An anonymous reader writes "Ten years since the debut of the Roomba vacuum cleaner and military PackBot, robots are mainstream but still not in every home. Meanwhile, a new generation of robotics companies is taking off. Where does that leave iRobot, the godfather of the field? With its military business taking a hit from the U.S. defense budget, the 22-year-old public company is looking to reinvent itself with new kinds of robots, including a telepresence machine for doctors and hospitals and, further down the road, inflatable robots that could be cheaper, safer, and more portable than their metallic predecessors. The question is whether these new machines will be successful enough to keep the company growing — and add to its legacy in robotics."
Esther Schindler writes "When Star Trek hit the air waves, talking computers were just a pipe dream. While teleportation remains elusive, several once-fictional technologies are changing the way people live and work. Here are some ways in which we're approaching the gizmos that Star Trek demonstrated. Speech recognition? Check. Holodeck? Sort of. Replicator? Workin' on it."
An anonymous reader writes "A Wired article discusses the relative decline of Dell, HP, and IBM in the server market over the past few years. Whereas those three companies once provided 75% of Intel's server chip revenue, those revenues are now split between the big three and five other companies as well. Google is fifth on the list. 'It's the big web players that are moving away from the HPs and the Dells, and most of these same companies offer large "cloud" services that let other businesses run their operations without purchasing servers in the first place. To be sure, as the market shifts, HP, Dell, and IBM are working to reinvent themselves. Dell, for instance, launched a new business unit dedicated to building custom gear for the big web players — Dell Data Center Services — and all these outfits are now offering their own cloud services. But the tide is against them.'"
vu1986 writes "Kaggle has a 'predictive-modeling competition platform that makes public the competitors in invite-only private competitions. Think of it like watching a major tournament in golf or tennis, where you can watch the best in the world shoot it out to see whose algorithms are king. Kaggle's tagline is "We're making data science a sport." Maybe now it can make data science a spectator sport.'"
coondoggie writes "The European Space Agency today said it would develop a radar system that will be capable of tracking space hazards such as asteroids and orbital debris. ESA and France's Office National d'Etudes et Recherches Aérospatiales research center will work with five other partners in France, Spain and Switzerland to this month design a test surveillance radar and develop a $6 million demonstrator model."
Mackadoodledoo writes "Details of an immersive video games display system that projects images of the title's environment around a player's room have been revealed in a U.S. patent belonging to Microsoft."
Today Phil Schiller took to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where he announced the long-expected iPhone 5. The casing is made entirely of glass and aluminum, and it's 7.6mm thick, which is 18% thinner than the iPhone 4S. It weighs in at 112 grams, which is 20% lighter than the 4S. Schiller confirmed that the iPhone 5 has a 4" display, with a resolution of 1136x640. It's a 16:9 aspect ratio. The screen is the same width as a 4S, but it's taller. To accommodate older apps, they either center the app or add black bars to make it look right. The new device also has LTE support. Tim Cook spoke earlier about the iPad, making some interesting claims: "Yes, we are in a post-PC world." He also claimed 68% tablet market share for the iPad, and says iPads account for 91% of tablet-based web traffic. The event is continuing, and we'll update this post as further announcements appear. A real-time liveblog is being quickly updated at Ars Technica. Update: 09/12 18:16 GMT by S : Further details below.
As_I_Please writes "In response to the previous report of the ENCODE project discovering 'biochemical functions for 80 percent of the genome,' many scientists have questioned what was meant by 'function.' Ars Technica Science Editor John Timmer wrote an article calling ENCODE's definition of functionality 'broad to the point of being meaningless. At worst, it was actively misleading.' Nature magazine also has a followup discussing the ambiguity surrounding the 80% figure and claims about junk DNA."
Mesa 3D has famously always not been technically OpenGL (lacking certification), but times are changing: "This is a great day for Mesa and open-source graphics drivers. Just a tad over a month ago, I submitted OpenGL ES 2.0 conformance test results to Khronos for Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge GPUs with Mesa 8.0.4. There were no objections during the 30 day review period, so we are now officially conformant! Finally being on that list is pretty cool. Not only is this great news for my team at Intel, but it's terrific news for Mesa. Mesa has had a long history with OpenGL, the ARB, and Khronos. This is, however, the first time that Mesa has ever, in any way, been listed as a conformant implementation. This is a big boost to Mesa's credibility."
wiredmikey writes with this excerpt from Security Week: "The Disttrack/Shamoon malware, while destructive, appears to be the work of amateurs and not elite and sophisticated developers, according to the latest analysis. The malware proved that it was possible for developers to subvert legitimate kernel-mode applications for malicious purposes, but it appears that the malware could have been even more destructive and dangerous, if it had not been for a series of programming mistakes in the code, according to recent analysis from Kaspersky Lab. Other suggestions that the developers behind the Shamoon malware are not high-profile programmers include that the command-and-control server is hard-coded as two addresses, which limits the tool since if the address ever changes, the infected machine can no longer receive instructions. The developers were most likely motivated by political reasons, as the malware overwrote existing files with a fragment of an image of a burning American flag. The Malware has also been reported to be linked to the recent Saudi Aramco attack, which some reports have suggested that insiders may have been partly involved. Saudi Aramco hasn't officially said what type of malware hit its systems."
Consumers upgrade to new smartphones when contracts expire rather than pay high out-of-contract costs.
As expected, the iPhone 5 led a busy Wednesday of product announcements for Apple. But it wasn’t the only unveiling at the company’s San Francisco press event...
