Tag: COMPUTERS

Yesterday saw Day Two of the great showdown between man and machine on 'Jeopardy.' So, how did Watson do? Well, to say he spanked Jennings and Rutter would be an understatement. But the supercomputer did suffer an embarrassing setback during Final Jeopardy. The category: U.S. Cities. Watson's answer: "Toronto?????" Apparently its vast database of knowledge doesn't include third-grade geography. ...

It's 35-years old, it can't send e-mail or compose office documents, and, even after you open up the box, you'll still have to add your own case, keyboard, monitor and power supply. Yet the Apple-1 -- the first computer to come out of the shop founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak -- is still commanding top dollar from eager buyers. Only 200 of the machines were made, and only 50 of those are ...

Computers rarely offer up witty banter, rob banks or get stuck in trees, so they need a little help when it comes to looking good on local TV news. Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic lists seven TV methods to make our binary buddies shine over the airwaves, ranging from the classic "typing in a suspiciously darkened room" to throwing a layer of 1s and 0s over serious button tapping. Sure, local news ...

Take a moment to glance down at your laptop. Chances are, you see a bunch of hideous, glittery stickers, with the names or logos of companies like Skype, Intel or Microsoft [Ed. Note: Nope! Just see white. Cult of Mac!]. Don't try and remove them, though. Scratching off these stickers, as with Chicken Pox, will only result in even uglier scars and residue. So, why are they there? The New York ...

CAPTCHA: the most irritating and unfortunate necessity of the Web. Spam bots have gotten smart enough to outwit most of the hoops put in place to keep them from flooding various sites with fake accounts. To stem the tide, CAPTCHAs have gotten increasingly difficult for the bots to decipher, which has the unfortunate side effect of leaving humans just as puzzled. While we're forced to pause, ...

The big brains at MIT aren't just interested in solar cells, robot desk lamps and gesture interfaces; they're also applying their evolved understanding of tech to decipher ancient languages. The team of Regina Barzilay, an associate professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, have created a computer program that successfully deciphered a chunk of Ugaritic, a dead Semitic ...

In 1999, Professor Sugata Mitra was working for a software company in Delhi, at an office building surrounded by one of India's infamous slums. The children populating the slum, needless to say, were mired in poverty, and hardly spent any time in school, much less in front of a computer. That didn't stop Mitra, though, from embedding computers on the walls of his office building, and exposing ...

Dear Switched: Help an Apple-hater out. I've searched everywhere for the PC equivalent of a MacBook Air: super slim, light, with a good-sized display, a full-powered processor and good battery life at a similar price. But amazingly, I haven't found any to equal it. I can't stand the thought of giving Steve Jobs my loyalty, much less my cash, so help a hater out and JTMWTG! Dear Hater: We ...

It may not be as bad as exploding batteries, but it turns out that some 535,000 Sony laptops that started shipping in January may have a fatal flaw, causing them to overheat and potentially deform. The problem lies within the BIOS installed on the Vaio F and Vaio C series machines. The bug affects the computers' basic heat management systems. Sony has recorded 39 instances of the laptops ...

Built-in obsolescence has been a common business strategy among electronics makers for the last half century, at least. Why make a gizmo that can last forever when you could make one that fails in a few years, leading to repeat purchases and bolstered revenue? Dell, the notoriously economical computer maker, took the opposite track; when it found out that 11.8 million of its desktops were filled ...

The Libretto has a long and distinguished history; it was one of the first and most successful devices in a category that eventually came to be known as UMPCs and netbooks. When it launched in 1996, cramming desktop-quality PC components into a package that weighed five pounds (much less two) was unheard of. So, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its laptop business, Toshiba is reviving this ...

In theory, it's a noble public initiative to provide every high school student with the latest, high-tech laptops. What's not so noble, though, is to make every kid pay for it themselves. As of September 2011, every student attending Beverly High School in Massachusetts will be required to have their own MacBook as part of a district-wide campaign to modernize classroom technology. According ...

There once was a time, at the dawn of the commercial flight era, when major airlines were at the forefront of new technology. While its computerized reservation system may have been revolutionary back in 1960, it hasn't changed a whole lot since, and consumers have had to suffer because of it. Decades-old computers and convoluted networks have only served to exacerbate already strained customer ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... The latest episode in the intensifying iPhone 4G soap opera seems to indicate that the ambiguous, and perhaps dangerous, gadget will indeed provide video chat capabilities. Director Sam Mendes has also apparently been tapped to create iPhone 4G ads, prompting an excited auditioning actor to drop an f-bomb in a tweet. Yeah, ...

It almost doesn't feel like news anymore, but Best Buy has once again been caught trying to take advantage of uninformed customers. After being caught baiting customers with low advertised prices only to pull a switcheroo, charging $130 to plug in a PS3 and faking low Wii inventories to drive up demand, the latest scandal to hit the big box retailer seems like a minor offense. It appears that the ...