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And then some.

"When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn't even know who he is," says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs.

On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn't quite do justice to Ritchie's sweeping influence on the modern world.

Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on -- including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs.

CNN's GeekOut blog: Without Ritchie, you wouldn't be reading this

"Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX," Pike tells Wired. "The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on -- is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.

"It's really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did."

Even Windows was once written in C, he adds, and UNIX underpins both Mac OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, and iOS, which runs the iPhone and the iPad. "Jobs was the king of the visible, and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible," says Martin Rinard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

"Jobs' genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don't necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday."

From B to C

Dennis Ritchie built C because he and Ken Thompson needed a better way to build UNIX. The original UNIX kernel was written in assembly language, but they soon decided they needed a "higher level" language, something that would give them more control over all the data that spanned the OS. Around 1970, they tried building a second version with Fortran, but this didn't quite cut it, and Ritchie proposed a new language based on a Thompson creation known as B.

Depending on which legend you believe, B was named either for Thompson's wife Bonnie or BCPL, a language developed at Cambridge in the mid-60s. Whatever the case, B begat C.]]> 1 Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:49:55 +0400 http://asimulation.ru/technology/108-weve-now-restored-full-services.html http://asimulation.ru/technology/108-weve-now-restored-full-services.html
"We've now restored full services," RIM's co-CEO Mike Lazaridis told reporters.

Some BlackBerry users may still see e-mails coming in slowly as the system recovers, he said.

The major outage frustrated customers on nearly every continent who were unable to send and receive e-mails and text messages this week. It also comes at a bad time for RIM, which is facing increased competition from Android and Apple smartphones.]]> 1 Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:49:55 +0400 http://asimulation.ru/technology/110-with-siri-iphone-finds-its-voice.html http://asimulation.ru/technology/110-with-siri-iphone-finds-its-voice.html
Sure, the fifth-generation iPhone's superb camera and speedy dual-core processor are classy additions. But Siri is the reason people should buy this phone.

When I step out of my apartment today, a reminder will pop up on my iPhone 4S to deposit checks at the bank. Tonight I'm meeting my friend Peter, who wants to eat steak, so I can say, "I want prime rib" to find steakhouses nearby. I have a meeting with a colleague Alexis this Thursday, and I can add that in my calendar just by saying, "Schedule meeting with Alexis on Thursday at 3 p.m."

I did all of this with the iPhone 4S's new built-in app Siri, a voice-recognition technology that Apple inherited when it acquired Siri Inc., a San Jose-based startup, in 2010. The enhanced voice tool is an iteration on Apple's previous Voice Control feature that debuted in the iPhone 3GS in 2009, which only allowed voice-powered phone dialing and music selection.

To give you an idea of how convenient Siri is, it takes about three seconds to create a reminder with a voice command, as opposed to the 10 seconds it takes me to manually type an event into a to-do list or calendar entry. Before, with the standard iPhone calendar, I would often forget to add an event because I was too busy to type it, and as a result I would forget I had something scheduled altogether. With Siri and Apple's new Reminders to-do list app, it's unlikely I'll forget anything important again because the process is so effortless.

It's kind of like having the unpaid intern of my dreams at my beck and call, organizing my life for me. I think Siri on the iPhone is a life changer, and this is only the beginning.]]> 1 Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:49:55 +0400 http://asimulation.ru/technology/109-why-gamers-are-a-great-fit-at-the-gym.html http://asimulation.ru/technology/109-why-gamers-are-a-great-fit-at-the-gym.html
They're obsessed with improving specific skills but judge success only by overall progress made in the world they've decided to conquer -- as realistic or fantastical as it may be.

It's precisely these traits that make video-gamers great bodybuilders.

Take a moment to laugh, if you must. Now hear us out.

Brian Wang and Dick Talens were the stereotypical video-gamers in high school. One was scrawny, the other fat. They grew up playing marathon sessions of "EverQuest" and "Counter-Strike."

"I literally would wake up and play all day, eating intermittently," Talens said. "OK, when I say intermittently, I mean eating a lot." But by the time the men met at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, they had traded an obsession with video gaming for an obsession with weight-lifting. As they shared stories at the gym, they realized their healthy transformation had been easier for them than for most.

Why? Because they were -- and would always be -- gamers.

"People don't realize that video games are an expression of personality," Talens said. "There's certain qualities that people have. They're obsessed with improving the stat sheets, getting to the next level; they pay a lot of attention to detail. Guys who play ('World of Warcraft') ... are very intense about whatever they do. They can turn that addiction and all its characteristics into fitness."

It's a theory they're taking to the bank. Talens and Wang are the co-founders of Fitocracy, a website that's turning gaming geeks into fitness geeks. The site has 70,000 users in its beta version and hopes to open to the 60,000 on a waiting list in the next couple months.

