Monday, June 16, 2008
Those Crazy Americans
Apparently a supercomputer built for the US government has performed the first petaflop in history. So what's crazy about that? Well the computer is called Roadrunner. It seems whatever they do, they have to include some form of cultural evangelism. I mean ok, call it something that's fast and ok, american too, 'cos that's where its made. But why name it after a cartoon character? A bad and boring one at that. (and I'll bet that to most people in the world it IS a cartoon character, not an example of the local fauna in new mexico). They should have just gone all the way and called it Speedy Gonzales, but then they couldn't have gotten out of paying royalties to warner bros. (Which is also why if one was built in Hobart, it wouldn't be called Tassie Devil) To be fair, it's quite likely however, that whoever named it was NOT thinking about the rest of the world at the time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
If they'd named it something highbrow, like a Shakespeare reference or something Greek, most non-tech people probably wouldn't get what it was all about. Plus, a pop-culture reference is so much sexier for newspapers to sell.
What name would you have chosen?
I would have called it eg:VFC080616 (Very Fast Computer & date it was first turned on)
Post a Comment