NEW NET Issues List for 17 Mar 2009

Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 17 March 2009, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week's gathering is at the Stone Cellar Brewpub. It is located at 1004 S. Olde Oneida Street, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA. In honor of St. Patrick's Day, it seemed appropriate to be frequenting a pub with a hint of the UK. If you've some green, wear it to our geek gathering -- and if it's green beer you're wanting, either call the Stone Cellar first to make sure they'll have it, or bring along your own bottle of green food coloring.

Éirinn go brách!

The ‘net

1. Second Life finding new life http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090314/tc_afp/lifestyleitinternetsecondlifelindenlab “…Linden Lab chief executive Mark Kingdon shakes his head when he sees news stories heralding the demise of former Internet darling Second Life. Reporters that rushed into Second Life to cover cyber-events and portrayed the online fantasy realm as science fiction future come true have been pulling up stakes and tearing down the community they had embraced…The number of "active users" at Second Life has grown 25 percent since September last year, while the amount of time and money spent in the virtual world has climbed by similar percentages…”

2. How Two Coke Fans Brought the Brand to Facebook Fame http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135238 “…Who has the most popular page on Facebook? Barack Obama. Who's second? Coca-Cola…The Coke page, which totals 3.3 million "fans," wasn't even created by Coca-Cola, but by a pair of Los Angelenos who just love Coke…Facebook made the decision to either close the page or let Coca-Cola take it over. Coca-Cola instead proposed an alternative: Let the creators keep the page but share it with a few of Coca-Cola's senior interactive folks…normally when a giant multinational company calls a consumer about something the consumer has created in that company's brand name or image, it's not a good sign…Everyone has this vision that if something like this happens, the big company will send you off to Guantanamo," he said…Coke instead flew the guys down to Atlanta for a few days of meetings, a tour of the World of Coke museum and a visit to the company's legendary archives. It was a friendly, not heavy-handed approach…Coke's actions in sharing the page are indicative of not only the lessons the beverage giant has learned in the social-media space but also proof that big brands can tread gracefully in social media…”

3. Chemistry on the web: Molecool http://blahbleh.com/molecools.php?name=ethanol http://www.molekult.no/euro/index.html

4. Six Lessons Learned from Domain Pigeon’s First Six Weeks http://tinyurl.com/crlpz3 (MattMazur) “…On January 29th I launched Domain Pigeon, a web site to help people find available domain names. The site lets visitors browse thousands of available .com domain names which they can register for their websites. It’s been more than six weeks since the initial launch and I wanted to do a recap of how things have been going as well as write about some of the lessons I’ve learned from the experience…Domain Pigeon was born out of a desire to learn something new and to prepare me for a startup one day. It’s a nights and weekends project that was never supposed to turn into anything serious…”

5. 100 Fabulous Social Networks and Communities for Lifelong Learners http://tinyurl.com/crpllw (RatedColleges) “…Whether you’re heading back to school after years in the working world or just like to learn about new topics in your spare time, being able to find support, information and an active community of like minded individuals can be essential to your learning success. Fortunately, the Internet makes it easier than ever to connect with others who are in the same boat as you and allows you to communicate quickly and easily with people from all over the world. Here are 100 that we’ve collected that you can use to get in touch and find new learning opportunities…”

6. Facebook Privacy Changes: Brave New, Twitter-Like, World http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/03/facebook-privac.html “…Facebook is developing a serious case of Twitter envy. It’s not hard to see how the popularity of Twitter is influencing Facebook’s attempts to remold itself and adapt to the web’s changing social network landscape. Back when Facebook was first expanding beyond the collegiate market, most people wanted to share thing with select friends, few, if any, would have wanted a way to broadcast their lives to the world — who would do such a thing? Then, along came Twitter, and as it turns out, millions of people would do such a thing…”