Fitocracy members can "level up" by earning points for their workouts. New levels unlock special challenges or "quests" that are designed to push users out of their comfort zones. For example, a runner might have to do yoga, or a bodybuilder might have to tackle a 5K. Still, one has to wonder: What would make a virtual warrior trade in his sword and shield for a pair of dumbbells? The same thing that got him interested in playing video games in the first place, Dr. Scott Rigby says.

Rigby and Dr. Richard Ryan are co-authors of the book "Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us In and Hold Us Spellbound." As experts on human motivation, they have identified basic psychological needs -- similar to physical needs like food, water and sleep -- that video games satisfy.

First, Ryan says, is the need to feel competent. In real life, you get the chance to "level up" only once every couple years: like when you earn a promotion at work or get married. In games, you always know what you have to do to get to the next level.

"In video games, you're constantly getting information about your achievements and (learning) how to do things better," Ryan says. "There's an opportunity to develop a mastery that's very much a key motivator."

That translates well to fitness, where tracking your accomplishments enables you to progress quicker. You know you've improved when you run an extra mile or dead lift another 50 pounds. A second motivator in video games is the feeling of freedom and autonomy, Rigby says. People like to know they have control over their future. In video games, you can choose your path, the skills you want to improve, even your outfit. Making the same choices in your fitness regimen helps you feel empowered.]]> 1 Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:06:21 +0400 http://asimulation.ru/technology/107-why-android-and-iphone.html http://asimulation.ru/technology/107-why-android-and-iphone.html
It would be technically impossible for all Android phones or iPhones to experience a global four-day outage like the one BlackBerry saw this week, according to mobile communications experts.

Why? The answer is in the technical details of how Research in Motion -- the company that makes BlackBerry smartphones, with their click-clacking keyboards and tie-wearing owners -- handles e-mails and text messages.

Here's the gist: RIM acts as a middleman for all e-mail and BlackBerry text messages. It picks up messages from the wireless carrier and passes them on to the recipient.
BlackBerry says outage restored
BlackBerry says outage restored

Androids and iPhones don't have a middleman for texts and e-mail.

It's this BlackBerry baton-passing system that went down Monday, killing or slowing e-mail and texting services for millions of people in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The ordeal lasted four days.

"It's because of the way RIM has set up the (network) architecture that is the downfall when it comes to these types of outages," said Sean Armstrong, who manages wireless communications at a large tech company. "When it's working fine, it's a great system. When it's not working fine, it's a failure."

This week, it's fair to say the system was a big ol' failure. On social media sites, some BlackBerry users said they were so upset about the outage -- the largest in the company's history -- that they were switching to Apple iOS and Google Android devices. And customer satisfaction with BlackBerry already was low.

"Add up every other thing we've ever written about why BlackBerry is dying," wrote the tech blog Gizmodo. "This is worse."

This is not to say that Androids and iPhones never experience network outages.

But they wouldn't be global. And they would be the responsibility of a particular wireless carrier -- AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile -- or a particular messaging system, like Gmail, Hotmail or iMessage, Apple's new in-house messaging service. Not the maker of the phone.

That makes their problems inherently more localized.

"All the stuff goes through them for some form or fashion," Nan Palmero, a writer for the site BlackBerryCool.com, said of the way BlackBerry handles messages and e-mail. That makes it possible, he said, for the global BlackBerry network to crash, which wouldn't be the case for iPhones or Androids.

RIM, however, takes issue with this analysis.

"I would not characterize that as fair," RIM's co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said at a Thursday news conference. "We run a global, secure-push environment that provides the kind of instant messaging that's made BlackBerry so compelling and so valuable."

RIM filters e-mails and BlackBerry messages through its own server farms -- giant warehouses full of computers -- for security reasons, said Armstrong. The company scrambles messages, making them more difficult to intercept.]]> 1 Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:03:38 +0400 http://asimulation.ru/technology/105-steve-wozniak-is-first-in-line-for-iphone-4s.html http://asimulation.ru/technology/105-steve-wozniak-is-first-in-line-for-iphone-4s.html
At the front of this particular line Thursday, Steve Wozniak sits in a Pico armchair, sipping Diet Dr Pepper and scanning e-mails from his white iPad.

The Apple co-founder, who gets a paycheck of "a couple hundred dollars every two weeks" and still maintains his status as employee No. 1 in company records, hasn't been able to stay put for long. Crowds of Apple fans, family friends and people who have seen him riding his Segway around the neighborhood stop to say hi, take pictures and ask for his autograph.

"I'll be taking a thousand pictures," Wozniak whispered with a smile. "I'm going to sit down and see if I can get a little e-mail done, because there's no way I'm going to get it all done today."

