IBM (NYSE:IBM) snared the top three spots in the TOP500 Supercomputer record book and had a total of 210 systems on the list, the most of any upper computer vendor, the company said Wednesday.

IBM also had the most aggregate performance on the list with 5.6 petaflops—48 percent of the total—and the most systems in the top 10, top 50 and top 100.

The official results were reported during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, where the bi-annual listing of the World’s TOP500 Supercomputer sites was released.

Leading the pack was IBM’s much- ballyhooed Roadrunner supercomputer, which operates at 1 petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

The speed demon was built for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

Roadrunner is powered by 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engines—the specialty chips that power popular video game consoles. In addition, 6,562 AMD (NYSE:AMD) Opteron dual-core processors perform basic compute functions on Roadrunner, which free the cell chips for the math-intensive calculations.

Taking second place in the fastest computer category is the IBM Blue Gene/L system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California. The supercomputer clocks in at 478 teraflops or 478 trillion calculations per second.

IBM’s Team Blue Gene held the No. 3 spot with a 450 teraflop performance from the Blue Gene/P system. The supercomputer is housed at Argonne National Lab in Chicago.

IBM said it also has the most power-efficient systems. They are the IBM QS22 PowerXCell 8i-based supercomputers at IBM Germany and Fraunhofer; and the Los Alamos system.

According to the Top500 rankings, IBM also has the fastest machine in Europe, the Blue Gene/P at Juelich Research Centre in Germany.

The TOP500 Supercomputer Site is compiled and published by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany

Yahoo!’s free online email service is to grow new tentacles with the company planning to add two domains alongside its existing “@yahoo.com” addresses. The struggling internet firm said it is to introduce “@ymail.com” and “@rocketmail.com” to give people who use its service a better choice of Yahoo! email address options.

According to industry stats, the company has about 266 million peeps across the globe with a Yahoo! email address, making it the most popular web-based email in the world, ahead of Microsoft’s Hotmail and Google’s Gmail.”We recognise that people want an email address that reflects who they are,” Yahoo! Mail vice president John Kremer told Agence France-Presse.

Dell is to stop selling new computers with Windows XP from today unless buyers spend an extra $50 to downgrade their operating system.

Customers looking to buy models from the company’s Vostro line will be offered Vista Business, but Dell will downgrade the system for an extra $50.

Some of the company’s XPS gaming systems will also carry a charge for the downgrade.

The move will raise eyebrows, since Dell may be seen as trying to cash in on the unpopularity of Microsoft’s latest operating system.

Dell was one of the first companies to offer a free downgrade service to customers, primarily aimed at small businesses reluctant to make the move to Vista.

Microsoft has said that it will stop selling XP licences and boxed software on 30 June, although it has already extended the lifespan of the operating system.

 
RICHIE RICH: Richie Randazzo celebrates yesterday outside the building where he works — and wants to live.

June 12, 2008 — A beloved Park Avenue doorman who won $5 million in the state lottery wants to move on up - and into the elegant, pre-war building where he works.

That way, “I’ll have the doorman open the door for me,” says Richie Randazzo, 44, a bachelor who lives in a two-story home in Brooklyn.

But the lucky winner will have to wait because the only apartment for sale in the building at 1021 Park Ave. at East 85th Street is out of his range.So for now, Randazzo, who plans to continue working, will be a millionaire who opens the door and hails taxis for millionaires.

The only apartment on the market in his building is an 11-room beauty that is going for a cool $9.95 million. And even though $5 million is nothing to sneeze at, it just isn’t enough scratch - even for a scratch-off millionaire.

Still, a fella can dream.

“After I hit the next lottery, I’ll buy that one,” Randazzo said yesterday at a ceremony announcing his good fortune.

The lucky doorman actually won the prize May 2, when he bought a $10 Set for Life instant ticket, which pays $5,000 a week for life and guarantees a minimum of $5 million. Winners get $65,000 every three months, or $41,926 after taxes.

That - minus tips - is more than the $40,000 the doorman earns in a year.

Randazzo’s new riches have given him the freedom to concentrate on one of his passions - women.

“I want a good Italian woman - or Swedish or Irish or Chinese,” he said. “I’m always looking. It’s a hobby of mine.”

Asked if he is the Big Apple’s most eligible bachelor, he replied, “Yes, absolutely. I’ve got a lot of money to prove it.

“If they want to start a reality show called, ‘Who Wants to Marry a Scratch-Off Millionaire,’ let me know,” he added. “They can call it, ‘From Rags to Richie.’ ”

Champing on a cigar, Randazzo got a hero’s welcome when he showed up at the building last night in a silver Porsche Cayenne stretch limo. The super, George Skintej, opened the limo’s door, saying, “Now, he’s my boss.”

