Tag: god

Church forced to buy thousands of dollars worth of iPhones

apple-disney-dreams-snow-white-Favim.com-142405A US church is scratching its head after it was charged for thousands dollars of iPhones , that it never bought.

It seems that God works in mysterious ways and is dropping the hint that the old religion is past, and Christians everywhere should be worshipping shiny consumer toys with an Apple on them.

A mysterious person used the Fountain of Life’s name to buy more than a thousand dollars worth of iPhones.

A man first tried to buy iPhones in the church’s name at Verizon, but was sent forth into outer darkness by the Apple staff who suspected he was not telling the truth. However when the man came back Apple staff realised he was a true believer and the buy  went through.

The Fountain of Life’s pastor, Preson Pitchford ,was shocked that someone would use the church’s good name to get the tools of a rival consumer based religion like that.

Wells was in her office at the church on the day of reckoning when she received the bill from AT&T.

The bill charged the church for 17 iPhones, all bought on separate days with different phone numbers.

“That just amazes me that somebody could get away with it not just once, not just twice, but multiple times,” Pitchford said. “We don’t use iPhones here at the church. We don’t even use AT&T.”

The suspect used the church’s address and a fake federal tax ID number. Police are still working to figure out if the phones were bought from a store or online.

Pitchford fears it could happen to another church.

“This guy is polished,” Pitchford said. “He’s done it before, and he will do it again.”

AT&T told church members they won’t have to pay the money, that it will be taken care of by the company’s fraud department.

Laser inventor dies

r6uhkgtsix9vtvl3pjd4The boffin who laid the foundations for the development of the laser has died. Charles Townes was 99.

Townes who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1964 is  best known as the “inventor” of the laser but he was also a pioneer in the field of infrared astronomy and was the first to discover water in space.

He first built a maser in the mid-1950s, which used microwave amplification rather than light.

At the time Gordon Gould at ARPA and Ted Maiman at Hughes Labs were working on similar research in the late 1950s. I Maiman who built a practical laser in 1960, but he used the published research of Townes.

Townes shared his 1964 Nobel Prize with Russian scientists N. G. Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov because they were also working on the laser in the Soviet Union concurrently and independently of Townes.

Later in his life, he became famous for suggesting that one-day science and religion would one day merge, revealing the secrets of creation.

The committed Christian told some Harvard students: “I look at science and religion as quite parallel, much more similar than most people think and that in the long run, they must converge. It’s a fantastically specialized universe, but how in the world did it happen?”

He was honoured in 2005 with the Templeton Prize for contributions to “affirming life’s spiritual dimension.”

Townes never really stopped working and would show up at Berkeley until he became unwell last year.

He did live long enough for his laser to be turned into the sci-fi weapon that it was touted to be in the 1960s, although not long enough to see them strapped to sharks.

Applied Micro Circuits frightens Intel

godApplied Micro Circuits has begun shipping a new kind of low-power server chip that might cause its rival Intel a headache in the data centre business.

Applied Micro Circuits announced it is shipping its new X-Gene “microserver” 64-bit chips, made with ARM designs. X-Gene is being touted as a Server-on-a-Chip which combines 10/40g mixed signal I/O with top-of-class, ARMv8 64-bit cores running at up to 2.4 Ghz, with an enterprise-class memory subsystem.

The company said that it has already made a million dollars from the chips and expects “meaningful” revenue from the chips in the quarters ending in December and March as shipments build.

Chief Executive Officer Paramesh Gopi told analysts on a conference call that there was a backlog for X-Gene, both in the September quarter and December quarter, as well as the March quarter.

Microservers have yet to be meaningfully adopted, but the belief is that data centres can be made more cost effective and energy efficient by using them.

Chipzilla will lose shedloads if the server market moves towards such technology and cannot lose even a few percentage points of market share.

Intel spokesman Bill Calder said that while Intel was not taking the competition lightly, he thought that the much-hyped threat of ARM servers getting any significant market segment share any time soon has been vastly overplayed.

Microservers will probably end up in data centres run by major Internet companies and for use in high-performance computing.

Intel executives in the past have said microserver chips being developed by Applied Micro Circuits, Advanced Micro Devices and other small rivals were unproven and not a serious threat to its server chip business.

In the past couple of years, Intel has launched its own low-power chips, designed with its own architecture, in anticipation of a potential move toward microservers.