Intel builds a 4-by-4-inch board with a full Core i5 CPU and enough I/O to build fully functional PCs barely bigger than a deck of cards.
With packages starting at only $30 a month, SMBs can get 24/7 peace of mind from new Comcast IT services.
Apple's new iPhone 5 got most of the attention at a launch event in San Francisco on Wednesday but the company also showed off a new iPod touch and a redesigned...
Intel has ported Google's Android 4.1 OS, called Jelly Bean, to work on smartphones based on the low-power Atom chips code-named Medfield.
Of particular interest to business users is support for whole disk encryption.
Apple's iPhone 5 has a larger screen than its predecessors and support for high-speed LTE wireless networks, the company said Wednesday at a launch event.
A new bill in the U.S. Congress would require mobile phone makers, network providers and application developers to disclose to customers any monitoring software...
Microsoft updated its Visual Studio software Wednesday so that the IDE reflects many of the changes that challenge developers, including mobility and cloud...
As was widely expected, Apple on Wednesday unveiled the iPhone 5, the newest entrant into its smartphone lineup.
Intel will announce HTML5 programming tools with the aim of reducing application development costs and boosting revenue for developers, software chief Renee...
One of the rumors leading into the Apple iPhone 5 event today is that the new smartphone will incorporate fingerprint scanning technology.
The U.S. Department of Justice is recommending that AU Optronics, a Taiwanese maker of LCD panels, pay a US$1 billion fine, and two former executives serve 10...
Security researchers from German antivirus vendor G Data Software have identified a botnet that is controlled by attackers from an Internet Relay Chat (IRC)...
European institutions on Wednesday beefed up their cyber security by establishing a permanent Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU).
No patching before release meant the forthcoming operating system would be vulnerable to attack immediately after it was made available
Apple will apparently call its new smartphone the "iPhone 5," validating pundits' expectations, according to the company's website.
Zendesk unveils an extensively reworked version of its online help-desk software.
The Copyright Alert System has been plagued by a series of delays. It was originally scheduled to launch in December 2011.
Want to send a "blind carbon copy" of a message to one or more contacts? In Outlook, it's not immediately obvious how to do so.
IBM is releasing a new version of its Connections enterprise social networking (ESN) software, which companies use to give their employees social media...
Facebook's CEO also said that the site made a mistake when it decided to start developing for the Web first, using HTML 5, rather than focusing on native apps.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced an online marketplace where users of its cloud computing services can sell their reserved server instances to other...
Apple is demanding that the trademark of an online Polish grocer be revoked
Apple is holding a press event on Wednesday Sept. 12 at 10 a.m. PT, where it's expected to unveil the latest iPhone. Follow our live blog to find out what Apple has planned.
Taiwanese PC maker Acer said on Wednesday the company plans to release a new smartphone in China that will use a mobile operating system developed by a...
The website of Domino's Pizza India was hacked, but customers' information was not compromised, the local franchisee Jubilant FoodWorks said on Wednesday.
Ahead of expected iPhone news interest in the phone reaches a fevered pitch.
Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday it broke ground in China on a NAND flash memory chip factory in which it will invest a total of US$7 billion, its single...
Huawei's plan to spend US$2 billion in the UK is expected to help the Chinese firm secure additional talent, and could even improve its political standing in...
Many automated teller machines (ATMs) and point-of-sale (POS) terminals fail to properly generate random numbers that are required by the EMV protocol to...
Anthony Gallippi, CEO of BitPay, has started paying his gardener in BitCoins.
Intel on Tuesday said it was on track to launch the next-generation Itanium processor later this year, brushing away any speculation that the processor would...
Spiceworks, the social business platform for IT professionals, has launched a new HD mobile application for Apple iPad and Google Android-based tablet devices.
The company plots a future where Intel is inside everything.
The man responsible for Intel's mobile computing platforms says he is pushing the company's engineers to squeeze Intel's next-generation Haswell chip into...
But if lots of consumers downgrade to Windows 7, that's not a good sign for Windows 8 and Microsoft.
Here's the flip side of last week's post on security missteps made by senior management. The takeaway? Know your priorities and work down the list -- now.
Can badges and scoreboards really make employees work harder, for no extra pay? Or will IT departments be stuck spending time and money "gamifying" work?
Research companies also predict in-app purchases will be major revenue driver as worldwide mobile-app count hits 309 billion.
Hewlett-Packard's lawsuit against Oracle over the latter's decision to halt future software development for Itanium will enter its second phase on Feb. 4, 2013...
Jammie Thomas-Rasset has been ordered to pay for downloading pirated music. Could a possible Supreme Court fight settle the issue of how much a pirated song is worth?
Hoping to unleash a wave of developer creativity in financial apps, Intuit is giving developers access to the financial data service that powers Quicken, QuickBooks and Mint.com.
T-Mobile doesn't appear to be on Apple's short list for iPhone 5 carriers, but that's not stopping T-Mobile from trying to lure iPhone customers to what it says will soon be its widespread 4G network.
The Windows Store, a new online marketplace for applications for Windows 8 and Windows RT computers, is now open to developers in 120 geographic markets.
University of Pennsylvania researchers are touting their creation of an all-optical switch that uses nanowires to transmit and process information using light pulses rather than electricity.
Startup ProfitBricks leverages InfiniBand technology to compete with the growing crop of cloud providers offering powerful cloud-based machines.
Imagine sitting down at work, plopping a mobile device on the desk and having it wirelessly charge itself while, at the same time, synchronizing new data to your PC.
Imagine a smartphone that can go weeks without needing its battery recharged.