Movielink not Mac compatible; Moore's Law valid?

Movielink incompatible with Macs CNET reports that Movielink, a new pay-to-download Internet movie service is incompatible with Macs. "Last week, an online movie download service backed by five major studios opened for business, marking one of the industry's biggest moves to date into Internet distribution. Dubbed Movielink, the joint project by MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Studios. Mac users will have to wait for a sequel to the initial Movielink service, however, since the service only works on computers running versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system." More.

Moore's Law: Valid or Not? A First Monday article attempts to debunk the validity of Moore's Law, which claims that processor transistor count doubles every 18 months. "Contrary to popular claims, it appears that the common versions of Moore's Law have not been valid during the last decades. As semiconductors are becoming important in economy and society, Moore's Law is now becoming an increasingly misleading predictor of future developments." More.

Xserve cluster achieves 217 GigaFlops Software written by researchers at Dauger Research and the University of California, Los Angeles, achieved over 217 billion floating-point operations per second on a cluster of 33 dual-processor Xserves. "The Applied Cluster Computing Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) recently acquired 33 XServes for the purpose of using them as a parallel computing cluster. Using Pooch, provided by Dauger Research, the JPL group has begun running parallel computing code on their new XServe cluster." More.

Students treat iBooks well According to a Wired News report analyzing Maine's implementation standard middle-school iBooks, students are taking good care of their new "buddies." "Not many middle-schoolers would refer to a 500-page textbook or graphing calculator as a buddy. But that's the term one student in Maine used to describe his iBook, which he received as part of Maine's initiative to provide every seventh- and eighth-grader in the state with a laptop." More.

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