TechWatch

Kinoma Create is the JavaScript-powered construction kit for makers, professional product designers, and web developers with no prior hardware experience.

With Kinoma Create, you can create personal projects, consumer electronics, and Internet of Things prototypes more quickly and easily than ever before.

It's designed to be the fastest way to go from a product concept to a fully realized, Internet-connected prototype.

Bare boards like Arduino and Raspberry Pi are amazing for their audience — we love these products and all the wonderful projects they have inspired. Kinoma Create was designed to enable a broader audience to join the party. It lets you make all the same sorts of things, but helps you skip the tedious and difficult details to get straight to the fun stuff.

Why is Kinoma Create especially good at prototyping smart consumer electronics and Internet of Things devices? Because they share the need to talk to other devices, phones, and tablets, to connect to sensors in order to interact with their environment, and to talk with web services. And Kinoma Create makes all of that simple.

Going where few password crackers have gone before, a team of security consultants has deployed a cracking-optimized computer that's completely submerged in mineral oil. Members say the setup offers significant cost savings compared with the same machine that uses air to stay cool.

The rig contains two AMD Radeon 6990 graphics cards, long considered a workhorse for password crackers. While the parallel processing in just one of these $800 cards can make as many as 9 billion password guesses each second (see PC3 in the graph at the bottom of this page), the performance comes at a price. GPUs run extremely hot, particularly when combined with other graphics cards, which drives up the cost of keeping them cool enough to run without burning out. The dedicated fans normally used to keep them cool also generate plenty of noise.

Teaching children the basics of computer science isn’t as simple as teaching them to tie their shoes. How often do you see a parent sitting down with their kids, walking them through a line of code or pointing out the components of a motherboard? Probably never. Because kids think it’s boring. And parents think it’s hard. Today, children grow up surrounded by shiny objects that look and act like magic. There are screens that respond to touch and computers that can do just about anything a five-year-old can dream up. But even though kids have been immersed in technology since birth, it’s rare for them to actually know how it works.