Friday 26 October 2012

Phonetics: The Sounds of AmE

This collaborative project led by the University of Iowa is an example of the Web incredible potential. It is a tool for students (and also professionals) of Phonetics, Linguistics and foreign languages. The site contains animated libraries of the phonetic sounds of English. You can see an animated articulatory diagram, a step-by-step description and a video of the sound spoken in context. Who has not yet faced difficulties in producing English sounds? This is the right place to solve that kind of problem. However, bear in mind this is an American tool, so the results you will get are for American English.





Thursday 25 October 2012

eGlossary


The eGlossary is part of the Moving into English series by Harcourt School Publishers.
It is an important piece of instructional material especially for beginners who need to learn the most important words at their own level. You can choose the level (from 1st to 5th grade) and then you choose a letter to start your search. Finally, you see a picture with the meaning and two sentences to clarify the comprehension. 
You get the meaning, the phonetics and the word in context, from basic vocabulary to more difficult one. If you are a teacher this is a good resource to explore your students' autonomy inside and outside te classroom.

Wednesday 24 October 2012

Wordnik

Back to tools that may be useful both for teachers and students! Wordnik is an outstanding example of that... It is more than a dictionary because it brings not only the definitions you want to see, but also examples from social networks like Twitter. When you type a word you get as a result photographs from Flickr and the statistics and ocurrences of the word besides its pronunciation. Suitable for understanding the use of new words around the cyberworld. It defines itself as "the most comprehensive dictionary in the known universe". 


Monday 22 October 2012

What makes Google Google?

Credits: Simplified Pixabay License
If you are looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest - you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center.
Engineering prowess famously catapulted the 14-year-old search giant into its place as one of the world’s most successful, influential, and frighteningly powerful companies. Its constantly refined search algorithm changed the way we all access and even think about information. Its equally complex ad-auction platform is a perpetual money-minting machine. But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings—a dozen or so information palaces in locales as diverse as Council Bluffs, Iowa; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and soon Hong Kong and Singapore - where an unspecified but huge number of machines process and deliver the continuing chronicle of human experience.
This is what makes Google Google: its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day. To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.
The problem for would-be bards attempting to sing of these data centers has been that, because Google sees its network as the ultimate competitive advantage, only critical employees have been permitted even a peek inside, a prohibition that has most certainly included bards. Until now.
Steven Levy became that rarest of species: an outsider who has been inside one of the company’s data centers and seen the legendary server floor, referred to simply as “the floor.” His visit is the latest evidence that Google is relaxing its black-box policy. His hosts included Joe Kava, who’s in charge of building and maintaining Google’s data centers, and his colleague Vitaly Gudanets, who populates the facilities with computers and makes sure they run smoothly.
Urs Hölzle had never stepped into a data center before he was hired by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. A hirsute, soft-spoken Swiss, Hölzle was on leave as a computer science professor at UC Santa Barbara in February 1999 when his new employers took him to the Exodus server facility in Santa Clara. Exodus was a colocation site, where multiple companies rent floor space. Google’s “cage” sat next to servers from eBay and other blue-chip Internet companies. But the search company’s array was the most densely packed and chaotic. Brin and Page were looking to upgrade the system, which often took a full 3.5 seconds to deliver search results and tended to crash on Mondays. They brought Hölzle on to help drive the effort.
It wouldn’t be easy. Exodus was “a huge mess”. Google was not only processing millions of queries every week but also stepping up the frequency with which it indexed the web, gathering every bit of online information and putting it into a searchable format. AdWords—the service that invited advertisers to bid for placement alongside search results relevant to their wares—involved computation-heavy processes that were just as demanding as search. Page had also become obsessed with speed, with delivering search results so quickly that it gave the illusion of mind reading, a trick that required even more servers and connections. And the faster Google delivered results, the more popular it became, creating an even greater burden. Meanwhile, the company was adding other applications, including a mail service that would require instant access to many petabytes of storage. Worse yet, the tech downturn that left many data centers underpopulated in the late ’90s was ending, and Google’s future leasing deals would become much more costly.
For Google to succeed, it would have to build and operate its own data centers—and figure out how to do it more cheaply and efficiently than anyone had before. The mission was codenamed Willpower. Its first built-from-scratch data center was in The Dalles, a city in Oregon near the Columbia River.
Hölzle and his team designed the $600 million facility in light of a radical insight: server rooms did not have to be kept so cold. The machines throw off prodigious amounts of heat. Traditionally, data centers cool them off with giant computer room air conditioners, or CRACs, typically jammed under raised floors and cranked up to arctic levels. That requires massive amounts of energy; data centers consume up to 1.5 percent of all the electricity in the world.
Google realized that the so-called cold aisle in front of the machines could be kept at a relatively balmy 80 degrees or so - workers could wear shorts and T-shirts instead of the standard sweaters. Add that to the long list of Google’s accomplishments: The company broke its CRAC habit.
Google also figured out money-saving ways to cool that water. In its Belgium facility, Google uses recycled industrial canal water for the cooling; in Finland it uses seawater.
All of these innovations helped Google achieve unprecedented energy savings. The standard measurement of data center efficiency is called power usage effectiveness, or PUE. A perfect number is 1.0, meaning all the power drawn by the facility is put to use. Experts considered 2.0 - indicating half the power is wasted - to be a reasonable number for a data center. Google was getting an unprecedented 1.2.
For years Google didn’t share what it was up to. “Our core advantage really was a massive computer network, more massive than probably anyone else’s in the world,” said Jim Reese, who helped set up the company’s servers. “We realized that it might not be in our best interest to let our competitors know.”
But stealth had its drawbacks. Google was on record as being an exemplar of green practices. In 2007 the company committed formally to carbon neutrality, meaning that every molecule of carbon produced by its activities - from operating its cooling units to running its diesel generators - had to be cancelled by offsets. Maintaining secrecy about energy savings undercut that ideal: if competitors knew how much energy Google was saving, they’d try to match those results, and that could make a real environmental impact.
In 2009, at an event dubbed the Efficient Data Center Summit, Google announced its latest PUE results and hinted at some of its techniques. It marked a turning point for the industry, and now companies like Facebook and Yahoo report similar PUEs.
Make no mistake, though: the green that motivates Google involves presidential portraiture. “Of course we love to save energy,” Hölzle says. “But take something like Gmail. We would lose a fair amount of money on Gmail if we did our data centers and servers the conventional way. Because of our efficiency, we can make the cost small enough that we can give it away for free.”

