CHELMSFORD, Mass., May 17, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:MRCY – News) (www.mc.com), a trusted provider of commercially developed application-ready ISR and EW subsystems for defense prime contractors, announced that it has received a contract from a leading defense prime contractor to provide an advanced solid state data recorder for the aggregation and storage of sensor data from airborne ISR applications.

“Our customer needed a technology upgrade that could manage the greatly expanded data streams generated by a new generation of sensors,” said Didier Thibaud, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mercury Computer Systems’ Advanced Computing Solutions business unit. “We were selected because we were able to provide a rapid prototype solution they could use to enhance their application. Our Services and Systems Integration (SSI) team engaged closely with the customer’s engineers to clearly understand the parameters of the problem, then designed an optimal solution based on industry standards.”

The Mercury solution combines the very high density capacity Digital Storage Unit (DSU) with a controller function built to the 3U OpenVPX standard. The DSU uses an array of commercially available Solid State Disk (SSD) components configured within a compact, rugged, deployable enclosure, while the controller supports flexible protocol conversions as part of the data recording process.

For more information, visit mc.com or contact Mercury at (866) 627-6951 or info@mc.com.

Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. — Where Challenges Drive Innovation^(R)

Mercury Computer Systems (www.mc.com) (Nasdaq:MRCY – News) is a best-of-breed provider of open, commercially developed, application-ready, multi-INT subsystems for defense prime contractors. With over 30 years of experience in embedded computing, superior domain expertise in radar, EW, EO/IR, C4I and sonar applications, and more than 300 successful program deployments including Aegis, Global Hawk and Predator, Mercury’s Services and Systems Integration team leads the industry in partnering with customers to design and integrate system-level solutions that minimize program risk, maximize application portability, and accelerate customers’ time to market.

Mercury is based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and serves customers worldwide through a broad network of direct sales offices, subsidiaries, and distributors.

Forward-Looking Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements, as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including those relating to the products and services described above. You can identify these statements by the use of the words “may,” “will,” “could,” “should,” “plans,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “continue,” “estimate,” “project,” “intend,” “likely,” “probable, “and similar expressions. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, general economic and business conditions, including unforeseen weakness in the Company’s markets, effects of continued geopolitical unrest and regional conflicts, competition, changes in technology and methods of marketing, delays in completing engineering and manufacturing programs, changes in customer order patterns, changes in product mix, continued success in technological advances and delivering technological innovations, continued funding of defense programs, the timing of such funding, changes in the U.S. Government’s interpretation of federal procurement rules and regulations, market acceptance of the Company’s products, shortages in components, production delays due to performance quality issues with outsourced components, inability to fully realize the expected benefits from acquisitions and divestitures or delays in realizing such benefits, challenges in integrating acquired businesses and achieving anticipated synergies, changes to export regulations, increases in tax rates, changes to generally accepted accounting principles, difficulties in retaining key employees and customers, unanticipated costs under fixed-price service and system integration engagements, and various other factors beyond our control. These risks and uncertainties also include such additional risk factors as are discussed in the Company’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011. The Company cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made.

Challenges Drive Innovation, Ensemble and Echotek are registered trademarks and Application Ready Subsystem and ARS are trademarks of Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

A pair of new computer components unveiled late this week — one which will require less energy to store and retrieve information, and one which improves power and resource efficiency by occasionally allowing errors to occur — could one day fundamentally change the technology behind desktops, laptops, and similar devices.

The first of those two units is known as a “memristor,” and according to BBC News Science and Technology Reporter Jason Palmer, its properties “make it suitable for both for computing and for far faster, denser memory.”

The theoretical concept of the memristor, which derives its name from the words memory and resistor, was first proposed roughly four decades ago, though a first prototype of the component was not possible until 2008, Palmer said.

The unit can remember how much current has passed through it, even after the device containing it has been powered off, and experts told BBC News that it can be manufactured more affordably these days thanks to modern semiconductor techniques.

