Knowledge Bytes ! !

Just weeks after Facebook announced it was going to buy Instagram for a cool $1 billion, Zuckerberg and company rolled out a new app for the iPhone and iPod Touch called Facebook Camera . Why, might you ask, did Facebook fork out that cool bil and then turn around and launch a similar application? First off, the Facebook Camera app had been on the drawing board well before the company bought Instagram, suggesting they were planning to compete against the young startup. Secondly, as Christina Warren points out at Mashable, the answer can be found in the rational behind another major acquisition -- for example, when Google bought YouTube, despite Google Video being readily available. "After the release of Facebook Camera, I’m even more convinced that Instagram could be Facebook’s YouTube — in other words, an acquisition that becomes monumentally important to its future, and helps it solve a problem it couldn’t solve on its own," Warren wrote. Similar ...

Here’s one hell of a fast way to share your internet connection with other devices, without need for a wireless router. It’s simple. You use your laptop as a WiFi hotspot instead. This post will be unusually short, since there really isn’t much to explain. Just type, click, and you’re ready to go.   WiFi HotSpot Creator is a small (374 KB) and free application that makes it all easy and fast. What you see above in the screenshot is all. That’s all there is to it. 1. Type the name of WiFi connection that you want to create. This name will appear to other devices when they search for a wireless hotspot. What you type in here is not really important. It can be anything you want it to be. 2. Type your desired password into the Passphrase field. Other devices will use this password to be able to use your shared internet connection via WiFi. 3. From the NIC drop-down choose the way your laptop is currently connected to internet. For example, if you are co...

• Researchers invent novel technique by fabricating tiny holes in a single quarter-inch chip to boost data transfer rates • Until now, it was not possible to transport terabits of data for existing parallel optical communications technology • New prototype compactly and efficiently delivers ultra-high interconnect bandwidth to power future supercomputer and data center applications  Photomicrograph of the back of the IBM Holey Optochip with lasers and photodectors visible through substrate holes.    IBM scientists today will report on a prototype optical chipset, dubbed “Holey Optochip”, that is the first parallel optical transceiver to transfer one trillion bits – one terabit – of information per second, the equivalent of downloading 500 high definition movies. The report will be presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference taking place in Los Angeles. With the ability to m...