The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

Exponentially growing technologies

• Dynamic RAM size (smallest feature sizes decreasing exponentially)
• Dynamic RAM price performance (improving exponentially)
• Average Transistor price (decreasing exponentially)
• Transistor Manufacturing costs (decreasing exponentially)
• Microprocessor clock speeds (increasing exponentially)
• Microprocessor costs (decreasing exponentially)
• Transistors per microprocessor (increasing exponentially)
• Processor performance (increasing exponentially)
• DNA sequencing costs per base pair (decreasing exponentially)
• Random Access Memory bits per dollar (increasing exponentially)
• Magnetic data storage bits per dollar (increasing exponentially)
• Wireless Internet and phone services price performance (increasing exponentially)
• Number of Internet hosts (increasing exponentially)
• Bytes of Internet traffic (increasing exponentially)
• Internet backbone bandwidth (increasing in a very terraced, quasi-exponential manner)
• Mechanical device sizes (decreasing exponentially)
• Number of scientific citations for nanotechnology research (increasing exponentially)
• Number of U.S. nanotech patents (increasing exponentially)

PANAFACOM U-200
16-bit CPU with proprietary architecture
Magnetic core, IC memory (8-64KB)

Are all small gadgets worthless? No, but I do hope that in the future manufactures will make functionality a higher priority and focus less on saving a few centimeters here and there. Gadgets like cell phones do need to be small, but not so tiny that they lose in practicality what they gain in portability. If an item fits comfortably into a pocket, then most of us aren’t going to be overly eager to downsize based solely on size if it costs us features. So hopefully the trend of making tiny gadgets just for the sake of simply doing so will end, and going forward, manufactures will find ways to better combine form and functionality.

Is it possible that our technological reach is very nearly sufficient now? That our lives, at least in the West, are sufficiently comfortable.

What will you have done to your newborn when you have installed into the nucleus of every one of her billions of cells a purchased code that will pump out proteins designed to change her? You will have robbed her of the last possible chance for creating context—meaning—for her life. Say she finds herself, at the age of sixteen, unaccountably happy. Is it her being happy—finding, perhaps, the boy she will first love—or is it the corporate product inserted within her when she was a small nest of cells, an artificial chromosome now causing her body to produce more serotonin? Don’t think she won’t wonder: at sixteen a sensitive soul questions everything. But perhaps you’ve “increased her intelligence”—and perhaps that’s why she is questioning so hard. She won’t be sure if even the questions are hers.

The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is drafting a new field manual for “Cyber-Electromagnetic Activity,” CEMA, a concept that joins the two functions at the hip. A new Army school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma has so far trained almost 700 electronic warfare specialists — many of them combat veterans, ranging from young sergeants to, as of Jan. 1st, the field’s first full colonel — who will oversee not only traditional EW but also cyber operations, at least on the tactical level.
In the new concept, once the sensors pick up an enemy transmission, “a commander has several options. He could have his SIGINT [signals intelligence] team exploit the signals, just sit there and listen to them. Or he could decide to attack it” — in various ways: “He can do a physical attack using kinetic weapons systems, meaning he can blow the crap out of it; or he can use an electronic attack using one of his EW systems; or in the future he may have the ability to do a cyber attack.”
Blowing something up is the most permanent solution, but missiles, bombs, and artillery shells might miss and, at worst, kill civilians. Cyber is the most subtle, but potentially the most challenging and time-consuming as US hackers figure out how to infiltrate and subvert the enemy network. Electronic warfare — jamming and spoofing — is non-lethal, for good and ill, and its effects only last as long as you keep transmitting, but because its ammunition is electromagnetic, it’s literally as fast as the speed of light.

Microsoft’s ascent to the top of the PC industry continued to cause great passions. If you had said, in 1987, that Intel and Microsoft would in a decade define the industry, most would have laughed. Intel was struggling to produce competitive RISC chips, and Microsoft had never written an operating system. But the answers to the questions: “Why did Microsoft win” and “Why did IBM lose” are really different.
IBM had never met a competitor like Bill Gates before – one quite so ruthless and opportunistic. Gates fought hard and IBM couldn’t shake him off. But with or without OS/2, IBM could have outflanked him or even dispensed with the nuisance altogether, if it had developed a coherent strategy, one giving customers reasons to think positively about spending money with IBM.
IBM should have realised earlier that the path to OS/2 was a radical one for customers in 1988. It could have taken control of DOS and enhanced it, to offer a smoother upgrade path to the GUI world. In fact, this is what IBM belatedly did – with a product dubbed PM for DOS – which never made it to market. But it was too late. IBM could have made an expensive acquisition of Apple, the most attractive consumer UI, and put it on a firm technology base. But even Apple failed to do this. And even more radically, Big Blue could have realised where the value is in software and competed higher up – helping to create a Linux-like platform that was free.
In the recriminations that followed the OS wars, OS/2 devotees would complain that the computer press was almost uniformly hostile to OS/2. They were quite right – you could count the number of journalists who used and liked OS/2 on the fingers of one hand. (One was John Lettice, founder of The Register – and another was your reporter. The charming OS/2 2.0 souvenir pictured above sits at Reg HQ today). But the press were reflecting both sentiments and economic choices that were widespread. They didn’t want to go back to a world where IBM defined the standards for the open PC.
They were so busy fighting the last war that they didn’t see the next one coming. Writing in 1995, as the OS wars raged on Usenet (though it was already clear who had won), the late Guy Kewney summed up his exasperation:
My friends tell me Microsoft will save us from IBM. But who will save us from Microsoft?

