As a newly minted WoW-head (that's World of Warcraft for you noobs), I've always wondered just how all those "gold farmers" who try to sell virtual gold within in the game came by their vast, ill-gotten riches. I'd heard rumors of sweatshops in China where people are forced to drink Mountain Dew and kill Fel Orcs for 16 hours straight, but that sounded too strange to be true -- and, at the same time, not too different from the average college dormitory.

I recently saw the ThinkPad W700, and, well, it’s almost scary. Packing a brilliant 17-inch screen, the beast spreads across a desk like a beached whale. But amazingly, it weighs just 8.4 pounds—about 4 pounds lighter than I would have expected.

Time was, a teraflop (that's one trillion, or 10^12 floating point operations per second) was just a dream. But the supercomputer ASCI Red nabbed that prize in 1996. Since then, it's been the grueling, relentless march to a petaflop--that's 10^15 flops for those keeping count--a goal achieved by the Riken MDGrape-3 computer in 2006 (some dispute this claim, as the machine is so specialized it can't properly run the benchmark software. For them, we present the latest iteration of IBM's Blue Gene/P, which is purportedly capable of a petaflop as well).