computer-sense.com

You could kind of argue that this monster was CPU limited, but this 4 way SLI machine will be able to churn through more polygons than you are likley to need for a long time.

The system needs a 1.5 Kilowatt power supply and roughly about £3000-4000 to buy. I’m not even sure if you’d need to write your own drivers to push that much power through a single display. Either way its a mighty impressive (if pointless) exercise.

The huge CPU cooler you can see here is there because the whole thing is overclocked some insanely large amount (they’d be better off with water cooling, but hey)

In the news this week is the story that Sony is stopping manufacturing Floppydisks in March 2011. I must confess I still feel a little uncomfortable if I am on a PC that doesn’t have a flopydisk drive. I still think they are still a useful device for restoring and installing base drivers.

I agree they are unreliable and, to be honest, a pretty crappy way of storing data, but I used one only a couple of months ago to install some SATA drivers onto a Windows XP machine. Doing the same with a usb drive would have been impossible at the time and the CD was in use to install Windows XP on.

I think they do still have a place as the ultimate last-resort. I will mourn them when they are gone.

After meeting with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection center, Facebook has decided not to put a panic button on their site.

Facebook claim their site is one of the safest places on the Internet.. I’m inclined to agree.. It’s not as if a panic button will make any difference. Children nowadays are well aware of what goes on online and if they don’t it’s time we told them how to be safe. If a child feels threatened online there’s only one place I’d suggest the child goes – the parents.

It’s clear to me that immature kids would abuse this pretty regularly.. making the whole thing pretty obsolete.. There’s a big red X in the corner of every website that can always be used if someone find themselves in trouble:

Firefox is the internet browser of choice for those in the internet business. It is much more user friendly than the most popular Internet Browser (Internet Explorer), as it offers a variety of plug-ins which give extra functionality to the browser which is why it is so popular amongst those in the internet world.

Now Firefox have announced that they are only days away from launching a mobile phone version of their browser. Initially the browser will only be available on the Nokia N900 phone. The mobile browser will be able to synchronise with your desktop version and should be available for download before the end of the year.

Those with iphones will have to wait a little longer for the release.

Further Proof today that the Patent system is horribly outdated and insufficient, as the XML format that works behind MS word has been found to be breaching a patent held by a small company called i4i.

The reality is that the patent should never have been granted in the 1st place. XML is an open standard, it’s unpatenteable and can’t belong to anyone.

Let me dum this down for those of us that aren’t programmers.. the patent (http://www.patents.com/Method-manipulating-architecture-content-a-document-separately-other/US5787449/en-US/) says its a method of separating content from design using XML. In other words every single website using html, every modern office package (not just word) and a lot of custom software (some of which I have written myself) all uses a similar method. You can’t patent against it because it’s not theirs to begin with.

-Also, just a thought.. for the price of the $250 million they are settling for, why don’t Microsoft just buy the company and dissolve it? Problem solved.

The award winning blogger “Fake Steve Jobs” launched a campaign a few weeks back as a protest to the American mobile network AT&T’s  continually terrible level of service.

The basic idea was to get as many people as possible to run a data intensive program through 3G in order to bog down the network as much as possible for a single hour. The threat got AT&T a little worried and there were all sorts of people dipping in with their two cents on the legality of the DoS attack.

Fake Steve Jobs then began backtracking, trying haalt the campeign, but of couse by that time it had taken on a life of it’s own.

The campaign eventually only succeeded in a “blip” in their traffic levels. But it was fun to watch it all happening and maybe (just maybe) AT&T will pull their finger out and start to improve their network.

As a testament to the power of the Internet (and Facebook Groups) the band “Rage Against The Machine” has had their 10 year old song “killing in the name of” brought to the top of the music chars in the UK.

The massive Internet campaign started life from a Facebook group trying to get the song to beat the X Factor single that has become a yearly fixture for the past 4 years in a row. The protest worked astoundingly well with just under a million people now in the facebook group and the song racing up the charts as people bought the song through iTunes, Amazon and a host of other music stores.

Go RATM!

So the big news today is that the popular micro blogging service Twitter was hacked last night by a group calling themselves the “Iranian Cyber Army”.

Twitter claims the hack itself was due to the sites DNS records being compromised.. meaning that the URL was temporarily being pointed somewhere else.

There was a badly written message in the code claiming they control the Internet by our power:

U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….

Anyone else running scared? Nope, me neither..

So it’s been a while now since Google have released (..sort of) it’s operating system, Chrome OS on us.

I think its the 1st step in a series of very important shifts in how we use computers in general. People have been talking about Cloud computing for what seems like an age, but Chrome OS is the 1st real attempt at making it a viable solution.

Of course, I doubt we will ever really get rid of a need for installed software, but the fact that Google believes that its both technically possible and in some cases an advantage to have all your programs running off a remote server shows that its a very real possibility that we will start having to pay monthly subscriptions to use web-based office suites. Scary thought..

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google is getting quite a reputation for putting his foot in his mouth.

Perhaps the most worrying thing about his comments a couple of days ago was the fact that his comments put light onto the fact that he obviously has no idea  about privacy, what it means and how to act responsibly with other people’s data.

Me? I’m making the switch to Bing.. I’m not having my valuable search data in the hands of some buffoon that doesn’t know the meaning of the word privacy let alone the peoples need to keep some information off the public domain.