With the release of Windows 8.1 this week, Microsoft did an about-turn and brought back the Windows “Start” button, found on Windows computers for 17 years until the company killed it off in 2012 in Windows 8. The Start button has a storied history, having first appeared
As governments worry about how they will legislate the access to and analysis of “big data”, scientists are still trying to figure out how they’re going to cope with the deluge of information. “Big data is a very abused term that is bandied about a lot,” says Simon Ratcliffe, technical lead for scientific
You swipe your credit card at a shop, sit down at a restaurant after checking Foursquare and browse Facebook while waiting for your friend to arrive. En route to your car afterwards, you reply to an e-mail and then turn on your GPS to find the best route home. At each
Former IBM South Africa MD Mark Harris has been named as the new CEO of Kagiso Media. He replaces Murphy Morobe, who stepped down recently. The JSE-listed Kagiso, which owns a range of radio stations, including East Coast Radio, Jacaranda FM and Kaya FM, told shareholders on Wednesday that
South Africa appears to be losing its status as the preferred investment destination on the continent for international technology companies. That honour, increasingly, is going to Kenya, which may be on the cusp of a technology-fuelled era of economic growth. When apartheid ended in
More than 100 years after Briton J Stuart Blackton made the first animated movie by drawing sketches on white paper, IBM Research has produced the smallest movie in the world, by creating pictures with atoms. Computers have become faster and are able to store more
The share price of BlackBerry, the long-suffering smartphone manufacturer until recently known as Research in Motion, leapt higher on Monday on renewed speculation that China’s biggest PC maker, Lenovo, could make a play for the company. BlackBerry’s share price shot
IBM has partnered with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron) to develop high-speed but low-powered “exascale” computers that will meet the enormous demands of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope. The
Vast aspects of contemporary computing will change dramatically in the next half decade, precipitated in part by the enormous demands the ever-growing amount of data mankind is producing place on computing systems. That’s the view of John Kelly, director
Fifty billion dollars was wiped off Apple’s valuation in after-market trading on Wednesday after it published first-quarter results that spooked investors, despite lifting sales by 18% to a record US$54,5bn. The question on investors’ lips now is whether this marks the bottom of an aggressive sell-off
