] The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech
] could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the
] planet, according to preliminary numbers.
]
] Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new
] supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100
] dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine
] into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest
] supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big
] and expensive Earth Simulator.

It was relatively inexpensive, too. $5.2 million. Theoretical peak performance is 17.6 teraflops. The developers are hoping to achieve 80% of that performance.

Update on TechWeb at http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031105S0011

The significance here is the steep drop in computing resources available for solving large problems. How many problems become economically tractable if there were a bunch of computers like this available to industry and academia?

Wired News: Mac Supercomputer: Fast, Cheap

Think about the most brilliant or insane theoretical idea you've read about recently. Think about organized chaos, evolution, emergence, artificial intelligence, parallel computers... There exists music in this universe that is a perfect metaphor for these things, nearly complete in it's audio conversion in terms of high resolution detail and complexity. It might be a pity if you never knew about it. Let's not even refer to these as music to avoid association with.. conventional.. "music". So without further adew I share with you the following organized sound (you can probably find them all in the search engine of the provided link):

"autechre" (often called lp5) by autechre
"8000 bc" by otto von schirach
"1" (often called nullpluze.nz) by crunch
"lipswitch" by richard devine
"the richard d. james album" by aphex twin

ta daaaaaa!

the most technologically advanced and lucid music I'm aware of

Terrific introductory book about computers. Petzold assumes the reader knows nothing and explains everything in a clear simple way from the very bottom level of functional abstraction up, in a building logical progression. Learn how bar codes work, how a lightbulb (or other output) can "answer" which switches are closed in a circuit, what "and" and "or" gates are and how to use these to build more complicated gates, and how to build a binary adding machine.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

I just got this link from Virgil Griffith.

This webpage will redirect you to a Google image search using a random search term based on the filename scheme used by many popular digital cameras. What results is the most random, random sampling of pictures.

The Google random picture generator

] let me just say that, as a slashdot troll, i have a
] firewall which allows me to dynamically modify my o/s
] fingerprint, a highly adaptive cookie manager/poisoner
] that can decode many cookies in realtime (stop using
] urlencode!), a browser plugin that lets me modify my
] entire http header including user agent, a
] database-driven transparent proxy tracker which harvests
] new proxies 24/7, scripts to generate free email accounts
] by the 100's, good web scripting skills, and on a good
] day around 500 moderation points on slashdot from over
] 1,000 monitored accounts.

This is a really great discussion between a troll and a sysop. It really speaks to the fact that governance of an internet community is a very complex problem that shares many of the social dynamics of governance of a IRL community.

Trolls vs. Sysops...

Awesome. AI Libraries for Never Winter Nights using NWN's NWScript language. How killer is that??

NWN Memetic AI Overview

sophisticated videogame site

the art and science of making video games

Despite the dotcom boom and bust, the computer and telecommunications revolution has barely begun. Over the next few decades, the internet and related technologies really will profoundly transform society

Finally, someone who gets it.

We've only just begun

An encyclopedia that is created and alterable by everyone.

wikipedia