C# 411Joseph Weizenbaum, who invented the famous “virtual psychiatrist” computer program Eliza, died from cancer on March 5 in Groben, Germany at age 85.
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Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Eliza, Weizenbaum
If you have a software startup and are looking to raise big money from venture capitalists, Silicon Valley in California is the place to be. But new data from PricewaterhouseCoopers, National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Thomson Financial shows that several cities outside Silicon Valley have the highest growth rates for startups and venture capital (VC) investments over the past decade.
Several patent reform organizations have joined forces to abolish software patents. The End Software Patents (ESP) coalition aims to eliminate patents that do not specify a physically innovative step, which would likely include many of the software patents granted today. The coalition was founded by the Free Software Foundation, Public Patent Foundation, and Software Freedom Law Center.
The ESP coalition will fight software patents on two fronts:
Tags: End Software Patents, Patents, Software, Software-Patents, USPTO
Apple’s share of the U.S. PC market jumped to 8.1% in the third quarter of 2007, a 37% increase from the previous year. One reason for Apple’s surging success is its catchy “Hello, I’m a Mac” commercials starring Justin Long as “Mac” and John Hodgman as “PC”:
As you might expect, these successful Mac vs. PC commercials have spawned a legion of spin-offs and parodies.
Senryu (literally ‘river willow’) is a Japanese form of short poetry similar to haiku, with three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. Senryu tends to be about human foibles, while haiku tends to be about nature; senryu is often cynical or darkly humorous, while haiku is serious.
Assembled from the Internet is a collection of senryu about software and computers:
Quick: How long does it take to construct one million C# objects?
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“To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.” –Paul Ehrlich
Software errors cost the U.S. economy $60 billion annually in rework, lost productivity and actual damages. We all know software bugs can be annoying, but faulty software can also be expensive, embarrassing, destructive and deadly. Following are 20 famous software “disasters” in chronological order:
