Top 10 Supercomputers

If someone says "supercomputer," your mind may jump to Deep Blue, and you wouldn't be alone. IBM's silicon chess wizard defeated grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1997, cementing it as one of the most famous computers of all time (some controversy around the win helped, too). For years, Deep Blue was the public face of supercomputers, but it's hardly the only all-powerful artificial thinker on the planet. In fact, IBM took Deep Blue apart shortly after the historic win! More recently, IBM made supercomputing history with Watson, which defeated "Jeopardy!" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a special match. Brilliant as they were, neither Deep Blue or Watson would be able to match the computational muscle of the systems on the 2012 TOP500 list. TOP500 calls itself a list of "the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems known to us." The supercomputers on this list are a throwback to the early computers of the 1950s -- which took up entire rooms -- except modern computers are using racks upon racks of cutting-edge hardware to produce petaflops of processing power.

Your home computer probably runs on four processor cores. Today's supercomputers use more than a million.
TOP500 relies on the Linpack benchmark, which feeds a computer a series of linear equations to measure its processing performance. The June 2012 list sees IBM's Sequoia on top of the world. Every six months, TOP500 releases a list, and a few new computers rise into the ranks of the world's fastest. Here are the current champions. Read on to see how they're putting their electronic mettle to work.

5 Signs Your Facebook Post Will Land You on Failbook

Maybe your phone's autocorrect function has its mind in the gutter -- right when you're commenting on Facebook about something concerning your grandmother. Or perhaps you mean to privately IM a love interest -- rather than post that intensely personal message directly onto his or her profile page. Could be your knowledge of geography is a little shaky, your spelling is simply atrocious, or you just don't have a clue concerning how to actually navigate Facebook.

No matter how carefully a loved one, friend, acquaintance or archnemesis crafts his or her Facebook status updates and comments, it's virtually guaranteed that eventually a mistake or faux pas -- perhaps accompanied by a moment of awesome -- will sneak in at some point. Sometimes those departures from the humdrum will be hilarious, at least to others out there cruising around the Wild West of the Web.
Because that's where Failbook reigns supreme. Failbook, one of the many scions of the vast Cheezburger Internet empire, is set up to showcase all the "wins," "fails" and "facepalms" that haunt the spidery halls of Facebook. Visitors to Failbook are invited to upload submissions (with the pictures and names largely obscured to protect people's privacy) of moments too priceless for just one person's social network. It's all in good fun. And it's not limited to Facebook these days. The site's traditional slogan was "Too Funny to Unfriend," but in a move to be more inclusive of all the far-flung fails social media has to offer, it made some updates in July 2011. The banner currently reads Failbook+ with the slogan: "Social Media from Facepalms to High-Fives."
Failbook showcases a wide range of items, and new entries constantly push the boundaries of wonderment when it comes to demonstrating to readers just how absolutely nuts their fellow human beings are. But there are also many tried-and-true memes that just never seem to get old -- and never stop cropping up. On the next few pages, we'll go over some of those hallmark bad habits of Facebookers that never die. Not that we'd want them to.

10 Worst Computer Viruses of All Time

Computer viruses can be a nightmare. Some can wipe out the information on a hard drive, tie up traffic on a computer network for hours, turn an innocent machine into a zombie and replicate and send themselves to other computers. If you've never had a machine fall victim to a computer virus, you may wonder what the fuss is about. But the concern is understandable -- according to Consumer Reports, computer viruses helped contribute to $8.5 billion in consumer losses in 2008. Computer viruses are just one kind of online threat, but they're arguably the best known of the bunch. Computer viruses have been around for many years. In fact, in 1949, a scientist named John von Neumann theorized that a self-replicated program was possible. The computer industry wasn't even a decade old, and already someone had figured out how to throw a monkey wrench into the figurative gears. But it took a few decades before programmers known as hackers began to build computer viruses.
While some pranksters created virus-like programs for large computer systems, it was really the introduction of the personal computer that brought computer viruses to the public's attention. A doctoral student named Fred Cohen was the first to describe self-replicating programs designed to modify computers as viruses. The name has stuck ever since.

