I though I had seen most astonishing pictures of 9/11, but the Big Picture has some impressive ones I hadn’t seen before…

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Eight years after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, we remember and here, take a look back, and a look at the present. This year’s remembrance is emphasizing volunteerism and service, honoring the private citizens that volunteered after the attacks and encouraging the observance of the anniversary to be a day of service. Construction at Ground Zero, the site of the former twin towers, is years behind because of construction delays, design disputes and litigation involving developers, state and local officials and insurance companies. At this point, One World Trade Center (formerly the Freedom Tower), the 120-story anchor building on the site, is scheduled for a 2013 completion. (38 photos total)

3 The south tower of New York’s World Trade Center collapses Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) #

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So why did they do it? Only Apple knows for sure, but there are compelling arguments for open sourcing Grand Central Dispatch, even for a commercial enterprise. First, Apple will of course reap the rewards of any development that takes place, just as they have with WebKit. Second, it is unlikely that Grand Central would be used by any direct competitor to Apple, like Microsoft. Grand Central is more likely to be added to other UNIX and Linux systems, none of which really pose a threat to Apple’s consumer-based business.

This leads to what is perhaps a more important consideration for Apple, that allowing Grand Central to be ported to other UNIX/Linux systems will encourage its use. Until today, it would have been very unlikely that any new UNIX tools would be developed on Mac OS X using Grand Central, simply because they would only run on the Mac. With the possibility that Grand Central will become available on other UNIX systems, the likelihood that Grand Central will be incorporated into command line tools is greatly increased.

Of course, this is also very interesting for scientific developers. It may be possible to parallelize code in the not too distant future using Grand Central Dispatch, and run that code not only on Macs, but also on clusters and supercomputers.

There could be one last reason why Apple has taken this step: they want to use Grand Central to push the adoption of other technologies, in particular, blocks. Blocks are an extension to C which form the basis of Grand Central Dispatch. Having your operating system based on a non-standard language is not a good position to be in, and Apple would surely like to see blocks incorporated into the C language. By offering Grand Central to the broader programming community, they may be hoping it will catch on, and make the argument for incorporating blocks in the C standard that much stronger.

One of the major new technologies in Snow Leopard is now open source:

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The libdispatch project consists of the user space implementation of the Grand Central Dispatch API as seen in Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard. The Mac OS X kernel support for GCD may be found in the xnu project. While kernel support provides many performance optimizations on Mac OS X, it is not strictly required for portability to other platforms. However, in order to implement the full API for Grand Central Dispatch, C compiler support for blocks is required. The blocks runtime is available as part of the LLVM project.

This project is intended to be a resource for developers interested in learning more about libdispatch on Mac OS X. Contributions to this project will be continually evaluated for possible inclusion in future releases of Mac OS X. The sources are available under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0 in the hope that they might serve as a launching point for porting GCD to other platforms.

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Good IT pros are not anti-bureaucracy, as many observers think. They are anti-stupidity. The difference is both subjective and subtle. Good IT pros, whether they are expected to or not, have to operate and make decisions with little supervision. So when the rules are loose and logical and supervision is results-oriented, supportive and helpful to the process, IT pros are loyal, open, engaged and downright sociable. Arbitrary or micro-management, illogical decisions, inconsistent policies, the creation of unnecessary work and exclusionary practices will elicit a quiet, subversive, almost vicious attitude from otherwise excellent IT staff.

translation for all the English readers here: Fokke & Sukke have some job openings…. “we’re looking for top-bankers” … “who feel the money isn’t all that important”..

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Dramatic, rarely seen, footage of the moment the second plane crashed into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 has surfaced.

The video was shot through a chain-link fence and shows black smoke pouring from the North Tower as a hijacked jet smashes into the South Tower.

The impact creates a massive fireball in the second skyscraper and then smoke billows upwards.

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2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown