data

Voting is now closed for this round. See the results of these battles here and vote on the Sweet Sixteen matchups here.

These robots don't want to fight. That's why you have to pick the winners. Here's part two of the first round of our grand tournament, featuring robots from the movies and TV. All you have to do is vote for the winners.

Voting is open from now until next Monday, September 10. Check back then for the results of this round, exciting second-round matchups, and a couple of surprises.

Information is the new currency. When it comes to social-networking sites and many other online enterprises, your attention is the product that is being sold. So it is not surprising that data mining, particularly efforts to link your online behavior to specific opportunities to market to you, is an exploding trend.

Data mining in itself is not inherently good or bad, but it raises many social issues whose implications we all need to understand and include in our ongoing dialogue. Data mining has benefits, including an opportunity to create a customized online experience that truly serves you better. Misuses can lead to serious breaches of privacy. I encountered several stories on data mining Tuesday that caught my attention.… Read more

Cambridge, Mass.--Corporations are mishandling their data center energy consumption to the point that they risk disruptive failures of their technology infrastructure, a panel of experts said on Tuesday.

Panelists, which included speakers from the research firm the Uptime Institute, as well as AMD, Hewlett-Packard, EMC and APC, agreed that the use of electricity in data centers is a problem too few IT professionals are addressing. The panel was assembled by AMD.

"The ever-widening gap between computing performance at the server and chip level is not being matched by energy efficiency," said Bruce Taylor, chief strategist and evangelist … Read more

San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joel Selvin mourns the loss of audio quality in our iPod-obsessed culture.

He's right: MP3 files and other forms of data-compressed audio, such as AAC (used by Apple's iTunes) and Windows Media Audio, don't contain as much audio data as an uncompressed song on a CD. For long-time music listeners such as Selvin, the difference is striking. (Note that he's talking about data compression, not the audio compression that's misused to "punch up" many modern recordings.)

The first time I heard a CD full of burned MP3 files … Read more

The market timing for products like the "Tele-Data Guard" couldn't be better, coming on the heels of the recent spate of spy movies such as The Good Shepherd, Breach and The Company. We can think of no better way to heighten people's sense of paranoia.

Besides, who hasn't had their phones tapped as part of international conspiracies? That's what this device is aimed at detecting (well, maybe not the conspiracy part), by flashing a green light during conversation if someone is eavesdropping on your line, according to Uber-Review. It supposedly works on faxes and … Read more

IBM intends to undertake a massive server consolidation in an effort to make its data centers more "green."

The computing giant on Wednesday said it will transfer the computing load now on 3,900 servers onto about 30 System z mainframes running Linux.

That transfer will reduce power consumption at IBM's 8 million square feet of data centers by 80 percent over the next five years.

Earlier this year, IBM officially launched what it calls its Big Green Innovations program to offer products and services around environmental conservation and energy efficiency.

Data centers represent large consumers of … Read more

Remember how we all mocked the gadgets and appliances used by our parents when we were kids? You know, the "Veg-O-Matics," the "Pocket Fisherman" and pretty much anything else pitched by Ron Popeil on TV after 2 a.m.

Well, don't laugh--we're next. Imagine the reaction of our own children a decade from now when they find something like the "DataGlass HMD" in a corner of the basement. Accurately described by SCI FI Tech as a "cross between a pirate, a cyborg soldier and a member of the Borg hive," … Read more

Does anyone remember the PDA? You know, that thing people used to carry around before BlackBerries, Treos and most mobile phones made since 2003? A few of them may be tucked away in a Members Only jacket somewhere in the closet (buried, we hope).

If any of them are still in use, they may be easy targets for schoolyard bullies like the iPhone. Perhaps that's why one of the surviving models, the "Recon 200X" from Tripod Data Systems, comes with its own body armor--to avoid serious injury when getting beaten up by the bigger kids. Although specs … Read more

Many of us at Crave aren't exactly the outdoorsy types, but we do our best to help exercise-enabled individuals in the interest of trying to be a full-service gadget blog. Recently, for example, we featured a tent that can keep your electronic equipment powered even while deep in the woods. And today we offer one for the seagoing geeks among us: the "DataMask HUD."

This underwater headgear, which is supposedly used by military special forces personnel, is equipped with a miniature LCD inside the mask, which provides such detailed diving info as "current depth, elapsed dive … Read more