SolarCanine - Slashdot User

Sign up for the Slashdot newsletter! OR check out the new Slashdot job board to browse remote jobs or jobs in your area

Do you develop on GitHub? You can keep using GitHub but automatically sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with this tool so your projects have a backup location, and get your project in front of SourceForge's nearly 20 million monthly users. It takes less than a minute. Get new users downloading your project releases today!

274263 feed

Feed Engadget: Calvin College duo creates cheap, portable supercomputer (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Sunday September 02, 2007 @09:52AM

Filed under: Desktops

Just months after scientists were able to run a quantum computer simulation on an everyday PC, we're now hearing that a Calvin College student / professor tandem have created an inexpensive, portable supercomputer for crunching massive chunks of data on the go (and on the cheap). Dubbed Microwulf, the wee beast is hailed as a "machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet," and when not being checked as baggage on a flight, can reportedly process 26.25 gigaflops of data per second. The system itself touts "four dual-core motherboards connected by an eight-port gigabit Ethernet switch," and when initially constructed, it cost just $2,470 to build. Talk about a solid price-to-performance ratio.

[Via Slashdot]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

274235 submission

Submission + - Bandwidth could be a new global 'currency'

Submitted by

techoon

on Sunday September 02, 2007 @08:40AM

techoon writes: "Bandwidth could become a form of "currency" with users paying for downloaded files by uploading more data themselves, researchers say. The goal is to ensure that future content, particularly video, is distributed as fairly and efficiently as possible.Computer scientists have have used the idea to develop peer-to-peer file-sharing software, which they are asking computer users to try out. They hope eventually to create a "global marketplace in bandwidth", where people can trade it as a commodity."

274217 submission

Submission + - The largest (distributed) supercomputer ...

Submitted by RockDoctor on Sunday September 02, 2007 @08:13AM

RockDoctor writes: Peter Gutmann at Auckland, New Zealand has made some estimates about what is probably the world's largest (distributed) supercomputer. Details are somewhat shady, not because of the secrecy habits of the spooks, or a government's desire to surveil it's citizens. No, the people who've built this (distributed) supercomputer are shadowy because they're simply criminals. The continuing Storm Worm botnet now seems to contain between 1 and 10 million computers, and with a broad-brush estimate of the likely machines involved he comes up with a description of a system that dwarfs all the largest publicly-described supercomputers of the world. I have my suspicions that the estimated "average" computer specification considered is somewhat over-the-top (I'd have to weld together at least two of the machines in my flat to even approach this specification, and I'd have to weld together at least 4 of the best video card in the house), but with an 8-fold difference in processor count between StormWorm and BlueGene/L , there's a lot of room for Gutmann to be both correct and on the low side in his estimates.
With a system like this, is it credible that they (the criminals running this system) are planning for example, to try breaking SSL-encrypted communications in real time?

2638335 comment

Comment Re:Class Action risk for using Microsoft's Product (Score 1) 113

by SolarCanine on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @09:16AM (#18939519) Attached to: Exposing Bots In Big Companies

In any company that's running 100,000 desktops, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that automatic patching is enabled on them - Corporate IT better damn well be reviewing those patches in a controlled environment and then rolling them out after they've been shown to conform to corporate standards and are safe in that network context.

1488001 story

The NYT's OS-Restrictive Video Policies 223

Posted by Zonk on Monday August 28, 2006 @02:40AM from the could-be-an-oversight dept.

ro1 writes to mention a story on Linux.com about the NYT's confusing video policies. Essentially, if you're running Linux you can only see videos running on the front page of the site; videos elsewhere on the site require Windows or OSX. Roblimo has a video tour of the NYT site to explain the issue in detail. (Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.)

Slashdot Top Deals