Brazilians go nuts for grid computing

Underwater tiger wows crowds at California park

Underwater tiger wows crowds at California park

shouldn't be tigers post? lol

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For whomever can use this info:

Courtesy of SlickDeals, 1GB (1 x 1GB) DDR2-667/PC2-5300 Desktop Memory $16 After $40 Rebate.

I'm in for 2GB for $32 (free s/h, no tax), for my current (ly 1GB (2 x 512MB)) Compaq Presario sr2030nx.

Guess maybe i can even fleaBay the old 512MB modules, to reduce even further the cost of the RAM upgrade.

Hope Rosie will like the extra RAM.....

Russian trouble makers find Quicken backdoor

"Perhaps Intuit included the Quicken backdoor to make it possible for the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), FBI, CIA, or other law-enforcement and forensics organizations to use an "escrow key" to gain entry into password-protected Quicken files."

Memory received (HP branded, Micron memory modules), installed, and functional. Ram on desktop doubled from 1gb to 2gb, for after rebate cost of $32.

NOW I'm ready for those memory-intensive Rosie wu's.....

For whomever can use this info:

Courtesy of SlickDeals, 1GB (1 x 1GB) DDR2-667/PC2-5300 Desktop Memory $16 After $40 Rebate.

I'm in for 2GB for $32 (free s/h, no tax), for my current (ly 1GB (2 x 512MB)) Compaq Presario sr2030nx.

Guess maybe i can even fleaBay the old 512MB modules, to reduce even further the cost of the RAM upgrade.

Hope Rosie will like the extra RAM.....

IBM breaks the petaflop barrier

IBM RECKONS ITS new supercomputer, Blue Gene/P trebles the performance of its predecessor, the current fastest supercomputer in the world, Blue Gene/L.

The firm claims to have built a one-petaflop system with 294,912-processors in a 72-rack system, harnessed to a high-speed, optical network. It says the Blue Gene/P system design can be scaled up to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to deliver three petaflops.

One petaflop is one-quadrillion operations per second. IBM says the system is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than the combined power of a stack of laptop computers nearly 1.5 miles high.

Four IBM (850 MHz) PowerPC 450 processors are integrated on a single Blue Gene/P chip. Each chip is capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. A two-foot-by-two-foot board containing 32 of these chips churns out 435 billion operations every second, making it more powerful than a typical, 40-node cluster based on two-core commodity processors.

Thirty-two of the compact boards comprise the six-foot-high racks. Each rack runs at 13.9 trillion operations per second, 1,300 times faster than today's fastest home PC.

Gates no longer the richest man in the world?

The Microsoft Corp. chairman and co-founder has been overtaken on the world's richest list by Mexican telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim, according to a Mexican financial news service quoted by Reuters.

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Man flies 193 miles in lawn chair

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Checkers computer becomes invincible

Checkers champions, meet your match.

An invincible checkers-playing program named Chinook has solved a game whose origins date back several millennia, scientists reported Thursday on the journal Science's Web site. By playing out every possible move — about 500 billion billion in all — the computer proved it can never be beaten. Even if its opponent also played flawlessly, the outcome would be a draw.

Chinook, created by computer scientists from the University of Alberta in 1989, wrapped up its work less than three months ago. In doing so, its programmers say the newly crowned checkers king has solved the most challenging game yet cracked by a machine — even outdoing the chess-playing wizardry of IBM’s Deep Blue.

“The computation that I do today feeds into the computation that I do tomorrow,” he said, meaning that past errors must be detected and weeded out before they skew the entire computation going forward. Even a single mistake could scuttle months or years of work, requiring Schaeffer and his colleagues to monitor up to 200 computers working simultaneously — and recheck even mundane tasks like copying files onto discs.

“Typically, at least once a month there would be a disc error that would need to be detected and corrected,” he said. The team even had to contend with “bit rot,” which refers to the corruption of previously correct data through the gradual degradation of the computer disc containing the data.

Old lady surfing Web at 40 gigabits-per-second

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- She is a latecomer to the information superhighway, but 75-year-old Sigbritt Lothberg is now cruising the Internet with a dizzying speed.

Lothberg's 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection in Karlstad is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world, Karlstad city officials said.

In less than 2 seconds, Lothberg can download a full-length movie on her home computer -- many thousand times faster than most residential connections, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, head of the Karlstad city network unit.

Jonsson and Lothberg's son, Peter, worked together to install the connection.

The speed is reached using a new modulation technique that allows the sending of data between two routers placed up to 1,240 miles apart, without any transponders in between, Jonsson said.

"We wanted to show that that there are no limitations to Internet speed," he said.

Peter Lothberg, who is a networking expert, said he wanted to demonstrate the new technology while providing a computer link for his mother.

"She's a brand new Internet user," Lothberg said by phone from California, where he lives. "She didn't even have a computer before."

His mother isn't exactly making the most of her high-speed connection. She only uses it to read Web-based newspapers.

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New processors present problems, payoff

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by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles

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send your name to the moon http://lro.jhuapl.edu/NameToMoon/index.php

planetarium on your computer

locate stars planets and other night objects http://www.stellarium.org/