We at GeekBrains try to keep up with life and offer you our selection of news and new products of the IT world in April, which attracted our attention.

Company news

XP is very much alive

Not news, but interesting fact.
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Two years ago, support for Windows XP officially stopped. However, according to recent statistics, the system still operates on 181 million machines, which is 11% of all existing computers. The figure turns out to be even more significant if we say that up to October 2015, Windows XP versions were used more than OS X (and that is the vast majority of MacBooks).

According to the Irish statistical agency StatCounter, about 47 million machines with XP are on board in China. And this is also an amazing fact, if you remember. what efforts Microsoft made to promote the 10th version in China (for example, the contract with the largest search engine in the Baidu region).

Everything passes, but Windows XP remains.

Oracle hurts Google

On May 9, the next round of the already 6-year lawsuit between Oracle and Google, dedicated to the illegitimate use of the Java API, starts. New agenda - the desire of the first to bite off a pie of $ 9 billion.

According to the lawyers, 475 million of this amount is damages, the rest is just all the money Google earned from selling services and applications. Google doesn't seem to deny the blame (this is confirmed by Android N with the open source Java Development Kit Oracle), but they talk about a slightly smaller amount - only $ 100 million.

Very soon we will know what they will agree on.

More power

At the GTC conference, Nvidia unveiled its new Tesla P100 accelerator. Its performance is simply amazing - when performing complex calculations that use large amounts of data, the P100 turns out to be faster than conventional servers by several dozen times.

Thanks to the new accelerator, he significantly increased his ability to learn. Watson is a super-powerful supercomputer on the basis of which artificial intelligence is built. At the very least, both sides declare this. It will be possible to purchase a server based on this miracle in 2017.

YouTube-connect

According to VentureBeat, Google is thinking about creating a rival Periscope and Facebook Live. This is a streaming video sharing service based on YouTube, in general, with the same functionality.

At the same time, does the information correspond to reality, and what needs to be added to YouTube-connect in order to beat the competition, the representatives have not yet commented. All that is known is that subscriptions, news feeds, comments will be saved, and the function for saving videos will appear.

New items

Robot beetles

Inventor Joe Stein (Joey Stein) from childhood was fond of insects and computer technology, so it is not surprising that when he grew up, he set out to create a device to communicate with the surrounding wildlife.

He decided to start with fireflies. Since the algorithms of their bioluminescence are well studied and described, it was not difficult to translate them into a code. Just over a month ago, on March 14, 2016, he launched his research project on Kickstarter and has already collected 15 thousand dollars.

The result of his work was a computer bug, capable of his flicker to attract relatives. One snag: fireflies in different regions have different bioluminescence algorithms. Joe is now working on this problem, creating codes for each species and putting them on the project website.

Computer artist

Maybe the day is far when the machines fully replace a person in everyday life, but they will be able to recreate works of art today. This was proven by the project Next Rembrandt , created under the guidance of experts from one of the advertising agencies in Amsterdam.

They analyzed over 300 paintings of their compatriot, and in combination with the great artist Rembrandt Van Rijn in order to find patterns and express them in code. According to the press release, the basis lay work with light and shade, a distinctive feature of the artist's works. All observations were translated into machine code and loaded into a 3D printer. A portrait of a white man with a beard and a middle-aged mustache wearing a hat was chosen as the theme. Given that the overwhelming number of paintings by Rembrandt can be described in this way, it is not surprising that the result of Next Rembrandt exceeded all expectations - only professionals could notice the “hand” of an outside artist.

Biggest and flying

Its length is 92 meters, which is 18 meters more than the largest airliner Airbus A380. It weighs only 20 tons, and on board will be able to accommodate only 48 passengers. His name is Airlander 10 , and today it is the largest of all existing aircraft.


The creation of the first copy was completed at the end of March and today it is ready to begin flight tests. The maximum speed of the Airlander 10 is quite decent 148 km / h, which means it will not compete with airplanes, but with cruise liners. The first flight with passengers is scheduled for 2018.

Wireless car charging

Demonstration of wireless car charging

The US Department of Energy recently unveiled data from a study of wireless 20kW charging for a car. It turns out that it is three times more efficient than a standard cord from a dispensing outlet.

Of course, there was a study not of an abstract model, but of a charge issued by the US National Energy Laboratory, in collaboration with Toyota, Cisco, Evatran and Clemson University for Automotive Research. In particular, charging the tested Toyota RAV4, or rather its 10kW · h battery, took only half an hour. In the near future will consider the use of such charges directly on the roads or at regular gas stations.

Article author: Ilya Bubnov

What did you notice this month?