10 Failed Google Projects

The reach of Google, its omnipresence -- from software to hardware to personal search results to location metrics to blog publishing -- has become a fact of life as quickly as the Internet has grown and changed, finding its way into our daily lives at every turn. As tablets and smartphones bring internet connectivity into our everyday experiences, keeping us closer than ever to our information, Google has followed. Its Android OS, in less than a decade, has become industry standard for the new guard of the pervasive Web. As we know, this is due to both Google's in-house concentration on innovation and also canny, even prescient acquisition of smaller, promising startups.
Google is very good at sniffing out the future, and bringing it to us in the most useful possible way -- until its products are so seamlessly transitioned into the toolbox we might wonder what we ever did before them. But that "throw everything at the wall" approach, even integrated with Google's focus on user experience, can't win every time. The probability just doesn't hold up under that massive amount of experimentation and open-handed approach. This rolling journey of debuts and re-absorptions has become the new norm: Everything is in beta-testing, all the time. Lose a Google product you love, and chances are you'll see the features that struck your fancy show up in something else soon.
In this article, we'll look at a variety of these "failures," across this spectrum. Some projects are simply failed analogues to products we still use today; others turn up piecemeal in different forms. In fact, Google has shown us a great deal about the nature of online development, experimentation, and innovation itself -- and that mistakes, properly recuperated back into the experiment, aren't really mistakes at all.

10 Most Popular Computers in History

As personal computers became affordable, must-have Internet gateways in the late 1990s, individual models took a backseat to larger brands. Dell didn't bother advertising special model names. It just advertised one major selling point: cheap. When Apple made a comeback with iMacs, and later MacBooks and MacBook Pros, you were either a Mac person or a PC person. Whether that PC was a Dell, or an HP, or an ASUS didn't make much difference.
But when the PC market was younger, smaller and much more expensive, things were different. Your PC was everything. In the late 1970s and 1980s, buying a computer was a huge investment, likely costing thousands of dollars and determining what kind of software you'd be running for the next several years. As a result, computer hobbyists picked favorites. And they stuck by them.

The wars between IBM fans, Tandy owners, Apple devotees and Commodore diehards were fiercer than any Mac versus PC argument. As a result, those early systems had an immense impact on those early home computer users, creating a generation of tech-savvy programmers. Ask any of them about their first (or favorite) computer, and they'll be able to tell you exactly what it was.
A few extremely popular breakout models sold millions of units. These are 10 of the most popular computers ever built. Your favorite may be among them.

10 Types of Computers

There are a lot of terms used to describe computers. Most of these words imply the size, expected use or capability of the computer. While the term computer can apply to virtually any device that has a microprocessor in it, most people think of a computer as a device that receives input from the user through a mouse or keyboard, processes it in some fashion and displays the result on a screen.

Do you know the different types of computers? See the next page to get started with the first computer type.

Top 10 Things You Should Not Share on Social Networks

Unless you've been living under a rock in 2009, you know that social networking Web sites are the latest and greatest way to interact with other users on the Internet. Thirty-five percent of adults on the Internet now have a profile on at least one social networking site, and 51 percent have more than one. Three-quarters of users between the ages of 18 and 24 have an online profile [source: USA Today]. The Pew Research Center found that 89 percent of these people use the sites to keep up with friends, 57 percent to make plans with friends and 49 percent to make new friends. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Urban Chat and Black Planet are just a few of more than 100 Web sites connecting folks around the world who are eager to share their thoughts and feelings. But just like in real life, there's such a thing as sharing too much information (TMI). It's easy to get caught up in the social aspects of sites like Facebook, but what you choose to share is there for all to see if you don't limit who can view your information. The same study by Pew Research found that 40 percent of users have open access to their profiles, allowing anyone to view their information. The other 60 percent restrict access to friends, family and colleagues. Sharing personal information with strangers can be dangerous business, and there are some things you should definitely put on your "do not share" list. We'll go over 10 of those items in this article.