Don Estridge saw the PC as more than a standalone computer. He correctly anticipated that the PC would become an intelligent workstation and many functions would be completed by a host plus a PC. Many groups in IBM feared that the PC business would harm the more profitable areas of IBM.
IBM dragged its heels producing more powerful PCs because of this. The IBM PS/2 line of computers was a dismal failure because the prices were high and customers didn’t understand why a different bus architecture was needed.
Microsoft let IBM sink many millions of dollars into OS/2 while Microsoft developed Windows. Even though many in the PC industry considered OS/2 a vastly superior product, Windows won out.
IBM did understand, from the beginning, the power of the Internet. Microsoft didn’t. IBM leveraged their business model and unleashed its developer power and marketing experience to develop hundreds of software and hardware products for the web. NetCommerce is one of IBM’s most successful software products. IBM also understood that the world wide web meant world wide opportunities and developed what some consider to the best consulting units around. IBM is more of a Service company today than it was in the past.
So, did IBM lose its Strategic position? I think while it did in the PC business and suffered greatly, it bounced back in the Internet business. And for someone to assume that they lost “the war” is wrong. They lost a battle. A big battle, but it certainly was not a critical injury to IBM.

There are sustaining innovations and there are disruptive innovations. A sustaining innovation tends to be an incremental improvement on current products or services and doesn’t affect existing markets. A disruptive innovation, however, displaces existing products or services and changes existing markets.
All of us have experienced disruptive technologies. When I was a kid, I took pictures on 35mm films and developed them in a darkroom myself. Two years ago on Sandia Peak in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was surprised to meet a guy who was still using a 35mm film camera. But the market nowadays is dominated by digital cameras. An example of disruptive innovation in IT was the displacement of 8-inch floppy disks by 5.25-inchfloppy disks, and then by 3.5-inch floppy disks.
The floppy disks have since been disrupted by CDs, DVDs, and USB drives. As a result of these disruptions, some companies have prospered while others have fallen behind.

When I began my search for an answer to the puzzle of why the best firms can fail, a friend offered some sage advice. “Those who study genetics avoid studying humans,” he noted. “Because new generations come along only every thirty years or so, it takes a long time to understand the cause and effect of any changes. Instead, they study fruit flies, because they are conceived, born, mature, and die all within a single day. If you want to understand why something happens in business, study the disk drive industry. Those companies are the closest things to fruit flies that the business world will ever see.”
Why was it that firms that could be esteemed as aggressive, innovative, customer-sensitive organizations could ignore or attend belatedly to technological innovations with enormous strategic importance? In the context of the preceding analysis of the disk drive industry, this question can be sharpened considerably. The established firms were, in fact, aggressive, innovative, and customer-sensitive in their approaches to sustaining innovations of every sort. But the problem established firms seem unable to confront successfully is that of downward vision and mobility, in terms of the trajectory map. Finding new applications and markets for these new products seems to be a capability that each of these firms exhibited once, upon entry, and then apparently lost. It was as if the leading firms were held captive by their customers, enabling attacking entrant firms to topple the incumbent industry leaders each time a disruptive technology emerged. Why did this happen? Is it still happening?

The 15-minute short film, Many Worlds, described as a bizarre physics experiment, has an alternate ending for every viewing, and decides between its endings based on how the audience reacts during the screening.
Before the film airs, audience will be strapped with small sensors to help measure their heart rate, muscle tension, brainwave activity, and how much they’re sweating. These data help the movie identify the interactivity level and mood so the film can select upcoming scenes accordingly. If an audience is feeling restless, the movie may insert intense, slow music to induce fear. If an audience is bored, an exciting action sequence may appear to keep their attention. It’s basically a Choose Your Own Adventure-type film, except all the choosing magically appears according to the way your body reacts.

