When the Met Office's latest £30m supercomputer was switched on in May it drew a fair amount of criticism, and a cloud of suspicion has hung over the organisation's Exeter-based headquarters ever since. Isn't it odd, critics asked, that an instrument for combating climate change has such a huge carbon footprint?
The insidious phrase "headcount reduction" hangs over many business transformation projects like an executioner with a fake tan. Management-speak can't hide the fact that "seeking efficiency improvements through new technology" often translates into substantial job losses. CIOs and change managers are in a catch-22 situation. Successful transformation depends on gaining the trust and commitment of those involved, but how do you persuade anyone to buy into a project that threatens their jobs, or those of their colleagues?
Microsoft Office 2010 is due out in the first half of next year, leading organisations to ask, once again, whether they should stay with the familiar Office suite or opt for an alternative.
CRYSTALS are objects of profound mystery. That's not because they channel occult energies, or hold misty hints of the future in their limpid depths. Their puzzle is much more prosaic: why are they as they are?
How can image sensors - the most complicated and expensive part of a digital camera - be made cheaper and less complex? Easy: take the lid off a memory chip and use that instead.
The first image of lunar material raised by the impact of NASA's LCROSS mission has been released, a week after the impact occurred. It was taken by a spacecraft trailing behind the impactor, whose bird's-eye view allowed it to see what has so far eluded the best telescopes on Earth and in Earth's orbit.
WITH the international launch of Amazon's Kindle reader this week, perhaps electronic books will become the must-have present this year. But even as we unwrap our shiny new e-readers, we may be forgiven for wondering how long it will be before the long-promised colour versions are available. Moreover, with multifunctional devices such as the iPhone becoming the norm, how soon could these e-readers make the breakthrough to display video?
INTEL's latest microchip technology has created transistors 22 nanometres wide - a mere 200 times the width of a hydrogen molecule. Carving such tiny features is devilishly difficult and expensive, but in another realm of microchips altogether, something odd is happening: chips are being made on an outsized scale and then shrunk to the required size, avoiding much fiddly hassle.
In the final minutes of its plunge toward the moon, NASA's LCROSS spacecraft spotted the brief infrared flash of a rocket booster hitting the lunar surface just ahead of it – and it even saw heat from the crater formed by the impact. But scientists remain puzzled about why the event did not seem to generate a visible plume of debris as expected.
