Forbes, who received an email from Intel, reports:

It’s an announcement with layers of ramifications, but it’s certainly not a death bell. The tried-and-true tower PC is a fixture among business and home users alike. While companies like Dell and HP have traditionally relied on Intel for motherboards in their low-to-mid-range desktops, there are several other companies happy to carry the torch. Just ask any power user or gaming enthusiast if they think ASUS or MSI will be elated to hear this news.

This is a forward-thinking move for Intel, who also said “The internal talent and experience of twenty years in the boards business…is being redistributed to address emerging new form factors.” Those form factors are springing up from all corners, inspired by Windows 8 and consumers shifting their needs to devices that serve multiple purposes in multiple environments. Microsoft‘s Surface Pro and the TAICHI from ASUS are perfect examples of where the post-PC market is heading.

In other news, Intel has declared d a 22.5 cents-per-share (90 cents-per-share on an annual basis) quarterly dividend on the company’s common stock. It will be payable on March 1 to stockholders of record on February 7.

CEO Paul Otellini said, “With the payout of this quarterly dividend, Intel’s dividend and stock buyback program will have returned approximately $119 billion to stockholders since the program’s inception. This is a testament to our commitment to return cash to our stockholders as we continue to generate strong cash flow driven by the combination of new products and design wins from the lowest power portable devices to the most powerful data center servers.”

But Ken Jennings (and you and me) has Watson beat in one measure of intelligence: human language. Once that fact no longer holds true, well, we’re all in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Nevertheless, IBM is trying to improve Watson’s human language prowess. And to do that, Watson needs to understand how humans talk – how they really talk. I’m talking about slang, of course. People simply don’t realize just how complicated human language really is. Teaching Watson proper and direct English is nowhere near good enough to turn it into a fully functional conversation partner. I mean, how the hell is it going to know how to respond to YOLO?

So, to work on that slang element of human language, IBM researchers decided to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary – you know, the online database of anything and everything human begins say – from the inane to the foul.

Apparently, this led to a problem. Watson developed a mouth like a sailor. From Fortune:

Watson couldn’t distinguish between polite language and profanity — which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word “bullshit” in an answer to a researcher’s query.

Ultimately, Brown’s 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory. But the trial proves just how thorny it will be to get artificial intelligence to communicate naturally. Brown is now training Watson as a diagnostic tool for hospitals. No knowledge of OMG required.

Suck it, Trebek.

[Fortune via The Atlantic]

A commenter at SlashGear indicates that a Lenovo sales rep told him the date would be August 21st.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is the lightest 14″ Ultrabook in the world, according to Lenovo.

“Created for those who demand the highest levels of performance, mobility, entertainment and design, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon exceeds Ultrabook specifications by using a premium carbon fiber rollcage to create a durable Ultrabook weighing less than three pounds,” the company says.

“Just like in the automotive industry, carbon fiber materials add structural strength and durability while minimizing weight,” the company adds on the product page.

It comes with embedded 3G connectivity and a mobile pay-as-you go option, and contains Intel vPro technology.

Lenovo also touts the fact that you can bring up the battery life of the device to 80% strength in as little as 35 minutes with its RapidCharge feature.

When the company introduced the X1 Carbon, it also revealed a new portfolio of ThinkPad laptops, the new ThinkPad X, T, W, and L Series models, which come with 3rd generation Intel Core processors and Lenovo Enhanced Experience 3.0. The laptops are 40% faster than typical Windows 7 computers, according to the company. These came out in June.

So what should we do about it? Health experts say to reduce our time looking at screens to less than two hours a day. They do, of course, provide the caveat that it’s fine when looking at a screen for work. They do say that you really should get out more while focusing your vision on books and other things.

Funny enough, the biggest problem that affects our eyes is being productive. People who focus entirely on their work forget some basic eye care like blinking. The average person blinks about 12 to 15 times a minute. When focused on work, a person will blink only four to five times a minute. Since blinking is such an subconscious action, it’s hard to actually force yourself to blink without taking your mind off the current work at hand.

