Free Republic

Robert Charette // Fri, August 07, 2009 The London Daily Mail published a long, interesting and disturbing story yesterday about the ease with which security experts were able to hack the supposedly "unforgeable" new UK ID card for foreign nationals and change the data within the embedded microchip within minutes. Given that the hacked ID card uses the same technology as is to be used in National ID cards for UK residents in the next few years, the implications are obvious. The Daily Mail says that when the UK government was told of its findings, the government dismissed them, saying,...

IBM plans to announce on Tuesday that it will supply the world's fastest supercomputer to the U.S. Department of Energy in the next few years, according to numerous reports. Not only will the machine, called Sequoia, be the fastest supercomputer to date, it will blow the current record-holder out of the water. IBM's Roadrunner, located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, was the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (a petaflop is equal to a quadrillion calculations per second; the "flops" stands for floating point operations per second). But only seven months after the Roadrunner took...

Terascale still moving forward With our time at IDF quickly drawing to a close, we are in the final stretch of content from the show.  While I didn’t get to the keynotes on the morning on mobility, we have the general basis of their contents here as well as some other interesting topics like terascale processors and Intel’s upcoming Extreme .Terascale Computing UpdateLast year at IDF Intel first started to demonstrate and discuss their terascale computing research project that featured a that was a dramatic shift from anything Intel had done in the past.  The was built out of 80...

The ongoing tussle between Intel and AMD has dominated the news in recent weeks, but there's another potential battleground shaping up for Intel that could have a huge impact on personal computing. A major topic I want to cover over the next several months is the looming showdown as the smart phone industry tries to develop more powerful computers, and the PC industry tries to build smaller and smaller computers. This week has provided a decent glimpse of Intel's vision of where it thinks the industry needs to go with its Silverthorne processor, designed for a new concept of computer...

GRID.ORG said it's finished gridding and stopped doing research on critical health research. It doesn't say why it's boldly stopped gridding apart from saying it's completed its mission to boldly demonstrate the benefits of large scale Internet based grid computing. It suggests how to uninstall your grid agent, here. One reader said: "I had 10 years & 28 days of accumulated participation since February 2002 beginning with a K6-2-450MHz and ending with a dual Xeon 3.6 GHz XP-Pro rig." Surely there's more that can be done?

Twenty years before most scientists expected it, a commercial company has announceda quantum computer that promises to massively speed up searches and optimisation calculations. D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, that can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel "universes"), thanks to a new technique which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach. D-Wave is the world's only "commercial" quantum computing company, backed by more than $20 million of venture capital (there are more commercial ventures in the related field of quantum cryptography). Its...

An individual "dopant" atom has been spied interfering with the flow of electrons through a silicon transistor for the first time. Researchers say the feat could help scientists squeeze more power out of conventional computers and ultimately develop silicon-based quantum computers. Dopants are chemical impurities that affect the flow of electrons through a conducting or semiconducting material. They are deliberately added to pure silicon, for example, to create different types of electronic component. To analyse a lone dopant atom in action, Sven Rogge and colleagues at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands cryogenically cooled 35-nanometre-wide silicon wires, taken from...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 21 — The Pentagon awarded almost $500 million in contracts to I.B.M. and Cray Inc. on Tuesday to design a supercomputer several times as fast as today’s most powerful systems. The Cray contract is for $250 million and the I.B.M. contract is for $244 million, to be spent during the next four years. They prevailed over Sun Microsystems.The contracts are part of the High Productivity Computing Systems program being led by the Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. The program aims to achieve and surpass the ability to calculate more than a...

The Royal Society (RS) announced yesterday that we may all know a lot less about a lot more than we ever thought we did as humans. A total of 1.5 million pages and 250,000 trillion articles will be available electronically to technologists. A new joint study by the Royal Society in Halifax, the California Polytechnical Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh in New Brunswick has found that people who have been publicly educated using high technology are likely to be twice as not as they are smart. This backs up several soon to be conducted prior studies which disclose disturbing...

