If your trial version of the antivirus software that came preloaded on your computer has expired, has become out-of-date, or you were hoping to do without the protection (and cost) – think again. According to Microsoft’s latest Security Intelligence Report, “computers without antivirus software are 5.5 times more likely to be infected.”
The world’s population is rapidly moving into city centers; by 2050, seven out of every 10 people on Earth will live in a city. But not every city will be a megacity--defined as an urban area with over 10 million inhabitants--and not every megacity is equally large.
Every year, Demographia releases a comprehensive list of the population, land area, and population density of urban areas with over 500,000 inhabitants. It’s a huge list, as you might imagine. But in looking at the top 10 urban areas by population, some clear patterns emerge. Below, the list.
Santa Monica – based Jung Park began his career as a concept artist after attending Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he developed an interest in Illustration and Entertainment Design. For the past 8 years he has worked as a senior concept artist for such games and film as Guild Wars, Lineage Forever,Battle Los Angeles, Mortal Kombat, and God of War III. His motivation, self-discipline, and a passion for design has allowed him a reputation as a leader in the industry. Let’s take a look at some of his artworks.
With great wealth comes great responsibility.
That's how we judge the tycoons of tech. While many of them spend their money on expensive luxuries, like cars, houses, planes — even islands — they are also expected to use their prosperity to do good works.
That's the implicit demand of the tech industry.
Some are astoundingly generous, giving tens of millions —even hundreds of millions — to their favorite causes. How much they give says a lot about them. Which causes they support does, too...
Apple's iPad was released to the world three years ago on April 3, 2010.
At the time, a lot of people were underwhelmed. We even called it a "big yawn," and said, "Jobs introduced something that is probably going to sell in the range of a few million units this year, much closer to one of the company's Macs than its runaway hits like the iPod and iPhone. Not the company's next huge growth story."
Oops. We got that one very wrong!
In the three years since the iPad launched, it's changed everything. It truly was a revolutionary device. Here's a quick run down.
Optical microscopes are limited by a phenomenon known as the diffraction barrier, wherein the microscope can't differentiate two objects separated by less than half the wavelength of light used—roughly 200 nm on average for the visible spectrum. But by combining powerful optics and cutting-edge rendering algorithms, GE's new DeltaVision OMX Blaze is bringing this hidden realm's drama to light.
GE launched the $1.2 million OMX back in 2011. To sidestep the diffraction barrier, once thought to be the set physical limit of optical microscopy, the OMX uses a technique known as 3D structured illumination microscopy (SIM). This system projects a pattern of light onto the sample, which illuminates fluorescent probes embedded in the sample and create interference patterns. These patterns are then reconstructed by the rendering algrithms to generate these hi-res images. The OMX can examine samples down to a mere 100 nm—a tenth the size of the average bacteria—and generate images with double the resolution of existing optical microscopes.
There’s no doubt about it: sales of tablets have been steadily increasing over the years, particularly now that there are so many affordable options for people to choose from. But as Mashable published earlier today, the uber mobile computers will outsell desktops this year, according to a report conducted by research group IDC. Tablet sales are expected to grow by 48.7 percent, while desktop sales will drop by 4.3 percent. What’s more, next year tablets will even begin to outsell laptops.
The trend, according to IDC, is due to the emerging market sales. “In emerging markets, consumer spending typically starts with mobile phones and, in many cases, moves to tablets before PCs,” said Megha Saini, a research analyst with IDC.
Technology has the potential to enhance our health and even help us live longer.
There's a slew of apps out there aiming to revitalize the health care industry, like ZocDoc for helping find doctors and making appointments, and Runkeeper for tracking your fitness.
But more importantly, there have been major breakthroughs in cancer treatment, health information collection, and medicine all thanks to technology.
The World Photography Organisation has announced the countdown to the close of the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards, one of the world’s leading photographic awards. There is just one month remaining for professional and amateur photographers from around the world to select and enter their best images of the year. This year's contest attracted more than 122,000 entries from 170 countries. The photographs are being judged in six different competition categories, including Professional, Open, and Student Focus.
The incredibly talented Philippe Sainte-Laudy has had his work featured in The Environmentalist, Computer Art, Geo Magazine, Outdoor Photographer – to name a few. He currently resides near Strasbourg in France where he creates his colorful landscape photographs.
In a lot of ways, China's Internet isn't the sort of Internet you want to be using. It's ridiculously censored, for example. But in other ways, it's way better than the stuff we have over here. According to a recent report from the New England Complex Systems Institute, China's 'net infrastructure is head and shoulders above what we've got here in the west.
The report, compiled in 2008 and only recently released to the public, outlines two major areas in which China's got us beat. For one, there's the security feature known as Source Address Validation Architecture (SAVA). SAVA puts checkpoints across a network and systematically builds up a database of trusted computers and their IP addresses, and authenticates who's really sending what. The result is that malicious spoofing becomes near impossible, instead of ludicrously easy. It's a system that Steve Wolff, one of the Internet's founding fathers, tells New Scientist "should be much more widely adopted." And China's got it baked in.
Imagine, if you will, a snow globe. Wait, the snow globe is in California — Long Beach to be exact. It’s really sunny in this particular snow globe. There’s a beach. Okay, thinking of a west coast snow globe? Good.
What’s inside the snow globe? Buildings — say, the sprawling, mid-century Long Beach Convention Center, the Long Beach Arena, four hotels, maybe an aquarium down the road — streets, cars. A few Teslas even. People — lots of people. And of course snowflakes. The snowflakes (for our purposes) should represent ideas in this snow globe, and they rise and fall, are shaken up, vibrate if you will, in harmony with the people. From the people. People and ideas, vibrating, exchanging, walking, talking, eating — all together, all inside the snow globe. For a week. One week only.
