dteichman2 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google is on a buying spree (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

jbrodkin

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @06:58PM

jbrodkin writes: "Google bought two companies this week, may soon buy a third, and that's not even including the pending DoubleClick acquisition. It's a continuation of a busy 12 months in which Google has agreed to 11 acquisitions of companies and technologies, several of which have bolstered the search engine leader in its competition with Microsoft. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/053107-googl e.html"

Submission + - Microwulf: A Personal, Portable Beowulf Cluster (calvin.edu)

Submitted by

Joel Adams

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @05:46PM

Joel Adams writes: "Tim Brom and I recently completed Microwulf — a personal, portable Beowulf cluster measuring just 11" (W) x 12" (D) x 17" (H), making it small enough to sit on one's desk and be easily transported. The total cost of the system (using January 2007 prices) was $2470. The design consists of a "double-decker sandwich" of four MicroATX motherboards and AMD64 X2 CPUs, providing a total of 8 processing cores that communicate via Gigabit Ethernet. Software includes Ubuntu Linux, OpenMPI, MPICH, and assorted free high performance apps that run on top of MPI. The system is air-cooled and draws just 450 watts of power under load, so it can be plugged into a wall outlet.

Microwulf produces 26.25 Gflops of measured, double-precision performance on the standard supercomputing benchmark HP Linpack (using Goto BLAS). That gives Microwulf a price/performance ratio of $94.10/Gflop, or less than $0.10/Mflop. These ratios reflect measured performance for double-precision floating point operations, not (sales hype) peak performance or (rarely used in high performance computing) single-precision floating point operations. Microwulf's power/performance ratio is a fairly efficient 17.14 watts/Gflop under load.

At this size and price, a person can afford to have a personal Beowulf cluster on his or her desk. For those who want to build one, the design details and pictures are available at the project website. The design is easily tweaked to incorporate quad-core and many-core CPUs, as they become available and affordable. It will be fun in the coming years to see how low people can drive the price/performance and power/performance ratios by building similar systems using these new CPUs. Microwulf costs under $0.10/Mflop; who will be the first to build a general purpose cluster for under $0.01/Mflop?"

Submission + - The Dangers of Non-Secular Morality (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

IConrad01

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @05:18PM

IConrad01 writes: "The Dangers of Non-Secular Morality: an op/ed piece by a technophile libertarian (yours truly) that attempts to discuss (and document) precisely how it is that allowing religion to define morality is harmful to society as a whole, addressing some of the mechanisms with which it (religion) does so."

Submission + - New Quality Footage of Loch Ness Monster

Submitted by jcgam69 on Thursday May 31, 2007 @04:18PM

jcgam69 writes: story: "I was minutes from going home and I had only gone up there to relax and enjoy the view when I saw something moving on the surface of the water so I dashed to get the camera. "It wasn't a wave because it was going in the opposite direction to the waves that I could see and the top half of it seemed to be black. "My camcorder was on a black and white setting and it took me a while to find it again in the water, but I've got two-and-half-minutes of footage which I have shown to experts and they think it is definitely a living creature." http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/news?articleid=291 3523 video: http://www.stv.tv/content/news/north_scotland/disp lay.html?id=opencms:/news/north_scotland/Man_belie ves_he_has_filmed_nessie

Submission + - New AACS Processing Key Found

Submitted by xaviel on Thursday May 31, 2007 @01:14PM

xaviel writes: From the post on http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=126404 "I guess its official now. The new Processing Key was posted by BtCB on freedom to tinker about a week ago (release day +1). its: Code: 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2 Save it. Store it. This opens up all newly released (and many to be released) HD DVD and Blu-ray discs. Wanna understand: go here. Regards, arnezami PS. I strongly advise everybody who knows how it was retrieved not to talk about it publicly. — Btw: To get a VUK you first need to get the Volume ID of the disc (there are several ways). If you have that you can use aacskeys with this Volume ID as input. — "

Submission + - Firefox 3 0.5a to be Released Tomorrow

Submitted by

dteichman2

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @08:14AM

dteichman2 writes: "According to the Firefox 3 Schedule (page down at time of writing, Google cache), the code was frozen last night and the official release announcement for Gran Paradiso alpha 5 will take place tomorrow. Of course, since the code's frozen, it's all ready to go for you bleeding-edgers (Mozilla pub FTP). At first glance, it seems relatively stable... just don't click an extension link twice."

Submission + - Holocaust Dropped From UK Schools

Submitted by

dteichman2

on Thursday May 24, 2007 @03:52AM

dteichman2 writes: "It appears that UK schools are ignoring The Holocaust. A government-backed study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, found that some teachers are reluctant to teach history lessons on The Holocaust for fear of offending Muslim students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. As such, many schools are not covering the subject. Additionally, similar problems are being met with lessons on The Crusades because these lessons contradict teachings from local mosques.

Isn't there a law that requires UK schools to cover these topics? Should there be?"

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