ICT Treats
Quick hits
- ASCII Star Wars
- Double Robotics: Wheels for your iPad
- Ergo Desktop
- Mac Performance Guide: Apple core rot
- Nest: The learning thermostat
- TidBITS: Investigating Siri’s English accents
- Typing
file:///Will crash almost any Mac App - CBC—The Irrelevant Show: Cyberdisk
- Programmers respond to PRISM, the US data-mining program
- Android Fragmentation Visualized (July 2013)
- Newton: The Greatest Flop of All Time
- PRSM: The Sharing Network
- Threats to mobile devices using the Android operating system
- How IBM’s Watson supercomputer wins at Jeopardy
- Leap Motion Controller
- Top Products in Two Decades of Tech Reviews: Walt Mossberg’s final column in The Wall Street Journal.
- Fortran IV
- TrueCrypt: free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux
- The Woman Behind Apple’s First Icons
- X to Close: The origins of the use of [x] in UI design.
- Inside Google’s Secret Drone-Delivery Program.
Tasty reading (and viewing)
The ad ran only once, but that was sufficient for us to learn why “1984 [wouldn’t] be like 1984”: into the world of text-based, command-driven human-computer interfaces, like MS-DOS, Apple Computer Inc. (now just Apple Inc.), introduced us to Macintosh. Later that year, Apple bought all of the advertising in the special fall U.S. election issue of Newsweek—the details of which make for some interesting reading.
The One Laptop Per Child project seeks to “stimulate local grassroots initiatives designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of laptops as learning tools for children living in lesser-developed countries.” Its Give 1 Get 1 project launched on 12 November 2007.
On 6 June 2009, Tetris celebrated its 25th anniversary—and Google did too! Computerworld, a respected IT news source, has the story on CNET.
Familiar? Read how CAPTCHA—Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart—protects websites from abuse.
Happy birthday, Computer! The University of Manchester celebrated the 60th anniversary of the stored-program computer with a site dedicated to “The Baby.”
IBM provides a concise 100 Years of Magnetic Recording Milestones: 1898 to 1998, where you can learn (amongst other things) that in 1971 an IBM team invented the 8-inch (200-mm) floppy diskette—which could hold 80 KB!
Theodor Holm Nelson, Senior Fellow of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, and Visiting Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute, is “best known for coining the terms hypertext and hypermedia (1965), and pursuing a vision of world-wide hypertext from the early nineteen-sixties” (Ted Nelson: Curriculum Vitae). His Project Xanadu® remains a work in progress.
Researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University analyzed more than 300 million tweets to derive a time-lapse cartogram of the mood of the U.S. “A cartogram is a map in which the mapping variable (in this case, the number of tweets) is substituted for the true land area.”
Young women with the power and passion to make a difference, Dot Divas believe in the potential of computing to build a better world—and they know that with computer-science grads in high demand, starting U.S. salaries average nearly $58,000! You’ll want to check out “the excellent adventures of two Dot Divas trying to save the world, one keystroke at a time” in The Webisode.
Jayme Gutierrez musically reveals that sometimes it’s a lot more complicated than you’d think to clean a laptop’s fan!
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