“The history-dependent nature of their electrical properties would make them able to carry out calculations, but most interest has focused on developing them for memory applications, to replace the widespread ‘flash’ solid-state memory of USB sticks and memory cards,” Palmer wrote on Friday.

“We’re reaching the limits of what we can do with flash memory in terms of increasing the storage density, and it’s also relatively high power and not as fast as we would like,” added Anthony Kenyon of University College London (UCL), who along with colleagues at the school and from France and Spain detail their work with memristors in the Journal of Applied Physics. “Flash memory devices switch at 10,000 nanoseconds (billionths of a second) or so, and in our device we can’t measure how fast it is… Our equipment only goes down to 90 nanoseconds. It’s at least as fast as that and probably faster.”

He also told Palmer that, while their memristor concepts may be less advanced than other, similar components being worked on by other teams that he believes that the ease of manufacturing and the low cost of materials could make them more attractive to consumer electronics manufacturers. Kenyon said that they were in preliminary talks with some “fairly major names” in the industry about making their technology commercially available.

On Thursday, researchers at Rice University announced via press release a new computer chip that they say “challenges the industry’s 50-year pursuit of accuracy” — a design which they argue “improves power and resource efficiency by allowing for occasional errors” and is “at least 15 times more efficient than today’s technology.”

Prototypes of the new chip were unveiled this week at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers in Cagliari, Italy — where research completed by experts at the Houston, Texas-based school, as well as Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, Switzerland’s Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) and the University of California, Berkeley, earned best-paper honors, the university announced.

“It is exciting to see this technology in a working chip that we can measure and validate for the first time,” Project Leader and Rice-NTUS Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID) Director Krishna Palem said in a statement.  “Our work since 2003 showed that significant gains were possible, and I am delighted that these working chips have met and even exceeded our expectations.”

“The paper received the highest peer-review evaluation of all the Computing Frontiers submissions this year,” added Paolo Faraboschi, the program co-chair of the ACM Computing Frontiers conference and an employee of Hewlett Packard Laboratories. “Research on approximate computation matches the forward-looking charter of Computing Frontiers well, and this work opens the door to interesting energy-efficiency opportunities of using inexact hardware together with traditional processing elements.”

The goal of the project, according to the university’s press release, is to create microchips that require a fraction of modern-day microprocessors by being inexact in certain processes.

“The concept is deceptively simple: Slash power use by allowing processing components — like hardware for adding and multiplying numbers — to make a few mistakes,” the researchers explain. “By cleverly managing the probability of errors and limiting which calculations produce errors, the designers have found they can simultaneously cut energy demands and dramatically boost performance.”

Two examples of this approach include a process known as “pruning,” which does away with some infrequently used areas of a microchip’s digital circuits, and “confined voltage scaling,” which harnesses improvements in processing speed performance to reduce the amount of power required to operate.

The Rice University researchers said that in simulated tests conducted last year, they discovered that the smaller pruned chips were twice the speed as traditional counterparts while needing less than half as much energy.

More recent tests demonstrated that pruning could reduce energy consumption by more than three times ordinary chips when they “deviated from the correct value” by just one-fourth of a percent, study co-author and graduate student Avinash Lingamneni said. When including size and speed increases into their figures, the researchers discovered that they could be up to 7.5 times more efficient than regular chips — a number which could be increased to as much as 15 times more efficient when larger deviation percentage was allowed, he added.

“Particular types of applications can tolerate quite a bit of error,” Christian Enz, project co-investigator and chief of the CSEM branch of the research, explained. “For example, the human eye has a built-in mechanism for error correction. We used inexact adders to process images and found that relative errors up to 0.54 percent were almost indiscernible, and relative errors as high as 7.5 percent still produced discernible images.”

Palem said that prototype hearing aids utilizing the pruned chips are expected by 2013.

