The-Teacher

Microsoft has lowered what it tells people are the necessary requirements to run Vista. I personally had thought it was something like that Cray Super desktop I mentioned in a previous post. It did this at the request of Intel but has managed to upset everyone else in the process because these requirements will actually only allow the user to run a basic version of the Vista OS.

 It also appears it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract girls to computer science courses at University. Girls have achieved relative parity with boys in most other technical areas but in computing it's a ratio of about 6:1. At least that's better than our class of 8:0 but don't tell anyone!

 Ok, time for some revision. Remember we looked at the measures used to compare the prerformance of computer systems? Well check out this story about NASA's newest supercomputer, 12,800 processors and giving an output of 487 TeraFLOPS!!! Remember a Tera is 1024 Giga.

And finally something off-topic. You are not a geek unless you've watched(and liked) Tron. It's a film where a hacker is digitised by a computer and he sees all of the programs inside the computer as other humans. One of these programs is charged with deleting the said hacker but he realises that as a programmer he has abilities in this environment. Well, anyway, apparently they are making a sequel.The original was mafde in 1982 and had sompretty cool effects for it's time. Hopefully this one will make good use of the technology available now.