Technical Difficulties

Aside from the all-too-common “I slept in,” beta-blocker Beta-Blogger is having a bad-photo day. I’ve tried to upload Today’s Pic at least four times, and on each occasion Blogger tells me “Your photo has been added. Click ‘Done’ to…” Just one small problem: no photo is visible in the post. I’ve “saved as draft” and checked the draft: no photo. I’ve deleted the draft posts with the “photo added (not)” and started over. I closed Blogger out and logged in again. I deleted my Google and Beta-Blogger cookies. I rebooted. Nothing works. {Sigh} The Beta-Blogger FAQ says there are “known issues” with photo uploads and they are working on it. It’s oh-so-obvious they haven’t fixed the “known issue” yet. I’ll try again later, I suppose. In the meantime, here’s an interesting article I found last evening…

What’s a “petaflop?” It has nothing at all to do with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Thank God. (don’t look for a PeTA link, either) No, a petaflop is 1,000 trillion calculations per second. There’s a number I just can’t quite wrap my brain around. I even have a hard time with just your basic teraflop, as in:

Video chips, technically graphics processor units, for PCs and the Xbox 360 can perform more than 1 trillion calculations a second – a teraflop – something only a supercomputer could do a decade ago.

IBM is gonna build a super computer at Los Alamos that will run at a consistent speed of one petaflop. Red Hat Linux will be the OS. I’m just wondering how in the Hell they (anyone) measures this sort of speed with any sort of reliability and confidence.

And by the way, here’s a good article on how fast we go, and how fast we used to go. Let’s hear it for Moore’s Law! And give me my broadband. Now, please!

I'll be back in a few...