7. Twine Could Soon Surpass Delicious http://tinyurl.com/cmtryf (ReadWriteWeb) “…Nova Spivack's semantic web company Twine is developing a free service to write and host semantic ontologies; the classification trees that enable machines to put concepts in topical context. Ready to play Aristotle and create an ontology of cheese, model airplanes, global anti-hunger organizations or any other topic?...Twine's public product lets people bookmark items like web pages and videos into topical collections. The service then analyzes the contents of all the bookmarks to identify the key concepts, people, places and other information automatically. It's like tagging in Delicious but automated…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

8. Amazon Uses DMCA To Try To Block Other Ebooks From Kindle http://techdirt.com/articles/20090312/1821234104.shtml “…Amazon has sent a DMCA takedown notice to MobileRead, concerning a link that site had to a small piece of software that would allow ebooks purchased elsewhere (other than Amazon) to work on the Kindle. There are a number of issues here, all of which seem troubling…MobileRead never hosted the software in question, but merely had links to the tool and some instructions. Such a takedown is only supposed to be used for sites that actually have the infringing material…it's not at all clear how this script violates the DMCA. It doesn't remove copy protection at all. It just serves to open up the device for other eBooks to be used on the device. All too often we've been seeing the DMCA used in cases like this, where companies are treating the DMCA's anti-circumvention clauses to mean that they can stop just about any script they don't like from being available…the script was useful for allowing legally obtained ebooks from other stores to be read on the device…”

9. JPEGSnoop Sniffs Out Signs of Editing http://lifehacker.com/5169143/jpegsnoop-sniffs-out-signs-of-editing “…JPEGSnoop is a small and portable application that sleuths through images determine if the image has been altered or edited. JPEGSnoop starts by reading a JPEG/JPG file's EXIF data to give you a wealth of information about the photo…Then it compares the compression patterns in the image against the patterns of known image editing applications…if you're not interested in the fine details, you can scroll to the bottom of the report for a simple assessment, such as "Class 1 - Image is processed/edited" or "Class 3 - Image has high probability of being original". I took an original image straight off my camera and ran it through JPEGSnoop, and it returned all the EXIF data and an evaluation that it was highly probable that the image had been unaltered. I then threw the image in Photoshop and made a small alteration, taking a few seconds to add fake "steam" to the latte. JPEGSnoop changed the assessment to indicate the image had been processed and reported the fix was made in Adobe Photoshop…”

10. Is Your PC Part of a Botnet? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_your_pc_part_of_a_botnet.php “…According to a report today from The Associated Press, Internet security company Prevx recently discovered a Web site that was being used as a storage facility for data stolen from 160K infected computers, and the discovery offers an interesting case study…One Southern California 22-year-old could be seen registering a domain name with GoDaddy.com, changing his Yahoo e-mail password and ordering a meal online from Pizza Hut. His credit card number, birth date, telephone number, address and passwords are now all in criminals' hands, though it's unclear what, if anything, criminals have done with the information yet," the AP notes…So how can you tell if you're machine is part of a botnet and what can you do about it?…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

11. AT&T Fails The SXSW iPhone Test http://www.businessinsider.com/att-fails-the-sxsw-iphone-test-2009-3 “…South by Southwest is one of the biggest annual geek shows, so naturally there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of iPhones roaming around downtown Austin. Good luck making calls or receiving text messages, especially anywhere near the convention center. As this Twitter search feed illustrates, many people are frustrated with the lousy mobile service AT&T (T) is providing…”

12. [in 2007] 15% U.S. households utilizing a cellphone only http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/41708/113/ “…A new study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and sponsored by the center's National Center for Health Statistics, indicates that almost 15 percent of U.S. households have abandoned their home phone service in favor of wireless service only -- leaving people with no landlines as backup, according to Reuters. The study estimates that around 14.7 percent of American households communicate only via their cell phone. Oklahoma has the highest percentage…of households in which only cell service is utilized, 26.2 percent of households were reported to be using cellphones rather than landlines in 2007…”