Google’s breakthroughs extend well beyond energy. Indeed, while Google is still thought of as an Internet company, it has also grown into one of the world’s largest hardware manufacturers, thanks to the fact that it builds much of its own equipment.
More than a dozen generations of Google servers later, the company now takes a much more sophisticated approach. Google knows exactly what it needs inside its rigorously controlled data centers - speed, power, and good connections - and saves money by not buying unnecessary extras.
So far, though, there’s one area where Google hasn’t ventured: designing its own chips. But even that could change.
Even if you reimagine the data center, the advantage won’t mean much if you can’t get all those bits out to customers speedily and reliably. And so Google has launched an attempt to wrap the world in fiber. In the early 2000s, taking advantage of the failure of some telecom operations, it began buying up abandoned fiber-optic networks, paying pennies on the dollar. Now, through acquisition, swaps, and actually laying down thousands of strands, the company has built a mighty empire of glass.
But when you’ve got a property like YouTube, you’ve got to do even more. It would be slow and burdensome to have millions of people grabbing videos from Google’s few data centers. So Google installs its own server racks in various outposts of its network and stuffs them with popular videos. That means that if you stream, you probably aren’t getting it from Lenoir or The Dalles but from some colocation just a few miles from where you are.
Over the years, Google has also built a software system that allows it to manage its countless servers as if they were one giant entity. Its in-house developers can act like puppet masters, dispatching thousands of computers to perform tasks as easily as running a single machine.
This is tremendously empowering for the people who write Google code. Just as your computer is a single device that runs different programs simultaneously - and you don’t have to worry about which part is running which application - Google engineers can treat seas of servers like a single unit. They just write their production code, and the system distributes it across a server floor they will likely never be authorized to visit. “If you’re an average engineer here, you can be completely oblivious,” Hölzle says. “You can order x petabytes of storage or whatever, and you have no idea what actually happens.”
But of course, none of this infrastructure is any good if it isn’t reliable. Google has innovated its own answer for that problem as well - one that involves a surprising ingredient for a company built on algorithms and automation: people. At 3 am on a  winter morning, a small group of engineers begin to attack Google. First they take down the internal corporate network that serves the company’s Mountain View, California, campus. Later the team attempts to disrupt various Google data centers by causing leaks in the water pipes and staging protests outside the gates—in hopes of distracting attention from intruders who try to steal data-packed disks from the servers. They mess with various services, including the company’s ad network. They take a data center in the Netherlands offline. Then comes the coup de grâce—cutting most of Google’s fiber connection to Asia.
Turns out this is an inside job. The attackers, working from a conference room on the fringes of the campus, are actually Googlers, part of the company’s Site Reliability Engineering team, the people with ultimate responsibility for keeping Google and its services running. The attack may be fake, but it’s almost indistinguishable from reality: incident managers must go through response procedures as if they were really happening. In some cases, actual functioning services are messed with. If the teams in charge can’t figure out fixes and patches to keep things running, the attacks must be aborted so real users won’t be affected.


