Happy Birthday: World Wide Web turns 20

British engineer and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) unveiled a project for organizing information  on August 6, 1991. He called it the World Wide Web and posted a short summary on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, marking the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. Today, the World Wide Web is thus 20 years old.

The World Wide Web, or just the Web as we call it today, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. In essence, users can view web pages that contain text, images, videos, and/or other multimedia with a Web browser. Navigation between them occurs via hyperlinks.

Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, used concepts from earlier hypertext systems to write a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. In November 1990, Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed to use hypertext to link and access information of various kinds.

The project was publicly introduced in December 1990 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first Web browser (which was a web editor as well), the first web server, and the first web pages, which of course described the project itself.

Of the various individual projects that went into building the Internet, the World Wide Web was one of the most significant ones that it accessible to the general public. Thank you Berners-Lee!

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44987-happy-birthday-world-wide-web-turns-20.html

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Nuance speech-to-text ?Dictation? functionality revealed in iOS 5 beta

More evidence of a speech-to-text feature that Apple is calling ?Dictation?, at least for now, has surfaced in iOS 5 beta 5. The feature will most likely be using the technology that Apple is licensing from speech company Nuance.

As you can see in the screenshot above, once the Dictation feature has been enabled, it will appear next to the global keyboard button, making the Spacebar slightly smaller. The microphone icon can be tapped, allowing you to speak into it. Once you?re done speaking the text appears in the field above.

The feature seems to be called ?Dictation? for now, according to files in iOS 5 b5, but that very well could change before the release. There is no guarantee, of course, that this feature will even make it into iOS 5, but the possibility seems strong that Apple will announce it at an event this fall where it should announce the next version of the iPhone as well.

Late last month 9to5Mac discovered references to the Nuance dictation feature in an internal settings menu, these settings seem to refer to the Dictation feature found in the iOS 5 beta and even make reference to Nuance?s name. These settings are for internal use however, so I doubt we?ll be seeing direct reference to Nuance in the final version of iOS.

Just for some background, the night before WWDC we heard from sources very close to the Nuance team involved in integration with iOS 5 and they were absolutely convinced that Apple was going to announce Nuance features built in to iOS during the keynote. That obviously did not happen. We believe that one of the demo sections showing off features of iOS was swapped in at the last minute because the Nuance integration, most likely including this ?Dictation? feature, was deemed not ready for public reveal, for whatever reason.

It seems like it is getting closer to a final product now though, and with any luck, we should be seeing this show up in the final release of iOS 5 in the fall, along with other possible features that use voice to help us control and interact with our iDevices.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/07/nuance-speech-to-text-dictation-functionality-revealed-in-ios-5-beta-5/

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How the World Wide Web was nearly called The Information Mesh

One of the many fascinating things that came out of our piece earlier on the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web?s public release is the names that were thrown around before ?World Wide Web? was settled on.

Did you know that not only was the? Information Mesh? considered but ?The Mine of Information? was also in the running? Somehow I can?t quite imagine either being said nowadays but had one of them been chosen, I also imagine I?d be writing this and smiling amusingly about something being called ?World Wide Web.?

According to WWW founder Tim Berners Lee, in his book Weaving the Web, the reason both were turned down was because ?The Information Mine? abbreviates to TIM (Berners-Lee?s first name), and ?Mine of Information? was turned down because it abbreviates to MOI which is ?Me? in French. Both were presumably far too possessive. The Information Mesh was rejected because, in Tim?s own words, ? it sounded too much like ?Mess.?

Berners Lee says World Wide Web was settled on because it:

??stressed the decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to be global of course. ?

Interestingly the first browser, also invented by Berners-Lee, was called the WorldWideWeb (no spaces). The first build was released on Christmas Day 1990 and it was already capable of downloading and displaying movies, sounds and any file type supported by the OS. Berners-Lee released the program to a number of people at CERN for testing.

Equally interesting, for you Linguaphile?s out there, is that even though worldwide is a valid English word, Berners-Lee insists it is spelled World Wide Web not Worldwide Web.

?It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym is three separate ?W?s. There are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in some places been spelled with a hyphen but the official way is without. Yes, I know that ?worldwide? is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web is three words.? he says

It?s worth noting, the WWW is just one of the many services that operate on the Internet, other services include e-mail, newsgroups and FTP. That being the case, had ?Gopher?, another service working on the Internet, and an alternative to the World Wide Web, succeeded we may have been surfing the Gopher rather than the WWW.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/08/06/how-the-world-wide-web-was-nearly-called-the-information-mesh/

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Amid Criticism on Downgrade of U.S., S.&P. Fires Back

In an unusual Saturday conference call with reporters, senior S.& P. officials insisted the ratings firm hadn?t overstepped its bounds by focusing on the political paralysis in Washington as much as fiscal policy in determining the new rating. ?The debacle over the debt ceiling continued until almost the midnight hour,? said John B. Chambers, chairman of S.& P.?s sovereign ratings committee.

