[H]ardNews 10th Edition - Blair's Tech Ed.

PS2 Price Cuts?

Is Sony on the verge of cutting PS2 prices? Chris Morris’ “Game Over” column takes an educated guess at Sony’s plans to counter the Xbox 360 launch next month. After posting profits that were down a whopping 73%, Sony better do something, that’s for sure. Personally, I am predicting $99 consoles (Xbox & PS2) this holiday season. Mark my words.

Let's be honest: It's not the youngest kid on the video game block; in fact, it's the oldest. It's still the strongest, though, and doesn't intend to give up its sales crown - even for the short term - without a fight. That could conceivably mean a price cut.

New IBM Supercomputer:

Sure, the new IBM supercomputer can do 280 trillion floating point operating per second but can you Play F.E.A.R. or Quake 4 on it?

In a ceremony at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California Thursday, officials from the Department of Energy and IBM celebrated completion of the world's fastest supercomputer, and said IBM's Blue Gene/L system had doubled its previous performance.

Fiber-Optic Data Transfer Record:

O.K., so you take the computer from the story above and hook it to the net using this fiber-optic technology from Japan and you could download the entire internet in 30 seconds. Well, at least the good parts.

Kansai Electric used fibre-optic cables on power-transmitting steel towers to achieve the speed of one terabit per second, which is more than 100 times faster than inter-city data transmissions currently in use, a spokesman says.