Source: Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) interviewed Mary Meeker in issue 20.10. in Wired via BBC Future (slightly abridged)

Friday 19 October 2012

The Scottish wish of independence

Credits: Simplified Pixabay License
The UK and Scotland have signed an agreement granting Scotland the power to hold a referendum on independence in 2014. Even these 'Loch Ness monsters' (one of the most relevant Scottish myths) are clearly against Scottish independence as they prefer Lake District in the north-west of England, in case of becoming independent from the UK.

Tuesday 16 October 2012

British Manners

Credits: "Designed by rawpixel.com / Freepik"

The British are said to be reserved in manners, dress and speech. They are famous for their politeness, self-discipline and especially for their sense of humour. Basic politeness (please, thank you, excuse me) is expected.
How to greet someone: British people are quite reserved when greeting one another. A greeting can be a bright 'Hello' 'Hi' or 'Good morning', when you arrive at work or at school.
Do stand in line: in England people like to form orderly queues (standing in line) and wait patiently for their turn e.g. boarding a bus. It is usual to queue when required, and expected that you will take your correct turn and not push in front. 'Queue jumping' is frowned upon.
Do take your hat off when you go indoors (men only): it is impolite for men to wear hats indoors especially in churches. Nowadays, it is becoming more common to see men wearing hats indoors. However, this is still seen as being impolite, especially to the older generations.
Do say "Excuse Me": if someone is blocking your way and you would like them to move, say excuse me and they will move out of your way.
Do say "Please" and "Thank you": it is very good manners to say "please" and "thank you". It is considered rude if you don't. You will notice in England that they say 'thank you” a lot.
Do cover your mouth: when yawning or coughing always cover your mouth with your hand.
Do shake hands: when you are first introduced to someone, shake their right hand with your own right hand.
Do say sorry: if you accidentally bump into someone, say 'sorry'. They probably will too, even if it was your fault! This is a habit and can be seen as very amusing by an 'outsider'.
Do Smile: a smiling face is a welcoming face.
Do open doors for other people: Men and women both hold open the door for each other. It depends on who goes through the door first.
Do not greet people with a kiss: they only kiss people who are close friends and relatives.
Avoid talking loudly in public: it is impolite to stare at anyone in public.

Monday 15 October 2012

A Continental Breakfast by 10th C

My last class of the day with 10th C (the Professional Course of Restaurant Service) gave me a reason to smile! My Students had been working the whole morning, preparing the perfect continental breakfast.
By the end of the afternoon, they surprised me with a special version of that continental breakfast that almost tasted like a "5 o'clock tea"! ;-) I really enjoyed your effort and your hard work: THANK YOU!
Credits: anacf3@gmail.com

The Union Jack and The Stars and Stripes

Credits: Simplified Pixabay License
The British flag is often called the “Union Jack

This is in fact a nautical term as a “jack” is a ship’s flag to show the ship’s nationality.
The British flag is the union of three flags in one, since it represents the crosses of the patron saints of EnglandScotland and Ireland.



Credits: Simplified Pixabay License
The American flag is usually called the “Stars and Stripes
When the first thirteen colonies proclaimed their independence, they needed an emblem of their union. Congress decided that the flag of the United States would have thirteen alternative red and white stripes and a constellation of thirteen white stars on a blue background.
Every time a new state joined the Union, a new star was added on to the blue sky. Today, when you look at the American flag, you can still count the thirteen red and white stripes which represent the original thirteen states but you have fifty stars representing the fifty states belonging to the Union today. So the stripes represent the past and the stars represent the present.