For better eye health, be sure to sit far away from the screen in a well-lit room. Both of these factors can contribue to poor eye health. It’s hard to sit far away from a computer while at work, but you can distance yourself from the screen. Be sure to keep the lights in the room on as well. The backlight of the computer screen coupled with a dark room is a recipe for early onset blindness.

I should admit that I don’t wear glasses and I’ve been staring at screens for the better part of 20 years now. My eyes don’t even appear to be getting worse with age, but I know other people who have problems. Ignoring the fact that I’m a mutant, taking care of your eyes in today’s digital age is super important. Until doctors are able to stab us in the eyes with needles to cure various vision problems, it’s best to take care of them.

[h/t: A Healthier Michigan]

Of course, it’s not so much the act of sitting in front of the computer that causes these problems as it is the time you waste doing so. Sara Thomee, lead author of this revealing study, explains that, when you’re devoting that much of your life towards one particular thing, you essentially allow other things to fall by the wayside, thus creating the unwanted stress.

“High quantitative use was a central link between computer use and stress, sleep disturbances, and depression, described by the young adults,” Thomee explained in the study. “It was easy to spend more time than planned at the computer (e.g., working, gaming, or chatting), and this tended to lead to time pressure, neglect of other activities and personal needs (such as social interaction, sleep, physical activity), as well as bad ergonomics, and mental overload.”

Spend a lot of time on the phone? You’re at risk, as well. Being available 24/7, for whatever reason, can often lead to feelings of being trapped, of “never being free” from those who wish to monopolize all of your time. And when you skip out on not returning calls or checking your voicemail right away, feelings of guilt can set in.

Last, but certainly not least, are the video gamers. They, too, are at risk for depression and sleep reduction, not to mentioned a reduced and underperforming libido. “Daily computer gaming for 1–2 hours meant an increased risk for symptoms of depression in the women. Often using the computer late at night (and consequently losing sleep) was a prospective risk factor for stress and sleep disturbances, including reduced performance, in both sexes,” the study revealed.

Once again, folks, we’re at that point where we simply cannot moderate our activities. Be it eating or computing or gaming or chatting — we’re a gluttonous lot, and our bodies and minds ultimately pay the price for our behavior. So the next time you find yourself wandering around Skyrim for hours at a time, perhaps you should take a break and do something else for a little while. Give your brain a break, treat your legs to some exercise.

As David Byrne used to say, “It might do you some good”.

For the longest time, people have been content with a paltry 1024×768 resolution. For the first time in three years, 1024×768 has finally fallen behind a competing resolution. The new most popular resolution worldwide is now a better, but still really small, 1366×768. This information comes from StatCounter who has been keeping track of global screen resolution trends since 2009. Surely this isn’t that important though, right? Wrong!

“The data reflects a continuing trend of users moving to larger screen resolution sizes,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The screen resolution size people are using is a critical factor for developers when it comes to web design, particularly in the case of fixed width web pages.”

How do the actual numbers work out though? 1024×768 has decreased in global use to only 18.6 percent, while 1366×768 has risen above it to 19.28 percent. It’s not a big difference, but it’s significant for the Web development ecosystem.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Screen Resolution Market Share

On a similar note, the move from 1024×768 to 1366×768 shows a change in aspect ratio as well. The new standard is a resolution at 16:9. This means that more and more people are switching over to widescreen. Hmm… I wonder, what popular social media service drew the ire of users when it switched its design to a non-widescreen friendly version full of whitespace? Companies like Google need this kind of information the most so they can take advantage of that whitespace for the increased amount of people using wide-screen monitors.

I was curious to see if this trend was being influenced by the types of PCs being sold. I highly doubt that many desktop monitors are being sold at that size, so the main culprit must be the all powerful laptop. Tablets don’t really come into question since the iPad 2 is at a 1024×768 resolution and the new iPad has a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Looking at Newegg, the selection of laptops with a 1024×768 resolution is all but dried out. While there are other resolutions to choose from, the most bountiful selection is, you guessed it, 1366×768 with 378 laptops to choose from. It seems that hardware manufacturers have been pushing this as the new standard in entry level cheap laptops and it’s working.

