NEW TECHNOLOGY

A report by CNBC, hints that Facebook may be planning to go public early next year with an estimated value of $100 billion, (£69 billion approx). CNBC quote 'the 500 rule', a section of the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act, as the reason behind the IPO (Initial public Offering). This rule states that once a private company has more than 500 investors, it must begin releasing quarterly financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission, as public companies must. Facebook currently has 600 million users. source CNBC

Taiwan's Economic Daily has published a report saying that Apple's new MacBook Air is about to be released. Quoting sources familiar with Apple's plans, the newspaper said that 380,000 units of the new model are on their way to the US. The new Air is expected to use the Thunderbolt high speed technology and rumours also hint that 'Sandy bridge' microprocessors will be used. The MacBook Air uses a solid hard drive which allows the model to be thinner and lighter than models that use a typical spin disk drive. Apple have not yet issued an official launch dat SOURCE       mashable

U.S. artist Joe Dragt has turned unwanted motherboards into works of art. Using only old, unwanted computers, Joe, from Arizona, disassembles each one and recycles all suitable parts, then uses the motherboards as blank canvases for his pictures.

Apple and Nokia have reached an agreement and have settled the long running patent dispute between the two. A Nokia spokesman said; "The agreement will result in settlement of all patent litigation between the companies." Nokia first sued Apple in 2009 over patent infringements, resulting in Apple counter-suing over infringements they claimed Nokia had made. Apple have paid Nokia a one-off undisclosed fee and will issue ongoing royalties for use of its technologies. Story Source:   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13759612

Pv6 test day appeared to be a success when it ran yesterday, (June 8th). I Many of the biggest internet companies took part in switching on their IPv6 versions of their websites for the one day trial. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Bing and Facebook were among those testing the new system which hopes to combat the shortage of IPv4 addresses. The transition of IPv6 from IPv4 is likely to take years to fully implement and may require users to update to new networking equipment. "A lot of routers at the moment are already capable of supporting IPv6. What they need is a firmware update," explained Richard Fletcher, chief operating officer at Plusnet, a UK internet service provider (ISP) "ISPs should ship new routers or offer those updates. We are making sure all our fibre routers are ready for IPv6." Mr Fletcher went on to say that the long term nature of the changeover meant that customers of most ISPs would receive compatible equipment through the natural cycle of upgrades...

   

IBM  has done  a deal with the US Department of Energy.  It's giving the department use of its next-generation supercomputer to help  design electric car batteries and study climate change.  The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will also use the company's next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to get a better understanding of global climate change and explore the evolution of our universe. Nicknamed "Mira" the 10-petaflop supercomputer is capable of producing over 500 trillion calculations a second. It is 20 times faster than the supercomputer the team is currently using and can run programs at 10 quadrillion calculations per second. It's built on the next version of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer architecture, called Blue Gene/Q.   It's a bright spark, according to IBM, which claims a simulation of how a human heart reacts to a medicine would take only two minutes to run on Mira, compared to two year...

IBM builds $8.3 million super computer in Québec Big Blue   has built  a $8.3 million supercomputer for McGill University so that the French wanna-bes will be able to evolve Canadian civilisation so that it does not want to hit baby harp seals over the head. BM is going to build a supercomputer cluster able to support the data intensive research activities of the CLUMEQ High Performance Computing Consortium. It will be the most powerful supercomputer in Quebec and the second-most energy-efficient data centre in Canada                                                                                                                                     ...