As Samsung’s Galaxy Gear commercial illustrates, the desire for a truly smart wrist-worn device is as old as the electronics industry itself. We’ve lusted after smart watches for so long that we’ve melded the two words into one utopian noun: a smartwatch. 2013 has been an undeniably good year for smartwatch enthusiasts. From the successful Kickstarter project that gave birth to the Pebble to Samsung and Sony’s most sincere efforts to commercialize the category, the buyer’s choice has never been wider. And that trend’s only set to continue, with Nokia, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all actively eyeing the wearable device category.
Even as we keep advancing toward the end goal, however, much progress remains to be made. Prices are still…
Read more at The Verge
The road to exascale computing will require substantial public investment. But that expense must be measured against the enormous long-term costs our nation will face if we abandon our quest for leadership in high-performance computing.
It’s been interesting to watch which components of Sun Microsystems’ portfolio of products–many of which were open source projects–Oracle has chosen to embrace or abandon since its acquisition of Sun. One project that it hasn’t jettisoned is VirtualBox, which has just arrived in 