Randazzo didn’t scratch off the winning ticket until he got home to the Gravesend house he grew up in. Hans Utsch, a mutual-fund manager who lives at 1021 Park, said the doorman “could barely speak” when he told him about his windfall. “He was halfway between laughing and crying.”

After the big win, Randazzo wondered whether to quit, telling building resident Amy Fine-Collins, “I don’t need to do this anymore.”

But, taking the advice of his parents, Cora and Frank, who live in West Palm Beach, Fla., he decided to keep his job, because “it’s too much too soon.”

Woman executed for allegedly helping the United States, being a prostitute

KHAR, Pakistan - Militants in Pakistan executed a woman after accusing her of being a spy for the U.S. and a prostitute, and said others would face the same fate, a government official and villagers said on Wednesday.

It was the first time that a woman had been killed in northwest Pakistan after being accused of spying, although militants have killed many men they accused of helping U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

The body of the unidentified woman was found dumped beside a road near the town of Khar in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border, a hotbed of support for al-Qaida and Taliban militants.

A note was found with the body, a government official said.

“She was killed because she was an American spy and a prostitute and those who found doing such activities will face the same fate,” said the official, who declined to be identified, citing the note.

A villager said the woman had apparently been strangled as there were rope marks on her neck.

“I didn’t see any bullet or knife wounds,” he said.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25090111

Toyota Motor Corp. said Wednesday that it plans to start producing lithium-ion batteries next year as it races against rivals to develop new high-mileage hybrid vehicles.

Toyota, seeking to keep its lead in the growing hybrid market amid rising petrol prices, said its joint venture with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. will move into full-scale production of lithium-ion batteries in 2010.

The Japanese giant was a pioneer of hybrids, which are equipped with an electric motor and a standard petrol engine to make them more economical.

The firm is poised to overtake General Motors this year as the world’s top automaker but faces renewed competition from other Japanese firms, such as Honda, and overseas rivals in the green automobile race.

Toyota said it would also step up efforts to development a next-generation battery that can outperform lithium-ion batteries.

Automakers have for years been competing to develop lithium-ion batteries suitable for long distance hybrids, but there have been safety concerns after massive recalls of the same type of battery by laptop computer manufacturers.

Nissan Motor Co. said last month it and NEC Corp. will invest 115 million dollars to mass produce new lithium-ion batteries batteries for electric, hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles.

German automaker Volkswagen AG has teamed up with Japan’s Sanyo Electric to develop a lithium-ion battery for next-generation hybrids.

Three major Internet provides have agreed to block access to websites and online discussion groups featuring child pornography, New York state attorney general said Tuesday.

“The pervasiveness of child pornography on the Internet is horrific and it needs to be stopped,” Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in a statement on the agreement with Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable.

“We are attacking this problem by working with Internet Service Providers to ensure they do not play host to this immoral business,” he said, adding that the agreement “should serve as a model for the entire industry.”

Internet providers had initially refused to control the content of communication between online users, but they finally agreed to block the pedophile content, Cuomo said.

The agreement covers the entire United States and Cuomo said he was negotiating similar deals with other Internet providers.

“Online child pornography represents one of the worst abuses of the Internet,” said Jeff Zimmerman, senior vice president and chief ethics officer at Time Warner Cable.

“Among the steps Time Warner Cable is taking are removing Newsgroups from our Internet service,” Zimmerman said, referring to online discussion groups.

Verizon, with 8.2 million users, and Time Warner, with 7.9 million, are among the five largest Internet provides in the world. Sprint is one of the three biggest mobile phone companies.

News by : AFP
Date: 6/11/2008

Microsoft’s TownSquare internal social network provides employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues

At the request of its SharePoint and Office product development teams, Microsoft ’s Office Labs operation has created and is testing a prototype of an internal social network that can provide employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues.

Chris Pratley, general manager of Office Labs , is slated to disclose details of the prototype — called TownSquare — Thursday at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. He spoke to Computerworld about the project, which was launched in January and has already been used by about 8,000 Microsoft employees.

With a layout that is strikingly similar to Facebook.com’s (in which Microsoft invested $240 million in October 2007), TownSquare is fueled by enterprise news feeds that use Web services to query SharePoint for public information, such as promotions and company anniversaries, about an employee.

TownSquare also notifies users when a document or file is modified. Users can customize their feeds and monitor who is receiving information about them.

In early January, Pratley’s group told 100 Microsoft employees about the network. Since then, 8,000 employees who learned of TownSquare by word of mouth have visited the network at least once, Pratley noted. About 700 use it daily.

Some Microsoft customers, which he declined to name, are testing the TownSquare network for use in their companies.

