66975369
submission
jfruh writes:
Fifty years ago, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors engineers were managing to squeeze onto a chip was doubling every two years. Four years later, Moore co-founded Intel, a company that elevated this observation into a law and put it at the heart of its business. But now, with chip engineering reaching the point where components are measured in terms of individual molecules, Moore's Law may have reached it's limits — with dire results for Intel.
66887511
submission
jfruh writes:
Computing devices have been gobbling up more and more memory, but storage tech has been hitting its limits, creating a bottleneck. Now researchers in Spain and Scotland have reported a breakthrough in working with metal-oxide clusters that can retain their charge. These molecules could serve as the basis for RAM and flash memory that will be leagues smaller than existing components.
66887331
submission
jfruh writes:
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, people wondered how the tech heavyweight would approach the business of running a traditional print outlet, and how Amazon would fit into the picture. Well, here's a first tiny step: Kindle Fire owners will now be getting a free six month subscription to the Post's slick new Web app, whether they ask for it or not.
66793953
submission
jfruh writes:
Last weekend, Tim Berners-Lee said that the UK needs more members of parliament who can code. Well, the most recent U.S. congressional election has obliged him on this side of the Atlantic: the number of coders in Congress has tripled, with the downside being that their numbers have gone from one to three.
66697455
submission
jfruh writes:
There's a lot more to building a new hospital than just unrolling a blueprint these days. This video shows some of the tools used to help people better navigate the complex infrastructure that underlies a high-tech building: designs that can be viewed with 3D glasses, and tiny drones that can fly into the worksite to check on hard-to-reach spaces.
66697027
submission
jfruh writes:
Facebook, not satisfied with being the site you sneak peeks with at the office when you should be doing real work, now wants to be someplace where you actually do that real work, with work collaboration and document editing features supposedly in the works. Of course, Facebook also says that "For users who are truly concerned with sharing their information with a particular platform, honestly, you might not want to share information with that platform."
66580389
submission
jfruh writes:
As Microsoft focuses its Xbox line firmly on games, Sony seems to be taking the opposite track with the PlayStation. PlayStation Vue will be a new TV service for PlayStation 3 and 4 users that allows both live viewing of TV and watching episodes later at your leisure. Beta testing begins soon in New York.
66580045
submission
jfruh writes:
To the chorus of companies opposed to President Obama's net neutrality proposals, add another: Cisco. The networking giant says the regulations would deter ISPs from making investments in their networks, which would in turn hurt sales of Cisco equipment.
66488203
submission
jfruh writes:
It's not a fun time to be a Qualcomm lawyer. In China, the company is under investigation for overcharging local licensees of its patents. In the U.S., the FTC began probing it in September for unfair trade practices. And last month, the European Commission opened an investigation of Qualcomm's use of rebates and financial incentives for customers.
66488041
submission
jfruh writes:
Last year, a bipartisan coalition helped get the Main Street Fairness Act, which would allow state and local governments to collect sales taxes on Internet sales by companies in different jurisdictions, approved by the U.S. Senate. But House Speaker John Boehner, a longtime opponent of Internet taxes, won't bring the matter to a vote in the House before the end of the year, which should kill it for the immediate future.
66441111
submission
jfruh writes:
In-flight Wi-Fi services tend to be expensive and disappointingly slow. So when AT&T announced a few months ago that it was planning on getting into the business, with customer airlines being able to connect to AT&T's LTE network instead of slow sattelite services, the industry shook. But now AT&T has announced that, upon further review, they're not going to bother.
66393679
submission
jfruh writes:
If you're part of the homebuilt PC scene, you've almost certainly heard of Zalman Tech, a Korean company that makes innovative cooling systems that won't leave your high-powered computer sounding like a jet engine about to take off. But now it appears Zalman is doomed — not because of any weakness in the market, but because Moneual, Zalman's parent company, has been overstating its profits for years in order to qualify for loans that that its owners have used for personal purposes, leaving the company a bankrupt shell.
66285973
submission
jfruh writes:
Facebook recently held its first ever town-hall meeting in which Mark Zuckerberg took questions from the general public, and one of his answers might raised some eyebrows. When asked if the increasing numbers of photos being uploaded might strain the company's servers, he said the infrastructure is more than up to the task, because they're preparing for the fact that 'in five years, most of [Facebook] will be video.'
66285795
submission
jfruh writes:
Many tech workers looking to expand their knowledge and burnish their credentials have gone on to get a master's degree in computer science. But now a relatively new graduate degree has become available: an IT-specific MBA. What would pursuing either mean for your career?
66194563
submission
jfruh writes:
At the dawn of the smartphone age, there was a belief that most mobile apps would be write once, run anywhere HTML 5-based programs that would run in the browser. But these were quickly displaced by native apps — and now it appears that HTML 5 apps open security holes on devices as well.
