Monthly Archives: November 2005

New Top 500 Supercomputer List out

Posted on by

Well it’s SC time again, and time for another round of gigaflop harlotry, er, sorry, another round of the Top 500 Supercomputer list!

Applying my non-patented completely arbitrary criteria for a summary of the vendor stats I find..

  • At number 1 is IBM with:
    • 5 of the top 10 systems, including the top 3,
    • almost half of the list with 219 of the top 500 giving them just over 43%
    • over 52% of the total Rmax!
  • Next is HP with 169 systems.
    • combined with IBM they make up over 77% of systems and 71% of Rmax
  • Then we’ve got a tie between SGI and Cray, both with 18 systems
    • Cray just edge SGI out on Rmax with 143606 versus 126711.
  • Then there’s Dell with 17 systems.
  • Linux Networx have 16 systems.
  • Then there is a big gap before we hit the rest…

“The Rest” are, in order, NEC (6); Hitachi, Atipa and homebuilts each with 5; Fujitsu and Sun each with 4; Appro and Intel each with 2 and a whole bunch of one-hit wonders.

One oddity there is that Apple have only one system listed (at number 308) but there are two homebrew Apple systems in the top 20 (numbers 15 and 20)! Then of the 3 that are left 2 more are Apple boxes (numbers 80 and 303)..

Sony “EULA” For Their Alleged “CD”

Posted on by

The EFF has a nice little article on the “EULA” that comes with certain Sony silver discs (that masquerade as music CD’s) which has some really interesting bits. Caveat that with the understandable fact that it only talks about US law and assumes that you have some rights to fair use which may or may not exist in your country.
Of course this only affects Windoze users who forget to press the shift key if they haven’t already disabled the Windoze “AutoRun” virus delivery system for CD’s.

My favourite quote from this contract with the devil is this bit about when you must stop playing the music you bought, er, sorry, licensed:


Without prejudice to any other rights SONY BMG or any SONY BMG PARTY may have hereunder, the term of this EULA shall terminate immediately, without notice from SONY BMG, and all rights you may have hereunder to use the LICENSED MATERIALS shall be immediately revoked, in the event that you: (i) fail to comply with any provision of this EULA, (ii) fail to install an update of the SOFTWARE that was previously provided to you by the SONY BMG PARTIES within the time specified, or (iii) file a voluntary petition or are subject to an involuntary petition under applicable bankruptcy laws, are declared insolvent, make an assignment for the benefit of creditors, or are served with a writ of attachment , writ of execution, garnishment or other legal process pertaining to any of your assets or property.

Yes indeedy, if you get into financial problems you have to remove this music from your computer…. and then they complain that people don’t buy many CD’s these days. Not only is their mass produced talentless music crap, the companies are stupid!

NB to fellow residents of down under regarding fair use rights – they don’t exist in Australia so it is illegal to put those CD’s you’ve bought onto your iPod here.

More on Hayabusa and Venus Express is Alive!

Posted on by

The Planetary Society has a couple of pieces of interesting news at the moment, the first is that the Japanese probe Hayabusa that is investigating an asteroid is going to try again to land, drop the robot and grab a sample, though JAXA are still not certain what caused the craft to abort last time. They are currently speculating that it could be to do with the optical navigation system and the spacecrafts orientation to the asteroid.

There’s also great news about Venus Express – the Planetary Society blog says that Venus Express has phoned home bang on time and the ESA is reporting in their online journal that:


9 Nov 06:10 UTC, MET +02h 40m
Sun acquisiton and successfull deployment of solar arrays confirmed.

Well needed good news after the loss of the CryoSat ice monitoring satellite!

Intelligent Design: Dover School Board Ousted, New Battle in Kansas

Posted on by

I read this yesterday, but only got around to blogging it today..

The Dover School Board who got sued by predominately Christian parents for trying to bring Intelligent Design onto the curriculum had 8 of their 9 members up for re-election, and they have all failed to get back onto the board!

However, now Kansas has decided to teach ID in science lessons, a move the state governor is concerned will make it harder to attract hi-tech investment to the state, and:

In her statement, Sebelius said that the board should concentrate more on strengthening science-teaching standards, not weakening them, and that stronger public schools ought to be the board`s mission.

Why I Read LWN

Posted on by

From the LWN kernel page discussing implementing support for the IBM “hard drive active protection system”:


The theory of operation here is that a user-space daemon will be monitoring the status of the system, as reported by the accelerometer. Should this daemon note that the laptop has begun to accelerate, it will quickly write a value to the protect attribute for each drive in the system. The drives will respond by parking the disk heads, and, in any other possible way, telling the drive to crawl into its shell and prepare for impact. Once the event has transpired, the shattered remains of the laptop can attempt to resume normal operation.

Thanks for the laugh John!

New Scientist & ABC Science Show Podcasts

Posted on by

Well, I’ve listened to the first New Scientist Podcast and, frankly, it was rather disappointing. 🙁 A bit too American and glitzy for me and it came as something of a culture shock thinking of that as coming from what has, to me, always seemed a rather more British publication.

A much nicer science podcast (and a lot longer too, about an hour instead of 10 minutes) is the excellent Australian Radio National program The Science Show presented by Robyn Williams (no, not Robin) which isn’t afraid to get into the nitty gritty of a story and also has a great sense of humour. There’s also the fact that Robyn has been doing this since the 70’s, so there are nice touches like them playing extracts from him interviewing Fred Hoyle in 1978 when discussing (in 2005) a new biography of him.

The Science Programs’ podcast XML file is here.