Friday 12 October 2012

Football Vocabulary

While addressing the topic sports, some students asked me to dig a little deeper into the semantic area of football. As it is the national sport in England, where the first modern set of rules for the code were established in 1863, which were a major influence on the development of the modern Laws of the Game. With over 40,000 association football clubs, England has more clubs involved in the code than any other country. England is home to, amongst others, the world's oldest association football club (Sheffield F.C.), the oldest national governing body (The Football Association), the first national team, the oldest national knockout competition (the FA Cup) and the oldest national league (The Football League). Today England's top domestic league, the Premier League, is one of the most popular and richest sports leagues in the world, and is home to some of the world's most famous football clubs. The modern global game of association football was first codified in 1863 in London, but football was played in England as far back as medieval times. The first written evidence of a football match came in about 1170.
So, let's have a close look at some specific 'football vocabulary'! Bear in mind this is only a short list, if you want to know more, you can check, for example, The Football Vocabulary Phrasebook, available for free download.
Credits: Simplified Pixabay License

Attack: to make a forceful attempt to score a goal
Attacker: a player that has possession of the ball
Away game: a game played at the opponent's ground
Away team: the team that is visiting the opponent's ground
Ball: the hollow sphere that players kick in soccer
Beat: to defeat
Captain: the player who leads and directs the other players on the field
Champions: a team that has beaten all other teams in a sporting contest
Championship: a sporting contest for the position of champion
Changing rooms: the rooms where players dress to play
Cheer: to shout in encouragement and give support
Coach: a person who trains a team
Corner kick: a restart of the game where the ball is kicked from one of the four corners of the field
Defend: to resist an attack
Defenders: the players that do not have possession of the ball
Draw: a game that ends with both teams having the same number of goals
Extra time: a further period of play added on to the game if the scores are equal
Field: the rectangular, grass area where a game is played
Field markings: the straight and curved white lines painted onto the field
FIFA: Federation Internationale de Football Association; the official body of international football
FIFA World Cup: a solid gold statue given to the champion of each World Cup tournament to keep for the next 4 years
First half: the first 45 minutes of the game, before half-time
Fit: in form, in good health
Fixture: a game played on a particular date
Fixture list: a programme of games
Forward: one of the three or four players on a team who play at the front and are responsible for most of the scoring
Foul: an unfair or invalid piece of play, against the rules
Free kick: a kick given to a player for a foul by the opposition; the player kicks the ball without any opposing players within ten feet of him
Friendly game: a game that is not part of a serious contest
Goal: a ball that crosses the goal line between the goalposts and below the crossbar, winning one point.
Goal area: the rectangular area 20 yards wide by 6 yards deep in front of each goal
Goal kick: a way of restarting the game where the ball is kicked from inside the goal area away from the goal
Goal line: the boundary or line at each end of the field
Goalkeeper: the player in front of the goal who tries to stop the other team scoring
Goal scorer: a player who puts the ball into the goal and so "scores a goal"
Half-time: the 15-minute rest period between the first half and second half
Hooligan: a violent troublemaker
Injury: a wound suffered by a player (for example: broken leg, sprained ankle)
Injury time: time added to the end of the first or second half to compensate for time lost because of player injuries
Kick: to strike or hit with the foot (also a noun)
Kick-off: the start of a game, or restart after a goal, when a player kicks the ball forwards
Linesman: the 2 officials who help the referee; they watch the sidelines and goal lines
Match: a game of football
Midfield player: the players that play behind the forwards
National team:  the team representing a particular country or nation
Opposing team: a team playing against another team
Pass: when a player kicks the ball to a teammate
Penalty area: a rectangular area in front of the goal, 44 yards wide by 18 yards deep
Penalty kick, penalty shot: a kick from the penalty spot by a player against the opposing goal keeper, awarded for the most serious violations of the rules or used in the event of a draw
Possession: control of the ball
Red card: a small card, red in colour, that the referee holds up to show that a player must leave the game for very bad behaviour
Score (verb): to put the ball into the goal and gain a point
Score (noun): the amount of goals for each team
Scorer: a player who scores or gets a goal
Scoreboard: a large panel or other display that shows the current score or number of goals for each side
Second half: the second 45 minutes of the game, after half-time
Send a player off: when the referee tells a player to leave the field for bad behaviour
Side: one of the two teams playing a game
Sideline: the line that runs along the length of the field on each side
Spectator: a person who watches a game (or other performance)
Stadium: a special sports ground with seats for spectators where football (or another game) is played
Substitute: a player who replaces another player on the field
Supporter: a spectator who supports one of the teams and wants it to win
Tackle: to try to take the ball away from another player by kicking or stopping it with the feet
Team: the members of one side
Tie: when two teams have scored the same number of goals in a game; a draw
Tiebreaker: a way of choosing the winner of a game when both teams have the same number of goals, for example by a series of penalty kicks
Underdog: a team that is not expected to win
Unsporting: behaviour rude or bad conduct
Whistle: the instrument that the referee blows to create a loud, high-pitched sound
Winger: a forward who plays to the side of the striker or strikers
World Cup: the international soccer competition between nations, organized by FIFA every 4 years
Yellow card: a small card, yellow in colour, that the referee holds up to warn a player for bad behaviour

