IT

Wed
24
Sep
John Lister's picture

How a $30 Cellphone Could Help Save a Mother's Life

A new project aims to use cellphones to give pregnant women in developing countries a lifeline. It's designed to tackle a problem of a reported 300,000 women each year dying during pregnancy or childbirth. The Zero Mothers Die project aims to use ... the cellphones in two ways. The first is as a way to send text and voice messages during the pregnancy, giving health information and tips. That's something that could be vital for women who don't have access to regular medical attention or the ability to read health advice online. The second part of the plan is that the phones will come ... (view more)

Thu
20
Feb
John Lister's picture

Google to Roll Out Super-Speed Gigabit Broadband

Google has named 34 cities where it hopes to offer its super-fast broadband service. Google Fiber customers can get speeds as high as 50 times more than that which is currently offered by most cable providers. Typical Broadband Versus Google Fiber ... Typical Internet broadband over an ordinary copper phone line means speeds of a few megabits per second. For services over the same fiber-optic cables as cable TV companies, speeds of 10 to 20 megabits per second are more common. For a numbers comparison, a 10 megabit connection is equal to 1280 kilobytes per second. That said, Google Fiber offers ... (view more)

Fri
09
Aug
Dennis Faas's picture

Flaw Results In Xerox Scanners Making Costly Errors

Xerox has admitted that some of its scanners mix up numbers. It's a problem that could prove costly for business users. Surprisingly, the problem isn't related to optical character recognition, which turns a scanned document into text; instead, the ... mixed-up numbers are right there on the scanned image. David Kriesel, a computer scientist in Germany, discovered the problem when scanning construction documents. The documents Kriesel scanned were related to three rooms of different sizes. However, after making the scan Kriesel found the document showed all three rooms as the same size -- a clear ... (view more)

Tue
02
Apr
Dennis Faas's picture

Roadrunner Supercomputer Switched Off to Save Power

In 2008, IBM's Roadrunner was crowned the fastest computer in the world. Just five years later it's being scrapped. Roadrunner is based at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where staff work on several projects, including the U.S. ... nuclear weapons program. The computer has some impressive specifications. To put things into context, a new desktop might have the equivalent of two or four processors, perhaps one terabyte (a thousand gigabytes) of hard drive space and four gigabytes of memory. Computer Performance Second-to-None Roadrunner has almost 20,000 different processors. It ... (view more)

Mon
06
Aug
Dennis Faas's picture

'Sentinel' Computer System Helps FBI Solve Crimes

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) plans to join the twenty-first century by using computer systems rather than paper to manage its cases. The change may improve detection rates by making it easier to cross-reference data between cases. ... The new computer system, called Sentinel, will also allow FBI agents to make notes on cases via dedicated software. A demonstration for reporters showed that Sentinel contains elements reminiscent of consumer software, such as web browsers, Microsoft Outlook, and tax preparation software. (Source: wsj.com ) FBI personnel have been using Sentinel ... (view more)

Fri
20
Apr
Dennis Faas's picture

Apple, Microsoft Targeted for Use of 'Dirty' Power

Environmental organization Greenpeace has issued a widespread warning about the technology used to host the Internet. According to Greenpeace, much of the online space is dependent on 'dirty' power. The group says that some of the largest web firms ... are intentionally moving their servers and other power-hungry facilities to geographical areas that can provide cheaper, although more environmentally harmful sources of electricity. The criticisms were recently published in a report titled: "How Clean Is Your Cloud?" The title is a reference to the current emphasis on cloud computing , ... (view more)

Mon
27
Feb
Dennis Faas's picture

MIT Launches Online-Only Course

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most respected universities in the world, is planning to launch a course that can be taken entirely over the Internet. It's not enough for a degree in itself, but those who pass will earn a ... certificate. The course will be a prototype for online learning at the university. This is the first time such a high-profile institution has offered a course that yields a passing or failing grade, rather than one where students simply access the information and receive a virtual "attendance" certificate. Existing Course Makes Electronic Leap ... (view more)

Thu
22
Dec
Dennis Faas's picture

IBM Makes Tech Predictions for 2016

Biometric information used for identification is among IBM's five newest forecasts for the year 2016, along with thought-reading smartphones, which is reminiscent of a forecast it made five years ago. Since 2006, IBM has published an annual list of ... five technology trends it expects to take effect within five years. This year's forecasts include the end of passwords, which by 2016 may be replaced by biometric log-ins like fingerprint scanners , iris scanners or even DNA readers. As science fiction as that may seem, it's already in the works: Windows 8 is thought to support an option for log- ... (view more)

Thu
10
Nov
Dennis Faas's picture

New Tech Solves 'Cable Guy' Waiting Game

An Ohio firm has developed a new software system which promises to reduce the time and money people waste waiting for deliveries and repairmen to show up on call. According to TOA Technologies, US workers lose about $37 billion each year because of ... vague schedules that keep them pinned down, waiting for delivery and service personnel. Software Monitors Real Time Events, Not Schedule The problem of delivery and service call scheduling has long been a tough nut to crack. TOA's new system, however, tackles the problem by calculating both the amount of time that a given job might take, and the ... (view more)

Mon
17
Oct
Dennis Faas's picture

Scientists: Table Salt to Increase Storage Density

A tandem of researchers in Singapore claim to have discovered a way to use table salt as a means to increase the density at which bits of data can be stored on a hard disk drive platter. Early projections indicate that this 'salty' method is ... actually 5 times more efficient than current hard disk densities. The method was first introduced by Joel Yang, a scientist at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) at Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research. Yang was able to hone his method using an extremely high-resolution e-beam lithography -- the same process by ... (view more)

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - IT