Another S.& P. official, David Beers, added that ?fiscal policy, like other government policy, is fundamentally a political process.?

Administration officials at the White House and Treasury angrily criticized S.& P.?s action as based on faulty budget accounting that discounted the just-enacted deal for increasing the debt limit.

The agreement set spending caps in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 and calls for a bipartisan Congressional ?super committee? to propose more deficit reduction ? for up to $2.5 trillion in combined savings over a decade.

?The bipartisan compromise on deficit reduction was an important step in the right direction,? the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said in a statement on Saturday. ?Yet, the path to getting there took too long and was at times too divisive. We must do better to make clear our nation?s will, capacity and commitment to work together to tackle our major fiscal and economic challenges.?

The ratings agency put additional pressure on the joint Congressional committee to find additional spending cuts, tax hikes or both to bring down the inexorably rising national debt. 

Still, the posturing on Capitol Hill continued.

?Unfortunately, decades of reckless spending cannot be reversed immediately, especially when the Democrats who run Washington remain unwilling to make the tough choices required to put America on solid ground,? Speaker John A. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said in a statement.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the downgrade affirmed the need for the Democratic approach, which would combine spending cuts with tax increases.

The decision, he said, ?shows why leaders should appoint members who will approach the committee?s work with an open mind ? instead of hardliners who have already ruled out the balanced approach that the markets and rating agencies like S.& P. are demanding.?

Even as the ratings agency insisted on Saturday that its move shouldn?t have come as a shock, it reverberated around the world as political and financial leaders scrambled to assess its impact on the already troubled world economy.

China, the largest foreign holder of United States debt, said on Saturday that Washington needed to ?cure its addiction to debts? and ?live within its means,? just hours after the S.& P. downgrade.

While Europeans had girded for a possible downgrade, the news that S.& P. had actually yanked the United States? AAA rating was nonetheless received with a degree of alarm in the corridors of power across the Continent. Finance Minister François Baroin of France questioned the move Saturday, noting that the figures used by S.& P. didn?t match those of the Treasury, and overstated the federal debt by about $2 trillion.

Mr. Baroin said he found it curious that neither Moody?s nor Fitch, the two other major ratings agencies, had reached a similar conclusion. Moody?s has said it was keeping its AAA rating on the nation?s debt, but that it might still lower it.

?We have total confidence in the solidity of the American economy,? Mr. Baroin said in an interview on French radio. Nonetheless, he added, the decision confirms that the world?s most developed economies are confronted with the same urgent priorities: to lift growth and reduce public and private debt.

Jackie Calmes, Binyamin Appelbaum, Louise Story, Julie Creswell, Liz Alderman, Jack Ewing and David Barboza contributed reporting.

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A Guiding Light for Silicon Photonics

A new way of controlling the path that light takes as it passes through silicon could help overcome one of the big obstacles to making an optical, rather than electronic, computer circuit. Researchers at Caltech and the University of California, San Diego, have taken a step toward a device that prevents light signals from reflecting back and causing errors in optical circuits.

Chips that compute with light instead of electrons promise to be not only faster, but also less expensive and more energy-efficient than their conventional counterparts. But to be made economically, many believe, photonic chips must be made from silicon, using equipment already being used to build electronic microchips.

Researchers have made many of the necessary elements for a silicon photonic circuit already, including superfast modulators for encoding information onto beams of light, and detectors to read these beams.

But the way light travels through silicon remains a big problem. Light doesn't just go in one direction?it bounces around and even reflects backward, which is disastrous in a circuit. If an optical device were designed to receive two inputs and a third input reflected back in, that would cause an error. As a circuit became more complex, error-causing reflections would overwhelm it.

The Caltech and UCSD researchers have developed a silicon waveguide that causes light to behave differently depending on the direction it's traveling. The researchers, led by Caltech electrical engineering professor Axel Scherer, created a waveguide out of a long, narrow strip of silicon about 800 nanometers wide, with metal spots along the sides like bumpers. Light travels freely in one direction down the waveguide, but is bent as it travels in the opposite direction.

"This is an important breakthrough in a field where we really need a few," says Marin Solja?i?, a physics professor at MIT. Solja?i? was not involved with the work. The lack of this kind of component, he says, has been "the single biggest obstacle to the large-scale integration of optics at a similar scale to electronics."

Physicists have been wrestling with the unruly behavior of light in silicon for a long time. The new design is the result of years of theoretical work by the California researchers, as well as Solja?i?, Shanhui Fan at Stanford University, and others. Previously, researchers had only been able to get light to behave this way in magnetic materials that cannot be incorporated into silicon circuitry, says Michelle Povinelli, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California.

