The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the USA announced that its new Cray super computer “Jaguar” reached a computing power of 1.3 Petaflops. This should beat even the fastest super computer in the world, the “roadrunner” with around 1.026 Petaflops. The release of the 32nd Top500 list in one week should bring certainty.

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In the last time, E-Book readers are coming up. In the beginning, they were heavy, had bad displays and were really expensive. But by now, the developers managed to create some products really looking worth to buy. Currently, there are two major readers: the Amazon Kindle and the Sony PRS-505.

With Kindle, Amazon wants to overtake the E-Book reader market. It features an 15cm display with 800×600 pixels and has the size of a normal book. The user can download E-Books directly from the Amazon shop using a free mobile connection, so you’ve got basically all available books with you at every time. Up to 200 books should fit into the internal memory which can be extended with an SD memory card.
The battery should last for one week, since it only needs power to turn pages (once the new page is loaded, the display keeps the image without needing any power). In addition, the user can add comments to lines of the E-Book. Price: 280€ (360 US$)

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How’s this for a double-edged sword? Microsoft is providing free bus transportation to work for some of its employees in China. Hey, that’s great! It saves money as well as the environment. The downside? The bus is full of workstations, meaning everyone it picks up gets to work that much longer every day. But surely, the working time in the bus won’t be counted as part of your eight-hour working day. So do you really want to work more just for free transportation instead of listening to your iPod, talking to your colleagues, …? And what’s about the motion sickness? Would you be able to read a book while the bus is shaking over Chinese roads? The same with looking a computer screen.

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Just a few days ago I found this quite impressing website: http://eyeos.info/
They offer an operating system which is completely running in your browser. It includes all basic applications you can think of (Office suite with text writer, spreadsheets and presentations, calendar, contact manager, calculator, email application and some basic games)and has the possibility to upload your local files to your online desktop.

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A Canadian gamer runs 36 World of Warcraft accounts at the same time. He wants to be able to invade Stormwind and Ironforge all by himself:

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Do you think today’s Netbooks like the Asus Eee PC, MSI Wind or Acer Aspire One are small? Then check out the iMovio iKIT! It’s a complete Netbook at the size of an iPod classic.

The iKIT is a mixture between notebook and messenger, has a size of only 95 x 65 x 15 mm, uses a 2.8″ display with 320×240 pixels and has a weight of only 113g including it’s 1050mAh battery. Inside, an Marvell PXA270 processor (312 MHz), 64 MB RAM and a memory card with 128 MB are doing the computing. Through the microSD-slot, it can be extended with an 8 GB memory card.

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Geode is a new plugin made by Mozilla labs for Firefox to determine your exact geographical location. You may download it here. On the welcome website, it says:

“Geode provides a rudimentary implementation of geolocation for the current version of Firefox uses a single hard-coded location provider to enable Wifi-based positioning conforming to the W3C Geolocation specification so that developers can begin experimenting with enabling location-aware experiences today.”

Since there are many upcoming web services using geotagging, Mozilla serves Firefox users with the first experimental browser plugin for geolocation determination.

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Today I want to show you how to extract media like ingame music, videos, images and textures from many common games. It’s useful if you want to listen to the sound track of your favourite game even when you’re not playing.

Extracting the media should be legal as long as you own the original game!

Search your game in the game index, navigate to the path specified in your Windows Explorer, then use the application given to extract your music. Good Luck!

If you have any questions, or want more games to be added, please comment!

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The development in the robotics sector is advancing fast. In the USA and Japan, there are many new companies producing robots for all kind of means: cleaning, helping, guarding and even defending the country. Today, the risk of being attacked by robots doesn’t seem to be realistic.

Internet millionaire Ben Way thinks otherwise. Just a few days ago he founded a company called “Weapons Against Robots”, short WAR, specialized in creating weapons for autonomous combat against robots.
The company will “combat the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence through the creation of anti-robot weaponry, detection and monitoring of robots, and use of anti-robot viruses. Way believes that, as AI is increasingly used in warfare and defense, it is prudent to ready countermeasures in the event, not only of an enemy’s use of robotics, but that an intelligence’s programming goes awry.”
On their official website, they show some of their ideas how to fight robots, like AAA (Autonomous Against Robot) and BAA (Biological Against Robot), although I don’t really understand what biological weapons could do against robots… bacteria fighting metal and plastic?
They also want to supply detection systems and so called “Robo virus systems”, computer viruses being channelled into the attacking robot to gain control over it. Another interesting idea is a mini microwave bomb which can destroy the electrical circuitry.

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The T-Mobile G1 phone, also known as the “Google phone”, will be released soon. It is the HTC Dream phone, running Google’s new mobile phone operating system “Android“. Google founded the Open Handset Alliance in 2007 with other big companies like HTC, Samsung, Nvidia and T-Mobile, in order to develop an open source platform and applications for mobile devices. Android is an open-source project, based on the Linux kernel, which can easily be extend it with open source applications.

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