Stories by: Michael Cooney

Welcome to the petaflop generation. That was the message as the new most powerful supercomputer in the world IBM's $100,000 million Roadrunner system installed at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory was officially named the most powerful and energy efficient supercomputer in the world.

Looking for a fun, last-minute little something for that special techie someone? Look no further.

An Australian researcher is developing technology that would let you use your eyes - or more specifically your iris - to unlock your PC, access secure buildings or open your front door.

With only a week before the busiest airline travel day of the year the US Government Accounting Office today issued a scathing and chilling report on airline security: Bomb making materials costing less that US$150 were purchased and carried past airport security screening in 19 US airports.

The companies tried to wear each other out in what was then called the midrange server market. The DEC VAX, rolled out in 1976 was a legend but the IBM System /36s and /38s were no slouches. Big Blue morphed those successful servers into its VAX killer, the AS/400 in 1988 and by 1994, 250,000 of them had been sold. DEC eventually tried to counter with its Alpha chip -based line of advanced servers but by the early 1990's Ken Olsen's engineering company was in trouble.

Still basking in the glow of its overly hyped iPhone launch, Apple plans to launch a cheaper version of much-sought after devices in the fourth quarter.

In the pantheon of controversial Microsoft comments CEO Steve Ballmer's recent quote about the Apple iPod: "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a US$500 subsidized item," ranks right up there. But Between Ballmer and Chairman Bill Gates that comment would be hard pressed to crack the Top 15 all-time most controversial or even colorful things the two of them have uttered in the past oh, 20 years or so. These are my favorite quotes, there are many like them but these are mine:

The Department of Justice and FBI Wednesday said ongoing investigations have identified more than 1 million botnet crime victims.

IBM made the unprecedented move to donate 10,000 copies of its speech-translation software and 1,000 laptops to run the software to the U.S. government for use in humanitarian settings in Iraq.

Cisco has developed a set of small smart robots, which can act as wireless communications relays, that sense when a mobile user is moving out of service range, and can follow the user to maintain connectivity.

Next month, billionaire software developer Charles Simonyi, will become the fifth civilian to fly in space when he rockets to the international space station aboard a Russian Soyuz TMA-10 capsule. He will be joined by Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov and return to Earth 11 days later with the systems current orbiting crew -- Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and Spanish-born U.S. astronaut Miguel Lopez-Alegria, according to reports. Simonyi is spending more than US$20 million for the trip.