Links for Friday, October 29, 2010

• Tom’s Hardware: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: October 2010: Athlon III X3 450 – “This is the fastest triple-core Athlon II available, and it sports an ideal combination of three CPU cores, a high clock rate, a low price, and respectable overclocking headroom. Despite the deceptively low buy-in, this processor delivers some serious gaming capability. It is such a great gaming CPU, in fact, that it almost renders most of the CPUs in the $100 to $130 range overkill.“
• Gonzalo Lira: Signs that Hyperinflation is Arriving – “*2012 will be the bad year: I predict that hyperinflation’s tipping point will be no later than the first quarter of 2012. From there, it will accelerate. By the end of 2012, I would not be surprised if the CPI for the year averaged 30%./em>”</li>
  • Wired Science: Sleeping Mars Rover Finds Evidence of Liquid Water – “These layers suggest water, maybe in the form of frost or snow, seeped into the ground relatively recently and carried the soluble minerals deeper into the soil. The seepage could have happened during cycles in Mars’ history when the planet tilted further on its axis.“
  • Scale of Universe – Interactive Scale of the Universe Tool – From quantum foam and neutrinoes to the local supergalactic cluster and on to the observable universe. This is cool!
  • Avatar Classroom: Avatar Classroom Hosting – “The Avatar Classroom is a virtual game object available for educators in Second Life and Open Sim. Once an educator logs into Second Life, they can acquire an Avatar Classroom helper robot which will automatically builda 3D Sloodle classroom for them. The magic happens however, when the robot uses its virtual radio antenna to communicate with the outside WWW. When the robot makes the connection, it will search the Avatar Classroom servers to see if the user has a classroom Website registered. If the user doesn’t our robot automatically creates and connects a supporting Moodle Website which communicates with Second Life.“</ul>