Recently, the development community has been debating the importance of knowing how to code. On one side of the argument are those like Shereef Bishay, founder of Developer Bootcamp, who sees programming skills as the new form of literacy. He notes that 300 years ago, “you would have to hire to write a letter for you, and hire them to read the letter for you.” That type of illiteracy would be unthinkable now, and Bishay believes the same sort of transformation is happening with programming languages.

On the other side of the debate is noted developer and StackOverflow.com creator Jeff Atwood, who believes verbal communication skills are much more important than programming skills. “Literacy is the new literacy,” he said. “As much as I love code, if my fellow programmers could communicate with other human beings one-tenth as well as they communicate with their interpreters and compilers, they’d have vastly more successful careers.”

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

Solid state disks (SSDs) made a splash in consumer technology, and now the technology has its eyes on the enterprise storage market. Download this eBook to see what SSDs can do for your infrastructure and review the pros and cons of this potentially game-changing storage technology.

Networking Solutions

Bellco’s Ion 3D Computer mouse controls the computer cursor from up to 35 ft away works on any computer. No desktop required.

(PRWEB) May 18, 2012

Who knows how many computer mouse designs are out there. Bellco has the first available computer mouse glove. This new Ion wireless air mouse glove has a mobile range of 35 ft and controls the computer cursor from anywhere in the room. Stop stressing over the desktop mouse. Bellco say’s go mobile; move around sit back, rest your arm on the big chair. The Ion air mouse glove works with simple small movements of the wrist with the right and left click button at one’s fingertip.

Bellco says online casino gaming and golf tournaments are growing leap and bounds and the need for a more comfortable gaming experience is growing as players are spending more time in front of the computer. Now that big screen TV’s are everywhere it is easy to play on the big screen, just connect your laptop computer to the TV through a HDMI cable.

The Ion wireless air mouse computer glove is simple to setup just plug the USB mini module and turn it on, it operates with Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Bellco says its new radio frequency technology for the computer mouse has room to grow and has new designs and colors in the works to suit all users.

Bellco is offering merchants and re-sellers opportunities with its new product, for more info contact: pbellco(at)gmail(dot)com

The Ion 3D wireless air mouse glove is available online for $79.95 at http://www.ionwirelessairmouse.com

Pete Bell
BELLCO VENTURES INC.
239-273-1248
Email Information

The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place.

Name: Raspberry Pi

[More from Mashable: 5 Ways Teachers Can Evaluate Educational Games]

Big Idea: Raspberry Pi is a small, lightweight computer that runs on Linux and costs next to nothing — the Model A retails at $35, while the forthcoming Model B will be priced at $25.

Why It’s Working: By far the cheapest computer on the market, the creator of Raspberry Pi hopes to get the gadget in the hands of children all over the world.

[More from Mashable: 4 Steps to Cultivating Online Trust]

Growing up in the ’80s, Eben Upton spent a lot of time in his bedroom learning to code. And in 2006, when Upton became a talented and successful mobile chipset developer, he began to realize that not everyone has the opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of programming.

“Many [kids] just don’t have computers at all,” Upton explains. “If they do, it’s a family computer, and you don’t want to mess with it.”

So, he began the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Registered as an official UK charity, the organization had a single goal in mind: to put cheap computers in the hands of youth and encourage them to expand their programming horizons. Upton says that the first Raspberry Pi computer had the capacity similar to the original computer he learned to code on, but he decided through multiple iterations that it would be more attractive with a modern spin and a Linux OS. And in order to keep production costs low, Upton says that the hardware for the flashcard-sized Raspberry Pi is decidedly no-frills — simply a core computer running on a mobile phone chipset developed and provided by Upton’s employer, Broadcom. The results of many prototypes were the Raspberry Pi Model A and Model B.

“What we’ve ended up with is something that’s very powerful from a multimedia level,” Upton explains. “We’ve styled the user experience to a recognizably modern thing while staying at the same price point.”

