Technology

The supercomputer gene pool has expanded. Of the top 10 systems on a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers announced Sunday, three machines are new, one is upgraded, and two are based on processors that have never before appeared on the list: IBM's PowerPC 970 and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron.

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Top dog though in the world of supercomputing is NEC, who keeps HP in second place.

Chess great Garry Kasparov virtually shut down computer program "X3D Fritz" to score a vital win in the third game of his latest man versus machine match.

World number one Kasparov, 40, had a winning position with the white pieces on Sunday after only 16 moves and coasted until the computer's programmers resigned on its 45th turn after more than four hours of play.

Yahoo on Wednesday started testing a tool for blocking pop-ups for its Companion Toolbar, a downloadable plug-in that allows people to search the Web directly from the browser. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web portal, which plans to launch the blocking tool officially next week, said the tool will let tens of millions of Web surfers customize their Net experience by determining which sites from which they will accept pop-up windows.

Wal-Mart Stores and Procter & Gamble quietly tested a controversial new retail technology earlier this year that allowed P&G employees to observe shoppers via a Webcam as they removed cosmetics from shelves, representatives of both companies confirmed Friday.

The test, which took place over a period of four months at a Wal-Mart store in the suburbs of Tulsa, Okla., sparked fresh criticism from privacy rights advocates, after a story in last Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times said the "secret study" made "unwitting guinea pigs" of Wal-Mart customers.

Microsoft Research is looking at how to leverage blogs, RSS feeds, wikis and other social-networking tools.

When Microsoft showed a prototype of software code-named "Wallop" at last month's Professional Developers Conference, attendees understood exactly what they were seeing. And the fact that Microsoft is sequestering Wallop behind a corporate firewall, allowing only a small number of researchers and their contacts to test the software, isn't helping to clarify matters.

While Neo slugs it out with Agent Smith on the silver screen, chess champ Garry Kasparov is about to face off against a different -- but no less formidable -- computer adversary in New York this week.

In what's becoming an annual tradition, Kasparov will take on the world's best chess-playing computer program, ChessBase's Fritz, for a $200,000 purse.
The four-game match, running from Nov. 11 to 18 at New York's Athletic Club, is once again billed as "Man versus Machine," but with an added twist.

Gartner told attendees that IP telephony is ready for deployment technologically, but business concerns might override making the shift in some companies. The cost of the phones is a major issue.

Bringing voice over IP into corporate networks is inevitable, so businesses should be well on their way to at least testing the technology according to Gartner.

In the November 2003 survey we received responses from 44,946,965 sites.

Apache has a significant percentage gain this month as register.com, a leading domain registrar with a domain parking system serving responses for over one million domains eliminated its Windows front end, and reverted to Linux and Apache which it ran previously. Barely weeks ago its largest rival, Network Solutions made a similar switch from Microsoft-IIS back to SunOne, nee Netscape-Enterprise, for its own domain parking system.

The analyst community has long been saying that it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft starts porting its applications, especially its server-based business applications, to Linux.

But one Microsoft notable, in the form of Gordon Mangione, corporate vice president, SQL Server Team, made a strong and clear statement that SQL Server would never be ported to other environments, when he addressed developers last week at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.

If predictions hold true, millions of cell phones will be put out to pasture starting in late November under a new rule allowing people to keep their phone numbers when switching cellular carriers.

Though many of those phones will find a dusty home in a cluttered desk drawer, millions could wind up in landfills, leaking toxic metals and chemicals into the ground.