PS3 helps Folding@Home reach a PetaFLOP

Now how will so-inclined parents claim video games consoles don't contribute anything constructive?

In an achievement that is heavily weighted towards the addition of a PS3 client to the project, Folding@Home has busted through the Petaflop mark, producing a distributed supercomputer capable of above and beyond a thousand trillion flops. Currently the client stats show 1.194 Petaflops of activity, 0.93 of which is due to the PlayStation 3's contribution.

[Via Engadget].

I'd been amazed by the PS3's use in Folding@Home before, but hadn't fully realized the impact of the cell processors. It's interesting that the PS3 clients can't be used for all the computations needed by the project, but they are useful for the most common computations, and are blazingly fast at them, so the combined supercomputer formed by PS3s and the other platforms is a truly amazing example of massive parallelism in system where each compute node is not created equal.

Wil Shipley on ignorant pro-DRM analysts

In a brilliant post titled "Steve Jobs v. Underwear Gnomes" Will Shipley offers this excellent conclusion to his most eloquent rant.

Next time, AP, call me, I'll give you a damn quote. Here, the first one is free: "It's about time record execs pull their heads out of their asses, and, after the giant 'schloORK' sound is done ringing in their ears, they start treating valued customers like they are valued and/or customers, instead of like a seething criminal class. Yes, there will always be people who steal music. So either offer the rest of us a compelling alternative to being one of them, or die the dinosaur's death that you so richly deserve."

[Via Call Me Fishmeal.].

The thing is, I'm a Delicious Monster client, and have no doubt I will remain so through future versions. Not because there aren't alternatives (none as nice yet, but there are a couple of promising challengers), and not because I can't live without the functionality the software offers (though it is a godsend). It's thanks to my experience a few months after buying a license. I had a question about library merges and scanning cover art, and was expecting a few days wait while someone got around to sending me a form reply, or a referral to a new version of a FAQ, or some other time-waster to check if my problem would just go away. It saddens me that I've come to expect that from most services providers. But lo and behold, within a few hours there was in my inbox a very thoughtful reply, several suggestions for solutions, and an explanation of why some feature was currently unavailable. And did I mention that it was thoughtful, well written, and quite funny in places. Most importantly it was a personal reply from someone who took the time to care that I was having trouble figuring out how to use the application in an undocumented manner. So yes, treating a customer as a valued customer really works for me at least. Thanks Wil!

P.S. Oh, be sure to read Wil's full post, it's very good, it's nice to see someone take note of how frustrating pro-DRM arguments by "analysts" can be for computer scientists ... I don't know if analysts like this even care if they're wrong or right, or if they simply care about sounding right for their clients (pity the ignorant, for preaching to them is easy).

From Flickr: The Sound Burger

sound burger
Originally uploaded by Wire & Twine

Would you like a nano with that? Beautiful device, even if it doesn't play movies or even work on the move.

Traveling Terabytes & Jim Gray

TG Daily is reporting about a New Jersey network engineer is sending digital care packages to troops. The packages are media-filled hard-drives, cables, and international power adapters, packaged in very appropriate Pelican cases. These packages are intended to continue "traveling," with the recipient encouraged to add-to and forward the package.

This idea seems to be hit, and reminds me of the work of the great Jim Gray (wikipedia entry), who (among many other contributions) suggested the efficiency of sending data in the mail thanks to the small size and increasing capacities of hard drives. He was very accurate, prescient, and is sorely missed. It saddens me more to think of how many people outside the research and academic worlds must not realize how much our digital world owes to him.

If you don't know of his work, consider the following. Every time you use a modern database, every time you you use an online map, or an online telescope. You are using systems and ideas that Jim brought into this world. And in saying that, I probably fall short of doing him justice.



Jim was helped set the Internet2 Land Speed Record, and yet was still able to envision the use of commodity drives as Storage Bricks. I find it impressive that he could consider such cutting edge projects and not lose sight of the practical nature of sneakernet, but to embrace it where appropriate and extend it to include the idea of mailing commodity PCs packed with disk when necessary (treating a NAS server as a "removable media" :)

Thank you, Jim, we miss you.

Saudi Sandal Road-Skating

YouTube - The new extreme sport: Saudi Sandal Skating

Surreal and Scary. Scary because I'm used to roads having a fair amount of friction and the occasional pothole.

[via YouTube]

Great collections of riddles and puzzles, and a great collection of ambiguity

Collection of Ambiguous or Inconsistent/Incomplete Statements

[ wu :: riddles ]

Update on Stephen Fry's smartphone post

So it's been a couple of days since I came across Stephen Fry's post (link, via Daring Fireball). I cannot thank John Gruber enough for posting a link to Fry's webpage. I had to mention it on this blog, and have since come across it on Boing Boing Gadgets, but have noticed the following. I can get to the article in the mornings, but by afternoon, I run into 503 errors. I can only guess that the site is very popular, and I hope it gets a lot more visits, and that it can hold up to the traffic (let me know in the comments if you can think of another reason for the outages).

In case you're wondering, I went back to the article to re-read it. And then to re-read again the next day - twice. It's just ... "delicious" would be the word that comes to my mind.

Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite, it's Fry's sidebar rant on design

By design here, I mean GUI and OS as much as outer case design. Let’s go back to houses. The sixties taught us, surely, that architectural design, commercial and domestic, is not an extra. The office you work in every day, the house you live in every day, they are more than the sum of their functions. We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say “well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do” is like saying my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it’s got a kitchen too, and a bathroom.” … I accept that price is an issue here; if budget is a consideration then you’ll have to forgive me, I’m writing from the privileged position of being able to indulge my taste for these objects. But who can deny that design really matters? Or that good design need not be more expensive? We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms - why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that? Why don’t the other bastards GET IT??