Facts:

1. The most important factor in software work is the quality of the programmers.
2. The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers.
3. Adding people to a late project makes it later.
4. The working environment has a profound impact on productivity and quality.
5. Hype (about tools and techniques) is the plague on the house of software.
6. New tools/techniques cause an initial loss of productivity/quality.
7. Software developers talk a lot about tools, but seldom use them.
8. One of the two most common causes of runaway projects is poor estimation.
9. Software estimation usually occurs at the wrong time.
10. Software estimation is usually done by the wrong people.
11. Software estimates are rarely corrected as the project proceeds.
12. It is not surprising that software estimates are bad. But we live by them anyway.
13. There is a disconnect between software management and their programmers.
14. The answer to a feasibility study is almost always “yes”.
15. Reuse-in-the-small is a well-solved problem.
16. Reuse-in-the-large remains a mostly unsolved problem.
17. Reuse-in-the-large works best for families of related systems.
18. Reusable components are three times as hard to build, and should be tried out in three settings.
19. Modification of reused code is particularly error-prone.
20. Design pattern reuse is one solution to the problems of code reuse.
21. 25 percent increase in problem complexity is a 100 percent increase in solution complexity.
22. 80 percent of software work is intellectual. A fair amount of it is creative. Little of it is clerical.
23. One of the two most common causes of runaway projects is unstable requirements.
24. Requirements errors are the most expensive to fix during production.
25. Missing requirements are the hardest requirements errors to correct.
26. Explicit requirements “explode” as implicit (design) requirements for a solution evolve.
27. There is seldom one best design solution to a software problem.
28. Design is a complex, iterative process. Initial design solutions are usually wrong, and not optimal.
29. Designer “primitives” (solutions they can readily code) rarely match programmer “primitives”.
30. COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others (for business applications) are so much worse.
31. Error-removal is the most time-consuming phase of the life cycle.
32. Software is usually tested at best at the 55-60 percent (branch) coverage level.
33. 100 percent coverage is still far from enough.
34. Test tools are essential, but many are rarely used.
35. Test automation rarely is. Most testing activities cannot be automated.
36. Programmer-created, built-in, debug code is an important supplement to testing tools.
37. Rigorous inspections can remove up to 90 percent of errors before the first test case is run.
38. But rigorous inspections should not replace testing.
39. Post-delivery reviews (some call them “retrospectives” ) are important, and seldom performed.
40. Reviews are both technical and sociological, and both factors must be accommodated.
41. Maintenance (most important phase) consumes 40-80 percent of software costs.
42. Enhancements represent roughly 60 percent of maintenance costs.
43. Maintenance is a solution, not a problem.
44. Understanding the existing product is the most difficult task of maintenance.
45. Better methods lead to MORE maintenance, not less.
46. Quality IS: a collection of attributes.
47. Quality is NOT: user satisfaction, meeting requirements, achieving cost/schedule, or reliability.
48. There are errors that most programmers tend to make.
49. Errors tend to cluster.
50. There is no single best approach to software error removal.
51. Residual errors will always persist. The goal should be to minimize or eliminate severe errors.
52. Efficiency stems more from good design than good coding.
53. High-order-language code can be about 90 percent as efficient as comparable assembler code.
54. There are tradeoffs between size and time optimization.
55. Many researchers advocate rather than investigate.

Fallacies

1. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
2. You can manage quality into a software product.
3. Programming can and should be egoless.
4. Tools and techniques: one size fits all.
5. Software needs more methodologies.
6. To estimate cost and schedule, first estimate lines of code.
7. Random test input is a good way to optimize testing.
8. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.
9. The way to make product replacement decisions is to look at past cost data.
10. You teach people how to program by showing them how to write programs.

The U.S. wants back into the manufacturing game, but the industry has had to weigh this desire to create new jobs and stimulate the economy against the reality of competing against lower operating costs elsewhere in the world. Whereas traditional assembly-line work may never return stateside in a big way, manufacturers and government agencies have begun placing bets on additive manufacturing technologies—including 3-D printing—that they believe could represent the industry’s future.
Additive manufacturing processes create 3-D objects based on a computer file by sequentially depositing thin layers of liquid or powdered metals, polymers or other materials on a substrate. Three-dimensional printing is either synonymous with or a subcategory of additive manufacturing, depending on whom you ask. There are significant differences between the two, however. There are 3-D printers now available for as little as $500, but they produce relatively low-quality objects, suitable as toys, jewelry and other novelties. Industrial additive machines, in contrast, cost at least $30,000—and the laser-based units that make high-quality metal products can cost as much as $1 million.
Of course, additive processes and materials are not nearly mature enough to sustain an entire industry. Layer-by-layer printing of items is simply not possible today at the speed and scale required to replace casting, molding, machining and other traditional manufacturing methods.
The greatest successes in additive manufacturing are taking place in the biomedical industry, particularly in the making of implants that take advantage of the technology’s design flexibility to match a patient’s particular needs, such as a customized hip implant.

Researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) worked in partnership with colleagues at Maastricht University and Danish biomechanical firm AnyBody Technology to develop the pioneering human foot simulation.
The Glasgow/Maastricht Foot Model uses computer technology to model the many bones, joints, ligaments, muscles and tendons which make up the human foot.
It will lead to the manufacture of better made and more efficient orthotic devices which should cut recovery times and reduce symptoms for the roughly 200 million Europeans who suffer from disabling foot and ankle conditions.

The Objet1000 is Objet’s wide format 3D printer for rapidly creating large industrial size models and 1:1 scale prototypes.
Featuring an ultra-large build tray size of 1000 x 800 x 500mm, it enables designers, engineers and manufacturers to quickly and precisely prototype any 3D CAD design, no matter how complex or detailed.

Objet1000 Brochure

Confirmation as to how seriously some companies are taking additive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, came when GE Aviation bought a privately owned company called Morris Technologies. Morris Technologies has invested heavily in 3D printing equipment and will be printing bits for a new range of jet engines. Morris Technologies uses a number of 3D printing machines, all of which work by using a digital description of an object to build it in physical form, layer by layer.

One of the attractions of printing parts is that it saves material. Instead of machining components from solid billets of metal, in which much of it may be cut away, only the material that is needed to shape the part is used. Printed parts can also be made lighter than forged parts, which promises fuel savings.

Many manufacturers already use 3D printing to make prototypes of parts, because it is cheaper and more flexible than tooling up to produce just one or two items. But the technology is now good enough for it to be used to make production items too.

Among the components that Morris Technologies plans to print will be some used in the LEAP jet engine, which is being developed by CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and Snecma of France. The LEAP engine is scheduled to enter service in the next few years on a number of short-haul airliners. More than 4,000 engines have already been ordered.

During the Civil War, it is believed that over one-third of the nation’s money was counterfeited. This can be largely blamed on the fact that each bank used to print their own money back then, making it so 4,000 types of money were hard to distinguish from the 7,000 types of counterfeit!
But nowadays, money and all counterfeiting matters are closely guarded by the Secret Service, who takes pride in investigating each and every counterfeiting case. Plus, money is no longer printed by banks; rather, a national currency was adopted in 1863.
While the traditional means of money counterfeiting used to be offset printing, technology has caused a surge in the counterfeiting business.
While the majority of the world will see the advances as a way to improve their output, a select few will view it as an opportunity to commit a crime or to try to “get away” with something illegal. High quality printing is both a blessing and a curse to law enforcement and even the Secret Service who no doubt use these technologies themselves.
Until detection equipment catches up, they seem to have their work cut out for them with all of this at-home money printing.

It’s a technology that can be used for good or ill and I’d love to see it used for good.

The car is a 2013 Lexus LS carrying equipment that includes on-board radar and video cameras to monitor the road and the driver. Toyota’s driverless features involve car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure technologies. The cameras and radar equipment can detect traffic signals, lane lines and other vehicles. The technology aims to prevent crashes—a Toyota spokesman said zero collisions are the goal. The car can be driver-assisted or completely self-driving. When a driver is at the wheel, Toyota’s technology could boost safety by detecting obstacles or alerting the driver if the driver is falling asleep.
Toyota refers to its “Intelligent Transport Systems” technology. As part of the ITS concept, beacons detect the positions of pedestrians and obstacles and relay information to the vehicle, on whether a traffic light is green or red. Toyota plans to say more about its autonomous driving technology at a press conference at CES. The vehicle will be shown at the Lexus display.

Hyperstealth announced Smartcamo; an intelligent textile which changes its color to match the background of the wearer in almost all environments. Further application of Smartcamo onto ground vehicles is expected to precede any wide scale uniform program as power and processors are one limiting factor for the individual soldier application.

Guy Cramer, President/CEO of HyperStealth, also announced Quantum Stealth (Light Bending material) non-powered adaptive camouflage which portrays what is behind the user in-front of the user bending the light around the target. The cost is inexpensive, very lightweight and there are no power requirements.

The U.S. military is backing the development of camouflage fabrics that could one day make their soldiers completely invisible, it has been claimed.
The so-called ‘Quantum Stealth’ camouflage material is said to render its wearers completely invisible by bending light waves around them.
Its makers claim the material, which is in effect similar to the invisibility cloak worn by Harry Potter, can even fool night-vision goggles.
However, its development is apparently so secret the Canadian company behind it says it cannot even show the technology in action and offers only mock ups of its effect on their website.

