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!

In a scene that conjures up visions of Terminator, the US Airforce have revealed the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s refueller will be an automatron. Not only is it another job gone by the wayside (which we could do with more of in the current climate) but also it makes the perfect inside job for a takeover.

Picture it, when the Asimos have massed on the Eastern border of Europe and are preparing for attack – the F-35’s are taken out of their hangers with tactical nukes onboard. The robots come to refuel them – ah but do they? Moments after takeoff, they run out of fuel and it’s game over for humanity.

I can see it, it will happen, and you’ll all be sorry when it does if you don’t listen now! OK – taking a step back from the paranoia end of the world stance – I’m not sure if trusting a robot to refuel a plane is a good idea. Fuel + sparks from robot’s innards = BOOM! It’s a simple formula..

Dell has announced this morning that it will cut jobs in a move to reduce costs in the current climate. The manufacturing of desktops and laptops will be moved to factories in Poland, with redundancies starting April this year up until January 2010.

According to economists in Ireland, every job at Dell directly effects another 4 jobs in the country, so the impact is expected to be more far reaching.

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.

A section has opened up on Tech Snake this weekend – those of you eagle-eyed enough may have spotted it. On the menu at the top there is a "Retro" section, which is about old computer systems from back in the day.

The first addition to this section is the Sinclair Range of Computers – known and loved by lots of dedicated fans in the early 80’s, in the UK. A cheap introduction to BASIC programming, the Sinclair Spectrum was many people’s first insight into computing. From this humble computer many people were bitten by the computer bug early on (myself included!)

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!)

PC World reports today that the once full-proof wireless encryption standard, WPA, has been partially cracked by Erik Tews and Martin Beck – two researchers which are due to make an appearance in the PacSec applied security conference next week.

Erik Tews was involved previously with developing new ways to crack the older, and shown to be weak, WEP method of wireless security. He has now developed an attack, along with Martin Beck, that can compromise the TKIP protocol within 15 minutes – much less time than was previously thought possible.

TKIP is a wrapper protocol that surrounds the old WEP encryption, essentially turning the once weak WEP into the thought to be stronger WPA. The encryption standard hasn’t fully been cracked however as the data was decrypted from the router to the PC and not from the PC to the router. So even though the password you type in to your browser is safe, the data coming back that might contain your bank balance won’t be. I’m sure it will just be a matter of time before it’s fully broken.

For those who are worried, WPA2, the latest version, does not suffer from the same flaws, but is also not available on every router and PC. If you have the latest service pack for Windows XP, or Windows Vista, WPA2 is built in, but you’ll have to verify that your router supports it too.

After the bad press Sony have got over the last couple of years for battery recalls (and most recently the recall of over 400,000 of their own laptops), you would think they would have sorted their issues out, or examined exactly what was going on in manufacturing that is producing this shoddy technology. But on the surface, it doesn’t appear they’ve done anything.

News appears today, that the battery in your Toshiba, HP, Dell, Acer or Lenovo could be potentially dangerous. The affected batch from Sony – produced between October 2004 and June 2005, is prone to overheating and could even catch fire. And it’s not just a few either, there are an estimated 100,000 batteries produced during this period that might have the same fundamental flaws.

Laptops that are currently on the affected list are: HP Pavilion dv1000, dv8000 and zd8000 – Compaq Presario v2000 and v2400, and HP Compaq nc6110, nc6120, nc6140, nc6220, nc6230, nx4800, nx4820, nx6110, nx6120, nx9600; Toshiba Satellite A70/A75, P30/P5, M30X/M35X and M50/M55 – Tecra A3, A5 and S2; Dell Latitude 110L, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610 – Inspiron 500M, 510M, 600M, 1100, 1150, 5100, 5150, and 5160 and Precision M20.

Use the links here to check to see if your battery is up for recall, for various makes of laptops: HP – Toshiba – Dell

If you own a different model of laptop by one of the listed manufacturers, I would check anyway, just to be sure. And if there isn’t a link for your laptop, check with the retailer that sold it to you, or contact the company directly. The batteries have the potential to catch fire, so double check with family members too that may not have access to this article.

The new phone, although not the prettiest mobile, marks another avenue for Google.

The G1 will be available the day before Haloween from T-Mobile, free with a £40 per month contract, in the UK.

Google, already making headway into the browser market, although Chrome desperately needs some updates to keep interest high, is making it’s presence known in the mobile OS field with Android. Is Android a small stepping stone away from a fully featured OS? I think only Google can answer that, but it would make sense. Everything they do is in the cloud – so why not provide a thin client, for virtually nothing – if not completely free. It could serve up Google documents, mail, chat, video and all of the other services that we’re finding our online lives more and more dependant, directly from their servers, fully integrated into the desktop.