Wired asked the folks at the Ig Nobel awards to draw up a list of the century’s most spectacular failures. The most interesting one is Mariner 1: a single punctuation mistake in a single line of code caused the beast to miss Venus and end up in the Atlantic Ocean.

Rumors continue to fly hot and heavy on the internet about what the recovered Apple will announce later this week at MacWorld. The re-introduction of dual-processor boxes, the advent of a smaller lighter powerbook and another tweaking of the company’s logo and image seem likely. What slips under the radar is the coming wave of third-party PPC motherboards. They won’t run the Mac OS –for now– but they will run other OSes, such as LinuxPPC. IBM’s reference board is coming soon. If you want to generate some serious heat, the Synergy Quad G4 board seems a good candidate. YIkes.