NPR reports that the Alaskan mountain which has for nearly a century been known officially as Mt. McKinley will revert to the name under which it’s been known for a much longer time: Denali. President Obama is to “make a public announcement of the name change in Anchorage Monday, during a three-day visit to Alaska.” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s secretarial order of August 28th declares the name change to be immediately effective, and directs the United States Board on Geographic Names “to immediately implement this name change, including changing the mountain’s name in the Board’s Geographic Names Information System and notifying all interested parties of the name change.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the article here:
"McKinley" Since 1917, Alaska’s Highest Peak Is Redesignated "Denali"
Windows: Last year, Microsoft announced an app that would allow you to have real-time conversations with people who spoke different languages, built on Skype. While the service was only available to a small group of testers, it’s now open to everyone. Read more… 
Looks like Whatsapp just crossed 600 million monthly active users, according to CEO and founder Jan Koum. Read more… 
What’s the language that the most Americans speak after English? As you’d probably guess, the second-most common language spoken in the U.S. is Spanish. But if you look at the most common languages after English and Spanish, the results get a little more surprising, especially when you parse them by state. Read more… 
Reader Patrick In Chicago is one of a few readers to write with this unpleasant news: “Computer-based testing provider Pearson Vue is now in day 5 of a global outage, preventing test-takers worldwide from sitting for exams. I was personally turned away from a Cisco exam on Wednesday morning because Pearson was unable to deliver. Countless people have posted to Pearson Vue’s Facebook page detailing various states of panic. There are people who have certifications expiring. Others are unable to sit their medical board exams. Still others are unable to sit exams that they are required to pass in order to work — Pearson Vue’s incompetence has actually prevented people from going out and making a paycheck.” This reminds me of a friend of mine who had to wait half a year to re-take his bar exam, because of a software glitch on the part of ExamSoft’s software. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
another random user writes with news that NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest wireless carrier, will be rolling out a real-time translation app for phone calls on November 1. At launch, the app will translate Japanese into English, Mandarin, and Korean, and later that month it will add French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai. No word on Klingon. From the article: “The products have the potential to let companies avoid having to use specially trained multilingual staff, helping them cut costs. They could also aid tourism. However, the software involved cannot offer perfect translations, limiting its use in some situations. … It provides users with voice translations of the other speaker’s conversation after a slight pause, as well as providing a text readout. … NTT Docomo will soon face competition from France’s Alcatel-Lucent which is developing a rival product, WeTalk. It can handle Japanese and about a dozen other languages including English, French and Arabic. The service is designed to work over any landline telephone, meaning the company has had to find a way to do speech recognition using audio data sampled at a rate of 8kHz or 16kHz. Other products — which rely on data connections — have used higher 44kHz samples which are easier to process.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.