This year’s SC conference was a lot of fun. I’ve been to Texas before, but never to Austin. Austin is big city, but it doesn’t really feel like one. Nestled next to the Colorado river, the skyscrapers create an interesting contrast with their surroundings. Many of the buildings seemed brand new, but the city seems fairly quiet for its size. This year’s conference was special because it was the 20th anniversary. In honor of the history of supercomputing, the conference had a musem with artifacts spanning those 20 years including a Cray 1. The SC’08 staff also gave out commemorative DVDs with a copy of the keynote speach given by Seymore Cray at the first SC. His speach sumarized the story of how he got his start after college and some of the interesting problems he and his colleagues had to solve. Even though his speach included a lot of highly technical details, he told the story so well that it was very enjoyable and easy to follow. SC is one of those places that can blow your mind the first time you’re there. There’s so much cutting edge technology and so much talent that it can be a bit overwhelming. Since it was my second time there, it wasn’t quite as overwhelming as the first, but it was still a lot of fun and a great experience.
Category Archives: Tech
Inquirer calls out NVidia over materials claims
It looks like The Inquirer has caught NVidia with their collective pants down over materials used in the production of some of their graphics chips. The short version is that high lead content solder used to bond the chips to the board were failing at high temperatures due to cracking. NVidia knew about this problem and rather than recall all the affected parts, they continued to sell them alongside good new parts which made their way into laptops from many of the major vendors including Apple’s new Macbook Pro. The problem is that while they were shipping both parts, they were telling everyone that only the corrected parts were being shipped. The Inquirer went so far as to have a lab disect a retail MBP and saw it’s motherboard up into slices that could be analyzed with an electron microscope and a mass spectrometer. The evidence they found proved NVidia was lying to their customers.
Sony – still hijacking your machine, now with SecuROM
You’d think after the huge fiasco over Sony’s use of First 4 Internet’s XCP product several years ago, sony would have changed course a bit. Instead Sony decided to bring their DRM efforts in house and out popped SecuROM. Again, they use the same rootkit tactics to secretly install their software. This makes SecuROM difficult to detect and even more difficult to remove. Sony was sued, and settled in the previous case(s). There are several suits pending against EA Games for use of the SecuROM DRM software. I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time before Sony gets served. When will they learn?