Tag: COMPUTER

You know the drill. Buy a laptop, grab the requisite warranty and tech support guarantee, and then spend endless minutes of your life on the line with said tech support every time your new baby starts to sputter. Why, you may ask yourself, is my laptop's tech support so gosh darn un- supportive? Well, Laptop Magazine did some extensive research on the subject, contacting tech support units at ...

While it might be overshadowed by the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the Robocup, a soccer tournament for robots, is also happening right now. According to Physorg, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have developed a computer algorithm for the American robo-team that allows the bots to anticipate and predict how the ball will move around the pitch. The goal of the Robocup is for researchers to ...

Hey, remember this thing called the Mac Mini? Apparently Apple thought there was still some demand for its only monitor-less, stand-alone box, and decided to give it a 2010 makeover with the now-standard aluminum unibody possessed by the rest of the Mac family. The main reason that the old Mac Mini was such a total suck piece of hardware was that, while relatively inexpensive compared to the rest ...

Well, you can add one more thing to the long list of tasks that computers can complete better than a human: jigsaw puzzle solving. Taeg Sang Cho and his colleagues at the MIT aren't the first to write jigsaw puzzle-solving software; a Danish team wrote a program that was able to solve a 320-piece puzzle back in 2008. While the older program only worked on simple "cartoon-style" drawings with a ...

As much as we love new technology here at Switched, we also sort of hate it. No matter how cool, innovative, or flat out mind-blowing a new device may be, it's equally frustrating when our gadgets, for whatever reason, fail us. But what are the most common issues people have with technology? According to a recent report, they're pretty basic. Consumer Reports recently surveyed over 13,000 of ...

No longer just a rumor or speculation, the newest version of the Macbook hit the Apple Store yesterday. According to Engadget, the laptop boasts a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, an NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics card and, best of all, a 10-hour battery life -- a full three hours longer than those of older MacBook incarnations. And that's not to mention that this bad boy is priced at $999, making it a ...

For those who often miss out on a virtual joke, scientists have found a way to help identify online sarcasm. According to Geekosystem, a team from the Institute of Computer Science at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem developed an algorithm that detects sarcastic sentences posted online. The Semi-Supervised Sarcasm Identification Algorithm (SASI) learns to detect sarcasm by studying sentences ...

Share As cars are increasingly equipped to wirelessly access the Internet, the potential for security breaches grows. According to The New York Times, computer security researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have proven in a study that it's possible to remotely control many of a car's functions by hacking its computer. The researchers ...

As you probably know, computers were once solely the purview of nerds. Those with pocket protectors, glasses, and very few friends spent the '80s sitting in front of bulky beige boxes named PC Jr. or Apple II. 'How I Met Your Motherboard' celebrates those heady days by collecting stories and photos of people's earliest computing memories. The tales collected speak of love affairs started with now ...

Do you find yourself annoyed with those inane quizzes on Facebook that measure how pure or how geeky you are? Well, if so, you probably don't want to wander over to the Microsoft Web site, because the company just launched 'Are You Certifiable?' -- a Silverlight-based quiz game that helps you decide if you're ready to become Microsoft Certified. The game is pretty straightforward. Pick a name ...

A group of researchers, led by Chris Harrison of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, have shown that simply applying an animation to a progress bar can make it appear to move 10-percent faster. The scientists set up a series of mock downloads using different progress bars. The control, a plain blue bar that moved from left to right, was compared to bars that pulsated between light and ...

If Gartner is to be believed, we are nearing the end of the keyboard and mouse age and entering one ruled by touch screens. According to Gartner, 50-percent of all the computers purchased between now and 2015 by children currently 15 and younger will have touchscreens. The study goes on to say that consumers and educational markets will be the first big adopters of the technology, as older workers ...

Share In an effort to provide a faster turnaround, the U.S. Army could replace some human intelligence officers in war zones with a complex system of computers. According to Wired, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, or the freaky arm of the US Military) is hosting a workshop for a new project dubbed Graph Understanding and Analysis for Rapid Detection - Deployed on the ...

For geeks like us, too many gadgets and not enough USB ports is a daily problem. You could just buy one of those USB hubs to remedy this problem, or you could try a brand new approach. Designer Gonglue's innovative product, dubbed 'Infinite USB,' cuts out the middleman (in this case the USB hub) by allowing you to stack USB cables on top of each other when you run out of ports. Wired describes ...

Everyone knows that robots and computers, the heartless harbingers of the end of humanity, will play a pivotal role in the inevitable apocalypse. But, before that cataclysmic destruction of hominid life occurs, could computers, programs, and bots actually reinvent the artistic endeavors that are supposedly unique to humans? One California composer, who has spent 30 years creating artificial ...