Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 09, 2008 by CyberNet.

Supercomputers have always been interesting to me because of the sheer power that they harness, and someday I would like to see one first-hand. According to Wikipedia though a “quad-core Xeon workstation running at 2.66 GHz will outperform a multimillion dollar Cray C90 supercomputer used in the early 1990s.” So having you’re own personal supercomputer isn’t out of the question, but don’t expect to break any records like the newly unveiled IBM Roadrunner does.

The $133 million IBM Roadrunner supercomputer takes the crown with its smashing 1.026 quadrillion calculations it’s capable of performing every second. It’s twice as fast as the IBM BlueGene/L located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Calfornia, which was the previous record holder. The IBM Roadrunner’s home is in New Mexico at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It will primarily be used for military purposes, such as making sure their nuclear weapons will continue to work properly as they age, and also simulating the first fraction of a second during a nuclear explosion.

The IBM Roadrunner is composed of 6,480 dual-core Opterons with a whopping 51.8TB of RAM. To give you a sense it’s power the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration said that if all 6 billion people on earth used hand calculators 24/7 it would take 46 years to accomplish what this supercomputer can do in one day.

What they don’t want you to know about is the “classified” LAN party they have there every night for playing Crysis. Nah, just kidding. It’s running Red Hat Enterprise Linux so there won’t be too much gaming going on there.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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What’s a good way to impress your friends? With a robot boom box that responds to your every hand movement, that’s how. Meet Qbo, TheCorpora’s open-source Linux robot who we’ve gotten to know over the years, even through his awkward phase. Nowadays, this full grown cutie has stereoscopic “eyes” and a face-identifying system that’s capable of learning, recognizing faces, and responding. With his new hand gesture recognition skills, Qbo will start playing music the moment you hold up a fist. Putting your hand out in a “halt” position stops the song and pointing left or right jumps to different tracks in your playlist. Giving Qbo the peace sign increases the volume (yeah, seriously!), while pointing the peace sign down tells him to take it down a few notches. The ultimate party mate and wing man is even so kind as to announce the name and title of the track. The video after the break best explains what hanging with this fellow is like, but if you’re keen on textual explanations, just imagine yourself awkwardly doing the robot to control your stereo. Go on, we won’t look.

Continue reading Qbo music player robot responds to hand gestures, challenges DJ Roomba to a dance-off (video)

Qbo music player robot responds to hand gestures, challenges DJ Roomba to a dance-off (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Aug 2011 06:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft and Linux haven’t always had the friendliest of rapports but, a few years back, the folks at Redmond decided to cozy up to Novell and the enterprise-focused distro SUSE. The German arm of the company even wished Tux a happy 20th birthday last week, in an attempt to further thaw their notoriously chilly relationship. Now the Windows crew have decided to renew their partnership with SUSE and have committed to purchasing $100 million in technical support for Microsoft Enterprise customers who also happen to be running Linux boxes as part of their operations. It’s not about to stop claiming that the open source OS violates several of its patents, but at least they’ve learned to get along with out suing each other into oblivion… unlike some other companies we could name. Cough. Check out the full PR after the break.

Continue reading Microsoft renews alliance with SUSE, throws $100 million in pocket change at Linux

Microsoft renews alliance with SUSE, throws $100 million in pocket change at Linux originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Earlier this month we asked CyberNet readers, “How old is your primary computer?” Over 950 of you responded and as it turns out, 30% of you, larger than any other group, are using a computer that’s less than one year old. Coming in next was 21% of you who said that you are using a computer that’s 1-2 years old. In all, over 50% of you have a computer that’s between less than a year, and two years old. Judging from the results, it looks as though many of you do what you can to keep up with the latest technology.

Now it’s time for a new Poll and the idea for this one came from a Tip from Asgard (thanks for the tip!) who thought it might be interesting to find out how many people are using Vista 64-bit compared to Vista 32-bit. In the message, he said “Guru3D had poll like that some time ago and it gave very interesting results. Over 80% had 64-bit. It would be nice to see if it’s just graphics fanatics who have or is it more common. Also it would help people to be less afraid of 64-bit systems because 64-bit Vista really has advantages over 32-bit.”

We thought it was a great idea, but decided to extend the poll further to include XP and Linux because there are 32-bit and 64-bit versions of those operating systems available.Some of you may not even know the difference between a 32-bit and 64-bit processor, so we thought we’d give a quick explanation of that first. We found a great explanation over at “Build Your Own Computer Tips“:

A bit is short for “binary digit.” It is basically how a computer stores and makes references to data, memory, etc. A bit can have a value of 1 or 0, that’s it. So binary code is streams of 1’s and 0’s, such as this random sequence 100100100111. These bits are also how your processor does calculations. By using 32 bits your processor can represent numbers from 0 to 4,294,967,295 while a 64-bit machine can represent numbers from 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.

There are several benefits to using 64-bit processors and one of the most popular is the ability to use more than 4GB of RAM in your computer. Computers with 32-bit processors are limited to 4GB of RAM while those with 64-bit processors are “limited” to 17.2 billion GB of RAM which is about 16 exabytes.

For our new poll, we’re taking a look at how many of you are using 64-bit operating systems to take advantage of the capabilities that your processor has to offer.

Which are you using, if any:

• 64-bit Vista
• 32-bit Vista
• 64-bit XP
• 32-bit XP
• 64-bit Linux
• 32-bit Linux
• none of the above

Cast your vote in the sidebar or if you have Flash enabled you can vote right here:

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

I was just browsing through some of the Digg articles and two Linux-related posts caught my attention. The first being that both the Ubuntu homepage and forum has received a very nice looking redesign. It not only looks classy but the layout is much better in my opinion.

For those of you who have short-term memories and can’t remember what it looked like, this archive of the Ubuntu homepage may get the gears turning in your head. Similarly you can pull up an archive of the Ubuntu Forums which used a lot more brown before. While the brownish color is the central scheme of Ubuntu, I think they were smart to use it a little more moderately throughout the entire site.

Now onto the next story I saw on Digg. I’ve used Linux in the past, but apparently I never knew how it worked. In order to use Linux you actually need to run Windows behind it, or so one commenter on a ZDNet blog thinks:

I dont see how this will happen at all.

Vista is far more powerful than windows XP, and runs twice as fast. It is also much harder to pirate, and this point more than anything else has the Linux crowd in a panic.

It wont be long until Windows XP is no longer supported, and when that happens, what is Linux going to do ?

Linux will have to find a way to work under Vista from here on, since it wont be able to rely on XP being readily available anymore.

Linux may seem like a good alternative to Office, but all that is happening in linux is that the windows interface is cleverly hidden away. It still needs the drivers and software services in order to run, and in most cases – that happens WITHOUT a valid windows licence.

This is just plain piracy.

Vista will finally put an end to this blatant abuse of intellectual property, and linux should decline, taking the pirates with it.

Anyone that supports the continuation of Windows XP in place of Vista surely has a hidden agenda .. and you will surely be caught out.

And he didn’t stop there, he then went on to say…

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me.

If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.

Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.

Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.

I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.

Now I normally don’t laugh about things other people are not knowledgeable about, because even I have a lot to learn. However, this person took it a little too far. Had he stopped after one sentence it wouldn’t have been as big of a deal, but he kept going on and on. About 5 minutes of research on Linux would have told him everything that he needs to know.

In the comments above I put a few things in bold that really sent me to the floor laughing, and the fact that he said Apple gave up and moved to “Intel and Microsoft”? Uh, they just switched processors and some hardware…but the last I heard they aren’t in any kind of agreement with Microsoft.

Of course, I don’t read the news very often so maybe I am just completely off the ball?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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