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Twice a year a list of the top 500 supercomputers is released.  BYU’s supercomputer, named Marylou4, was once ranked as high as 45 on the list.  As of last June, Marylou4 fell in rank to 274.

The most recent listing doesn’t even include a BYU supercomputer.  Marylou4 is too slow to make the list. 

So there you have it: BYU no longer has a top-500 supercomputer.

Last June, Google and Yahoo announced a partnership where Yahoo would use Google Advertising on its site to increase revenue.  Yahoo would raise some much needed cash from the more effective advertising, while Google publishes its ads on a very large site.  Currently Yahoo uses its own advertising framework which is less effective.

However, today we learn that the deal is going bust because too many government regulators and advertisors had concerns that this agreement would give Google too much of an advertising monopoly.

The problem is that Yahoo as a company is in trouble.  After the failed Yahoo takeover by Microsoft, Yahoo’s stock is off by 60% of its high this year.

Without this deal, could Yahoo be forced to shrink or even die?  Is killing off Yahoo really worth the risk of a Google monopoly?

I use a modern HP Compaq laptop for business use.  Recently, I installed Kubuntu 8.10 on it with KDE 4.1.  One of the features of the power monitoring task is that it can tell you how much power your laptop.  Power is measured in watts, just like lightbulbs.

When I’m casually using my laptop, it uses between 16 and 21 watts.  I played around a little with the display brightness controlls, and I found that as much as 25% of the laptop power is used by the display backlight.  When the display brightness is all the way down, my laptop uses 16-17 watts.  When the display birghtness is fully bright, it uses about 20-21 watts.

This means that you can extend the lenght of time that you can run a laptop on a single battery charge by 20-40 minutes by turning the display brightness down.

The environmental impact of this energy savings is not very significant to other home energy saving measures, such as using LED Christmas lighting.

Disclosure: I am an engineer for HP, but I have not worked on designing any laptop systems nor have I done developement on power efficiency.

On the LDS Media Talk Blog, there was a post about the growth of the Internet.   I wondered if the growth has been increasing or decreasing, or if it is reaching a plateau.

To answer that question, I decided to plot the numbers on a logarithmic scale:

Using a logarithmic scale, it is easy to see the rate of growth.  As you can see, up until 1997 there was a very substantial growth.  In 1996, for example, the Internet grew by 900%.  Between 1998 and 2001 growth slowed so that it only (on average) doubled in each of those years.  Since then, we’ve established a slower, yet still substantial rate of doubling only every two or three years.

A little over a month ago, Google released its own web browser, similar to Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Their new web browser is called Google Chrome, and has some great features and some great speed, but is currently available for Windows only.

I’ve been using it off and on for the last month, and I’ve found a few missing features that really bug me:

No Feed Viewer. When viewing an RSS or Atom feed, such as the one on my site, other modern web browsers will format the feed nicely and perhaps give the user subscription options. With Google Chrome, the feed text is displayed completely unformatted. This makes using and subscribing to feeds with Google Chrome extremely difficult.

No full screen mode.  Sometimes, especially on laptops or when I’m giving web-based presentations to others, I like to put my browser into full screen mode, to maximize the viewable area of the webpage and to remove distractions like browser navigation.  With Firefox or Internet Explorer, you can press the F11 key to enter full screen mode, however there isn’t such a mode in Google Chrome.  Seeing as viewing a presentation in Google Docs is best in full screen mode, I find this missing feature a surprise.

No built in spell checker.  I’m a big fan of having a spell checker built right into the web browser to spell check text fields.  Google Chrome does not have this feature.  So if you see any misspelled words in this post, you can blame it on the fact that I didn’t have a spell checker built in.  The Google web browser toolbar does (or at least used to have) a spell checker, so I find it surprising that this got lost in their web browser.  I would think this feature would be essential for a web browser that is looking to be a web application platform.

No browser certificates. One of the least used features in web browsers are the use of browser certificates.  While most web sites use a username/password credential pair for authentication, some can use a browser certificate for authentication.  While these web sites are very rare, they can be very important in some businesses.  This missing feature probably won’t effect many people, but it could be a deal-breaker for some businesses when they are choosing the best browser for their enterprise.

No page settings for printing. Normally, when a page prints, there are additional headers and footers such as page number, date, title, and web page addresses.  In some cases this may be helpful, but in other cases I may not want this, such as when I’m printing off a web-based document for distribution to others.  Google Chrome has no way to customize these page headers for printing.  Having customizable page headers is important for a web browser that wishes to be a framework for applications that may want the user to print.