WoW in Billion Bucks League

Vivendi, the publisher of World of Warcraft, a popular MMORPG, announced that the game has reached the billion-dollar mark in revenues (1.2 billion big ones, to be exact), and more than ten million subscribers (I was one until about September, and I'm considering playing again after the finals)

Cisco's Minority Report Tech

I went to a Cisco event in Metrowalk in Ortigas yesterday, and the communications gear company showcased some upcoming networking technologies. One of the demo that impressed me is the Minority Report-like Digital Signin, which uses RFID (not retina scans like in the movie).

Of course, the piece de resistance of the event is the Express Network on Wheels, a self-contained data center housed in a container van. The NoW contains racks for servers, routers, security appliances and UPS, and can be deployed anywhere.

What's even nicer is the swag bag they gave out. It contains a miniature Cisco Now, at 1:72 scale. Really cool.

Crunching Numbers

I'm becoming obsessed with the work units that I get credited with in BOINC, the distributed computing program where you can "donate" idle CPU cycles to crunch numbers for different research endeavors. I have overclocked my AMD Athlon 64 X2 proc just to bump up its number crunching abilities a bit.

Currenty I am donating CPU cycles to six projects: SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, rosetta@home, SIMAP, malariacontrol.net and SHA-1 Collision Search.

SETI@Home processes the signals gathered by the Arecibo radio telescope, searching for alien signals; rosetta@home and SIMAP simulates protein folding; malariacontrol.net simulates the distribution of malaria; and SHA-1 Collision Search is concerned with cryptography.

Teraflops for Video

ATI's newest video card, the 3870 X2, can reach a processing speed of 1 teraflop, making it faster than the supercomputers of yonder, like the Cray 1, which can only reach 800 megaflops.

I think my Athlon 64 X2 3800+ can reach 3.6 gigaflops if overclocked.

via Slashgear

Assassin's Creed

I got my copy of Assassin's Creed today (for PS3 console), and I'd say the game exceeded all my expectations. The graphics are amazing and the gameplay is tops!

Mariner 1 and the DO Loop

I stumbled upon this interesting fact about the Mariner 1 spacecraft while browsing Wikipedia.

The Fortran DO loop caused an orbit computation error in a Mercury flight, and was long suspected to have caused the crash of the Mariner 1 space rocket on 22 July 1962 .

Mariner 1 was supposed to explore Venus but was destroyed shortly after takeoff. Its backup, Mariner 2, was successfully launched however.