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On a recent weekday in a sunny, computer-strewn classroom at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts in Hot Springs, one of teacher Nicholas Seward's printers was busily whirring out a squirrel. Not a picture of a squirrel. Not a drawing of a squirrel. An actual, three-dimensional toy squirrel: bright orange, plastic, tough enough that when the reporter managed to drop a similar piece on the hard concrete, it simply bounced with a bright, ping-pong ball clink. The machine — called "Simpson" after the scientist George Gaylord Simpson, who came up with the idea that when animals evolve,...

2014 is right around the corner. Most of us can look into our crystal balls and see that a handful of tech trends which became big in 2013 will probably get bigger next year: cloud computing, big data, the rise of tablets, the Internet of Things. But market research firm IDC has gone one better by predicting how these trends will unfold next year — and generate billions of dollars. People and companies will spend $2.1 trillion on technology. Worldwide IT spending will grow 5% next year to $2.1 trillion, IDC says. People and companies will buy smartphones and tablets,...

Productivity. Every employer loves it, and every employee is fascinated by it, especially if it comes in cute colors, a retina screen, and weighs under a pound... at least until such time as "productivity" results in the loss of the employee's job, which in turn makes the employer love it even more as it results in even higher profits, even if it means one more pink slip and a 91 million people outside the labor force. With a labor force already in turmoil as millions drop out every year never to be heard from again, made obscolete by the...

We worry about robots. Hardly a day goes by where we're not reminded about how robots are taking our jobs and hollowing out the middle class. The worry is so acute that economists are busy devising new social contracts to cope with a potentially enormous class of obsolete humans. Documentarian James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, is worried about robots too. Only he's not worried about them taking our jobs. He's worried about them exterminating the human race. I'll repeat that: In 267 brisk pages, Barrat lays out just how...

The progress in 3-D printing has been nothing short of astounding over the last decade. The soaring stock prices of publicly traded 3-D printing companies 3D Systems (NYSE: DDD ) and Stratasys clearly illustrate the industry has made advances. Today, even consumers can get their hands on a plastic 3-D printer at a reasonable price -- an unheard-of possibility just five years ago. This phenomenal industry progress has led some to believe Moore's law applies to 3-D printing. Are they right? One inventor in Colorado disagrees. Moore's law? Not really At the Inside 3D Printing conference in Chicago this year,...

Calgary - Maker6 is a very different ballgame for 3D printing. This is an integrated service, including assistance with design and consumer-friendly services. It’s also a very interesting business approach, making 3D printing easily accessible. I was fortunate enough to get an interview with MacKenzie Brown, CEO of maker6 and its related CAD design company, CAD Crowd. I was extremely interested in what looked to me to be a very effective way of managing 3D printing across a very wide range of commercial and consumer needs. I don’t need to do a lot of talking here. I was lucky enough...

The American intelligence service - NSA - infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. Documents provided by former NSA-employee Edward Snowden and seen by this newspaper, prove this. A management presentation dating from 2012 explains how the NSA collects information worldwide. In addition, the presentation shows that the intelligence service uses ‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE) in more than 50,000 locations. CNE is the secret infiltration of computer systems achieved by installing malware, malicious software. One example of this type of hacking was discovered in September 2013 at the Belgium telecom provider Belgacom....

An important—and costly—plank of Obamacare is the forced changeover to EHR. However, as health care informatics guru Scot Silverstein MD tells us, there seem to be endless issues with EHR products. Case in point: University of Arizona Health System. As Silverstein reports, upwards of $100 million was spent on EHR, which could have financed an entire new wing to the facility. As the University’s own internal website devoted to EHR proclaims, “We’ve resolved 6,036 issues and have 3,517 open issues.” Scot continues… “These issues are in a supposedly mature product for which this organization has spent...

If you're team Microsoft — or just anti-Google in general — you now have your pickings of "Scroogled" gear, a term coined by the Redmond, Calif.-based software company. The products, which range from hats to T-shirts to mugs, poke fun of Google collecting personal data about its users. The items come just in time for the holiday shopping season.

