Friday, March 23, 2007

Alaska Department of Revenue vaporizes $38 billion account

The Last Frontier is no stranger to computer failure on a noteworthy scale, but the latest mishap far exceeds the severity of yet another e-voting failure. A quick-fingered technician at the Alaska Department of Revenue reformatted a hard drive while handling "routine maintenance work" that contained an account worth $38 billion -- yeah, with a B. To make matters exponentially worse, he / she also deleted the backup drive for reasons unbeknownst to mere men, and we can probably assume that at least a few individuals in the department suffered a near-heart attack when they found the backup tapes completely unreadable. The only remaining proof of the oil-funded account was in 300 boxes of paperwork, which had to be digitized yet again by staff members working incredibly long hours completing work that had just been done a few months earlier. Incredibly, no one was reportedly punished for the incident, and while the recovery efforts were actually finished in just six painstaking weeks, the damage inflicted by a few careless keystrokes totaled $220,700 in excess labor costs. Ouch. [Via Fark]

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Tyan's 40 CPU Core Personal Supercomputer -- now shipping

Sure, you probably don't currently have a need for 256 gigaflops of processing power in your home. Rest assured, you will -- just as certain as the day when robots will care for our children and decorate our Christmas trees. So go 'head, raid the education fund and future proof your domicile by picking up a TYANPSC T-650 series computer from Tyan -- "PSC," as in Personal SuperComputer. Prices start at just $20,000 for a 40 CPU Core (10x quad-core Intel Xeons) system configurable with up to 60GB of RAM and a power draw of just 15A. And it's "portable" in the same way a refrigerator is portable: it has wheels. Who knows, maybe you can put those spare cycles to use by solving the traveling salesman problem. Better yet, join Engadget's Folding@Home team for some hardcore protein folding fun. [Via 64-bit-computers]

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SilverBrook Designing World's Fastest Printer

SilverBrook may be a no-name in the world of tech (they've never released a single product), but all that can change if this baby comes to fruition—it's a super-fast "memjet" printer capable of shooting out two pages per second. Memjet refers to the technology behind the printer, which is a cousin of the inkjet. The difference is that this memjet printer uses a print head that spans the width of a standard-size page. The printer is expected to debut for $200. Smells like vaporware, but I hope it's not.

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Gallery: Nokia's Flagship N95 Launched Internationally

n95_low_nowplaying_02-thumb.jpgHere's a gallery in celebration of Nokia lauching the H.M.S. N95, the follow up to their N93, and the latest in their line of huge multimedia phones (Previously mentioned specs here). These are aircraft carrier class gadgets. I'd never be able to fit on in my skin tight lycra suit pockets. But I still want one oh so badly. Dual slider action? Yes, please.

Depending on how it works, I'd consider this instead of an iPhone...if it ever comes state-side.

(Please, when you leave your Lam is a Fanboy posts below, make em original and entertaining.)

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Hammer Storage's 2TB Network Drives Are Big Like a Large Object

hammermyshare.jpg

This Hammer (don't...) Storage myshare NAS seems to be one of the few home and small business units to offer up to 2TB of storage. The unit itself takes 2 hard disks to form anywhere between 320GB and 2TB of storage, with an extra USB expansion port in the back for printers or even more space. Best of all, the NAS has Gigabit Ethernet and RAID 0/1 support, so the performance will be (theoretically) pretty solid.

The 1TB version is on sale now for $499, and the 2TB will be shipping in August. We're always looking for more storage for all the crap we amass from being on the Internet 18 hours a day (we went on a Batman comic downloading spree last week).

Product Page [Hammer via Electronista]

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