Petaflops and the PS3

What is a petaflop? At first glance I thought this was an unfavorable review of the latest PETA campaign, however a petaflop is the capability of a computer to do a quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). That's the equivalent of every person on earth doing 75,000 simple math problems per second. Anybody remember "Chisanbop" ?

The reason this is important is because it is the milestone reached by Stanford's "Folding@home" project. Folding@home was designed to simulate protein folding and perform molecular dynamics simulations. The data gathered here would be used to understand the progression of diseases such as Alzheimer's, mad cow, cancer, and even Cystic Fibrosis.

Aside from the OSX, Linux and WIndows folding applications available, there are over 600,000 Playstation 3 users registered who participate in the folding@home project as well. If you feel so inclined you can download the program here and let your computer (or PS3) fight disease when you are not fighting space aliens.

Bluetooth vs. QR Codes

A Reuters article on mobile marketing highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses of Bluetooth and QR Code marketing for mobile devices. Overall the carries don't like Bluetooth solutions because they don't require a data plan.

The carriers favor another method called QR Codes or Code 2D: "These bar codes, already used in Japan, are read by camera phones and send the user directly to a Web page. Accessing a Web site requires a subscription to a wireless Internet connection for which users usually have to pay."

Either method still has work to do to. "It (mobile marketing) has the potential to become a significant player in the marketing world as TV advertisers struggle to get people's eyeballs," says Jon Hudson, senior vice President of PC, automotive and consumer business units at CSR, "But it has to be more than 'your next McDonalds is 200 meters on the left'."