The promise of hypersonic flight sending us halfway around the world in a matter of hours is being bandied about again, this time by a British company that declares, with all due humility, that it has made “the biggest breakthrough in aerospace propulsion technology since the invention of the jet engine.”
Reaction Engines Limited says its hypersonic engine will send us streaking across the sky at speeds well over Mach 5, allowing us to have bagels for breakfast in New York and sushi for lunch in Tokyo.

We have achieved a breakthrough in aerospace engine technology by developing ultra-lightweight heat exchangers 100 times lighter than existing technologies that allow the cooling of very hot airstreams from over 1,000 °C to minus 150 °C in less than 1/100th of a second.
This integrated air-breathing and rocket propulsion technology enables the following vehicle applications:

• Mach 5 high altitude cruise:
  • Fly anywhere in the world in 4 hours
  • Efficient sub-sonic and hypersonic cruise modes
• Low-cost reusable space access:
  • Aircraft-like access to space
  • Operates from runway to orbit and back
  • Order of magnitude reduction in cost vs. existing technology
  • 400 x improved reliability
  • Responsive access to space

Reportedly many skyscrapers in Tokyo swayed like this – It’s a Japanese quake-absorbing structure. I do not want to stay there…

Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as “wide-body ASCII” that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world’s living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.
The idea of expanding the basis for character encoding from 8 to 16 bits is so sensible, indeed so obvious, that the mind initially recoils from it.
The major catch is simply that the 16-bit approach requires перестройка (perestroika), i.e. restructuring our old ways of thinking. Rather than struggling to salvage obsolete. 8-bit encodings via horrendous “extension” contrivances, we need to recognize that the current absence of a standard international/multilingual encoding is a unique opportunity to rethink and revitalize the design concepts behind text encoding.

Bring your own device (BYOD) is a recurrent theme for the most productive members of the workforce. An increasing number of mobile workers are relying on their own devices, and are using these tools to connect to corporate networks to access work applications-often with great frustration. The dawn of BYOD appears to link strongly with mobile workers who’ve revealed that they are a resourceful group and will do anything to ensure ubiquitous connectivity, including work-arounds that could unwittingly threaten the security of a company. However, they also feel a sense of responsibility and care deeply for what they do. They are far more willing to use their personal devices for work, but much less willing to use their work devices for personal reasons. The impact on IT departments can be onerous, but we have some suggestions on how IT can tackle both security and productivity issues and become the company heroes they ought to be.

The reality of today’s networks is that a large percentage of the devices connected to it are unknown to administrators. These may consist of mobile devices, WAPs, or user owned machines attaching to the network. This trend is growing as the number of tablets, phones, personal notebooks, ebooks, and even game systems attach to the network and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies become the norm.
Because administrators do not manage user owned devices, the applications and operating systems range from the latest betas to very old versions with commensurate security vulnerabilities. In today’s networks, administrators are faced with a disparate set of endpoint configurations that do not meet corporate security policies.
User owned devices are not the property of the organization, so intrusive security software running on the devices cannot be mandated by IT. Therefore, organizations that deny access to the devices face loss of productivity, and organizations that allow the devices open up potential threats to the network.
Ideally, unknown devices should not have access to the network until they are registered, either by the users or administrators, and access should be limited to just what’s necessary. However, networks that provide access for BYOD devices must also provide broader access for employee computers connecting to servers and other enterprise resources.

For years, the promise and allure of a concurrent design methodology included talk of models, high-level synthesis, virtual prototyping and other system-level technologies all peacefully coexisting in a single design methodology.
While it sounds like a good idea, the model-based design approach hasn’t mixed well with the virtual prototype approach. And at least for the foreseeable future, it probably won’t.
… From a use-case perspective, it does make sense that these things come together in one way or the other …
… On the virtual prototyping side for software, it’s more a question of what type of model is taken from the C-based development flow into the virtual prototype …
At the end of the day, while the input for execution and implementation routes is different today, industry players are working on standards and technologies to eventually have a single architectural intent that drives both—and one that ideally reduces complexity for architects and design teams.

Air-powered motorcycle runs on scuba tank can do 96.5 km and can reach 139 km/h

FuelCell Energy is one of a handful of companies investigating how to address one of the biggest barriers in trying to capture carbon dioxide from coal plants for later storage underground, an unproved concept. The problem is called parasitic load. It refers to the phenomenon that a typical carbon capture system requires a great deal of electricity and thus saps power from a power plant and can cause electricity costs to spike by 70 percent or more.
The Danbury company’s potential solution for this problem is fuel cells. The company says that fuel cells have the potential to essentially reverse parasitic load and cause a carbon capture system to generate as much as 40 percent more electricity for a power plant, rather than take away power.

