Russia's profile in supercomputing is being raised thanks to a Moscow-based company and a Russian president who sees high-performance computing as critical to the nation's future.
Two years ago, Russia's President, Dmitry Medvedev, chastised his country's progress in developing supercomputers, saying in a speech somewhat sarcastically that "a huge number of entrepreneurs, not to mention officials, do not know what supercomputers are."
An iPhone-based device will soon let police forces identify within seconds a suspect based on facial features, fingerprints, or now the unique features of the human eye.
The blocky device, dubbed MORIS, attaches to the back of an Apple iPhone. To use the iris scan, a police officer holds the phone's camera about 6 inches from the suspect's face and snaps a close-up of the eye. The software analyzes over 200 unique features and, if the suspect's scan is already in a database, an algorithm matches them, and identifies the suspect.
Mobile networks in North America are filled to 80 percent of capacity, with 36 percent of base stations facing capacity constraints, according to a survey by investment bank Credit Suisse.
As we explained in part 2 of this series, A brief history of virtualisation, in the 1960s, it was a sound move to run one OS on top of a totally different one. On the hardware of the time, full multi-user time-sharing was a big challenge, which virtualisation neatly sidestepped by splitting a tough problem into two smaller, easier ones.
Within a decade, though, a new generation of hardware made it easy enough that a skunkworks project at AT&T was able to create a relatively small, simple OS that was nonetheless a full multi-user, time-sharing one: Unix.
The pilots on NASA’s last space shuttle flight fixed another one of their main computers Friday after it failed and set off an alarm that shattered their sleep.
NASA declared all five of Atlantis’ primary computers to be working, pending evaluation of the latest shutdown.
AMD's Bulldozer processor architecture still hasn't formally launched, but Donanim Haber got a hold of a recent engineering sample with benchmarked speeds that come close to Intel's current Sandy Bridge CPUs. With the ability to run limited cores at up to 4.2GHz, it could potentially outperform comparable Intel hardware at certain workloads.
Flash memory is the dominant nonvolatile (retaining information when unpowered) memory thanks to its appearance in solid-state drives (SSDs) and USB flash drives. Despite its popularity, it has issues when feature sizes are scaled down to 30nm and below. In addition, flash has a finite number of write-erase cycles and slow write speeds (on the order of ms). Because of these shortcomings, researchers have been searching for a successor even as consumers snap up flash-based SSDs.
There has been talk recently of the first solar powered aircraft. But it appears a research team at MIT have gone one better and developed the first solar powered paper planes.
That's because the new solar cell production method, devised by a team at MIT, is able to print photovoltaic (PV) materials directly onto a sheet of plain old A4, creating a cheap alternative to conventional cell materials.
The rush toward virtualisation of internal enterprise computing resources and cloud computing can have many advantages, such as server consolidation, but it's largely outracing traditional security and identity management practices.
Apple has been much maligned in the press recently for filing a patent application covering a camera system with infrared technology that could, among other things, allow the recording functionality to be shut off by a third party.
