Mr Pelletier's Site

The Japanese Supercomputer known only as “K” has the world record for most calculations per second, hitting 10 quadrillion calculations per second (10.51 petaflops).  According to the artilce, ”the supercomputer “K” consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs and has a theoretical calculation speed of 11.28 petaflops, the companies said.” What do they use this beast computer for?  Mostly for very realistic simulations of the real world, such as weather patterns or how materials behave under different conditions.  But, I suspect the engineers are playing Crysis every night on maximum settings.

Also notice it is powered by Pylons.

[source]

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

-Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

This is a hard drive from 1956.  It weighs 1 ton and stores 5mb.  This really makes me appreciate my 16gb memory stick I carry around in my pocket.

This weekend I finally qualified for 1v1 Gold in the Starcraft 2 ladder.  I no longer have to walk the halls of the school in shame.  In celebration, here is an awesome flicker page of somebody’s Starcraft Lego creations!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pepa_quin/collections/72157613013874752/

Ever want to make your own iPhone/Touch app?  All you need is HTML, CSS, and Javascript.  Two of those things, HTML and CSS, you learned or will learn in my class!  The other, Javascript, isn’t too hard to learn.  This free online book has since been published by O’Reilly, but their free evaluation copy is still available on the interweb.  Yay for free stuff!

http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/

So, say you had infinite money and you could turn your education into anything you wanted.  What would it look like? Welcome to Bill Gates’ life!  Having retired from active duty with Microsoft, Bill Gates spends his time and his 80 billion dollar fortune on helping important causes and learning from the world’s greatest teachers.  I am completely jealous.

Fortunately, Bill Gates has decided to share what he learns about the world on his web site http://www.gatesnotes.com.  Although it pays to be aware of his biases, this is a pretty cool opportunity for everyone to learn from the greatest teachers in the world.