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November 2008
End of the (virtual) world for Google
Google is giving up on its virtual world project, shuttering its not-so-lively site called Lively at the end of this year, the company announced.
The short-lived virtual world, where users could create animated avatars like the sad little guy on the left and dance and play and compete against fellow fake beings, never really got a foothold in the universe of online make believe.
Lively isn’t alone. Many virtual world sites for grown-ups - from the vaunted Second Life on down - are seeing real-world problems, even though kid-focused sites like Webkinz and Club Penguin are doing pretty well.
According to Austin-based research firm Virtual Worlds Management, more than 150 virtual world sites have popped up on the Internet over the past few years, most targeted users under age 18.
Do you ever visit virtual worlds? Ever been on Lively - and if so why do you think it’s dying?
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Yahoo founder Yang out as CEO
From the As-the-Yahoo-turns department, the Internet giant just announced that it has begun searching for a CEO to replace founder Jerry Yang.
Yahoo, of course, has been fraught with troubles and suffering from shareholder angst since its on-again, off-again, gone-for-good merger talks by Microsoft Corp. earlier this year.
It’s tried all sorts of steps to regain footing, from putting angry investor Carl Icahn on its board to thwart an ugly proxy fight to striking deals with arch-rival Google Inc. to boost its advertising business.
Yang took over again in June 2007 to try and right the ship he helped build. But his day-to-day control of the company has done little: Yahoo’s stock price is about a third what it was back when it was being courted by Microsoft, and it is still far behind Google and other online competitors when it comes to generating advertising and other revenues.
Yang has tried several programs to re-energize his company and increase its innovation, but obviously Yahoo’s board thinks maybe somebody else can do the job a little better.
Click here for the announcement from Yahoo.
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IBM and Cray take fastest supercomputer spots
Roadrunner is still the fastest animal in the supercomputing world, but Jaguar is nipping at its heels.
IBM’s Roadrunner system kept its hold on the No. 1 spot on the latest Top500.org list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Cray’s XT5 Jaguar system, however, has become the first to join it beyond the petaflop mark.
The list is scheduled to be released today at the SC08 supercomputing conference, which is being held through Friday at the Austin Convention Center. The event is expected to draw 9,000 people from around the world.
Austin’s own supercomputer - the “Ranger” system at the University of Texas’ advanced computing center - dropped two places on the list, but remained in the top 10 at No. 6.
With the aid of a few enhancements added since June, the Roadrunner system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory pushed its performance on a benchmark test to 1.105 petaflops.
Normally, we’d try to come up with a clever way to portray the magnitude of that number. In this case, just typing it out seems impressive enough - 1,105,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
(Generally speaking, a desktop PC might pump through roughly 10,000,000,000 “flops.” What a puny little number that is.)
The supercomputer runs all those calculations through a combination of IBM Cell and AMD Opteron processors. The bulk of the design work for both processors occurred at those companies’ offices in Austin.
Roadrunner became the first supercomputer to surpass the petaflop barrier earlier this year. Cray now has joined it.
The Jaguar supercomputer, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, clocked in at 1.059 petaflops. Again, for effect: That’s 1,059,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second.
Cray and IBM dominate the top 10, taking seven of those spots (Cray 4, IBM 3).
Author= Dan Zehr Author_email= dzehr@statesman.com
IBM, Cray, AMD, supercomputer, Top500, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Texas, SC08
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Prognosis for PC sales: Grim
It’s getting ugly out there for personal computer makers.
The current recession has sparked “rapid, seismic changes in consumer behavior” that have made this holiday season “the most difficult climate we’ve ever seen,” Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson said today. The company dropped its forecast for the current quarter, just days after its main rival, Circuit City, declared bankruptcy.
Best Buy’s news prompted another round of pessimistic research notes from analysts today, many saying the announcement confirmed their expectations of a tough holiday season for computer makers.
Even before Circuit City’s news, UBS analyst Ben Reitzes said the smaller, cheaper netbooks popular this year would put a damper on average PC sales prices through the holiday season. Yesterday, he dropped his revenue estimate on Dell and H-P for the second time in a month.
It doesn’t look like it’ll get any better next year. Research firm IDC, which tracks technology sales, lowered its forecast today for worldwide technology spending growth in 2009 — dropping it to 2.6 percent from 5.9 percent. For the U.S., IDC scaled back its estimate to 0.9 percent from 4.2 percent.
Any way you slice it, the recession is making life difficult for computer and information-technology companies. Then again, it’s not exactly roses for the rest of us, either.
