Fifty years ago last Sunday, a computer engineer named Douglas Engelbart gave a live demonstration in San Francisco that changed the computer industry and, indirectly, the world. In the auditorium, several hundred entranced geeks watched as he used something called a “mouse” and a special keypad to manipulate structured documents and showed how people in different physical locations could work collaboratively on shared files, online.

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device.

Smartphones have achieved the ridiculous level of market penetration they have thanks in no small part to their universal utility: While in the not-too-distant past you might have carried around a separate MP3 player, game console, PDA, flashlight, and any number of other accessories in addition to your cell phone, having all this functionality baked into one device is what helps make the general-purpose smartphone so appealing.

Smartphones have changed the way we live life. Along with the new tech, early on, we got an entire subculture of hackers who wanted to unlock their smartphones to use on other carriers or with different software. This same trend continues today, but now also with our … cars? Redditor trsohmers took on the challenge of hacking the infotainment system in his Tesla Model 3 and was able to gain root access — also known as admin access, for the Windows users in the room.

Matt is right on point here. I think the iPhone is the personal computing device of our generation. Our parents had the PC revolution, and it was a massive change unlike almost anything we’ve seen before. The PC was the center of everything for decades, but the smartphone is the new king of the hill. In the first quarter of 2017 it’s estimated 348 million smartphones were sold worldwide, while 62 million PCs we sold in the same time period.

A half century ago, computer history took a giant leap when Douglas Engelbart—then a mid-career 43-year-old engineer at Stanford Research Institute in the heart of Silicon Valley—gave what has come to be known as the "mother of all demos." On December 9, 1968 at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed off the first inklings of numerous technologies that we all now take for granted: video conferencing, a modern desktop-style user interface, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, collaborative editing, among many others.

It has been six years since Dell first introduced its XPS Developer Edition moniker, which refers specifically to the company's XPS laptop models that ship with Ubuntu Linux (and not Windows) pre-installed. Ever since, Dell has been producing some of the best Linux "ultrabooks" in recent memory.

The human mind can be a confusing and overwhelming place. Despite incredible leaps in human progress, many of us still struggle to make our peace with our thoughts. The roots of this are complex and multifaceted. To find explanations for the global mental health epidemic, one can tap into neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, or simply observe the meaningless systems that dominate our modern-day world.

The Pixel Slate is a 2-in-1 device like no other. It’s not the most polished product we’ve ever used, but Google has laid the foundation for letting mobile and desktop software sit side-by-side. Here’s what Google has changed in Chrome OS to make it all work -- as well as where it all falls apart.

Let’s start with the most important piece of information. The official MSRP for Radeon RX 590 is 279 USD. This is a suggested price for nonexisting reference model (I mean there is a slide with a reference design, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be available). That said, the 279 USD price tag is likely just a starting point. The price of RX 590 is therefore 40 USD higher than RX 480 at launch and 50 USD higher than RX 580 at launch (we are talking about 8GB models here).

This is probably not the byline you were expecting for a review of some Apple hardware. It comes as a bit of a shock to both of us, to be honest, but here we are: I have a Mac mini on my desk, along with a Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard. It's all hooked up to an LG 4K 21.5-inch display, all supplied by Apple.

Amid the gush of money and enthusiastic predictions being thrown at quantum computing comes a proposed cold shower in the form of an essay by physicist Mikhail Dyakonov published in IEEE Spectrum this month – The Case Against Quantum Computing. Whatever your view of QC’s prospects, Dyakonov’s commentary is worth a read. Error correction – or more accurately the inability to monitor variables and correct errors at the scale required – is the big stumbling block, he writes, but there is a good deal more to his piece.

From iPhones on Earth to rovers on Mars, most electronics only function within a certain temperature range. By blending two organic materials together, researchers at Purdue University could create electronics that withstand extreme heat. This new plastic material could reliably conduct electricity in up to 220 degrees Celsius (428 F), according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.

Chinese authorities have begun deploying a new surveillance tool: "gait recognition" software that uses people's body shapes and how they walk to identify them, even when their faces are hidden from cameras. Already used by police on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, "gait recognition" is part of a push across China to develop artificial-intelligence and data-driven surveillance that is raising concern about how far the technology will go.

Quantum physicists from the University of Alberta, Canada, announced this week that they have developed a new technique for storing quantum information into pulses of light. The physicists created "a new way to store pulses of light—down to the single-photon level—in clouds of ultracold rubidium atoms, and to later retrieve them on demand by shining a ‘control' pulse of light,” Lindsay LeBlanc, assistant professor of physics and Canada Research Chair in Ultracold Gases for Quantum Simulation, said.

Yoshitaka Sakurada is responsible for ensuring the 2020 Olympic Games are not hacked.

