It's true that many desktop/server applications don't have the parallelism available to make use of many cores (i.e. > 2). However, this chip was designed with scientific applications in mind, where thousands, if not millions, of calculations can be executed simultaneously. Many of these problems are readily mapped to programming models that take advantage of many cores, such as message passing or SIMD/vector processing. For those programs that don't have available parallelism, there's not a whole lot to do with extra processing power. You can sometimes speculatively execute code, but that's a tricky problem for the compiler and runtime to figure out.

Having been in attendance of this presentation at Supercomputing 2010, for once I can say without a doubt that the article captured the essence of reality. The only part it left out is that the interconnect between all the processing elements uses significantly less energy than that of the previous 80-core chip; I think the figure was around 10% of chip power for the 48-core, and 30% for the 80-core. Oh, and MPI over TCP/IP was faster than the native message passing scheme for large messages.

We were also lucky that the laptop didn't require a password to log in. This seems like a bad idea, but if there was a password, the thief would probably have reinstalled the OS. The lack of a login password was the major reason we had enough time to track down the laptop.

I have a friend who was in a similar situation a while ago. Luckily, he had sshd running and the thief wasn't behind NAT, so we had ssh access to the machine once we found its IP address. The local police didn't know about IP addresses, so we were unsuccessful in motivating them to subpoena the ISP. However, we were able to remotely install Undercover, which used nearby SSIDs to give an approximate location of the laptop. Based on our work with Kismet and a directional wifi antenna, we were able to localize the thief to a single apartment building. With this information, the thief's name (gleaned from monitoring the thief's visits to myspace), and a multitude of webcam photos of the thief, the police managed to just walk in to the front office, get an apartment number, and retrieve the laptop. Unfortunately, none of this will help if you don't have remote access...

Vibration still does reduce image quality. If SOPHIA had been completed on its initial timeline, it would have been more impressive, but modern adaptive optics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics and large, ground-based telescopes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Binocular_Telescope have made SOPHIA's altitude less of an advantage.

In all seriousness, I took a great statistics course in grad school from the author of this book. The book covers much about statistics that is relevant to computer scientists & engineers, namely statistically valid benchmarking and performance measurement.