Bloomberg (October 2)
For an entire trading day, a “piece of hardware took down Japan’s $6-trillion stock market,” marking the longest shutdown “since the exchange switched to a fully electronic trading system in 1999.” Besides drawing criticism, the malfunction “shone a spotlight on a lesser-discussed vulnerability in the world’s financial plumbing — not software or security risks but the danger when one of hundreds of pieces of hardware that make up a trading system decides to give up the ghost.”
Tags: Danger, Financial plumbing, Hardware, Japan, Malfunction, Security risks, Shutdown, Software, Stock market, Trading, TSE, Vulnerability
The Economist (March 12)
“Now after five decades, the end of Moore’s law is in sight.” This might not prove a bad thing as the quest for improvement will turn to more promising areas, such as the “deep learning” technology that recently beat Go legend Lee Sedol. “Huge performance gains can be achieved through new algorithms. Indeed, slowing progress in hardware will provide stronger incentives to develop cleverer software.”
Tags: Algorithms, Deep learning, Gains, Go, Hardware, Improvement, Moore’s Law, Performance, Progress, Promising, Software, Technology
The Economist (January 18, 2014)
“With a string of deals the internet giant has positioned itself to become a big inventor, and reinventor, of hardware.” Google is becoming “the next GE,” with recent acquisitions spanning Nest Labs, Motorola Mobility and Boston Dynamics even as Google’s in-house engineers are “busy working on driverless cars and wearable gadgets such as Google Glass.”
Tags: Acquisitions, Boston Dynamics, Driverless cars, Engineers, GE, Google, Google Glass, Hardware, Inventor, Motorola Mobility, Nest Labs, Wearable gadgets
