Technology

Moore's Law puts supercomputers out to pasture because power – not just the cost of electricity, but the availability of juice – is the biggest constraint at the big supercomputing centers. And sometimes the lack of budget helps lock the gate, and HPC cloud computing butchers the cow.

That's the case with the massive 28-rack supercomputer at the University of New Mexico nicknamed "Encanto," which was supposed to be a foundation for high-tech investment and research in the Southwest state with the motto "Land of Enchantment."

As you may have heard by now, the Linux kernel is dropping support for the 386 processor.

It's okay. I'll wait right here while you finish pushing over monitors and flipping over every desk at work in a nerd rage. I did the same thing. Get it out of your system.

Back in March, Ars wrote about PhD student Michael Cook and his artificial intelligence machine called Angelina. Angelina was special because she was creating games from scratch with little help from her human counterparts. By dividing the concept of a computer game up into three defined “species,” or sub-tasks—maps, layouts, and rulesets—Cook and his compatriots at Imperial College in London helped their system auto-generate some simple platformer games.

Who needs an Xbox when you can just put on a sweatshirt and thrash your arms about? That's the idea behind Woven, a wearable gaming platform by two Dutch designers.

Christiaan Ribbens and Patrick Kersten, recent graduates of the Utrecht School of the Arts, embedded a sweater and pair of jeans with a small Bluetooth module, speakers, motion sensors, shake motors, a three-color LED screen, and other gizmos to create their concept gaming platform. A trio of LilyPad Arduino microcontrollers process the data and operate the LEDs (and are, incidentally, washable).

It's no secret how America's stealth warplanes primarily evade enemy radars. Their airframes are specifically sculpted to scatter radar waves rather than bouncing them back to the enemy. Somewhat less important is the application, to select areas, of Radar Absorbing Material (RAM) meant to trap sensor energy not scattered by the plane's special shape.

They're back -- wireless chargers, that is. If you believe the hype in the product blogs and from some consulting firms, by 2016 you'll have them nearly everywhere: hotel rooms, conference rooms, airports, lobbies, cafés, and on your desks and entryway tables. I'm not so sure.

Despite years of vendor attempts, the fairly old technology underneath wireless charging -- inductive charging -- has simply failed to take root in computing devices.

Texas Instruments announced earlier this year that it is getting out of the SoC market, and that sadly means a little under two thousand jobs are being cut. In response, Apple has snatched up dozens of engineers from TI’s Israel-based operation.

Not only were these engineers reportedly working on TI’s Open Multimedia Applications Platform (OMAP), but they were also working on chips including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios. As Apple continues to move into custom chip designs, this kind of expertise becomes absolutely essential to its core business.

Intel is on a mission to cut the power consumption of its chips. But that's not only future silicon. The current Ivy Bridge chip will get throttled down too.

Intel will cut power consumption "significantly" for future versions of the chip, an industry source familiar with the chipmaker's plans told CNET.

Computing has come a long way. Take a look at this clip of the Harwell Dekatron, otherwise known as the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation (WITCH). The supercomputer from 1951 was restored over a period of three years by experts at England's National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park. This week, they rebooted the beast in front of reporters.

An influential member of Congress has suggested that Rapiscan, the company behind some of the full-body scanners used at American airports, faked tests of its machines' ability to protect passenger privacy. In a letter quoted by Bloomberg, Rep Mike Rogers (R-AL) charged that Rapiscan "may have attempted to defraud the government by knowingly manipulating an operational test."