BAD HARDWARE WEEK

This same pattern appeared in the brains of humans, rhesus monkeys, owl monkeys, marmosets and galagos, researchers report Thursday in the journal Science.The surface of the brain contains about 40 billion nerve cells, each making about 1,000 connections in a pattern that brain researchers have yet to decipher, said Marsel Mesulam, the director of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University.





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According to LG, the first plastic display-toting e-readers are expected to emerge in Europe “at the beginning of next month,” with the US presumably following swiftly after.
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Obama Administration Places $200 Million Bet On Big Data
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Towards 5G Network ?

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Model: Eken A90 (8GB)


Screen Size: 9.7 inch screen, 4:3, Resolution: 1024*768
Operating System: Android 4.0.3 OS
Touch Screen: Capacitive 5-Points Multi-Touch Screen
CPU: Chipset: Allwinner ARM Cortex A10, Cortex-A8, 1.5 GHz
RAM: DDR2 1GB
Storage: 8GB
Expanded MicroSDHC card, up to 32GB
I / O Ports: USB2.0 (host), MINI USB2.0, MicroSD card slot, earphone jack, HDMI, and Charging port.
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A team of undersea searchers funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has located the rocket engines that powered the manned trip to the moon in 1969, and now plans to recover them, he said. 
Those five F-1s burned for just a few minutes, and then plunged back to Earth into the Atlantic Ocean, just as NASA planned. A few days later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Nice that Apollo 11 lift engines were found. However, strange enough is that Armstrong's Moon landing engine has been never convincingly found ! And brought back, even as a photo of. Using 1kg micro thrusters for example.

2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer
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Original 1984 Macintosh 128k computer spotted on eBay
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Conrad Zuse sold it to academia, ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 1950.


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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Several months before the sale of the first UNIVAC.

Tablets from 2011 and 2012 are still around 10 times slower than a standard gaming PC from 2009
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But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information ?

So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.

But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in 2009, it will be an “unassuming facility with limited view from roads,” in keeping with the NSA’s desire for secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.

Feature size of 22 to 11 nanometers, CMOS in 2018
* Total average of 25 picojoules per floating point operation
* Approximately 10 billion-way concurrency for simultaneous operation and latency hiding
* 100 million to 1 billion cores
* Clock rates of 1 to 2 GHz
* Multithreaded, fine-grained concurrency of 10- to 100-way concurrency per core
* Hundreds of cores per die (varies dramatically depending on core type and other factors)
* Global address space without cache coherence; extensions to PGAS (e.g., AGAS)
* 128-petabyte capacity mix of DRAM and nonvolatile memory (most expensive subsystem)
* Explicitly managed high-speed buffer caches; part of deep memory hierarchy
* Optical communications for distances > 10 centimeters, possibly intersocket
* Optical bandwidth of 1 terabit per second
* Systemwide latencies on the order of tens of thousands of cycles
* Active power management to eliminate wasted energy by momentarily unused cores
* Fault tolerance by means of graceful degradation and dynamically reconfigurable structures
* Hardware-supported rapid thread context switching
* Hardware-supported efficient message-to-thread conversion for message-driven computation
* Hardware-supported, lightweight synchronization mechanisms
* 3-D packaging of dies for stacks of 4 to 10 dies each including DRAM, cores, and networking 

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Looping fibre optics from Japan under the Arctic ice will improve internet performance – but is easier said than done
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With half the drag of conventional supersonic jets such as Concorde
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Java-based Web attack installs hard-to-detect malware in RAM.
Kaspersky Lab researchers investigated a drive-by download attack that installs malware which only lives in the computer's memory
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Google tablet in production 
The tablet is still a 7-incher and it won’t be cheaper than $199, despite rumors that it might get a dual-core processor and drop to $149. 

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Apple to announce plans for its $100 billion cash stockpile tomorrow
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, and Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, will host a conference call to announce the outcome of the Company’s discussions concerning its cash balance.
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: The PowerVR SGX543MP4 GPU is the same graphics processor core found in the Sony Inc.'s Playstation Vita, according to UBM TechInsights.Yet another Apple's radical twist ! BAckward ?

