Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for.

However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me.

To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

Fusion-io, a designer of high-end solid-state drive (SSD) solutions, announced this week that it would deploy custom installations based on its ioMemory technology at two presently undisclosed government organizations. Each deployment consists of hundreds of terabytes of solid-state storage capacity and is capable of sustaining over 1TB/s of aggregate bandwidth with access latencies under 50ms.

The extreme performance achievements were made possible by Fusion-io’s development of the ioDrive Octal card, a custom PCI Express card. The device holds eight ioMemory Modules – putting the equivalent capacity and performance of eight ioDrives into a single card. The ioDrive Octal fits any PCI Express 2.0 x16 double-wide slot, the same as those used for high performance graphics cards, and it is capable of saturating the full performance of that slot. The ioDrive Octal again demonstrates the flexibility, performance and scalability of Fusion’s ioMemory architecture, the core technology that powers all the company’s enterprise products.

Achieving a 1TB/s sustained bandwidth with existing storage technologies requires close to 55 440 disk drives, 396 SAN controllers, 792 I/O servers and 132 racks of equipment. Fusion-io can achieve this same bandwidth with a mere 220 ioDrive Octal cards, housed in Infiniband-attached I/O servers running the Lustre parallel file system. This 1TB/s Fusion-io based solution requires six racks or less than 1/20th the rack space of an equivalent, high-performance, hard disk drive-based storage system.

“We were eager to take on the challenge of creating a device that meets the intense demands of high performance computing. With this architecture, IOPS are easy. We achieved over a hundred million IOPS, more than enough performance to meet our customer’s requirements. The real power in our architecture was the ability to also scale bandwidth. We look forward to productizing the ioDrive Octal in the future, and bringing the power of this solid-state storage technology from the world of HPC to the enterprise,” said Steve Wozniak, chief scientist at Fusion-io.

Specifications of ioDrive Octal look as follows:

• 800,000 IOPS (4k packet size);
• 6 GB/s bandwidth;
• 5 TB maximum capacity;
• PCIe x16 2.0 double-wide PCI Express form factor.

ROSEVILLE, Calif. - The original Apple-1 computer has been called the Holy Grail of vintage machines and a California man has one for sale.

The computer, handmade by Apple founder Steve Jobs, was sold in small batches back in 1976.

By today's standards it looks downright primitive. But Jesse Sackman knows it's also a collectors item and he wants $50,000 for his model on eBay.

"It's a museum piece and in demand all over the world," said Sackman.

Sackman says he's selling his Apple-1 with its original packing for financial reasons.

"I hate that I have to, it's very hard for me," said Sackman.

The computer even comes with a typed letter from Steve Jobs to the original buyer of the Apple-1 who wanted his money back because it didn't come with a keyboard or monitor. In the letter, Jobs explains to the buyer how to connect it.

Bidding ends Sunday. So far there are no online bids on the computer.

EBay has completed its sale of Skype for about $2 billion to an investor group that included the founders of the Internet phone service.

Last week, the online auction site settled a legal skirmish with co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis which allowed the deal to move forward. The settlement gave Skype ownership of critical software that had been licensed from the company they founded, Joltid Ltd.

Ebay said Thursday it sold a 70 percent stake in the company for about $1.9 billion plus $125 million that it will receive at a later date. The company is keeping the remaining 30 percent stake.

The settlement means Zennstrom and Friis get a 14 percent stake in Skype. The investor group, led by Silver Lake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz, get 56 percent ownership.

San Jose, Calif.-based Ebay Inc. also purchased senior debt securities worth $50 million to help finance the deal.