Stanford researchers' new etching method shows promise for bulk manufacturing of nanotube-electronics. Semiconducting carbon nanotubes could be the centerpiece of low-power, ultra-fast electronics of the future. The challenge is getting them to work with today's manufacturing processes. Now researchers at Stanford University have made an important advance toward large-scale nanotube electronics. They have created functional transistors using an etching process that can be integrated with the methods used to carve out silicon-based computer chips. A major roadblock to making carbon-nanotube transistors has been the difficulty of separating semiconducting tubes from a typical batch of nanotubes, in which about a third...

HAL may soon be getting some company. But unlike the famous computer companion in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the first space-based supercomputer — so described because it will be by far the most powerful computer in space — is already nearing reality. Engineering researchers at the University of Florida and Honeywell Aerospace are designing and building the computer projected to operate as much as 100 times faster than any computer in space today. Expected to be launched aboard a NASA rocket on a test mission in 2009, the computer is needed to process rapidly increasing amounts of data...

Even if quantum computers can be made to work, there will still be two big obstacles preventing quantum networks becoming a reality. First, quantum bits, or qubits, stored in matter will have to be transferred to photons to be transmitted over long distances. Secondly, errors that creep in during transmission have to be corrected. Two unrelated studies have now shown how to clear these hurdles. Both studies use quantum entanglement, a spooky property that links particles however far apart they are. Measuring a quantum property on one particle immediately affects the other, and this effect can be used to “teleport”...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1,020 active CPUs - 70,500 completed Work Units and 12.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

Intel Terascale Brings 80 Cores To Your DesktopIf you were impressed with dual core technology and quad core processors seem a bit like overkill, how about Terascale processing with 80 cores? Sound far fetched? Intel doesn’t think so. Head on over to PCPerspective for the rest of the article. For our discussions here, the term “terascale” will refer to a processor with 32 or more cores. Moving away from the “large” cores seen in the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 lines from Intel and AMD, the cores in a terascale processor will be much simpler (kind of like we...

Computer designers at the University of Rochester are going ballistic. "Everyone has been trying to make better transistors by modifying current designs, but what we really need is the next paradigm," says Quentin Diduck, a graduate student at the University who thought up the radical new design. "We've gone from the relay, to the tube, to semiconductor physics. Now we're taking the next step on the evolutionary track." That next step goes by the imposing name of "Ballistic Deflection Transistor," and it's as far from traditional transistors as tubes. Instead of running electrons through a transistor as if they were...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1009 active CPUs - 55,700 completed Work Units and 9.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

Tokyo, Japan, Jul 18, 2006 (JCN Newswire via COMTEX) -- IBM Japan in collaboration with Connect Technology has developed an electronic clipping system, which uses invisible 2D barcodes printed on paper to integrate information from paper and digital data such as information provided on Internet sites. The new system adds an invisible digital layer to printed materials, enabling the printed materials to be used like a portable site. Invisible 2D barcodes which store digital data are printed on paper using invisible ink. The barcodes are then extracted from the paper by an image processing application. Since invisible ink is...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 351 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 85th place (with 908 active CPUs - 47,400 completed Work Units and nearly 8.5 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 342 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 99th place (with 985 active CPUs - 39,500 completed Work Units and nearly 7 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 337 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 103th place (with 988 active CPUs - 36,400 completed Work Units and more than 6,4 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 325+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 108th place (with 991 active CPUs - 34,150 completed Work Units and more than 6,000,000 points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 117th place (with 1,038 active CPUs - 29,000 completed Work Units and more than 5,000,000 points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Maxtor has taken charge in the land of personal backup for quite some time now and shows no signs of slowing down and letting its competition gain ground with its not too distant release of the One-Touch III drive that has a total of 1 Terabyte on tap. It wasn’t long ago that 1 Terabyte of storage would be limited to the ultra-rich or businesses whose need for large amounts of data could justify it. To that point, Maxtor has found a way to bring this huge amount of storage in a price tag of well under $800 dollars. While...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 144th place (with 1,045 CPUs - 24,200 completed Work Units and nearly 4,000,000 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 164th place (with 992 CPUs - nearly 19,000 completed Work Units and 2,982,241 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see...

