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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "On February 5, 1897, 111 years ago today, the Indiana legislature very nearly passed a bill 'introducing a new mathematical truth,' that would have erroneously established pi as the ratio 'five-fourths to four' or 3.2. The story explaining the rationale behind the bill and how they were prevented from legislating it when a real mathematician intervened is quite interesting, because the man who discovered the 'new mathematical truth' wanted to charge royalties, which could have made pi the first form of irrational property."

dillkvast writes "Nokia and Trolltech ASA today announced that they have entered into an agreement that Nokia will make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech. Trolltech, of Qt fame, anounces this in a press release on their website today. How will this affect Qt based open source projects like KDE, and is it the beginning of the end for Nokia's current S60 platform or just nervous safe-betting in reaction to Google's Android platform and Apple's iPhone entering the mobile scene."

Anders Kringstad writes "A press release this morning (CET) from both Nokia and Trolltech inform markets that Nokia is set to acquire Trolltech to accelerate their use of free and open software in handheld devices.
"Trolltech's Qt-based technology facilitate application development for multiple platforms and devices Nokia and Trolltech ASA today announced that they have entered into an agreement that Nokia will make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech".
At the opening of markets in Oslo, Norway were Trolltech is listed the stock is being traded at 16NOK, the same price the shareholders once paid when the company held it's IPO in 2005. Nokia currently controls about 66% of Trolltech.
Trolltech's popular QT powers, among other things, the KDE desktop system."
http://www.newsweb.no/newsweb/index.jsp?messageId=201563&lang=1

An anonymous reader writes "Following the success of Elephants Dream, the Blender Foundation is developing a follow-on open movie called Peach, set for completion later this year. Computerworld has up an interesting interview with Matt Ebb, lead artist from Elephants Dream (the interview is split over 5 pages). Ebb talks about the making of the world's first open movie and offers some advice to others wanting to start such a project."

Tim Danhamn writes "SmartPlanet.com, a green-focused Web site, has put up an article about the best way to recycle your old tech, including local recycling centers and reusing old technology in other ways. I'm about to upgrade to a new PC and I have a lot of old radios, MP3 players and other electronic goods lying around the house. The article though is mostly about solutions in the UK, so I want to know - what is the best way to recycle old tech in the US?"

BaCa writes to mention that a new hardware/software combination has been created by a company called ElcomSoft that will reportedly allow cryptography professionals to build cheap PCs that work like supercomputers for the specific task of retrieving lost passwords. Utilizing a combination of the CPU and the GPU the task of brute forcing a password may be reduced by as much as a factor of 25. "Until recently, graphic cards' GPUs couldn't be used for applications such as password recovery. Older graphics chips could only perform floating-point calculations, and most cryptography algorithms require fixed-point mathematics. Today's chips can process fixed-point calculations. And with as much as 1.5 Gb of onboard video memory and up to 128 processing units, these powerful GPU chips are much more effective than CPUs in performing many of these calculations."

Some small but significant details of the next major release of Windows have emerged via a presentation at the University of Illinois by Microsoft engineer Eric Traut. His presentation focuses on an internal project called "MinWin," designed to optimize the Windows kernel to a minimum footprint, and for which will be the basis for the Windows 7 kernel.

BoldAC writes "A geek physician has reviewed the medical literature that explores if a relationship exists between computer use and carpal tunnel syndrome. 'Typing at the keyboard or using the mouse for hours and hours upon end just seems like it has to be horrible for your joints, right?' His conclusions certainly seem to contradict the thinking of many: 'The current research shows that computer use has very little role in causing carpal tunnel syndrome.' It even seems that both Harvard and the Journal of the American Medical Association agree with his conclusions."

mytrip writes to mention that Nokia has agreed to buy Navteq, Chicago-based maker of digital mapping and navigational software, for $8.1 billion. "Nokia's president and chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, said that location-based services were a cornerstone of Nokia's Internet services strategy, which is part of an overall plan to expand beyond the production of cellphones into user services like photos, video, music and games."

A preview of the new version of the Python language has been released. 3.0a1 is an early alpha based on the PEPs created for what has been internally called 'Python3000', which embodies the next generation of the popular language used extensively by Google and NASA, among others. Python 3.x will be incompatible (by design) with the 2.x line, since much of the crud accumulated and deprecated over the last few years has now been removed (the 2.x versions will continue to be patched, but not enhanced). More information about the release can be found on Guido van Rossum's blog.

Pythonistas and pythoneers rejoice!

Oh, and by the way, there will be a terrible earthquake that will affect China in May of 2008. And the NY Giants will win Superbowl XLII!

The first alpha version of Python 3.0 (aka Python 3000, Python 3k) was released today. A What's New list is provided; get used to typing "print(x)" in interactive mode instead of "print x". The final release is scheduled for next August.

mestlick writes "Today AMD unveiled its 128-Bit SSE5 Instruction Set. The big news is that it includes 3 operand instructions such as floating point and integer fused multiply add and permute. AMD posted a press release and a PDF describing the new instructions."