Solja?i? says the new waveguide is particularly significant because it was fabricated using methods used by the semiconductor industry. "This is a very important step toward large-scale optics integration," he says.

Caltech researcher Liang Feng says the team is now working on engineering a full isolator?a component that only lets light travel in one direction, instead of just bending it as it tries to travel the wrong way. He says the current work "is just the first step."

"Now it's about engineering around this fundamental discovery," says Keren Bergman, professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University. Bergman was not involved with the work.

Even after that engineering is finished, Bergman says, there's a big looming problem for silicon photonics: there's no good way to make the light sources that are needed for silicon optical processors. Solja?i? adds that a full optical computer will also need optical memory, which hasn't been made, either. However, the current work overcomes the "biggest uncertainty" that had been troubling engineers, he says. "Now, with this work, I'm feeling much better."

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=944b72097b1347e2adef473675352c18

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Happy Birthday: World Wide Web turns 20

British engineer and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) unveiled a project for organizing information  on August 6, 1991. He called it the World Wide Web and posted a short summary on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, marking the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. Today, the World Wide Web is thus 20 years old.

The World Wide Web, or just the Web as we call it today, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. In essence, users can view web pages that contain text, images, videos, and/or other multimedia with a Web browser. Navigation between them occurs via hyperlinks.

Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, used concepts from earlier hypertext systems to write a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. In November 1990, Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed to use hypertext to link and access information of various kinds.

The project was publicly introduced in December 1990 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first Web browser (which was a web editor as well), the first web server, and the first web pages, which of course described the project itself.

Of the various individual projects that went into building the Internet, the World Wide Web was one of the most significant ones that it accessible to the general public. Thank you Berners-Lee!

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44987-happy-birthday-world-wide-web-turns-20.html

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Weekend Open Forum: What if the Internet didn't exist?

Have you ever wondered what would life be like if the Internet didn't exist? The Internet as we know it had its early development in the 1960s as a point-to-point communication between mainframe computers. Then the TCP/IP protocol was standarized in the 80s, and by 1995 it was revolutionizing communication worldwide.

This tidbit of information from Wikipedia really caught my attention: "It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication, by 2000 this figure had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information was carried over the Internet."

Sure, people had already lived long and well without the Internet, just watch an episode of Mad Men and you'll get the drill, but for us, tech and computer enthusiasts that almost feels like going back to the stone age.

I remember with particular fondness the early days of connecting to the net using a dial-up modem and waiting an hour or two for the latest version of Netscape to finally download. Waking up in the early morning (4-5am) to download the latest game demos before my ISP's lines got too congested. Add to that your fair share of positive experiences using Amazon, Google, your instant messenger of choice, and most recently social networking sites and the on-the-go capabilities of today's smartphones.

But aside from all that, remove the Internet and I'd be left without TechSpot, my true and only full-time job in the past decade. Heck, without the Internet I may have become an architect or a doctor instead.

What would you do if the Internet never existed, or why not, if the Internet somehow ceased to exist? Discuss.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44986-weekend-open-forum-what-if-the-internet-didnt-exist.html

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This PR2 robot bakes chocolate cookies [Video]

This robot may look like he?s about to perform open heart surgery, dressed in head to robo-toe plastic, but he?s actually just baking chocolate cookies, Chocolate Afghans, to be exact. MIT CSAIL students programmed this PR2 robot, built by Willow Garage to identify bowls, mix ingredients, and move the dough into an oven. The bot?s slow movements (note that the video is sped up 8X) make cooking baking look quite laborious, so don?t expect robots to replace your nearest pastry chef anytime soon.

The project is supported by Willow Garage and an NDSEG fellowship. Other PR2 projects have included things like having it fetch you cold beer from the refrigerator and ringing up items as a grocery cashier.

Check out the video here:

For more robots, check out: The 10 Robots That Rocked in 2010.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/08/06/this-pr2-robot-bakes-chocolate-cookies-video/

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S.& P. Downgrades Debt Rating of U.S. for the First Time

The company, one of three major agencies that offer advice to investors in debt securities, said it was cutting its rating of long-term federal debt to AA+, one notch below the top grade of AAA. It described the decision as a judgment about the nation?s leaders, writing that ?the gulf between the political parties? had reduced its confidence in the government?s ability to manage its finances.

?The downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenge,? the company said in a statement.

The Obama administration reacted with indignation, noting that the company had made a significant mathematical mistake in a document that it provided to the Treasury Department on Friday afternoon, overstating the federal debt by about $2 trillion.

?A judgment flawed by a $2 trillion error speaks for itself,? a Treasury spokeswoman said.

