Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Computer mouse inventor, Doug Engelbart, dies at 88 ...WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO AFFECT LIVES LIKE HE DID?........think about it!


The inventor of the computer mouse, Doug Engelbart, has died aged 88.
Engelbart developed the tool in the 1960s as a wooden shell covering two metal wheels, patenting it long before the mouse’s widespread use.
He also worked on early incarnations of email, word processing and video teleconferences at a California research institute.
The state’s Computer History Museum was notified of his death by his daughter, Christina, in an email.
Her father had been in poor health and died peacefully on Tuesday night in his sleep, she said.
Doug Engelbart was born on 30 January 1925 in Portland, Oregon, to a radio repairman father and a housewife mother.
He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and served as a radar technician during World War II.
He then worked at Nasa’s predecessor, Naca, as an electrical engineer, but soon left to pursue a doctorate at University of California, Berkeley.
His interest in how computers could be used to aid human cognition eventually led him to Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and then his own laboratory, the Augmentation Research Center.
His laboratory helped develop ARPANet, the government research network that led to the internet.
Engelbart’s ideas were way ahead of their time in an era when computers took up entire rooms and data was fed into the hulking machines on punch cards.
At a now legendary presentation that became known as the “mother of all demos” in San Francisco in 1968, he made the first public demonstration of the mouse.
At the same event, he held the first video teleconference and explained his theory of text-based links, which would form the architecture of the internet.
He did not make much money from the mouse because its patent ran out in 1987, before the device became widely used.
SRI licensed the technology in 1983 for $40,000 (£26,000) to Apple.
At least one billion computer mouses have been sold.
Engelbart had considered other designs for his most famous invention, including a device that could be fixed underneath a table and operated by the knee.
He was said to have been driven by the belief that computers could be used to augment human intellect.
Engelbart was awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize in 1997 and the National Medal of Technology for “creating the foundations of personal computing” in 2000.
Since 2005, he had been a fellow at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
He is survived by his second wife, Karen O’Leary Engelbart, and four children.

ASUU/ASUP strike: Ignore ministers’ reports, dialogue with workers, TUC charges Jonathan •As Yabatech students, others protest

In a frank message to the President, the Trade Union Congress (TUC) has called on President Goodluck Jonathan to ignore the reports of his ministers on the ongoing crises in the nations’ universities and polytechnics, declaring that the ministers will never tell him the truth about the situation in the education sector.
Rather, the congress advised the President to dialogue with the university and polytechnic teachers that are both on nationwide strikes.   “We urge President Goodluck Jonathan not to rely solely on reports from people in his cabinet who might never tell him the truth about the situation at hand. From one side of their lips they tell us that Nigeria has a robust and strong economy, and from the other side they tell us that from October, 2013 the government may have problems paying workers’ salaries/allowances. Something is definitely wrong somewhere.
“If nothing is wrong, there is no reason why an agreement that was signed in 2009 with stakeholders in the tertiary institutions is yet to be honoured four years later. This is not only preposterous, but also has a devastating and fatal consequence on sanctity of contract,” the TUC said in a statement issued on Tuesday and signed by its President, Comrade Bobboi Bala Kaigama and the Secretary-General, Comrade Musa Lawal.
The congress said it was particularly troubled taking into cognisance the abysmal performance of students in their examination and other academic endeavours, adding, “If the nation must enter the club of 20 leading countries in the world, we must begin to address these issues holistically.”
The statement said the congress was highly disturbed by the various strikes embarked upon by the ASUU and their counterparts in ASUP, saying that the strike had been brewing for four years, being a fall-out of the Federal Government’s non-implementation of some key clauses in a Memorandum of Understanding that it entered into with the lecturers in 2009.
It therefore called on the government to engage the workers, adding, “The TUC wishes to appeal to government to engage all the striking workers in a dialogue to resolve the issues at stake and give room for more conducive and optimally productive working environment.”
“The educational downslide and attendant problems must be stopped lest we find ourselves in an abyss. The government should take decisive action that will meet the legitimate needs and expectations of ASUU and ASUP.  The time to do that is now!”
MEANWHILE, angry students from Yaba College of Technology (Yabatech) and other higher institutions on Tuesday disrupted traffic along Ikorodu Road in Lagos State to protest against the continued closure of their school.
The students gathered under the umbrella of Nigeria Education Right Coalition against Commercialisation of  Education in Nigeria.0
The students were protesting the indefinite strike, embarked upon by Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and Academic Staff Union of Polytechnic (ASUP), which has been on for months now.
The visibly angry students rebuffed efforts by men of the Nigeria Police to disperse them as they chanted war songs.
Some of the students laid down on the middle of ever-busy Ikorodu road, while others were busy distributing fliers to drivers who were driving at snail speed on the other side of the road.
One of the students, who simply identified himself as Bright, while speaking with the Nigerian Tribune carpeted the Federal Government and the Minister of Education for what he described as “uncaring attitude”
When contacted , the image maker in charge of the state police command , Ngozi Braide said that she was not aware of any protest and promised to find out from the appropriate authority.

Nigeria to probe crazy 79-0, 67-0 scores!!!


NIGERIA-TRAINLAGOS, Nigeria, July 9 – Nigeria’s top football authority has suspended four teams who reported “mind-boggling” results from their play-offs matches, describing the scores of 79-0 and 67-0 as “scandalous” tallies that must be probed.
Plateau United Feeders and Police Machine FC both needed convincing wins to earn promotions to the Nigeria Nationwide League, but officials immediately rejected the eye-popping results.
In a statement, the country’s Football Federation described the scores as “a mind-boggling show of shame never previously witnessed in Nigeria.”
“Plateau United Feeders somehow manufactured a 79-0 victory over Akurba FC while Police Machine FC demolished Babayaro FC 67-0.”
Federation spokesman Ademola Olajire told AFP a deal was certainly struck among the sides, but the details, including whether any money changed hands, are not yet known.
“We are setting up an investigation. We don’t know exactly what happened. We just feel scandalised,” he said.
“The four teams involved are suspended immediately and indefinitely,” federation chairman Mike Emeh said in a statement.
Everyone involved in the Monday matches, including officials and staff at the pitch in northern Bauchi state, could face sanctions, the federation said.
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