New internet domain names in 2009: ICANN

Internet users should soon be able to use new domain names such as .love, .paris or .bank if one of the world wide web's biggest shakeups is approved this week as expected by the web regulator ICANN.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which opened its annual general meeting Monday in Paris, was due to vote on the new names this week.
"Apart from the .com, .net or .org, the 1.3 billion web users will be able from early 2009 to acquire generic addresses by lodging common words such as .love, .hate or .city or proper names," ICANN president Paul Twomey told French newspaper Les Echos.
The meeting has gathered more than 1,300 delegates from 130 countries.
ICANN, a non-profit organization based in southern California, oversees the assignment of domain names and internet protocol addresses that help computers communicate.

US military makes world's fastest supercomputer

A US military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

It has out beaten the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California

Thomas P D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop - one thousand trillion calculations per second - has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organisations in the US, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the EU.

The Roadrunner

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine.

"Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade," said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics."

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the US in supercomputing.

Television or Computer, GOOD or BAD ?

Television, a rectangular piece of glass with some electrical components inside which made us sit in front of it and doesn't make us avoid it, but surely lands us to trouble by making us forget our work and people.
Surely making us gain weight and make us more lazy with just making us to press some button according to what we like.
So, what does it do for us ?....... Enrich us of the world, make us enjoy the famous football and baseball match, entertain us with movies and much more. Though gives us a lot of entertainment, also gives us a lot of health problems.
So what to say whether to say its good or its bad?

Computer , the world famous invention without which I wont be writing this brought the world in our hands but whats the use we cant hold the world with out small hands.
It opened the portals of unlimited knowledge and made us pass time with loads of games, continuous music with lots of entertainment and also with trouble like neck pain, back pain and also making us wear those lenses as vision aid.
So what can I say? Neither I can say the computer is good nor bad, hence you decide!!