My IKEA experiences have been pretty hit or miss, but maybe that’s just because I wasn’t building Linux rendering clusters out of the POÄNG chairs. Because one modder took a US$40 IKEA Helmer set of drawers and shoved in 6 Intel Quad Core processors. His end product featured 24 2.4 Ghz cores and 48GB of RAM. Where an example render on his DualCore Xenon 2.66 Ghz with 4 GB ram took 552 minutes (9.2 h), the IKEA machine breezed through the same task in just 64 minutes. Just don’t try to pick up your Helmer case on a weekend. You could seriously die. [Helmer via MAKE]
Start buying Cold War nuclear shelters and piling up the canned food, because Boeing Advanced Systems has started System F6, “DARPA’s Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft United by Information Exchange space technology program.” In other words: multiple, networked specialised spacecraft swarms that are intelligent enough to perform a single coordinated task together, like analysing the crops or deciding to destroy humanity, Skynet-style. Actually, it could completely change satellites for the better, according to some experts:
