Hardware

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Google announced the Patent Purchase Promotion, an experimental initiative to fight the phenomenon of patent trolling, the use of patents for the sole purpose of restricting competition and to obtain money through lawsuits or through agreements following threats of such actions. In this case, Google asked holders of American patents willing to sell them to submit their requests with the price. That’s meant to prevent them from ending up in the hands of patent trolls.

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Nokia announced that it reached an agreement to buy Alcatel-Lucent for 15.6 billion Euros (about $16.6 billion) in a share exchange. In the end Alcatel-Lucent’s shareholders will own 33.5% of the combined share capital while Nokia’s shareholders will own the remaining 66.5%. The company involved is the “true” Nokia, not the Devices & Services unit sold to Microsoft in 2013.

IBM Chef Watson website home page

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In recent years, IBM has been adapting the technology of its cognitive computing system Watson to many different activities. Lately, it’s also launching Chef Watson, a version of this intelligence artificial that specializes in inventing new recipes. The idea is to get it to recognize people’s tastes to provide customized recipes.

Cognitive computing aims to reproduce human thought. In the case of recipes, the process is called “cognitive cooking”. For the training necessary to make it learn this art, Chef Watson analyzed thousands of recipes including the database of 9,000 recipes of the magazine “Bon Appétit” and studied the Wikipedia files to learn associations among different ingredients and different cuisines.

A 3D NAND Die with an M.2 SSD (Image courtesy Intel. All rights reserved)

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Intel and Micron have announced a new technology for the production of 3D NAND flash memory. With its 32 layers of flash cells, it will allow to get a storage capacity three times higher than competitor NAND technologies in a “die”, a block of semiconductor material on which electronic circuits were created, of standard size. The result are 256 GB dies in the MLC (Multi Level Cell) type and 384 GB in the (Triple Level Cell) type.