaint. Nonetheless, it still seems a less-than-generous move, especially given that you have to wait 10 days to lodge a complaint anyway
Google and 47 other international corporations have been sued in a US District Court for trademark infringement over their use of the word Android
. To Google, Android is the name of its open-source, Linux-based operating system for phones and mobile devices that it introduced in November of 2007. To Erich Specht, a software developer and internet applications service provider in the Village of Palatine, Illinois, Android is the part of the name of his company, Android Data, for which he was granted a trademark in October of 2002 by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Google applied for a trademark for Android in October of 2007, but had that application denied in February of 2008. The USPTO’s reasoning for the denial was simple: Since both Google and Specht were involved in the development of software and related services, consumers are likely to conclude that the goods are related and originate from a single source
. Google countered in August, claiming that the trademark Android Data hadn’t been used for over three years, that the company has been dissolved for over four years, and that there couldn’t be any confusion between the two names
Before Google came on the scene, book scanning was a tedious process that sometimes resulted in the death of a book. The software used to scan books, called Optical Character Recognition software or OCR for short, required each page of the book to be flat. Now anyone who’s ever opened a book knows it’s next to impossible for a book to lie flat without some sort of device. Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately. No more broken bindings, no more inefficient glass plates. Google has finally figured out a way to digitise books en masse
Most often when people think of the web they think of it as a place to get new information. Companies are told they must constantly update their website while customers and citizens look for the latest updates. But because the web is relatively new, it is strongly biased towards digitally displaying and archiving new
information. What happens when the web gets older? One possibility… it could change how we study history. Again, nothing is different per se — the same old research methods will be used — but what if it is 10 times easier to do, a 100 times faster and contains with a million time the quantity of information? With the archives of newspapers, blogs and other web sites readily available to be searched the types of research once reserved for only the most diligent and patient might be more broadly accessible
The Iranian government, more than almost any other, censors what citizens can read online, using elaborate technology to block millions of Web sites offering news, commentary, videos, music and, until recently, Facebook and YouTube. Search for women
in Persian and you’re told, Dear Subscriber, access to this site is not possible.
Last July, on popular sites that offer free downloads of various software, an escape hatch appeared. The computer program allowed Iranian Internet users to evade government censorship. College students discovered the key first, then spread it through e-mail messages and file-sharing. By late autumn more than 400,000 Iranians were surfing the uncensored Web. The software was created not by Iranians, but by Chinese computer experts volunteering for the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has beem suppressed by the Chinese government since 1999. They maintain a series of computers in data centers around the world to route Web users’ requests around censors’ firewalls
StudiVZ is a Facebook-style operation and is Germany’s largest web-based social networking site. With the European Parliament elections in sight, the web site recently opened up to established political parties for election campaigning. Not for all parties though, as they chose to ban the Pirate Party
Apparently the Kindle app for iPhone wasn’t enough for Amazon. Monday it was announced on Lexcycle’s blog that the online retailer purchased the company which includes the popular iPhone eBook reader Stanza. According to the Lexcycle blog, there will be no changes to the Stanza application or it’s function as the result of the acquisition. They imply that they hope they will be able to offer more books and services through the Amazon connection
Adding small amounts of metal to spider silk — a material already stronger and lighter than steel — makes it up to 10 times tougher. The scientists devised a way to incorporate zinc, titanium and aluminium ions into natural spider silk. They say the method could one day prove useful for creating super-strong textiles, surgical thread or even synthetic bones
Astronomers have recorded the light of a gamma-ray burst, which they believe comes from the oldest, and most distant object ever observed in the universe. At 13 billion light-years away, the burst occurred when the universe was just five per cent of its current age, or 630 million years old. This provides the first evidence that the young universe, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, was already home to exploding stars and black holes
Apple is building a significant capability to design its own computer chips, a strategy shift that the company hopes will create exclusive features for its gadgets and shield Apple’s work from rivals. The Silicon Valley trend-setter has been hiring people from many different segments of the semiconductor industry, including engineers to create multifunction chips that are used in cellphones to run software and carry out other chores. Apple could use the internally developed chips to sharply reduce the power consumption of its hit iPhone and iPod touch devices, and possibly add graphics circuitry to help its hardware play realistic game software and high-definition videos, people familiar with its plans say
Google launched a new search tool yesterday designed to help Web users find public data that is often buried in hard-to-navigate government Web sites. The tool, called Google Public Data, is the latest in the company’s efforts to make information from federal, state and local governments accessible to citizens. It’s a goal that many Washington public interest groups and government watchdogs share with President Obama, whose technology advisers are pushing to open up federal data to the public
Scientists have rendered objects invisible under near-infrared light. Unlike previous such cloaks
, the new work does not employ metals, which introduce losses of light and result in imperfect cloaking. Because the approach can be scaled down further in size, researchers say this is a major step towards a cloak that would work for visible light
The Justice Department has begun an inquiry into the antitrust implications of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its Google Book Search service
The Home Office has been accused of colluding with online ad firm Phorm on informal guidance
to the public on whether the company’s service is legal. E-mails between the ministry and Phorm show the department asking if the firm would be comforted
by its position. The messages show Phorm making changes to the guidance sought by the ministry. Lib Dem Home Affairs spokeswoman Baroness Sue Miller, who has questioned the Home Office about Phorm, said the e-mails were jaw dropping
The Swedish telecom operator Tele 2 plans to erase all data identifying its 600,000 customers, a decision that will undermine the new IPRED law and make the hunt for internet scofflaws more difficult. Starting on Tuesday, Tele 2 will destroy records of IP addresses after they’ve been processed for internal use. It’s a way to secure the customers’ privacy — and, the company likely hopes, to strengthen the ISP’s market position
Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems announced last week is reviving calls for Sun’s open-source OpenOffice.org suite to be spun out into an independent foundation. Oracle is one of the top corporate contributors to Linux and many other open-source software projects. However, that has long been overshadowed by the tens of billions of dollars Oracle reaps annually from proprietary enterprise software, as well as brazen attacks it has made on open-source stalwarts such as Red Hat
The island of Taiwan has just approved new legislation which effectively bans the use of P2P technology to facilitate the distribution of copyrighted works online. The legislation also requires ISPs to start a 3 strikes
regime for file-sharers
A disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric. The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry. But the company believes it can eventually be used in the consumer market place and home players. Blu-ray discs, which are used to store high definition movies and games, can currently hold between 25GB and 50GB. Micro-holographic discs can store more data than DVDs or Blu-ray because they store information on the disc in three dimensions, rather than just pits on the surface of the disc
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