Small Supercomputer, XPC, Notebook, and Gaming Thingy

kidgenius, SpinnerBait, and anonymous readers wrote in with four fun tales of small devices doing cool things. IBM has built a supercomputer the size of a TV, using 1000 PPC-based CPUs. Shuttle recently began shipping their AMD Athlon 64 based XPC, the size of a breadbox. Sony has a new 0.4" thick VAIO notebook (scroll down). And a European company is about to introduce the Gametrac, a handheld WinCE gaming gadget with 3D, Bluetooth, SMS, MP3 playback, MPEG4 video playback, camera, and -- interestingly -- GPS tracking. "The system allows the parents to establish 'fences,' which, when entered by the child, cause a notification to be sent to the parents in the form of either an SMS message or an email." Hmmm.

Comments

allows parents.

[happyfrogcow]

it's one thing to be pissed about a government tracking you, but if parents want to track their children, so be it. don't make it sound so big brotherly.

however, i don't think it would be good parenting (though, really.. who am i to judge) to use tracking like this as a first, second, or even third option. a little trust goes a long way.

Thank god

[Lord_Dweomer]

""The system allows the parents to establish 'fences,' which, when entered by the child, cause a notification to be sent to the parents in the form of either an SMS message or an email." Hmmm."

Thank God. For a second I was a little scared. I mean, my parents need me to program their VCR to stop flashing 12. My dad thought his shift key was broken, when in reality his entire keyboard wasn't working. My guess is that the kids are going to be able to either change the "fence", disable it, make it so it doesn't notify the parents, or simply not take it with them.

Just goes to show, digital rights management isn't the only easy thing to crack, organic rights management is too.

More Info on IBM Machine

[obsidianpreacher]

There's more to the story than the simple Reuters blurb that the CNN/Money article above shows ... internetnews.com has got a more in-depth article about this.

Also interesting to note is that IBM says this is the same processors that will be in next-gen consoles from Nintendo and Sony that are due out next year ... but I thought that wasn't gonna happen ...?