Open Source

13. SourceForge adds support for new version control systems http://tinyurl.com/ahcrwg (ars technica) “…Although SourceForge was once the dominant collaboration service for open source software, its relevance declined sharply over the past few years as it stagnated and lost ground to emerging competitors. The trend towards distributed version control systems (DVCS) looked like it would be the final nail in the coffin, but now SourceForge is preparing to make a major comeback. The Web service has gained support for Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar, the three most popular distributed version control systems…DVCS is a major technical advancement in the area of source code management. The approach offers developers an unprecedented level of power and flexibility. The three major DVCS systems have all been used to build robust project management and code hosting services—such as GitHub, Launchpad, and BitBucket—which are rapidly displacing SourceForge. Here at Ars, our Web ninjas use GitHub extensively for managing the source code that powers our website. I personally use Launchpad for several of my own projects…”

14. Interview with FFmpeg developers http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ffmpeg_05_interview&num=1 “…What is next for FFmpeg?...Will there be a 1.0 release in the foreseeable future? To answer these questions plus others, I spoke with three of the main FFmpeg developers about this very popular -- and important -- open-source multimedia project. The three developers that shared their thoughts were Diego Biurrun, Baptiste Coudurier, and Robert Swain…Diego was the one that stepped up to the plate and took over the release manager position for version 0.5. Baptiste discovered FFmpeg three years ago and after realizing it was "the Swiss knife of multimedia on Linux," he began fixing random bugs…”

15. French police: we saved millions of euros by adopting Ubuntu http://tinyurl.com/dneja3 (ars technica) “…France's Gendarmerie Nationale, the country's national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution. The Gendarmerie began its transition to open source software in 2005 when it replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org across the entire organization. It gradually adopted other open source software applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird. After the launch of Windows Vista in 2006, it decided to phase out Windows and incrementally migrate to Ubuntu…”

16. Linux gains social networking hub http://www.itwire.com/content/view/23837/1141/ “The Linux Foundation has taken over hosting and content for the linux.com domain from SourceForge Inc with the aim of producing a dynamic web 2.0 site that is high on collaboration and utility. Potential ideas touted so far include a Linux AppStore, Digg-like news aggregation and location-based support. linux.com now sports a fresh new home page, advertising the Linux Foundation stewardship…The Linux Foundation stated their goal to transform the site in months ahead from being solely news related to community-driven, with the real content and conversation coming from the Linux community itself.…”

SkyNet

17. One number to rule them all: Google Voice (GrandCentral 2.0) http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10194446-2.html “…Google plans to unveil a service called Google Voice on Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone communications what companies such as Yahoo have done with e-mail. Google Voice, the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google acquired in July 2007, has the potential to make the search giant a middleman in an important part of people's lives, telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual phones a person uses and handle voice mail. The old version could let people centralize telephone services, screen their calls, and listen to voice mail over the Web…Google now uses its speech-to-text technology to transcribe voice mail, making it possible to search for particular words. Gmail's contacts now is used to instruct Google Voice how to treat various callers. And Google Voice now can send and receive SMS text messages and set up conference calls. Existing GrandCentral users should get the option to upgrade Thursday, and Google plans to offer it to the public after "a number of weeks…” [ http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?answer=141993]

18. Google OS is Coming By Year's End http://tinyurl.com/cjoa4d (CIO) “…Google will have its own contender for desktop operating system king: Android. What would a Linux-based phone operating system be doing on the desktop? Running it, perhaps…Krzykowski and Hartmann decided to see if they could get Android to work on a netbook. It took them about four hours to compile Android for an Asus' Eee PC 1000H…we got the netbook fully up and running on it, with nearly all of the necessary hardware you'd want -- including graphics, sound and wireless card for Internet." In other words, Android is already a desktop operating system…that doesn't mean anyone is actually going to build and sell Android-powered computers, does it? Yes, that's exactly what it means…”

19. Google Targets Users With Behavior-Based Ads http://www.crn.com/security/215801961 “…Google on Wednesday will officially take its controversial behavioral advertising into beta testing. The technology will base targeted ads on users' online interests and activities.The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced Wednesday that it will begin offering ads on YouTube and on its partner AdSense sites using what it terms "interest-based advertising," which tracks users' online behavior and displays ads based on the sites they have visited in the past…to make its beta testing more palatable, Google created a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets the user view, delete or add interest categories associated with the browser, ostensibly so they can receive more ads that are of interest. Google also emphasized that users have the choice to view, manage and opt out of advertising cookies, and can save an opt-out function permanently to their browser settings…”

