LONG BEACH, California — Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they’re done.

Pattie Maes of the lab’s Fluid Interfaces group said the research is aimed at creating a new digital “sixth sense” for humans.

In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn’t come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

From soldering irons to SparcStations, from MITS to Macintosh, personal computers have evolved from do-it-yourself kits for electronic hobbyists into machines that practically leap out of the box and set themselves up. What enabled them to get from there to here? Innovation and determination. Here are top 20 systems that made that rapid evolution possible.

MITS Altair 8800

There once was a time when you could buy a top-of-the-line computer for $395. The only catch was that you had to build it yourself. Although the Altair 8800 wasn’t actually the first personal computer (Scelbi Computer Consulting`s 8008-based Scelbi-8H kit probably took that honor in 1973), it grabbed attention. MITS sold 2000 of them in 1975 - more than any single computer before it. Read the rest of this entry »

Although Intel’s wildly popular Atom processor was originally conceived for mobile Internet devices with an eye toward eventually trickling into smartphones, it quickly caught on with netbooks and has since carved out a sizable chunk of the mobile landscape. The concept of cheap, fast-enough computing soon migrated from portables to the desktop, where it spawned a new class of delightfully small nettop systems. With Atom now available with two physical cores and an economic downturn causing many to tighten their budgets, the nettop looks to have a promising future, especially in cheap, media-centric PCs. Read the rest of this entry »

From a computer enthusiast’s point of view, some machines may never fall into the obsolete category. Rare as it may be, sometimes you just bond with a machine to the point where you will go to the ends of the earth to continue its life. Apple feels otherwise, however, and occasionally decides to no longer provide service parts for aging machines.

Now, that being said, the latest list—which, according to MacMerc.com will be made official March 17th—may make you feel a bit on the old side (we’re not exactly sure where MacMerc got this information, but the list is reasonable, so we’ll go with it). Knowing this, you may want to stop reading right now; otherwise here is the list: Read the rest of this entry »

AP1900 is the world’s slimmest AIO PC design, and its finest with only 35mm in width. So, it can minimize space usage while broadening the visual capacity like other LCD monitors. The Black Bars on the top and the bottom of the screen can also be avoided. In the other hand, AP1900 provides a 160 degrees wide visual experience.

In Comparison to the traditional PC, the AP1900 is equipped with the Intel® Atom™ processor. It has all the outstanding features as the regular PC, added with energy-saving and noise-reduction functions. Furthermore, a variety of internet capabilities and 802.11 b/g wireless bandwidth (optional) for the ultimate freedom in the virtual universe. Read the rest of this entry »

By Esteban Israel

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba launched its own variant of the Linux computer operating system this week in the latest front of the communist island’s battle against what it views as U.S. hegemony.

The Cuban variant, called Nova, was introduced at a Havana computer conference on “technological sovereignty” and is central to the Cuban government’s desire to replace the Microsoft software running most of the island’s computers. Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla Labs on Thursday unveiled a new open-source project called Bespin, a Web-based programming environment its developers hope will combine the speed and power of desktop-based development with the collaborative benefits of cloud computing.

Bespin 0.1 is only an “initial prototype framework that includes support for basic editing features,” according to the site, but Mozilla has high hopes for the project. “We’re particularly excited by the prospect of empowering Web developers to hack on the editor itself and make it their own,” said Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer in Mozilla’s Bespin announcement. Read the rest of this entry »

If there were any lingering doubts about whether Amazon Web Services were enterprise ready they dissolved this week once IBM became a partner. And now that Amazon and IBM have teamed up a picture of multiple computing clouds is emerging.

Amazon Web Services teamed up with IBM to provide pay-as-you-go access to Big Blue’s database servers, Lotus and Websphere middleware running on Novell SUSE Linux. Those applications will run on Amazon’s EC2. Read the rest of this entry »

This week brought the very interesting news that IBM is making some of its software products (database and middleware, primarily) available on Amazon’s EC2. IBM is also offering Amazon Machine Images (AMI) preconfigured with its products, ready to begin running in EC2. The products and AMIs are, for today, only available for development, not production, but IBM and Amazon plan to offer production versions available on a per-hour of use basis in the near future. Furthermore, if you have existing IBM licenses, you can transfer them to EC2 and begin using the Amazon instances for production immediately. Read the rest of this entry »

Serendipitously, both IBM and HP held events this week to describe their cloud computing initiatives. Their presentations offered insight into what they’re doing and provide some food for thought to IT organizations assessing what cloud computing means to their future-as well as some information that might give pause as well.

IBM announced a number of separate things as well as doing an actual demo of cloud capability. Read the rest of this entry »