These days, software spending is increasing at twice the rate of hardware spending, as businesses struggle to make their new computers work better.

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These concerns have grown after Windows 8, which is designed to make PCs work more like tablet computers, was greeted with mixed reviews at its launch last October.

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The long-term goal is to build robots that will make people more productive at home and at work, just as personal computers do today, Wyrobek says.

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The non-profit organisation offers residents state-of-the-art computers and courses to build their literacy and computer skills, work on their CVs or make money as Web designers.

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The fact that many of these work computers could be laptops taken home in the evening and during the weekend could make the problem of spotting smut much more difficult.

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While Professor O'Brien said he is confident that such waveguides are the logical choice for future optical quantum computers, he added that there is still a significant amount of work to do before they make it out of the laboratory.

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On Tuesday, the company debuted tools on the video service, Brightcove, that spread the work of delivering video files among many users' computers at once, a process designed to make streaming video faster, cheaper and more reliable.

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This concentration of fire is achieved by a combination of programming that causes an individual computer to make repeated requests as fast as it can and the ganging together of as many computers as possible to undertake this work at the same time.

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