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Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. It's peak 504 teraflops processing power will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design.
http://www.rangersupercomputer.com/release.html

SethJohnson writes "An article in the Austin-American Statesman describes how Gary Lockhart has pushed DIY aerial photography into the professional big leagues. With 16 years of testing and over $125,000 in prototypes, he's chosen tethered blimps over wind-dependent kites to give him a stable vantage point up to 1,000 feet high. But it's his nearness to the ground that gives his aerial photography business a competitive edge over traditional helicopter and plane-based platforms. Lockhart's specialized 130 panoramic camera captures 3.2 gigabyte images from intimate perspectives where motorized aircraft can't fly.

The recent credit collapse puts developers under increasing pressure to pre-sell their condos before they can build these high rises. That's where Lockhart's blimp photography comes in- his photos give prospective buyers a sample of the view specific to the height and angle of each unit in a building before it's even built. Ground-floor sales rooms have panoramic murals mounted in window frames so it looks like you're on the 24th floor of a building that hasn't begun construction."
http://www.statesman.com/search/content/business/stories/realestate/01/05/0105blimp.html

SethJohnson writes "In order to raise funds to develop the University of Texas' upcoming Video Game Archive at the Center for American History, Richard Garriott is throwing a party at his Austin estate. Festivities will include Segway scooter polo, classic arcade games, a replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and the chance to win a zero-gravity flight 32,000 feet above Earth. Garriott is best known as the creator of the Ultima series of computer RPGs and is working to support the video game archive so that early works in the field will be preserved for future reflection. Tickets for the fundraiser start at $75 per person and escalate to $5,000."
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/07/31/0731gamearchive.html

EGSonikku writes "According to this article on Endgadget, the AACS DRM used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has been cracked. The program allows one to decrypt and dump the video for play on a users hard drive, or it can be burned to a blank HD-DVD and played on a stand-alone player. According to the accompanying video, a source release for the program will be made available in January. Time to get that $200 Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive?"

SynapseLapse writes "Popular dvd ripping/encoding site doom9 has a message thread running where user Muslix64 has released a program allowing users to rip their HD DVDs sans DRM. The program isnt a full crack along the lines of DeCSS, as it requires a legitimate KEY to perform the decryption. It is, nonetheless, a step forward to not being restricted by HDCP nonsense. AACS is the new DRM for HD-DVD that is supposedly far more difficult to crack. Any comments Jon?"

BlueStraggler writes "Project Censored has posted their top-25 censored news stories of 2006 (although they confusingly call it the top 25 of 2007). Network Neutrality is number one. Several other stories with a tech/science aspect made the list, too."

BatMacumba writes "from the Boston Globe: "The armed forces, already struggling to meet recruiting goals, are considering expanding the number of noncitizens in the ranks — including disputed proposals to open recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to US citizenship if they volunteer — according to Pentagon officials." My main concern is how foreign soldiers may be less inclined to question orders — such as orders to shoot Americans."

Anonymous writes "A vulnerability has been found in WordPress that leaves 500,000+ blogs at risk. It affects all versions including the latest version (v2.0.5). Currently all WordPress blogs are vulnerable. It is recommended that all apply the fix ASAP.

A temp fix was also provided with the original post (see: http://michaeldaw.org/md-hacks/wordpress-persisten t-xss/).

An overnight fix has been provided by WordPress (see: http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/4665).

Other references:
www.securityfocus.com/bid/21782"

An anonymous reader writes "Well after the long torturous wait, Vista is finally out. Is it just me or do others see similarities between Vista and the OS/2 launch back in the '80's?

I mean you need new hardware to run the new OS (Just like OS/2). Even on the best '386 system OS/2 still ran like a dog. Older apps sometimes didn't work (DOS penalty box). And most important, what was the compelling reason to upgrade?

Add to this an interview I saw with Ballmer some time ago where he was talking about how he knew OS/2 was doomed when IBM kept talking about OS/2's KLOC's (thousands of lines of code), and how bloated OS/2 was.... Now I see an interview with him where he talks about how great Vista is due to the, yes you guessed it, KLOC's of code in it.

So is Vista going to see the same fate as OS/2?"

narramissic writes "With nearly a month of Vista availability behind us, businesses don't seem to be in any rush to take the leap. An article on ITworld cites two significant reasons for the foot-dragging. First, Microsoft's case-by-case approach to Vista patches, which is leaving some problems unpatched until after the consumer release in January. Second, application (in)compatibility. From the article:

Some of the applications that still aren't compatible with Vista include IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes e-mail and collaboration suite; Cisco Systems Inc.'s and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.'s VPN clients; Intuit Corp.'s accounting software QuickBooks 2006 and earlier versions; and anti-virus (AV) software from Trend Micro Inc.

"

treeves writes "Radioactive nuclei that hang around for a mere half-minute before falling apart hardly seem stable. Yet compared with the fleeting lifetimes of their superheavy atomic neighbors, the roughly 30-second period that transpired from creation to disintegration of four atoms of a newly discovered isotope of element 108 qualifies those atoms as rock solid.

Theoretical physicists predicted years ago that some nuclei of elements much more massive than uranium should survive for a relatively long time — possibly long enough to probe their chemical properties — if they could be synthesized. On the chart of nuclides, theoreticians pinpointed a region with coordinates corresponding to 114 protons and 184 neutrons and indicated that nuclei with those "magic" numbers of subatomic particles should lie at the center of an island of stability. The nuclear longevity, according to the models, is due to the closing of proton and neutron shells, which renders the particles stable against spontaneous fission much the same way that a filled outer electron shell endows noble gases with chemical inertness. Experimentalists, though, haven't yet found a route to reach the center of the island.

Other theoreticians calculated the effects of subshell closings in other superheavy nuclei. They concluded that an isotope of hassium containing 108 protons and 162 neutrons (270Hs) should survive a long timemuch longer than the millisecond or shorter lifetimes typical of most of the heaviest nuclides.

Now, an international team of experimentalists has detected four of those atoms and probed some of their chemical properties during the roughly 30 seconds the nuclei survive (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2006, 97, 242501). The findings confirm the predictions and provide new statistical data with which such theoretical models can be refined. The team includes 24 scientists from 10 research institutions, including the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Institute for Heavy-Ion Research (GSI), both in Germany, as well as institutions in Russia, the U.S., Switzerland, Japan, China, and Poland.

As TUM graduate student Jan Dvorak explains, the hassium nuclei were formed by firing a high-energy beam of 26Mg projectiles into a target enriched in 248Cm. [http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/84/i52/8452hassium.h tml]"

thefickler sends in an article comparing Windows Vista and Windows XP in the areas of security, home entertainment, GUI, parental controls, and networking. The author clearly believes that Vista wins across these categories.