Douglas Adams obviously knew what makes an IT shop tick. In Life, the Universe, and Everything, he identified the Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field, which renders some things not so much invisible as unnoticeable.

IT departments are littered with SEPs because they make the whole tangled mess the average beleaguered IT manager has to deal with more workable. The politically astute sometimes call them “knowledge domains”, or “fields of expertise”, otherwise known as silos.

Remember Places, the Facebook Foursquare clone feature you probably didn't use? I say probably, because Facebook just axed it entirely, BI reports, admitting inevitable defeat in the check-in war. It's about time!

Nun, zunächst ist klar, dass Blog eine Abkürzung von Weblog ist, und darin ist das Wort log enthalten. Die deutsche Entsprechung Log(buch) ist ein Neutrum, und als das Wort (We)blog vor noch nicht allzulanger Zeit ins Deutsche entlehnt wurde, war es deshalb auch ein Neutrum.

Aber woher kommt dieser Trend zum Maskulinum? Nun, die semantisch motivierte Genuswahl, bei der einem Lehnwort das Genus der deutschen Entsprechung (oder des am nächsten verwandten deutschen Wortes) verpasst wird, ist nur eine von zwei Strategien. Die andere ist phonologisch: Das Lehnwort erhält das Genus eines lautlich verwandten Wortes. Das Wort Blog ist nun lautlich identisch mit dem Wort Block, beide werden [blɔk] ausgesprochen. Und Block ist ein Maskulinum. Je stärker die ursprüngliche semantische Verwandschaft zwischen Blog und Logbuch also in Vergessenheit gerät, desto mehr setzt sich die phonologisch motivierte Genuszuweisung durch.

Every time transistors shrink, they get closer to the point where they can shrink no further—for if the law continues on its merry way, transistors will be the size of individual silicon atoms within two decades.

More to the point, they have already shrunk to a size where every atom counts. Too few atoms can cause their insulation to break down, or allow current to leak to places it is not supposed to be because of a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, in which electrons vanish spontaneously and reappear elsewhere. Too many atoms of the wrong sort, though, can be equally bad, interfering with a transistor’s conductivity. Engineers are therefore endeavouring to redesign transistors yet again, so that Dr Moore’s prediction can remain true a little longer.

The Chinese government may have accidentally revealed how it secretly engages in cyber warfare.

Despite the fact that it denies that it does launch cyber attacks, a somewhat dull piece of military propaganda was screened on television which showed a Chinese military university engaged in cyberwarfare against the United States.

Samsung is claiming that Apple's insistence that Steve Jobs invented the iPad is overturned by science fiction.

According to a new filing, Samsung has opposed the preliminary injunction Apple filed for in early July. It claims that Stanley Kubrick's 1968 flick "2001: A Space Odyssey" and episodes of the British kids show "The Tomorrow People" both have designs similar to the iPad. The 2001 clip looks like it is running Android.

Kojo is a desktop application that runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac. It is a Learning Environment - with many different features that help with the exploration, learning, and teaching of concepts in the areas of:

* Computer Programming and Critical Thinking.
* Math and Science.
* Art, Music, and Creative Thinking.
* Computer and Internet Literacy.

There is a technique known as the ``Clockwise/Spiral Rule'' which enables any C programmer to parse in their head any C declaration!

Officially known as Java Platform Standard Edition 7, Java SE 7 is the first big release of Java in more than five years and the first under Oracle's stewardship. It offers improvements for running dynamic languages, programming, and file systems.

Carly Fiorina, who swept Compaq under HP's rug, is something of a crystal ball. Having her on your side, some in the industry would argue, is a sure fire sign that there is a wrong decision being made. Giving Apotheker her full backing doesn't bode well.

A play in 4 acts. Please feel free to exit along with the stage character that best represents you. Take intermissions as you see fit. Click on the stage if you have a hard time seeing it. If you get bored, you can jump to the code. Most importantly, enjoy the show!

Glitch Fiction is the false error, the point of chute, the wormhole in the timeline,the ‘what could have been’?

At the edge between science fiction and reality, a series of thought-provoking, participative and speculative design projects will be revealed.

Come, test out and experience the fringe of design for yourself. Glitch Fiction mixes activist and experimental designs in a real office of wonders. Dreams, nightmares, near realities and hyper fantasies meet in the middle to explore the implications of current and emerging technologies through the presentation of fictional scenarios, parallel worlds, extrapolated tangents, cautionary tales and design fictions.

Inspired by science and technology the following proposals use design as a medium to speculate, be critical and stimulate debate around our human relationship to science and technology in our current, alternative and imagined future everyday lives.

Jem Stansfield throws his own mobile phone in with bits of old computers and circuit boards in an attempt to create his own gold nugget but it is not an easy task - potentially lethal acids and temperatures of 1,000C are needed if the experiment is to work.

As surprising as it is, there really is no where on the internet where I found any decent instructions on how to make a grappling hook gun. Figuring it would not be that hard to make, I decided to design and make one myself. After running into many problems, obstacles, and a few prototypes, I think I finally have a really solid version that definitely will impress all who use/see/build it. Naturally there are sure to be plenty of upgrades and other ways to accomplish what I did but I will share the parts and methods I used to make this particular launcher.

DevOps (a portmanteau of development and operations) is quite the buzzword now, and the discussion yielded many attempts to define it. One thing we agreed on: Unfortunately development and operations are two organizational entities that tend not to get along very well. In this post I'll explain why DevOps represents a mental shift from "us versus them" to a more cohesive, results-oriented approach.

I propose a new rule for discussions of object-oriented programming:

Anyone who brings up examples of Dog, Bike, Car, Person,
or other real-world objects, unless they are talking about writing a
clone of The Sims or something, is immediately shot.

I feel that this new policy will improve the quality of the discourse enormously.

Wu-Gazi: Shaolin Ninja goes mosh-punk
Here’s a great combo – take hip-hop’s finest Wu-Tang Clan and post-hardcore band Fugazi and mosh them together.

Google are wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It's nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it's to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they're pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it's not a real identity to them: it's a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them. Forcing people to use their real name online won't magically induce civility: the trolls don't care. Identity, to them, is something that exists in the room with the big blue ceiling, away from the keyboard. Stuff in the glowing screen is imaginary and of no consequence.

The decline of HP began, I think, with the spinoff of Agilent Technologies in 1999. Lew Platt was running HP and he thought the company was too diversified and really needed to concentrate on computers, storage, and imaging. So everything else was spun-off into Agilent. And while this made sense at the time and even today, there were unintended consequences of that spinoff — the loss of HP’s corporate soul. You see Hewlett Packard was in 1999 an instrument company that made a hell of a lot of money from printers, not a printer company that also built instruments. Hewlett and Packard were instrument guys: had they still been on the job in 1999 they would have gone with Agilent. If Packard was still alive in 1999 I doubt that the spinoff would even have happened.

Ein breites gesellschaftliches Bündnis ruft auch heuer wieder in ganz Europa zu Aktionen und Demonstrationen für Freiheitsrechte, für einen modernen Datenschutz und für ein freies Internet auf.

Auf österreichischer Seite plant unwatched.org für Samstag, den 10. September 2011 eine Veranstaltung (#fsa11_vie) im Metalab in Wien.

Ziel ist es, unterschiedliche Organisationen und Akteure, die sich für eine freie, demokratische und offene Gesellschaft einsetzen, zusammenzubringen und über Möglichkeiten zur Stärkung der Zivilgesellschaft (in Österreich) zu diskutieren, Aktionen zu planen und Informationen auszutauschen.