With Electronic Arts’ recent $400 million purchase of Playfish, social games are all the rage in today’s tech industry. That’s no surprise: lightweight games on social networks (which people usually play while they’re goofing off at work) and social games have attracted huge player numbers with the biggest titles boasting 20 million to 60 million regular players.

City of Eternals.
(Credit:
Ohai)

The Cray XT5 supercomputer known as “Jaguar” has finally clawed its way to the title of fastest computer in the world.

Sitting back at No. 2 on the Top500 list of supercomputers for more than a year, Jaguar overtook IBM’s “Roadrunner” according to the twice-yearly list that will be unveiled Tuesday at the SC09 Conference in Portland, Ore., this week.

Jaguar beat out the competition by showing it can process 1.75 petflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. IBM’s Roadrunner was pushed back to …

Verizon Communications has agreed to forward copyright violation notices on behalf of Hollywood studios, including NBC Universal, multiple sources tell CNET.

Medpedia, a collaborative project for medical information launched in February, is getting beyond the medical-data basics as it adds answers, alerts, and analysis.

The nearly year-old Medpedia grows up with the addition of three key features.
(Credit:

Medpedia)

In this last wrap-up post for Speeds and Feeds, I address what may be the most important issue in the future of personal computing architecture: consistent data access across multiple platforms.
Perhaps it’s my multi-platform background, but I’ve never demanded or expected consistency in form factors, user interfaces or even capabilities. Variety in these areas is great; it’s what makes the personal computing market so big. Variety is also why I keep so many PCs and consumer electronic devices around (see photo); I like knowing I have the right tools …

The next time you search Google for life expectancies or number of Internet users in the U.S., you’ll find the specific figures plus an interactive chart letting you compare the U.S. with other countries.
Since Wednesday, Google has been tapping into data from the World Bank to provide key details and interactive charts on specific topics along with its own search results. The goal is to better help you search for and compare certain types of public data.
The World Bank is providing Google with facts and figures on 17 key indicators, …

New York is the center of book publishing, all four music labels have headquarters here and the country’s largest general newspaper is The New York Times.

(Credit:
New York magazine)

Guess what? Google has too many Spocks and not enough Captain Kirks.

That was one of the many interesting insights BoomTown gleaned from a video interview Wednesday night with well-known New Yorker scribe Ken Auletta, who has just written a new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.”

This “lack of emotional intelligence” at the search giant, said Auletta, reminded him a lot of the subject of one of his previous books: Microsoft.

Oh, the delicious irony!
Auletta was feted at a lovely party on …

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday announced a comprehensive agreement to end all outstanding legal disputes between the two chipmakers.

The pact covers both antitrust litigation and patent cross-license disputes, which have been churning since 2004.