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Corporate Espionage Leads To Faulty Motherboards
Champs writes "If you've gotten the feeling that they really don't make 'em like they used to, you might be right. This article at IEEE Spectrum tells the story of large batches of faulty capacitors sourced from Taiwan causing motherboards to eventually fail, with an interesting twist on the reason why these capacitors failed."
NEW YORK (AP) - That's one small step for a man, one giant saving of face for mankind.
Chess legend Garry Kasparov, still smarting after his 1997 loss to a computer, agreed to a draw in the last game of his Man vs. Machine series with Israeli chess program Deep Junior. The six-game series, sanctioned by the sport's governing body, finished 3-3.
"I had one item on my agenda today: not to lose," Kasparov said after Friday's finale. "And a draw was a good result."
He said the series' five other games and "dangerous reminiscences" of his loss to an IBM supercomputer, seen by some as a watershed moment in technological advancement, weighed heavily on his mind.
"Unlike a machine, I can't forget the five previous games," he said. "For a human player to play under such conditions, it's a terrible burden."
Kasparov played himself into a superior position but offered a draw on the 23rd move, surprising chess experts at the New York Athletic Club. Deep Junior turned down the offer but presented its own draw five moves later, and Kasparov readily accepted - to boos from the crowd.
Kasparov said he played better than Deep Junior in the deciding game and would have pressed for a win in a similar position against a human opponent. But, he said, he feared even a tiny mistake would have been severely punished by the computer.
"The machine will never collapse," he said, "but a human can never be so sure."
Kasparov, rated No. 1 by the governing body, the World Chess Federation, announced last month that he would take on Deep Junior, a computer created by two Israeli programmers that beat 18 other programs in a worldwide competition last summer.
One of Deep Junior's programmers, Shay Bushinsky, said that although the computer was challenging a human, it was no threat to humankind.
"Most chess officials feel that chess programs do benefit the game," he said.
Kasparov, widely regarded as the best chess player in history, was paid $500,000 by the World Chess Federation for playing and would have received another $300,000 had he won.
Kasparov, 39, rose to chess prominence as a Soviet junior champion in 1976, at age 12. He has held the world's No. 1 point-system ranking since 1984, despite occasional losses to humans, and has achieved almost mythic status in the chess world.
Deep Junior, which can process 3 million chess moves per second, is a three-time computer world champion and hasn't lost to a human in two years.
While you only really need one post to say DUPLICATE, I like this one because of the wit content. Tripe indeed!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
In order to make time wasting more enjoyable, the department of public sloth has established the hot grits medal for proclimation of double entrys on popular weblogs. If you happen to notice an announcment of a double entry on a popular weblog, popular defined by able to render useless pages hosted on less than a dual Xeon with T1, please let the department of public sloth know immediately. Remember kids if you read a second story about the same topic the terrorists have already won!
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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...people who dupe articles are shot immediately!