Computers

A 19-year-old beats out Google's self-driving solution by approximately $71,000 and wins Intel's top prize at the International Science and Engineering Fair.

Hey kids! Why bother with Minecraft when you could play an evidence-based policy sim? Australia's Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released a game, Run That Town, that borrows heavily form SimCity to give players the chance to learn about the way statistics are used to shape policy.…

What is Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) planning on doing with its enormous cash reserves? It’s no secret that some of it is going into shareholder’s pockets. Apple has approximately $145 billion in cash reserves and about $100 billion of this cash pile sits offshore. This is why the Cupertino-based company chose to fund its recently expanded capital return plan with a $17 billion bond offering. This also allowed Apple to increase its quarterly dividend by 15 percent in the second quarter. Apple now pays approximately $11 billion in total annual dividends, making it one of the largest dividend payers in the world. However, even after returning a lot of cash to shareholders, the iPhone maker is still left holding a significant amount, not to mention the new cash it is continually generating. Apple generated $12.5 billion in cash flow in the last quarter alone. Some investors have called for the company to start looking at mergers and acquisitions as another way to put its cash hoard to use. Some would like to see Apple expand through a large acquisition such as Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) did with Motorola Mobility or Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) did with Skype. However, Apple doesn’t seem inclined to buy companies just for the sake of owning them. The largest company that it acquired in recent memory was AuthenTec in 2012, which only cost Apple the relatively small amount of $356 million. Instead of company mergers and acquisitions, Apple seems to be focusing its expenditure on capital investment. Apple’s chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer stated earlier this year that “we expect to spend a little bit under $1 billion in retail stores and the other $9 billion is spent in a variety of areas. We’re buying equipment that we will own that we will put in our partners facilities. Our primary motivation there is for a supply, but we get other benefits as well.” Besides expanding its physical retail presence, Apple is also adding to its data center capabilities. This includes the construction of a massive data center site located about 15 miles east of Reno, Nevada. This data center will support Apple’s iTunes Store, App Store, and iCloud services. Apple is also dropping about $4 billion on software development incentives. Apple takes a 30 percent distribution fee from third-party app sales and is reinvesting a large portion of this money back into its thriving app ecosystem. Apple is also spending a significant amount of cash on its new Apple Campus 2, otherwise known as the “Spaceship Campus.” Although the project was originally slated for completion in 2015, it is now planned to be finished in 2016. According to anonymous sources via Bloomberg Businessweek, “the budget for Apple’s Campus 2 has ballooned from less than $3 billion to nearly $5 billion” since it was originally announced. Finally, Apple is handing over a significant portion of its cash pile to the Internal Revenue Service. Apple paid $6 billion in federal corporate income tax in fiscal 2012 and is on route to pay $7 billion in federal taxes this year. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

The new update will officially kill off Microsoft's Points system for purchases and tie new Xbox 360 UI changes into the look and feel of Microsoft's new Xbox.

It’s a pity that ‘drone’ isn’t ‘Dorne,’ but I digress. This Thursday the President of the United States will address the nation on its current drone program that targets enemies abroad for what are called ‘targeted’ killings. Naturally, however, when you are firing explosive-laden rockets, things tend to explode. Drones are a popular current tool of modern warfare as they put no usage-side lives at risk; the US doesn’t lose a soldier if a drone is shot down, just a good deal of money. According to the Associated Press, the Obama administration will address other topics in the address including “counterterrorism practices.” Why might TNW be bringing you dronish war news that feels like it has a political bent? It’s simple really, drone tech isn’t just an abroad affair; it’s coming home, and in some instances already has. Drones as a tool for surveillance are not merely a potentiality for the homeland; the technology is attractive enough that it will find cachet in your neighborhood. This is now a regulatory question, not one that directly pertains to technology. However, where tech policy and tech hardware meet, TNW is there. Here’s the rubbish nub: Drones are currently shrouded in defensive obscurity; the administration has been infamously tight when it comes to drone legality details. To their credit, it’s a senscial position; the less they say, the less those on the other end of Hellfire missiles know. But as drones come home, we need to know. We must know. The legally daunting situations are already stacking. So, this Thursday, tune in. It’s not often that the government drives technology forward, after all. Top Image Credit: Don McCullough

Trains are beginning to get up to speed with airlines and it has absolutely nothing to do with the travel time. Amtrak announced this week that a push to upgrade Wi-Fi service on board its passenger trains has begun and should be completed by late summer. " We continue to place a strong focus on improving customer satisfaction, and this upgrade is delivering the improved speeds and connectivity required to maintain a competitive edge." Comments

Congress wants to know how Google plans to protect consumers using and not using Google Glass.