Seconds later, an enthusiastic man in a yellow polo shirt positioned his two kids near the computer legend and pleaded for him to pose. Wozniak immediately sprang to his feet with a grin on his face.

People brought iPhones, iPods and iPads for Wozniak to sign with a marker. "Now your phone is not going to be worth as much when you sell it," Wozniak said to one woman before signing her iPhone 4.

Fans gave Wozniak their condolences over the late Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder who died last week. Flowers, partially eaten apples and notes were laid in front of Apple Stores around the world, including this one, where the memorial was set just a few feet from Wozniak's spot in line.

Wozniak explained that sending flowers or onetime celebrations are the kinds of traditions he and Jobs agreed were unnecessary. However, he talked openly about how much he misses his high-school pal, with whom he built a technology empire.

Wozniak acknowledged that he could have easily made one phone call to Apple and gotten the phone he's waiting in line for, but he didn't. He has yet to play with an iPhone 4S or its Siri voice-controlled assistant. He has said previously that he does not ask colleagues about products in development because he does not want to ruin the surprise for himself.

Steve Wozniak autographed fans' Apple products outside the Los Gatos store.

"I want to get mine along with the millions of other fans," Wozniak said. "I just want to be able to talk to my phone."

Analysts have expressed disappointment in the iPhone 4S, but Wozniak, who looks forward to every new Apple device, is especially animated when discussing it. Over the past year, he has not been shy about his anticipation for voice-assist technology, like the new 4S tool called Siri.

People who say they have waited in lines behind Wozniak during past Apple releases have written spiteful messages online claiming he had used his celebrity to cut in line just before the stores opened. Wozniak said that he is usually further back in line at these events but that fans in front of him insist that he get his devices first.

On Thursday, there is no dispute about Wozniak's place in line. His Segway, which he rode from his nearby home, is parked in a corner near the store's entrance. Wozniak arrived about noon, and he plans to stay overnight in order to get the new iPhone first, he said.]]> 1 Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:59:59 +0400 http://asimulation.ru/technology/104-for-blackberry-addicts-rim-is.html http://asimulation.ru/technology/104-for-blackberry-addicts-rim-is.html
Fans often discuss the intimate details about why they are attached at the hip to smartphones made by Research in Motion -- the clack-clack of the tiny keys, the feel of the trackball or square pad on their thumbs, the informative indicator light calling out for attention. They affectionately call it the "CrackBerry."

After the recent outage, which RIM says was caused by a server error, some longtime BlackBerry users are writing goodbye letters on blogs, and on message boards operated and frequented by the CrackBerry collective. Richie, a British member of a Web forum called CrackBerry, summed up the concerns, saying RIM has been "chipping away our faith" in the company's ability to satisfy customers.

In interviews with reporters, RIM executives issued apologies, which they also made public in a recorded video, but they avoided questions about whether they planned to offer incentives as compensation for the millions of customers affected by the outage. RIM did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.

By comparison, after Sony restored its network this summer following a lengthy outage, the company compensated users of its subscription service, and gave free games and movie rentals to all users.

Netflix has offered small discounts to customers affected by technical troubles.

Despite RIM's lack of public comment, an AT&T customer in Cleveland wrote on the CrackBerry message boards that he received a credit on his bill when he called to complain about the outage.

RIM customers still holding onto their faith in the company should pay close attention to a conference being held in San Francisco next week. The pressure on BlackBerry from competitors is mounting, and RIM's promised next-generation models, with dual-core processors and large touchscreens, are overdue.

A CrackBerry forum member, posting under the alias N8star, says he is giving up his BlackBerry Torch 9850 "after years of being treated like a battered spouse by RIM," he wrote. His wife urged him to switch to an iPhone, and he says he will acquiesce.

Jim Kerstetter, the executive editor for technology website CNET, published an editorial on Thursday titled "RIM, you're dead to me now." He writes that he has defended BlackBerry, despite the lack of multimedia features, but that the recent outage has spurred him to switch phones and operating systems.

RIM still has a comfortable hold on corporate buyers, who snap up large orders for employees. Security experts tend to trust BlackBerry more than other smartphone platforms.

However, even tech departments in companies are becoming more lenient on this policy. David Hurst, who was waiting in line to buy an iPhone 4S for his wife at a store in Atlanta, said her company "has finally approved for her to switch from BlackBerry to iPhone, and her BlackBerry is just falling apart."

In the now crucial mobile-consumer market, Google and Apple both lead BlackBerry in sales, a trend expected to continue into the crucial holiday shopping season. A combined 69% of smartphone buyers say they plan to get either an Android phone or iPhone, while only 8% indicated that BlackBerry was at the top of their shopping lists, according to an NPD study from this summer.]]> 1 Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:59:06 +0400 http://asimulation.ru/technology/90-cnn-acquires-zite-maker-of-ipad-magazine-app.html http://asimulation.ru/technology/90-cnn-acquires-zite-maker-of-ipad-magazine-app.html

San Francisco (CNN) -- CNN announced Tuesday that it is acquiring Zite, a Canadian tablet software developer.

