The European Commission wants to make it easier for lightweight drones to fly autonomously in European airspace — with logistics, inspection services and agricultural businesses set to benefit. Last Friday, the Commission unveiled a plan to improve the safety of drones flying at low altitude. It wants to introduce a consistent set of rules across…
With no change at the top of the latest Top500.org supercomputer list, you need to look further down the rankings to see the real story. Top500.org published the 49th edition of its twice-yearly supercomputer league table on Monday, and once again the Chinese computers 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight and 33.9-petaflop Tianhe 2 lead the pack. An…
With internet traffic set to triple over the next five years or so, according to recent estimates from Nokia and Cisco Systems, Nokia thinks the time is right for a new range of high-end routers that can boost core capacity by a factor of six — and even help 10-year-old devices to double their capacity.…
Picture this: The networking stack on the main pump controller has crashed, and you need to reboot it — but it’s 20 meters underground, on another continent — and there’s no-one on site to hit ‘reset’. Or you’re bowling along the highway and one of the processor cores in your self-driving car gets zapped by…
SoftBank’s latest robotics acquisition could allow it to open up a whole new market for service industries and home help. Its customer service and companion robot, Pepper, is somewhat limited by the fact that it can’t do much more than wave its arms and talk. Now, though, SoftBank has its eyes on the fetching and…
They have the resources, the expertise and, though they may not realize it, the need — but it turns out that enterprises are often the ones that don’t yet have IPv6. That’s the finding of the Internet Society its latest report on IPv6 deployment, published five years after the organization began a worldwide push to…
All-electric satellites are changing the way airline passengers access the internet. Like a Tesla in space, an all-electric satellite uses electric propulsion to climb from transfer orbit to geostationary orbit and to maintain its position on station, instead of the chemical rockets used by traditional satellites. Such satellites still need a traditional launcher burning solid…
A major British Airways crash has highlighted the importance for businesses of testing backup systems and disaster recovery procedures to ensure that they work as planned. The airline experienced what CEO Alex Cruz described as “a major IT systems failure” that, he said, affected all check-in and operational systems. The failure on Saturday, May 27,…
Artificial intelligence is where the competition is in IT, with Microsoft and Google both parading powerful, always-available AI tools for the enterprise at their respective developer conferences, Build and I/O, in May. It’s not just about work: AI software can now play chess, go, and some retro video games better than any human — and…
Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java. Gosling revealed his new employer on his Facebook page with the words: “It’s time for a change. I’m leaving Boeing Defense (nee…