David Smith, technology correspondent
Guardian
30 Nov 2008

The name was never meant to stick. When Doug Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute in California designed a computer controller encased in a carved-out wooden block, with wheels mounted on the underbelly, one researcher nicknamed it a 'mouse'. 'We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name,' Engelbart recalled later. 'But it didn't.'


Apple bought the mouse patent for its Macintosh in 1984, securing the success of the invention. (Photograph: Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images)

Engelbart's invention became the mouse that soared, an essential piece of computer hardware. Its 40th birthday will be celebrated next week when Engelbart returns to Stanford (now known as SRI International). The mouse was first shown to the world when he gave a presentation of a working network computer system in San Francisco on 9 December, 1968, which is still revered as 'the dawn of interactive computing'. ( >>Continued )

Programmers try to fool human interrogators

David Smith, technology correspondent
The Observer
Sunday October 5 2008


Hal, the supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. [Photograph: RGA]

Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes.

In the 'Turing test' a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be 'thinking'.

No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - 'artificial conversational entities' - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised 'thinking' machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be 'conscious' - and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off. ( >>Continued )

Seen in a review comparing Google's Chrome browser with Firefox and the new IE:

"At work, I often have 40 or 50 tabs open in Firefox, grouped in different windows depending on which topic they pertain to. Frequently, Firefox would slow down all the other applications on my computer, then seize up completely."

O_O

Maybe I am missing something here, but who really needs 50 fecking tabs open at one time?

Gary McKinnon is no terrorist – he's a UFO nerd. And the US would be wise to give him a job

By Duncan Campbell
Guardian
32 July 2008

So Gary McKinnon, the hacker who cracked the computer systems of the Pentagon and Nasa from his bedroom in north London more than seven years ago, is to be extradited to stand trial in the US. That was the ruling this week of the law lords as they departed on their summer holidays.

>>Read on

RTÉ.ie
31 July 2008

Scientists have used modern scanning technology to unlock the secrets of an ancient Greek 'computer', the Antikythera Mechanism.

The astronomical calculator, considered a technological marvel of antiquity, was also used to track dates of the ancient Olympic games, researchers reported today in the British science journal Nature (read their full story).

Experts from Britain, Greece and the United States said they have detected the word 'Olympia' on a bronze dial, as well as the names of other games in ancient Greece on the device.

The 2,100-year-old Antikythera Mechanism was recovered from an ancient shipwreck in 1901 near Antikythera, a small island off Greece's south coast.

Its insides look like a clock. About 30 bronze gears were cranked to calculate phases of the moon, eclipses and other celestial information specific to a certain date. Results were displayed on dials on the front and back of the mechanism.

Most workings of the device only came to light with recent advances in scanning technology and computer processing power. ( >>Read on )

This site has been a favourite of mine for a long time, ever since I found the fantastic 'Conjunction' [take a look! you will like it] created by the talented artist named Ryan Bliss.


Small version of 'Planitia'

Digital Blasphemy

I found a rather interesting Livejournal community called No Opt In, No Ads, which has a lot of very useful information concerning the various tools you can ustilise to make your Livejournal experience a lot more pleasant without all the shite ads they have on them now all over the place so that it is beginning to look like Myspace. :-p.

Whilst I was there, I found this link to a very useful wiki entry called Using AdBlock and AdBlock Plus for people like myself who use Firefox and other addons which block excess scripts and ads. For someone like myself on dialup, it is a real blessing, but also, it makes anyones browser more user friendly and disables other sites from tracking you and fecking with you in other important ways.

I also found, from reading the above, this wonderful page where you can subscribe to an updating list of blocks for your AdBlock Plus: Easy List Filter subscriptions. It is wonderful! It almost makes Myspace, should you have the misfortune to be a Myspace user, look civilised.

Of course, this is not to even mention the Firefox addon called NoScript. This one is indispensible.

Hashi posted an interesting application process which will make a graphic display using your posts' words and showing them in size and prominence according to how often you use them I think. You can get the link from him.

Last night I tried it 3 times, and it crashed my browsers and failed to initiate the java applet, so today I am updating my Java from 6 update 1 to 6 update 6, but I canny tell if the download and installation is stalled or what because the indicator is not doing a whole fecking lot. :-p

I am starting it over. :/

Edit: POOP on Sun and their updates.