Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
Ten years after the millennium bug scare, there's a new computer glitch hitting users of Sony's PlayStation games consoles Age: 10. Appearance: Surprisingly youthful. You do realise the millennium bug is old news? The clue's in the name. Yes, yes, but it's back! And this time it has come for our children! What are you on about? Remember how a decade ago the bug nearly destroyed civilisation? Planes were going to fall out of the sky, nuclear power stations were going to melt down, clock radios were going to wake us in the middle of the night . . . Unless we paid trillions of pounds to IT specialists . . . That's right. And all because other IT specialists had sold us computers that couldn't handle the switch from 1999 to 2000. That's the kind of organised blackmail even a banker could admire. Still, what has it got to do with 2010, especially now we're several months into it? Something very similar has hit Sony's PlayStation games consoles. On Monday, when February turned into March, millions of PS3 owners had their machines' calendars reset to 1 January 2000, and lost their high scores. Oh, the humanity! Have they been offered counselling?
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Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
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
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Imogen Heap: 'Don't blame the machines, it's not their fault'
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.
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Charlie Brooker | Want to read this article? Then enter your password
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
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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
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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
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Microsoft Office 2010 programs available separately
HP boosts computer industry with rising profit
The technology industry breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday, after the world's largest computer manufacturer, Hewlett Packard, announced a 20% jump in quarterly profit. The Californian company said that revenues and income had risen significantly from this time last year, in what many saw as the strongest sign yet that the economic slump's impact on technology spending was almost over. Revenues for the first quarter of 2010 were up 8% to $31.2bn (£19.9bn), with profits rising to $2.3bn - up from $1.9bn a year ago. The company also said it was expecting more signs of recovery in the coming year, with projected earnings narrowly ahead of expectations. "HP is well-positioned to outperform the market," said chairman and chief executive Mark Hurd, who has worked to cut costs at the company since taking over in 2005. The growth largely came from HP's computer and printer manufacturing businesses, as consumers - who had been reticent about purchasing during the downturn - started buying again. While figures released by industry analysts Gartner suggested that shipments in western Europe were flat, the company experienced what Hurd called "accelerating market momentum". That could be partially due to the impact of Microsoft's Windows 7, which launched last autumn and gave many PC manufacturers a boost by encouraging shoppers to purchase new hardware. The company's services business - which expanded significantly in 2008 with the $12.6bn purchase of EDS - did not enjoy a revival, however, with revenue falling by 1%. HP's results will please investors and analysts, but they have not been without its costs. The company has cut tens of thousands of jobs in the past two years, including 25,000 as a direct result of the EDS acquisition, and plans a further 8,600 by October. Last month more than 1,000 HP staff who work for the Department of Work and Pensions took strike action in protest at job losses. Shares rose marginally in after hours trading, to 50.12.
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HP boosts computer industry with rising profit
European PC market has perked up, led by Acer
The PC industry had a tough time last year, but sales in Western Europe were higher in unit terms in the fourth quarter, says Gartner. And with consumers buying notebooks and netbooks, this year should be better Western Europe's PC shipments grew by 4% to 20.2m units in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to Gartner figures released today . Shipments for the year were flat at 64.8m units, but could have been worse. Ranjit Atwal, a principal analyst at Gartner in the UK, said: "The Western European PC market performed better than expected. Despite the tough economic conditions the consumer PC market provided vendors with a source of growth." The company that benefited most was Taiwan's Acer, which has been particularly successful with its affordable portable PCs and netbooks. It became the leading vendor in Western Europe, where its shipments grew by 33.9% to 4.7m units. In Germany, its shipments grew by 87.1% to 808,000 units.
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European PC market has perked up, led by Acer
Microsoft is cutting the cost of Office, but will more people buy it?
Office 2010 will be cheaper, which could reflect its reduced value in an era where online apps are free, or Microsoft's attempt to expand its paying customer base, or both of these and more…. Microsoft announced the UK prices for Microsoft Office 2010 this morning and, like the US prices unveiled last month, they're down. (For details, see: Microsoft Office 2010 priced from free .) There are plenty of reasons for this, though it's hard to know which have been most influential. The main ones may be the arrival of online office suites and competition from Open Office, both of which are free. Limited as they are, they must reduce the perceived value of Office, to some extent. But there has also been the huge success of the cheap Home and Student version, which you can install on three PCs. At Christmas, this was one of Amazon.com's top three best-sellers. Indeed, Microsoft says Office has been the top selling PC software product, including games, at US retail for the past seven years. That success has led to the launch of the Office Home and Business version at £239.99, which might have the same effect. That is, it could encourage more Office users to pay a reasonable price for a proper copy, rather than use a pirate version. And, to be frank, if you reckon you can't afford to pay roughly £1 a week (assuming the usual Amazon discount) for five top class programs then you're not being entirely honest with yourself. Another factor is the prospect of a reduction in the cost of packaging and distribution
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Microsoft is cutting the cost of Office, but will more people buy it?
Converting data from PDF files to Excel spreadsheets
John Haworth wants to reliably convert a lot of data from PDF files to Excel for spreadsheet analysis. I receive a lot of data in PDF format and it would be very useful to reliably convert it for spreadsheet analysis. Currently I print files then OCR scan and save them in Excel. It needs time-consuming scrutiny to ensure reliability. John Haworth There are lots of ways to get data from Adobe PDF files into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and several of them should work better than the one you are using. However, I'm not sure any of them will avoid the need for "time-consuming scrutiny to ensure reliability". The best way to do that is to get whoever publishes the data in PDF to send it to you in Excel format, or in another common format such as csv (comma-separated values). Any process that involves a conversion will generally involve some level of checking, though you should be able to decrease the level as the system proves itself. Since PDF-to-Excel conversions are economically significant (possibly saving hours of re-keying and checking), there are commercial solutions such as Cogniview's PDF2XL -- which might be your best bet -- and Blue Label Soft's PDF to Excel Converter 2.4 . A search will find more. However, before buying anything, you should try some of the free online solutions, such as Nitro's PDF to Excel Online . Zamzar, a site that offers a very wide range of conversions , has recently added PDF to Excel. Before that, you could have used it to convert PDF to text and then loaded it into Excel using the Text Import Wizard -- a process that could well be more accurate than your OCR. Incidentally, if the files are commercially sensitive, you should consult your IT department first
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Converting data from PDF files to Excel spreadsheets