Computing

How Unicode Brought the Digital World Together

Encoding symbols and characters in digital form is fairly easy—but making sure that everyone in the world is doing it in the same way sure isn’t. Fortunately, Unicode came along—but how the hell does it work? The Unicode Consortium has the unenviable task of looking after more than 100,000 characters and making sure they’re encoded…

The Best (and Worst) Sci-Fi Computer Interfaces

Science fiction is crammed full of some excellent—and awful—computer interfaces. But, as Chris Noessel explains in this talk, we can learn an awful lot from what we see on screen. After spending two years watching and analyzing sci-fi for a new book, Nosseel has an amazing grasp of the world of fictional computing. This presentation,…

Is the Data on Your SSD Secure?

SSDs are wonderful things that take up next to no space and are incredibly fast to boot. But while most people understand the basics data security on HDDs, the same isn’t necessarily true of solid state storage. Deleting files may not mean they’re gone, overwriting them isn’t safe, and a thorough scrub is at the…

Inside CERN’s Massive Computer Center

Given how much data the scientists at CERN have to crunch through, it’s not surprising that it take its computing power seriously. This video takes a look inside the massive computer center that allows the magic to happen. In what is essentially the brain of the Large Hadron Collider it is noisy, hot—and incredibly powerful.…

This computer took 40 minutes to simulate one second of brain activity

And it required 82,944 processors, to do it — showing that we’re still quite a ways off from being able to match the computational power of the human brain. Top image: Japan’s K Computer — a massive array consisting of over 80,000 nodes and capable of 10 petaflops (about 1016 billion operations per second). The…

How to Make YouTube Look Like Unix

YouTube has decided to celebrate its upcoming Geek Week event by giving its site an, um, underhaul—and making it look like Unix. If you head to the site and type “/ geekweek” into the search field, you’ll be presented with a site full of fixed width fonts and, simple colors and ASCII art. Just don’t…

What’s the Absolute Minimum You Can Compress Data to?

If you’ve ever tried to squeeze data down into a tiny file, you’ll know that there comes a point where you can’t get it any smaller. This video explains why that is. The answer is something you might have heard about in physics or chemistry classes back at school: entropy. But it turns out Professor…

The History of Early Computing Machines, from Ancient Times to 1981

From the abacus to the IBM personal computer, calculating devices have come a long way. Let’s take a look through the history of these machines and the remarkable progress that came with the 20th century. A picture above was taken at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, 1951. The Chinese Abacus ‘Suan Pan’…

The First Ever Electronically Stored Program Ran 65 Years Ago Today

Sixty five years ago, in a cluttered lab in Manchester, UK, three scientists changed the world of computing forever. Working with a machine they’d built and nicknamed Baby, they ran the first ever program to be stored electronically in a computer’s memory. Put together by “Freddie” Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, ghe computer—officially called…

How the Hell Does a Quantum Computer Work?

You’ve probably heard people—including us—banging on about quantum computers for a long ol’ time. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you know exactly how they work. Fortunately this video is here to help. It goes straight from the basic of how quantum bit—a qubit—can carry more information than a normal bit, right the way up to…

When Will Computers Be as Powerful as the Human Brain?

We all know that computing power roughly doubles every 18 months—but at that rate, how long will it take for computers to be as powerful as the human brain? As this animation from Mother Jones shows, not long. It might have been slow going at first, but we’re soon about to witness a growth spurt…

Germanium Transistors Are Four Times Faster Than Today’s

It might look like something out of Tron, but you’re actually looking at a new type of transistor made out of germanium—which is four times faster than those currently in use. The new transistor, developed at MIT, is what scientists refer to as a p-type device: an electronic component which relies on holes—voids in a…

Will We Have Cognitive Computers That Feel And Smell in The Next Five Years?

At the end of each year, IBM releases its “5 in 5″—five technology predictions that IBM researchers foresee coming to fruition within the coming five years. These predictions are based on everything from emerging market trends to cultural and social behaviors to actual technologies IBM has incubating in its many labs. And if this year’s…

Google Wants to Give You Answers Before You Ask Questions

Google’s working on building a new kind of mobile search tool, one which pre-guesses what you’re likely to be looking for and pings you a little update before you ask. Sort of like a clairvoyant butler arriving with a bacon sandwich when you need it most. According to Technology Review, the new concept is to…

Wireless Networks of Cows Will Keep Gas Under Control

I’d hate to be the IT guy fixing this network. By dropping electronic devices into the stomachs of cows and networking them together, researchers hope to reduce the climate-warming farts and burps they produce. Emissions from livestock – much of which is methane released when they burp – are a serious component of global greenhouse…

The World’s Oldest Working Computer Has Been Resurrected

The world’s oldest working digital computer, often referred to as “The Witch”, has been given a new lease of life. A team of computer scientists has restored it to its former glory—and now it’s on display for all to see. The computer was originally designed and developed all the way back in 1949 at the…

America’s Titan Supercomputer Is the Fastest in the World

Cray‘s Titan supercomputer has snatched the title of world’s fastest from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sequoia—and it’s cray fast, as you might expect. Powered by a mixture of CPUs and GPUs, Titan is home to 18,688 nodes, each of which contains an AMD 16-core Opteron and a NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerator. All told,…

How Crypto Keys Can Be Stolen Across the Cloud

Most people are happy to give their neighbours a spare house key in case of emergencies, but you probably wouldn’t want to give them your digital passwords. Now security researchers have shown that you may not have a choice, at least when it comes to cloud computing. Cloud servers let users run simulations of an…

Scientists Are Making Computer Chips of the Future Out of Carbon Nanotubes

Scientists have developed a way to manufacture a new breed of computer chips that use carbon nanotubes in the place of silicon. Nanotubes have plenty of superior electronic properties over silicon, but until now it’s been impossible to manufacture a chip with a high enough density of nanotubes to make an effective processing unit. Now,…

The Raspberry Pi mini computer now ships with 512MB of RAM, up from 256MB, for the same $35 price. Tasty. [Raspberry Pi]