Books of The Times By MICHIKO KAKUTANI The title of Janine di Giovanni’s devastating new book, “The Morning They Came for Us,” refers to those terrible moments in ordinary Syrians’ lives when the war in their country becomes personal. Those moments when there is a knock on the door and the police or intelligence services take a family member away. Those moments when a government-delivered barrel bomb […]
Big Blue has announced that it is now offering the Nvidia Tesla M60 GPU accelerator to enterprise clients in the cloud. IBM said it is the first company to do so, giving companies of all sizes easier and more affordable access to virtual desktop applications without having to skimp on performance. The Tesla M60 (pictured above) is the latest in a line of Nvidia GPUs available through […]
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Two teams of suicide attackers waged coordinated assaults on Monday deep inside Syrian government territory, killing scores of people and piercing a sanctuary for supporters of President Bashar al-Assad. Merely pulling off the bombings was a logistical feat that calls into question the effectiveness of Syria’s defenses. To reach the areas attacked, the jihadists would have had to move large quantities of explosives and […]
INTERNATIONAL. Global inclusion in the internet could bring seven percent of the world’s population – 500 million people – above absolute poverty levels, and add US$6.7 trillion (£4.6 trillion) to global economic output, according to a new study by Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business. The study, for Facebook, encompassed 120 countries over a 10-year period and examines how barriers to accessing the internet could be removed, and […]
This is the age of the disgruntled — in domestic politics and foreign affairs alike. Anti-establishment sentiment within countries is somehow echoed by the way the rule book of international relations is being torn up. These dynamics feed on each other. They are at play in America (the rise of Donald Trump), Europe (growing populism) and Asia (nationalism and an arms race). Finding a way to […]
ABU DHABI // Solar Impulse 2 landed Sunday morning in Dayton, Ohio, the birthplace of the legendary aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright. The solar-powered plane took off from Tulsa, Oklahoma on the third leg of its journey across the United States on Saturday afternoon. Pilots Andre Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard have been taking turns flying the craft since the mission began in Abu Dhabi in March […]
By HELENE COOPER May 21, 2016 WASHINGTON — An American drone strike targeted the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, United States officials said on Saturday, in the most significant American incursion inside Pakistan since Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, in 2011. In a statement issued on Saturday, Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, said the […]
Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Al Nahda was able to survive in Tunisia despite initial conflict with secularists Tunisian President Beji Qaid Al Sebsi (right) and Rached Ghannouchi, leader of the Al Nahda wave to the audience during an Al Nahda congress in Tunis on May 20. Tunis: Tunisia’s Islamist party Al Nahda will separate its political and religious work, its chief said on Friday, moving […]
To help Skype continue making inroads into the enterprise, Microsoft has launched Skype for Business SDK (software developer kit). The new product is a set of tools that lets iOS and Android developers integrate Skype’s messaging, audio and voice capabilities into their mobile applications. The goal of Microsoft’s Skype for Business SDK is to allow Skype to power the communications experience inside applications, so developers can focus […]
Call them the RoboBats. In a recent article in Science, Harvard roboticists demonstrate that their flying microrobots, nicknamed the RoboBees, can now perch during flight to save energy — like bats, birds or butterflies. “Many applications for small drones require them to stay in the air for extended periods,” said Moritz Graule, first author of the paper who conducted this research as a student at the Harvard […]
A team of scientists working at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and led by Northern Illinois University physicist and Argonne materials scientist Zhili Xiao has created a new material, called “rewritable magnetic charge ice,” that permits an unprecedented degree of control over local magnetic fields and could pave the way for new computing technologies. The scientists’ research report on development of magnetic charge […]
At its I/O Developers Conference this week, Google announced a new product that had been an open secret for several months. The Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is named after the TensorFlow software it uses for its machine learning programs. In announcing the chip, Google referred to the TPU as an accelerator chip, able to speed up a given task, like data analysis or voice translation. When he […]
It was the early to mid 1980s, and everybody was having fun. But some of us Datsun Nissan fans couldn’t afford a 280Z or 300ZX, yet we wanted a sporty ride. What to do, oh, what to do. Enter the first generation Pulsar NX into the American market in 1983. Its timing was superb, since the Sentra Sport Coupe was still a few years away, and a […]
Researchers at IBM say they’ve achieved a “significant milestone” in an emerging type of memory technology called phase-change memory (PCM). Because it doesn’t lose data when power is turned off and can endure millions of read-write cycles, PCM could eventually enable new levels of performance in a wide range of devices. During a demonstration today at the International Memory Workshop in Paris, IBM researchers showed how they […]
Since shortly after Twitter launched in 2006, users of the microblogging site have generally been limited to tweets of no more than 140 characters each. However, the company is reportedly considering a change to eliminate images and links from that limit. The length restriction on tweets made sense in the pre-smartphone era, when SMS text messages had to abide by similar limits. But today’s much more powerful […]
Tripoli: Libya’s new unity government said Tuesday it wants warplanes and helicopters to fight terrorists as it hailed international support for lifting a longstanding embargo on weapons sales. International backing to lift the embargo, in place since 2011, is “fundamental to the creation of a strong army… capable of fighting the jihadist Islamic State group and other extremist groups”, Deputy Prime Minister Mussa Al Kony said. On […]
Ministry has been also taking steps to intervene in the market on time so that consumers are not affected by price rise New Delhi: Keen to prevent a repetition of last year’s skyrocketing prices of onions and pulses, the union Food and Consumer Affairs Ministry is taking steps to prepare timely import plans and also set up buffer stocks of these items, official sources said here on […]
They hog resources, take too long to load and are often embedded with malware. That’s why Google is planning to phase out Adobe Flash videos in its Chrome Web browser by the end of this year. Google disclosed its plan to ditch the multimedia player in a proposal that was published on its Chromium-dev Google Groups page last week. Instead, Chrome will transition to HTML5 as its […]
A new study from Microsoft has found that organizations now rely more on digital infrastructures than they do on physical infrastructures. The findings indicate that cloud deployment models have now overtaken any other type of deployment in the technology sector, according to the company, which asked tech research firm 451 Research to conduct the study. “As organizations prepare for major business and technology changes, they will depend […]
The sun rises behind the entrance sign to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park before the company’s IPO launch, May 18, 2012. Reuters/Beck Diefenbach/File Photo Facebook (FB.O) on Thursday emphasized that it does not permit its employees to block news stories from its “Trending Topics” list based on political bias, amid a controversy over how the social media superpower selects what news it displays. Technology news website Gizmodo […]
The latest developer version of Opera Software’s browser features a power-saving mode the company said can extend a laptop’s battery life by almost 50 percent, compared to previous versions of the browser as well as Google Chrome. Opera 39 includes a feature that activates when a laptop is unplugged from a power source. When that happens, a battery icon appears next to the browser’s search and address […]
German tech giant SAP said that it will be expanding the enterprise offerings available on its HANA Cloud Platform for Internet of Things (IoT). Making the announcement at the IoT World 2016 conference being held in Santa Clara, Calif., this week, SAP said the new offerings will be focused on helping enterprises provide new customer outcomes. “SAP is helping customers map their journeys through digital transformation, and […]
|By Matein Khalid| The April payrolls data demonstrated that US economic growth has hit a soft patch. The US economy only added 160 jobs in April, less than the expected 203,000 average in the first three months of 2016. One disappointing data point does not imply a macroeconomic trend reversal since the US economy added 2.8 million jobs between March 2015 and March 2016. Statistical and measurement errors […]
