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Submission + - Historians Rediscover Einstein's Forgotten Model of the Universe

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In 1931, after a 3- month visit to the US , Einstein penned a little known paper that attempted to show how his theory of general relativity could account for some of the latest scientific evidence. In particular, Einstein had met Edwin Hubble during his trip and so was aware of the latter's data indicating that the universe must be expanding. The resulting model is of a universe that expands and then contracts with a singularity at each end. In other words, Einstein was studying a universe that starts with a big bang and ends in a big crunch. What's extraordinary about the paper is that Einstein misspells Hubble's name throughout and makes a number of numerical errors in his calculations. That's probably because he wrote the paper in only 4 days, say the historians who have translated it into English for the time. This model was ultimately superseded by the Einstein-de Sitter model published the following year which improves on this in various ways and has since become the workhorse of modern cosmology.
IBM

MS-DOS Is 30 Years Old Today 433

Posted by CmdrTaco from the for-some-unit-of-measure dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Thirty years ago, on July 27 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for $25,000. QDOS, otherwise known as 86-DOS, was designed by SCP to run on the Intel 8086 processor, and was originally thrown together in just two months for a 0.1 release in 1980 (thus the name). Meanwhile, IBM had planned on powering its first Personal Computer with CP/M-86, which had been the standard OS for Intel 8086 and 8080 architectures at the time, but a deal could not be struck with CP/M's developer, Digital Research. IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools — and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed."
Google

Google Grabbed Locations of Phones, PCs 230

Posted by Soulskill from the gift-that-keeps-on-giving dept.
1800maxim writes "As it turns out, Google didn't only grab the hotspot SSIDs and MAC addresses with its Street View cars. As this article at CNET notes, Google also recorded location data of computers using wireless cards, as well as cell phones and other Wi-Fi devices. Google's explanation is that the data collection was accidental, and they declined to answer further questions from CNET."
Android

Apple Delays Release of LGPL WebKit Code 209

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hey-now-wait-a-minute dept.
jfruhlinger writes "Ever since Apple forked the KHTML project to create WebKit, the rendering engine at the core of Safari, the company has been a good open source citizen, releasing the code back to the community after updates. But that suddenly stopped in March, with no code releases for the last two updates to the iOS version of the browser, for reasons unknown. This might remind you of Google's failure to release the Honeycomb source code. But at least Google announced that it was holding the code back, and Android is under a license that allows for a delay; the LGPL'd WebKit isn't." Update: 05/09 21:21 GMT by S : Reader Shin-LaC points out that Apple has now released the relevant source code.
Technology

Do Gadgets Degrade Our Common Sense? 311

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stay-off-my-lawn dept.
ShelleyPortet writes "In a world where gadgets are growing more sophisticated, human behavior is changing — and not in a good way. That is what Robert Vamosi, author of When Gadgets Betray Us argues in his book, which examines the dangers of our growing dependence on technology. As gadgets develop the ability to multitask seemingly endless functions, Vamosi argues that people are increasingly unable to think for themselves. 'Instead of lifting our heads, looking around and thinking for ourselves,' Vamosi writes, some of us no longer see the world as human beings have for thousands of years and simply accept whatever our gadgets show us."
Iphone

iPad Just Another TV Set? 270

Posted by CmdrTaco from the screens-are-screens dept.
An anonymous reader writes "An iPad is just another TV set, and can be viewed just like an extra outlet. These are the words Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) has thrown toward content providers as demand for consumer viewing keeps shifting to more available sources like Roku, Apple TV, and the iPad, over providers like Netflix, and Hulu, and now Cable TV. Programmers are throwing down the gauntlet as more devices are able to stream video from a variety of providers."

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"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell

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