The concept of a tightly knit, interconnected world — one where an individual’s connection with another is within six degrees of separation — has been around for nearly half a century. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram published his findings in 1967, and has been a standby of sociology and pop culture alike ever since.

It comes as little surprise, then, that the rise of social networks over the past decade has brought us even closer together. Facebook released two studies of its social graph on Tuesday, which conclude that we Facebookers are closer to one another than we thought.

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HP says that its Integrity servers will ship with Xeon processors (Photo: HP)

HP has announced that its “mission critical” Integrity servers will eventually ship with ordinary x86 chips that run Linux and Windows — not just the ill-fated Itanium processor that runs the company’s old-school UNIX operating system, HP-UX.

On Tuesday, HP said it was going to start porting some of that HP-UX software to Windows and Linux, making them more Unix-like. It will also build new Xeon x86 rack-mounted servers and blade servers that will slide in next to the Itanium servers inside the server’s chassis. The c...