And that price point is shockingly low. Cost-efficient parts and minimal overhead contributed to the Model B’s jaw-dropping $35 MSRP — and sent geeks from all over clamoring to get their hands on it. Upton says that even as early as January, the organization only expected to sell 10,000 units. Instead, the Model B’s February launch on Leap Day of this year crashed the websites of the vendors who sold out in minutes.

“I think the numbers that are kicking around now are well over a quarter of a million units ordered so far,” Upton says of the Model B’s sales. “We’re very pleased.”

And it’s not just geeks looking to get a piece of the action. Upton says that the foundation has been approached by commercial companies, hospitals, museums and others looking to integrate the Raspberry Pi’s low-cost computing systems into their own everyday services. He adds that while the company is maintaining a strict role as a distributor of materials, the foundation has given special consideration to orgs looking to do good with the tiny computer.

“We’ve been helping people by making sure they get early access to boards and making sure that they’re getting a little support to put them in the right direction,” Upton adds.

But this is just the first step toward Upton’s larger goals. He says he hopes to debut the even cheaper Model A, which will be priced at $25, sometime before the end of the summer. Looking ahead, Upton says he’s excited to implement specialized software, tutorials and sample codes to encourage kids (and adults) to tackle the world of home programming.

“We’re trying to put the fun back into the computing,” Upton explains. “So now we have things going out the door. The goal is to refocus and make a polished educational offering around the device.”

The World at Work is powered by GE. GE Works focuses on the people who make the things that move, power, build and help to cure the world.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

SUFFERN, NY–(Marketwire -05/17/12)-
CDx Diagnostics announced today that Seth A. Gross, MD, Director of Advanced Endoscopy, Norwalk Hospital, Norwalk, Connecticut, will be demonstrating the new EndoCDx WATS3D (Wide Area Transepithelial Sample) 3-dimensional biopsy during the ASGE Hands-On Workshop taking place at the Digestive Disease Week® 2012 conference on Monday, May 21st from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm PT. The WATS3D biopsy with computer-assisted laboratory analysis addresses the sampling limitations of standard esophageal forceps biopsy, has been shown to increase detection of the precancerous conditions Barrett’s esophagus and dysplasia by up to 40%(1,2) and is easily performed in about a minute’s time. The high sensitivity of the WATS3D is due to the large tissue area sampled, and the proprietary 3-dimensionial computer imaging system that is based on an algorithm developed as part of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative missile defense program. CDx Diagnostics is exhibiting at booth #424 throughout the conference which runs from May 19 – 22 in San Diego.

“About 30 million Americans report having heartburn, or Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease (GERD), at least twice a week. Of this group, approximately 10% will develop altered cells in their esophagus called Barrett’s esophagus. While Barrett’s esophagus is not lethal, in some patients it can lead to esophageal cancer, which is deadly and, unfortunately, one of the fastest growing types of cancer,” said Dr. Gross. “In addition, if esophageal dysplasia is detected in time, cancer can be prevented. The WATS3D biopsy makes it much more likely that any precancer present will be found and therefore help us ultimately to prevent cancer,” he added.

About Digestive Disease Week

DDW is the largest international gathering of physicians, researchers and academics in the fields of gastroenterology, hepatology, endoscopy and gastrointestinal surgery. Jointly sponsored by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute, the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract, DDW takes place May 19 – 22, 2012, at the San Diego Convention Center. The meeting showcases more than 5,000 abstracts and hundreds of lectures on the latest advances in GI research, medicine and technology. For more information, visit www.ddw.org.