20. Expedia shares gain on Google takeover talk http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE52G4EQ20090317 “…Shares of online travel agency Expedia Inc gained 5.18 percent to $7.71 on Tuesday on talk that the company might be a takeover target for Google Inc…”

General Technology

21. Poken: Tiny RFID thingies that share all your personal data with others http://tinyurl.com/cldzes (CrunchGear) “…Poken is a tiny USB key with an embedded RFID reader/transmitter. When you press a little button on the dongle and place it next to another Poken it passes all of your pertinent information to between Pokens - Pokenii? You then plug the Poken into a laptop and connect to your online manager and you can then “add” that person to your contact list…There is a great audience for these little guys - kids. They’re collectible, they’re high tech, and they only transmit information when you press the button, ensuring relative privacy. I could also see this appearing in phones…”

22. Charge lithium batteries in <> http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090311/full/news.2009.156.html#B1 “…Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have found a way to get a common lithium compound to release and take up lithium ions in a matter of seconds. The compound, which is already used in the electrodes of some commercial lithium-ion batteries, might lead to laptop batteries capable of charging themselves in about a minute…”

23. HP Adds B-P Battery Tech to Most Consumer Laptops http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343113,00.asp “Boston-Power's agreement with Hewlett-Packard has borne fruit, as the top PC supplier agreed to sell B-P's three-year Sonata lithium-ion batteries in conjunction with 70 percent of its consumer notebook PC line…HP said in December that it will sell the Sonata technology as the "HP Enviro Series," and it will be priced at just $20 to $30 over its other batteries…The "HP Enviro Series" label capitalizes on the fact that HP will guarantee the battery will last for three years…”

Leisure & Entertainment

24. Will XP Support Deadline Spur Vista Upgrades? http://www.crn.com/software/215900273 “…April 14 is when Microsoft will stop offering what it calls mainstream support for XP, which includes free security updates and bug fixes for those running retail versions of the eight-year-old operating system. After that date, XP users will have to pay for support on a per-incident basis for bug fixes, although Microsoft will still deliver XP security updates for free until 2014…Even though we're retiring Windows XP, we won't leave you hanging," the company says in a Web site called "Windows XP: The Facts About The Future…”

25. Talking iPod Shuffle unveiled http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE52A3HF20090312 “…Apple introduced a smaller version of its popular iPod Shuffle music player on Wednesday with a new feature that tells the user what song is playing. The new 4-gigabyte gadget costs $79, is half the size of the previous Shuffle, and carries up to 1,000 songs -- twice as many as the last generation of the device…”

26. Pangea Not Making Any More Mac Games http://tinyurl.com/aljyda (Business Insider) “Pangea Software has been making software for Apple's (AAPL) computer platforms since 1987. No more. Why not? Because the iPhone app store has been such a huge success, the company is only going to focus its efforts on Apple's portable gadgets from now on…”

Economy and Technology

27. TDS under pressure to find big telecom buyer http://www.reuters.com/article/innovationNews/idUSTRE52A5KS20090311 “U.S. regional phone company Telephone & Data Systems Inc (TDS.N) could face pressure to sell itself to bigger rivals, which have been eroding the company's market share and outpacing it technologically. TDS, which owns 81 percent of U.S. Cellular Corp (USM.N), the country's fifth-largest wireless operator, has grappled in recent months with investor dissent over what strategy it should follow…TDS is one of the last regional carriers standing…”

