$500

Performing more than 33 quadrillion calculations per second, a new Chinese supercomputer called Tianhe-2 arrived two years earlier than expected to claim the top spot in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The Top500 list, updated twice a year at the International Supercomputing Conference, measures performance for mammoth systems typically used for jobs like modeling nuclear weapons explosions and forecasting global climate changes. And the Chinese machine, at the National University of Defense Technology, is more mammoth than most.

The Tianhe-2 has 32,000 Xeon processors boosted by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors for … Read more

iRobot wants to help you stay away from work meetings, a sentiment we can all applaud.

Trundling along on the heels -- or wheels -- of its RP-VITA medical robot, the AVA 500 was introduced Monday by the company as an enterprise-grade telepresence robot.

Developed with Cisco's TelePresence technology, the autonomously navigating machine is like a large, rolling webcam that lets remote users take part in "meetings and presentations where movement and location spontaneity are important." … Read more

ARM, the designer of most of the world's smartphone processors, announced new silicon that will likely find its way to future mobile devices.

Mali-V500: This video encode/decode chip is designed to prevent piracy of 1080p class video. Using TrustZone technology, the V500 was developed after consultation with Hollywood studios, according to a report in the Financial Times. Hollywood movie studios and content distributors like Netflix "are demanding [that]...their highest value content...be protected not just by digital rights management but by the hardware, all the way from download through to display," the Times wrote, citing … Read more

The new Moving Art app from Louie Schwartzberg takes a series of videos of locations and landscapes and combines them into arresting imagery in video format. Displayed on the iPad's gorgeous retina display screen, the results are at times breathtaking, but can at times suffer from a lack of direction.

The result of Schwartzberg's work is an engaging but often slow and very large app that can be soothing but will certainly be best for a certain audience. Open the app after the long download process, and Moving Art gives you a number of videos to choose from. … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- Sprint just announced a trio of tri-band LTE mobile hot spots today at CTIA 2013. The devices are the Netgear Zing, the Netgear 341U, and the Novatel Wireless MiFi 500LTE.

The most striking product is the Netgear Zing, which not only connects to Sprint's 3G and 4G networks to supply up to 10 users simultaneously, it also features a large LCD touch screen. In fact Sprint claims it's the first hot spot it has offered with a touch-controlled display. Another added bonus to the Zing is it's capable of roaming globally on GSM networks. … Read more

Congrats to Enrique G. of Tracy, Calif., for winning a pair of Sennheiser Momentum headphones in last week's giveaway. This week, we're got a twofer -- hardware and software.

First off, the winner gets a 120GB Crucial M500 solid-state drive with a three-year limited warranty. Like most new SSDs, the Crucial M500 supports the SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard and has a standard 2.5-inch design with 7mm thickness. This means it can fit in all standard laptops and desktops, as well as some ultrabooks. If your computer is running on a hard drive, replacing it with an SSD will be a big upgrade in terms of performance.

Once you've revved up your machine with your new drive, you can make sure it runs like new longer with the other half of this week's prize -- a copy of Iolo's System Mechanic, a highly rated PC tune-up suite designed to fix and clean up your machine. You'll be getting version 11.5, which works with all versions of Windows. … Read more

Apple has shot up to sixth place in the Fortune 500, Fortune announced today.

The iPhone maker's strong showing in the Fortune 500 is a dramatic rise from its 17th-place ranking in 2012. In sixth place, Apple is the highest-ranking technology company in a list topped by Walmart. Major oil companies, including Exxon Mobil and Chevron, along with Berkshire Hathaway, separate Apple from the top spot.

Another notable mention -- Facebook has for the first time made the Fortune 500. The company was previously ranked 598, but this year, it was able to take the 482nd spot in Fortune'… Read more

In home networking, the fastest way -- in terms of data speed -- to connect devices together is via network cables. However, running cables properly, which involves making networking ports and connector heads, is no easy task. This is part of the reason the wireless network (Wi-Fi) has become so popular. But chances are, there's a spot in your home that the Wi-Fi signal can't reach, because of distance or thick walls. This is when a power-line connection can be a useful alternative.

Power-line adapters basically turn the electrical wiring of a home into network cables for a computer network. You need at least two power-line adapters to form the first power-line connection. The first adapter is connected to the router and the second to the Ethernet-ready device at the far end. There are some routers on the market, such as the D-Link DHP-1320, that have built-in support for power-line connectivity, meaning you can skip the first adapter. After the first connection, you just need one more adapter to add another Ethernet-ready device to the home network.

Apart from the ability to bridge the network through thick walls, power-line connections are also a lot more stable than Wi-Fi signal and have as low latency and a regular Ethernet wired connections.

Currently there are two main standards for power-line networking, HomePlug AV and Powerline AV 500. They offer speed caps of 200Mbps and 500Mbps, respectively. The following is the list of top five power-line adapters on the market. This list is sorted by the review date, starting with the most recently reviewed. It will be updated as more devices are reviewed.… Read more

The dream of a solid-state drive that offers near 1TB of storage space without breaking the bank has just come true.

Crucial today announced the availability of the M500 SSD, its first terabyte-class drive, which comes in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities and costs $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99, respectively.

This is the first SSD on the market to offer close to 1TB at a cost close to that of most existing 480GB to 512GB SSDs.

According to Crucial, the M500 uses Micron's 20nm MLC NAND flash and Micron's custom firmware to deliver … Read more