How to create a conspiracy theory: first, make a shocking statement featuring geek heroes, corporate censorship, cowardly mainstream media and evil lawyers. Then retract it. If the US TV programme MythBusters was trying an experiment last week, it worked.
The GeoEye-1 satellite that launched into orbit Saturday is on a mission from Google.
Well, not just Google. The GeoEye-1 is part of the NextView program of the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a dot-mil organization that, odd as it may seem, wants access to commercial satellite imagery to support its national security mission. GeoEye, the company, won its $500 million NextView contract four years ago.
Google's rocket-borne logo
Blu-Ray might have beaten down HD-DVD and helped Sony sell more PS3s, but tha company’s plans for a 10 year PS3 life cycle have been dashed by Samsung, which claims Blu-Ray only “has five years left”.
Sony has been pinning its hopes on the format to make the PS3 future-proof, but speaking to Pocket-Lint, Andy Griffiths, director of consumer electronics at Samsung UK said: “I think it [Blu-ray] has 5 years left, I certainly wouldn’t give it 10.”
IBM has singed a deal to build the world's first sustained petascale computational system dedicated to open scientific research.
Dubbed Blue Water, the computer system is being built for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
This fall, French public transportation company SNCF intends to begin employing RFID-enabled smart cards with USB connectivity, in order to allow users to plug the cards into a PC or laptop, automatically connect to the SNCF Web site and add funds to the cards from home. Approximately 1,000 SNCF customers will pilot the Weneo smart cards as part of the company's home-payment effort.
MIT researchers are working toward a computer tool that could reduce airline flight delays due to weather. Already, they have found that a prototype deployed in the New York City region cut delays last year by 2,300 hours, saving the equivalent of some $7.5 million in operating costs.
The team, led by Richard DeLaura of MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Weather Sensing Group, estimates that fully implementing the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) in the New York region alone could save 8,800 hours per year, or $28 million.
A Sydney internet cafe is the first venue in Australia - and among the first in the world - to install high-tech computer monitors capable of displaying games and movies in 3D without forcing the user to wear special 3D glasses.
Customers of Beyond Internet Gaming, which is located below the movie cinemas on Sydney's George Street, can from today play a variety of video games in full 3D with images appearing to pop out of the computer screen.
A representative from Sony said during an interview that Blu-ray may easily be the last and final optical disc format. Sony did not admit that physical media for content will be gone in a decade or even less from now, quite opposite, the firm believes that further incarnations of Blu-ray will allow the technology to live quite a long life.
A brief overview of how the Internet came about: some years ago, some military boffs thought it’d be awesome if computers could talk to each other, so the US could nuke the hell out of other countries without actually being near there. A smart professor from England then came up with an idea to plug on top of the original idea, to make text and pictures appear on a screen. Some years passed, some boring developments and company takeovers, and now we have the Internet.
First Intel, now Big Blue is keen on SSDs. IBM said it is testing a 4-terabyte high-speed solid state drive array targeted at the enterprise, as the technology giant gives its imprimatur to flash memory-based storage.
For years, flash memory cards--the first mass-market SSDs--have been limited to digital cameras and music players like the iPod. But SSDs are now poised to hit technological critical mass in terms of storage capacity, speed, and availability as they find their way into everything ranging from tiny netbooks to massive enterprise storage arrays.
