Quantum games could be the first area to achieve quantum advantage. In Helsinki, developers are getting set for another round of experiments. “When it comes to quantum programming, people think, ‘Whoa, it's some weird, magical thing done by weird magical people’. And then I say, ‘Well, I made battleships on a quantum computer’.” James Wootton is excited. He always gets excited when it comes to quantum computing or game design...

There are a lot of factors to consider.

The rules of quantum mechanics describe how atoms and molecules act very differently from the world around us. Scientists have made progress toward teasing out these rules—essential for finding ways to make new molecules and better technology—but some are so complex that they evade experimental verification. With the advent of open-access quantum computers, scientists at the University of Chicago saw an opportunity to do a very unusual experiment to test some of these quantum principles.

The computer mouse turned 50 last December, which as far as I can tell makes it one of the longest long cons in recent history. Indeed, that small digital interface piloted by your dominant hand may very well have been the greatest grift ever devised until the dongle hit the scene. It is a decadent device that is superfluous in almost every detail; an emblem of the pure excess that has turned our modern society’s beating heart into a putrid mess of rotting flesh.

Sort of like making artificial life out of silicon, controlled nuclear fusion power or Bussard ramjets is “just an engineering problem.” By Scott Locklin.

Today marks the 35th anniversary of Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs unveiling the original Macintosh. Jobs pulled the Macintosh out of a bag during Apple's annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984 at the Flint Center in Cupertino, California, grinning from ear to ear as the crowd erupted in applause.

Larger OLED laptop screens are coming sooner than we anticipated. Samsung Displays announced that it has made a 15.6-inch 4K laptop display and will begin producing the panels next month. The company plans on providing them to other manufacturers to put into their premium notebooks.

As it turns out, the video card wars are going to charge into 2019 quite a bit hotter than any of us were expecting. Moments ago, as part of AMD’s CES 2019 keynote, CEO Dr. Lisa Su announced that AMD will be releasing a new high-end, high-performance Radeon graphics card. Dubbed the Radeon VII (Seven), AMD has their eyes set on countering NVIDIA’s previously untouchable GeForce RTX 2080. And, if the card lives up to AMD’s expectations, then come February 7th it may just as well do that.

Picture a system that makes decisions with huge impacts on a person’s prospects – even decisions of life and death. Imagine that system is complex and opaque: it sorts people into winners and losers, but the criteria by which it does so are never made clear. Those being assessed do not know what data the system has gathered about them, or with what data theirs is being compared. And no one is willing to take responsibility for the system’s decisions – everyone claims to be fulfilling their own cog-like function.

​With the arrival of USB-C a few years back, plugging into laptops, tablets and smartphones became even easier than before. But there are potential security risks. The USB Type-C Authentication Program launched today aims to address such issues.​

Rare scenes from the early days of personal computer shopping.

Scientists have combined two types of qubit on a single device, potentially overcoming some of the barriers to practical quantum computing. Quantum computing has been on the horizon for a number of years, but there’s more than one problem in making the idea scalable and practical. While the resulting machine could handle maths problems far larger than the greatest modern supercomputer, right now, researchers are struggling to produce a machine that can come up with any coherent answers at all.

Donald Knuth, master of algorithms, reflects on 50 years of his opus-in-progress, “The Art of Computer Programming.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.