It looks like something NASA would aim at the sky and launch into orbit but no, it's a car. And by the time its builders' blast it across a desert in South Africa next year, they hope to set the land speed record by going well over 1,000MPH. Read more
You either see Chrome OS's all browser OS approach as revolutionizing the PC industry or then next "technology solution looking for a problem" doomed to fail. Google's approach with Chrome OS is certainly radically different from the Windows, Mac OS and Linux approach we've used since the birth of the personal computer industry in the seventies. Read more
A radiation-proof Cisco router was sent into space today aboard an Intelsat satellite with the goal to set up military communications from space. Read more
Researchers at IBM say they have created smart software that that translates text between English and 11 other languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic.
Hosted as an internal IBM service since August 2008, n.Fluent offers a secure real-time translation tool that translates text in web pages, electronic documents, Sametime instant message chats, and provides a BlackBerry mobile translation application. Read more
I was in New York last Wednesday, 11/18 for a one-day whirlwind tour of the Interop show floor. Sorry to say I did not have time to attend the keynote presentations, but my schedule only afforded enough time to catch up with the twenty or so management vendors who were exhibiting. Little did I know that I would be forced to live the day as one of the unfortunate - the "have-nots" - the "Internet unconnecteds"... Read more
Google's laying it all out on the table with Chrome OS. My editor posted an excellent article about Chrome OS and we're already expecting a Chrome OS update from Google. Despite the distraction of a bank robbery and shooting in our city last week, I managed to dig my paws into Chrome OS to try and really understand what Google's up to. Read more
In court the Federal Communications Commission has charged 26 people with defrauding the agency of "tens of millions of dollars" from its program that lets people with hearing disabilities to communicate with hearing individuals through the use of interpreters and Web cameras. Read more
When The Little App Factory received a legal letter from Apple requesting that they change the name of their popular Mac app, "iPodRip", CEO John Devor decided to pen a heartfelt email to Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself. iPodRip, in case you're unaware, is a nifty little Mac app that enables users to copy songs from their iPhone or iPod back to their Mac. The app has been around since 2003 and is must-have if you experience any kind of data loss on your Mac. To date, it has been downloaded over 5 million times. Read more
While the number of permitted unmanned aircraft operations in commercial airspace has tripled since 2007, the Federal Aviation Administration says routine drone access to civilian airspace is years away. Read more
The FBI today warned that scammers using uniquely spoofed subject lines designed to engage recipients with specific business content, are targeting US law and public relations firms with spear phishing e-mails containing malicious payloads. Read more
Microsoft's Ray Ozzie significantly blew past the basic Exchange, SharePoint and SQL database hosting services with the Azure announcements at PDC 2009 yesterday. Read more
It's not a very good day when a security report concludes: Disruptive cyber activities expected to become the norm in future political and military conflicts. Read more
Some math problems are as old as the wind, experts say and many remain truly unsolved. But a new open source-based site from the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) looks to help track work done and solve long-standing and difficult math problems. Read more
Over the past few months, Palm and Apple have been playing a never ending game of cat and mouse over the Palm Pre's ability to sync up with iTunes. Every time Apple released an iTunes update which prevented the Pre from syncing with iTunes, Palm would fire back with a WebOS update of its own which restored media syncing. This back and forth went on a number of times, and Palm even went so far as to file a complaint with the USB Implementers Forum claiming that Apple was improperly discriminating against third party USB vendor ID's. Read more
The Florida based Psystar corporation has been a perennial thorn in Apple's side for well over a year. You might recall that Psystar is the company that sells un-authroized Mac clones via its website, in addition to selling software (called Rebel EFI) which enables PC owners to install OS X on their machines. Apple naturally doesn't take too kindly to companies stealing its intellectual property, and in the summer of 2008, Apple took Psystar to court for copyright infringement. Read more
Microsoft is trying to keep up with the demand for an additional 10,000 servers a month. The majority of the servers are needed for “search” (approximately 80,000 or so) and the rest are mostly allotted for things like Hotmail, messenger, consumer video, photo services as well as its collection of hosted enterprise services. Read more
A Tang soufflé' perhaps? Yum. A new book out this week will tell you everything you wanted to know about cooking and eating in space.
The Astronaut's Cookbook - Tales, Recipes, and More - penned by NASA veterans Charles Bourland and Gregory Vogt offers up a number of recipes as well a history of space feasting just in time for Thanksgiving, if you are so inclined. Read more
Last week, Google announced that it was acquiring the mobile advertising company AdMob for $750 million in stock. AdMob, of course, is the largest mobile advertising company in the world and its ads can be seen on a plethora of iPhone apps. As the market for smartphones continues to expand, so does the market for high quality mobile apps, and in turn, so increases the opportunity for mobile advertising. Read more
The NASA spacecraft that plowed into the moon last month have discovered what the space agency calls "significant amounts of water" on the lunar surface. Read more
Microsoft is achieving impressive performance gains with "Velocity", the code name for a new Microsoft data caching technology currently in Community Technical Preview. Velocity is a distributed in-memory application cache technology that combines in-memory data caches across multiple servers, appearing as one large data cache to data hungry applications.
By accessing data in Velocity data caches, expensive hits to the SQL database are avoided and application data is delivered with much less latency. Server CPU and disk resource consumption are also lowered. Read more