A chip with 80 processing cores, which can make more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops), has been unveiled by Intel. The Teraflop chip is not for commercial use but could lead to more powerful processors. The chip, which makes the calculations on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail, would have, 11 years ago, required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it to do the same job. The Teraflop chip uses less electricity than many current high-end processors, making the design attractive for home computers. Other possible uses include artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games and real-time speech recognition.

Steve Jobs, the Chief Executive of Apple, has called on the recording industry to abandon anti-piracy DRM software in an attempt to open up online music. He argued that copyright protection had failed to tackle piracy but had made systems incompatible with iTunes. Writing on Apple's website, Jobs said: "This is clearly the best alternative for consumers and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat." Jobs said that if DRM software were dropped, Apple would be in a position to create a download system that would be compatible with a wider range of MP3s, including Microsoft's Zune.

Networking website MySpace is launching a competition to win a director's job on a £1 million feature film. Participants will be asked to submit a short film on the site, which will then be judged by, among others, Oscar-winners Anthony Minghella and Kevin Macdonald. MySpace users will be able to contribute to the script and audition for roles in the film, due to be completed by the summer of 2008. "Until you know what sort of director you're going to get, it's difficult to know if a British thriller or an improvised comedy would be more appropriate," said Film4 executive Peter Carlton. Any British resident, regardless of past film experience, can enter. The deadline for submission is April 27.

BT's IT Advisor Service has revealed its quirkiest conversations with customers. When one advisor asked: "Can you click on 'My Computer'?" one customer replied: "I don't have your computer, just mine." Other funny comments include: "My mouse mat isn't wired up", "I met a man on the Internet, can you give me his phone number?" and "Spyware? Can they see me getting dressed through the monitor?" Anthony Vollmer, at BT, admitted: "Some of the calls we get from customers have certainly raised a smile."

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

To read the full article please click here

It must be browser update season as both Microsoft and Mozilla  have released new versions of their browsers.

IE7 was released on 10/18/06. In the first four days more than 3 million copies were downloaded. Source

To get your copy click here.

Firefox 2.0 released 10/24/06 Get your copy here

More than one in eight American adults showed signs of being addicted to the Internet in a recent study.

The so-called "addicts" showed evidence of compulsive Internet use, habitually checking email, websites and chatrooms. The profile of a typical addict is a single, white-collared male in his thirties, who spends more than 30 hours a week on "non-essential" computer use.

More than eight per cent of the 2,513 people questioned admitted that they hide their Internet use from partners, while six percent said their cyberspace activity adversely affected their relationships with other people.

Computer games can be a powerful learning tool according to a report by the Department of Education and Skills.

A study in Nottinghamshire found that achievement in key skills increased to 94 per cent when people played computer games, a significant enhancement of the national benchmark, which currently stands at 22 per cent.

Google has bought the garage and suburban home, where it was founded in 1998. The Internet giant paid an undisclosed sum for the property in California's Menlo Park, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the search engine with just $1million in funds. Today, the company has a market value of $125 billion. Google bought the property from Susan Wojcicki, who, in 1998, agreed to rent out her garage for $1,700 a month to two Stanford University students, one of whom had dated a friend. Wojcicki is now Google's Vice President of Product Management.

World Wine Consultant William Hancock has just sent us an update of what he's been up to in Buenos Aires, South America including this really nice pic below...

William Hancock preparing the land for the next cosecha at 2.990 metrs above sea level

For more info http://www.worldwineconsultants.com/

Tagnautica is an experimental navigation tool built to explore the space of related Flickr tags.
Type in one start tag, confirm with the [Enter] key and dive into tag space.
When there are no related tags found the cursor will reappear - type in a new tag and start over.
Click in the center to see the images labelled with the shown tag.

Found at Yardwear.net