computer

WristQue wearable sensor connects you, digital world

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--An MIT Media Lab project called WristQue offers a way to interact with smart buildings and computers in an unobtrusive way.

Researchers at the Media Lab recently completed the first prototype of WristQue wearable sensor and described some of its potential uses yesterday here.

The first application of the wristband device is to automatically set heating and lighting controls to the wearer's preferences. It could also be used as an interface with public displays in buildings, showing the user personal information, such as a daily calendar, according to PhD student Brian Mayton who is working on the … Read more

Intel to buy key assets from supercomputer maker Cray

Supercomputer maker Cray will sell its interconnect hardware development program and related intellectual property to Intel for $140 million in cash, the two companies announced today.

Up to 74 Cray employees will join Intel, Cray said. The company currently employs approximately 800 people worldwide.

"By broadening our relationship with Intel, we are positioned to further penetrate the [high-performance computing] market," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, in a statement.

Ungaro continued, "This agreement also dramatically strengthens our balance sheet and increases our options for further growth, profitability and creating shareholder value."

Cray said it … Read more

University cutting computer science dept.? An insider's view

We all struggle with our priorities daily.

Who, therefore, cannot hold loving hands with the fine, struggling minds at the University of Florida? For they have searched their souls and deduced that quite a lot of its Computer And Information Science and Engineering Department might be surplus to requirements.

I was initially grateful to Forbes for offering this disturbing information.

Forbes said that the school -- faced with the need to cut budgets -- sees insufficient use for teaching assistants in computer science, so it intends to chop them out. The graduate and research programs? Oh, what can they possibly … Read more

Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox? Heck, use 'em all!

It's true that the newly launched Google Drive competes with plenty of other services for sharing files across all your devices. But there's something very different in this particular situation than in a lot of online services.

Namely this: why not use them all?

With social networking, few people have the patience to keep a lively feed of activity at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and any number of other sites. We gravitate toward the one where our contacts are active.

And with e-mail, it's inconvenient to have multiple addresses on multiple services, generally speaking.

But with … Read more

Google Drive: It's slick, integrated...and not exactly free

Google is set today to open Google Drive, a service to store files online and share them among various computing devices that turns out to be a lot more important than you might think.

Why? Two reasons:

First, Google's service goes well beyond rivals because of integration with Google Docs, Google+, Gmail, and other services. Second, beyond a basic free level, ordinary consumers will pay to use Google Drive -- not much, but enough to make them into customers, not just users of an advertising-subsidized service. That's a pretty big philosophical shift for Google.

What is Google Drive? … Read more

Where IT is going: Cloud, mobile, and data

Cloud computing seems to often get used as a catch-all term for the big trends happening in IT.

This has the unfortunate effect of adding additional ambiguities to a topic that's already laden with definitional overload. (For example, on a topic like security or compliance, it makes a lot of difference whether you're talking about public clouds like Amazon's, a private cloud within an enterprise, a social network, or some mashup of two or more of the above.)

However, I'm starting to see a certain consensus emerge about how best to think about the broad sense … Read more

Okta aims to make cloud identity secure for the enterprise

You may not yet be familiar with Okta, an on-demand identity and access management service company founded by former Salesforce.com executives and backed by big-time venture investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate. But as cloud services continue to find their way into the enterprise, there is a good chance it will be noticed by companies that will have the need to support identity and access management across enterprise/cloud borders.

While this is an early market, the premise of Okta (and others such as Symplified) is that the next generation of IT infrastructure is being built … Read more

Greenpeace's clean cloud push: Hey, they've got a point

Commentary In its trademark smashmouth style, Greenpeace this week took cloud computing companies to task for using dirty energy -- and then came under fire itself over its methods and assertions.

Whatever Greenpeace's shortcomings, though, its activists have a point.

In the latest event of its "Clean our Cloud" campaign, Greenpeace activists yesterday rappelled off a building near Amazon and Microsoft offices and attached a banner which reads "Amazon, Microsoft: How Clean is Your Cloud?"

Earlier, it released three videos that poke fun at Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft by showing workers shoveling coal into a … Read more

Greenpeace: Time for cloud companies to come clean

Greenpeace is pushing harder for cloud-computing companies to cut back on coal and tap into cleaner sources of electricity.

The environmental watchdog group today released its latest rankings of companies, including Google, Apple, and Amazon, that run giant data centers to serve up Web pages and services. Greenpeace now has a "clean energy index" to measure how much electricity from renewable sources is used by these companies.

Greenpeace has been pressuring cloud companies for years to improve the efficiency of their data centers, advocate for clean-energy policies, and disclose energy usage.

This year, Yahoo, despite its dire financial … Read more