Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. has announced that after 250 years, it’s throwing in the towel on print editions and moving to all-digital delivery of alphabetized facts and figures.

Encyclopaedia Britannica was a touchstone of my youth. You couldn’t go to a state fair or school event without seeing someone seated at a table next to a tall stack of books – books that held, in my mind, every fact worth knowing. (Read more below…)

My article on The Register comparing supercomputer performance and price/performance to common computers here generated quite a few comments. Most of them were the typical mix of humor, flames, and thoughtful asides, but one in particular caught my eye. It was from “buzza,” who mused:

“The K machine is mighty pricey, and it would (be) interesting to see how that cost breaks down into CPU vs I/O development. The K machine has a very elaborate interconnect. This must surely take a lot of the credit for the machine’s sustained performance being so close to the theoretical peak performance. The cost break down might illustrate where investment pays off best.”

For those who didn’t see the initial story, the Fujitsu K computer is a 10 petaflop monster that’s currently the fastest computer in the world. It’s roughly 4x faster than the second place Tianhe-1A Chinese system that topped the chart at the end of 2010.

The K computer delivers incredible performance but also an equally incredible price tag at $1.25 billion to build and $10 million annually to operate. (Read more below…)

A study published by the Journal of Applied Social Psychology says that analyzing applicant social network pages is a good predictor of how well the newbie might (or might not) fit into your organization.

They’re not talking about the obvious stuff, like status updates about looting stuff from work or faking exotic illnesses in order to get more hangover recovery time. The researchers wanted to know whether posts and interactions on the social nets can accurately assess how job candidates score on the “Big Five” personality traits.

So what are the Big Five? Glad you asked. They are: 1) Openness to experience… 2) Conscientiousness… 3) Extraversion… 4) Agreeableness… and 5) Neuroticism. (Read more below…)

Procter & Gamble is going to quadruple the company’s staff of business analytics experts in the near future. This is despite the fact that the company is reducing spending in other categories, including significant non-manufacturing layoffs and a hefty 30% cut (equaling $1 billion) in annual IT spending.

So why would P&G look to build their analytics ranks so large, so quickly? It’s because they see a new business model emerging, and they’re embracing it. (Read more below…)

AMD’s sudden purchase of SeaMicro came out of the blue Wednesday afternoon (West Coast U.S. time) and was followed by a conference call with CEO Rory Read, SeaMicro co-founder Andrew Feldman, and Lisa Su, AMD’s newly-dubbed head of Global Business Units. This is a purchase that has the potential to put AMD back into the forefront of server technology – a place they haven’t visited since the early Opteron years.

For the uninitiated, SeaMicro makes very small, very dense systems typically populated by dual-core 64-bit Intel Atom processors. They fit four sockets/servers, each with 4GB RAM, onto a PCIe board about the size of a typical PC sound card (3”x2”) and still have space for “more cool stuff,” as they put it in a 2011 analyst presentation. (Read more below…)

The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), due to kick off in Hamburg in mid-June, is Europe’s leading supercomputing event. This show has almost everything you’d expect: keynote speeches by research computing stars; presentations, tutorials, demonstrations, and exhibits; and a huge variety of logo-imprinted tote bags. This year, they’re adding a Student Cluster Competition to their growing slate of offerings.

So what is a student cluster competition? Small teams (usually six or eight members) of university or even high school students put together their own clusters and compete to achieve the fastest/best results on a set of benchmarks and real-world HPC applications. The systems they build are subject to power constraints, usually somewhere around 25-30 amps, which is what keeps them from trying to Infiniband together anything that has a processor. (Read more below…)

The move into the Age of Analytics is going to produce plenty of creepy, shudder-inducing moments along the way. The latest? It’s a story that illustrates how big analytics-enabled enterprises can divine highly private details about us just by analyzing mega amounts of data and looking for patterns.

Case in point:  A father observed that his high school-age daughter suddenly started getting baby clothing coupons in the mail from Target. He went to the local store and protested, saying that this was an obvious and highly offensive mistake.

When the store manager called the man a few days later to apologize, the father apologized to the store manager; his daughter was in fact pregnant, and due that August. In fact, we infer from the story that the highly targeted Target ads were what caused the daughter to come clean to her dad and admit she had a bun in the oven. (Read more below…)

When HP announced its purchase of UK analytics firm Automony for $10.4 billion back in September 2011, it shocked HP shareholders and caused many industry insiders to comment that HP was paying way too much for the company.

At the time, Autonomy was a 15-year-old analytics firm that specialized in helping enterprises manage all types of data, with an emphasis on pan-enterprise search and dealing with the growing problem/opportunity inherent in the explosion of unstructured data.

Pre-purchase, Autonomy boasted high recessionary revenue growth of 18% in 2010, solid 43% operating margins, an average deal size of $800,000, and a customer list that included some of the largest high-profile enterprises in the world. But the company still hadn’t topped a billion in revenue and certainly didn’t have the profile of a SAS or SPSS. (Read more below…)