Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Rupert started off as a nerdy lad expecting to be an electronics engineer, but having tried it for a while discovered that journalism was more fun. He ended up on PC Magazine in the early '90s, before that evolved into ZDNet UK - and Rupert evolved with them into an online journalist.
The 4004 chip is 40 today, so it's about time it had a mid-life identity crisis. Its creation story is well known — here's ZDNet UK's coverage from its 30th birthday — and it is indeed the first commercially available microprocessor.
Jack Clark, the man who lives on data the way plants live on sunlight, and myself are at Exeter University today. We'll be talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of research during the day and at 5pm, we're chairing a round table with guests from IBM, Rackspace and others on the subject of what it's like to have a career in IT.
Jack Clark, the man who lives on data the way plants live on sunlight, and myself are at Exeter University today. We'll be talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of research during the day and at 5pm, we're chairing a round table with guests from IBM, Rackspace and others on the subject of what it's like to have a career in IT.
The European Commission has finished its deliberation on the proposed acquisition by Seagate Technology of Samsung's hard disk drive business, and has no objections.The $1.
Intel has abandoned attempts to sell x86 processors to TV manufacturers, concentrating instead on portable devices as the natural home for its Atom-based chips.The chip company put its weight behind Smart TVs in September 2010, when CEO Paul Otellini demonstrated a Google TV mixing up IM, Facebook and web browsing on top of a live TV transmission.
Google has begun to give details of Dart, a new language that the company says is intended for structured web coding.The designers of the language say that their aims were to make a familiar, natural language for web programming that has high performance, is flexible yet encourages structure.
UK telecom regulator Ofcom has announced that it is further delaying the auction of the 2.6GHz and 800MHz spectrum set aside for the next generation of mobile broadband.
Chancellor George Osborne has promised £50 million for research into graphene, the carbon-based material tipped as a breakthrough in material science, nanotechnology and electronics.Graphene was discovered in 2004 by Dr (now Professor) Kostya Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim from the University of Manchester in work that won them the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics.
The most interesting and significant aspect of Amazon's Kindle announcements on Thursday was not the hardware, diverting as it might be. It was Silk, the browser that the Kindle Fire runs - currently, the only browser it can run.
Amazon has unveiled four new Kindle e-readers and a new browser, Silk, that runs partially in the cloud.The four Kindles include a Wi-Fi only, smaller and lighter keyboardless version of the current Kindle, costing $79 in the US and £89 in the UK.