Distributed Computing Projects

I'm adding two more projects for my distributed computing effort under BOINC: Cosmology@Home and Proteins@Home, which resumed operations recently. I now participate in eight BOINC projects:

• Rosetta@Home - proteins reseach
  
• SIMAP - proteins research
  
• Cosmology@Home - compares theoretical models of the universe with astronomical and physics data
  
• Einstein@Home - searches for pulsar using data from LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors
  
• SETI@Home - searches for intelligent life using data from Arecibo
  
• Malaria Control - transmission dynamics of malaria
  
• SHA-1 Collision Search - searches for weaknesses in SHA-1 hash function
  
• Proteins@Home - proteins research
  

So far I have 58,000+ credits from the eight projects, enough to rank me at #75 in the Philippines and #131,000 in the world

I am also participating in Folding@Home using my PlayStation 3.

F-22 Supermanouverability

An F-22 Raptor stealth aircraft showing its stuff.

Red PSP

Sony will release a red PlayStation Portable bundled with God of War: Chains of Olympus game. It will also bundle an 80-gig PS3 with the soon-to-be released Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot.

Tasty.

via Engadget

Use Your Coconut

Virgin Atlantic and Boeing tested a 747 jumbo jet that uses biofuel derived from Philippine coconuts and oil extracted from Brazilian palms called babassu.

more here

How to Burn $1.2 Billion

Ever wondered how a burning pile of $1.2 billion worth of bills looks like? A B-2 Stealth bomber that crashed should give you an idea. One of the radar-evading Cold War-era bomber, which flew in 1989 crashed during a deployment in Guam in Saturday.

Satellite Kill

Pentagon briefing showing video of the Aegis missile strike which took out the USA 193 spy satellite.

Akira in Live Action Film

Warner is said to be developing a live action version of anime/manga classic Akira, with Leonardo di Caprio as producer. New Manhattan will be the setting of the film, not Tokyo as in the animation. The first of the 2-part film will open in 2009.

R.I.P. HD DVD

Toshiba formally announced it will formally cease production and further development of HD DVD.

El Reg has an excellent accounting of the format's demise, here. Almost on cue, Universal announced that it will sell movies in Blu-Ray format

10,000 BC

I think this movie is cool.

Hooray, Blu-Ray!

There are reports that say Toshiba is about to pull the plug of its HD DVD business, which means Blu-Ray is the de facto winner of the Hi-Def Format Wars.

Personally, it means that I can go ahead and buy Blu-Ray discs for my video collection (I use my PS3 for playback). In fact, I just did, I bought 3 Blu-Ray movies from Amazon today: Full Metal Jacket, Black Hawk Down and Steve McQueen's Bullitt (my elder brother was named after that movie, btw).

AMD Snags Supercomputer Order

Kyoto University is buying an AMD Quad Core Opteron-based supercomputer. The machine will have 1,664 Opteron processors for a total of 6,656 cores, pumping out 61.2 TFLOP of computing power, enough to put it in the top 20s of the rankings.

Photon Blasters, Check...

US will blow up to smithereens an ailing spy satellite that's supposed to fall to terra firma any day now. The satellite is said to contain state-of-the-art tech and the Americans would rather see it smashed to bits than see parts of it fall to the wrong hands.

Red Roses Banned in Saudi

Saudi Arabia's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has banned the sale of red roses - or anything that has something to do with Valentines Day - in the medieval kingdom. The mutawas are concerned that roses might cause Saudis to have relations out of wedlock.

Petition For Freedom of Information

There is a controversy lately about the posting of pictures of Mohammad in Wikipedia. Apparently there is an online petition that calls for taking down the pictures (an ancient art that depicts the prophet).

There is now a counter petition that calls to the contrary, as a way of ensuring the freedom of information that our civilization is rooted on. The link is here if you wish to sign it.

Fini to Polaroids

Polaroid announced that it will stop producing instant film - the mainstay of homemade porn memories of yore. The company will produce enough stocks to supply owners of instant cameras with film until 2009.

Classmate and MID

I just got back from a symposium held this evening at the Ateneo de Manila University Rockwell campus. One of the speakers was from Intel, who showed off the Classmate PC, the for-kids laptop designed to kill compete with the AMD Geode-powered OLPC.

The Intel guy also discussed the Mobile Internet Device, a.k.a. Rehashed UMPC.

AMD OverDrive Now Available

AMD's Overdrive overclocking tool is now available. Owners of quad-core Phenom X4 procs can now overclock their systems easily.

RIAA Wants Anti-Virus to Filter Content

The greedy fat cats are at it again. Music trade group RIAA wants antivirus companies to include content filtering to anti-virus software.

What a bunch of morons. This is the reason why I don't buy music CDs anymore.

Roboquad vs. Dog

Cool vid: a Wowee Roboquad battling it out versus a puppy.

Lights Out for Incandescent Bulbs

The Philippines will ban incandescent bulbs starting 2010, President Arroyo announced today. The move, which is first in Asia, will save households up to 80% of their lighting expenses. It will also reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in Philippines by up to 2.2 million tons a year.

Yahoo Toolbar on MS Word?

I wasn't really surprised about the $44 billion bid of Microsoft (the Vole, as The Inquirer UK would call it) to buy its rival Yahoo!. It seems that eventually the two losers of Web 2.0 have to join forces somehow to fight the current king of the hill, Google Inc. If the deal goes through, expect to see Yahoo! toolbars appearing in Microsoft Word or Excel.

I shudder at the idea of combining two crappy webmail services, though.