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Dictionary chief has the last word - retire

11:00am Friday 26th April 2013 in News By Andrew Ffrench, covering Didcot and Wallingford. Call me on 01865 425425

JOHN Simpson doesnt have a favourite word in the English language he loves them all.

He joined the Oxford English Dictionary staff in 1976 and, since becoming chief editor in 1993, 60,000 new words have been added.

Now Mr Simpson, 59, says he needs a break from defining words and will retire from his post at Oxford University Press in Walton Street in October.

People are always asking me what my favourite word is but I dont have one, said the father-of-two, who lived in Wheatley for 25 years until he moved to Cheltenham last year.

Each word is a fascinating object of observation and analysis in its own right.

Its hard to pick out favourites from several decades of lexicography, but you always feel an affinity with the first word you edit and Queen Mum was one.

I remember hunting high and low for early evidence of the expression, only to see the current update project take the date of first use further back to 1954, early in the Queens reign.

Mr Simpson, who lives with wife Hilary, 58, a former adviser to the county councils chief executive, is a big fan of cricket and expects to watch a few Test matches during his retirement.

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Dictionary chief has the last word - retire

Lost Planet 3 producer Andrew Szymanski believes that "not all games have to be everything for all people".

"It's tough, I think even when you're coming with a concept you have to make a clear decision what you want to do," Szymanski told OXM, "because storytelling by its very nature is not interactive. In the truest sense of the word, if you want a strong story, you're much better off reading a book or watching a movie. But games by their very nature being interactive, they don't need a story, it works without a story."

"So we're in this constant kind of push and pull tug of war between how cinematic we want games to be, how much we want to force that upon the player in terms of having them find it through gameplay."

Szymanski continued: "When we started Lost Planet 3 we said this is going to be a cinematic game. I know that's kind of a dirty word now in the games industry: "Oh, we're trying to do movies!" Well, yeah, we kind of are. And you can probably cut all the cutscenes together in Lost Planet 3 and make a pretty decent movie. But, we also have what I feel is good gameplay in between."

Though Szymanski then stated that "not all games have to be everything for all people," broadening franchises appears to be one of Capcom's priorities - two of its most recent offerings, Devil May Cry and now Lost Planet, have been outsourced to developers with a view to lifting them out of stagnation. Lost Planet 3 is a massive shift in focus for the series, which leans more heavily on story than its predecessor.

All that said, the publisher may have changed its tune in recent times - it issued dramatic profit warnings to investors last week, partly off the back of a "decline in quality of titles outsourced to overseas developers".

Lost Planet 3 is due to launch on August 30th. Read our latest preview, hot off the press and cold off E.D.N.III, right here.

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Capcom: devs can't "please everybody", "cinematic is a dirty word"

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Press release

AURELIUS daughter SECOP to take over compressor manufacturer ACC Austria

- Important strategic step for SECOP and ACC

- Industrial concept secures the production site and approx. 700 jobs at ACC

- Preventing company liquidation

Munich, Germany (April 25, 2013) - SECOP GmbH, Flensburg, Germany, a daughter of the Munich-based industrial holding AURELIUS Group (ISIN: DE000A0Jk2A8) has signed an agreement to acquire the compressor manufacturer ACC Austria GmbH, Frstenfeld, Austria. ACC is a leading manufacturer of hermetic compressors for refrigerators and freezers with approx. 700 employees and generated revenue of roughly 150 million euros in 2012. The company is a key supplier for international cooling unit manufacturers and represents an excellent addition to the SECOP product portfolio. The transaction is subject to approval by the respective competition authorities.

Due to the insolvency of the Italian mother company and its German daughter company, ACC Frstenfeld was forced to file for insolvency at the end of 2012 as well. The takeover by Secop now provides a strategic sustainable solution securing jobs and the production site at Frstenfeld in Austria. ACC is well-known for its high quality products which are state-of the-art within their market. Together with Secop, ACC will further expand its research and development activities and be technology leader with both fixed and variable speed compressors for the household appliance market in the future. This will ensure the supply of compressors which will fulfill the highest requirements for energy efficiency and low noise level.

'The acquisition of ACC Austria is an important strategic step for our daughter company SECOP', says Donatus Albrecht, AURELIUS Chief Investment Officer. 'In the future we would like to develop our portfolio companies even further and more actively through add-on-acquisitions. This has already been a successful strategy for some of our daughter companies in the past.'

Mogens Sholm, SECOP President & CEO explains: 'By combining the competences of both companies we have established an important independent European based compressor manufacturer which is able to drive continuous product innovations to the market.'

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DGAP-News: AURELIUS daughter SECOP to take over compressor manufacturer ACC Austria

A hijacked Associated Press Twitter account that rattled markets with false word of an attack on the White House put the security of social media in the crosshairs.

The stock market rebounded from the nosedive triggered Tuesday by the bogus tweet and the AP posted a message on Twitter that its account "which was suspended after being hacked, has been secured and is back up."

The AP Twitter page indicated more than 1.8 million followers as of early evening in San Francisco, where the one-to-many messaging service has its headquarters.

What remained were questions as to whether security was tight enough on Twitter and other popular social networks in an age when people increasingly turn to posts from friends or strangers for reliable news and information.

Twitter was firm that evaluating and improving defenses at the service remains an ongoing priority and that the hijacking of the AP account didn't prompt any immediate moves to toughen security.

AP's Twitter account appeared to have been breached after hackers tricked someone into revealing a password with a deceptive email message in what is referred to as a "phishing" attack.

Some online reports contended that Twitter was considering "two-factor authentication" that would require users to either know something or do something aside from just type in passwords to access accounts.

"When you look at the problem in mass, the most critical thing we see is people just have horrendous passwords and use them all over the web," said Mark Risher, chief and founder of Impermium, an Internet security firm.

While incorporating a second step such as sending a confirmation code in a message to an email account or mobile phone associated with a user's account is a big improvement, even that defense is flawed, he said.

Risher was 'spam czar' at Yahoo! Mail before leaving the Internet pioneer and launching Impermium in 2010. His team includes Sameer Bhalotra, a former senior director of cybersecurity for the White House.

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Twitter security in crosshairs after AP account hijack

2:03 PM

The Associated Press

PROVIDENCE, R.I. The widow of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has not yet said whether she plans a funeral or wants to claim his body.

click image to enlarge

Katherine Russell, widow of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, leaves her lawyer's office Tuesday in Providence, R.I.

The Associated Press

Katherine Russell's lawyer, Amato DeLuca, by Thursday had not responded to questions sent through a spokesman the previous day asking whether she plans a funeral for her husband and whether she is in touch with his parents or the medical examiner's office.

Her lawyer says Katherine Russell has switched to using her maiden name.

Tsarnaev's father has said he is returning to the United States. He has said he wants to bring his body back to Russia for burial.

Russell, as Tsarnaev's wife, would be first in line to claim his body once the Massachusetts medical examiner's office is done with it.

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No word from widow of bombing suspect on funeral