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by Shara Tibken - January 30, 2014 11:10 AM PST "Things are about to get tougher for Apple. Google late Wednesday made an unexpected announcement that it's selling Motorola Mobility to Chinese PC giant Lenovo for $2.91 billion, or less than a quarter of what it paid for the handset vendor just a couple of years ago. During the years Google owned it, Motorola lost money and market share, and the relationship caused tension between Google and the other Android vendors, particularly Samsung. It also led those other phone makers to develop their own software and services, rather than push those from Google. That amplified Android's fragmentation in the market. Overall, Google's purchase of Motorola turned out much better for iPhone maker Apple than for Google. That's now going to change. Google, sans Motorola, can go back to focusing on what it does best -- making a really great operating system and apps. It can mend its relationship with Android leader Samsung and the other vendors. And it can concentrate on unifying and streamlining the Android experience, rather than worry about bolstering its own hardware operations. All of those factors mean that Apple may not be able to win over customers as easily as it has in the past. Related stories: Google sells Motorola unit to Lenovo for $2.9B With Motorola out, can Samsung, Google be BFFs again? Apple's higher standard: How 51M iPhones is somehow disappointing Apple's iPhone 5C misses the low-cost mark By ditching Motorola, Google frees Android from distractions Behind Samsung's push to rule the world"

"Babelfish 101 (also appliable to the Google translator) Babelfish is not a little polyglot genius lurking in your computer or in cyberspace Babelfish is A computer program made of lists of words and phrases in different languages complex, but not all-covering, rules applied to these lists in order to produce translations Babelfish will not give you a publishable or even editable version of your text in another language analyse and render correctly complex sentence structures always choose the meaning you had it mind if two or more words have the same spelling confuse two words due to approximate memory Babelfish will produce apparent gibberish give you a rough idea of what someone else's original text is about Therefore, when dealing with Babelfish, you must use commonsense Don't use Babelfish to produce a translation into another language, especially if you don't know that language If you know others will use Babelfish to read you, use simple sentence structure and avoid terms that can have several meanings If you read something absurd or outrageous in a Babelfish translation, don't immediately attribute the absurdity or outrage to the author. Try to guess from the context what the author might have meant Compare what the author might have meant with what you know of Babelfish's limitations, to see if these limitations are the likely cause of the apparent absurdity or outrage be wary of commonsense The author may indeed have expressed something that would baffle you even if you both used the same language: because your cultural references are different, because s/he is using irony because (make your own list) ask when in doubt ;-)" Avevo scritto questo post su un blog del Digital Divide Network (DDN) che non c'è più. Questa è la copia salvata sull'Internet Archive il 13 agosto 2007