About CDx Diagnostics and the WATS3D biopsy

CDx Diagnostics (www.cdxdiagnostics.com) is the world’s leader in the prevention of cancer of the oral cavity, pharynx, larynx and esophagus through early detection of their pre-cancerous precursors. Clinicians use CDx patented WATS3D biopsy instruments to collect, through minimally invasive procedures, a wide area, disaggregated tissue specimen of the entire thickness of the suspect epithelium. This unique tissue specimen is then subjected to specialized, computer-assisted laboratory analysis. In clinical trials, CDx Diagnostics’ WATS3D biopsy significantly increased the detection rate of Barrett’s esophagus in GERD patients as well as precancerous changes in esophageal tissue (dysplasia) by up to 40%(1,2). The high sensitivity of WATS3D is due to the large tissue area sampled, and the proprietary 3-dimensionial computer imaging system that is based on an algorithm developed as part of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative missile defense program.

About Barrett’s Esophagus and Esophageal Cancer

Many cases of esophageal adenocarcinoma (EA) are preceded by chronic heartburn. Some heartburn patients develop altered cell patches in their esophagus. A condition known as dysplasia occurs as Barrett’s esophagus progresses to Barrett’s-associated cancer. Dysplasia is considered a precancerous condition and should be monitored very closely to ensure the cells do not become cancerous. Dysplastic cells are very similar to cancer cells but have not yet acquired the ability to invade into tissue or metastasize. The number of Americans diagnosed with esophageal adenocarcinoma has increased 600% over the last 25 years. It is now the fastest growing form of cancer in the U.S., and one of the most lethal of cancers, with a five year survival rate of less than 20%.

(1) Johanson, J. F., J. Frakes, D. Eisen, (2010). Computer-assisted analysis of abrasive transepithelial brush biopsies increases the effectiveness of esophageal screening: a multicenter prospective clinical trial by the endocdx collaborative group. Dig Dis Sci, e-pub
(2) Anandasabapathy, Sharmila, Stephen Sontag, David Y. Graham, Stephen Frist, Joan Bratton, Noam Harpaz, Jerome D. Waye, (2010). Computer-assisted brush-biopsy analysis for the detection of dysplasia in a high-risk barrett’s esophagus surveillance population. Dig Dis Sci, e-pub

The democratization of literacy in the late 19th century created one of the great inflection points in human history. Knowledge was no longer confined to an elite class, and influence began to spread throughout all levels of society. Any educated person could command the power of words.

What if any educated person had equal sway over the power of machines? What if we were to expand our notion of literacy to encompass not only human languages but also machine languages? Could widespread facility in reading and writing code come to be as critical to society as the ability to manipulate spoken and written language?

The usual definition of computer literacy stops at the UI: If a user knows how to make the machine work, he or she is computer-literate. But, of course, the deeper literacy of the programmer is far more powerful. Fortunately, computer languages and human languages are basically very similar. Like human languages, computer languages vary in form and character (Python to Java to Ruby) and can be implemented in infinite ways. My Python may not look like your Python, but it can do the same thing; likewise, a single idea can be expressed using a variety of combinations of English words. And both kinds of language are infinitely flexible. Just as a person literate in English can compose everything from a sonnet to a statute, a person literate in programming languages can automate repetitive tasks, saving time for things only a human can do; distribute access to systems of communication and control to large groups of people; and train machines to do things they’ve never done before. Computer programming already does marvelous things like deliver this article to your mind, operate life-sustaining medical devices and enable IBM’s Watson to win at Jeopardy. The current potential for innovation would be many times greater if every schoolchild had a firm grasp of programming concepts and how to apply them.

Among programmers, a movement is forming around this idea. Shereef Bishay, founder of San Francisco-based Developer Bootcamp, believes that coding is destined to become a new form of widespread literacy within the next 20 to 30 years. Everybody should learn to code, he says, because machine/human and machine/machine interaction is becoming as ubiquitous as human/human interaction. Those who don’t know how to code soon will be in the same position as those who couldn’t read or write 200 years ago.

300 years ago, Bishay said, “you would have to hire to write a letter for you, and hire them to read the letter for you. It is just insane.” Today most people hire a skilled programmer to write computer programs for them.

