Free Republic

Alpha Technology has a new development update and its Viper scrypt board seems to be making headway. The British ASIC maker said it has completed the schematics for the ATX power distribution board and of the AC power metering board. Those of the actual ASIC board are not complete yet, but Alpha said it is “almost” done. In addition, the company has finalised the design of the enclosure and WebGUI user interface. ... In any case, the advent of powerful and immensely efficient scrypt ASICs is not good news for GPU miners, as the ASICs will render GPU-based miners uncompetitive...

Bitcoin mining difficulty is increasing now exponentially with more and more ASIC miners coming online. Today the difficulty increased by 45% to 390 million. In a little over 2 days, difficulty level is predicted to increase by 300% to 1.6 billion. When I first started paying attention in May of this year, the difficulty level was only 10 million. Not sure what this will mean for bitcoins or the price theroof. I'm curious what those Freepers who mine or have bitcoins think?

Three years ago a team from Bell Labs took on a very daunting challenge – put an optical networking system on a commercially manufactured silicon chip, load it with a smorgasbord of sophisticated opto-electronic devices in a combination that’s never been done before, and make it easy to mass produce. The project is part of a U.S. DARPA-funded program (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) to develop technologies and design tools necessary to fabricate an application specific, electronic-photonic integrated circuit (EPIC). This program is led by BAE Systems in partnership with MIT, Applied Wave Research, and Bell Labs, through Alcatel-Lucent’s LGS...