Imogen Heap: ‘Don’t blame the machines, it’s not their fault’
Why singer Imogen Heap wants to make electricity out of horse manure What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? I was going to say Macs, but everyone says that, so I'm going to go into geek mode. I have these wireless wrist microphones that I wear on stage – they are throat mics that I've adapted. The audio gets picked up and goes into my computer. What's great about them is that I can wander about on stage and grab any instrument – like the wine glasses I use – and the mics are in the perfect position to pick up the sound. They've completely transformed me on stage. When was the last time you used them
Excerpt from:
Imogen Heap: 'Don't blame the machines, it's not their fault'
Sir Clive Sinclair: "I don’t use a computer at all"
The entrepreneur and innovator tells Simon Garfield about inspiration, determination and why he doesn't do email… Thirty years ago this month, Clive Sinclair launched a computer that he hoped would change the world. In the majority of cases it only changed the way people played primitive computer games, but it also turned a bespectacled, prematurely balding man into a hero for our times. In those dark days before Windows 7 and the iPad, the Sinclair ZX80 represented the pinnacle of affordable domestic computing. It was a flat box without a screen or proper keyboard, it had the memory of a hamster and at the back of it was something that looked like a radiator grille but was actually a strip of plastic designed to look like a radiator grille. It promised it could do "quite literally anything, from playing chess to running a power station", which was good value for something costing £79.95 in kit form and £99.95 assembled, about one fifth of the price of other home computers. Sir Clive, who was knighted for services to industry at the age of 43, will be 70 later this year. He lives in an apartment overlooking Trafalgar Square, and from his adjacent office he has a magnificent view of tourists and lions (recently he also had a view of people performing on Antony Gormley's fourth plinth, but that "got a bit boring really"). He was a household name before Sir Alan Sugar, and for a while was the unlikely future of modern electronics: a bright, hi-tech uncle rejuvenating British industry blighted by decay, unions and Thatcher. Sinclair helped transform Cambridge into the computing capital of the world, a homegrown version of Silicon Valley and Taipei, and for a couple of brilliant years he made the bestselling computers in the world
Read the original here:
Sir Clive Sinclair: "I don't use a computer at all"
Charlie Brooker | Want to read this article? Then enter your password
Forgotten your password? That'll be the 58th one you've not remembered this year, then In days of yore, we're told, people had less leisure time because everything – everything – was a protracted pain in the fundament. Want to clean that smock? Then you'll have to walk six miles carrying a pail of water back from the village well. And that's before you've tackled the laundering process itself, which consists of three hours laboriously scrubbing your soiled garment against a washboard and wringing it through a mangle. By the time you've finished, it's bedtime.
Go here to read the rest:
Charlie Brooker | Want to read this article? Then enter your password
Lenovo ThinkPad X100e | Technophile
The ThinkPad X100e has both good and bad points, depending on whether you see it as an overpriced netbook or a cut-price ThinkPad business notebook The IBM ThinkPad became the industry's premier notebook brand after the launch of the 700T in 1992, and its distinctive black styling and red TrackPoint became a noticeable part of business travel. ThinkPads were never cheap, but they were very durable, had outstanding keyboards, and you could get support and spare parts almost anywhere. Prices came down after China's Lenovo took over IBM's PC division, but the brand has managed to retain most of its value. I've been carrying ThinkPads everywhere for more than a decade, so I was delighted to see the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e when it appeared at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. It was almost love at first sight. After using one (Type 2876), I'm less impressed, and my views might have tipped too far the other way. The main problem with the X100e is trying to decide what it is.
Read the original here:
Lenovo ThinkPad X100e | Technophile
Christopher Smith: Macs are beautiful, PCs are vile | Celebrity squares
Film director Christopher Smith devours new gadgets but he won't download films as he's a sucker for DVDs What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? The thing that changed my life, and improved my life, was originally my video [player]. That idea of being able to rent movies genuinely changed me, I think. All of my filmgoing when I was a kid was watching videos. The most modern thing: I love my Sky+. I love the idea that I can use my iPhone and record stuff and having it waiting for me in a big bank. And I don't record movies – I record rubbish. When was the last time you used the Sky+ box, and what for? I used it the other day to record My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding for my wife. What additional features would you add if you could? I wouldn't change a thing, I just love it. I think it's perfect as it is. Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time
More here:
Christopher Smith: Macs are beautiful, PCs are vile | Celebrity squares
Will an algorithm pick you for your next coding job?
The former CTO of Dopplr has hacked together an algorithm to find the best (open source and public) coders in whatever location he's in. A taste of the future? Will your next job come from an algorithm? You'll have noticed that among other things you can get here at the Guardian are jobs. But the way that we find jobs is a bit outdated, isn't it? Plug in a CV, hope that someone picks it up; or alternatively, hunt through job ads trying to find something that fits your experience and skills. Wouldn't it be easier - at least in the programming field to begin with - if your job could find you? That's the possibility being held out by a recent post on Hackdiary , in which Matt Biddulph ("I'm based in Berlin. I'm a software designer and creative technologist. I work at Nokia. I was the CTO of Dopplr, a social network for frequent travellers acquired by Nokia in 2009") notes that his new job involves recruiting people for new projects in Berlin, which he's only recently moved to. The problem: how do you figure out who the people to recruit for your project are, when you're not familiar with the people in the area but need to get going? Well, one option is to analyse submissions to Github , the open source code repository used by dozens of companies and individual programmers. Biddulph explains: "When I'm hiring, one of the things I always want to see is evidence of personal projects. Over the last two years, GitHub has become an amazing treasure trove of code, with the best social infrastructure I've ever seen on a developer site. GitHub profiles let the user set their location, so I started with a few web searches for Berlin developers. This finds hundreds of interesting people, but how do I prioritise them?" Good question.
