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Comment Re:Finally (Score 1) 575

An interesting alternative is "Molten salt reactor" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor). There are, at least, two videos from google tech talks about them: Liquid Fluoride Reactors: A New Beginning for an Old Idea (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So) and The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8&feature=channel_page).

Supercomputing

Submission + - IBM Computer Breaks Petaflop Processing Barrier

edesio writes: SAN FRANCISCO -(Dow Jones)- A supercomputer developed by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has become the first so-called petaflop computer, processing more than one thousand trillion calculations per second.

See http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200806091322DOWJONESDJONLINE000438_FORTUNE5.htm for more information.

Feed Science Daily: We Remember Bad Times Better Than Good (sciencedaily.com)

Do you remember exactly where you were when you learned of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? Your answer is probably yes, and researchers are beginning to understand why we remember events that carry negative emotional weight. Her research shows that whether an event is pleasurable or aversive seems to be a critical determinant of the accuracy with which the event is remembered, with negative events being remembered in greater detail than positive ones.
AMD

Submission + - AMD claims the Barcelona = 170% faster than Xeon! (techarp.com)

crazyeyes writes: "Less than two weeks before Barcelona is launched, we had the opportunity to talk to the guy who's supposed to make it a big financial success — John Freude, AMD's Worldwide Business Development Manager for Server/Workstation Products.

John sure had some interesting numbers to tell us, as well as some updates on Phenom and even Budapest. Check out these updates from AMD. There will be more to come. Here's a quote from the editorial :-

"Because they are under NDA, he cannot reveal the actual results, but he gave us some interesting indications of how the Barcelona will eventually fare against an equivalent Intel processor.

— 20-30% better performance overall
— 170% better performance in some benchmarks

More importantly, he says, the Quad-Core Opteron (Barcelona) will offer 45-85% better performance than current dual-core Opteron processors at the same power consumption and thermal dissipation. Intel quad-core processors, on the other hand, only offer 30-35% better performance (11% in floating point) than their dual-core processors with a 23-25% increase in power consumption and thermal dissipation."
"

Programming

Submission + - Linux device development

An anonymous reader writes: Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who leads the development of several kernel subsystems including USB and PCI, admits that his January offer of free Linux device driver development was "marketing hype" — but says it has brought companies and developers together anyway. http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;58590129 ;fp;16;fpid;0
Communications

Submission + - New Cable Modem to Triple Internet Speed

BlueMorpho writes: "That's right-optical fiber-to-the-home service had previously offered the fastest available connection for residential Internet. The best-known example is the FiOS service from Verizon Communications, which peaks at 50 megabits per second.

But the cable industry has recently taken the wraps off new cable modem technology that exceeds the FiOS speed by a factor of more than three. Called the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) 3.0, it allows data throughput of as much as 160 megabits.

http://www.livescience.com/technology/070522_cable _modem.html"
Power

Submission + - Energy efficiency in the data center

jcatcw writes: In Computerworld's Grill, Rocky Mountain Insitute's Amory B. Lovins claims that a watt of energy saved is worth $20 to $27 to a business and that U.S. data centers are missing comprehensive integration of efficiency technologies that are available.

The next big step will be when one or more major operators puts all these parts together to realize the ninefold or greater savings that we outlined. In fact, I now think we can do even better, because both the IT and the support equipment are proving to be more efficient than we thought possible.
Google

Submission + - Google loses cache-copyright lawsuit in Belgium

acroyear writes: "A court in Belgium found that Google's website caching policies are a violation of that nation's copyright laws, claiming that Google's cache offers effectively "free" access to articles that, while free initially, are archived charged for via subscriptions. Google claims that they only store "short extracts, but the court determined that's still a violation. The court found, "We confirm that the activities of Google News, the reproduction and publication of headlines as well as short extracts, and the use of Google's cache, the publicly available data storage of articles and documents, violate the law on authors' rights.""

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