supercomputer

any of a class of extremely powerful computers. The term is commonly applied to the fastest high-performance systems available at any given time. [...]

Moore's law

[...] Moore may be best known for a rather simple observation. In 1965, for a special issue of the journal Electronics, Moore was asked to predict developments over the next decade. In reviewing past increases in the number of transistors per silicon chip, Moore formulated what became known as Moore's law: The number of transistors per silicon chip doubles each year. In 1975, as the rate of growth began to slow, Moore revised his time frame to two years. His revised law was a bit pessimistic; over roughly 40 years from 1961, the number of transistors doubled approximately every 18 months. Magazines regularly referred to Moore's law as though it were inexorable - a technological law with the assurance of Newton's laws of motion. Only time will tell if Moore's law will be repealed.

Now I have EB installed on my PowerBook. The application is written in Java, so the user interface was not like Mac OS X. (But as a benefit EB runs also on Windows.) The articles are long and factual, and there is suprisingly few illustrations. And the maps don't go into much detail. But the text is well researched and written, which makes this a nice reference.

I installed EB on the hard disk of the PowerBook, which took 2.4 GB of disk space. But now I don't have to carry the DVD with the portable.