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A new video that shows kids reacting to old technology is stirring up memories of clunky monitors and large floppy disks. The Apple II, which was released in 1977, was the pioneer of desktop computers. The 8-bit Apple computer featured a green and black screen and a floppy disk drive for 3.5-by-5-inch media. Relative to today's technology, describing the Apple II as simply obsolete or primitive does not do the situation justice. When the computers first hit the marketplace, Apple sold them for about $1,300. Adjusted for inflation, that translates to $5,000 in today's world, and that amount of money...

"Eric Holder described the charging of five Chinese military officers with cybercrimes as a "wake-up call" and China is certainly paying attention: Government officials have summoned the US ambassador in Beijing, suspended a cybersecurity agreement made with the US last month, and denounced the charges as an "absurd" move that has "severely damaged mutual trust," reports the BBC, which notes that it is "extremely unlikely" that any of the accused will ever be sent to the US to face charges."

Opinion: Two recent cave-ins leave no doubt they are done for With two major cave-ins in the past few weeks, Microsoft is screaming at the top of its lungs about how irrelevant it is. If you didn’t understand the fall of Microsoft from powerful monopolist to computing afterthought, let SemiAccurate explain it to you. For the past few decades, Microsoft has been a monopoly with one game plan, leverage what they have to exclude competition. If someone had a good idea, Microsoft would come out with a barely functional copy, give it away, and shut out the income stream of...

The Defense Department has decided to retire its 19-year-old retiree pay system written in “antiquated” computer code and replace it with a lower cost, easier to use application based on off-the-shelf technology. The Defense Retiree and Annuitant Pay System, or DRAS, maintains military pay accounts for more than 2.6 million military retirees, former spouses and survivor beneficiaries totaling $40 billion a year. The system was introduced in 1995 and is based on Common Business Oriented Language computer code of the time. DRAS uses “antiquated mainframe technology dating back to 1980 that has exceeded the end of its planned lifecycle,” the...

Chris Sevier, a man from Florida, believes he should be allowed to wed his Macbook. Mr Sevier argues that if gays should be allowed to marry, then so should other sexual minorities. Mr Sevier states he has fallen in love with a pornography laden computer. “Over time, I began preferring sex with my computer over sex with real women,” he told a court in Florida. This appears to be not a passing holiday romance, but a lifelong commitment.

Asking for opinions on the best budget tablet. Something big enough for me to work on -- i.e., be able to type easily and see the display without holding it six inches from my face. Not worried about communications -- as long as it's got WiFi built in (which I'm sure they all do), I can use my cellphone as a mobile hotspot to transfer/send files. This is intended to be a replacement for a working laptop/notebook. And again -- "budget" is the keyword. Thanks all!.

The old Dell Latitude e5500 appears to have reached the end of its useful life (Final report from tech due this afternoon) I am loooking for advice on a replacement. I use it for photo, video and audio editing for YouTube, web sites and my radio program. It would have to be very mobile but have a big enough screen for video editing. The Dell Alienware 14 has been suggested, but spec'd out, it runs $1.5K. That seems a little steep to me. Advice?

Scarlett Johansson left nude photos of herself on her computer. A hacker grabbed them and sent them to gossip websites. A Pennsylvania high school issued laptop computers to students and then remotely activated the laptops' cameras to watch the students when they were away from school. On my computer, a program called Disconnect reveals that my favorite websites spy on me and track what I like to read, what I browse, what I buy. Privacy is almost a thing of the past. As I explain on my show this week, I follow the advice of "experts." I buy anti-virus software...

Researchers at Princeton and Northwestern universities have pored over 1,800 US policies and concluded that America is an oligarchy. Instead of looking out for the majority of the country’s citizens, the US government is ruled by the interests of the rich and the powerful, they found. No great surprises there, then. But the government is not the only American power whose motivations need to be rigourously examined. Some 2,400 miles away from Washington, in Silicon Valley, Google is aggressively gaining power with little to keep it in check. It has cosied up to governments around the world so effectively that...

Summary: A future computer might be a lot slimier than the solid silicon devices we have today. Researchers have revealed details of logic units built using living slime molds, which might act as the building blocks for computing devices and sensors.

