Tag: TECHNOLOGY

According to one IPv6 provider, we are now just days away from the IPv4 ARPAgeddon, or IPocalypse [not to be confused with the iPocalypse]. With IPv4 providing only 4.3 billion addresses, we all knew that the end of the reckless and fancy-free Internet era was coming -- we just didn't know when. The death knell has started to ring. Asia is on its knees plaintively pleading for its fix of IP ...

In a move to decrease Russia's dependence on American technology, the Russian government has announced plans to develop a state-sponsored national operating system. Shifting away from Windows would mean both money savings for Russia, and increased digital security. 150 million rubles (5 million dollars) have been set aside to create an operating system that will be based on Linux. It's not yet ...

There were rumors about it yesterday, but today we find out that it actually happened: AOL has purchased TechCrunch, one of the biggest blogs (and blog networks) in the technology industry. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong announced the news this morning at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference, noting that TechCrunch will become part of the AOL Technology Network that includes sites like Engadget, Switched, The ...

Much has been said about Gmail's new priority inbox -- all of it good! -- but it turns out that Microsoft Research has been working on similar technology since the 1990s. Not only is there a slew of research papers detailing how the technology works (it sounds very similar to Gmail's priority inbox), but Microsoft also has a bunch of well-targeted patents filed as far back as 1999! Is this ...

In recent months I've been losing my mind. I don't know if I actually have something wrong upstairs, but I have been finding it increasingly hard to keep things -- ideas, snippets, variables -- in short-term memory. I think, though, that it's just a symptom of Information Overload. I sit here, hour after hour, day upon day, scanning RSS feeds, IRC rooms and forums. The amount of new data, videos ...

A few days ago, the Microsoft vice president of Corporate Communications shared some figures with the rest of the world. Total sales, downloads, visitors, subscriptions -- numbers. It's a blog post of numbers. TechCrunch calls it passive-aggressive. I call it smug, reassured braggatry -- the kind that only 800lb gorillas can pull off. If you want a full analysis of the numbers, read ...

New Scientist is running a story this morning about immortality -- not the physiological, philosopher's stone variety, though: digital immortality. What if, rather than dying, you could live on... inside a computer? Physically we might die, but if an accurate representation of our brain and all of its associated memories can be recreated inside a digital computer, stored in digital memory, can ...

"In many cases, sarcasm is difficult even for people to recognise," says Ari Rappoport of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. No shit, Ari, really? Given a sample set of Amazon product reviews and random Twitter posts, the new sarcasm software agreed with human analysis more than 75% of the time! While this is a pretty nifty advance for natural language processing, the implications ...

Following on from a New Scientist article that was written a few days ago, I ended up on the website of Taeg Sang Cho -- a graduate student at MIT. He's been working on a bunch of advanced imaging algorithms -- with gifts and grants from big names like Microsoft, Adobe and Google. His recent work -- three research papers -- is all about content-aware manipulation of photos. I'm struggling to ...

What would you do? You're sitting on top of an innovation that would rock the world. This particular invention would change the entire make-up of both the virtual and real worlds -- in fact, it would inexorably merge them together, for better or worse. I am of course talking about face recognition. Face recognition already exists -- be it to biometrically to open doors, or ostensibly as a ...

Domestic, consumer-grade high-speed optical cables are finally here, folks! By the end of the year you will begin to see Intel's new Light Peak technology. So that you have some idea of just how fast 10 gigabits per second is, Intel's Light Peak overview leaps straight into layman's analogy: at 10Gb/s, you could transfer a Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds -- that's 1200 megabytes per ...

Not content to give up and suckle on the buzzworded cable teat just yet, Bell Labs has just successfully tested a variant of DSL that is capable of up to 800Mbps -- about 100 megabytes per second -- using just a pair of traditional DSL connections. The range is short -- only a few hundred meters -- but the same technology, according to Alcatel-Lucent, is capable of 100Mbps over a 1,000 meter ...

Unlimited Detail is definitely the most interesting technology demo I stumbled on today. In a nutshell: current 3D technology is based on polygons. Each 3D shape you see on the screen is made out of multiple straight facets (polygons). The more polygons (or facets), the rounder and more natural it seems. The current battle is all about polygon counts -- how many polygons can a certain graphics ...

Proper writing -- you know, novels and stuff -- shares a few common traits with blogging. The most common is 'writers' block' or THE WALL. You simply run out of things to write. It can either creep up on you slowly, or just suddenly emerge before you like a big... brick thing... but either way, it's a problem. And IBM has a solution! In true, researchers-are-not-very-good-at-naming-things fashion, ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/03/05/within-a-year-90-of-microsoft-employees-will-be-working-on-clo/'; I hinted that, with Office 2010, Microsoft would be moving the focus of its development towards the cloud, but I had no idea they were quite so involved! As of today, around 75% of its employees are working on cloud-related projects. "A year from now that will be 90 ...