Wired

Wired may refer to:

Art, entertainment, and media

Fictional entities

Film

Music

Albums

Songs

Publications and internet

Wired (book)

Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, is a 1984 non-fiction book by American journalist Bob Woodward about the American actor and comedian John Belushi. The hardcover edition includes sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, front and back.

Details

Many friends and relatives of Belushi, including his widow Judith Belushi Pisano, Dan Aykroyd and James Belushi, agreed to be interviewed at length for the book, but later felt the final product was exploitative and not representative of the John Belushi they knew. Pisano wrote her own book, Samurai Widow (1990) to counter the image of Belushi portrayed in Wired. In 2013 Tanner Colby, who had co-authored the 2005 book Belushi: A Biography with Pisano, wrote about how Wired exposes Woodward's strengths and weaknesses as a journalist. While in the process of researching the anecdotes related in the book, he found that while many of them were true, Woodward missed, or didn't seek out, their meaning or context.

For example, in Woodward's telling, a "lazy and undisciplined" Belushi is guided through the scene on the cafeteria line in Animal House by director John Landis, yet other actors present for that scene recall how much of it was improvised by the actor in one single take. Blair Brown told Colby she was still angry about how Woodward "tricked" her in describing her and Belushi preparing for a love scene in Continental Divide. Colby notes that Woodward devotes a single paragraph to Belushi's grandmother's funeral, where he hit a low point and resolved to get clean for that film, while diligently documenting every instance of drug abuse he turned up. "It's like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn't very good at playing basketball," he concluded.

Wired (website)

The Wired website, formerly known as Wired News or HotWired, is an online technology news website launched in 1992 that split off from Wired magazine when the magazine was purchased by Condé Nast Publishing in the 1990s. Wired News was owned by Lycos not long after the split, until Condé Nast purchased Wired News on July 11, 2006. Competition from sites like the Drudge Report and The Political Simpleton slightly decreased after the 2006 purchase, due to the increase in advertising revenue.

Website

Wired.com hosts several technology blogs on topics in transportation, security, business, new products, video games, the "GeekDad" blog on toys, creating websites, cameras, culture and science.

It also publishes the Vaporware Awards.

Wired Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of the Year

Kraken

The Kraken (/ˈkreɪkən/ or /ˈkrɑːkən/) is a legendary sea monster of giant size that is said to dwell off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. A number of authors over the years have postulated that the legend originated from sightings of giant squids that may grow to 12-15 meters (40-50 feet) in length, despite the fact that the creature in the original tales was not described as having tentacles and more closely resembled a whale or crab. The sheer size and fearsome appearance attributed to the kraken have made it a common ocean-dwelling monster in various fictional works.

Etymology

The English word kraken is taken from Norwegian. In Norwegian and Swedish, Kraken is the definite form of krake, a word designating an unhealthy animal or something twisted (cognate with the English crook and crank). In modern German, Krake (plural and declined singular: Kraken) means octopus, but can also refer to the legendary kraken.

History

In the late-13th-century version of the Old Icelandic saga Örvar-Oddr is an inserted episode of a journey bound for Helluland (Baffin Island) which takes the protagonists through the Greenland Sea, and here they spot two massive sea-monsters called Hafgufa ("sea mist") and Lyngbakr ("heather-back"). The hafgufa is believed to be a reference to the kraken:

Browser speed test

A browser speed test is a computer benchmark that scores the performance of a web browser, by measuring the browser's efficiency in completing a predefined list of tasks. In general the testing software is available online, located on a website, where different algorithms are loaded and performed in the browser client. Typical test tasks are rendering and animation, DOM transformations, string operations, mathematical calculations, sorting algorithms, graphic performance tests and memory instructions. Browser speed tests have been used during browser wars to prove superiority of specific web browsers. The popular Acid3 test is no particular speed test but checks browser conformity to web standards (though it checks whether a general performance goal is met or not).

General tests

Peacekeeper

Online speed test by Futuremark, mainly using rendering, mathematical and memory operations. Takes approx. 5 minutes for execution and tells results of other browsers with different CPUs. Does not respect operating system.

Kraken (supercomputer)

Kraken was a Cray XT5 supercomputer that entered into full production mode on February 2, 2009. Kraken was operated by the University of Tennessee and was the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia at the time. It was housed in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kraken was decommissioned on April 30, 2014.

History

Kraken's history began in 1991 with the establishment of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS), a joint venture between the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The JICS facility, the UT campus building in which JICS is housed, is one of the only state-owned buildings ever built on the campus of a national laboratory. The main goals of JICS are to create new ways to simulate and model data using supercomputers and to train future engineers and scientists on the use of these techniques.

The next major event in the establishment of Kraken occurred in the Spring of 2008 when the National Science Foundation awarded the University of Tennessee a $65 million grant to build and operate a supercomputer in order to aid public research in academia; the grant provided $30 million for the hardware and $35 million for the operation of the system. The supercomputer was housed at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and managed by the University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS).