Linus Torvalds Gives Nvidia the Finger. Literally

Linus Torvalds sends a none-too-subtle message to Nvidia. Image: Screenshot/YouTube

Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn’t happy with Nvidia. And he wants you to know it.

Late last week, at a hacker meetup in Finland, Torvalds laid into Nvidia, calling it “the single worst company” the Linux developer community has ever dealt with, complaining that the chipmaker doesn’t do as much as it could to ensure that its hardware plays nicely with his open source operating system. He even turned to the camera filming the event, flipped the company the proverbial bird, and dropped the proverbial F bomb.

“Nvidia, fuck you,” he said, as the room erupted with applause and laughter.

Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the chipmaker does offer Linux drivers for its hardware in some cases, and it offers a support page on its website for questions involving Linux.

Twenty years after creating Linux, Torvalds still oversees development of the operating system’s core code, and many still look to him a spokesman for the Linux community as a whole — though many others think his opinion is relatively unimportant now that so many businesses and individual developers are behind the widely used OS. In any case, he has never been one to hold back his opinion.

Continue Reading “Linus Torvalds Gives Nvidia the Finger. Literally” »

Tags: , ,
Back to top

Before Google and GoDaddy, There Was Elizabeth Feinler

Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the head of the "Prehistoric Google." Image: ISOC

Before GoDaddy and Network Solutions and VeriSign, there was Elizabeth Feinler and the NIC.

From 1972 to 1989, Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler ran the Network Information Center at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California — the place that oversaw the use of internet addresses before the arrival of commercial outfits such as GoDaddy and Network Solutions. If you wanted a domain name, you came to Jake.

The NIC was also the place that published the documentation and directories for the internet — well before it was called the internet. The Stanford Research Center, or SRI, was one of the original nodes on the ARPAnet — a network backed by the US Department of Defense that connected various research centers across the country — and in building the NIC and running it for 17 years, Feinler was among a small group of researchers who bootstrapped this government network into something that would one day connect one third of the world’s population.

Earlier this year, Elizabeth Feinler was inducted into the inaugural class of the Internet Society’s (ISOC) Internet Hall of Fame, alongside such luminaries as Vint Cerf, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Van Jacobson, and Steve Crocker. But don’t call her Elizabeth. She has long been known as Jake.

Continue Reading “Before Google and GoDaddy, There Was Elizabeth Feinler” »

Back to top

California Nuke Simulator Is World’s Most Powerful Computer

An unidentified tech slogs on while Livermore's Kim Cupps and Adam Bertsch pose for a publicity shot in front of Sequoia. Image: Lawrence Livermore

A massive liquid-cooled supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has received the bragging rights that come with being the world’s most powerful calculating machine.

With 1.5 million processing cores, Livermore’s Sequoia supercomputer weighs about the same as 30 elephants, and it can do more calculations per second than any machine ever built. How many? 16.3 quadrillion, according to benchmark numbers researchers at the national lab submitted for international supercomputing benchmarking contest called the Top500 list. In benchmarking terms, that translates to 16.3 petaflops per second.

That blows away the reigning top supercomputer, Japan’s K computer, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science, which can deliver 10.5 petaflops per second.

Sequoia will simulate nuclear explosions to a degree that was previously impossible, but it will also give researchers insight into what’s happening to weapons in the country’s weapons stockpile without actually testing nuclear bombs.

“Supercomputers such as Sequoia have allowed the United States to have confidence in its nuclear weapons stockpile over the 20 years since nuclear testing ended in 1992,” Lawrence Livermore said in a statement.

Continue Reading “California Nuke Simulator Is World’s Most Powerful Computer” »

Tags: , , , ,
Back to top

Who Invented Email? Just Ask … Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky — linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and all around critic — has weighed into the debate over who invented email Photo: Andrew Rusk/Flickr

Who invented email? That’s a question sure to spark some debate. And where there’s debate, the appearance of Noam Chomsky should come as no surprise.

This week, Chomsky — the professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at MIT who’s known as much for his criticism of US foreign policy and capitalism as much as his academic work — unexpectedly joined the debate over the origins of email, putting his weight behind V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, a man who claims he invented email as in 1978 at the age of 14 while working at a medical and dentistry university in New Jersey.

Today, Ayyadurai is a lecturer at MIT, and he once studied with Chomsky. But Chomsky says he backs Ayyadurai’s claims for reasons of, yes, semantics.

“Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today — and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. The facts are indisputable,” reads a statement from Chomsky that fired across the internet in a press release from Ayyadurai.

Yes, by 1978, people were already sending electronic messages across computer networks, but Ayyadurai says he was the first person to build a software program called “email” — and that he was the first to structure electronic communications in a way that mirrored methods traditionally used to move paper mail through an office, setting up electronic “inboxes” and “outboxes” and “address books.”

Continue Reading “Who Invented Email? Just Ask … Noam Chomsky” »

Tags: , ,
Back to top

IBM Overcomes Apple Secrecy to Stream US Open

IBM's John Kent shows off a heat map of a tough hole at the US Open. Photo: Caleb Garling/Wired

Even IBM is fed up with Apple’s famously secretive approach to new hardware and software.

This weekend, as the world’s best golfers are competing at the US Open in San Francisco, Big Blue is teaming with the US Golf Association to offer both mobile and web apps that let fans follow the action. From an iPhone, iPad, Android device, or an ordinary PC, you can stream live video or follow Twitter feeds or load heat maps of individual holes at the Olympic Club golf course.

Everything works as advertised. But as the tournament approached, IBM was worried it wouldn’t. Just days before the first golfer teed off, Apple was slated to unveil a new collection of who-knows-what at its annual developer conference, just down the road from the Olympic Club, and Big Blue was concerned whatever Apple introduced would mess with its software.

When Apple released its new “Retina display” iPads earlier this year, IBM program manager John Kent and his team had to scramble to ensure that their apps for The Masters — the first major golf tournament of the year — worked well with the new tablet.

An old-school app. Photo: Caleb Garling/Wired

“It’s a really big challenge,” Kent says of working with Apple products. “[Apple] might guide you, but they don’t tell you anything.” But he does say that once a product is released, the company is “very helpful.”

He also says that when changes are made to Big Blue’s software, it’s much easier for IBM to update and redistribute applications for Android. Google’s approach to its online app store is less, shall we say, strict than Apple’s.

Continue Reading “IBM Overcomes Apple Secrecy to Stream US Open” »

Tags: , , ,
Back to top
« OLDER POSTS