The M4 Project began in early January, as an attempt to break three original Enigma messages that were intercepted in 1942 and are thought never to have been broken by the Allied forces. These messages were encrypted using a four-rotor Enigma. That version was considered by Germany to be completely unbreakable, as it could be set up in any one of a vast number of ways (2 times 10 to the 145th power), each of which would encrypt a plain text message differently.

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 250+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 188th place (with 940 CPUs - 15,725 completed Work Units and 2,330,000 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see the...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's 250+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 204th place, having reached more than 2,000,000 points! This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Welcome to the new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. The previous thread has gotten too large, so we move on to yet another. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's 250+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 241st place, having moved up from 1200th...

 AUSSIE MICROSOFT CALENDAR MESS The Commonwealth Games are coming to Melbourne in March this year http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/ and normally that would not matter to us except that it's going to cause a major upheaval for users of Microsoft Office, Exchange and Windows.  It'll mostly affect our Aussie friends but also anyone who deals with the Great Southern Land. The problem is also a sharp indictment of Microsoft's spotty support for changing time zones.  Changes in daylight savings arrangements do happen so paying customers of Windows and Office are entitled to expect more elegant technologies to deal with this real world situation.  ...

Welcome to the folding at home thread. The previous thread has gotten too large, so we move on to yet another. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's members, or it's founders, it is comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing, who have banded together, to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via Distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimers, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 777th place,...

OK, new thread to celebrate reaching a major milestone! Within a few hours Team FreeRepublic will be in the Top1000!!!! We should pass Dean for America, around noon tommorrow. Other liberal teams want to challenge us (DUmmies and Kos) but we're humiliating them beyond description.

Apologies if this is cross posted on the wrong board... While surfing around yesterday, I saw this post... http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1547014/posts?page=1,50 I got to thinking, which was a big mistake cause it started me crying. You see, I've lost more than 7 family members to Cancer...the most recent was my sweet Niece. She was only 31 and left behind 2 awesome little boys, and devastated my Sister, as well. I have friends that have lost loved ones too, and some that are still living in fear of the day that the test comes back with bad old news...again. Smile is a friend...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 104 processors and 76 users. We have a number of new users in the team, with Clara Lou, fzx12345, SamfromLivingston, brityank, manwiththehands and Tami all popping onto the hit list this week. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. Malsua is continuing to add systems and now accounts for 10% of the FR total. Great...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 65 processors. ArgentCent is the latest to have joined our happy band of folders and jumps in at # 36 with his first completed WU. We now have 51 members in the team, and about 45 active participants. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. One of these will probably be the new Numero Uno...

FreeRepublic Team Ranked #1,550 (of 41,708 teams)

For the first time in years, hardware startups are trying to break into the market. Their gambit: Inexpensive special-purpose machinesSPECIAL REPORT: NEXT-GENERATION COMPUTERS>> Steve Dewitt remembers an incident that occurred soon after he joined startup Azul Systems three years ago. He walked out to the driveway of his Silicon Valley home to pick up the morning newspaper and ran into a neighbor -- Bob Evans, a legendary former IBM (IBM) executive who oversaw the development of the mainframe computer in the 1960s that led to Big Blue's industry dominance. Dewitt had recently told Evans of Azul's plan to create a...

FR Team ranking up to number 1782 of 41608

Folding@Home update: 3 Work Units completed, 2 computers, 138 points, overall team rank #15,162

Any Freepers "folding@home"???? For those not familiar with F@H -> some diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer and even "mad cow" disease are believed to be linked to protein (mis)folding. A scientist team from Stanford University studies this phenomenon to try and find a cure to these diseases. To do this, they have designed a software (folding@home) which enables people to donate unused power from their computer to speed up medical research!

OCTOBER 3, 2005 SPECIAL REPORT: OPEN SOURCE Open Source: Now It's an Ecosystem This software movement is branching into not just mainstream business applications but also the associated services. And VCs are eager to help Eighteen months ago John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor decided to quit their jobs at Epiphany, a maker of customer-relationship software. The trio wanted to target the same market, but write a new application developed using open-source code. It took them only three months to create the program and just another month to close their first round of funding. Little more than a year...