Office Labs works as a sort of advance development team that tests technology concepts suggested by employees and, as in this case, development teams. Pratley stressed that TownSquare is not a product, but a platform to test the technology concepts. By hammering out the various likes and dislikes of its users before releasing a product, “We’re trying to get version three goodness into a first release,” he added.

“We have instrumentation ?so we know which things people use,” Pratley noted. “We share that with the client teams we work with. They take the knowledge about usage so they don’t make so many mistakes in product design.”

Many third party vendors have targeted SharePoint as the core data source for information to feed their enterprise social networking and other Enterprise 2.0 applications. Several have announced upgrades to their products or new integration with SharePoint this week at the conference.

Anecdotal evidence has shown that employees like the TownSquare tool, Pratley noted. Employees especially appreciate being able to monitor the creation and editing of documents by colleagues, he added. One employee used the network to find a sponsor within Microsoft to fund her trip to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

“That is the kind of information that spreads through an enterprise social network,” he said. “By posting it out there, the people interested can pick up on it, and other people can ignore it. It’s a way to keep in touch in a social way with people you work with.”

Like Facebook , TownSquare also includes a photos of users and allows them to note when they are away from their workstations, such as at a meeting or in the cafeteria for coffee.

While some employees have expressed initial surprise at all the information that Microsoft has about them in its intranet, once people see the type of information that is included in the feeds about them, “they see it’s pretty safe stuff and say okay,” Pratley said.

By Heather Havenstein, Computerworld

Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP/Vista/2000/Server 2003/Server 2008 (KB950759)
Security issues have been identified that could allow an attacker to compromise a system that is running Microsoft Internet Explorer and gain control over it. You can help protect your system by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Security Update for Windows XP/Vista/Server 2003 (KB951376)
A security issue has been identified that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows-based system and gain control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Security Update for Windows XP/Vista/Server 2003 (KB950762)
A security issue has been identified that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the affected system to stop responding. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Cumulative Security Update for ActiveX Killbits for Windows XP/Vista/2000/Server 2003/Server 2008 (KB950760)
Security issues have been identified in ActiveX controls that could allow an attacker to compromise a system that is running Microsoft Internet Explorer and gain control over it. You can help protect your system by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Security Update for Windows XP/Vista/2000/Server 2003/Server 2008 (KB951698)
A security issue has been identified in Microsoft DirectShow that could allow an attacker to compromise your Windows-based system and gain control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - June 2008 (KB890830)
After the download, this tool runs one time to check your computer for infection by specific, prevalent malicious software (including Blaster, Sasser, and Mydoom) and helps remove any infection that is found. If an infection is found, the tool will display a status report the next time that you start your computer. A new version of the tool will be offered every month. If you want to manually run the tool on your computer, you can download a copy from the Microsoft Download Center, or you can run an online version from microsoft.com. This tool is not a replacement for an antivirus product. To help protect your computer, you should use an antivirus product.

UK operator T-Mobile is disconnecting its CSD-WAP subscribers from July 9th, suggesting customers might like to switch to GPRS or something a little more 21st century, and disposing of pay-per-minute internet access.

Circuit Switched Data (CSD) was how mobile phones accessed data services in the early days, or at least the technology that allowed them to try. Technically equivalent to a dial-up modem, it allows speeds of up to 9.6Kb/s, ideal for downloading the latest news and reviews from the Mobile Internet.

The first WAP phones only had CSD, and it was the 9.6Kb/sec speed that drove the creation of WAP itself: a desperate attempt to create a usable experience over such slow connections. But even the mono graphics and text-menu content was painfully slow to use, and starkly contrasted with TV advertising in the UK, from Genie Internet, promoting the Mobile Internet.

WAP over CSD was a painful experience, but we were promised that once GPRS came along then the mobile web would rock our worlds. When that failed to happen we were told that 3G would be the revolution; with data at 3G speeds we would all want the web in our hands. That too failed to change the world, so HSDPA came along to make it all happen, and now HSUPA, LTE and WiMAX are all vying to be the next contender. Meanwhile Apple quietly proved that speed isn’t everything when it comes to the mobile web

So damning was that original WAP experience that the term is largely verboten in the mobile phone industry, despite the fact that parts of the standard are still in daily use, driving operator portals, delivering content to handsets, and even embedded into Sky’s digiboxes for its “red button” services.

CSD is a connection-based technology, just like making a phone call, so connections were charged by the minute rather than by the quantity of data. The last few T-Mobile customers using CSD are paying £2.50 a month for 30 minutes, or are on one of the Freetime tariffs. They’re all going to have to migrate to GPRS at least if they want to be able to access the internet on the move: they might even find the experience an improvement. ®