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IBM demonstrates Deep Thunder weather app on iPad
Almost everyone knows about Deep Blue, the chess playing supercomputer. But have you heard of its counterpart Deep Thunder? If you haven't, you will, because it may be coming to iOS as an iPad app, says IBM in an IdeaLab article on the Talking Points Memo website. Deep Thunder, like Deep Blue, is a parallel processing supercomputing system. Instead of chess, Deep Thunder is designed to assist with weather forecasting. It takes weather data from a variety of sources like the NOAA and the USGS and crunches that data to provide a detailed weather forecast. IBM says Deep Thunder "allows for an unprecedented granular look at incoming weather over an 84-hour period in a specific location, down to within a square mile, much more detailed than any other current weather forecast can provide." Not only would this be fantastic for iOS users, it would also be useful for landscapers and other people whose jobs are influenced by the weather. There's no timetable for release, but Talking Points Memo did see a working, but rudimentary version of the app.
Talking Points Memo sees Windows visitors decline, Mac and iOS users soar
The progressive left-leaning political news site Talking Points Memo issued an interesting set of (non-partisan) statistics that shows just how much the share of total devices running Microsoft Windows has declined in the last five years. As you can see from the chart above, in 2006 78% of visitors to TPM were using devices running some flavor of Windows (blue line). Total share of Windows devices started a rapid decline in the years that followed, thanks mostly in part to the increasing popularity of Macs (red line). By 2009, Windows devices had fallen 13% while Mac devices rose by 10%. But what's really interesting is what started to happen in 2009. With the rise of mobile devices like the iPhone 3G, mobile visits (green line) to the site skyrocketed from 3% in 2009 to 14% in 2011. More interesting is that mobile devices continued to take a huge chunk away from Windows devices. While Mac usage on the site only declined 2% between 2009-2011, Windows usage took a big dip, going from 65% to 57%. TPM does note that the sites visitors tend to slant towards the Mac-favoring side anyway, but still founder Josh Marshall rightly points out that that the decline of visitors running a Microsoft OS from 78% in 2006 to only 57% is huge. TPM further notes that the breakdown of mobile OS traffic is about 77% iOS and 23% all other mobile OSs. When you combine the 28% OS X traffic with the iOS traffic, devices that use an Apple OS account for a whopping 40% of the site's traffic. Not bad for a company that only had a 20% share of the traffic just five years ago. [via Daring Fireball]
