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PlayStation (Games)

USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s 163

digitaldc writes with this excerpt from Gamasutra: "The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 systems together to create what the organization is calling the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department. The Condor Cluster, as the group of systems is known, also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (500 TFLOPS), according to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell."
Patents

8-Year-Old Receives Patent 142

Knile writes "While not the youngest patent recipient ever (that would be a four year old in Texas), Bryce Gunderman has received a patent at age 8 for a space-saver that combines an outlet cover plate with a shelf. From the article: '"I thought how I was going to make a lot of money," Bryce said about what raced through his brain when he received the patent.'"

Comment Re:Lights that count down (Score 1) 976

I agree, these things are great, a lot of the pedestrian signals around here are being changed to them. I live a bit north of Ft Myers, in Port Charlotte, and some intersections around here have them, where as further north in Sarasota county, almost all major intersections along 41 have them, useful since very often work takes me south or north along 41 primarily.

About short yellow lights, I guess it's about where you are from, a few years back a guy I knew from NH commented about how the yellow lights lasted longer here.

The cameras are also becoming more common around here, though you still see many people run red lights, most often following the car's bumper in front of them, or snaking behind cars in left hand turns.
Image

Hollywood Stock Exchange Set To Launch In April 100

You can buy and sell actor or movie "stock" for virtual cash on the website Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). Starting in April the company plans on letting you turn those movie performance predictions into real dollars. HSX filed with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission for approval as an active trading site in November 2008 and has just entered the final phase of regulatory review. Richard Jaycobs, president of HSX's parent company, said, "The number of people who visit movie theaters each year and form opinions about a film's success is in the tens of millions. We believe that's the reason the public response to this product has been very positive."
Space

Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242

likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."
The Almighty Buck

Massive Bank Fraud In EVE Online 138

djconrad was one of several readers to point out the latest major scandal in EVE Online, the space MMO notable for its large, player-driven economy and the entertaining stories it often generates. A player named Ricdic, chairman of a large in-game bank, decided to embezzle roughly 200 billion ISK (the game's currency). Ricdic exchanged the ISK for about $5,000 to pay off real-life debts. Massively has an in-depth write-up about how the theft affects the game and its players. Since the scandal became public, there's been a run on the virtual bank, and its executives are doing what they can to reassure people that it will continue to exist. Ricdic was banned, not for the embezzlement, but for trading 200 billion ISK for real currency, which is forbidden by EVE's EULA.

Comment Re:There seems to be a tags issue (Score 1) 174

By looking when you mouse-over the tags, you will see there are 3 sets of tags. From the right there is the "Type Tags", which is usually just story. Then we have the "System Tags", general categorization of the article, such as tech, game, security, etc. Last there are the "Top Tags", or the user tags, which seem to be the mostly useless set of the three, as pointed out, mainly comments about the story, but sometimes do contain a useful tag.
Networking

The Other Side of the Sprint Vs. Cogent Depeering 174

Swoolley writes "A month back this community discussed the Sprint vs. Cogent depeering. Now a story I wrote for Forbes.com tells the inside story of the fight, based on the lawsuits the two companies filed against each other in Virginia state court. For once, thanks to those suits, the public gets to see the details of a confidential peering agreement between two of the Internet's largest autonomous systems, as well as the circumstances leading up to the depeering. (Which company is in the right? Read the facts and decide for yourself.) While some people have argued that the depeering is reason for more government regulation, the Forbes story makes the case that details of the recent Cogent vs. Sprint fight argue for exactly the opposite: keeping the Internet backbones free of government meddling."
Data Storage

An In-Depth Look At Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda 283

theraindog writes "More than a year and a half after the first terabyte hard drives became widely available, Seagate has reached the next storage capacity milestone. With 1.5 terabytes, the latest Barracuda 7200.11 serves up 50% more capacity than its peers, and at a surprisingly affordable $0.12 per gigabyte. But Seagate's decision to drop new platters into an old Barracuda shell may not have been a wise one. The Tech Report's in-depth review of the world's first 1.5TB hard drive shows that while the latest 'cuda is screaming fast in synthetic throughput drag races, poor real world write speeds ultimately tarnish its appeal."
Music

Submission + - RIAA Balks at Complying with Order for Documents

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "When the RIAA was ordered to turn over its attorneys billing records to the defendant's lawyer in Capitol v. Foster, there was a lot of speculation that they would never comply with the order. As it turns out they have indeed balked at compliance with the order, saying that they are preparing a motion for protective order seeking confidentiality (something they could have asked for, but didn't ask for, in their opposition papers to the initial motion). Not having any of that, Ms. Foster's lawyer has now made a motion to compel their compliance with the Court's March 15th order."

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