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OCAU News |
Tuesday Afternoon
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Tuesday, 20-March-2018 13:23:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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IBM have a new tiny computer. March 19 is the first day of IBM Think 2018, the company's flagship conference, where the company will unveil what it claims is the world's smallest computer. They're not kidding: It's literally smaller than a grain of salt. But don't let the size fool you: This sucker has the computing power of the x86 chip from 1990. Okay, so that's not great compared to what we have today, but cut it some slack — you need a microscope to see it.
Meanwhile Intel have redesigned its CPUs to patch the recent security issues. As promised, Intel has redesigned its upcoming 8th-gen Xeon and Core processors to further reduce the risks of attacks via the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, CEO Brian Krzanich wrote. Those fixes are on top of the software updates already issued, which now patch "100 percent" of vulnerable Intel products launched in the past five years, he affirmed.
Here's an interesting article from 2015, about how you can try out Stephen Hawking's speech system. For 3 years, Intel Labs worked in close collaboration with Hawking to acutely address his needs and in January of 2014, they announced the first stable release that Hawking would use to replace his decades-old speech system. There was a near instant 10x improvement to all common tasks such as conducting a web search or opening a Word document. Fast-forward a few months and now Intel has open sourced the whole platform to allow researchers and hackers to broaden its use for people with disabilities of all backgrounds.
Facebook are in hot water after a major data breach. The social media company's share price fell by 6.8 per cent, as its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg faces calls from US and European politicians to explain an enormous data breach. Of particular interest is how political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the private data of more than 50 million Facebook users without their consent to support Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign.
A power outage has disrupted Samsung's NAND output. A half-hour power outage at Samsung’s fab near Pyeongtaek, South Korea, disrupted production and damaged tens of thousands of processed wafers. Media reports claim that the outage destroyed as much as 3.5% of the global NAND supply for March, which may have an effect on flash memory pricing in the coming weeks.
The Gold Coast now apparently has the fastest internet in Australia. The cable's fibre count provides internet 10times faster than the NBN. It's a major coup for the city's Mayor Tom Tate who boasted: "We're way ahead of the game". The fibre-optic cable runs 45 kilometres and has been installed to make the Games the safest in history.
Is this the future? Cheap, quick 3D-printed houses. Last week at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, construction technologies startup ICON and housing nonprofit New Story unveiled their version of a 3D printed house. The model is 650 square feet and consists of a living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and shaded porch. It went from zero to finished in under 24 hours, and it cost less than $10,000. Equivalent homes built in developing countries will cost a mere $4,000 each.
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