Tag: IBM

Only a few miles from their target, three European eco-terrorists were arrested by Swiss police during a routine traffic stop on April 15th. According to The Daily Mail, Costantino Ragusa, Silvia Guerini and Luca Bernasconi -- all members of the Italian terrorist group Il Silvestre -- were arrested when authorities found a primed explosive device inside their vehicle. A police spokesman said the ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... We've previously written about what could now be considered "antique" game consoles, along with their cartridges, fetching auction prices that put our yearly salaries to shame. Well, now some guy has sold a copy of a hard-to-find Atari game called 'Air Raid' for $31,600. Apparently the game, one of only thirteen known copies, kind ...

Everyone out there has endured writer's block at some point. You don't have to be a novelist, or even a pro-blogger to have smacked up against the wall at some point. Sadly, if you're struggling with a school paper we can't help you, but IBM thinks it has a solution for those bloggers that might be stuck for topics. Blog Muse is a social tool that allows users to suggest and vote on topics ...

Readers, IBM has been developing a supercomputer that could compete with human brainiacs on the quiz show 'Jeopardy' -- and it scares the hell out of us. Let's forget, for a moment, that we've been transported back to 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue machine beat world-champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match, solidifying both hopes and fears that computers would one day outsmart their creators. (And ...

Maru goes in the box. Maru goes out of the box. Maru goes back into the box, again. Not exactly genius (adorable, but not genius), though apparently scientists say there is something about the feline brain that may help advance the "thinking computer." A machine that can replicate basic human cognition -- abstract concepts, emotional data -- is still pretty distant, but IBM researchers in ...

When the U.K.'s Met Office for weather research fired up the nation's largest supercomputer in May, the Daily Mail celebrated the enormous weather predictor by saying it would "help save millions of lives by predicting long-term patterns in global warming and forecasting extreme weather events such as typhoons and hurricanes." The Daily Mail reports that the almost $50 million IBM machine, ...

It's about time. The Associated Press writes today that mercifully, IBM reports that phishing attacks are on the decline. Phishing, for the uninitiated, has nothing to do with Vermont hippies. Phishing scams are typically comprised of a sketchy e-mail that links the recipient to a malicious Web page (often disguised as the log-in page of a bank or social networking site). There, the duped ...

Currently, microchips are made with silicon, but IBM is looking to the future and working on replacing the traditional computing material with DNA. IBM doesn't plan on harvesting this DNA from people, of course. It has instead demonstrated a way to use artificial nano-structures that replicate the composition of DNA. IBM believes the repetitive design of DNA is a perfect match for fabricating ...

Twitter, apparently, now appeals to inanimate objects. Not letting his house miss the Web 2.0 boom, Andy Stanford-Clark, a 43-year-old computer engineer, has wired his U.K. home with sensors to tweet status updates. According to The Daily Mail, Mr. Stanford-Clark, who is a "distinguished engineer and master inventor" at IBM, was worried about the upkeep of his home in the Isle of Wright. To ...

Years after building a computer called Deep Blue that gave chess champion Garry Kasparov a run for his money, IBM is now taking aim at another human-only intellectual pursuit -- 'Jeopardy!' IBM is developing a supercomputer, along with an accompanying program called Watson, to compete on the popular game show, and may even face off against the painfully brilliant Ken Jennings, who holds the ...

About six months ago, IBM unveiled Roadrunner, a super computer built to maintain our nation's nuclear arsenal. Roadrunner was twice as fast as BluGene/L, the fastest computer on Earth for three years running. But if you thought Roadrunner was impressive, you haven't seen anything yet. IBM has begun work on Sequoia, a new super computer for the Department of Energy (DoE) that will also help ...

Still on the fence about whether video games offer good real-world experience and lessons for kids, despite the many studies that report findings to the contrary? If so, an executive at IBM would like to change your mind, as he firmly believes that gaming is good for children, including his own. David Laux, a Global Executive for IBM in charge of their interactive entertainment division, thinks ...

When you're looking to set a record, this is how you do it. Not only has IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer come on-line, it's now the world's fastest -- twice as fast as the old BluGene/L champ -- and churning through 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. The $133 million supercomputer achieved the milestone with the help of 12,960 "improved" Cell processors (yes, like those powering your ...

One of the byproducts of extreme computing power is heat. The problem is that all of this heat represents wasted energy, and instead of trying to recapture it, we use even more energy to dissipate that heat with air conditioning. But in the city of Uitikon, Switzerland, the local government, GIB Services, and IBM have come up with a rather unique solution. The IBM-built data center run by GIB ...

It happened pretty suddenly, and without explanation -- in fact, we almost lost it among all the April-Fool's-Day jokes. But it appears that, at least temporarily, IBM is banned from obtaining new Federal contracts with the U.S. government. The reason for the ban is unclear at this time, but we do know that it involves IBM's relationship with the EPA. In addition to the ban, several employees at ...