The ICT Development Index (IDI) is a composite index combining 11 indicators into one benchmark measure that serves to monitor and compare developments in information and communication technology (ICT) across countries.
The Republic of Korea tops the IDI in 2011, as it did in 2010. The country ranks first in the use and skills sub-indices, and is the only country that exceeds the eight-point mark in the use sub-index. Both mobile-broadband and fixed (wired)-broadband penetration rates are very high, and 84 per cent of the population is online. The Republic of Korea excels on all three indicators used to calculate the skills sub-index, underlining the importance of education and literacy in bringing people online. Finally, it has the highest percentage of households with Internet access worldwide (97 per cent), with virtually all households connected to the Internet. The country has made ICT development a policy priority and integrated its use in many aspects of society.

ボットとは、コンピュータを悪用することを目的に作られたプログラムで、コンピュータに感染すると、インターネットを通じて悪意を持った第三者が、あなたのコンピュータを外部から遠隔操作することを目的として作成された悪性プログラムです。
感染すると、この悪意を持った攻撃者（以下、攻撃者）があなたのコンピュータを操り「迷惑メールの大量配信」、「特定サイトの攻撃」等の迷惑行為から、あなたのコンピュータ内の情報を盗み出す「スパイ活動」など深刻な被害をもたらします。
この操られる動作が、ロボット（Robot）に似ているところから、ボット（BOT)と呼ばれています。
ボットに感染したコンピュータは、攻撃者が用意した指令サーバなどに自動的に接続され数十～数百万台のボット感染コンピュータを従えた「ボットネットワーク」と言われる巨大ネットワークを形成します。
感染したコンピュータは、攻撃者からの命令を待ち続け、攻撃者から命令が下されると、このボットネットワークに接続された感染コンピュータは、攻撃者の意のままに数十～数百万台の感染コンピュータを操ることができ、フィッシング目的などのスパムメールの大量送信や、特定サイトへのDDoS攻撃などに利用され、とても大きな脅威となります。
このため、感染コンピュータを使用しているユーザーは、知らぬ間に犯罪の踏み台にされ、「被害者」であると同時に「加害者」にもなってしまうのです。

“Bot” is derived from the word “robot” and is an automated process that interacts with other network services. Bots often automate tasks and provide information or services that would otherwise be conducted by a human being. A typical use of bots is to gather information (such as web crawlers), or interact automatically with instant messaging (IM), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), or other web interfaces. They may also be used to interact dynamically with websites.
Bots can be used for either good or malicious intent. A malicious bot is self-propagating malware designed to infect a host and connect back to a central server or servers that act as a command and control (C&C) center for an entire network of compromised devices, or “botnet.” With a botnet, attackers can launch broad-based, “remote-control,” flood-type attacks against their target(s). In addition to the worm-like ability to self-propagate, bots can include the ability to log keystrokes, gather passwords, capture and analyze packets, gather financial information, launch DoS attacks, relay spam, and open back doors on the infected host. Bots have all the advantages of worms, but are generally much more versatile in their infection vector, and are often modified within hours of publication of a new exploit. They have been known to exploit back doors opened by worms and viruses, which allows them to access networks that have good perimeter control. Bots rarely announce their presence with high scan rates, which damage network infrastructure; instead they infect networks in a way that escapes immediate notice.

The German subsidiary of MBDA says that the solid-state laser weapon it is developing has now reached an output power of 40 kW.
The power level exceeds the 25 kW levels achieved so far by US rivals – and the company says that it will shortly begin testing the system at a “proving ground” in Oberjettenberg, with the aim of shooting down an airborne target for the first time.

The double helix of DNA was unravelled, as was the transcription formula for building cells. However, the functioning of one part of our bodies remained a mystery: the brain.
We have more than a hundred billion (10¹¹) neurons in our brain. And like the trees in a forest, the neurons of our brain touch on average a thousand other neurons. The point of touching, where the communication takes place, is called a synapse. With a hundred billion (10¹¹) neurons and, on average, a thousand synapses, we have in total a hundred trillion (10¹⁴) connection points. It is the passing of chemicals – neurotransmitters – across these connection points that account for our consciousness and thinking processes.
Is it possible to accurately model, simulate and visualize the functioning of the human brain, beginning from the neuron level? This is a challenge of enormous proportions that has been taken up by the Blue Brain Project at the Brain Mind Institute, EPFL.

The unique craft is intended to demonstrate two key missions:
The ability to reach and sustain horizontal flight at 100,000 feet altitude on a single-day flight, and to maintain flight above 50,000 feet altitude for at least four days, both on electrical power derived from non-polluting solar energy.