Thursday 11 October 2012

Geography & Weather Idioms

Credits: Jim Wellington por Pixabay
We have already blogged about idioms. If you still remember, "an idiom is a combination of words that has a meaning that is different from the meanings of the individual words themselves". 
Today we are going to focus on Geography/Weather topics, which are almost an obsession for British people, especially the latter. But is there any special reason for that? To tell the truth, we don't know but the fact is that the weather is extremely unpredictable and wet in the British Isles, that's why 70% of the British check the weather forecast at least once a day and use the idiom "It's raining cats and dogs" so often!
Idiom
Meaning
Example
(on) cloud nine
extremely happy
Andrea was on cloud nine when she bought her new car.
dig deep
look hard for information
I had to dig deep to find my old report cards.
dirt cheap
very inexpensive
The clothes at the thrift shop are dirt cheap.
down to earth
natural or real (personality)
Lucile is really down to earth for a woman with so much money.
fair-weather friend
a person who is only a friend in good times
I can't talk to Nancy about my boyfriend problems. She's only a fair-weather friend.
a field day
a very enjoyable time
The kids had a field day at the water slide park.
go downhill
get progressively worse
My grades started going downhill when I got a part-time job.
go with the flow
continue in the same way as others
Nobody trained me at work. I just went with the flow.
hit the hay
go to sleep
I'm exhausted. I think I'll hit the hay early tonight.
hit the road
leave
It's getting late. We had better hit the road.
keep one's head above water
have just enough money to live
It's hard to keep my head above water with all of these medical bills.
know which way the wind blows
know how things will turn out
Who knows which way the wind will blow? I just hope Jesse gets one of the jobs he's applied for.
make a mountain out of a molehill
make a small problem seem big
The car only got a tiny dent. You're making a mountain out of a molehill.
out of the woods
clear of danger
The doctor said my heart is doing better, but I'm not out of the woods yet.
over the hill
past middle age
I knew I was over the hill when I started needing glasses to read.
rain on someone else's parade
ruin somebody else's happiness
Whenever I had a dance recital, my older brother always rained on my parade.
stick-in-the-mud
a loner or person who won't join in
They didn't bother inviting Charles to the party because he's alway a stick-in-the-mud.
(as) quick as lightning
very fast
Wow! Your shower was as quick as lightning.
the tip of the iceberg
a small part of a large problem
The lost tickets were just the tip of the iceberg.
take a raincheck
accept at a later date
I'd love to go out for dinner, but can I take a raincheck?
under the weather
ill
I was feeling under the weather so I went back to bed.
up the creek
in trouble
If my Dad finds out I had a party I'll be up the creek.
win by a landslide
win by a lot of points
The skiier in the green coat won by a landslide.
(get) wind of something
overhear something about someone or something (often gossip)
My Dad has a new girlfriend. I got wind of it over dinner tonight.

Friday 5 October 2012

The world misses you, Steve...

