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AI

Submission + - IBM Prototype Chip Acts Like Human Brain (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by cheezitmike
cheezitmike writes: IBM has created two prototype computer chips which process data similar to the way humans digest information: "The challenge in training a computer to behave like a human brain is technological and physiological, testing the limits of computer and brain science. But researchers from IBM Corp. say they've made a key step toward combining the two worlds. The company announced Thursday that it has built two prototype chips that it says process data more like how humans digest information than the chips that now power PCs and supercomputers."
Programming

Submission + - C++ And The Return Of Native Code (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that the new version of C++ signals renewed interest in old-fashioned native binaries. 'Modern programmers have increasingly turned away from native compilation in favor of managed-code environments such as Java and .Net, which shield them from some of the drudgery of memory management and input validation. Others are willing to sacrifice some performance for the syntactic comforts of dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. But C++11 arrives at an interesting time. There's a growing sentiment that the pendulum may have swung too far away from native code, and it might be time for it to swing back in the other direction. Thus, C++ may have found itself some unlikely allies.'"
Linux

Submission + - Linus Torvalds: ARM has a lot to learn from the PC (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "Linux and ARM developers have clashed over what's been described as a "United Nations-level complexity of the forks in the ARM section of the Linux kernel." Linus Torvalds addressed the issue at LinuxCon this week on the 20th anniversary of Linux, saying the ARM platform has a lot to learn from the PC. While Torvalds noted that "a lot of people love to hate the PC," the fact that Intel, AMD and hardware makers worked on building a common infrastructure "made it very efficient and easy to support." ARM, on the other hand, "is missing it completely," Torvalds said. "ARM is this hodgepodge of five or six major companies and tens of minor companies making random pieces of hardware, and it looks like they're taking hardware and throwing it at a wall and seeing where it sticks, and making a chip out of what's stuck on the wall.""
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - New Twitter-Based Hedge Fund Beat the Stock Market (theatlanticwire.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: Derwent Capital, a new hedge fund that makes trades and investments based on Twitter sentiment, beat the market--and other hedge funds--in its first full month of trading. From the Atlantic: " Using an algorithm based on the social media mood that day, the hedge fund predicted the market to make the right trades. Sounds unbelievable that something cluttered with mundane musings and media links could have anything smart to say about the market. But it's working so far." Blind luck?
Robotics

Submission + - Samarai UAV Inspired by Maple Seed - Demo at AUVSI (engineeringtv.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bill Borgia, Director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Lockheed Martin, gives us the details on their latest unique creation: a small UAV with a design inspired by a samara, the seed from a maple tree. The Samarai has only two moving parts, weighs less than half a pound. At AUVSI Unmanned Systems 2011, the Samarai debuted and demonstrated vertical takeoff and landing, stable hover, and on-board video streaming.
Space

Submission + - DARPA to Sponsor R&D for Interstellar Travel (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Apocryphos
Apocryphos writes: The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars.

In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.
Hardware

Submission + - Organic semiconductor 30x faster than silicon (stanford.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Creating a flexible display requires finding an organic material that's both durable and capable of carrying an electric signal fast enough. To create such a material requires choosing the right compound and combining it with an organic base material. It's a hit and miss affair that can take years of synthesis to get right, but even then the final material may not be good enough.

Standford and Harvard researchers have come up with a much faster solution: use computer prediction to decide on the best compound before synthesizing begins. They also proved it works by developing a new organic semiconductor material 30x faster than the amorphous silicon used in LCDs.

Submission + - How volunteers rebuilt WW2 computers (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
nk497
nk497 writes: "A single photograph, scraps of circuit diagrams drawn from memory and a pile of disused components – it isn’t much to go on, but from such meagre beginnings, engineers rebuilt one of the precursors to the modern computer. The Tunny decryption machine – on display at The Museum of National Computing at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire in the UK – was a feat of engineering both during World War II when it was created, and over the past five years when it was rebuilt by retired BT engineers."

Comment My Cat Does That (Score 1) 139

by cheezitmike (#36907082) Attached to: South Korean Scientists Create Glowing Dog
So what? My cat can produce spots on the carpet that glow under a fluorescent UV light. I suppose if we had a dog, the cat could pee on the dog and make it glow too. But you don't see cats running of to publish stuff in journals; they have too much important napping and paw-licking to do instead.
Patents

Submission + - When Patents Attack (npr.org)

Submitted by cheezitmike
cheezitmike writes: From NPR, a story about how software patents and their licensing and litigation are harming the IT industry. NPR specifically shines the light on a company called Intellectual Ventures which owns 35,000 patents: "Technology companies pay Intellectual Ventures fees ranging "from tens of thousands to the millions and millions of dollars ... to buy themselves insurance that protects them from being sued by any harmful, malevolent outsiders," Sacca says. There's an implication in IV's pitch, Sacca says: If you don't join us, who knows what'll happen?"
Apple

Submission + - Netflix Killing DVDs like Apple Killed Floppies? (cnet.com) 1

Submitted by cheezitmike
cheezitmike writes: While there has been lots of outcry about Netflix separating DVD service from streaming service, streaming media expert Eric Garland says they're just doing to the DVD what Apple did to the floppy disk. "I was reminded of so many precedents: Facebook revamping its user interface, the introduction of the first Blueberry iMac, the one with the conspicuously missing 3.5-inch floppy drive on the front. All of these were moments when there was a paradigm shift that led to an immediate public outcry. People made a lot of noise and had a lot of complaints. People were very upset about these shifts...until they weren't. In the news cycle, the outcry is significant and it is problematic, but it's also important to note how quickly these things are forgotten."

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