Filed under: Computers, Google

While the anti-Google movement is already in full-swing amongst the nerdarati, it seems that the company is still enjoying its “good guy” reputation with the mainstream. According to a study released on last week, the company has the single best reputation in all of corporate America. (Which is kinda like being named prom king at Zombie High School, but we digress.)

Google has become famous for its perks — from allowing engineers to spend 20 percent of their work time on side projects, to free, unlimited snack bins full of everything from salted cashews to dried mangoes — and this probably didn’t hurt its case.

“The ratings they get focus on how they treat their employees, their workplace environment,” said Robert Fronk, senior vice president at Rochester, New York-based Harris. “They absolutely get tremendous credit for the social responsibility, which for them is also linked with their vision and leadership.”

On the other end of the spectrum, unsurprisingly, was nearly the entire U.S. airline industry, which has cut employee salaries while raising ticket prices and tacking on fees for every conceivable perk for consumers. The percentage of respondents whose rating toward the industry was favorable fell to 26 percent from 31 percent last year — the single the sharpest drop of any of the 11 industries counted in the survey.

Rounding out the top 10, from second to ninth, were health care company Johnson & Johnson, Intel Corp, food companies General Mills Inc and Kraft Foods Inc, Warren Buffet’s investment and insurance enterprise Berkshire Hathaway Inc (sweet Web site, by the way), the 3M Co, Coca-Cola Co., and Japanese automaker Honda Motor Co.

Johnson & Johnson? Kraft Foods? Really? Perception is a powerful thing. [Source: Reuters]

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Filed under: Computers

It’s no surprise that more displays is always better, but when it comes to mimicking the act of reading a book, dual displays is a clear step forward. Researchers at Maryland and Berkeley Universities developed a prototype dual-face, modular e-book reader that allows readers to fan pages to advance in a book or via trackball.

If you’re doing some serious research, the displays separate from one another, allowing one to display in landscape mode while the other runs in portrait. To complete the book meme, the device can be folded over to run in a more compact manner, and a simple flip changes the page. Possibilities for future e-book readers are endless here, so we applaud Maryland and Berkeley for using those research dollars. [Source: New Scientist]

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Filed under: Audio/Video

Leave it to space nerds with money to come up with the world’s highest resolution visualization system. NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames has created the 128-screen hyperwall-2, a mega display capable of rendering one quarter billion pixels.

Hyperwall-2 measures 23- x 10-feet of LCD goodness, and is powered by 128 GPUs and 1,024 processor cores with 74 teraflops of peak processing power. To top things off, 475 terabytes of storage keep the system rolling. All in all, hyperwall-2 has more than 100 times the processing power of its poor predecessor, hyperwall, from 2002. The elder hyperwall was unavailable for comment and is most likely on an alcoholic bender somewhere, complaining about “kids these days.” [Source: NASA]

[Thanks, james]

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Filed under: Audio/Video

Leave it to space nerds with money to come up with the world’s highest resolution visualization system. NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames has created the 128-screen hyperwall-2, a mega display capable of rendering one quarter billion pixels.

Hyperwall-2 measures 23- x 10-feet of LCD goodness, and is powered by 128 GPUs and 1,024 processor cores with 74 teraflops of peak processing power. To top things off, 475 terabytes of storage keep the system rolling. All in all, hyperwall-2 has more than 100 times the processing power of its poor predecessor, hyperwall, from 2002. The elder hyperwall was unavailable for comment and is most likely on an alcoholic bender somewhere, complaining about “kids these days.” [Source: NASA]

[Thanks, james]

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Filed under: Audio/Video

Leave it to space nerds with money to come up with the world’s highest resolution visualization system. NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames has created the 128-screen hyperwall-2, a mega display capable of rendering one quarter billion pixels.

