...way off base...

Well played.

Before anyone else asks what I was about to, the full title of the article is: $1,279-per-hour, 30,000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud

How does that compare to the cost-per-core-hour for other Amazon EC2 offerings? Is this a value meal deal or just a lot of burgers?

There is an IBM patent on nano-stamping (which I can't seem to locate due to all the other IBM and stamping patents) which describes a technique developed after noticing that very small errors were being reproduced from the CD plate repeatably in the final produced CDs. I was reading this article at least 8 years ago.

So it is going to be a really big private network...

They should call it...I-WAN.

Don't cross the streams! ... but seriously. What kind of name is that? No one is going to call it Nintendo Stream, they'll call it Wii 2 or Wii Stream. All the work of name recognition that was done for the Wii will have to be done again for this new system unless they come up with a 'backwards compatible' name. Rumors and speculation, the article says.

Being based on an AMD Fusion platform, however, maybe they want to move the programming model toward using 'stream processors' and have computation on the GPU as well. Then again, this is my own rumor and speculation. The stream-to-touchscreen controllers sound like the Dreamcast VMU brought into the future.

I am just now preparing to replace that motherboard because the SATA stuff is crapping out and not booting successfully about 3 out of 4 times. I have a socket 939 dual-core Toledo with the ULi M1695/M1567 chipset that allowed for the AGP (Radeon 9800 XT) and later PCIe video (nVidia 8800 GTX).

While I didn't take advantage of it, there was the future CPU expansion slot that provided the upgrade path you mentioned but I never found anyone selling the actual socket. Still, an interesting and forward-thinking design.

Great board, I wish there was a good replacement available but the prices have gone down and come back up, so I may as well get myself into a quad- or hex-core on a motherboard with USB3... Still, it served me very well for the last 4 years.

I purchased a G1 from eBay and was lucky enough to get an extended battery (but not the back cover) and I successfully used it for wifi-only development for about 1.5 years. It worked out pretty well, the keyboard held up during that time, and aside from the slower processor speed, I was able to do what I wanted to do without much issue. The GPS acquisition time was much slower than my then-gf's MyTouch 3G, but I suspect the better hardware as well as some hints from the cell signal were responsible for that.

The only problem I had was that my particular device (or the way I did it) wasn't quite compatible with the CyanogenMod Froyo firmware and was unstable, froze and/or crashed a lot. I'd give it another try but I can't make it boot and haven't been back to the recovery console since I bought my G2 (soon to be AT&T-Mobile, grumble).

I was wondering how best to take long exposure images and not have the dark areas be over-exposed a while ago and I just came across this light-painting plugin for the video editor KDEnlive: http://www.kdenlive.org/users/granjow/light-graffiti-2nd Their plugin demo video is pretty neat and I would assume could be applied to video that has already been filmed and properly modified to enhance the brighter areas.

It'll probably be covered by health insurance, even though birth control still typically won't be.

Is this the same budget that is proposing cutting to zero the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? These programs provide far more social good and support democracy (a viewpoint I am still not quite jaded about, yet). There are so many other places to cut and other sources of tax revenue that should be explored long before this is considered. There are projects that the Pentagon doesn't even want but are still funded. Maybe the cast of Sesame Street should show up in DC and TEACH THEM SOME MATH.

What, no one is making the obvious oil / Euler joke? Tough crowd.

Funny you should mention this... There was widespread talk about using 'white hat worms' to patch systems infected with Code Red and Nimda, both enabled by bugs in MS products. The idea was that it would remove and patch infected/compromised systems and inoculate systems that had not yet been targeted.

I'm pretty sure there have been ideas floated around to distribute vaccines through alternate means similar to what MS is trying to patent.

This is why the markets creep up on almost no volume and everyone wonders why stocks drop so quickly when someone sells a large enough block of stocks. These programs are the reason for the 'flash crash' and not the ridiculous 'typo by a trader' explanation. The argument of 'providing liquidity' doesn't really seem like it has that much value for a normal investor. It's robots all the way down!