Bored Hunters in Oregon Are Regularly Shooting Down Google's Fibers

 

When there's no deer, or quail, or whatever it is hunters shoot up in The Dalles around, bored gunmen have been playing target practice with the insulators on Google's electricity distribution poles. It's so problematic Google's moving their fibers underground.

The fibers that are continually being shot down connect with Google's $600 million data center in The Dalles. It happens as soon as hunting season starts each November, so now a fed-up Google is building an underground path for it.

On one snowstormy occasion, Google repairmen couldn't be transported to the area of a recent cut. Normally sent out by helicopter or Caterpillar tractor, three technicians had to cross country ski for three days to reach and then fix the damaged fiber.

NVIDIA and PGI Announce CUDA-x86

NVIDIA announced this morning that they have entered a partnership with The Portland Group and that the company is bringing the CUDA parallel computing framework for both 64- and 32-bit x86 architectures. This means that CUDA-x86 will compile CUDA applications in order for them to work with x86 processors. This is great news for NVIDIA as their CUDA applications will now run in theory run on "any computer, or any server in the world." There will be some exceptions, but this is good news.

NVIDIA GPU Roadmap To 2013 - Kepler and Maxell GPU's Coming

NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference 2010 opening keynote just ended her in San Jose, and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has announced the successor to the Fermi GPU that was released in 2009. The new GPU will be called ‘Kepler’ and is scheduled to be released later in 2011. Jen-Hsun said that hundreds of engineers have been working on this processor and that it will be their first 28nm design. NVIDIA said they will have billions invested into the development of the processor and that it will be 3 to 4 times the performance per watt compared to Fermi. After Kepler is released at some point in 2011 the roadmap then shifts focus to Maxwell in 2013. This processor is said to be 10 to 12 times the performance per watt compared to Fermi, a sixteen-fold increase on parallel GPU computing and will be built on the 22nm process.

AMD Introduces Six New Desktop Processors - Phenom II X6 1075

AMD today announced new arrivals to its processor line giving more reasons than ever to upgrade to the visual experience of a new PC featuring VISION Technology from AMD. These processors join AMD’s award winning AMD 8-series chipset and ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics for PCs that combine stunning high definition video and 3D graphics with multi-tasking performance.

Zotac GeForce GTX 460 3DP Quadruple-Display Graphics Card

ZOTAC today announced the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 3DP – the world’s first NVIDIA Fermi-powered graphics card capable of up to four native display outputs. The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 3DP enables multi-monitor computing with up to four simultaneous displays from a single graphics card for enhanced productivity, gaming and multimedia.