See the rest here:
Will an algorithm pick you for your next coding job?
Meedan puts machine translation into practice
A new website uses computers to translate everything between English and Arabic (and vice versa) to create a real cross-language site The Meedan wesite has been launched today, and we've covered the story in News translation website Meedan aims to improve Arabic-English relations . The site also has a YouTube video to explain how it works. An article published last year -- Will web users join forces to break the online language barrier? -- mentioned Meedan in another context, because it planned to use the Worldwide Lexicon (WWL) project's open source system. In the end, it didn't. Meedan's content and community manager George Weyman, based in London, told us: "it has some advantages, but right now we're using IBM's Machine Translation engine and the IBM Transbrowser " -- a browser-based tool for creating a translation layer on the web. IBM's sytem isn't open source, but Meedan's data -- its 'translation memory' of over 3m words -- is available to other translators. Weyman says: "the translations that are done with the Transbrowser are part of our agreement with IBM that makes sure all those translations are open source." This isn't true of some other web-based translation services, which are open access but not open source data services. The 'translation memory' is important because having a corpus of texts in two languages allows you to apply statistical techniques to improve a translation engine. One of the leading open source statistical machine translation systems is Moses , whch is funded partly by the European Commission. The project is being led by Philipp Koehn at the University of Edinburgh, and he's just written a book about the topic
Original post:
Meedan puts machine translation into practice
Kneber attack resurrects notorious Zeus Trojan, say experts
There's been a lot of noise online about the so-called "Kneber" botnet, which has compromised more than 70,000 computers and stolen thousands of pieces of data. According to reports, around 2,500 companies were hit over the last 18 months as part of a botnet first spotted by NetWitness in January. The subject - cybercrime attacks undertaken by organised gangs of hackers - has become a hot topic in recent months, not least after Google accused Chinese hackers of trying to steal information from it and a string of other companies . In fact, however, is not a brand new attack. According to Symantec, the so-called "Kneber" strike is merely the resurrection of an existing Trojan that has been known about for some time. "Kneber, in reality, is not a new threat at all, but is simply a pseudonym for the infamous and well-known Zeus Trojan," said the company. "The name Kneber simply refers to a particular group, or herd, of zombie computers, a.k.a. bots, being controlled by one owner. The actual Trojan itself is the same Trojan.Zbot, which also goes by the name Zeus, which has been being observed, analyzed and protected against for some time now." "Since Zeus/Zbot toolkits are widely available on the underground economy, it is not uncommon for attackers to create new strings, such as Kneber, of the overall Zeus botnet." We have written about Zeus before - last November two people were arrested in Manchester on suspicion of using Zeus to steal people's bank details , part of a series of systematic strikes that had led experts to claim it was "one of the most notorious pieces of malware to have been seen recently" . To be fair, NetWitness was not claiming that the Kneber attack was a new method. Indeed, in the company's white paper on the strikes (registration required) says prominently that "the format and structure of the logged data indicate a Zeus Trojan botnet". What does this mean
Read the original here:
Kneber attack resurrects notorious Zeus Trojan, say experts
Microsoft Office 2010 programs available separately
Microsoft has announced estimated retail pricing for Microsoft Office 2010 in the UK, but Cyteck only wants one application…. In response to your story about Microsoft Office 2010 priced from free , will it be possible in future to purchase Office 2010 applications as separate programs? I'm interested in Outlook, and I wonder if Ask Jack might be able to enlighten me on that. Cyteck Microsoft UK has just released estimated retail prices for separate applications, so you can assume that all of these will be available separately. Basically they all cost £119.99 each -- that's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and Access -- except for OneNote, which costs £69.99. Microsoft Software Computing Jack Schofield guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Original post:
Microsoft Office 2010 programs available separately
Kneber botnet catches 2,500 companies worldwide
About 75,000 personal computers in almost 2,500 companies and government agencies worldwide have been caught in a botnet based on a new variant of the ZeuS Trojan About 75,000 personal computers in almost 2,500 companies and government agencies across the globe have been caught in a botnet uncovered by a researcher at the US-based NetWitness network forensics firm. Hackers were able to collect logins and passwords for Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and other accounts, including online banking sites. They were also able to access some corporate servers used to store confidential data, including one used for processing credit-card payments. Companies reportedly attacked include Paramount Pictures, Merck, Juniper Networks and Cardinal Health in the US, but affected computers in more than 200 countries including Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey. The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck and Cardinal Health said they had isolated and contained the problem, and Merck said "no sensitive information was compromised". NetWitness's Alex Cox uncovered the botnet while installing monitoring software to help a large corporation deal with cyberattacks. He found a 75GB cache of data generated by the botnet, which NetWitness has called Kneber after a username linking the infected systems. NetWitness said in a statement: "Disturbingly, the data was only a one-month snapshot of data from a campaign that has been in operation for more than a year." The PCs in question, almost all running Microsoft Windows XP or Vista, had been compromised by a new variant of the well-known ZeuS Trojan, which is one of the "top five" in its class. Cox told the SearchSecurity.com site that the variant used in the latest attacks had a detection rate of less than 10% among antivirus software.
See the original post here:
Kneber botnet catches 2,500 companies worldwide