This article in in PDF form so be aware of that. Here's a snippet that's indicative of the overall style and the points that Mickens makes: When you debug a distributed system or an OS kernel, you do it Texas-style. You gather some mean, stoic people, people who have seen things die, and you get some primitive tools, like a compass and a rucksack and a stick that’s pointed on one end, and you walk into the wilderness and you look for trouble, possibly while using chewing tobacco. As a systems hacker, you must be prepared to do savage things,...

I just upgraded my home PC, reluctantly so because my XP worked so well. But as all support for XP will be stopping in 4/2014, I knew I had no choice. But I have no idea why the people at Microsoft changed the OS from something people got used to over a period of 20 years. I find myself using the desktop almost exclusively and never using what I consider to be silly apps. Am I seeing this incorrectly and these apps are truly useful? After a day of using this, I think I may never use them. Would be...

Spam filters, overflowing browser histories and web caches on the computers of Americans trying to sign up for Obamacare are now being cited for why consumers can’t complete their applications for federally-sanctioned health insurance.

President Obama wanted to go in himself and fix glitches that have plagued HealthCare.gov since its rollout last month, he told a crowd Friday at the Port of New Orleans, "but," he added, "I don't write code." The president couldn't ignore altogether lingering dissatisfaction with the botched health insurance exchanges, despite that the crux of the speech was intended to move back on the offensive with other aspects of his second-term agenda - specifically, job growth through investments in infrastructure and increasing U.S. exports.

Edward Snowden's stolen secrets and the dismal failure of the rollout of Obamacare is giving electronic technology a bad name. But blaming high-tech tools is more like blaming the messenger. We have to work harder to master the secrets of the Internet, but the human element remains our biggest weakness. It's hardly news that the screening process for giving Snowden access to sensitive data was deeply flawed. So, too, were the instructions to the National Security Agency that enabled the abuse of the rest of us. For whatever good intentions the NSA might have had, the snoops cost America the...

The Crypto Locker virus is a new piece of “ransomware” that is said to be one of the worst viruses to ever infect Windows PCs. The virus takes over a computers files, encrypts them, and then holds the files ransom until a user pays to have them freed by clearing out the virus. The Crypto Locker virus is sent to users through emails that have innocent enough looking senders, such as UPS or FedEx. Once the file is installed a display pops up demanding upwards of $100 to restore a users important files. In same cases users have stated that...

Why does the White House need a private-sector "tech surge" to repair its wretched Obamacare website failures? Weren't all of the president's myriad IT czars and their underlings supposed to ensure that taxpayers got the most effective, innovative, cutting-edge and secure technology for their money? Now is the perfect time for an update on Obama's top government titans of information technology. As usual, "screw up, move up" is standard bureaucratic operating procedure. Let's start with the "federal chief information officer." In 2009, Obama named then 34-year-old "whiz kid" Vivek Kundra to the post overseeing $80 billion in government IT spending....

So I get a private call, dead air for a few seconds, then the phone rings back to the caller. Indian accented man answers claiming my computer is infected with a virus, no company name nothing. So I ask which computer. a few meaningless back and forth. Ask me to google teamviewer.com, instead of just going to teamviewer.com. wanted access to my system, wouldn't tell me the virus. did an off line scan anyway. So note to selfs, do not let anyone your not 100% sure is legit connect to your system with teamviewer

We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now. This story is something that I think about in those times to remember to stay calm. No last minute fix could ever be this dramatic or important. My grandfather passed away about a week ago. At the service, I was asked to say a few words and read from his memoirs. This was my choice. RED TEAM...

If you happen to do anything other than sleep in a cave today, chances are you have Ada Lovelace to thank for it. She is responsible for the first ever computer program. And she came up with it long before the computer even existed. Today is the fifth annual Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating the achievement of a Victorian mother-of-three who would change the world. Let’s travel back through time for a moment. Before the ZX Spectrum and before the Atari 2600, there was a thing that historians like to call the 19th century. The computer may have existed as a...

Back in the early 1980s I was a first-adopter and bought an AT&T 6300 PC. Believe it or not, it still fires up and runs (though the monitor fizzes now and won't display anything). It runs MS-DOS and had Wordstar on it. I backed up the work I had on that machine with both hard copies and floppy disks, (you young whipper-snappers might have heard of those), but they were all destroyed in a fire. Always intended to ask someone if there was a way to get the information off the old hard drive, but I kept thinking, "mañana," and...