The downgrade could lead investors to demand higher interest rates from the federal government and other borrowers, raising costs for governments, businesses and home buyers. But many analysts say the impact could be modest, in part because the other ratings agencies, Moody?s and Fitch, have decided not to downgrade the government at this time.

The announcement came after markets closed for the weekend, but there was no evidence of any immediate disruption. A spokesman for the Federal Reserve said the decision would not affect the ability of banks to borrow money by pledging government debt as collateral, a statement that could set the tone for the reaction of the broader market.

S.& P. had prepared investors for the downgrade announcement with a series of warnings earlier this year that it would act if Congress did not agree to increase the government?s borrowing limit and adopt a long-term plan for reducing its debts by at least $4 trillion over the next decade.

Earlier this week, President Obama signed into law a Congressional compromise that raised the debt ceiling but reduced the debt by at least $2.1 trillion.

On Friday, the company notified the Treasury that it planned to issue a downgrade after the markets closed, and sent the department a copy of the announcement, which is a standard procedure.

A Treasury staff member noticed the $2 trillion mistake within the hour, according to a department official. The Treasury called the company and explained the problem. About an hour later, the company conceded the problem but did not indicate how it planned to proceed, the official said. Hours later, S.& P. issued a revised release with new numbers but the same conclusion.

In a statement early Saturday morning, Standard & Poor?s said the difference could be attributed to a ?change in assumptions? in its methodology but that it had ?no impact on the rating decision.?

In a release on Friday announcing the downgrade, it warned that the government still needed to make progress in paying its debts to avoid further downgrades.

?The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government?s medium-term debt dynamics,? it said.

The credit rating agencies have been trying to restore their credibility after missteps leading to the financial crisis. A Congressional panel called them ?essential cogs in the wheel of financial destruction? after their wildly optimistic models led them to give top-flight reviews to complex mortgage securities that later collapsed. A downgrade of federal debt is the kind of controversial decision that critics have sometimes said the agencies are unwilling to make.

Eric Dash contributed reporting from New York.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=813d8a69f0215581681a2fe89c333279

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A Guiding Light for Silicon Photonics

A new way of controlling the path that light takes as it passes through silicon could help overcome one of the big obstacles to making an optical, rather than electronic, computer circuit. Researchers at Caltech and the University of California, San Diego, have taken a step toward a device that prevents light signals from reflecting back and causing errors in optical circuits.

Chips that compute with light instead of electrons promise to be not only faster, but also less expensive and more energy-efficient than their conventional counterparts. But to be made economically, many believe, photonic chips must be made from silicon, using equipment already being used to build electronic microchips.

Researchers have made many of the necessary elements for a silicon photonic circuit already, including superfast modulators for encoding information onto beams of light, and detectors to read these beams.

But the way light travels through silicon remains a big problem. Light doesn't just go in one direction?it bounces around and even reflects backward, which is disastrous in a circuit. If an optical device were designed to receive two inputs and a third input reflected back in, that would cause an error. As a circuit became more complex, error-causing reflections would overwhelm it.

The Caltech and UCSD researchers have developed a silicon waveguide that causes light to behave differently depending on the direction it's traveling. The researchers, led by Caltech electrical engineering professor Axel Scherer, created a waveguide out of a long, narrow strip of silicon about 800 nanometers wide, with metal spots along the sides like bumpers. Light travels freely in one direction down the waveguide, but is bent as it travels in the opposite direction.

"This is an important breakthrough in a field where we really need a few," says Marin Solja?i?, a physics professor at MIT. Solja?i? was not involved with the work. The lack of this kind of component, he says, has been "the single biggest obstacle to the large-scale integration of optics at a similar scale to electronics."

Physicists have been wrestling with the unruly behavior of light in silicon for a long time. The new design is the result of years of theoretical work by the California researchers, as well as Solja?i?, Shanhui Fan at Stanford University, and others. Previously, researchers had only been able to get light to behave this way in magnetic materials that cannot be incorporated into silicon circuitry, says Michelle Povinelli, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California.

Solja?i? says the new waveguide is particularly significant because it was fabricated using methods used by the semiconductor industry. "This is a very important step toward large-scale optics integration," he says.

Caltech researcher Liang Feng says the team is now working on engineering a full isolator?a component that only lets light travel in one direction, instead of just bending it as it tries to travel the wrong way. He says the current work "is just the first step."

"Now it's about engineering around this fundamental discovery," says Keren Bergman, professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University. Bergman was not involved with the work.

Even after that engineering is finished, Bergman says, there's a big looming problem for silicon photonics: there's no good way to make the light sources that are needed for silicon optical processors. Solja?i? adds that a full optical computer will also need optical memory, which hasn't been made, either. However, the current work overcomes the "biggest uncertainty" that had been troubling engineers, he says. "Now, with this work, I'm feeling much better."

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=944b72097b1347e2adef473675352c18

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