Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Extreme Tech- Computing

Computing

Court filings allege Apple mismanagement drove sapphire company into ground November 10, 2014 at 3:56 pm
A new briefing from Apple’s bankrupt sapphire supplier sheds light on why the company folded — and it’s not kind to Apple.
PowerVR Series7 GPU unveiled: Bringing desktop-class graphics to the mobile masses November 10, 2014 at 10:27 am
Imagination Technologies has detailed its next-gen PowerVR Series7 GPUs — and boy are they beastly. Imagination is claiming a performance boost of 60% over its Series6 GPUs, clock for clock, which for a single generational leap is pretty darn impressive. The top-end Series7XT GT7900 will feature 16 clusters, for a total of 512 ALUs and peak theoretical performance above 1 teraflop — or around the same as an Nvidia GTX 750.
Raspberry Pi, the original $25 PC, now smaller than a credit card and costs just $20 November 10, 2014 at 7:55 am
When the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced way back in 2011 that it would release a complete PC for $25, we were dubious — but hey, here we are in 2014 and Raspberry Pi has been a massive success story, with thousands of units sold at the promised $25 price point. Today, the Foundation is releasing the Raspberry Pi Model A+ — a smaller, cheaper version of the Model A. The A+ costs just $20, and you can buy it today from Farnell in the UK or MCM in the US. Amusingly enough, the A+ is actually smaller than credit-card sized.
Dark market massacre: FBI shuts down Silk Road 2.0 and dozens more Tor websites November 8, 2014 at 8:09 am
The FBI has killed the Silk Road 2.0 and more than 400 other deep web sites, and it didn’t need fancy tech to do it.
Our terrifying reliance on GPS, and the need to develop a ground-based alternative November 7, 2014 at 2:16 pm
The Global Positioning System, or GPS, has — somewhat surprisingly — found itself at the heart of modern civilization. There is no doubt that the ubiquity of GPS across all areas of civilian, commercial, and scientific endeavor has improved the quality of life for billions of people. It is a little bit scary, then, that GPS can very easily be jammed or disrupted by terrorists or other nefarious actors. What are the alternatives? Do we have a backup?
What does a CPU do when it’s doing nothing? November 7, 2014 at 12:21 pm
Ever wondered what your CPU does when idle? Turns out it’s still processing tasks — but engineers designed one that takes very little power.
New phase-change material lights the way to all-optical, super-fast computing November 7, 2014 at 9:22 am
British researchers have created a new material that could allow for the creation of all-optical computers — computers that are orders of magnitude faster and power efficient than today’s hot, sweaty electronic beasts. This isn’t some crazy, hard-to-fabricate material like graphene, either — we’re talking about a special breed of chalcogenide glass.
Microsoft releases free Office apps for iPhone and iPad, Android coming soon November 6, 2014 at 11:45 am
In a rather surprising move, Microsoft has made the Office suite of apps — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — free to download and use on the iPad and iPhone. Previously, an Office 365 subscription was required. If all that wasn’t exciting enough, Microsoft also announced that the free Office suite is coming to Android, with beta access starting today.
DARPA’s new autonomous quadcopter is powered by a brain-like neuromorphic chip November 5, 2014 at 11:31 am
Many technology fans, including DARPA think that brainlike neuromorphic chips bleeping digital spikes at each other could provide the answer to autonomous vehicle control — if only someone knew what exactly should generate the spikes they use. The latest brainstorm, before turning over the keys of life to these chips, is to put them into drones and see what happens.