Engineers at PureDepth Inc. spent years developing tools for helping the military plot 3-D maps of war zones, eventually licensing top-secret technology to the U.S. Air Force and Navy.
But the Silicon Valley startup hit the jackpot in October when it inked a deal with International Game Technology Inc., the world's largest maker of slot machines.
It?s a gaming machine with a supercomputing side. Sony hopes owners of its PlayStation 3 will link the console into distributed computing to boost academic research with idle computing power.
In a Stanford University campus event on Thursday, Sony and Stanford representations unveiled a new partnership for the school?s Folding@home distributed computing project that could help researchers learn more about deadly diseases.
The move underscores Sony?s desire to push the PS3 hardware beyond video games and highlights the Cell?s adoption in powerful computing applications.
In the near future, it could be a lot easier to see if those pictures of the person you've been talking to on Match.com have been retouched.
Adobe's Advanced Technology lab is working on plug-ins for PhotoShop that would detect whether or not a photo has been tampered with, according to an Adobe representative. So far, the company has two plug-ins that are in a fairly advanced stage of development. Adobe is working with Dartmouth professor Hani Farid, an expert in photo fraud detection.
Normally the switch to daylight-saving time isn't a big deal, but this Sunday, Jeff Ronner has to put people on the case.
Ronner is a San Francisco-area field services manager for technology outsourcer Perot Systems Corp., and he handles computer systems for a big Perot client, Catholic Healthcare West. This week he was putting final touches on his plan to make certain that Catholic HealthCare's voicemail systems and other networks recognize daylight time.
In storage circles, much discussion has arisen from the very interesting papers investigating disk drive reliability presented recently at FAST '07. Other columnists and bloggers, such as Frank Hayes and Robin Harris have already done an excellent job of covering them. Rather than repeat the details, I'd like to take the perspective of what the implications are for service level commitments with the storage infrastructure.
Japan is pretty serious about robotics. If the droids are going to fit in, they probably need to learn the Japanese custom of serving tea.
Fortunately, researchers at the University of Tokyo are exploring just that. In a demonstration this week, a humanoid with camera eyes made by Kawada Industries Inc. poured tea from a bottle into a cup.
Then another robot on wheels delivered the cup of tea in an experimental room that has sensors embedded in the floor and sofa as well as cameras on the ceiling, to simulate life with robot technology.
Data rates of 28Mbit/s could be available on 3G mobile phones as early as next year if the industry adopts a plan to upgrade existing HSDPA and HSUPA technology. The high speed technology known as HSPA+ will be introduced before next generation 3G LTE technology, which is due in 2010.
Google Inc. is racing to head off a media industry backlash over its video Web site YouTube, will soon offer anti-piracy technologies to help all copyright holders thwart unauthorized video sharing, its chief executive said on Wednesday.
"We are definitely committed to (offering copyright protection technologies)," Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in an interview. "It is one of the company's highest priorities," he said.
In what sounds like a science fair project on steroids, engineers at Stanford University plan to have an unmanned robot car ready to navigate urban traffic in less than a year.
The car, a 2006 Volkswagen Passat wagon dubbed Junior, is Stanford's newest competitor in a high-stakes road race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Defense's research and development arm.
Japan, one of the world's most seismically active nations, on Friday began an alert system using satellites to instantly transmit warnings of natural disasters, such as tsunamis, to speed up evacuations.
Tremors occur in Japan at least every five minutes, and the country accounts for about 20 percent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude 6 or higher.
Last month, a powerful Pacific earthquake prompted widespread tsunami warnings, although only small waves hit Japan.