The Los Angeles Times was the first newspaper to publish a story about an earthquake on Monday - thanks to a robot writer. Journalist and programmer Ken Schwencke created an algorithm that automatically generates a short article when an earthquake occurs. Mr Schwencke told Slate magazine that it took around three minutes for the story to appear online. "Robo-journalism" is increasingly being used in newsrooms worldwide. The LA Times is a pioneer in the technology which draws on trusted sources - such as the US Geological Survey - and places data into a pre-written template. As well as the earthquake...

THE FUTURE OF GLASS - "AMAZING"! If you wonder why HP, Dell and other leading computer manufacturers believe the end of the computer as we know it is near, here’s why. It's not the iPad that has them concerned about the future. It is developments like the ones Corning is working on that are game-changers:

Need advice on upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7

I upgraded to Windows 8 about 4 months ago, and about a month ago, I started having issues with windowsupdate where the windowsupdate screen would open but everything in the screen was white, where there it normally tells you what patches you need. I tried several routes, including the Windows Update Troubleshooter found at the link above. The Windows Update Troubleshooter seems to be running, but it never comes to an end.....the blue bar just keeps rolling.....for hours if I let it. It says "Resolving problems" but nothing gets resolved. Nothing I tried worked, and so I rolled back the...

<p>Traditional hard drive manufacturers are currently going through a paradigm shift—one where new solid-state hard drives, known as SSD, are taking market share and slowly eliminating traditional hard drives. SSD hard drives of one terabyte or more are slowly becoming affordable to the masses.</p>

The growth rate of high-tech investments has slowed dramatically over the past 10 years, especially since the Great Recession. Everyone has a pet theory explaining why the economic recovery has been so weak, but here’s one overlooked factor: The productivity revolution driven by computers, software and the Internet is fading, and nothing has yet emerged to take its place as an engine of growth. For all of the incessant buzz in the markets about the latest tech start-up, few businesses are investing much in high-tech equipment or software. Investments in information processing equipment and software are growing at the slowest...

SNIPPET: "Security concerns ahead of this summer's Brazilian World Cup have increased after a football fan was beaten to death in host city Sao Paulo." SNIPPET: "There are serious concerns about the safety of travelling supporters at this summer's World Cup after more than 30 people were killed in 2013 as a result of football-related violence. One of Brazil’s biggest criminal gangs last year promised a ‘Tournament of Terror’. The threat was issued by Sau Paulo's 'First Capital of the Command', who in 2012 was a group behind the murder of more than a hundred of the city’s police officers."

In case you haven’t heard, an Alaskan Malamute killed a 6 day old baby in Wales this week. The dad had brought the dog home from the pub several months earlier because someone said they were going to get rid of it. This news makes me incredibly sad. It also makes me painfully aware that the breed may soon be as demonized as the Pit Bull. But humans also carry some responsibility for this tragedy. What with your fanciful ideas about dogs and such. So at the risk of upsetting some of my readers, let me state what should be...

TECHNOLOGY 7887 kHz, Your Home for Classic Cuban Espionage Radio The shortwave radio signals that the alleged Russian spies were using are still surprisingly effective. By Brett Sokol Posted Tuesday, July 6, 2010, at 1:53 PM ET The FBI documents that accompanied last week's arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies are alternately creepy—who knew the Tribeca Barnes & Noble was a hotbed of espionage?—and comical—turns out even foreign spies wanted to cash in on suburban New Jersey's real estate boom. With a nod to Boris and Natasha, the accused are also said to have used short-wave radio, a 1920s-era technology...

Dubai: At a conference in Dubai this week, an American futurist painted an intriguing, at times unsettling, picture of the coming world. As Dr Peter Diamandis went over his presentation slides at The Government Summit on Tuesday, there were plenty of raised eyebrows. In the future, the slides suggested, privacy will be a thing of the past, robots will take over our jobs, 3D printers will pop out everything from human organs to houses, and man will mine asteroids in deep space for unfathomable mineral wealth. The 58-year-old said hyper-tech breakthroughs are already hurtling us towards that future, today. “The...