If you follow the tech world or just like Jeopardy, one of the coolest things to happen to that long running game show in a long time was when IBM’s Watson computer came to the show to challenge the human champions Ken Jennings and that other dude that nobody can remember. Watson cleaned up although there were reports that the computer crashed during taping. Those reports were later claimed to be false.

Now that Watson’s days on TV are over, IBM is looking for new jobs for the supercomputer. IBM used Jeopardy as a way to show how well the Watson line of supercomputers responds to naturally spoken human questions. The computer did so well that IBM sees a future for Watson in jobs like telemarketing and sales calls. Watson could be used to call us like a human salesperson and then answer questions like a human would. I wonder if Watson would take “not interested” as an answer.

Watson also has uses in e-commerce and tech support where it could answer questions for people having problems or wanting more details on a product. Interestingly, one of the first uses for Watson may be at IBM helping sell itself. That makes Watson sort of a pimp and the pimped rolled into one.

[via ExtremeTech]

Apparently, if you use PS3s, you can save up to 10× the cost of commercial supercomputer technology. Condor was created for the Air Force for its image processing tasks. It’s considered one of the top forty fastest computers in the world, despite its video game brains. The Condor is supposed to help process all of the Air Force’s recent aerial photos. Snapping up the photos via satellites isn’t a problem. It’s finding something useful in them.

Users will be able to use Condor to move cameras around, kind of like if you’re playing Starcraft. Apparently, users can rewind or predict forward based upon the information gathered. I don’t know exactly what they mean about predicting the future, but it probably has to do with some image interpolation based upon the available info.

[Hot Hardware via CrunchGear]

Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM refused and dismantled Deep Blue, *ahem* because it’s technology obviously dangerous to the survival of the human race (WTF?). Watson was made for Jeopardy. Watson will face two of Jeopardy’s most successful players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in three episodes that will be broadcast February 14th to 16th, 2011.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

So who will you bet on this time? Man or machine?

[via NY Times]

The little rig is called the Linutop 3 and unlike the AMD power the Linutop 2 sported, the new version has an Intel Atom processor at 1.6GHz. We all know this processor from its long running use as the go to CPU in the netbook realm. The little rig runs the Linutop flavor of Ubuntu Linux and might be perfect for the alternate OS geek looking for a tiny PC.

The Linutop 3 measures just 9.25″ x 9.25″ x 2.16″. The machine has 1GB of RAM inside and supports up to 3GB. Instead of a hard drive, the system stores data to 2GB of internal flash memory and the OS is loaded on a 600MB flash device. I assume that the OS is not loaded on the main 2GB of storage, but the company doesn’t specify that. Other features include Gigabit Ethernet, VGA and DVI out as well as 3D graphics 6 USB ports, and more.

You can grab one at the Linutop store for 340 EUR (appx. $391 USD).

This supercomputer system is called the Grape-DR and is composed of 64 pairs of Intel’s Core i7-920 processors and a board mounted with 4 Grape-DR accelerator chips. This accelerator board diminishes the power consumption of the supercomputer five fold! In terms of specs, each Grape-DR accelerator chip kicks out 200 GFLOPS of throughput, while using just 50-watts. That’s less than a lightbulb for you science majors out there.

The system belongs to a Japanese university and research institute, and was ranked first in a list of 500 green supercomputers, beating by 5% IBM’s green supercomputer. For those of you keeping score, the system’s performance per unit power consumption is 815.43 MFLOPS/W – vs. IBM’s 773.38 MFLOPS/W. Take that, IBM!

I don’t know much about supercomputing, but from what I see, it can get quite messy, cable-wise. With all of its intelligence, you’d think it could devise some kind of cable management system.

[Tech-On via Ubergizmo]

Look at that perfect handwriting. Astonishingly, Watson also rings-in on its own, although it looks like humans can still beat it at ringing-in. And if you think that Watson just goes online and Googles for answers, you’re wrong. Watson will join Jeopardy! armed with whatever knowledge its creators can stuff inside it and nothing else.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Maybe Watson knows how to clean up BP’s oil spill. Read more about Watson on IBM’s website.

[via Engadget]

Einstein’s formula for the equivalence of mass and energy states that anything that has mass possesses a certain amount of energy whether or not it’s at rest. Meanwhile, as mentioned in the article, particle physics says that protons and neutrons – from which atoms are made of – are made up of quarks, which are bound together by gluons. What is strange is that gluons have zero mass, while quarks account for just 5% of an atom’s mass, which leaves 95%, or practically all of it, unaccounted for. The physicists discovered that the rest of the mass is actually the energy arising out of the “movement and interaction of quarks and gluons.” In other words, mass is equivalent to energy. Which is what Einstein said. In 1905. Tsk. Ye of little faith.

So what did we learn today? That Einstein’s brain is larger than France, Germany and Hungary plus a bunch of Michael Phelps/LeBron James class of supercomputers put together. His hair was probably made up of brain cells for all we know. Yup. One smart dude.

***Crickets***

In other news, Brock Lesnar won me $8 by beating Randy Couture.

[via The Age via Slashdot]