This is pretty late news but just an update.

Apple is expected to update their Macbooks as well as their Macbook Pros with the new Intel Penryn chips. There is also an increase of ram as well as hard drive space. It has been rumored that Apple is working on new aluminum MacBook Pro designs that will adopt features of the current iMac and MacBook Air

AnAndTech
Engadget

Independent tests show that Red Hat Linux pulls as much as 12% less power than Windows 2008 on identical hardware

While this is an interesting read from Network World, it’s not a slam dunk win for Linux because there are just a few too many caveats in the test bed for the Linux test. So instead of the goal to compare “apples to apples”, when you really dig in and look at the results what you’ve got is trying to compare a Red Delicious to a Granny Smith. I’ll let you decide who’s ‘delicious’ and who’s ‘granny’

Snip:   

Our tests point to Linux as the winner of the green flag by margins that topped out at 12%. But we must note that our results are full of stipulations imposed by our test bed, and as the more truthful car advertisements might warn — your wattage may vary.

The fastest supercomputer in the world, nicknamed “Roadrunner”, is made from commercial parts and it runs Fedora.

In total, Roadrunner connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron procs as well as 12,240 Cell procs (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). The Roadrunner system has 98 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 278 refrigerator-sized racks occupying 5,200 square feet. Its 10,000 connections – both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet — require 55 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs.

Besides that link above to the high level specs, this PDF has much more detail you might find interesting including the memory hierarchy and the software stack.

If you’re like me then you don’t like to play games of chance, you’re not a “betting man” (or woman?). If that’s the case, then this backup drive is probably what you need. With their new 250GB fire-resistant and waterproof hard drive, SentrySafe is putting the ‘hard’ in hard drive.

The hard drive is encased in a fire-safe and waterproof enclosure, protecting data from the types of disasters that we tend not to anticipate when it matters most. Its third-party ETL-verified for fire protection for 30 minutes up to 1550 degrees F and ETL-verified waterproof – meaning it is fully submerged in water for up to 24 hours.

Not bad insurance for US $400.

Here’s a video from GetConnected demo’ing the drive.

Cool: Reporter calls up the NSA and asks to interview a member of their elite “Red Team” hacking squad. NSA agrees. That was easy.

[via fark]