[via Stephen Fry's Blog]

Video of Walt Mossberg reviewing the iPod touch

Alright, so TUAW has a post with Walt Mossberg's video review of the iPod Touch. I'm including that video in this post for another reason, the video glitch (slight banding in top center and top left of view at the 20-second mark) just had me crack up since it looked like Walt's head was smoking or had been zapped by some form of soft fluffy lightning. That's a terrible description, but I think you get the picture, and if not, just play the video since it's a good review of a fun product that I doubt I'll buy till it can (is allowed) to do more.

Chickens boycott Agatha Christie bookclub

... they'd heard talk of "murder most fowl"

I did warn the puns can be bad, and not in good funny way either.

Stephen Fry ... Gadgethound!

Who knew? John Gruber points out Fry's extensive survey of the smartphone market.

The P1i is what happens when “oh, that’ll do” becomes the corporate motto. UIQ promised something, the actual GUI is reasonable, in fact quite delightful, but it needed refinement, it needed acceleration and it needed flair. Instead we’ve got a very, very slow device that eats power, is difficult to use in varying environments and frequently hangs and crashes. In a word unusable. And I can just hear them hiding behind the excuse of “price” and “sectors of the market” and other bullshit. What, Apple’s a bigger company than Sony? Got more muscle? What muscle it has got, it got from daring to be better. That was once true of Sony too.

You can find John Gruber's post here, and Fry's brilliant post "Devices and Desires" here.

[via Daring Fireball].

P.S. If you haven't already seen it, check out the Voco clock, it even went Creative Commons.

[via boingboing]

UPDATE: I take it back, a gadgethound by his own implication, a brilliantly eloquent and knowledgable tech historian by my perception. I particularly liked the following passage from Fry's wonderful post:

Bandwidth and memory ceased almost to be an issue and those of us who had once spent hundreds on a 256MB Compact Flash looked in amazement at the cheap 2Gb thumbnails hanging in blister-packs from any old airport Dixon’s.

This morning over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel Johnson likened the article to "a mental massage"

Weird Al Wednesday!

Yes, it's that time of the week again, here's another fun Weird Al video.
If you enjoyed last weeks "white & nerdy" video, then it's the same song again here, but this time, it's all Donny, and just as hilarious (if not a little bit more so).



You can catch the behind-the-scenes video on YouTube here.

Are you owed a refund on your online purchase? do you check?

Well, you don't really need to anymore. Price protectr is a really great service, it tracks price changes in anything you might have bought from online stores that offer a price-drop guarantee. If the price drops, and you notice it, these stores offer to refund you the difference, but in almost all cases that is dependent on you asking for the refund.
Amazon, Costco, CircuitCity, Sears, Costco, Staples, Best Buy, and Staples are included, though the full list of stores they cover can be found here.

An optical illusion from NASA's APotD

From the Astronomy Picture of the Day site comes this gem of an optical illusion. The A and B squares are the same color.



To see how that can be, follow this link.

Rami Efal, Simple and Beautiful Illustrations

You can find Rami Efal's photostream on Flickr.

Interactive Weave and Peg Mirrors

Now this isn't exactly iPod Nano screen resolution, and is much bigger to boot, but it's very impressive anyway.

The "Weave Mirror" and "Peg Mirror" projects from Daniel Rozin are both interactive installations that use physical objects as pixels to create a low-rez, real-time display. Weave Mirror uses strips of laminate with varying shades of grey, which it turns to match the grayscale value of its camera, while Peg Mirror turns its 650 wooden dowels that are cut at an angle to produce varying shadows.

Rozin's interactive mirrors at Bitforms [WMMNA]

[Via Boing Boing Gadgets].

Anime song generator and an Otaku Prime Minister?

Sounds very cool. I remember an academic project in the early 90s that attempted to do this, but which didn't really get very far, or so I recall.

Vocaloid is a technology and application software developed by Yamaha that enables users to synthesize authentic-sounding singing by just typing in the melody and the lyrics of a song.

This news item is closely followed by another news item regarding the manga-interest of Taro Sato, possibly Japan's next PM. The post refers to a CNN Money item, which credits a 71 percent bump for a manga retailer's stock price to the news of Taro's potential election.

More info about Vocaloid can be found at the Yamaha website.

[via Hobby Blog]

Killacycle almost kills owner

The Killacycle, an all-electric bike that claims the title of "world's quickest" crashes into a parked van at Wired NextFest. Luckily Bill Dube is fine.

You can see Killacycle breaking a world record at 155MPH here, and see the crash two thirds of the way into the video here. The crash video really makes it clear how quickly this bike can accelerate.

[via tgdaily]

I am not a number! ... but I do own one now

Freedom-to-Tinker shows you how to own your own number. If you aren't familiar with the AACS code issue, then this won't be as funny as it sounds. Oh, and my number is 77 C5 6C 3A 5D 7E 61 32 6C B1 42 60 2F 7A 55 2A, it's mine! all mine! So hands off and get your own.

If you don't get the "not a number" reference, go here.

[via Freedom to Tinker]

Printing projector film using an inkjet and transparencies

Jesse England shows how video frames can be printed on transparency sheets using an inkjet printer and cut to form Super-8 film.

[via Jesse England's Website]

Pink Panther makes "100 Sexiest Cars" List

The Land Rover "SAS Pink Pather" made Top Gear's 100 Sexiest Cars list at 84.

The number one car may come as a bit of a surprise, it is Italian and very very cute. It's the Fiat Cinquecento.



[via Top Gear]