we say "shapah!"

Given the cult-film status of 1971’s THX 1138 in the George Lucas universe, it should come as little surprise that the total capacity of Lucasfilm’s giant data center is 11.38 petabits per second.

Granted, that number–which represents the value one would get by adding up the bandwidth capacity of all the company’s 1 gigabit per second desktop machines and its 10-gbps backbone–is purely theoretical. But in an environment like Lucasfilm, which is celebrating four Oscar nominations this week, and where self-referential history is a big parlor game, numbers like that are nothing to be messed with.

The 10-gbps backbone is the core of the data center’s network. That rate is faster than the prevailing industry standard of around 1 gbps for most servers.

“They’re hesitant to change that capacity,” Kevin Clark, Lucasfilm’s director of IT operations, said of the total theoretical bandwidth number.

Take a video tour of this badass datacenter here!

Debian hacker Robert Millan has just announced the availability of a Debian-Installer Loader for win32. The program, inspired by Ubuntu’s similar project, features 64-bit CPU auto-detection, download of linux/initrd netboot images, and chainloading into Debian-Installer via grub4dos. The frontend site goodbye-microsoft.com has been set up for advocacy purposes.

Even tho we know MS will continue to carry the lion’s share of the OS market for some time, it’s comforting to know that those people who know nothing else but Winblows have options, if they so choose.

That’s the real challenge: complacency leads to, well, here’s a famous quote of Thomas Edison’s:

We shall have no better conditions in the future if we are satisfied with all those which we have at present.

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thinking what albums were the best last year, one thing’s for sure : Dangermouse and crew came out of left field and kicked everyone’s ass with music that transcended all cultures and tastes. arguably the best album of the year.

as we brainstormed this list, we realized it could go on and on. therefore we limited ourselves to more popular music and started some other, more specific lists that we may get to posting another time. hard to narrow it down, tho, otherwise!

so, the rest pollee and i collectively listed in no particular order [and with some fun youtube links we found] :

Gnarls Barkley St. Elsewhere

The Flaming Lips At War With the Mystics

Cat Power The Greatest

Raconteurs Broken Boy Soldiers

The Roots Game Theory

Brand New Heavies Get Used To It

Gomez How We Operate

Prefuse 73 Security Screenings

Yeah Yeah Yeahs Show Your Bones

Eric Bachmann To The Races

She Wants Revenge Out of Control

Guillemots Through the Windowpane

TV On The Radio Return to Cookie Mountain

Belle and Sebastian The Life Pursuit

The Gossip Standing in the Way of Control

Old Crow Medicine Show Big Iron World

Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

Built To Spill You In Reverse

That all said, this year is slated for the release of some new albums from some of our other favorite bands.

Indeed, the year is shaping up already.

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With the release of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, an adaptation of a novel once considered impossible to film, what better time to look into the process of adaptation. Most movies these days are based on literary sources. Which is ironic, considering the increasing lack of interest in books these days as opposed to the spoon-fed thoughts offered by Hollywood.

While many novels can be almost directly translated to screen, especially pre-20th century novels such as Jane Austen’s gossip columns, more recent novels can prove difficult.

[more]

via [slashdot]

In an interview with the New York Times, Steve Jobs confirms reports that the recently-announced iPhone will not allow third party applications to be installed. According to Jobs, “These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them.”

In a similar vein, Jobs said in an MSNBC article that, “Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

As someone who’s supported devices on multiple platforms for years always battling often baffling conflicts induced by the interaction of third party apps with otherwise reliable systems, i must say i can see his point, which is why my own, private systems have none of these types of software installed on them.

the question is : will the average bear be detracted by this and thus affect the total number of sales?

Jobs is confident in acquiring 1% of the total cellular market upon release of the iPhone [approximately 10 million phones per year]

Time surely will tell.

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It looks kick ass. It couldn’t have better hype. At less than $600 not too bad for a phone/media player with 8GB on board.

Hurry, June. We all want to play with Apple’s latest wow device.

Read more about it here if you likey.

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