President Barack Obama has signed an executive order calling for the United States to build the world’s fastest computer by 2025.

The supercomputer would be 20 times quicker than the current leading machine, which is in China.

It would be capable of making one quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second – a figure which is known as one exaflop.

A body called the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) will be set up to research and build the computer.
The US is seeking the new supercomputer, significantly faster than today’s models, to perform complex simulations and aid scientific research.

It is hoped the machine would help to analyse weather data for more accurate forecasts or assist in cancer diagnoses by analysing X-ray images.

It could allow NASA scientists to model turbulence, which might enable the design of more streamlined aircraft without the need for extensive wind tunnel testing.
Such a computer would be called an ‘exascale’ machine.
Today’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2 in China’s National Computer Centre, Guangzhou, performs at 33.86 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second), almost twice as fast as the second-quickest machine, which is American. Watch out BRICS…here comes OBAMA!

GOOGLE PROJECT LOON
to provide free internet across Sri Lanka

Google’s ambitious Project Loon, which aims to provide free internet through a network of high-altitude balloons, is to be launched in Sri Lanka.
A deal between Sri Lanka’s government and Google, signed on last Tuesday, will see free LTE connections made available across the country by March 2016, making it the first country in the world to have universal internet access.
Sri Lanka is to become first country to have universal internet access through Google’s Project Loon
Sri Lanka is on its way to becoming the very first country in the world to have network connectivity cover the entire country.

Reasons why Microsoft Edge is a better browser than Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is the oldest browser on the market, with a lineage dating back to 1995. And in that 20-year-old browser there’s a lot of 20-year-old code, supporting a lot of standards that are no longer in use. At the same time, new technologies and standards evolved for browsers, and IE has proved to be a laggard.
So it was high time for a clean-sheet redesign -a whole new browser from the bottom up. And with Windows 10, we get it, in the form of Microsoft Edge.
(Yes, Microsoft wants us to keep that ‘Microsoft’ in there, just as Google does with ‘Google Chrome’).
Here’s what I think you’ll find most exciting in Microsoft’s brand new browser.

New rendering engine
Microsoft Edge will come with a new rendering engine (Microsoft EdgeHTML) to replace the Trident engine that powered Internet Explorer for decades. The result should be that webpages appear on the screen a lot faster.

Better security
Microsoft Edge does a bunch of little, behind-the-scenes things to make browsing the Web safer. For example, it renders each individual page inside a “sandbox” — so if there happens to be malicious software on a page, it won’t be able to break out of that page’s browser process to do anything like access your hard drive.
Microsoft Edge also implements some new Internet security standards, including HTTP Strict Transport Security (to make Web connections more secure) and HTML 5 Content Security Policy (to protect against cross-site scripting attacks). So long IE…Welcome Edge!