28. Parrot Secrets http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/parrot-secrets/ “…that doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate Internet businesses that can be started on a shoestring. So to do my part for the economy I’m going to offer-up what I have always considered to be the cleverest little Internet business of all: www.parrotsecrets.com...there is plenty of opportunity to replicate this model…here’s the literal bottom line on Parrotsecrets. The site sells 15-20 eBook sets per day seven days per week. Using the low end of that range is 5,475 copies per year for gross sales of $437,726.25 from a web site that costs less than $10 per month. The profit on Parrotsecrets, even after various expenses I’ll detail below, is WAY north of $400,000 per year…The thing I love the most about Parrotsecrets is not the great money but that it actually serves a need. People really do have problems with their parrots and there isn’t that much information out there about how to train and care for parrots that is in an easily accessible form…The first thing that’s remarkable about Parrotsecrets is how it came about. The owner of Parrotsecrets, for one thing, doesn’t even own a parrot. Rather, the owner set out to find a niche in the information economy that could be filled with eBooks as sold here. The first step in the development of Parrotsecrets, then, was to identify the frustration of Parrot owners…”

29. Weary of looking for work, some create their own http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-ups/14startup.html “…Plenty of other laid-off workers across the country, burned out by a merciless job market, are building business plans instead of sending out résumés. For these people, recession has become the mother of invention. Economists say that when the economy takes a dive, it is common for people to turn to their inner entrepreneur to try to make their own work. But they say that it takes months for that mentality to sink in, and that this is about the time in the economic cycle when it really starts to happen — when the formerly employed realize that traditional job searches are not working, and that they are running out of time and money…If there is a silver lining, the large-scale downsizing from major companies will release a lot of new entrepreneurial talent and ideas — scientists, engineers, business folks now looking to do other things,” Mr. Cannice said. “It’s a Darwinian unleashing of talent into the entrepreneurial ecosystem…”

30. m-commerce: Daily use of the mobile web is soaring http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=29783 “…Overseas, in many European and Asian countries, accessing the Internet via smartphones and other mobile devices is commonplace. More Japanese, for example, access the web via mobile devices than via PCs…The number of people using their mobile devices to access the Internet more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009, comScore reports. Among the 63.2 million [US] people who accessed the web on their mobile devices during the month of January 2009, 22.4 million, or 35%, did so daily—an increase of 107% over 10.8 million in January 2008 …”

Civilian Aerospace

31. SpaceShipTwo mothership test flights http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090313-whiteknighttwo-flight-tests.html “…The skies over California's Mojave Air and Space Port are serving as the proving ground for the WhiteKnightTwo, the massive mothership being tested to air-launch commercial spaceliners on suborbital flights. A third test flight of the huge carrier craft - which looks like a giant catamaran for the sky - is deemed as "imminent…We now have just under four hours flying on WhiteKnightTwo and have now gone above 18,000 feet," Whitehorn said…The up-and-coming next test flight is set to raise the bar in altitude and flight-duration of the vehicle…”

32. Debris just missed space station http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/090312-space-station-debris.html “…Astronauts aboard the International Space Station took refuge inside their Russian-built Soyuz lifeboat Thursday when a potentially life-threatening piece of space debris zipped too close to their orbiting laboratory. The three astronauts, two Americans and one Russian, moved into the station's attached Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft…as a safety precaution in case the debris - a small piece of a spent satellite motor - slammed into the orbiting lab and ripped a hole in its outer hull…Notice of the incoming debris came overnight, too late for flight controllers to plan a maneuver to fire the station's thrusters and put more space between it and the space trash, NASA officials said. But the debris apparently did not impact the $100 billion orbiting lab…”

33. British Space Plane Concept Gets Boost http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090311-tw-space-plane.html “…The European Space Agency and British government have awarded $1 million euros ($1.28 million dollars) to Reaction Engines Limited (REL), a British aerospace company, as part of a multi-million dollar development program for an air-breathing rocket engine that could power the Skylon spaceplane. The unpiloted, reusable vehicle is designed to take off from an airstrip, deliver cargo into orbit and return to the same runway…”

34. Orbiter: space flight simulator http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ “ORBITER is a free flight simulator that goes beyond the confines of Earth's atmosphere. Launch the Space Shuttle from Kennedy Space Center to deploy a satellite, rendezvous with the International Space Station or take the futuristic Delta-glider for a tour through the solar system - the choice is yours. But make no mistake - ORBITER is not a space shooter. The emphasis is firmly on realism, and the learning curve can be steep. Be prepared to invest some time and effort to brush up on your orbital mechanics background…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

