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Twice a year, a list of the Top 500 most powerful supercomputers in exsistence is released. These machines are incredibly complex, cost millions of dollars and fill multiple rooms. In return, they are capable of crunching numbers like you wouldn’t believe. To get an idea of how fast, imagine a large calculation is an Oreo. Your home PC or Laptop would eat the Oreo by following the standard three phase “twist, lick and munch” procedure, at a rate of one Oreo per ten seconds. A supercomputer wouldn’t even consider “twist, lick and munch.” It would swallow the Oreo whole. Three at a time.  This works out at an average of fifty Oreo’s per ten seconds. That is a lot of Oreo’s.

So, what exactly are these machines used for? Lots of crazy cool shit. Well, most of the time it is boring and unimportant research, such as looking into how we came into being, or studying climate change models. Don’t worry though, some supercomputers do also perform socially useful functions. Here are some examples of recent supercomputer uses.

• A $350m supercomputer in California is used to process the Autotune for all Britney Spears records. This was first attempted with standard studio hardware, however it was not capable of performing the number of pitch corrections per second required to make her voice sound just passable.
• A large supercomputer cluster in Switzerland is used to host the popular social networking game “Farmville”.
• A supercomputer at MIT is used to automatically generate the scripts for all ”Straight to DVD” American Pie spin offs.
• Since the reduction in funding for the space programme, NASA has raised additional funds by allowing gossip website TMZ access to one of their supercomputers. It is believed they are using it to try and work out exactly how many people Tiger Woods has slept with.

Most of the worlds supercomputers are hosted in Europe and the United States. However, China and the middle east are areas which have increasing computational power available. Even small nations are joining the supercomputer party. Tristan da Cunha, the worlds smallest inhabited island, recently announced it was opening its first computer research centre. However, the main supercomputer has been created by connecting three XBox 360′s together, meaning capabilities are limited.

Since the dawn of time, one question has been puzzling man. What exactly do women want in a partner? Many claim to know the answer, however there has been no definitive proof. Until now.

Most men seem to think that most women are interested in such standards as – good looks, a sense of humour, the ability to cook, how good they would be as a father and if they are happy to go curtain shopping.

These men are wrong. Very wrong.

Researchers for the psychological studies department at Prickwillow University have just released the results of a ground breaking study. Over the course of three years, 150 single women were observed during everyday situations and attached to various monitoring implements. This allowed the research team to examine brain activity and work out exactly when the women were most susceptible to seduction.

Incredibly, the results show one activity did more for the ladies than any other conducted during the study. Professor Richard Ingaround, who lead the study said “it’s truly amazing, one hundred percent of the women who took part in the study found this particular activity to be the most arousing”.

So, what exactly was this most stimulating of all activities?

Well, the results show that all women, ever, can’t resist a bloody good “PowerPoint Presentation”.

This is a particularly sexy graph.

It’s true! All of the women were subject to multiple PowerPoint presentations during the study, on a variety of subjects – including health and safety. During each presentation the monitoring equipment revealed that, if he wanted to, the presenter could have probably had his way with any of them. This despite being a 42 year old divorcee, with bad teeth, who had just had garlic for dinner, didn’t wash his hands, was boring as sin, had no sense of humour, referred to children as “an expensive mistake”, made sexist comments and openly discussed his reliance on Viagra to provide “two minutes of the most depressing lovemaking ever known to man”.

These results will surely boost the sales of Microsoft Powerpoint and see membership numbers at gyms fall.

A closer examination of the results show that while standard pie charts and backgrounds are pretty arousing, adding as many unnecessary animations and sound effects to the presentation as possible will often send women over the edge.

The full results of the study will be revealed at a presentation in central London next week, Professor Ingaround said “I am very excited about giving this presentation, I have personally paid for one hundred Swedish Au pairs to be flown in to attend”.

Scottish singer Susan Boyle may have been snubbed by the Brit Awards this year, but she has been given special recognition by a Linux distribution.

Haggisnix is a Debian based distro, made by a group of developers from Glasgow, Scotland. In a remarkable step they have decided to rename the ‘sudo’ command to ‘subo’, in honour of the Britain’s Got Talent runner up. Head of the Haggisnix project Alistair McMuckerson said “we all love Susan and thought this would be a great tribute to her. Now when users want to run commands with higher privilege they have to use the subo command, rather than sudo. Users that are allowed to run this command have to first be added to the /etc/suboers file.”

Susan Boyle is believed by many to be a fan of open source operating systems, mainly Ubuntu but she has dabbled in Slackware.

subo ifconfig eth0 down

The command will appear in the next release of Haggisnix, out in a few weeks.

After months of speculation and several well managed information leaks, Apple finally revealed the iPad to the world on Wednesday. The iPad is a tablet PC style device, that looks like a big o’iPhone. It is set to take the world by storm, in the same way that the iPod, iMac and iEverybloodythingelse did.

Though iPad pricing hasn’t been revealed to the UK, its a safe bet it’ll be quite expensive – however if you own an iPhone there is a very easy 99 pence hardware hack you can do, to convert your Phone to a Pad.

