Posthumous Apology For Alan Turing

Alan Turing was a mathematical genius and some would consider him a war hero for his cracking of the German Enigma machines in World War II, allowing the allies to decipher encrypted messages sent by the enemy. Turing also made significant contributions to the advancement of artificial intelligence and is well known in the field of AI for the test he envisioned would determine whether or not a machine was intelligent, The Turing Test. Unfortunately for Turing, he was also a gay man in a time when there was no acceptance for the sexual preference. Turing was imprisoned for his sexual orientation and would later take his own life.

Yesterday British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for his country's treatment of Turing saying "While Mr Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him."

The apology came after an online campaign, the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming and backed by Ian McEwan, scientist Richard Dawkins and gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

Source: BBC

Jobs Returns To The Stage At Apple

“I’m vertical, I’m back at Apple and I’m loving every day of it,” said Steve Jobs after a standing ovation by the crowd gathered at the Apple news conference held yesterday. “I feel great. I probably need to gain about 30 pounds, but I feel really good,” said Jobs in a post event interview “I’m eating like crazy. A lot of ice cream.”

During the conference Apple announced a new version of iTunes and a line of iPod Nanos that have a video camera, microphone, speaker, FM radio tuner and pedometer built in and will have a starting price of $149 US. The new features are meant to rejuvenate the slumping sales of iPods and take a bite out of the market for small video devices such as the Flip Video. The new Nano is compared in size to a package of gum while the Flip is roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.

Source: New York Times

Twitter User Celebrates 104th Birthday

Ivy Bean of Bradford, near Leeds, is an active twitter user with 27,000 followers. She tweets about the highs and lows of her life like many of the rest of us, only Ivy is 104 years old and is believed to be the oldest active Twitter user. Ms Bean tweets from the care home where she lives, Hillside Manor, "We're trying to do something different than knitting or crochet," says Pat Wright, the home's manager.

Before Twitter, Ivy was an active Facebook user, where she had maxed out her 5,000-friend limit.

Source: CNN

9-9-09 Preview Beatles: Rock Band

In this G4 tv's XPlay video Blair Herter talks to John Drake from Harmonix about the upcoming 'Beatles: Rock Band,' On sale tomorrow 09-09-09! Can't wait...

Video Game - E3 2009 - X-Play

Space Junk Explained

With the recent near miss, within a mile, of the International Space Station (ISS) by a large piece of space junk I decided to do a little searching regarding how much junk is out there and how dangerous it is to orbiting craft. The Science Channel produced a short video of the subject that does a good job of explaining. Check it out here: http://science.discovery.com/videos/spaced-out-space-junk.html

HTC Hero - Android Coming Of Age?

The Telegraph.co.uk asks if the time is now for Android enabled devices. It seems as though Europe is getting on board...

Microsoft Given Stay On Word Injunction - Can Sell Product During Busy Back To School Season

On August 12th a court in Texas ruled that Microsoft had infringed upon the patent of I4i, a small Toronto company, and ordered the software giant to pay $290m in damages and to stop sales of the relevant versions of Word. Microsoft then quickly filed a request to stay the injunction and asked that the courts put the appeal on a fast track so it could be heard quickly. The US court has agreed that Microsoft had met the conditions needed to grant the stay.

"We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main issues on September 23," said Kevin Kutz, a Microsoft spokesman, in a statement.

Source: BBC

NASA Tracks Bungalow Sized Space Junk Approaching ISS

NASA does not believe that a 19 square metre piece of a European Ariane 5 rocket, debris from a three year old mission, will not cause the International Space Station and space shuttle Discovery to make evasive maneuvers.

The shuttle is docked with the space station and together are currently circling the Earth at a height of 354 kilometres. The debris is easily tracked because of its size and is expected to get within three kilometres from the station, 8 kilometres closer than previously estimated. If a maneuver is required, a decision will be made during the last hour of a space walk planned for today.

Source: CBC

Gmail Outage Caused By Miscalculation

For several hours yesterday many of Gmail's 150 million users were unable to send or receive email via the service and the online community was all a twitter (couldn't resist).

"We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service," said the firm's Ben Treynor in a blog post.

"Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologise to all of you - today's outage was a big deal, and we're treating it as such."

Treynor blamed the outage on a miscalculation by system engineers who had taken some of the services servers offline for maintenance, routing the traffic to other servers which caved under the increased flow of traffic.

If you were like me, the first sign of trouble arrived in the flood of tweets about the incident on Twitter. It was bigger news than a celebrity death! At least amongst those of whom I follow.

Looking For Work? 10 Twitter Users You Should Follow

Looking for work or dealing with issues at work, Anthony Balderrama a CareerBuilder.com writer provides some guidance regarding who you should be following on Twitter and why. Balderrama's list of 10 career changing tweeters is perhaps a little self serving but what the heck... if it provides you with advice, the interview skills, or the confidence you are lacking to find that job you've been seeking, and it only costs you a 140 characters, it's a steal! Find the list here.