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May |
Newsletter |
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Issue
54 |
Included in this months issue:
How Alan Turing's Pilot ACE changed computing
Asus Eee Keyboard Launched
Asus' Eee Keyboard - a full netbook built into a keyboard chassis - has been demo'd time after time by the manufacturer and now, the computer may actually be coming to market.
The CPU, according to Asus, is Intel's now old Atom N270, the chipset the equally past-its-prime 945GSE. It comes with Windows XP Home.
Still, there are innovations: the Eee Keyboard now connects to a monitor by an ultrawideband (UWB) wireless link. Presumably, Asus bundles a dongle for the other end of the connection. If not, the 425 x 145 x 10-24mm Keyboard has HDMI to fall back on. A Broadcom video decoder has been built in to augment the weak integrated graphics.
The unit also sports a 5in, 480 x 800 multi-touch control panel for launching favourite apps and such. And the main key array is now backlit.
The Keyboard incorporates 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, Gigabit Ethernet and three USB 2.0 ports for connectivity, and Asus has built in a four-hour battery for usage away from a desk.
By Tony Smith
How Alan Turing's Pilot ACE changed computing
On 10 January 1954, a de Havilland Comet - the world's first commercial jet airliner - took off from Rome.
After only just 20 minutes in flight, it exploded, killing all 35 people on board.
Months later there was another disaster, this time a Comet crashed near Naples during a flight between Rome and Cairo.
The two crashes in such short succession prompted an investigation.
Fatigued failure
It was eventually discovered, through a series of tests, that metal fatigue had been the cause of both accidents.
Testing had been carried out by building a replica aircraft in a tank of water before exposing it to high pressures - similar to the conditions it would experience in mid-air.
This required carrying out some intricate calculations - a task perfect for the Pilot ACE, the predecessor to English computer scientist Alan Turing's computer, the ACE.
Tom Vickers was operations manager for the Pilot ACE. For BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme, he was interviewed by his granddaughter, Harriet, about the early days of the machine - and of computing in the UK.
"The idea of computers developed during the war, in America, and also at Bletchley where they did build special purpose computers for code-cracking.
"One of the key people there was Alan Turing, who was to design an electronic computer.
"He started off on his own, and I was encouraged to join. And so, the ideas of electronic computers developed."
Although work on the machine started in 1946, it was not until 1950 that the Pilot ACE ran its first programme.
From BBC World Service
Sergey Brin: 'We screwed up' on Street View Wi-Fi grab
Google co-founder Sergey Brin says the company "screwed up" when it equipped its world-roving Street View cars with software code that spent three years capturing personal data from open Wi-Fi networks.
"Let me just say: We screwed up," Brin told a room full of reporters this afternoon at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco. "I'm not going to make excuses about this."
In a blog post on Friday, Google announced that contrary to previous assurances by the company, its Street View cars had been capturing payload data from open Wi-Fi networks as they sped around the globe snapping digital photos. Just a month earlier the company had said the cars were collecting only SSIDs and MAC addresses from Wi-Fi networks.
The Friday post said that the company's mobile team included payload-capturing code in the cars' software despite the fact that the project leaders "did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data". It called this "a mistake".
By Cade Metz
Microsoft starts Office Web Apps roll out
Microsoft has released its Office Web Apps in the UK via its online SkyDrive storage service.
The software giant plans to roll out its rival to Google Docs gradually. Currently it is only available to the US, Ireland, Blighty and Canada.
Redmond has slotted the tools into its Windows Live service, so it now sits alongside Hotmail, in a similar way to how Google Docs are knitted into Gmail.
On 15 June the rest of the world will also gain access to Microsoft's Office Web Apps, which MS described as an "online companion to Office 2010."
By Kelly Fiveash
LHC particle search 'nearing', says physicist
The Large Hadron Collider could soon begin a search for new sub-atomic particles, a leading physicist says.
If commissioning work goes well, the LHC could become sensitive enough to probe a hitherto unexplored domain in particle physics by the end of summer.
Among the first candidates for discovery are two boson particles that have been predicted to exist.
The £6bn ($10bn) collider is being used to smash together proton beams to shed light on the nature of Universe.
The machine has seen half a billion of these collisions since beams crossed for the first time in November 2009.
t is operated by Cern (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), based near Geneva. The machine itself is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border.
It is designed to search for the elusive Higgs boson and study new physics predicted to exist at the 1,000 gigaelectronvolt (GeV) scale (approximately 1,000 times larger than the mass of a proton).
Taken from BBC Technology News
School IT quango to be expelled
Becta, the education IT procurement quango, is to be scrapped as part of the new government's £6.2bn cuts this year, announced by George Osborne this morning.
Schools are expected to get more control over their technology purchases as a result. Becta did not buy computers and software for schools, but instead drew up framework agreements that bound local authorities to particular vendors and packages.
Staff were told the organisation will close down by November.
By Chris Williams
Hack attacks mounted on car control systems
The computer systems used to control modern cars are very vulnerable to attack, say experts. An investigation by security researchers found the systems to be "fragile" and easily subverted.
The researchers showed how to kill a car engine remotely, turn off the brakes so the car would not stop and make instruments give false readings.
Despite their success, the team said it would be hard for malicious attackers to reproduce their work.
The team of researchers, led by Professor Stefan Savage from the University of California-San Diego, and Tadayoshi Kohno from the University of Washington set out to see what resilience cars had to an attack on their control systems.
"Our findings suggest that, unfortunately, the answer is 'little,'" wrote the researchers from the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security.
From BBC Technology News
Seven atom transistor sets the pace for future PCs
Researchers have shown off a transistor made from just seven atoms that could be used to create smaller, more powerful computers.
Transistors are tiny switches used as the building blocks of silicon chips.
If the new atomic transistor can be made in large numbers it could mean chips with components up to 100 times smaller than on existing processors.
The Australian creators of the transistor hope it is also a step towards a solid-state quantum computer.
The transistor is not the smallest ever created as two research groups have previously managed to produce working single-atom transistors.
However, the device is many times smaller than the components found in chips in contemporary computers. On chips where components are 22 nanometres in size, transistor gates are about 42 atoms across.
From BBC Technology News
Many companies are unaware that almost all Digital Copiers since 2002 contain a hard drive. Every copy, scan, email and fax is stored on these hard drives. This could be a time-bomb for your business!
It takes about half an hour to remove the hard drive. Then all you need is a forensic program easily available on-line for free! You can download tens of thousands of documents in less than 12 hours.
A well known American TV station recently commissioned an expert to go and buy four used copiers and extract the data from them. The machines were brought from a warehouse which at the time was holding 6000 units, most bound for foreign shores.
The machines were brought on price and the number of copies they had done. They had no idea where they were from until they powered them up. The first machine showed that it was from the Buffalo Sex Crimes Unit. It showed detailed documents on domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. The second machine came from the same Police Department with a list of major drug raids. The third from a New York Construction Company spit out designs plans for a building near Ground Zero. 95 pages of pay stubs with names, addresses and social security numbers along with $40,000 of copied cheques. The fourth machine and probably the most damming came from a New York insurance company. It showed 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from prescriptions, to blood tests, to a cancer diagnosis.
Manufactures of copiers have taken note that this is a serious problem which they have caused. You now can buy an optional extra which deletes copies as they are done however it is not cheap ranging from £300-£500. Alternatively go to a well known WEEE recycling company and for a fraction of that cost they can remove the hard drives and eradicate the data for you, obviously Recycling Your IT is one of those companies.
From Recycling Your IT
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