computers

Until today, Google's Chrome OS has been little more than a wordy concept. Now, finally, we truly know what it is, what it looks like, and how it works. Here's the breakdown.

Cats may retain an aura of mystery about their smug selves, but that could change with scientists using a supercomputer to simulate the the feline brain. That translates into 144 terabytes of working memory for the digital kitty mind.

Server farms are undeniably awesome in that they store huge pools of data, enable such modern phenomena as cloud computing and Web-hosted email, and most importantly, make the Internet as it stands today possible. The downside: data centers get very, very hot. Cooling huge banks of servers doesn't just cost a lot, it eats up a lot of energy, and that generally means fossil fuels.

While the rest of the Web-savvy world fawns over breakthroughs in real-time search and pontificates on the future of social networking, Los Alamos National Labs is looking to the past. A team there is developing a "time traveling" Web browsing technology, dubbed Memento, that will allow users to find old versions of Web pages without trolling old archives.

A supercomputer known as Jaguar has finally bested IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer in the biannual TOP500 list, but researchers have already begun looking into exascale supercomputers that consist of 100 million cores and run 1,000 times faster than Jaguar. Computerworld reports that the U.S. Department of Energy has begun holding workshops on the new supercomputers to run high-res climate models, develop smart grids and aid fusion energy design.

Google has scarcely stopped for a breather since launching its cloud-based Chrome OS as an alternative to PC and Mac operating systems. Now its Chromium group has announced an effort to replace the traditional HTTP web browser language with a new protocol that supposedly boosts Internet browsing by up to 55 percent.

UK netizens may find their online activities under ever-greater scrutiny in the near future. The UK government has pushed ahead with a proposal to require monitoring of Internet usage, including social networks such as Facebook and conversations within online games.

The new UK law would require communication firms to hold records of who contacted whom, rather than the actual contents of online conversation. About £2 billion ($3.34 billion) would go toward compensating the firms for the technical challenge of collecting the data.

According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That's the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain's low energy requirements of just 20 watts--barely enough to run a dim light bulb.

Pen and voice input for computers is so early-millennium. Now Microsoft has created a next-gen computer concept that includes touchless gestures and eye-tracking, and has taken the device on a college tour with chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie.

In the realm of beautiful, shiny things Dell's new Adamo XPS is among the shiniest and most beautiful. And, if we were in the business of judging (note)books by their covers, we'd leave that at that. That's not our business, though; the Adamo XPS is a gorgeous conversation piece, but a computer worth $1,800 it is not.