The new generation dual Socket 2011 Xeon E5 platform has one rarely mentioned, but important, capability - receiving the I/O data from, say, storage or network, directly into the CPU cache, rather than going to and from the main memory. Direct I/O (DDIO) could be used even beyond workstations and servers, though... how about low-latency high end gameplay?

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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: 8MB or more of L3 and say 64MB L4 should directly solve a lot of problems. However, is it shared with GPU or not? Data delivery from two 1TB SSD to L4 eDRAM directly? Interesting and impressive . And technologically quite possible for Intel. Thus, please don't misunderstand abbrev LLC as: Laughing Like Crazy

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Pearl, 75, contributed to the field of artificial intelligence by developing mathematical formulas that factor in uncertainty. That allows computers to find connections between millions of pieces of data, even when the information is incomplete or vague. His work has made it possible for computers to think more like humans, as humans often have to make inferences in decision making.
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Startup Aims to Cut the Cost of Solar Cells in Half.
Twin Creeks Technologies—a startup that has been operating in secret until today—has developed a way to make thin wafers of crystalline silicon that it says could cut the cost of making silicon solar cells in half. It has demonstrated the technology in a small, 25-megawatt-per-year solar-cell factory it built in Senatobia, Mississippi.
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Google working on semantic search
While further changes are expected to appear over the next few months, a full switch to semantic search isn't expected for some years.

To provide answers that aren't already in Google's ever-expanding database, the company will blend new semantic-search technology with its current system to better recognize the value of information on websites and figure out which ones to show in search results. It would do so by examining a Web page and identifying information about specific entities referenced on it, rather than only look for keywords.
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Google may still be raking in the profits, but the mojo behind Gmail, Chrome, News, Translate, and Docs has started to fade in the face of stiffer competition.
That magic is what made Google into one of the world's greatest companies. Without it, Google's just another stodgy company trying to protect its weakening empire.
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Facebook. Google. Zynga. They think they're saints of American capitalism. But they're really the successors to the Big Money magnates of the Gilded Age.
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COmpare those calculating devices: Win8 one vs Salamis tablet from year 300 BC right.

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The accompanying photograph represents the first locomotive built by George Stephenson, which was constructed for the Killingworth Colliery Company, in the year 1814.
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The UNIVAC machine was 25 feet by 50 feet in length, contained 5,600 tubes, 18,000 crystal diodes, and 300 relays. It utilized serial circuitry, 2.25 MHz bit rate, and had an internal storage capacity 1,000 words or 12,000 characters.
UNIVAC clock in 1954 was decent 2,25MHz, Intel's 8080 had clock 2 MHz in 1974.
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: After 23 years at the same clock speed enormous reduction in size and power consumed. Intel's 8080 micro processor had 6000 integrated transistors in 6 micron geometry. After two technology generations had been  left behind .

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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: 1000 times more light sensitive than ordinary ISO 100 setting ! Thermal noise is quite visible, but imagine shoots of something you couldn't take a photo until now.

Weighing in at 4 kilograms and standing a proud 22 centimetres tall, this is the world's first portable digital camera. In 1975, Steve Sasson and his team at Kodak's Elmgrove plant in Rochester, New York, cobbled it together from existing Kodak parts and other state-of-the-art technology.
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The modular HP PODs were delivered to Airbus sites in Toulouse and Hamburg, Germany. Each POD contains all the elements of an HP Converged Infrastructure, including servers, storage, networking, software, management, and integrated power and cooling. A total of 2,016 clustered HP ProLiant BL280 G6 blade servers enable the two 12 meter-long containers to deliver the equivalent of nearly 1,000 square meters of data center space.
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Recent progress in HPC, numerical algorithms and complex integrated simulation systems has shown a clear route to achieve this objective: accurately simulate flying aircraft with interaction of all relevant disciplines on board.
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With its hardware support for generally written mulitcore applications. However, does the Win 8 support Haswell in that mode, it is not said, nor it is mentioned what OS is used.
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The Active Denial System (ADS) beams a high-frequency, man-sized electromagnetic wave 1,000 meters.
ADS fires a high-powered beam of high-frequency millimeter waves at 95 GHz (a wavelength of 3.2 mm). Similar to the same way that a microwave oven heats food at 2.45GHz, the millimeter waves excite the water and fat molecules in the body, instantly heating them via dielectric heating and causing intense pain. While microwaves will penetrate into human tissue about 17mm (0.67"), the millimeter waves used in ADS only penetrate the top layers of skin, with most of the energy being absorbed within 0.4 mm (1/64").
The properties of an electro-magnetic field have been long used to put the enemy’s electronic instruments out of order. The prototypes of a microwave novelty were first used almost 30 years ago and have significantly diminished in size since then: the first version reached the size of a train carriage. Now it can be put on a Hummer. It is reported the Pentagon is about to create an airborne version of the heat ray.
Wall Street protest movement spreads to cities across US, Canada and Europe
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Nice application for an airborne version

