This is a project that I wouldn’t mind doing – If I had the time, money, and patience, plus required skill. As I possess none of these, I, like most of us, can only look on with envy..

The desk is constructed from laser-cut acrylic, 7 fans, liquid cooled with glycol (through 15 feet of tubing no less!) PC specs are 4Gb RAM, a quad-core 3Ghz Intel CPU & a GTX 280 graphics card. Personally, I think they could have upped the specs to included a couple of TB of storage, but they settled for two 300Gb drives instead. And then factor in the 13 blue Neon lights, and you can see why the 850 Watt power supply gave up the ghost – the new system needing a whole Kilowatt! Have a look at the steps the guys at Popular Mechanics took to build this beast!

I know, it sounds like a post title to draw you in, but it really isn’t – you can own Windows 7, free for a year, to install on your PC!

Windows 7, the latest operating system from Microsoft, is trying to put to bed the bad press they’ve received recently with their Vista release. Windows 7, in combination with input from users, is being hailed as the best OS that Microsoft have released to date. It is quicker, leaner, and more compatible than ever before. Partly down to a re-written kernel, but also down to the modular approach to the OS – gone are all the extras like Movie Maker, although you’re free to add them to the OS if you want them. Also, with a Windows XP mode,  applications are virtualised in a real Windows XP environment, with the help of Microsoft’s Virtual PC.

But to top this, as the Release Candidate is made available to subscribers to Microsoft’s MSDN, there is also news that anyone, from May 5th, will be able to download the OS, install it and use completely free for year. This is truly a stroke of genius! All those people thinking twice about investing in a new OS, now have the option to use it for a year, and if they’re not happy, simply go back to their old OS without any cost! It raises the bar on the try-before-you-buy way of thinking, and could also eradicate piracy of the OS too. And at the same time, the PR is pure gold for the company. Bare in mind that this is a Release Candidate, and although you can be fairly sure it will contain all of the features you’ll get in the final product, there’s no guarantee of course. But, hey, who cares if it’s free?

Read the Microsoft press release

Proof XKCD style, if you needed it, that the weakest link in any security solution is YOU!

Anyone who has seen the Michael Caine classic will know the ending to the film well.. A coach teetering over the edge of a cliff. Pallets of gold temptingly close, but ever creeping towards the end of the coach, and away from the team that had just stolen it – trying desperately to keep the coach balanced.

And that’s where the film ended. What happened next? How could they retrieve the gold? Well the Royal Society decided to put that question to the general public, in the hope of finding the answer – and at the same time get everyone’s grey matter working.

Read all of this article…

In what seems like a bit of a tradition here, I’ve stumbled into another YouTube video with a retro computing slant. This advert touts the “enormous 64K memory” and a price of less than £230!

A great machine, that I will be covering in the “Retro” section of Tech Snake soon.

Ideal for the geek who wants something a little different than the standard Windows screensavers, or perhaps for the person who wants to play a prank on an unknowing friend. This screensaver, available from Microsoft, will display a fake Blue Screen of Death (or BSoD) that looks so convincing most people will rush to tell you your PC has crashed. I like the idea that it’s released by Microsoft, and shows even they have a sense of humour..

This reminds me of something from Terminator, as the machines rise to take over the earth with Skynet – only scarier. It just shows you though that reality can be stranger than fiction sometimes..

Tired of your tired looking GMail? Well you’re in luck, because along with the already growing customisations, there are now selectable themes. Previously only enjoyed by browser hacks, the option is now open to everyone. Some of the new ways to customise your inbox:

To select the skin theme for your GMail account (assuming you have one of course) go to your settings when looking at your email, and there is a new "Themes" tab. Don’t worry if you don’t have it, Google are rolling them out for everyone over the next couple of days, so check back every day or so until it appears..

OK, well it’s a way to show off this amazing piece of technology, but what I really wanted to see was it rescuing people from burning buildings, or fighting acid-spitting extra terrestrials – not bench pressing 50kgs!

Created by Raytheon, a military hardware specialist, the Sarcos Exoskeleton fits around a human to augment his or her basic functions. It’s able to walk, jog, work out or punch people (apparently) so all-round it looks a great idea. What amazes me is how quickly and fluidly it reacts to movements from the person strapped into it. Have a look at the video with a small interview with one of the creators, below:

The "Jaguar" in Tennessee, USA, has been crowned the fastest computer in the world and is to be used for science.

The new champion, consisting of 284 Cray supercomputer cabinets, will be able to crunch an amazing 1.64 Petaflops – 1,640,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. Tested so far up to 1.3 Petaflops, the team at Oak Ridge National Lab are hoping to crank the machine up to it’s full potential soon.

Specification:

45,000 Quad Core Opterons (AMD), 362 Terabytes of RAM (that’s 370,000 Gigabytes!), 10 Petabytes of storage (or 10,485,000 Gigabytes)

Performance:

578 Terabytes per second Memory bandwidth, 284 Gigabytes per second bus bandwidth (to move data around the system)

All in all an impressive machine which will knock the current champion, Roadrunner (at 1.34 Petaflops), off the top spot when it’s up to speed. Read The Register article, and also check out the top 500 supercomputers on Wikipedia (soon to be updated I’m sure!)