TechTales

Slow and steady wins the race is history. The need for speed is the need of the hour not just for techies, but users everywhere. Facebook has finally realised this fact and updated its iOS client to version 5, which has bid adieu to HTML 5 and says hello to Objective-C. The social networking app is now twice as fast with Photos, News Feed and the app itself launching quicker than ever. With this update, iPad users can now access the Timeline profile view. The app has been built from scratch over the past nine months to bring a major performance improvement. We take a detailed look at what's new under the hood. Now when you launch the app, it opens in the blink of an eye as opposed to earlier when you would continue to stare at the logo for a couple of seconds at least. It directly opens into the News Feed, which is more responsive and speedier than before. The navigation bar now slides out with a punch. All the options in the sidebar like Messages, Events, Grou

IBM has been shipping computers for more than 65 years, and it is finally on the verge of creating a true electronic brain. Big Blue is announcing today that it, along with four universities and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have created the basic design of an experimental computer chip  that emulates the way the brain processes information. IBM’s so-called cognitive computing chips could one day simulate and emulate the brain’s ability to sense, perceive, interact and recognize — all tasks that humans can currently do much better than computers can. Dharmendra Modha (pictured below right) is the principal investigator of the DARPA project, called Synapse (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics, or SyNAPSE). He is also a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. “This is the seed for a new generation of computers, using a combination of supercomputing, neuroscience, and nanotechnology,” Modha said in