Hyperwall-2 measures 23- x 10-feet of LCD goodness, and is powered by 128 GPUs and 1,024 processor cores with 74 teraflops of peak processing power. To top things off, 475 terabytes of storage keep the system rolling. All in all, hyperwall-2 has more than 100 times the processing power of its poor predecessor, hyperwall, from 2002. The elder hyperwall was unavailable for comment and is most likely on an alcoholic bender somewhere, complaining about “kids these days.” [Source: NASA]

[Thanks, james]

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Filed under: Computers

It’s time to take a long, hard look at where we’re headed as a society. No, really — we’ve got office chairs coming to kill comradeship, specially designed lapboards made to keep you sedentary for as long as humanly possible, and now we’re looking at the perfect device for keeping Earthlings in bed for days on end.

The EasyChair WorkStation line of products essentially puts your laptop on wheels, and the adjustable boom arm ensures that you can reach the keys / trackpad regardless of which side you wake up on. We’re hearing a bedpan attachment is in the works as well, but we’re feeling entirely too lazy to actually check.

[EasyChair WorkStation Via TechDigest]

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Filed under: Audio/Video

Leave it to space nerds with money to come up with the world’s highest resolution visualization system. NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames has created the 128-screen hyperwall-2, a mega display capable of rendering one quarter billion pixels.

Hyperwall-2 measures 23- x 10-feet of LCD goodness, and is powered by 128 GPUs and 1,024 processor cores with 74 teraflops of peak processing power. To top things off, 475 terabytes of storage keep the system rolling. All in all, hyperwall-2 has more than 100 times the processing power of its poor predecessor, hyperwall, from 2002. The elder hyperwall was unavailable for comment and is most likely on an alcoholic bender somewhere, complaining about “kids these days.” [Source: NASA]

[Thanks, james]

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Filed under: Celebrities, eBay

Remember when eBay was all about getting tickets to sold-out Radiohead concerts and Superbowls and stuff? Now you can get lots of gross and unnecessary things on there, like this Kate Moss hair extension, which the supermodel “shed” in Germany while fleeing the paparazzi. The victorious hair-finder, (fashion equivalent of the guy who catches a fly ball in his beer at a Yankees game) is auctioning off the lock for an anti-drug charity, ironically.

The organization is called Keine Macht den Drogen (No Power to Drugs) and sounds like the Weimar equivalent of D.A.R.E. We hope the hair money goes toward the purchase of thousands of KMDD t-shirts and will keep the German youth from one day losing their own hair and teeth.

“I hope Kate doesn’t mind. I did not have time to ask her…” says hair-auctioneer John Farr. Of course she won’t, John. It’s for the kids. [Source: The Local]

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Filed under: Audio/Video

Leave it to space nerds with money to come up with the world’s highest resolution visualization system. NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames has created the 128-screen hyperwall-2, a mega display capable of rendering one quarter billion pixels.

Hyperwall-2 measures 23- x 10-feet of LCD goodness, and is powered by 128 GPUs and 1,024 processor cores with 74 teraflops of peak processing power. To top things off, 475 terabytes of storage keep the system rolling. All in all, hyperwall-2 has more than 100 times the processing power of its poor predecessor, hyperwall, from 2002. The elder hyperwall was unavailable for comment and is most likely on an alcoholic bender somewhere, complaining about “kids these days.” [Source: NASA]

[Thanks, james]

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Filed under: Celebrities, eBay

Remember when eBay was all about getting tickets to sold-out Radiohead concerts and Superbowls and stuff? Now you can get lots of gross and unnecessary things on there, like this Kate Moss hair extension, which the supermodel “shed” in Germany while fleeing the paparazzi. The victorious hair-finder, (fashion equivalent of the guy who catches a fly ball in his beer at a Yankees game) is auctioning off the lock for an anti-drug charity, ironically.

The organization is called Keine Macht den Drogen (No Power to Drugs) and sounds like the Weimar equivalent of D.A.R.E. We hope the hair money goes toward the purchase of thousands of KMDD t-shirts and will keep the German youth from one day losing their own hair and teeth.

“I hope Kate doesn’t mind. I did not have time to ask her…” says hair-auctioneer John Farr. Of course she won’t, John. It’s for the kids. [Source: The Local]

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