holy_calamity - Slashdot User

Submission + - Race to mine bitcoins drives enthusiasts into the chip making business (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @05:23PM

holy_calamity writes: "MIT Technology Review looks at the small companies attempting to build dedicated chips to mining bitcoins. Several are claiming they will start selling hardware based on their chips early in 2013, with the technology expected to force many small time miners to give up. However, as happened in the CPU industry, miners may soon be caught in an expensive arms race that pushes development of faster and faster chips."

Submission + - French Company Building a Mobile Internet Just for Things (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @02:39PM

holy_calamity writes: "France now has a dedicated cellular data network just for Internet of Things devices, and the company that built it is rolling out the technology elsewhere, says MIT Technology Review. SigFox's network is slower than a conventional cellular data network, but built using technology able to make much longer range links and operate on unlicensed spectrum. Those features are intended to allow the service to be cheap enough for low cost sensors on energy infrastructure and many other places to make sense, something not possible on a network shared with smartphones and other consumer devices."

Submission + - Moore's Law is becoming irrelevant, says ARM's boss (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity on Friday November 09, 2012 @04:41PM

holy_calamity writes: PCs will inevitably shift over to ARM-based chips because efficiency now matters more than gains in raw performance, the CEO of chip designer ARM tells MIT Technology Review. He also claims that the greater competition in the ARM-chip will cause more companies to follow Microsoft in building PCs without x86, as it did with the Surface tablet, for cost reasons.

Submission + - Google Puts Souped-up Neural Networks to Work (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity on Friday October 05, 2012 @07:20PM

holy_calamity writes: A machine learning breakthrough from Google researchers that grabbed headlines this summer is now being put to work improving the company's products. The company revealed in June that it had built neural networks that run on 16,000 processors simultaneously, enough power that they could learn to recognize cats just by watching YouTube. Those neural nets have now made Google's speech recognition for US English 25 percent better, and are set to be used in other products, such as image search.

Submission + - The CIA and Amazon's founder invest in quantum computing (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity on Thursday October 04, 2012 @02:50PM

holy_calamity writes: Canadian company D-Wave has claimed for years it can build quantum computers, and now has the backing of the CIA's investment fund In-Q-Tel and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Between them they will put $30 million into the company, which academics say is yet to conclusively prove its technology works.

Submission + - Inside Facebook data mining research group (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @04:45PM

holy_calamity writes: "Technology Review has an in depth profile of the team at Facebook tasked with figuring out what can be learned from all our data. The Data Science Team mine that information trove both in the name of scientific research into the patterns of human behavior and to advance Facebook's understanding of its users. Facebook's ad business gets the most public attention, but the company's data mining technology may have a greater effect on its destiny — and users lives."

Submission + - Upstart Search Engines Climbing as Google Tinkers (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Monday June 04, 2012 @03:40PM

holy_calamity writes: "Google has made major changes to its Web search this year, including adding its social network into results and a privacy policy change allowing broader use of behavioral data. All that seems to have encouraged Web users to look for alternative search engines. Search startups, Blekko and DuckDuckGo, have experienced significant user growth in recent months. Is there space for new search engines to succeed?"

Submission + - Microsoft's Lifebrowser is a Prosthetic for Memory (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Friday March 16, 2012 @08:07PM

holy_calamity writes: "Technology Review writes about software from Microsoft Research that looks like a smarter, more private version of Facebook's timeline. Lifebrowser uses machine learning techniques to process photos, emails, web history, documents and other data on your computer and automatically create an interactive timeline with an awareness of what's important and what isn't. Lifebrowser is intended to be a prosthetic for memory. When a user searches their archive for specific information Lifebrowser presents notable photos and other information to aid recollection."