This hack is revealed below -

iPhone without iPad Hack

You need to head to any good supermarket, or local business if your feeling nice, a buy a piece of hardware called a “magnifying glass”. Then to complete the hack, hold the magnifying glass about 3 inches above the iPhone – et voila -

iPhone with iPad Hack

So there you have it, a device with more connectivity options than Waterloo station, can play music, allows you to read books, can run iPhone apps and is essentially a large iPhone. All using your existing equipment plus around 99 pence of hardware. Job done.

Recently, I was approached by a Professor and a couple of research students from the University of Prickwillow in Cambridgeshire. They wanted to know if I would be interested in taking part in a unique experiment. The first ever attempt at downloading the contents of a human brain on to a computer hard drive, via USB. I said yes, but obviously I had some reservations.

Firstly, where would the USB port be installed? I didn’t want it to be exposed because it would collect dust and other debris, for this same reason my belly button was also ruled out. I have an “inny” and that sucker is like a fluff collecting black hole. I didn’t want it installed in my anus either, as a rule I would never consider my anus a suitable location for any peripheral.

Secondly, was this dangerous? Had this been tried on a rat or anything? Surely it would have been tested on a Guinea Pig, that’s what they live for isn’t it.

Finally, if this did work, would the professor and his team be able to review the entire contents of my brain? Would they want to share it with the world? If so I’d probably end up with a court order, banning me from being in the same country as Pixie Lott. There are a number of thoughts involving Pixie stored in my head that are really not suitable for worldwide publication.

Thankfully the Professor was able to provide me with reassuring answers. The USB port would be installed on the top of my arm, in place of my nasty TB jab lump scar thingy. Here it would be out of the way, but easily accessible. Apparently, there had been tests involving mice, a quick Google search for “USB Mouse” produced several million hits. This was all the evidence I needed to convince me.  Also, they promised not to publish or work on anything stored in my brain that involved Pixie Lott; a move they would later regret as the amount of data they had to work with was reduced by 86%.

So the big day came, the USB port and a controller board were installed in my arm. The whole procedure was pretty painless. There were some inevitable driver issues, but as the human body is largely open source these were soon rectified. I also passed out just as the cables connecting the port to my brain was inserted, this turned out to be caused by a kernel exception and a patch is currently being developed.

After the procedure I tested positive for USB Type A.

With my USB port in place I was hooked up to a computer. I requested that a Mac be used, rather than windows. I didn’t want to expose my body to worms or viruses, which made the Mac a much better option. Also I quite liked the idea of being able to sync my brain with iTunes, however doing this would require me to hand over the digital rights management of sounds stored in my head to Apple. Something I was ill prepared to do.

The Professor then started to explore my brain using Mac OS X. He made a back up of critical files and folders. The file structure of a my brain was surprisingly logical, however the Professor reminded me that the file structure would be different depending on the individual. Chances are, if I were female, several key files in the “Reasoning” “Emotional Stability” and “Map Reading” folders would have been corrupted or missing completely.

The contents of my Brain, as viewed with Mac OS X.

The Professor was keen to explore the contents of the System directory, which appeared to contain instruction sets for my organs. He also found that the “Skills” sub-directory stored things like the ability to read and write. He said in time it would be possible to copy new language files into this directory, thus enabling me to be instantly fluent in a whole other language. I reminded him that while this was clever, it was not required, because I am English after all.

I was quite surprised to be told that several instructional files had been corrupted, however when I found out which files they were, it actually helped explain a lot.

This explains a lot.

This whole experiment was a huge success and if you are approached by to strangers who offer to insert USB into your brain, I would suggest you do it. The Professor has since told me he is planning to conduct a similar experiment whereby a human subject will have a Bluetooth module installed in place of an actual tooth, allowing them better connectivity with mobile devices.

Google, the people who made millions helping people find stuff, are having issues with there new smartphone, the Nexus One. Apparently the phone itself its pretty good, it’s speedy, has a decent touch screen and a sounds as good as an iPod. Currently, it’s out in the USA, but not quite in the UK yet.

The problem with the Nexus One is what happens when you have problems. Who do you talk to about it – Google? Your phone company? Your Auntie? Frank?

No one really seems to know. Google have some online help guides, but as Google is run exclusively by robots, there is no telephone support number. However, the phone companies are generally saying you should get in touch with Google, but how?

People with the Nexus One are resorting to using Google to search for the correct department at Google to get help. In several cases this has resulted in customers getting stuck in an indefinite Google loop. This can last for hours, and without the intervention of a loved one there is no reason it couldn’t last for days. If you are stuck in a Google loop you won’t remember to eat, drink or sleep.  In the US state of Arizona there have been at least 12 deaths reported as people who live alone have become trapped in a Google loop while searching for information.

Meanwhile, internet boffins are warning of an impending crisis. One anonymous source said “everyone knows that Googling Google can break the internet. It is now happening so often that there is a danger of a Google black hole being created as Google tries to index it’s own contents, or to put it another way, the entire internet”.

The message is simple, if you have a Google Nexus One, use Microsoft Bing to search for support information. Otherwise you might die and/or break the internet.

Apple were quick to stress that no iPhone users have ever died as a result of excessive Googling.