水素はとてもクリーンで、さまざまなものから製造可能なエネルギーです。将来の「水素をエネルギーを活用した社会」に向けて、世界各地で水素エネルギー社会実現にむけた取組みが進められています。

• 酸素と反応させてエネルギーを取り出した後は水になります。
• 化石燃料からの精製だけでなく、水の電気分解や様々な工場の副生成物として得ることができます。
• 再生可能エネルギーを用いて水素を製造すれば、循環型エネルギー社会が形成できます。

We are excited to be involved in this pioneering subretinal implant technology and to announce the first patients implanted in the UK were successful. The visual results of these patients exceeded our expectations. This technology represents a genuinely exciting development and is an important step forward in our attempts to offer people with RP a better quality of life.

>Iranian engineers have succeeded in neutralizing and purging the computer virus known as Stuxnet from their country’s nuclear machinery, European and U.S. officials and private experts have told Reuters.
The malicious code, whose precise origin and authorship remain unconfirmed, made its way as early as 2009 into equipment controlling centrifuges Iran is using to enrich uranium, dealing a significant but perhaps temporary setback to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons work.
Many experts believe that Israel, possibly with assistance from the United States, was responsible for creating and deploying Stuxnet. But no authoritative account of who invented Stuxnet or how it got into Iran’s centrifuge control equipment has surfaced.

>Technology-Driven Trends for 2012

1. Rapid growth of big data.
2. Cloud computing and advanced cloud services
3. On demand services will increasingly be offered to companies needing to rapidly deploy new services. Hardware as a Service (HaaS) joins Software as a Service (SaaS), creating what some have called “IT as a service.”
4. Virtualization of storage, desktops, applications, and networking.
5. Consumerization of IT increases.
6. Gamification of training and education.
7. Social business.
8. Smart phones and tablets become our primary PCs, and the mobile web.
9. Tablet computers with enterprise level web apps.
10. Intelligent electronic agents.
11. Digital identity management.
12. Visual communications.
13. Enhanced location awareness.
14. Geo-spatial visualization.
15. Smart TV using apps. 
16. Multiple app stores.
17. 3D displays for smart phones and tablets.
18. eBooks, eNewspapers, and eMagazines pass the tipping point.
19. Interactive multimedia eTextbooks.
20. Wireless machine-to-machine applications.

>KneeCAS is a system for TKA preoperative planning, postoperative evaluation and actual operation support. It was developed to achieve an ideal TKA. The shapes and positions of knee joint, femur and tibia are accurately aligned 3-dimensionally.

>The symphony began under the expert direction of conductor Alan Gilbert and soon I was caught up in the music, marveling at how engaged I was …
In the last movement, right as the piece was building to its big finish, somewhere, in the left front area of the auditorium, someone’s iphone began to go off. Alec Baldwin had asked us so nicely to turn them off and yet someone had not heeded his call! Some terrible soul had forgotten and was now disturbing the performance! Luckily, the music was building and so the ringer was drowned out by the instruments. I think we all hoped that the call would end and that would be the end of it. Oddly enough though, the ringer persisted, consistently for a good 5 or so minutes. Every so often, Alan Gilbert would give the slightest glance in the direction of the ringer as he conducted.
Another few minutes passed and still the ringer persisted, we were getting to a point in the piece where it was very quiet, with only some violins and a few wind instruments playing. It was supposed to be a quiet moment before the big finale and this persistent iphone ring was ruining the entire aesthetic of the piece. Finally, in a move that shocked the whole venue, Gilbert put down his baton and signaled the players to stop. The audience was dead silent for a moment, save of course for the terrible sound of the ringing phone. Then, suddenly there was the sound of a great shifting and rumbling as every single person in the hall reached for their pockets and made sure their phones were off. And still, the phone continued to ring.
“We’ll wait.” Gilbert said, sounding more like a chastising kindergarten teacher than a conductor. Myself and those around me cringed in embarrassment, both for ourselves and the nameless dolt who had forgotten to go to vibrate.
Gilbert continued to stare in the direction of the ringer, that was still ringing!
“Turn off the phone.” He said sternly.
Still the phone continued to ring.

But as the number of demonstrations has mounted, it has become clear that it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.
In hindsight, this dichotomy is not surprising. Since the first multi- celled animals appeared about a billion years ago, survival in the fierce competition over such limited resources as space, food, or mates has often been awarded to the animal that could most quickly produce a correct action from inconclusive perceptions. Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.

>Science and science-based technologies have transformed modern life. They have led to major improvements in living standards, public welfare, health, and security. They have changed how we view the universe and how we think about ourselves in relation to the world around us.
Biological evolution is one of the most important ideas of modern science. Evolution is supported by abundant evidence from many different fields of scientific investigation. It underlies the modern biological sciences, including the biomedical sciences, and has applications in many other scientific and engineering disciplines.
As individuals and societies, we are now making decisions that will have profound consequences for future generations. How should we balance the need to preserve the Earth’s plants, animals, and natural environment against other pressing concerns? Should we alter our use of fossil fuels and other natural resources to enhance the well-being of our descendants? To what extent should we use our new understanding of biology on a molecular level to alter the characteristics of living things?
None of these decisions can be made wisely without considering biological evolution. People need to understand evolution, its role within the broader scientific enterprise, and its vital implications for some of the most pressing social, cultural, and political issues of our time.

