Virginia Tech G5 cluster named third most powerful

The Virginia Tech supercomputer -- composed of 1100 Apple Power Mac G5 computers -- is ranked third on a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers. Japan's Earth Simulator and the Los Alamos National Laboratory's supercomputer are the only clusters to outperform the Virginia Tech system. The Virginia Tech cluster has a peak theoretical output of 17600 gigaflops.

ROUTE 66 Route USA 2004 now available for Mac OS X

ROUTE 66 Route USA 2004 is now available for the Mac, according to one MacNN reader: "ROUTE 66 Route USA 2004 is more than just a route planner for planning all your business and private journeys efficiently. Besides containing more than 6,500,000 streets in the US & Canada, ROUTE 66 contains no less than 4,000,000 Points of Interest in over 60 categories like hotels, restaurants and petrol stations, most of which together with their addresses and telephone numbers. What is more, ROUTE 66 also provides support for GPS, enabling you to establish your exact location using satellite navigation and ensuring that you will never lose your way again." The $40 software is available for Mac OS X 10.1 or later.

Lyric Media launches motion tracking for Final Cut Pro

Lyric Media has released a new kit of motion tracking and image stabilization plugins for Apple's Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express video editing systems. The Motion Tracking plugin kit uses a sub-pixel feature tracking engine that supports frame-by-frame correction and track smoothing. The kit includes plugins for sub-pixel image stabilization, pinning clips to moving features within other clips, automatically-tracked "cop show" feature blurring, and 4-point corner pinning for attaching signs, etc. to moving objects and buildings with automatic perspective correction. It is available for $50. [791KB]