Submission + - WebKit Bug Allows Remote Takeover of Most Android Phones (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @07:44PM

holy_calamity writes: "An attack shown at the RSA security conference today demonstrates that bugs in the WebKit browser library can be used to remotely take over Android phones. Researchers from startup company CrowdStrike paid $1400 for details of unpatched WebKit bugs. They combined them with malware developed in China to create a system that installs a remote access tool when a user clicks a web link. The attackers gain access to phone audio, text messages and a device's location. Android versions 2.2 and 2.3 are affected, approximately 90 percent of devices in the wild."

Submission + - Cloud Service Convinces Your PC Its Hard Drive is "Infinite" (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @01:39PM

holy_calamity writes: "Startup Bitcasa has launched a beta of its cloud storage service that claims to allow users to treat their hard drives as "infinite". Bitcasa's application links certain folders to the company's cloud storage so that they can appear to swallow unlimited amounts of data, while some files and folders really reside on distant servers and must be downloaded when an application wishes to access them. Mounting online storage locally isn't new, but Bitcasa tries to make the illusion more complete and encourage users to rely on it more heavily. The service will launch later this year for $10 a month."

Submission + - IRobot's Latest, Biggest Military Robot

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Wednesday February 08, 2012 @03:20PM

holy_calamity writes: "Technology Review has video of a one-armed robot named Warrior, newly for sale by Roomba-maker iRobot and aimed at military and police. The company's PackBots have been helping US troops disable improvised explosive devices for years and are small enough for one person to carry. The greater size and strength of the 450 pound Warrior — it can tow an SUV and lift 150 pounds — is intended to make it useful in a broader range of situations, such as search and rescue."

Submission + - Stanford Spinout Nicira Tipped to Dethrone Cisco (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Monday February 06, 2012 @11:27AM

holy_calamity writes: "Many outlets today are covering startup Nicira, which has $50 million in funding and could threaten the businesses of networking giants Cisco and Juniper. Nicira offers virtualized versions of data center network hardware, meaning admins control their networks using only software and the underlying hardware sold by companies like Cisco and Juniper is less important. Nicira claims this approach has the potential to make large data centers — and hence any cloud service — more efficient. Technology Review has an in depth article on the company and its ideas and like many others suggests Nicira could become the "VMware of networking"."

Submission + - Patent covering URLs in text messages for sale at (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Thursday January 12, 2012 @05:49PM

holy_calamity writes: "Press day at CES is packed with announcements from the world's largest tech companies, but one unknown managed to grab a spot this year to hawk a patent its founder says is worth $60 million. Robert Sanchez of Cherple says Twitter, Facebook, and wireless carriers all infringe on his patent millions of times a day and that he's in discussions with several major tech companies to acquire it. The broadly written patent "System and method for delivering web content to a mobile device" covers linking to web content in SMS messages, says Sanchez, who claims he will sell it to the highest bidder. Mobile devices manufacturers are said to be among those in talks to buy it."

Submission + - Intel Demos Phone, Tablet in New Mobile Chip Push (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @01:19PM

holy_calamity writes: "Intel is making another assault on the mobile processor market, showing off a prototype phone, and a tablet, using its newest mobile processor, Medfield. The company claims that products based on the chips will appear in the first half of next year. There's reason to believe that Intel might get somewhere this time. Its chipsets traditionally comprise three separate chips, a design that guzzles power. Medfield introduces an all-in-one chip, mirroring the power efficient design of the ARM-based chips that run smart phones and tablets in the market today."

Submission + - Microsoft's So.cl Combines Search and Social Netwo (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Thursday December 15, 2011 @02:47PM

holy_calamity writes: "As Slashdot noted, Microsoft accidentally revealed a social network a few months ago. Now the company is talking about the site, known as So.cl. Technology Review has a write up with screenshots, showing a Facebook-like design. Users create status updates using a Bing search box at the top of the page, selecting chunks of text or collages of images from their results. Although the site looks like a slick, general purpose network it is aimed at helping students to collaborate while learning, says the team that built it. For now, only students at three schools can sign up, but that may change."

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