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Forget Space Travel: It's Just a Dream
From ACM Opinion

Forget Space Travel: It's Just a Dream

The clash of two titans—physics and chemistry—are major barriers to human space travel to Mars and beyond, and may well make it impossible... at least with current...

Japan Has Shifted 13 Feet!
From ACM News

Japan Has Shifted 13 Feet!

What does Japan's earthquake mean for GPS? Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake was so powerful that it actually widened Japan. While parts of the country barely...

The Future of Mobile Gadgets
From ACM Opinion

The Future of Mobile Gadgets

I got my first cell phone a little more than a decade ago, just as I was finishing college and looking for my first job. I didn't need a mobile phone; none of...

From ACM News

Is the Navy Trying to Start the Robot Apocalypse?

Whenever the military rolls out a new robot program, folks like to joke about SkyNet or the Rise of the Machines. But this time, the military really is starting...

From ACM News

Wiring in a Wireless Age

Is Intel's Thunderbolt cable a brilliant innovation or a worthless grasp at the past?

Gadget Politics: Why Tech Fans Share the Love and Hate
From ACM Opinion

Gadget Politics: Why Tech Fans Share the Love and Hate

I’ve been a consumer technology critic for over 10 years. During that time, hate mail has been part of my job every day.

From ACM Opinion

Apple: Disrupt or Perish

While the secret for Apple's success seems patently obvious to most&meash;as obvious as the form and function of the iPhone 4—a more subtle reason is the company's...

Success of Verizon's Iphone Will Depend on Cdma Network Performance
From ACM Opinion

Success of Verizon's Iphone Will Depend on Cdma Network Performance

Professor P.K. Kannan at the University of Maryland, says the success of the iPhone 4 released by Verizon boils down to one word: "performance.  That is, the performance...

Arm Ceo on Microsoft, Tech's Rise
From ACM Opinion

Arm Ceo on Microsoft, Tech's Rise

ARM chief executive Warren East discusses major announcements from Microsoft, Nvidia, and Motorola involving his company and its chip architecture.

Why I Don't Want an Ipad For Christmas
From ACM Opinion

Why I Don't Want an Ipad For Christmas

Everyone wants an iPad this Christmas, right?

From ACM News

Google Goes to the Cloud For New Idea in Pc System

In the personal-computer industry, where things change fast, one fact has been a constant for years: There are two major, mainstream operating systems for consumers...

­.s. Chip Manufacturing in the Age of the Ipad
From ACM News

­.s. Chip Manufacturing in the Age of the Ipad

Behind the fly-off-the-shelf popularity of products like Apple's iPad and iPhone are hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs—mostly overseas. Is it possible...

New 'story of Stuff' Video Reminds ­S to Think Twice Before Buying New Gadgets
From ACM Opinion

New 'story of Stuff' Video Reminds ­S to Think Twice Before Buying New Gadgets

In the opening moments of the new Web video "The Story of Electronics," I found myself nodding in recognition as host Annie Leonard held up a tangled mess of...

IBM's Single-Processor Supercomputer Efforts
From Communications of the ACM

IBM's Single-Processor Supercomputer Efforts

Imagine a CPU designed to issue and execute up to seven instructions per clock cycle, with a clock rate 10 times faster than the reigning supercomputer. This is...

Why China's New Supercomputer Isn't Actually the World's Fastest
From ACM Opinion

Why China's New Supercomputer Isn't Actually the World's Fastest

Peak performance doesn't equal sustained performance, and the NVIDIA GPUs in the Tianhe 1A are especially bad at the latter.

From ACM Opinion

Ray Ozzie: Dawn of a New Day

Five years ago, having only recently arrived at the company, I wrote The Internet Services Disruption in order to kick off a major change management process across...

Why Graphene Is the Stuff of the Future
From ACM Opinion

Why Graphene Is the Stuff of the Future

Everything in our three-dimensional world has a width, length and height. That was what we thought, at least. But this picture overlooks a whole class of materials...

From ACM Opinion

Robots vs. Suicide Terrorists

In February 2008, a pair of suicide bombers struck the Israeli town of Dimona. One of the attackers detonated his explosive vest, killing an Israeli, and injuring...

Future Internet Architecture: Clean-Slate Versus Evolutionary Research
From Communications of the ACM

Future Internet Architecture: Clean-Slate Versus Evolutionary Research

Should researchers focus on designing new network architectures or improving the current Internet?

From ACM Opinion

Apple, Trackpads, and the Long Death of the Mouse

Another day, another envelope-pushing design from Apple intended to make us rethink the way we interact with our computers. Welcome to the Magic Trackpad.
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