What Would You Do With a Bargain Basement Supercomputer? While Microsoft continually seeks out new markets and new competitors to conquer (old Star Trek riff), they have set their sights on the supercomputing market with a “low-cost” solution for small companies. If you have a spare $50K laying around for the software alone, MS says you can get your own cluster of servers acting like a supercomputer.

Why would law or professional services firms want a supercomputer? Conceptual searching and relationship analysis for litigation support, for one. What would you use a supercomputer for?

Collaborating on the Web? Read the Fine Print. Between Lawyers has a post and comments on using online web services like conferencing or data storage. The issues include possible data breaches like when GMail was hacked and having a third party between lawyer and client.

Blame Tech Problems on the Planet Mercury: Here is a little chuckle for a Friday. Currently, the planet Mercury is in retrograde, an optical illusion that makes it look like the planet has reversed direction in the sky. For astrologers, this is a bad time of year as accidents happen, things go pear-shaped. So when Yahoo! Messenger went down on Wednesday, the culprit was not bad code or human error, but the zigzagging planet.