The code literacy movement began to gather steam in late 2011, when Codecademy started teaching basic programming skills for free. The debate came to a head this week as two blog posts took the top spots on the tech website Hacker News. The first, dubbed “Please Don’t Learn to Code,” came from noted developer and StackOverflow.com creator Jeff Atwood on his blog Coding Horror. The second, a rebuttal entitled “Please Learn to Code,” came from Sacha Greif, a Parisian designer whose clients include HipMunk and MileWise. 

“I do think (or at least, hope) that computer programming will become the next version of literacy,” Greif wrote in an email to ReadWriteWeb. “When I watch my 4 year old niece interact with an iPhone, I see her intuitively using interaction patterns that older people often have trouble with, even when they’re computer-literate. And kids can easily memorize huge quantities of facts about complex abstract systems like Pokemon games. So clearly they have the potential to learn how to code.”

Not everyone in the programming community agrees. Atwood argues that verbal literacy is a different kind of skill, and more fundamental. “Literacy is the new literacy,” he told ReadWriteWeb. “As much as I love code, if my fellow programmers could communicate with other human beings one-tenth as well as they communicate with their interpreters and compilers, they’d have vastly more successful careers.”

Atwood stresses learning, and mastering, the basic skills of communication. Learn to read. Learn to write. Learn to hold a conversation. Learn some basic math. These skills, he says, are more essential than being able to program a computer.

Of course, the path to universal code literacy is not without roadblocks. The skills necessary depend on how computing evolves over the next several decades. How will quantum computing affect our relationship with computers? However, the human capacity to learn is not at issue. If it becomes necessary for me to code to interact with my machine, I will likely learn to code. It is no different than if I was dropped off in Cambodia without a place to stay or food to eat – I’d learn the local language posthaste. 

At present, the ability to program computers is vocational, like carpentry or learning to cook. There’s little impetus to make it universal. But imagine if it were.

Should computer programming become the new literacy? Or should it remain a vocation? Let us know in the comments. 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock

New Delhi, May 17 (IANS) Indian computer experts have devised a technique to smoke out bots and deter their malicious programmers from taking over your desk computer or laptop, stealing passwords or vital information in your hard drive even without your suspecting anything amiss, or deluging website with emails to crash them.

Bots are emerging as one of the biggest threats to cyber safety and security worldwide. They may sneak into your computer through an email link or a contaminated external device such as a USB drive, or through chinks in outdated software loaded on your system.

A bot automatically hooks a computer to an instruction server installed by the hacker, generating a gigantic network referred to as botnet, involving thousands or millions of computers at homes, schools, financial centres, government institutions, hitched to malicious and illegal activities.

“Ours is a twin approach, involving standalone and network algorithm (a step-by-step procedure used in calculation, data processing and automated reasoning), to detect and demolish bots,” Manoj Thakur, who developed the technique with colleagues, told IANS from Mumbai.

“The initial work related to this research began as a part of our final year B.Tech project in 2009. We had come up with an initial version of the algorithm along with some simulations at that time,” informed Thakur, of the Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI), Mumbai.

The standalone algorithm, operating independently, analyzes the IP addresses of incoming, outgoing data packets; ports used for communication and patterns of traffic either way, said Thakur.

If it sniffs any suspicious activity, it immediately alerts the network algorithm, which sifts through the movement of information to and from the hosts, to figure out whether the activity is due to a bot or a legitimate programme, added Thakur.

“A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer or network resource unavailable to its intended users.”

“The time taken to detect and mitigate the effect of a bot attack will depend on the kind of attack, the scale of the attack and the time span across which an attack prevails,” said Thakur.

“A number of services hosted on the web today are over the Cloud. The distributed nature of the computing infrastructure raises important concerns such as confidentiality and veracity of data,” he said.

Cloud computing allows you to access software, server and storage resources over web browser, without having to buy, install, maintain and manage these resources on your own computer or device. Prime examples are gmail and hotmail.

