SmartClassroom :: Wednesday, January 3, 2006

News & Product Updates

University Viewers Tilt Rankings of Top Web Sites

Eight percent of all Web content consumed by U.S. Internet users, as measured in page views, comes from university settings, according to an Internet audience measurement service. A study by comScore Networks showed that 12 percent of the November 2007 viewership of MySpace.com parent Fox Interactive Media was from university sites, while 6 percent of page views at Yahoo sites are from university locations. The two sites are the first and second most popular sites on the Internet.

If college usage is omitted, Yahoo sites, with 35.6 billion page views for November, would rank higher than Fox sites with 34.9 billion, the survey showed. Yahoo sites also retained the top spot in audience size with 129.9 million unique visitors...

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Affordable Laptops Feature Unique Interface

When students in Thailand, Libya, and other developing countries get their $150 computers from the One Laptop Per Child project in 2007, their experience will be unlike anything on standard PCs.

The XO machine will likely will be the first computer these children have ever used. Since the students have no expectations for what PCs should be like, the laptop has been designed with a child-intuitive interface.

For example, students who turn on the small green-and-white computers will be greeted by a basic home screen with a stick-figure icon at the center, surrounded by a white ring. The entire desktop has a black frame with more icons...

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U. Guelph Picks Altix Technology for Bio Research

Ontario’s University of Guelph purchased SGI’s Altix systems with SGI storage arrays for large math and statistical simulations. The university’s math and statistics department obtained a number of federal and provincial grants for the purchases, including the highest research tools grant ever awarded for pure applied mathematics work.

The department will use the SGI systems to study evolutionary algorithms, as well as for projects investigating problems in epidemiology. Hermann Eberl, an associate professor in the department said the benefit of using the Altix systems running on Linux is that “we can use the same compilers that we use on our desktop PCs…. Using the Intel compilers for Linux, we can develop our codes on the PCs and do small simulations and then, without trouble, move them over to the Altix system compilers, and run much bigger problems.”...

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