computers

The enterprise computing industry seems like it's turning into one big utility company.

It's a good thing the accountants didn't have to sit through the keynote speeches during the first two days of Oracle OpenWorld, because no one would be allowed to attend next year. Hector Ruiz of Advanced Micro Devices showed video clips of Star Wars and the World Series. Mark Hurd of Hewlett-Packard discussed whether or not he thought Oracle's Larry Ellison could beat him at tennis. At least Intel's Paul Otellini tailored his Tuesday morning address to the actual attendees of the … Read more

Microsoft released the public beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 for running large computing clusters, part of its plan to creep into supercomputing.

HPC Server 2008 is the successor to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. HPC Server runs on the individual servers in a cluster and also comes with higher-level software that coordinates all of the members of a cluster. Microsoft says it achieved a 30 percent improvement in Linpack, a commonly used supercomputing benchmark, on its production cluster with 2,048 processor cores.

HPC is also being used on a 1,151 node cluster at the Holland Computing Center … Read more

Depleted uranium armor may provide great protection against other tanks, but it's useless against hackers bent on penetrating the networks that tankers and other crews increasingly rely on to move and shoot.

Looking to fill the order for "digital armor," General Dynamics Canada and Secure Computing have teamed up to develop Meshnet, a hardware/software firewall designed to protect networks and digital devices inside tanks and other military vehicles from hostile computer and virus attacks.

Without adequate firewall protection, a tech-savvy enemy could infiltrate the net to eavesdrop, ambush or "blind" a crew by cutting … Read more

Sony Computer Entertainment America announced on Thursday a full list of the games and hardware bundles that it will be launching for its PlayStation systems--PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation portable (PSP)--for the fast-approaching holiday season.

The games, both first- and third-party, range from "enthusiast" titles geared toward the traditional young-male "gamer demographic," to more casual and social games "This holiday season we are offering our largest line up of quality software and hardware products to meet every taste, lifestyle and budget," said Scott A. Steinberg, vice president of product marketing for SCEA, said in a statement.

Sony is pitching the older PlayStation 2 console as an affordable hub for casual games, like SingStar and Buzz: The Mega Quiz. The PS2 is also "getting a social makeover with limited edition ceramic white hardware" and a new price of $149.99--perhaps as Sony's answer to that other white gaming console, you know, the one from Nintendo.

Among the more highly anticipated Sony titles are EA's Rock Band and The Orange Box; Activision's Guitar Hero III; and The Eye of Judgment, a trading card-based game that Sony developed in conjunction with Hasbro's Wizards of the Coast subsidiary.

A full list, below the jump:… Read more

AMD's upcoming FireStream processor might be a way for scientists to tap into a lot of performance without breaking the bank.

The company will be demonstrating its FireStream 9170 processor next week at the SC07 supercomputing show, and executives spoke this week about the promise of "stream computing." The 9170 is designed to let high-performance computing applications take advantage of the excellent parallel performance of a graphics chip.

The big trend in chip design over the past few years has been parallelism. Instead of trying to crunch all the data through a single path moving as fast … Read more

The nation's governors are jumping on the bandwagon of energy efficiency in computing.

The governors of Minnesota and Kansas on Wednesday committed to buying energy-efficient PCs, part of a partnership between the National Governors Assocation and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

Launched earlier this year, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative is a group formed by Intel and Google to promote use of energy-efficient power supplies for PCs.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas said that new PC purchases for their states will meet the EnergyStar 4.0 rating, which could result in a 50 … Read more

A few days ago in The Wall Street Journal someone with a 5-year-old PC asked Walter Mossberg how to determine when to buy a new PC. The response in the paper was short. Fortunately, this blog lets me offer a longer, more detailed answer.

The first thing Mossberg said in his response was "There's no universal answer to your question." I disagree. The simple answer is that a computer needs to be replaced only when it no longer does something you want or need it to do. This has nothing to do with the age of the … Read more

I had a great time over the weekend at the 10th Vintage Computer Festival, which took place in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

In addition to the exhibits of vintage computers--including the largest collection of Radio Shack Pocket Computers I've ever seen--and the marketplace, where I managed to avoid buying any slide rules, Vectrix video games, or Cray supercomputer circuit boards--there were several notable presentations.

On Saturday, Tim McNerney spoke about his work to reimplement the Intel 4004 microprocessor, which led to a 130x-scale working model of the chip composed of individual transistors on a large … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For an industry that's just 30 years old, personal computing has a lot of history.

Here at the Computer History Museum, just a stone's throw from the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley, PC industry veterans, tech enthusiasts, and even a few kids came out for the annual Vintage Computer Festival.

The event is highlighted by seminars and panels on topics like "Deconstructing the Intel 4004" and "The Disk Drive Industry Family Tree," but the real payoff is the Exhibit Hall, in which hobbyists display their dusty, yellowed sets of two-decades-old computers, … Read more