To recap, Web developers need to start building their applications with these resolutions in mind. While most will build their Web applications to take advantage of a large variety of resolutions, it’s good to keep the standard in mind.

Are you still a 1024×768 diehard? Have you upgraded to 1366×768? Or are you like me and have an HD resolution? Let us know in the comments.

[Lead Image: StatCounter]

Li-Shiuan Peh, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, wants cores to communicate the same way computers hooked to the Internet do: by bundling the information they transmit into “packets.” Each core would have its own router, which could send a packet down any of several paths, depending on the condition of the network as a whole.

In principle, multicore chips are faster than single-core chips because they can split up computational tasks and run them on several cores at once. Cores working on the same task will occasionally need to share data, but until recently, the core count on commercial chips has been low enough that a single bus has been able to handle the extra communication load. That’s already changing, however: “Buses have hit a limit,” Peh says. “They typically scale to about eight cores.” The 10-core chips found in high-end servers frequently add a second bus, but that approach won’t work for chips with hundreds of cores.

For one thing, Peh says, “buses take up a lot of power, because they are trying to drive long wires to eight or 10 cores at the same time.” In the type of network Peh is proposing, on the other hand, each core communicates only with the four cores nearest it. “Here, you’re driving short segments of wires, so that allows you to go lower in voltage,” she explains.

In an on-chip network, however, a packet of data traveling from one core to another has to stop at every router in between. Moreover, if two packets arrive at a router at the same time, one of them has to be stored in memory while the router handles the other. Many engineers, Peh says, worry that these added requirements will introduce enough delays and computational complexity to offset the advantages of packet switching. “The biggest problem, I think, is that in industry right now, people don’t know how to build these networks, because it has been buses for decades,” Peh says.

Peh and her colleagues have developed two techniques to address these concerns. One is something they call “virtual bypassing.” In the Internet, when a packet arrives at a router, the router inspects its addressing information before deciding which path to send it down. With virtual bypassing, however, each router sends an advance signal to the next, so that it can preset its switch, speeding the packet on with no additional computation. In her group’s test chips, Peh says, virtual bypassing allowed a very close approach to the maximum data-transmission rates predicted by theoretical analysis.

The other technique is something called low-swing signaling. Digital data consists of ones and zeroes, which are transmitted over communications channels as high and low voltages. Sunghyun Park, a PhD student advised by both Peh and Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering, developed a circuit that reduces the swing between the high and low voltages from one volt to 300 millivolts. With its combination of virtual bypassing and low-swing signaling, the researchers’ test chip consumed 38 percent less energy than previous packet-switched test chips. The researchers have more work to do, Peh says, before their test chip’s power consumption gets as close to the theoretical limit as its data transmission rate does. But, she adds, “if we compare it against a bus, we get orders-of-magnitude savings.”

Jack Tramiel, as reported by Forbes, passed away Sunday at the age of 83. You may not know Tramiel by name, but you surely know his company and legacy. He was the founder of Commodore International, the company that created the famous Commodore 64. It’s because of this that his influence on computing and gaming can not be understated.

Tramiel’s rise to fame is even more impressive when you learn that he was a holocaust survivor. He was born to a Jewish family in Poland on December 13, 1928. In 1939, he was moved with his father to a labor camp where his father died. He was rescued from the camp in 1945 and moved to the U.S. in 1947.

It was his time in the U.S. that he began to enter the technology field. He started his first company, Commodore Portable Typewriter, in 1953 that repaired office machinery. After a less than successful venture into the adding machine business and calculators, Commodore finally entered into the home computer market with the Commodore PET.

While the PET was a success for the company, their first major break away success was the Commodore 64 in 1982. It went on to become the best-selling home computer of all time with 17 million units sold. After this success, Tramiel resigned from Commodore to form Tramel Technology in 1984. It was here that he bought a dead-in-the-water Atari Inc. from Warner Communications after the video game market crash of 1983. Tramel Technology was renamed Atari Corporation and the rest is history.

All of is to say that Jack Tramiel helped shape the future of computing and the industry it spawned. It was his mantra, “We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes,” that inspired the idea of the consumer computer. The Commodore 64 is a testament to that and the continued consumer support for personal computers, whether they be a desktop, laptop or tablet, continue the idea of “computers for the masses.”