35. FSC Adds Tesla to CELSIUS Workstations http://tinyurl.com/at9ka4 (Softpedia) “Fujitsu Siemens Computers has just announced that its line of CELSIUS workstation computer systems will now boast NVIDIA's Tesla technology in both current and future mid- and high-end products. According to Fujitsu, the use of NVIDIA's Tesla technology will provide its customers with more efficient and higher-performance computer systems that can deliver the equivalent computing power of a cluster at 1/100th of the price. The Tesla-enabled CELSIUS workstations will provide the performance of a supercomputer in the form factor of a standard desktop workstation…”

36. Accelerating Life Science and Bioinformatics Applications http://tinyurl.com/c7j6ty (HPCwire) “…general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) and Cell co-processors have proven themselves effective in analyzing molecular mechanical codes and in image analysis. These co-processors are attractive options for accelerating floating-point-intensive applications resulting in orders of magnitude performance increases for mathematical computations. The rising adoption is occurring because GPGPUs and Cell co-processors are now capable of performing in applications beyond their original design purposes in graphics and gaming…In life sciences, there are many molecular mechanical codes used for visualizing molecular docking and solving atom-to-atom interactions for drug discovery. GPGPUs have shown proof to accelerated codes like NAMD (NAnoscale Molecular Dynamics), VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics), and CHARMM (Chemistry at Harvard Macromolecular Mechanics). Cell has been proven to effectively accelerate codes like GROMACS (GROningen Machine for Chemical Simulations), a protein folding code that unlocks the mystery of protein assembly and its relationship to cancers, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. These, and similar codes benefit from a hybrid mix of CPU and floating-point acceleration…”

37. Wall Street Accelerates Options Analysis With GPU Technology http://tinyurl.com/b5sdvq (WallStreetAndTech) “…Because of the skyrocketing amount of data and the complexity of options calculations, derivatives pricing is hitting a wall in terms of processing power…In addition to latency concerns, the required power consumption and server rack prices are straining Wall Street data centers, he adds…Wall Street firms and third-party software developers in the options and derivatives space are turning to graphics processing units, or GPUs, from NVIDIA, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker that gained prominence for its support of 3-D graphics in video games. While NVIDIA's GeForce graphics cards are ubiquitous in the consumer and entertainment computing markets, the company's Tesla professional workstations, which feature hundreds of processor cores to support parallel processing, have gained momentum in the high-performance computing market, finding their way into molecular dynamics, neuron simulation, MRI processing and atmospheric cloud simulation, as well as derivatives pricing and Monte Carlo simulations…”

38. Penguin Offers Tesla GPU-Based Clusters http://tinyurl.com/cyojc6 (HPCwire) “…Penguin is now offering an Altus 1702 fully-integrated cluster with…four NVIDIA Tesla S1070 GPU Computing Systems, Gigabit Ethernet and Penguin's Scyld management software for $44,985…This system provides over 16 teraflops of compute power in a 9U rack configuration…Each Tesla S1070 1U GPU Computing System has four Tesla T10 GPUs, each delivering almost one teraflop of single precision and 80 gigaflops of double precision performance…”

39. AMD ATI Stream SDK v1.4 http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Updates-ATI-Stream-SDK-with-v1-4-106680.shtml “…AMD has just announced the introduction of the latest version of their ATI Stream SDK, a technology that combines both hardware and software to leverage the performance capabilities of the company's graphics processing units to accelerate compute-intensive applications. The ATI Stream technology is AMD's response to NVIDIA's CUDA, enabling programmers and software developers to use the computer's GPU to improve the performance of their applications. There are several significant improvements delivered by AMD's ATI Stream SDK v1.4…AMD will enable software developers to take advantage of the enhancements to Brook+, which supports multiple GPUs, finely grained data handling, DirectX interoperability and access to thread-level data sharing…ATI Stream SDK v1.4 now provides support for AMD's dual-GPU 55nm-based graphics cards, the Radeon HD 3870X2 and the more recent HD 4870X2…”