Archive for November 16, 2009
MC Hammer: STOP… The Music Piracy Crackdown
Nov 16th
MC Hammer, rap phenomenon and self-confessed geek, has kicked the major music labels in their over-sized pants with regard to their anti-piracy strategy. Hammer said that the labels’ decision to go after individual filesharers and ISPs has failed, because it only alienated paying customers.
http://torrentfreak.com/mc-hammer-stop-the-music-piracy-crackdown-091116/
Apple tablet speculation: high-end graphics, several models
Nov 16th
Amplifying the buzz for Apple’s long-rumored tablet device, a new report suggests the hardware will include a high-end graphics card to produce a picture with “stunning resolution.”
Cray blows by IBM to regain supercomputing crown
Nov 16th
The upgraded Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, now boasts a speed of 1.759 petaflops from its 224,162 cores, while the IBM Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico slowed slightly to 1.042 petaflops after it was repartitioned. A petaflop is one thousand trillion calculations per second.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/111609-two-rival-supercomputers-duke-it.html
Windows 7 tool violates GPL; Microsoft will open source it
Nov 16th
After looking at the code in question, we are now able to confirm this was indeed the case, although it was not intentional on our part. While we had contracted with a third party to create the tool, we share responsibility as we did not catch it as part of our code review process. We have furthermore conducted a review of other code provided through the Microsoft Store and this was the only incident of this sort we could find.
Wow, AMD better than Intel (it’s official)
Nov 16th
It’s time, once again, for the Top 500 list of speedy supercomputers. AMD is crowing that the first four are powered by its chips. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers dissect the list and marvel at the big numbers.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/15102/wow_amd_better_than_intel_its_official
Google Could Double Web Speeds With SPDY Protocol
Nov 16th
So Google is developing a new protocol, dubbed SPDY (pronounced speedy). SPDY is designed, from the ground up, to handle modern Web apps that transfer several smaller files. Without getting too technical, SPDY is able to handle multiple streams of data at once and prioritize on the fly.
http://www.switched.com/2009/11/14/google-looks-to-boost-web-speeds-with-spdy/
Fusion-io ioXtreme PCI Express SSD Review
Nov 16th
With some help from Fusion-io and Windows Perfmon utility, we determined that ATTO was actually wrapping performance readings back around, for transfer rates hitting 1GB/sec and higher. In fact the ioXtreme RAID 0 pair chalked up what looked like 300MB/sec in some of the larger file transfers of the test, but in reality was pushing 1.3GB/sec (or 1300MB/sec) though the bar graphs and numbers were only showing the 300MB/sec or so, for read throughput. For write performance, we did observe in excess of 600MB/sec of available throughput in RAID 0 mode with a pair of ioXtreme drives.
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-ioXtreme-PCI-Express-SSD-Review/?page=4
Russia Gives MW2 Cold Shoulder
Nov 16th
The Russian government is apparently not a fan of how the country is represented in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, as all copies of the console version of the game have been recalled from stores.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/11/16/russia-gives-mw2-cold-shoulder
Mark Cuban’s Plan to Kill Google
Nov 16th
Mark Cuban, the eccentric owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, has a post in his blog this week suggesting a way to kill Google by paying the top one thousand most popular sites $1M each to leave the Google Index. He wonders if Rupert Murdoch’s plan to leave the Google Index could mark the beginning of a full-scale exodus from Google, one which could be expedited with some cash payoffs from Microsoft. Now, I’m no legal expert, but it seems to me that such a ploy would not fly with the government, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it would. Why would you want to wipe out Google?