The Twitter reaction has been heartfelt with fans of Commodore expressing their love of the company and the man who founded it:

We here at WebProNews salute Jack Tramiel. His contributions to the computer and gaming industries make our jobs more interesting and life more fun for everybody.

The technique uses a “heat spreader” made of a copper-graphene composite, which is attached to the electronic device using an indium-graphene interface film “Both the copper-graphene and indium-graphene have higher thermal conductivity, allowing the device to cool efficiently,” says Dr. Jag Kasichainula, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and author of a paper on the research. Thermal conductivity is the rate at which a material conducts heat.

In fact, Kasichainula found that the copper-graphene film’s thermal conductivity allows it to cool approximately 25 percent faster than pure copper, which is what most devices currently use.

Dissipating heat from electronic devices is important, because the devices become unreliable when they become too hot.

The paper also lays out the manufacturing process for creating the copper-graphene composite, using an electrochemical deposition process. “The copper-graphene composite is also low-cost and easy to produce,” Kasichainula says. “Copper is expensive, so replacing some of the copper with graphene actually lowers the overall cost.”

The demonstration shows the viability of solid-state quantum computers, which – unlike earlier gas- and liquid-state systems – may represent the future of quantum computing because they can be easily scaled up in size. Current quantum computers are typically very small and – though impressive – cannot yet compete with the speed of larger, traditional computers.

The multinational team included USC Professor Daniel Lidar and USC postdoctoral researcher Zhihui Wang, as well as researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Iowa State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their findings will be published on April 5 in Nature.

The team’s diamond quantum computer system featured two quantum bits (called “qubits”), made of subatomic particles. As opposed to traditional computer bits, which can encode distinctly either a one or a zero, qubits can encode a one and a zero at the same time. This property, called superposition, along with the ability of quantum states to “tunnel” through energy barriers, will some day allow quantum computers to perform optimization calculations much faster than traditional computers.

Like all diamonds, the diamond used by the researchers has impurities – things other than carbon. The more impurities in a diamond, the less attractive it is as a piece of jewelry, because it makes the crystal appear cloudy. The team, however, utilized the impurities themselves. A rogue nitrogen nucleus became the first qubit. In a second flaw sat an electron, which became the second qubit. (Though put more accurately, the “spin” of each of these subatomic particles was used as the qubit.) Electrons are smaller than nuclei and perform computations much more quickly, but also fall victim more quickly to “decoherence.” A qubit based on a nucleus, which is large, is much more stable but slower.

“A nucleus has a long decoherence time – in the milliseconds. You can think of it as very sluggish,” said Lidar, who holds a joint appointment with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Though solid-state computing systems have existed before, this was the first to incorporate decoherence protection – using microwave pulses to continually switch the direction of the electron spin rotation.

“It’s a little like time travel,” Lidar said, because switching the direction of rotation time-reverses the inconsistencies in motion as the qubits move back to their original position.

The team was able to demonstrate that their diamond-encased system does indeed operate in a quantum fashion by seeing how closely it matched “Grover’s algorithm.” The algorithm is not new – Lov Grover of Bell Labs invented it in 1996 – but it shows the promise of quantum computing. The test is a search of an unsorted database, akin to being told to search for a name in a phone book when you’ve only been given the phone number. Sometimes you’d miraculously find it on the first try, other times you might have to search through the entire book to find it. If you did the search countless times, on average, you’d find the name you were looking for after searching through half of the phone book. Mathematically, this can be expressed by saying you’d find the correct choice in X/2 tries – if X is the number of total choices you have to search through. So, with four choices total, you’ll find the correct one after two tries on average. A quantum computer, using the properties of superposition, can find the correct choice much more quickly. The mathematics behind it are complicated, but in practical terms, a quantum computer searching through an unsorted list of four choices will find the correct choice on the first try, every time. Though not perfect, the new computer picked the correct choice on the first try about 95 percent of the time – enough to demonstrate that it operates in a quantum fashion.