Fresh gossip from the GPU grapevine contends that AMD is preparing to launch Radeon RX 3080, RX 3070 and RX 3060 graphics cards to compete with Nvidia’s new Turing models – and potentially in a big way on price, if this leak is anything to go by. This comes from AdoredTV, the YouTube channel which has been the source of various leaks in the past – some of them pretty accurate...

Last week we noted that the general consensus at this point is that Bloomberg screwed up its story about a supposed supply chain hack, in which it was claimed that Chinese spies hacked Supermicro chips that were destined for Apple and Amazon...

Apple Mac Minis used to work fine on Linux, but that appears to no longer be the case... Or for any other Apple hardware with the T2 security chip enabled.

Let's be honest here: modern processors aren’t exciting. Speed bumps no longer thrill us, and we’ve become blasé about adding more cores. But we are living in a time when computers casually offer amounts of processing power that would have made previous generations swoon. It’s also a competitive time, primarily with two companies fighting for your silicon spending and giving you great computing bang for your buck. On one side we have Intel, the 800-pound gorilla of the processor world. On the other side, we have AMD, the upstart that occasionally steals the crown by doing something unexpected that changes the rules.

Inside a small laboratory in Boston’s seaport district, buried within a jumble of lasers, lenses, mirrors, and a tangle of wiring, is a tiny chip that might be about to have a big impact on the world of artificial intelligence. The lab belongs to Lightelligence, a startup that’s developing a radically new kind of AI accelerator chip. Instead of using electrons to carry out the core mathematical computations needed for machine learning, the company’s prototype device uses light.

Cash-strapped environmental regulators have a powerful and cheap new weapon. Machine learning methods could more than double the number of violations detected, according to Stanford researchers.

According to an internal Apple service document, any Mac with a T2 chip now requires proprietary diagnostics to complete certain repairs. It's been lauded by tech publications as a certified bricking machine for third-party repair technicians, but we decided to put it to the test just to make sure.

Smartphones or TVs may be Samsung's most popular products, but they are certainly not the most profitable for the company. The South Korea electronics giant has announced its estimates for the third quarter of the year, and that data points to the company achieving the highest operating profit in its entire history. Samsung is set to reach 17.5 trillion won ($15.8 billion), up 20% from the same period last year. Not only that: revenues will also reach a record 65 trillion won ($57.3 billion), almost 5% more than last year.

Intel unveiled a range of new processors aimed at the performance-desktop segment today. For the mainstream market, there are three new K-series overclockable chips branded as ninth-generation parts; seven new Core X-series chips are launching for the high-end desktop market, and for those who need still more performance, there's an overclockable Xeon chip.

We can no longer leave online security to the market.

A clever new cryptomining scheme downloads the latest version of Adobe for you, but adds malware to the bargain.

Researchers at the University of Jyväskylä have taken part in an international British-Finnish-Chinese collaboration where the first molecule capable of remembering the direction of a magnetic above liquid nitrogen temperatures has been prepared and characterized. The results may be used in the future to massively increase the storage capacity of hard disks without increasing their physical size.

Although Intel added more cores to its previous-gen Coffee Lake processors in an effort to keep up with AMD's Ryzen CPUs, struggles with its 10nm node obviously delayed a more significant response. The company's ninth-generation Core processors, otherwise known as the Coffee Lake refresh, represent another step forward in a contentious battle for desktop supremacy.

Horrific tales from real refurbishers prove there’s much worse that can happen to a computer than spilled coffee.

In World War II, Britain invented the electronic computer. By the 1970s, its computing industry had collapsed—thanks to a labor shortage produced by sexism. By Marie Hicks.

What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity with an algorithm. By David Scharfenberg, Irfan Uraizee, Saurabh Datar. (Sept. 21, 2018)

The fan is blowing on this brand-new MacBook Air with Retina Display. It’s a familiar sound: a computer trying to cool down a processor that’s being overtaxed by one of the eight or so apps I have running. (In this case, it’s TweetDeck going rogue.) But it’s also a sound you don’t hear on more futuristic computers like the iPad, the Surface Pro, or even the Pixelbook. Still, fan or not, the computer is handling everything I’m doing just fine, and a quick restart of the app quiets it down.

The future is now! Apple’s once-neglected Mac mini is coming in hot with a brand new, cutting edge, long awaited … processor upgrade? And a couple more ports? There has to be more, and we know how to find it—time for a teardown!

Since 2013, the U.S. and governments in Europe and Asia have been locked in a constant battle to equip supercomputers with more processing power to claim the ever-shifting title of world's fastest mega-machine. The U.S. relinquished its place at the top of the pile last June, but reclaimed it a year later when the Oak Ridge National Laboratory managed to get its Summit supercomputer online.