N Game

Wow! You must play this game if you haven't already it's just called N. It is so good in fact that Metanet Software Inc. made a video game of it simply called N+. Photo here.

Cost per gigFlOPS: REALLY cheap now!

I love this table (adapted from Wikipedia) on how the cost per gigaFLOPS has changed in the last 50 years or so:

Hardware costs:

* 1961: about US$1,100,000,000,000 ($1.1 trillion) per GFLOPS
* 1997: about US$30,000 per GFLOPS
* 2000, April: $1,000 per GFLOPS
* 2000, May: $640 per GFLOPS
* 2003, August: $82 per GFLOPS
* 2006, February: about $1 per GFLOPS
* 2007, March: about $0.42 per GFLOPS
* 2007, October: about $0.20 per GFLOPS (in a Sony PS3 console).

Imagine: we pay twenty cents today for something that cost over a trillion dollars around the time I was born! Now that's a bargain!

Petaflop barrier soon to go down?

Computer speeds are often measured in 'FlOPS' = floating point operations per second, essentially a measure of how many calculations the machine can do in a second (skipping over some technical details). A megaFlOPS is about one million floating-point operations per second. A gigaFlOPS is one thousand times faster (actually, 1024 times faster = 2 to the 10th power), or (roughly) one billion floating-point operations per second. Most desktop PCs can do a few (< 50) gigaFlOPs now. A teraFlOPS is one thousand (1024) times faster: roughly one trillion floating-point operations per second. Only a few machines in the world can do a teraFlOPS. Now IBM says their RoadRunner computer (pictured above) will soon bust through the petaFlOPS barrier, which is again 1024 times faster, or 1024 trillion FlOPS. You could play some cool video games on that baby.

Via: dvice.com

Ambigrams

Whem I was young I used to spend hours making ambigrams: words that can be read (either as the same word, or two different words) whether they are upside down or right way up. Above is an ambigram of the word 'ambigram'. The contemporary master of this difficult art (and related graphical arts) is Scott Kim.

New rulers

Convert plain old arbitrary units of measurement into sensible real-world units like 'cans of baked beans', 'Mount Everests', or 'hydrogen atom diameters' at http://www.sensibleunits.com/.

M of the M

Mario of the month. Via: Boing Boing.

GameBoy Platform Shoes

Although I suspect they are just a joke, these GameBoy platform shoes come from Japan- where else?! More here.

Via BoingBoing Gadgets via www.syberpunk.com

Kids Problems

I like that one and I was asked to be in this video!

The Top Game Sites

My top flash gaming sites this year: Addicting Games and of course Armor Games and Nitrome. Photo here.

PuzzPinball

Quite a good game where you must complete the pinball level by adding pieces. Play it here. Photo and walkthrough here.