Credits: Charis Tsevis via FlickR

Steve Jobs died a year ago, but it is impossible for the whole world to forget about his incredible genius. Without you, Steve, it's much more difficult to "Stay hungry. Stay Foolish."
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave their unnamed son up for adoption. His father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor and his mother, Joanne Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents. As an infant, Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist. The family lived in Mountain View within California's Silicon Valley. As a boy, Steve and his father would work on electronics in the family garage. Paul would show his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby which instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in Steve. While he has always been an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. A prankster in elementary school, Jobs's fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Steve tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal that his parents declined.
Not long after Jobs did enroll at Homestead High School (1971), he was introduced to his future partner, Steve Wozniak, through a friend of Wozniak's. Wozniak was attending the University of Michigan at the time. In a 2007 interview with ABC News, Wozniak spoke about why he and Steve clicked so well: "We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips," Wozniak said. "Very few people, especially back then had any idea what chips were, how they worked and what they could do. I had designed many computers so I was way ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common interests. We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things in the world. ..." Apple Computers After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography. In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left Atari to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling the continent and experimenting with psychedelic drugs. In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computers. The duo started in the Jobs family garage, and funded their entrepreneurial venture after Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his beloved scientific calculator. Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making the machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers. Wozniak conceived a series of user-friendly personal computers, and—with Jobs in charge of marketing—Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, sales increased by 700 percent, to $139 million.
In 1980, Apple Computer became a publically traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion on the very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Scully of Pepsi-Cola to help fill the role of Apple's president.
However, the next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC dominated business world. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counter culture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM compatible. Scully believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and executives began to phase him out.
In 1985, Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO to begin a new hardware and software company called NeXT, Inc. The following year Jobs purchased an animation company from George Lucas, which later became Pixar Animation Studios. Believing in Pixar's potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of his own money into the company. Pixar Studios went on to produce wildly popular animation films such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Pixar's films have netted $4 billion. The studio merged with Walt Disney in 2006, making Steve Jobs Disney's largest shareholder.
Despite Pixar's success, NeXT, Inc. floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to mainstream America. Apple eventually bought the company in 1997 for $429 million. That same year, Jobs returned to his post as Apple's CEO.
Much like Steve Jobs instigated Apple's success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s. With a new management team, altered stock options and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. His ingenious products such as the iMac, effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.
In 2003, Jobs discovered that he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pescovegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options. For nine months Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple's board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stocks if word got out that their CEO was ill. But in the end, Jobs's confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure. In 2004, he had a successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form, in subsequent years, Jobs disclosed little about his health.
Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook, iPod,  iPhone and iPad, all of which have dictated the evolution of modern technology. Almost immediately after Apple releases a new product, competitors scramble to produce comparable technologies. In 2007, Apple's quarterly reports were the company's most impressive statistics to date. Stocks were worth a record-breaking $199.99 a share, and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion dollar profit, an $18 billion dollar surplus in the bank, and zero debt.
In 2008, iTunes became the second biggest music retailer in America-second only to Wal-Mart. Half of Apple's current revenue comes from iTunes and iPod sales, with 200 million iPods sold and six billion songs downloaded. For these reasons, Apple has been rated No. 1 in America's Most Admired Companies, and No. 1 amongst Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.
Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs's weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included a liver transplant. Jobs had responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Steve Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event September 9, 2009.
In respect to his personal life, Steve Jobs remained a private man who rarely discloses information about his family. What is known is Jobs fathered a daughter with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan when he was 23. Jobs denied paternity of his daughter Lisa in court documents, claiming he was sterile. Jobs did not initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 but, when she was a teenager, she came to live with her father.
In the early 1990s, Jobs met Laurene Powell at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They married on March 18, 1991, and lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children.
On October 5, 2011, Apple Inc. announced that co-founder Steve Jobs had died. He was 56 years old at the time of his death.



Source: Bio.TrueStory (slightly adapted)


Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address in 2005

Wednesday 3 October 2012

Turning the World Pink!

The Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, Nelson's Column and BT Tower are among London landmarks bathed in pink for breast cancer awareness. Even Tokyo Tower, Tokyo Sky Tree and the Empire State Building glowed with a rosy hue for the event which lasts through the month of October.
Campaigners want to raise awareness of the disease that still kills 12,000 women in the UK every year. In Portugal the rate is of 4 women a day. The main point is that throughout October, everyone can do something to help: from wearing it, buying it, turning it or painting it pink, through to encouraging friends and family to be more aware of the signs and symptoms - every action will help move us closer to curing the disease.

Check the Mail Online for more information and incredible shots or one of these links for more information about the disease: Pink Ribbon or Liga Portuguesa Contra o Cancro.

  • Credits: Mail Online