The paradigm hasn’t changed since the advent of software: Applications run, and platforms are what they run on. But the underlying principles of application design and deployment do change every now and then – sometimes drastically, thanks to quantum-leap developments in infrastructure. For instance, application design principles changed dramatically when the PC, x86 architecture, and client/server paradigm were born in the ’80s. And  it happened again with the advent of the web and open-source technology in the mid ’90s. Whenever such abrupt changes arise, application developers are forced to rethink how they build and deploy their software. Today, we’re seeing a huge leap in infrastructure capability, this time pioneered by Amazon Web Services. It’s clear that to take full advantage of the new cloud infrastructure, applications that run successfully on AWS must be inherently different than applications that were built to run successfully on a corporate server – even a virtualized one. But there are a number of other particular ways in which today’s (and tomorrow’s) cloud applications will need to be designed differently than in the past. Here are the most crucial ones, and how the ways of the old world have been changed in the new one : Scaling  In the old world, scaling was accomplished by scaling up – to accommodate more users or data, you simply bought a bigger server. In the new world, scaling is typically done by scaling out. You don’t add a bigger machine, you add multiple machines of the same sort. In the cloud world, those machines are virtual machines, and their instantiations in the cloud are instances. Resilience  Before, software was seen as unreliable, and resilience was built into the hardware layer. Today, the underlying infrastructure – the hardware – is seen as the weak link, and it is up to applications to accommodate for this. There is no guarantee that a virtual machine instance will always function. It can disappear at any moment and the application must be prepared for this. By way of example, Netflix, arguably the most advanced user of the cloud today, has gone the farthest in adopting this new paradigm. They have a process called ChaosMonkey that randomly kills virtual machine instances from underneath the application workloads. Why on earth do they do this on purpose? Because they are ensuring uptime and resilience: By exposing their applications to random loss of instances, they force application developers to build more resilient apps. Brilliant. Bursting In the old world – think accounting and payroll applications – the application workload was reasonably stable and predictable. It was known how many users a system had, and how many records they were likely to process at any given moment. In the new world, we see variable and unpredictable workloads. Today’s software systems have to reach farther out in the world, to consumers and devices that demand services at unpredictable moments and unpredictable loads. To accommodate such unforeseen fluctuations in individual application workloads required a new software architecture. We now have it in the cloud, but clearly it is still in its infancy. Software variety In the past we didn’t have much software variety. Each application was written in one language and used one database. Companies standardized on a single, or at least very few operating systems. The software stack was boringly simple and uniform (at least now in retrospect). In the new world of cloud, the opposite is happening. Within a single application, many different languages can be used, many different libraries and toolkits can be employed, and many different database products can be used. And because in a cloud you can create and spin up you own image, tailored to your and your application’s specific needs, applications within one company must be able to operate under a spectrum of configurations. From VM to cloud  Even between the relatively ne

According to Quantcast, which has direct access to Tumblr's traffic data, the site now has about 184 million unique visitors per month and 12.1 billion page views. Of those 184 million unique visitors, 36 million come from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. That's huge, and it all falls in line with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's strategy of buying companies with tons of users and a strong mobile presence. According to multiple reports, Yahoo's board just approved the $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, but Tumblr still has to formally accept the offer. To the charts! Here's Tumblr's traffic for the last month: And here's Tumblr's traffic growth since 2009: Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

It's all but official. Yahoo's board has reportedly approved the plan to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. Tumblr's board has reportedly agreed to the deal, too. So, unless something goes wildly wrong, then Yahoo is going to own Tumblr, the simple blogging/social network site. According to Quantcast, Tumblr had 184 million unique visitors, and 12.1 billion pageviews last month. Despite those impressive numbers, it's light on revenue, which is making a lot of people question the wisdom of spending $1.1 billion in cash on the site. We think this is a win for both Tumblr and Yahoo. Yahoo gets a big, young audience. Tumblr gets a more money, and time, to figure out its business. Here's the longer explanation of those two points, from our previous report on the deal: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is perfectly positioned to give Tumblr CEO David Karp what he wants. You might think David Karp would sell Tumblr to Yahoo for $1 billion because it would put $250 million in his pocket. You would not be stupid to think this. $250 million is a nice incentive for anyone, let alone a first-time entrepreneur in his 20s, like Karp. But… Karp has gotten lots of offers to sell Tumblr at prices that would make him rich over the years, and he's resisted them all. Why would he sell this time? Easy: Karp and Tumblr have problems like never before… Tumblr does not have a COO and the board wants him to hire one, Tumblr is light on revenues. (Karp disputed this in an earlier story, but sources told us Tumblr is doing OK on revenues – it's marginally behind plan.) Tumblr needs cash to keep running and growing. Selling to Mayer solves all those problems. To keep Tumblr's servers going, Yahoo has billions of dollars in cash. As for revenues and a COO? Mayer, we're guessing, will tell Karp not to worry about either for now. Mayer, according to lots and lots of sources who have worked with her, is not concerned with things like "revenue" and "money." She's much more focused on "product" and "user-growth." Right now, Yahoo shareholders are happy to let her do that. That's because Yahoo shareholders are not shareholders because of Yahoo's core business or core products. They are Yahoo shareholders because owning Yahoo is the only way to make a pre-IPO bet on Alibaba, a successful Chinese Internet company that Yahoo owns a big stake in. So Mayer is perfectly able to spend a billion dollars on Tumblr and allow Karp to keep running it relatively ad-free. This in turn, should keep Tumblr growing, since users hate ads. Buying Tumblr helps Yahoo solve one of Yahoo's biggest problems: mobile. Sometime in the next couple years, more people will be accessing the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs. This trend is bad news for Yahoo, which has limited mobile reach and even more limited mobile usage. (Its reach numbers get a boost because Yahoo gets credit for having a weather app installed by default on every new iPhone. This is despite the facts that the Weather Channel provides the data for the app, Apple built the app, and Yahoo sells no ads in the app.) Tumblr, despite a rocky start in mobile, now has TONS of mobile users. Check out this table from ComScore, which shows that Tumblr is, relatively speaking, about as strong as Facebook in mobile, and much stronger than Yahoo: Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »