But with the combination of mobile devices and the cloud, the momentum is clearly going in the direction of computing without the computer.

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But as the U.S. economy sputters and companies transfer their IT needs from the desktop to virtualized data centers and to the Web, one computer giant is moving its enterprise products in a new direction: slimmer and cheaper.

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When wearing a pair of goggles fitted with small video screens, one of Dr Viirre's subjects has the impression of standing within a computer-generated panorama, which can be examined in any direction in real time.

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Or Apple could be about to strike out in a radically different direction than the one that has guided the rest of the computer industry towards cheaper, less capable versions of notebook computers.

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"While the ice is disappearing faster than the computer models indicate, both observations and the models point in the same direction: the Arctic is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace and the impact of greenhouse gases is growing, " said co-author Marika Holland of NCAR.

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After helping users figure out how to use new devices from iMacs to iPods to iPhones for so long, perhaps Apple now knows personal computer users are ready to put down the mouse, and point towards a new direction, on their own.

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These thin magnetic films can be manipulated to trigger vastly different signals, depending upon which direction they face, allowing them to be read as the ones or zeros of basic computer code.

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The information is shown as location trails on a computer screen map, down to a level of detail which shows on which side of the street and in which direction a person is moving.

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