“Irrespective of the way an attack is conducted, it is characterized by abnormal patterns in system usage and network traffic flow. Our technique explores these patterns to detect and mitigate the effect of bots,” said Thakur.

“Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the efforts of one or more people to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet.”

“Each of the bots involved in a DDoS attack overloads the target system with such high volumes of traffic that the system is unable to serve end-users, particularly sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, even root name servers,” adds Thakur.

Chinese retailers have started selling a miniature Linux computer that is housed in a 3.5-inch plastic case slightly larger than a USB thumb drive. Individual units are available online for $74.

The small computer has an AllWinner A10 single-core 1.5GHz ARM CPU, a Mali 400 GPU, and 512MB of RAM. An HDMI port on the exterior allows users to plug the computer into a television. It outputs at 1080p and is said to be capable of playing high-definition video.

The device also has a full-sized USB port with host support for input devices, a conventional micro-USB port, a microSD slot, and an internal 802.11 b/g WiFi antenna. The computer can boot from a microSD card and is capable of running Android 4.0 and other ARM-compatible Linux platforms.

Earlier this year, we reported on the FXI Cotton Candy, a thumb drive computer that can plug directly into the HDMI port on a television. The system, which became available for preorder in February, sells for $199.

The $74 AllWinner system seems like an intriguing, low-cost alternative to the Cotton Candy. Both computers have the same GPU, but the Cotton Candy has a faster dual-core processor and twice as much RAM. Another key difference is that the Cotton Candy has an actual HDMI male plug built in (whereas the AllWinner computer has a socket) and consequently doesn’t require the use of an HDMI cable.

Much like the recently launched $35 Raspberry Pi, these relatively small and inexpensive Linux systems offer enthusiasts a compelling platform for embedded computing projects.

(Adds details on plans for turnaround)

May 17 (Reuters) – Computer Sciences Corp (NYSE: CSC – news) ‘s new CEO
vowed to turn around his struggling firm as it posted an annual
loss of $4.2 billion, saying he is working hard to lay the
groundwork for a return to profitability.

“These results are very poor. They are unacceptable ,” Chief
Executive Mike L awrie said on the technology services firm’s
earnings conference call Thursday. “We are taking immediate
actions.”

Lawrie, a former IBM (NYSE: IBM – news) executive who took the helm at CSC (SES: E1:C06.SI – news) in
March, said he would cut expenses by $1 billion over the next 12
to 18 months, look at selling “non-core” assets, and quickly
assemble a new management team to help engineer the turnaround
effort.

One focus area has been renegotiating a multibillion-dollar
contract to implement a system for managing digital medical
records for Britain’s National Health Service. CSC has been
losing money on the contract. Lawrie said he expected to sign an
interim agreement amending the terms of the pact in the
“not-too-distant future.”

The company has uncovered about 40 other troubled contracts
and is in the process of taking steps to remedy those problems,
he added.

CSC shares fell 2.2 percent to $25.83 in midday trading on
the New York Stock Exchange, about double the percentage decline
in the Nasdaq Composite Index.

The company posted a loss attributable to common
shareholders of $158 million, or $1.02 per share, for its fiscal
fourth quarter ended March 30, compared with a year-earlier
profit of $171 million, or $1.09 per share.

Revenue fell 2.1 percent to $4.1 billion.

Lawrie attributed the company’s problems to the NHS
contract, difficulty managing costs, and “headwinds” in its
business with the U.S. government and in Europe (Chicago Options: ^REURUSD – news) .

“Our company is in a turnaround situation and we are taking
the first steps,” said Lawrie, an IT industry veteran whose
career includes 27 years at IBM. “This will be a
multi-year journey.

CSC, which named a new CFO on Monday, said it would hold off
issuing full-year earnings projections until later this year.

The company promised to provide an in-depth update on the
status of its turnaround at an investor meeting scheduled for
Sept. 10.

(Reporting By Jim Finkle; Editing by Maureen Bavdek and John
Wallace)