7836108
submission
Maria Williams writes:
The 2009 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Peter de Jager on the tenth anniversary of Y2K which he helped avert. This award is in recognition of his 1993 warning which alerted the world to the potential disaster that might have occurred on January 1, 2000 and his efforts in the following years to create global awareness of the problem, and the possible solutions. His presentations, articles, and more than 2,000 media interviews contributed significantly to the world's mobilization to avoid that fate.
7779200
submission
mr_sifter writes:
PC gamers love to obsess over whether PC gaming is dying, but bit-tech thinks it's time to look at the other side and examine if console gaming is really as secure as publishers would have us believe. All three console manufacturers suffered from the recession — this year, Sony announced its first net loss in 14 years; a stunning ¥989.9bn, which includes record losses of ¥58.5bn in its gaming sector. Microsoft also announced its first loss since it went public in 1986 in the second quarter of this financial year, with a $31 million US loss coming straight from the Entertainment and Devices division – i.e those responsible for the Xbox 360. Not even Nintendo has escaped the financial plague either, with sales of the Wii dropping by 67 percent in the US, 60 percent in Japan and 47 percent in the rest of the world. In addition to reduced profitability, casual games and the rise of the iPhone further suggest the current model is on its last legs.
7208726
submission
bennyboy64 writes:
The CSIRO will this week launch a new supercomputer which uses a cluster of GPUs [pictures] to gain a processing capacity that competes with supercomputers over twice its size.
The supercomputer is one of the world's first to combine traditional CPUs with the more powerful GPUs.
It features 100 Intel Xeon CPU chips and 50 Tesla GPU chips, connected to an 80 Terabyte Hitachi Data Systems network attached storage unit. CSIRO science applications have already seen 10-100x speedups on NVIDIA GPUs.
6384933
submission
fsufitch writes:
Kevin Maney wrote his new book "Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't", and came to NYU-Poly to lecture the engineering students there of the basics of his book. His theory of the trade-off between convenience and fidelity of a product or idea casts a light on the open source movement, and what kind of innovation Ubuntu in particular needs in order to be known and be popular.
6384525
submission
ChristW writes:
OpenMoko inc, of FreeRunner fame, proudly presents its new product: The WikiReader. It's a small form factor device that needs no internet connection to show Wikipedia articles. The articles are stored on an internal, removable uSD card. Needs 2 AAA batteries to run. The company claims that it can run up to a year on one set of batteries.