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Here
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Ex-Microsofter Ray Ozzie Warns Microsoft: "We are in a "Post-PC' World'
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Here
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World's first optical FPGA technology demo from Altera
As data rates approach 100-Gbps and beyond, significantly more bandwidth is required for next-generation applications in the computer and storage, communication infrastructure, and broadcast markets. By integrating programmable devices and optical transceivers within a single package, Altera's Optical FPGA technology can break through the reach, power, port density, cost, and circuit board complexity limitations of copper-based and conventional optical solutions.
This will allow FPGA users to utilize the high bandwidth and compact size advantages of parallel optical interfaces that are currently used in data centers."
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A power supply problem left passengers stuck on Eurostar trains between the U.K. and France for up to 11 hours on Monday and early Tuesday this week.
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Apple planning post-PC future
With the new iPad, Apple could increase its market share in tablets to 61 percent in 2012, up from 57 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to IHS iSuppli. 

However, long term Apple’s market share is expected to decline from 62 percent in 2011 to 52 percent in 2014, it said.

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Conflicting Higgs results muddy particle hunt
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The IAS Computer, 1952
With the machine half-built, early programmers began to write software to simulate hydrogen bomb explosions, follow genetic mutations, predict the weather and examine the life cycle of stars.
It used about 2300 tubes in its circuitry
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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) broke ground on a facility that will house its vision for the  supercomputer of the future. The 140,000 square foot data center will overlook the San Francisco Bay on a hill above the UC Berkeley campus. It may also provides the first view into exascale – the new frontier for supercomputing.
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Chevrolet
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To advance the development of Information Technology, NSA has created the new Information Technology Development Program (ITDP) and is seeking full-time talented computer scientists, information technologists, engineers, and networking specialists to participate.
This is a full-time position at Fort George G. Meade, MD.
Salary range: $42,209 - $97,333
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Google patches 14 Chrome bugs, pays record $47K in bounties and bonuses
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Haswell included Transactional Synchronization Extensions, or TSX
Transactional memory is a software technique that simplifies writing concurrent programs. 
Software TM has been available for a number of years, and many programmers have played around with TM libraries. However, the performance overhead is crippling large, 2-10× slowdowns are common, which precludes widespread use. 

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In year 2010 93 percent of income gains went to the top 1 percent
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IMEC offers 14-nm dev kit, test chip to follow 2H12
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T-Mobile's German Parent Unveils World's Fast Fiber Signal -- 512 Gbps
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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: At 25Ghz fiber that means 100 Gbps Ethernet at 800km distance.

February 23, 2012: It was recently announced that the new Russian anti-aircraft/anti-missile system, the S-500, will be further delayed. Apparently the S-500 won't enter service until the end of the decade. Last year it was admitted that the S-500 was a full two years behind schedule, with prototype testing not taking place until 2015 and deliveries in 2017. 


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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Iran defended with anti aircraft S-300 ?

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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: 8MB L3 size was  in 1995 Main Memory size. Software is now  one level of storage closer to processor. And faster. In 1995 processor clock was 133 MHz.
Now, 30 times faster and one storage level shorter.