Zite offers an iPad application that can build a personalized magazine based on someone's interests and social media feeds. The app can determine users' favorite topics from which articles they choose to read and how they rate each one, similar to the way the Pandora Internet radio station customizes music playlists to listeners' tastes.

CNN plans to operate Zite as an independent business, said KC Estenson, senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com, on Monday. In addition to financing Zite's ongoing development, CNN intends to promote the software on the news organization's website and television programs, Estenson said.

The Zite app, which is free, will not contain advertisements at first. Zite recently mined app-usage data for a report that showed users' interests by state, information that can be attractive to marketers. The app was downloaded 120,000 times during the week it debuted in March; a spokeswoman declined to provided current user statistics.]]> 1 Thu, 01 Sep 2011 23:06:45 +0400 http://asimulation.ru/technology/89-how-to-write-that-first-online-dating-note.html http://asimulation.ru/technology/89-how-to-write-that-first-online-dating-note.html

Editor's note: Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz are the sarcastic brains behind humor blog and book "Stuff Hipsters Hate." When they're not trolling Brooklyn for new material, Ehrlich works as a senior writer at MTV, and Bartz is a news editor at Psychology Today. Got a question about etiquette in the digital world? Contact them at netiquette@cnn.com.

(CNN) -- Last week, we penned a public service announcement demonstrating a few of the ways you can guarantee a nonresponse in an initial online dating message, no matter the quality of your profile or personality.

While we received a fair amount of gratitude (mostly from online daters tired of finding such hapless missives in their inboxes), we also received many a request for tips on what to write in a successful first note. (One humanity-loving reader also took the time to inform us he suspects we are "two former high school cheerleaders who now have an inferiority complex," a flattering if inaccurate assumption that we were once capable of killer herkies and immense pep.)

While it's infinitely more fun to tell you what not to do than it is to give you helpful pointers (hey, the Ten Commandments weren't written in the negative for nothin'), this week we're heeding your call.

Before we proceed with the advice-shilling, though, a big disclaimer looms. Even if you write an excellent first letter, there is no guarantee that the recipient will write you back. If there were a magic formula, some genius would have cracked it by now.

Every online dater has had the experience of reading an impossibly sweet, heart-bursting message and thinking, "Oh, sigh, I wish we could use this site to arrange dates for our friends or make new totally platonic acquaintances, because the sender of this message is clearly a lovely person. Alas. [hits delete]."

This is simply part of the numbers game that is dating (online and in real life), and it's the reason online courtship is not for those with rickety self-esteem and hair-trigger rejection sensitivity. Because most of your messages will go unanswered, doesn't mean there's anything wrong about you. (Certainly you're brimming with foibles, but your intended date doesn't necessarily know that yet.)]]> 1 Thu, 01 Sep 2011 23:05:50 +0400 http://asimulation.ru/technology/88-robots-arent-good-at-talking-to-themselves.html http://asimulation.ru/technology/88-robots-arent-good-at-talking-to-themselves.html
(CNN) -- Have you ever looked at your smartphone or laptop -- or even a robot, if you're lucky enough to come in contact with one -- and wondered, "What the heck are you thinking?"

Well, if so, here's your answer.

Cornell's Creative Machines Lab posted a video this week of a computer's inner monologue, and it's making the rounds on the Internet not because the machine is having profound thoughts about world domination or the future of technology -- but because the discussion it has with itself is totally ridiculous.

Researchers used the "Cleverbot" for this test case, which is regarded as one of researchers' best attempts to mimic human conversation patterns with computer intelligence. Cleverbot actually "learns" from the conversations it has as it has them, which is fairly impressive, as this episode of WNYC's "Radiolab" podcast discusses at great length.

(Side note: You can have a text conversation with this piece of computer software at Cleverbot.com, and the results are sometimes frighteningly spot-on and sometimes hilarious).

But turn the computer on itself and things go totally awry. The researchers set up two screens, one with a computer-graphics picture of a woman, and one with a man. They talk to each other, but they're both controlled by the same program. Here's a snippet of the dialogue, which is posted in full on YouTube:

Man: "I am not a robot. I am a unicorn."

Woman: "But you said earlier that you were a robot."

Man: "I did not."

Woman: "I thought you did."

Man: "You were mistaken, which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you."

I guess that last bit is a nod to the fact that these computers come packed with lots of hardware memory.]]> 1 Thu, 01 Sep 2011 23:04:51 +0400