language

Microsoft releases initial code for IronRuby

Continuing to warm up to Web developers, Microsoft released an early version of IronRuby that will let programmers write .Net applications with the Ruby language.

In tandem with the "first code drop" of IronRuby, Microsoft will be taking code contributions from outsiders, John Lam, program manager on the Common Language Runtime team at Microsoft, wrote in his blog on Monday.

Lam said that the company intends to fully release IronRuby on RubyForge and take a wider range of contributions by the end of August. The software is available under the open-source style Microsoft Permissive License.

IronRuby uses the … Read more

Powerset: Re-indexing the Web

My first thought when stepping into the Powerset offices: "Overfunded." The company, which aims to create a better search engine than Google, already has some of the search giant's trappings: fancy offices (though rented), a game room, and a victor's arrogance. Yet if the Powerset team can pull off what it's set out to do, it will indeed revolutionize search and the way people use the Web, not to mention its economics.

Only natural Powerset is "natural language search." What that means is that instead of searching the Web based on keywords, like … Read more

Sign language a step closer to phones

This is why we love technology. Sure, a lot of gadgets are made just for fashion, fetish or one-upsmanship, but every once in awhile something of socially redeeming value comes along. In this case, it's sign language on mobile phones.

Taking a generational leap beyond text messaging, the University of Washington's "MobileASL" project is working on video-compression technology that would improve transmission quality so that American Sign Language gestures would be recognizable on cell phones. "It uses skin-detection algorithms to zoom in on those specific areas in the video that contain essential movements used to … Read more

'Tower of Babel' lets you pretend you're bilingual

Is the future finally here? We've started to hear murmurs and rumbles about flying cars. Then there's all that research on the cloak of invisibility. And now, according to a BBC story, automatic translation machines that dub your speech, movie-style, could be next. Over on Digg they're extolling this in-the-works product as a "real Star Trek Universal Translator" (of course), but the scientists who are developing it are using the name "Tower of Babel." It looks like they're still having some accuracy issues, so I doubt you'll be seeing world leaders … Read more