Computing

Peer-to-peer goes off the grid

Artist and technologist Aram Bartholl is mortaring USB drives into brick walls and curbstones throughout New York City and inviting people to use them to share files. His "Dead Drops" project offers a glimpse of a utopian, DIY darknet in RL.

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Apple puts letterpress in the cloud

In the excitement around the new MacBook Airs, another Apple product rollout has received less attention: the addition of a letterpress-printing option in iPhoto. But Apple's foray into craft printing should come as no surprise; Steve Jobs has always been an aficionado of classic typography.

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A hyperdrive for Google Earth

Perhaps the most visceral effect Google Earth offers takes place when you open the program and that vision of the Earth from space swings into view. It's tempting to head off into space itself�but the space imagery Google includes is low-res and very incomplete. Now, two Fermilab scientists have created a layer of rich, detailed images of galaxies and galaxy clusters, using data from the Sloan Sky Survey...

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Axsotic 3D Spherical Mouse

If you can’t do 3D right, don’t do it at all. I’m looking at you 3D cinema! I much prefer the classics. The Axsotic 3D Spherical Mouse provides maximum navigation of your 3D images and design projects, allowing you to move your creations around as if you were actually holding them in your fingertips, instead of pointing and scrolling. Using ...

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The World’s Fastest Supercomputer Unveiled in China

Just for a moment, take into consideration that in the 1950s, it would have taken a supercomputer of this size just to power your cellphone. And that much computing power might have even been a stretch. Today at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing (HPC China 2010) in Beijing, the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China ...

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LumiNet: The Wearable Computing Network

LumiNet takes the conventions of a central processing unit, such as an Arduino, handling most of the workload and spreads the responsibility across a series of parallel ‘LumiNet modules’ which only depend on the four modules directly connected to it. This way, if one module goes bad, the rest of the wearable network will stay up and running. It’s programming ...

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IMEC meets Howest: The First Solar Powered Laptop

We’ve seen solar-powered laptop cases and even a crazy Apple patent that suggested sun powered back lighting, but this is a concept that could change computing as we know it. The “IMEC meets Howest” is claimed to be the first laptop which relies completely on the power of the sun. Energized by two solar panels, no electricity source is needed ...

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