The experiment, done at the company's Cambridge, England, labs, is a step toward developing a new generation of highly powerful processors. By Peter Clarke,  EE Times Sept. 1, 2005 URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170102712 LONDON — A team at Hitachi’s Cambridge Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England has developed a silicon device for quantum computing: a quantum-dot charge “qubit”. This structure, based on Hitachi's many years of work on single-electron devices, is the first step in the development of a quantum computer based on conventional silicon technology, according to Hitachi Europe Ltd. Quantum computers make use of quantum bits (qubits), which...

The hidden currents powering Intel's next gen chips Out of order speculation By: Thursday 18 August 2005, 07:20 AT NEXT WEEK'S Intel developer forum, the firm is due to announce a next generation x86 processor core. The current speculation is this new core is going too be based on one of the existing Pentium M cores. I think it’s going to be something completely different. If it was just a Pentium M variant I don’t think there’d be such a fuss about it. Intel is portraying this as the biggest change since the original P4, yet there have been several...

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) today released price cuts for its line of desktop PC-use processors, including the Sempron and Athlon 64 lines. In addition, the chip vendor noted that production of Socket-A Semprons will be completely phased out by the end of the third quarter.Prices for AMD’s mainstream Sempron lineup fell by up to 25%. In addition, AMD cut prices for dual-core Athlon 64x2 processors 8-12%. AMD also launched the Athlon 64x2 3800+ processor, which at US$354, is the company’s lowest priced dual-core processor.Unit prices for AMD Athlon 64 2800+, 3000+ and 3200+ remained unchanged, whereas prices for faster Athlon...

The researchers behind the Screensaver-Lifesaver project – which uses the ‘idle time’ of millions of computers worldwide to screen for anti-cancer drugs – are now turning their attention to fighting pancreatic cancer. The Screensaver-Lifesaver project is run out of the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) Centre for Computational Drug Discovery under the direction of Professor Graham Richards, Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. In a recent joint statement with the NFCR and Dr. Daniel Von Hoff of the Center for Targeted Cancer Therapies at the University of Arizona and the Translational Genomics Research Institute,...

Microsoft (MSFT) on Monday plans to make its biggest push yet to popularize 64-bit computing on everyday computers. At a conference here, Chairman Bill Gates is expected to announce the general availability of the first desktop version of Windows to support 64-bit processing chips, which can access bigger chunks of memory and move data around faster than 32-bit chips in wide use on PCs since the 1980s. About 2,800 hardware developers are expected here at the Microsoft-sponsored Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHec) this week to hear where Microsoft is driving the tech industry, and learn what they can do. The...

Tax records, resumes, photo albums--the modern hard drive can keep increasingly larger volumes of information at the ready. But that can turn into a problem when it comes to effectively erasing the devices. There are a number of options for cleansing the drives of unwanted computers, from special wiping software to destruction services to manufacturers' recycling programs. But what many PC owners don't realize, experts say, is that these methods are often not enough.

In the world of modern mathematics, Dr. Peter D. Lax, professor emeritus at New York University, ranks among the giants. As a teenage refugee from the Nazis, he worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where met the likes of Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman and Edward Teller. As a young mathematician, he was a protégé of John von Neumann, a father of modern computing. Full Story

Chicago, IL, Feb. 11 (UPI) -- The latest wireless mobile computing technology, called WiMax, is gaining momentum at a rapid clip. WiMax will help bridge the gap between wireless fidelity and wireless telecom networks, giving mobile computer users free, or cheap, wireless access across many miles of terrain, not just inside the office or at a WiFi hot spot, such as a Starbucks or a Kinko's store.Major companies, including Lucent Technologies, Nortel, Cisco and Huawei Technologies, are moving forward with projects in the WiMax market -- known formally as Metropolitan Broadband Fixed, Portable and Mobile Applications -- and new commercial...

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Wednesday launched an initiative to accelerate innovation in science and computing in Europe. Speaking to journalists in Prague, Gates said the EuroScience Initiative will bring together talented people from universities and research centers all over Europe. "Software has become a key tool for many types of research," Gates said. The initiative also wants to support the Lisbon Strategy, a plan to make Europe the world's most competitive economy by 2010. Within the strategy, EU governments are expected to boost research and development spending, cut bureaucracy and social spending and increase education...