After dinner with some of technology’s brightest minds Thursday night, President Barack Obama toured an Intel microprocessor factory on Friday and spoke to local students at Intel’s Hillsboro, Ore., site. His theme was innovation in America and the critical role of education in maintaining U.S. competitiveness.

“It is a great honor to host President Obama. Our country and that company have been built on innovation, and manufacturing has been at the heart of America’s economy for by a century,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. “We share the president’s belief that with a culture of innovation we can and will retain a vibrant economy based on industries of the future.”

Intel’s Mega Investment

During his visit, Obama toured Intel’s Fab D1D at Ronler Acres campus, a wafer-fabrication facility. The U.S. semiconductor industry is the country’s leading exporter when averaged by the past five years.

In comments before Obama spoke, [...]

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A new device that absorbs a laser beam — an anti-laser — could advance the development of optical computers. The anti-laser has been built by researchers at Yale University, and is outlined in the current issue of Science magazine.

Other uses could include radiology, but scientists expect more applications will emerge. After all, when a working version of the now-ubiquitous laser was first developed 50 years ago, it wasn’t clear at the date what uses it might have.

‘Coherent Perfect Absorber’

The anti-laser, additionally known as a “coherent perfect absorber,” directs two lasers of approximately the same wavelength toward each other. The laser beams are separated by a cavity composed of a thin sheet of silicon.

The silicon traps the laser beams until their energy is absorbed, the beams cancel each other out, and heat is produced. The researchers said they can produce a version that generates electricity [...]

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Google has unleashed a new Chrome 10 beta browser with several new features, including a substantially faster JavaScript engine. Chrome 10 beta additionally integrates accelerated video for PCs with graphics processing units (GPU).

Browsers are the gateway to the Net, so it’s great to see fierce competition, noted Al Hilwa, director of applications software development at IDC. But browser makers won’t be able to continue packing substantial performance gains into new releases forever, he said.

“There is going to be a continual leapfrogging war in terms of speed, performance and features,” Hilwa said. “Exploitation of more hardware for that additional ounce of new performance will continue, but at some point we will reach diminishing returns.”

More Chrome 10 Improvements

Google’s development team says Chrome 10 beta’s new V8 JavaScript engine represents a 66 percent improvement by the previous release. Moreover, the GPU acceleration promises to reduce CPU usage in [...]

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Now that the dust has settled on the Jeopardy showdown, IBM and Nuance Communications have announced a research agreement to develop the Watson supercomputer for the healthcare industry. The deal combines Big Blue’s deep question answering (QA), natural language processing, and machine learning capabilities with Nuance’s speech recognition and clinical language understanding (CLU) solutions to diagnose and even treat patients.

Dr. John E. Kelly III, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, is confident that the collaboration sets the stage to “transform the way healthcare professionals achieve everyday tasks.”

Meet Dr. Watson

IBM offered a scenario in which a doctor who is considering a patient diagnosis could use Watson’s analytics technology and Nuance’s voice and clinical language understanding solutions to consider all the related texts, reference materials, prior cases, and latest knowledge in journals and medical literature. Armed with that data, Watson could help medical professionals determine the [...]

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Apple is selling more portable computers than any other manufacturer.

Including the iPad, Apple Inc. sold 17.2 percent of mobile computers worldwide in the October-December quarter, according to a report published Wednesday by research group DisplaySearch. That’s even more than Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s top PC maker.

Apple has sold nearly 15 million iPads in its first nine months on sale, including 7.3 million in the most recent quarter alone. Without the iPad, Apple is the world’s eighth-ranking PC manufacturer.

HP ranks second when it comes to mobile computers, a category that includes laptops, tablet computers and netbooks. Acer Inc., Dell Inc. and Toshiba Corp round out the top five.

Apple’s lead doesn’t mean folks are buying iPads instead of larger laptops and desktops, said DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim. Rather, it’s selling best in countries where most public already own computers. He said that even though the iPad is relatively inexpensive, with [...]

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Chinese personal computer maker Lenovo said Thursday its quarterly profit rose 25 percent on double-digit sales growth in developing markets.

Net profit for the three months ending Dec. 31 was $100 million, or 98 cents per share, compared with $80 million in the same period of 2009, Lenovo said. Its global sales rose 22 percent to $5.8 billion.

Lenovo said sales in its home China market rose 18 percent by a year earlier to $2.7 billion, while sales in other developing markets increased 34 percent to $1.1 billion. Sales in the United States and Europe rose 22 percent to $2 billion.

“We will invest in building our global type, driving more product innovation and creating an even more efficient end-to-end business model,” said CEO Yang Yuanqing in a statement. “We are confident we can continue to outgrow the market.”

Lenovo has expanded aggressively outside China since it became a global competitor by [...]

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In two years’ moment the first “army of cyber warriors” is due to be trained and ready to enter the war against Web terrorists, hackers and info thieves.

Militaristic language like that is frequently used at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) when referring to its Cyber defense course. Protecting the Net has become a matter of national shield in the US.

UMUC began offering a bachelors degree and two masters programs in World Wide Web shield last autumn. It’s a new field of study with the potential to fill a gap in the market. Within a short period hundreds of citizens expressed an interest in taking up the course.

There is huge demand for such specialists at the moment and it’s likely to rise even further. Whether it’s administration, government bodies or the private economy, there are networks and systems everywhere that need to be protected, details secured and [...]

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