>筑波大学の渡邉信教授の研究チームと自動車メーカーのマツダが先月、水中などに生息する「藻」から採りだした油を軽油に７０％混ぜて、車を走らせるという実験を行ないまし­た。
実験は成功。国際藻類学会によりますと、「７０％」という高い割合で藻の燃料を使い、乗用車を動かす走行実験は、これが世界で初めてということです。

>For me it’s the pen, more than any other. There is no instrument more powerful than the writing instrument in my mind. Ability to communicate and ‘archive’ thought, enabled through writing.

>I could not survive without a ballpoint pen in my back pocket. It’s invaluable for scribbling notes on the front of my hand (my version of the PalmPilot…) to remind me to do things I used to be able to remember unaided before my age converged with my IQ while traveling in opposite directions.

>In an otherwise nondescript conference room, Wu Jianping stands before a giant wall of frosted glass. He toggles a switch and the glass becomes transparent, looking down on an imposing network operations center full of large computer displays. They show maps of China and the world, pinpointing China’s IPv6 links, the next generation of the Internet.
China already has almost twice the number of Internet users as in the United States, and Dr. Wu, a computer scientist and director of the Chinese Educational and Research Network, points out that his nation is moving more quickly than any other in the world to deploy the new protocol.
IPv6 — Internet Protocol version 6 — offers advanced security and privacy options, but more important, many more I.P. addresses, whose supply on the present Internet (IPv4) is almost exhausted.
“China must move to IPv6,” Dr. Wu said. “In the U.S., some people don’t believe it’s urgent, but we believe it’s urgent.”
If the future of the Internet is already in China, is the future of computing there as well?
Many experts in the United States say it could very well be. Because of the ready availability of low-cost labor, China has already become the world’s dominant maker of computers and consumer electronics products. Now, these experts say, its booming economy and growing technological infrastructure may thrust it to the forefront of the next generation of computing.

>Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life using your computer, phone, tablet and the web.

>KOBOT β-3

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+ Ever dreamed of… Giving a speech without looking down at notes Watching stock tickers throughout the day Playing a video game anywhere in 3D or VR Watching a video or favorite TV show on the go Catching the news while on a break Viewing an email, sms or the internet inconsoiciously during meetings Taking your vision to the ultimate level Lumus provides a new dimension for the human visual experience.

RQ-170 Sentinel
… designed to be virtually invisible to radar and carries advanced communications and surveillance gear
… flight controls, communications gear, video equipment and self- destruct, holding pattern, return-to-base mechanisms
… is part of a Secret Compartmented Intelligence (SCI) program, a classification higher than Top Secret …
…the remains of the RQ-170 could help the Russians, Chinese, Iranians or others develop Infrared Surveillance and Targeting (IRST) or Doppler radar technology that under some conditions are capable of detecting stealth aircraft such as drones and the new Lockheed Martin F-35s.

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>Welcome to the world of viruses where you can get the blame for someone else’s infection.

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>左が従来のガラス。

>make.believe symbolizes the spirit of our brand. It stands for the power of our creativity, our ability to turn ideas into reality and the belief that anything we can imagine, we can make real.

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>This multifaceted threat is clearly of Chinese origin with a starting MD5: 39CDF84761FF16D6532484327FCF4112

It downloads five components making a startup entry in the local Registry for;

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\International] ->W2KLpk

This threat is a tracking tool that can be started with a single click from any of the following 22 Internet addresses;

113.108.239.107 [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-m.weather.com.cn;Beijing]

119.42.148.252 [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-www.wa300.com;San_Po_Kong]

121.10.132.235 [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-s84.cnzz.com;Zhanjiang]

123.125.114.140 [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-search.hao123.com;Beijing]

183.60.136.65 [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-s14.cnzz.com;Guangzhou]

183.61.3.25 [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-www.xx-ie.com;Guangzhou]

219.232.241.248 [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-zs17.cnzz.com;Beijing]

61.4.185.35 [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-www.weather.com.cn;Beijing]

61.4.185.48 [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-cnnic.cn;Beijing]

m.weather.com.cn [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-113.108.239.107;Beijing]

s14.cnzz.com [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-183.60.136.65;Guangzhou]

s17.cnzz.com [Agent/Clicker/Delf.from-183.60.136.65;Guangzhou]

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>The Gigapxl™ Project

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