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.

Top 5 Future Cell Phones

Since the introduction of the iPhone, the cell phone market in the United States has started to shift. Before the iPhone, most smartphone owners in the United States were enterprise users. That means they owned a smartphone for business purposes. They'd check e-mail and browse the Web, often while driving, weaving in and out of traffic, and scaring the rest of us.
But the iPhone helped introduce the general consumer to smartphones. Its sleek design and intuitive interface appealed to a wide audience. It didn't hurt that Apple partnered with AT&T, the second-largest cell phone carrier in the United States, for distribution. Soon lots of people were exploring advanced phone features while attempting to navigate through city traffic. Isn't progress wonderful?

In many ways, the iPhone was a game-changing device. It proved that customers in the United States were ready to join the smartphone customer base. Meanwhile, users in Europe and Asia quietly chuckled while they used their own phones to watch television or control their bank accounts.
Today, it seems like it's only a matter of time before the newest smartphone to hit the market is branded as a potential iPhone-killer. The iPhone continues to sell well with each new generation of hardware, but other big names are getting into the game and we may yet see some serious competition rise in the consumer market.
With that in mind, it's time to gaze into the technological crystal ball and take a look at what the future of cell phones will be. Rather than focus on prototypes or unreleased handsets, our list, in no particular order, covers a few phones that manufacturers may one day put in the hands of consumers -- but hopefully not while they're driving.

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 Ways to Make Money on the Internet

Unless you're a freegan and have found a way to live entirely off the grid, you probably need some sort of steady income in order to survive. The traditional way to earn money, of course, is by having a job. You work for a company or start your own, and the work you do earns you money, which you spend on things like a mortgage, rent, food, clothing, utilities and entertainment.

Most people typically work from their company's central location, a physical space where everyone from that organization gathers to exchange ideas and organize their efforts.
But a few lucky souls have found ways to make money within the comfort of their own home. With the Internet, an ever-changing arena for businesses, some people looking to earn money are finding ways to do so. Some forms are best for part-time endeavors for those looking to make a little extra money on the side, while others can lead to full-time jobs and Internet success stories.
We've put together a list of our top 10 ways to make money on the Internet, in no particular order. On the next page, we'll start with an old favorite.

10 Myths About Video Games

Since the early days of video games, young gamers have whispered secrets on the schoolyard and spent long hours trying to make the most outrageous gaming myths come true. Some kids heard their best friend's cousin found Mew under a truck in "Pokemon"; others were utterly convinced there was a secret way to find the Triforce in "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time." Before gamers banded together on the Internet and used their collective knowledge -- and the ability to hack into games and parse their code -- to rule out the impossible, any schoolyard whisper could turn out to be the truth.
The video game world is so insular that you'd have to be a dedicated gamer to even hear certain rumors and myths -- the one surrounding a code that revives Aeris in the game "Final Fantasy 7" is a good example. Other rumors are more scandalous, like the one about a cheat code that allows players of "Tomb Raider" to defrock Lara Croft. But gaming myths extend beyond secret characters and gamer gossip. There are myths about gaming, too -- like the idea that gaming directly causes violence or that only boys play video games.

Because these ideas are funny, intriguing or just plain misguided -- and because we like debunking myths -- we now present 10 of the most common myths about video games.

6 Reuses for Old Video Game Controllers

When the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, my brother and I spent an entire summer working on a farm to buy one. It took us three months, but we were finally able to afford the monstrous $100 dollar price tag. That was the beginning of our love affair with video games. As the years passed, video game systems became more advanced and old systems became outdated quickly. My brother and I found ourselves with a pile of control pads and laser guns that we no longer used. If you are experiencing a similar problem, here are some solutions to keep your old controllers out of the landfill.

Top 5 Scary Modern Technologies

Technology makes our lives better. You're enjoying your new high-definition television, and have your work and personal appointments organized on your computer. You pay your bills electronically and save time and money. That's fine and dandy, until someone takes out the electronic banking system and the machines take over the planet.
Sounds crazy? Perhaps. None of the technologies we included in our top 5 are likely to rain death and destruction on our little planet, though that doesn't prevent people from being unnerved by them. Read on to find out what weirdness may await in the future.

5 Myths About Facebook

If you've been on the Internet for any length of time, you've probably come across one of the hundreds of hoaxes that are floating around cyberspace. In fact, many of these half-truths and outright myths have been making the rounds nearly as long as the word "Internet" has been a part of our vocabulary. In 1997, for instance, an e-mail promising quick riches and a copy of Windows 98, courtesy of Bill Gates, flooded Inboxes across the world. Predictably, Bill Gates wasn't actually parting with his billions to have people forward e-mails to their friends.
A few years later, Al Gore made a crucial mistake during his presidential campaign when he claimed that he invented the Internet. Only he didn't. In reality, Gore claimed he "took the initiative in creating the Internet" in an interview with CNN. While that's still a big claim, many argue it's a far cry from claiming he engineered routers and laid fiber optic cables with his bare hands.

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.