Technology

Thousands of National Australia Bank customers were prevented from withdrawing money when a computer glitch crippled its network.

Customers were unable to use ATM, EFTPOS, internet and phone banking services on Friday from about noon, the bank said in a statement.

NAB said the bank began rectifying the problem from 1pm. "For any customers whose transactions failed during the system outage period, they will have their accounts brought up to date overnight," the bank said in a statement.

Supercomputer company Cray has created a new division that will sell big-data systems, the company has announced. The division will market its offerings to large enterprises, which will be a new kind of client for the company.

It seems like the recent release of Kinect for Windows has caused a resurgence in Kinect hacks over the last few days. The official Microsoft SDK makes it easier than ever to come up with interesting new uses for the depth-sensing camera system, and now there's a Kinect hack you can play with from the comfort of your own home without even buying a Kinect.

Intel has announced that its Haswell architecture, due to ship some time in 2013, will include hardware support for transactional memory.

Transactional memory is a promising technique designed to make the creation of reliable multithreaded programs easier. It does this by using a transactional model wherein complex operations can be performed concurrently, in isolation from each other, with those operations either completing or being undone as if they'd never been started—a model that developers are already familiar with from database programming.

Has your media library outgrown your gadgets?

There comes a time when your digital entertainment library just won’t squeeze onto one computer, especially if it’s brimming with video as well as music. It’s easy to add a hefty external USB drive to a desktop computer, but this isn’t all that practical for notebooks, tablets, smartphones and music players. So what do you do?

This DIYer had a 1st generation iPhone lying around, so he decided to put it to good use.  You can use any phone to accomplish this, even a $10 prepaid phone.  An SMS to the iPhone goes through an Arduino which tells yours car to start or stop from anywhere.  There’s some custom circuitry and programming which is all included in the instructions. When a text message is sent to the iPhone, the iPhone tells the Arduino to start the engine, and the iPhone sends a message back reporting that the start has commenced.

Requirements:

AMD today laid out its plans for the next couple of years at its Financial Analyst Day. The plans are a mix of familiar and logical extensions of the company's current products, but contained some more surprising elements: specifically, AMD opened the door to future processors that include ARM CPUs.

Asia's biggest budget carrier AirAsia said yesterday it has taken "corrective action" to resolve complaints in a lawsuit brought by Australian regulators over its online fare information.

The Malaysia-based airline, which flies international services out of Australia from the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Perth, with Sydney to be added from April, was named in documents lodged at the Federal Court in Melbourne.

Consider the tech it takes to back the search box on Google's home page: behind the algorithms, the cached search terms, and the other features that spring to life as you type in a query sits a data store that essentially contains a full-text snapshot of most of the Web. While you and thousands of other people are simultaneously submitting searches, that snapshot is constantly being updated with a firehose of changes.

Solar flares emitted by the sun on the morning of Jan. 23 concerned airlines enough to reroute its Polar route flights but may improve aurora borealis activity in Alaska.

Delta airlines announced that it had rerouted flights from China to the U.S. that traverse the North Pole making  direct fuel saving flights over the arctic. While there is no danger to passengers the airline reported that it changed routes primarily due to the possibility of radio interference from the solar flares.