They may sport love handles and Ivy League degrees, but every two weeks some Silicon Valley techies turn into vicious street brawlers in a real-life, underground fight club.

Kicking, punching and swinging every household object imaginable — from frying pans and tennis rackets to pillowcases stuffed with soda cans — they beat each other mercilessly in a garage in this bedroom community south of San Francisco.

Then, bloodied and bruised, they limp back to their desks in the morning.

Source: USAToday

The Israeli chess software, Junior, won the title World Computer Chess Champion for the fifth time.

The 14th World Computer-Chess Championship was held in Turin, Italy, in conjunction with the 11th Computer Olympiad and the 5th Computers and Games conference (CG 2006).

Junior won 7 games and tied 4. The chess software did not loose a single game during the competition. Jonior’s strength is in it’s AI and its ability to “think” like a human by sacrifing tools to gain a strategic advantage.

Although Junior is running on 2 dual core Intel CPU and can calculate 10M moves a second it overwhelmed last years winner, Zappa, and American software which runs on NCSA’s 512 CPU super computer which can calculate 100M moves per second.

To evaluate Cell’s potential, computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory evaluated the processor’s performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures.

Overall results demonstrate the tremendous potential of the Cell architecture for scientific computations in terms of both raw performance and power efficiency. On average, Cell is eight times faster and at least eight times more power efficient than current Opteron and Itanium processors

Source: hpcwire

Circuit City Stores Inc. on Thursday patched a customer support message forum Web site that had been silently installing a backdoor Trojan on visitors’ PCs for more than two weeks.

Sometime on or about May 17, hackers broke into a home theater message board on Circuit City’s online site, said Bill Cimino, a spokesman for the Richmond, Va.-based electronics retailer. “We’re trying to backtrack to when the break-in actually occurred,” Cimino said Friday.

Source: InformationWeek

Microsoft Corp. said it has canceled plans to include an automatic way to save documents in the popular PDF format in the next version of its Office software, amid an ongoing dispute with Adobe Systems Inc.

Instead, users who purchase Office 2007, due out to consumers in January, will have to download separate, free software to save documents created in Office products such as Word and Excel as PDFs.

Source: AP

Dell is hoping to stanch criticism of its tech support program with a service that lets technicians remotely troubleshoot balky PCs over a high-speed Internet connection.

All U.S. Dell customers under warranty will receive the one-on-one online tech support for free, the company announced on Friday.

Source: News.com

Rachel Cook recently had a baby and wanted a place to get advice and connect with other parents on the Web, but she didn’t find a lot of good options.

So she did something about it, and co-founded Minti.com, which launched in March. Privately funded and run out of Perth, Australia, Minti is designed to be a Wikipedia of sorts for parenting advice. Its content is user-generated from a community of parents offering tips on everything from potty training to immunization.

Source: News.com

The union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company’s reported actions in China.

The National Union of Journalists said it sent a letter on Friday to Dominique Vidal, Yahoo Europe’s vice president, denouncing the company for allegedly providing information to Chinese authorities about journalists. The union also said it would stop using all Yahoo-operated services.

Source: Reuters