The resources of those individual machines will then be pooled to create a massive computing "grid, " a virtual computer that is more powerful than the fastest supercomputers.
Adrenalyn lets today's kids do something like that online, where a player losing a computer competition sees his virtual card swallowed up and uploaded to the winner's account.
"For anyone who witnessed the onset of computers and the dawn of video games, 'Tron' spoke to a lot of us with concepts about what it was like to be inside a computer or a virtual world, " he said.
Once a design is set, different bits of the manufacturing process are tried out on computer: a virtual pipe-bending machine, for instance, makes sure that the fuel lines which snake their way through the airframe can be created without wrapping themselves around the machine and bringing it to a halt.
They are programmed into the virtual model as well, creating a detailed virtual city which anyone can navigate with the click of a computer mouse.
Students at Carnegie Mellon designed for us a computer-aided virtual locking system.
For those tracking the growing malicious elements on the Web, Chrome's innovation--and GreenBorder's contribution to the open-source browser--is a technology known as "sandboxing, " a tactic that limits Web applications' access to a computer's memory beyond a virtual border.
Like a motion-controlled video gaming system, the Virtual Music Instrument employs a camera that is mounted on a computer screen and aimed at someone, capturing their gestures.
In a step beyond the virtual pet Tamagotchi, computer simulations like the PlayStation game Tokimeki Memorial provide the lovelorn with the experience of dating a girl.
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The secure communication link is a virtual private network communication link over the computer network in which one or more data values that vary according to a pseudo-random sequence are inserted into each data packet.
Ms. Charlton of Clos-ette says a new feature she's including in recent designs is a "virtual styling tool" consisting of computer screens and iPads set up in the closet so people can work remotely with a stylist who has a visual inventory of their clothes to scroll through.
Three possibilities proposed by Cox: a "peer-to-peer" social network, a cluster of "virtual individual servers" running on a cloud service such as Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud, and "hybrid decentralization, " a mix of the two approaches.
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By pulling apart the hardware and software of a computer, the technology allows multiple virtual machines to share the same hardware resources without conflict.
To process the MRI data, a computer overlaid on Pickens' brain a virtual three-dimensional grid of 50, 000 cubes called voxels (a word hinting at volume and pixels).
To do this, you could run a "Monte Carlo simulation" in which you plug historical weather data into a computer and then roll a pair of virtual dice 10, 000 times.
His researchers are working on virtual stores for a retail firm and a three-dimensional computer version of the city of Coventry for use by architects and planners in local government.
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As those tools are manipulated by a student, the computer works out where they are inside the virtual body and then tells the motors how much resistance to put up when he tries to move them.
He has explored crystal growth, and developed, with a specialist in nature-related algorithms, a 3-D program mimicking the way crystals actually grow over millions of years (with this particular program, he and the scientists he has been working with made virtual crystals grow directly on a ring-like structure on their computer, almost instantly, then manufactured them with a 3-D printer).
Game players tend to be early adapters of any new technology, from specialized high-speed graphics chip sets to surround-sound computer speakers, that promises a more complete immersion in the virtual world.
They met in 1984 at a Ben Rosen-Esther Dyson computer conference and started going on "virtual dates" by driving to the same movie at the same time in different cities and discussing it on their cell phones.
One online firm, Plenus, runs a popular web portal called NetMarble which does a good business selling everything from virtual hats and handbags to virtual plastic surgery for computer avatars.
That opens up the possibility of putting virtual objects into the real world, letting you "pick up" a computer-generated 3D architectural model and spin it around in your hand, for instance, or gesture to control a virtual display appearing on an actual wall.
Since drug molecules can also be represented by computer models, it will eventually be possible to throw a huge range of virtual compounds at a virtual heart to see which, if any, have the desired effect.
The committee's report, A Fresh Start For Cancer, suggests the creation of a "virtual" National Cancer Institute, which will link all the smaller centres in Britain by computer.
So they conducted a "virtual teardown" to come up with an estimate of what it costs to build the tablet computer Apple Chief Steve Jobs announced last month.
Dr Swade, agreed that this was the correct approach and said a virtual recreation of the machine could solve "95% of problems" and allow them to use computer to design the thousands of individual parts needed to make the behemoth.
If you've been wondering what all the Google this, Glass that fuss is all about, Mountain View's revealed what it'll be like to actually port a pair of its upcoming virtual specs with a new video, now that it's announced limited availability of the wearable computer.
Google, by its configuration of hundreds of thousands of commodity servers into a massive, parallel, virtual supercomputer used for search, has worked out, by intent or accident, the enterprise computer platform of the future.
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