That snow globe metaphor helped me to understand the TED conference (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design), a yearly happening focused on “ideas worth spreading.” Those ideas come in the form of 12 to 18 minute presentations (dubbed “TED talks”), which are later disseminated online.
Before I physically went to TED, my only real impression of what the event was like came to me through those short videos. A person on a stage, wearing a flesh colored headset, talking about a Big Idea. But it’s not just Big Ideas, or the people on stage. It’s temporary world unto itself that brings some of the smartest, weirdest, most powerful, and most famous people together in one place. To vibrate; to shake snowflakes. And this is what it’s like to be one of those people when it’s all shaking.
Eric Valli is a French photographer who takes incredible photographs of some extreme situations. Back in 2004 he took this series of photos of the Gurung, a community of people who live in the foothills of the Himalayas. Twice a year the men scale the cliffs that are home to the world’s largest honeybee, Apis laboriosa.
Medical researchers announced today that, for the first time, a child born with an HIV infection appears to have been cured. Doctors are hopeful that the results may be replicated and used to treat infants infected via pregnancy or delivery in the first few days of life.
According to the National Institutes of Health, a two-year old child born with HIV — the virus responsible for AIDS — is now "functionally cured" of the infection following the early administration of antiretroviral therapy. Doctors initially detected small levels of the virus in the baby, concluding that the infection occurred before the infant's premature birth in July 2010, and began treatment of a liquid antiretroviral around 30 hours of age. The infant's HIV-infected mother reportedly had received no antiretroviral medication or prenatal care, and was unaware she had been infected with the virus. After 18 months of treatment, the child was taken off therapy "for reasons that are unclear," but doctors say that despite ending treatment the child now has no identifiable levels of HIV in the body.
Scientists say it's an unprecedented development; according to NIH, it's the first well-documented case of an HIV-infected child who has been cured of the infection. According to The New York Times, the lead author on today's report, Dr. Deborah Persaud of the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, says that "it's proof of principle that we can cure HIV infection if we can replicate this case." Persaud says that "for pediatrics, this is our Timothy Brown," in reference to the only other person known to have been cured of HIV. Brown, an adult, was cured via a risky bone-marrow transplant that's difficult to replicate.
Nepal lies on a little territory and if to look for it on the map you’ll see it as a piece of land that reminds footprint, which is squeezed between two Asian monsters – India and China. Relief of Nepal is like a tribune of a stadium. It has extended from south to the north on about 150 kilometres. And all this space gradually raises higher and higher, row upon row. The football field and racecourses are fertile lowlands of India, and overhead rows next to a board are the Large Himalaya range after which there is a homeless mountain desert – the Tibetan Plateau. Jungles to the south and eternal ices to the north. Hills and valleys, stormy rivers and snow lances of mountain of 8,000 metres or higher. People arrive here, to see the Nature. And they can find it here. But Nepal also has its original culture. Due to the long-term isolation, Nepal saved unique cities, temples, customs. In this collection of photos we made an effort share with you the spirit of Nepal and maybe to inspire you on a new trip in to this enigmatic country.
Microsoft announced today that it plans to expand its Surface RT availability to additional markets. Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, and Taiwan will all receive Surface RT units in late March. Microsoft is also promising that the UK, Australia, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, and New Zealand will be able to buy Surface Pro "in the coming months."
Mobile is taking over the scene. Smartphones and tablets are bringing along this revolution, and our lives are becoming more intertwined with technology as a result. The term “mobile payment” actually has a number of different meanings. To some, NFC (near field communications) comes to mind. NFC is a relatively new payment option that allows users to wave either a card or mobile device in front of a sensor that will automatically process a payment for you. A lack of NFC sensors in the market has ultimately hindered the development of this payment method, but it could take off at any time.
In November, mobile app services company Flurry announced that China was on track to top the U.S. and Android install base at some point in the first quarter of 2013. Today, Flurry says that has happened. China has passed the U.S. to become the world’s top country for active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, a year after the country became the fastest-growing smart device market in the world.
For its report, Flurry sourced from its entire data set of over 2.4 billion anonymous, aggregated app session daily across over 275,000 applications around the world. The company says it reliably measures activity in over 90 percent of the world’s smart devices.
In January of this year, the U.S. and China were neck-and-neck in terms of their active smart device installed base, at 222 million and 221 million, respectively. By the end of this month, Flurry estimates that will change to 230 million in the U.S. and 246 million in China.
More importantly, the U.S. will not regain the lead after this shift occurs, due the size of China’s population (over 1.3 billion people vs. 310 million in the U.S.). In fact, the report notes, the only other country that could eventually challenge China is India, which has just over 1.2 billion people. But China’s smart device installed base is significantly larger than India’s, where today there are only 19 million active devices.
It isn't all about the Z10, you know. BlackBerry just gave PlayBook owners some equal time in the sun with a new (if unceremoniously titled) 2.1.0.1526 update. The release puts the tablet through the same BlackBerry World rebranding we've seen on the Z10 along with truly functional improvements, such as support for in-app payments and the addition of SMS chats through BlackBerry Bridge. Less conspicuous audio and browser upgrades lurk underneath.
World Architecture Day is celebrated worldwide every year on October 1st. This day was celebrated as was proposed by the International Union of Architects (UIA). Everyone loves to live in an environment which is structurally very sound and strong. Before any construction is commenced the first thing taken into account is its architectural design. For this purpose many architects are working day and night to produce their glorious work This day is purely dedicated to the untiring efforts of all such great people who have produced world’s well renowned landmarks.
