217w ago - Mjbauer95 has released an update to his development library for the Nintendo Wii that allows homebrew developers to use the Mii's (the characters you create using the Wii that are commonly used in commercial games) in their games, applications, etc ...

Download: Libmii 0.3c / Source

To quote: What works (as of version 0.3c)

• Name
• Creator
• Birthday
• Favorite
• Gender

224w ago - The U.S. government has agreed to buy two supercomputers from IBM Corp., including one to be in use in 2012 that will ultimately scale to 20 petaflops, an estimated ten times the performance of today's most powerful system.

Terms of the deal were not immediately released.

In June, IBM became the first to break the petaflops performance mark with a separate government system. Cray quickly followed with a petaflops system that hit the Top 500 list in November.

The new IBM BlueGene-class systems will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to handle analysis of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The lab currently uses an IBM BlueGene/L system.

Under the deal IBM will deliver to the lab by April one of its BlueGene/P systems capable of up to 500 teraflops. By sometime in 2012, IBM will have installed a follow on system called Sequoia.

BlueGene/P uses a modified PowerPC 450 processor running at 850 MHz with four cores per chip and as many as 4,096 processors in a rack. The Sequoia system will use 45nm processors with as many as 16 cores per chip running at a significantly faster data rate.

Both BlueGene/P and Sequoia consist of clusters built up from 96 racks of systems. Sequoia will have 1.6 petabytes of memory feeding its 1.6 million cores, but...

226w ago - Former IBM technical architect David Shippy, who worked on both the PS3's Cell-specific PPU chip and XBox 360's Xenon CPU has discussed the power of each system.

He couldn't give a definite answer on which system was powerful and laughed it all depends. The conclusion that he come to was that overall they are fairly equal even though they use different processing models.

To quote: But Gamasutra also asked him about the relative power of the two systems - since he worked so intimately on them, does he have an opinion on which was the more powerful?

"I'm going to have to answer with an 'it depends,'" laughs Shippy, after a pause.

"Again, they're completely different models. So in the PS3, you've got this Cell chip which has massive parallel processing power, the PowerPC core, multiple SPU cores... it's got a GPU that is, in the model here, processing more in the Cell chip and less in the GPU. So that's one processing paradigm - a heterogeneous paradigm."

"With the Xbox 360, you've got more of a traditional multi-core system, and you've got three PowerPC cores, each of them having dual threads - so you've got six threads running there, at least in the CPU.

250w ago - In an article at IBM.com (linked above) titled 'PS3 is more than a Toy', Peter Seebach talks us through how to tweak Linux for the best possible performance on the PS3.

To quote: The Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) runs Linux, but getting it to run well requires some tweaking. In this article, first in a series, Peter Seebach introduces the features and benefits of PS3 Linux, and explains some of the issues that might benefit from a bit of tweaking.

When Sony first announced that the PlayStation 3 would be able to run Linux natively, a great deal of excitement ensued. Early on, it was a bit of a challenge to get Linux natively installed. The supported installer ran a custom script that hand-mangled a Fedora Core 5 or 6 install DVD into a runnable system with a special PS3 kernel. People put in hours and hours of effort to get other systems, such as Ubuntu, working. Terrasoft's Yellow Dog Linux, with an actual graphical installer that ran on the PS3, was the king of the hill.

Time has passed, and a great deal has changed. Fedora 7 installs on the PS3 out of the box, with the most challenging parts being selecting the PS3 storage driver so it can find the install DVD, and remembering to specify a video mode on the initial install command line so you'll be able to see the installer.

278w ago - As outlined in our Past News last night, the recent 'ICE' PS3 hack claim turned out to be just another PS3 hangup resulting with a black screen- useless!

Today, the same ICE lamers (alec, streetskaterfu, iqd) have been childishly pestering the @ps in iRC EFnet #PS3News (primarily CJPC) with the infamous "Source Code" (helloworld_source.zip - 2.82 KB (2,894 bytes)) of their alleged PS3 'hack'... you know, the one with the video showing nothing but a black screen.

After getting bored humoring them for awhile, we decided to reveal that their 'hack' Source Code is ironically 100% identical code (with the exception of a printf to their lameass page) as this IBM Code that has been published back in 2006.

Additionally, mainman and Gigi wanted us to share that this code checks for 8 SPE's... and (D'OH!) the PS3 only utilizes a maximum of 7- PWN'D once again!

Not only did ICE pilfer IBM's old (Cell) code and claim it as their own, but they also didn't know enough to realize it's not even LV2 PS3 code! Needless...