Andrew Knight

After the recent incident of an Iraqi Journalist throwing shoes at President Bush last Monday, 15th of December, a developer by the name of PopJam released a funny interactive game titled “Sock and Awe!”. The aim of the game is to throw as many shows at President Bush within the specified time limit, using your mouse to move the shoe left and right and clicking to throw.

It’s a very quick game and really is just a novelty type of thing, you wouldn’t play it for hours unless you felt some ridicioulous desire to haha. You can play the game by visiting the website below:

Sock and Awe - http://www.sockandawe.com

Fathers 4 Justice - f4joz.com (F4J) has shown an interesting article from News.com.au regarding the new proposed Australian Internet Web Filter, which simply put, will strip the last source of freedom from people and with reduced speeds of up to 25%. I’ll make it easy, just think of your web page loading a few more seconds later or your downloads a few more minutes later…now times that by a few thousand times you load a website or download a song, starting to add up now? Not to mention, if the government takes control of our web, then they can deliberately block websites to their own advantage - scary stuff hey?

The ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) also noted that web filtering software blocked the wrong content up to 25 per cent in most studies. Think of your local community centre or a blog about gardening could just get blocked, for absolutely no reason. Sure, there is some “nasty” stuff out there and for that, you need the right anti-virus and anti-spyware protection, however forcing you not to see websites is a restriction, a restriction that should not be put in place!

There were hundreds of people who attended protests in capital cities around Australia on Saturday, 13th of December, voicing their opinion on the above proposed internet filtering scheme by Kevin Rudd.

I’m far higher than politics and don’t wish to be involved in any shape or form, however Mr. Rudd seems to be doing a good service so far, however if this goes ahead, he will no longer have my support - that’s a promise… and you can take that to the bank with interest on top!

Full article on Fathers 4 Justice Australia:
http://www.f4joz.com/news/newspage.php?yr=8&id=10291

Some Important Reverse Mortgage Information

Reverse mortgage loans were introduced in the United States in 1989. Since then, almost 20,000 seniors in the country have acquired reverse mortgage loans. This article would give you some important reverse mortgage information.

Reverse mortgages are also termed as home equity conversion mortgages. In case of a reverse mortgage, home owners are able to keep the ownership of their houses and at the same time, receive a lump sum payment, or in some instances, a monthly payment from the lender. If the home owners shift to another place or expire, ownership of the house is obtained by the lender unless the elderly borrowers or their inheritors repay the loan. The home owners also have the option of selling the house and use the sale proceeds to pay off the lender.

Obviously, reverse mortgages are not meant for everybody. They might turn out to be expensive and a senior home owner might only find out 30%-80% of his home’s value with a reverse mortgage. The service charges and closing costs related to a reverse mortgage may vary from 20 dollars to 30 dollars every month. Some reverse mortgages bear adjustable interest rates and some fixed interest rates. Reverse mortgages are offered to you in various forms. You can get reverse mortgage information from different websites including FHA (Federal Housing Administration) and HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development).

Google, the largest search engine in the world, revealed on the 29th of November they managed to move and sort 1 petabyte of data (1024 terabytes) to over 48,000 hard drives in just 6 hours and 2 minutes. Breaking it down, that’s 1 terabyte of data (1024 gigabytes) in 68 seconds, crushing the previous record of 1 terabyte across 910 computers in 209 seconds.

So with so much data being moved, so quickly, there is always a chance of something not going right and in this case, Google  was on the ball. They have triple redundancy, keeping the possibility open that something could happen, fortunately, nothing did. Though you may ask, with triple redundancy, would’ve this slowed things down? Not really, since storing may not be part of the sorting algorithm that was recorded (and storing the data could have still been ongoing after the sort had been completed). Though this is purely speculation as we’re unsure of Google’s full play.

Though all this was a milestone for the technology world, demonstrating how effective our technology is becoming and how quick things can be moved with the right hardware and knowledge. Google did push the boundaries for various reasons with the main one being to help further our knowledge to create better systems to make things like these seem small in the future.

Written based on: http://www.web-app.net/?Google_Breaks_Speed_Record_Sorting_1PB_Data_In_6_hours_%2F&action=viewnews&id=43