NO PANIC

03/11/2014

(Reuters) - A fully operational Apple computer that company co-founder Steve Jobs sold out of his parents' garage in 1976 for $600 will hit the auction block in December, where it is expected to fetch more than half a million dollars, Christie's said on Monday.

The so-called Ricketts Apple-1 Personal Computer, named after its original owner Charles Ricketts and being sold on Dec. 11, is the only known surviving Apple-1 documented as having been sold directly by Jobs, then just 21, to an individual from the Los Altos, California family home, Christie's said.

"It all started with the Apple-1 and with this particular machine," said Andrew McVinish, Christie's director of decorative arts.

"When you see a child playing with an iPad or iPhone, not too many people know that it all started with the Apple-1," he added. "So to be able to own a machine that started the digital revolution is a very powerful attraction."

The computer is being sold by Robert Luther, a Virginia collector who bought it in 2004 at a police auction of storage locker goods without knowing all the details of its history.

"I knew it had been sold from the garage of Steve Jobs in July of 1976, because I had the buyer's canceled check," Luther wrote on a kickstarter page soliciting funding for a book on the machine's history.

"My computer had been purchased directly from Jobs, and based on the buyers address on the check, he lived four miles from Jobs."

In 1999, the Ricketts Apple-1 was acquired by Bruce Waldack, an entrepreneur who had just sold his company, DigitalNation. Waldack eventually lost his fortune, left the country and died in 2007. The Ricketts Apple-1 was auctioned at a self-storage facility in Virginia, where Luther purchased it.

An Apple-1 expert serviced and started the computer, running the standard original software program, Microsoft BASIC, and an original Apple-1 Star Trek game to test it out, Christie's said.

The computer will be sold with the canceled check from the original garage purchase on July 27, 1976 made out to Apple Computer by Charles Ricketts for $600, which Ricketts later labeled as "Purchased July 1976 from Steve Jobs in his parents’ garage in Los Altos".

A second canceled check for $193 from Aug. 5, 1976 is labeled “Software NA Programmed by Steve Jobs August 1976.” The checks were used as evidence for the city of Los Altos to designate the Jobs family home on Crist Drive for eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Last month, the Henry Ford organization paid $905,000 at auction for one of the few remaining Apple-1 computers, which was more than twice the pre-sale estimate.

Fewer than 50 original Apple-1s are believed to be in existence of the few hundred originally produced.

03/11/2014

IT Leaders Struggling With Protecting Businesses: Fortinet Survey
Enterprise security decisions have reached the board level and are taken up as a primary consideration among business initiatives, says Fortinet in its new report.

01/06/2014

AMD launches Second-Gen embedded R-Series APU, CPU

01/06/2014

Print Anything from Anywhere With Google Cloud Print
Print Anything from Anywhere With Google Cloud Print
Printing at home is dead simple, and most of us don't think twice about it. But it sure is a heck of a lot easier when you can send a print job from any device, anywhere in the world to your printer at home.

16/04/2014

Heartbleed computer virus stayed undetected for 2 years


Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/heartbleed-computer-virus-stayed-undetected-for-2-years/1/355158.html

Security experts warn there is little Internet users can do to protect themselves from the recently uncovered -Heartbleed- bug that exposes data to hackers, at least not until vulnerable websites upgrade their software.

31/01/2014

31/01/2014

Water to replace ink in your printer!
BEIJING: Imagine a simple printer at your office or home that uses water instead of ink to print reams of papers.

Possible, say Chinese researchers. But the catch is not in the printer but the paper.

According to scientists at Jilin University in Changchun, China, the printed characters last for a day on a special paper that can then be re-used.

"Every time you print, it's fresh," Sean Zhang, professor of chemistry, was quoted as saying.

"We are using a commercially available inkjet printer. We just filled the cartridges with water and put it back. It's like normal printing. The magic is in the paper," Zhang, a former researcher at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Menlo Park, California, told DiscoveryNews.

This method allows the paper to be reused several times and could potentially have cheaper running costs.

How did they produce this special paper?

The team developed a special coating on the paper that responds to the water.

They were able to print various Chinese and English characters using blue, magenta gold and purple colours, using water as a key that activates the dye molecule.

"The next step is to combine colours to go black," Zhang added.

According to Kira Barton, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, "going toward more sustainable techniques of printing is helpful and beneficial".

31/01/2014

IBM Preps Talent Suite for Human Resources Tasks
IBM Preps Talent Suite for Human Resources Tasks
IBM has created a cloud-hosted software suite designed for automating and improving human resources tasks.

27/12/2013

21/11/2013

Two storms, separated by 2,000 years, resulted in the loss and recovery of one of the most amazing mechanical devices made in the ancient world.

The first storm, around 65 BC, wrecked a Roman vessel taking home loot from Asia Minor. The ship went down near the island of Antikythera, between the Greek mainland and Crete. The second storm, in 1900, forced some sponge divers to shelter near the island, where they discovered the wreck.

This led to the first major underwater archeological expedition. In addition to sculptures and other art works, an amorphous lump of bronze, later described as the Antikythera Mechanism, was found.

On examination, the bronze lump turned out to be a complex assemblage of gears, a mechanical device previously unknown in Greek civilisation. Inscribed signs of the Zodiac suggested that it was probably for astronomical rather than navigation purposes.

Several techniques were used to establish that the AM is about 2,000 years old. Carbon dating of the ship’s timber put it at about 200 BC, but the wreck could have been many decades later.

The style of amphora jars found on board implied a date between 86 BC and 60 BC. Coins found in the wreckage allowed this to be pinned down to about 65 BC.

The inscriptions on the mechanism link it to Corinth and thence to its colony at Syracuse, where Archimedes flourished. This gives an intriguing possibility that the AM was in a mechanical tradition inspired by Archimedes.

The mechanism was driven by a handle that turned a linked system of more than 30 gear wheels. Using modern imaging techniques, it is possible to count the teeth on the wheels, see which cog meshes with which and what are the gear ratios. These ratios enable us to figure out what the mechanism was computing.

The gears were coupled to pointers on the front and back of the mechanism, showing the positions of the sun, moon and planets as they moved through the zodiac. An extendable arm with a pin followed a spiral groove, like a record player stylus. A small sphere, half white and half black, indicated the phase of the moon.

Even more impressive was the prediction of solar and lunar eclipses. It was known to the Babylonians that if a lunar eclipse is observed, a similar event occurs 223 full moons later. This period of about 19 years is known as the Saros cycle. It required complex mathematical reasoning and technology to implement the cycle in the mechanism.

The mechanism could provide accurate predictions of eclipses several decades ahead. Derek de Solla Price, who analysed it in the 1960s, said the discovery was like finding an internal combustion engine in Tutankhamen’s tomb.

The Antikythera mechanism has revolutionised our thinking about the scientific legacy of the Greeks. It is like modern clockwork, but clocks were invented in medieval Europe. It shows that the Greeks came close to our technology. Had the Romans not taken charge, we might today be far in advance of our current level of technology.

All the gear ratios are now understood; there was even a dial to indicate which of the pan-Hellenic games would take place each year, with the Olympics occurring every fourth year. Just one small cog remains a mystery. Research is continuing, and more remains to be discovered about this amazing high-tech device.


Peter Lynch is professor of meteorology at University College Dublin.