Computing, features and articles | Educational Science

Jun 30, 2005

NY Police Computer Predicts Robbery

In the movie Minority Lt. James In the gloomy half-darkness the three idiots sat babbling. Every incoherent utterance, every random syllable, was analyzed, compared and reassembled in the form of visual symbols, transcribed on conventional punchcards, and ejected into various coded slots.(Read more about the precrime analytical wing) ...

Jun 30, 2007

New Supercomputer is Fastest Yet

Running about 100,000 times faster than a high-end desktop PC, IBM has unveiled the world’s fastest computer. Already, it's not fast enough. The new king of the supercomputers is the IBM Blue Gene/P running at a speed of at least one petaflop per second, meaning it can solve one quadrillion...

Mar 31, 2007

New Hard Drives Hold a Terabyte of Data

Just when you got used to hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes (hundreds of billions of bytes) they do it: make one with a terabyte (a trillion bytes). Yes, you can now get a terabyte hard drive on a desktop PC. Breaking the ice with a Hitachi drive was Dell,...

Jan 31, 2007

Hackers Attack Every 39 Seconds

Hackers attack computers every 39 seconds, according to new research. The study, which investigated how exactly hackers crack computers, confirms those regularly issued warnings about password vulnerability. Experts advise longer passwords, regularly changed and not based on users' biographies, that mix letters and numerals and are hard to guess. “Our...

Apr 30, 2008

Microbes Could Build 'Iron Man' Circuits

How is the Iron Man suit made? We admire the result in the movie (still number one this week at the box office); the comic book version states that the Iron Man suit circuits were created using a process called biological circuit fabrication: Micro-Scale suit tiles fabricated by genetically engineered...

Sep 30, 2009

Computers Faster Only for 75 More Years

WASHINGTON (ISNS) -- With the speed of computers so regularly seeing dramatic increases in their processing speed, it seems that it shouldn't be too long before the machines become infinitely fast -- except they can't. A pair of physicists has shown that computers have a speed limit as unbreakable as...

Feb 28, 2009

You Pay, Computer Prays For You

Information Age Prayer is a site that charges you a monthly fee to say prayers for you. A typical charge is $4.95 per month to say three prayers specified by you each day. We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume...

May 31, 2010

Why Do Computers Crash?

It turns out that humans are to blame for computer crashes. These involuntary shutdowns typically result from glitches in software code written by human programmers. This code can contain many, many bugs, and these bugs can manifest themselves every now and then to cause program crashes, said Junfeng Yang, professor...

Mar 31, 2010

Crowds Wait to be First in Country to Buy iPad

NEW YORK CITY – Hundreds of people descended on New York’s flagship Apple store here on Fifth Avenue early Saturday morning, eager to get their hands on the brand new iPad tablet computer. Excited shoppers waited in line in the crisp morning temperature for the store to open at 9...

Mar 31, 2010

McAfee Offers to Pay for PC Repairs After Bad Update

Antivirus software maker McAfee says it will reimburse reasonable expenses associated with a bad update last Wednesday that crashed computers worldwide. The reimbursement will be offered to impacted home or home office customers who have incurred costs to repair PCs as a result of the security update issue, McAfee said...

Feb 28, 2010

5 Ways We’ll Interface With Future Computers

Since the dawn of personal computing, the mouse has served as the link between human and machine. As computers have become ever more powerful and portable, this basic interface of point-and-click has remained tried, true and little changed. But now, new ideas and products are offering revolutionary ways for people...

Feb 28, 2010

Why Are Keyboards QWERTY?

The arrangement of the first six letters in the top alphabet row of a standard keyboard QWERTY goes way back. The layout was created in 1873 when Christopher Latham Sholes made improvements to his earlier typewriter models in order to design a quicker and more efficient typewriter for E. Remington...

Feb 28, 2010

iPad Already Changing the Way Web Sites Are Built

While much of the iPad rhetoric centers around it jumpstarting the nascent tablet market, the iPad is already having a wide-ranging effect on businesses before it has even been officially released. Already, many major media companies are changing the very way they build Web sites to accommodate Apple's tablet. The...

May 31, 2013

Why the Supercomputing Arms Race Benefits Everyone (Op-Ed)

Gregory Scott Jones is a writer specializing in the field of supercomputing. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Next week, a torch will be passed. On June 17, the Top500, a biannual ranking of the world's fastest computers, will be announced in Leipzig, Germany. In...

May 31, 2014

Microchip That Birthed Modern Computing Could Fetch $2 Million

NEW YORK — A prototype microchip designed by famed inventor Jack Kilby, who went on to create the world's first integrated circuit that revolutionized the world of computing, will hit the auction block tomorrow (June 19) here in Manhattan. The vintage piece of technology, built more than 55 years ago,...