blue

Drawing from engineering ideas that are revamping personal computers, IBM and two Swiss universities are using flash memory to improve performance of a supercomputer designed to simulate an actual mouse brain.

But there's a lot more flash memory than you'll find in the latest laptop.

A PC's solid-state drive may come with something like 128GB to 512GB of flash memory. The mouse-brain project's specially upgraded version of a Blue Gene/Q supercomputer has 250 to 1,000 times as much flash memory -- 128 terabytes.

The supercomputer project, in conjunction with the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de … Read more

Some Windows OEMs showed off coming small form-factor Windows 8 tablets as part of Computex this week.

Microsoft didn't take the wraps off its rumored 8-inch Surface at the show. But the company did share a few more tidbits about some of the changes it's making to Windows 8 with the 8.1 "Blue" release that will potentially make these smaller devices more usable.

Among the new small-screen devices that Microsoft's partners showed this week were the 8-inch Acer Iconia W3 (with the outsized keyboard); the Lenovo MiiX 8, an 8-inch tablet with a stylus … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Weird Al Yankovic says next album will be his last.

- Australian scientists uncover "God's bathtub."

- These Blu-ray discs will last 1,000 years.

- You guys, Xanga is about to shut down unless we give them $60k.

- This teenager would rather go to jail than play his Xbox 360.… Read more

Microsoft finally peeled back the covers on the server-side products coming as part of the "Blue" wave on the opening day of the annual Microsoft TechEd North America conference.

Microsoft officials went public with details about Windows Server Blue, which is officially christened "Windows Server 2012 R2"; System Center "Blue," which will be called "System Center 2012 R2"; SQL Server Blue, a k a "SQL Server 2014"; and Visual Studio Blue, or "Visual Studio 2013," on Monday at its show for IT pros and developers in … Read more

GamePop will continue to hand out free gaming consoles for the next month in the hopes that it will spur preorder interest for the upstart game system that plays Android games on your TV, its maker announced on Thursday.

BlueStacks, which also makes an eponymous desktop Android app player, has extended the GamePop console giveaway, saying in a prepared statement that "...due to the high demand of preorders it is extending its offer of giving the console itself away free to the end of June." You can preorder the console for free at GamePop.tv. … Read more

Scientists have been investigating the structure of the HIV capsid for years; the protein shell protects the virus' genetic material, helps debilitate the infected person's immune system, and is the target for the development of new antiretroviral drugs. Research teams have turned to a wide range of futuristic-sounding techniques to crack the code, from cryo-electron microscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to cryo-EM tomography and X-ray crystallography.

Now, thanks to a little help from the supercomputer Blue Waters, the mystery finally has been unraveled, according to a research team reporting this week in the journal Nature.… Read more

I know there are still doubters out there, but from everything I've heard, the rumored Start Button is going to be part of Windows Blue, aka Windows 8.1.

I've heard from one of my good sources that the Start Button, as well as a new boot-straight-to-desktop option are included in the most recent internal "Milestone Preview" builds of Windows 8.1.

What we haven't heard many leaks about is how this new Start Button will work. While sources have emphasized that the Start Button won't work the way the current Windows Start Button … Read more

The Gogroove BlueGate performs one very simple function that can be split into two parts. It receives a digital Bluetooth audio signal from a smartphone (or other Bluetooth capable device) and outputs an analog audio signal that can be listened to through headphones, a car stereo, or home audio system. It basically takes a wireless signal and makes a wired one.

The wireless portion of the BlueGate's functionality was performed almost flawlessly. It's the wired half of the equation that frustrated me.

The trouble with wires The BlueGate device itself is remarkably compact and unobtrusive. The tiny matte-black … Read more

In all the talk about Microsoft's makeover into a devices and services company, one service many forget the company has in its back pocket is Bing.

Bing is evolving into more than "just" a Web search engine for Microsoft. It's also gives the company a way to harness and make use of data using Microsoft's myriad machine learning and computation capabilities. And though it may be hard to see through all the "Scroggled" fog, Bing may be more important as a service than a "mere" search engine to Microsoft going … Read more