The Brics Cable, a superfast broadband submarine network that will extend from the east of Russia to the US via SA, and which will cost as much as US$1,5bn to construct, is already at an advanced stage of planning and should be ready by mid to late 2014, according to Andrew Mthembu, the SA businessman
Dimension Data’s long-serving Africa and Middle East CEO Allan Cawood is stepping down at the end of May. This has triggered a management shake-up at the technology services group, with Internet Solutions (IS) MD Derek Wilcocks taking over the position
AppChat founder John Holdsworth has fired back at Reunert and its subsidiary Nashua ECN, of which he is founder and former CEO, accusing the JSE-listed group of using a lawsuit against him and his new company as an attempt to “prevent fair competition
The fierce battles between SA and Australia normally reserved for the rugby field and cricket pitch have spilled over into the realm of science. With the national teams resting, the media and politicians have been kicking insults across the Indian Ocean over the hosting of one of the world’s largest and most important scientific endeavours
In 1086, William the Conqueror completed a comprehensive survey of England and Wales. The Domesday Book, as it came to be called, contained details of 13 418 places and 112 boroughs — and is still available for public inspection at the National Archives in London. Not so the original version of a new survey that was commissioned for the
Picture yourself as a historian in 2035, trying to make sense of this year’s American election campaign. Many of the websites and blogs now abuzz with news and comment will have long since perished. Data stored electronically decays. Many floppy disks from the early digital age are already unreadable. If you are lucky, copies of
MTN, the R255bn Johannesburg-listed cellphone giant, is in danger of being whacked with sanctions by the US for its telecommunication activities in Iran and Syria. US President Barack Obama issued an executive order this week that allows American authorities for the first time to impose sanctions on individuals or entities found to have
Inside a low-rise building in a business park at Rock Hill, South Carolina, is a vision of the factory of the future. Several dozen machines are humming away, monitored from a glass-fronted control room by two people looking at computer screens. Some of the machines are the size of a car, others that of a microwave oven, but they all have
Using a 3D printer is like printing a letter; hit the print button on a computer screen and a digital file is sent to, say, an inkjet printer which deposits a layer of ink on the surface of a piece of paper to create an image in two dimensions. In 3D printing, however, the software takes a series of digital slices through a computer-aided design and
The first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers’ cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when
