Fascinating! What a wonderful world it would be. I had never really thought about filesystems as being so nonsensically arbitrary. This concept is really quite satisfyingly amazing …
‘The ability to associate any piece of information with any file system object provides an unlimited number of new ways to organize files. The “default” organization is based on file name and file path
Apple – Science – Profile – COLSA Corporation
When the Hypersonic Missile Technology (HMT) team at COLSA Corporation and the U.S. Army need to model hypersonic flight on a computer system, they’ll no longer have to wait two months to get results.
The HMT team, headed by senior scientist Dr. John Medeiros, now has access to one of the world’s largest and most powerful computers: a supercluster of 1,566 64-bit, dual-processor Apple Xserve G5 servers.
Called MACH5 — an acronym for Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonics — the Apple cluster “gives us more than 60 times the computational power of our current production machine,” says Medeiros. What used to take two months can now be done in a day.
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Joi Ito’s Web: Off to Beijing
Gate Agent: Our computer is broken. I can’t check you through to your final destination.
Me: OK, but please check my bag through to Bejing via Tokyo.
Gate Agent: My computer is down. I have to look up the codes by hand. What country is Tokyo in.
Me: Japan
Gate Agent: Beijing is also in Japan.
Me: No, China.
Gate Agent: OK. (scribbles down codes and flights on luggage tag.)
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