Hardware.no: Tips til artikler på hw.no

[b-real]

http://www.physorg.com/news184533633.html

 

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the last several weeks, we've read a bit about how Google is getting restless just being the world’s largest search engine and a proud cloud computing parent. In fact, Googleland is growing by quantum leaps and bounds.

 

Behind the scenes, in fact, Google has been working with a D-Wave quantum computer that seems to be able to spot images of cars from among 20,000 photos faster than any other Google computer. Though there are reports of skepticism among higher math experts that D-Wave really is a quantum computer, it’s clear that Google is going to be the first to use the quantumest computer available to its fullest capacity.

 

Fast and accurate sorting capability is a must, and not just for Internet browsers. Think about the jobs of radiologists, for example, looking for a diseased cell or two in a mass of tissue. Or a baggage screener looking for a gun, a knife, or a bomb in someone’s carry-on bag. Recently published research on “visual attention," prepared by Harvard professor Jeremy Wolfe, demonstrates that the more we [humans!] look for that “needle in a haystack,” the less likely it is that we will find it. Now, how does that make you feel when you take a mammogram or get on an airplane?

 

But what if a quantum computer could detect the diseased cell? And not only that. What if that super computer could determine which antibody might kill that cell without harming the surrounding cells? Think about how much time that would save researchers in testing various drugs, and how much time it would save in getting approval for potential life-saving drugs.

 

It’s highly likely that Google Venture’s recent investment into Adimab was made with a computer antibody identifier in mind. Adimab, a New Hampshire-based biotech company, has already developed a simulated human immune system, composed of engineered yeast cells, that produces antibodies in response to drug molecules. This process obviates the need for testing engineered mice, as well as other animal testing, and produces therapeutic outcomes in less than eight weeks.

 

Already having a leg up on other biotech firms with its proprietary technology, Adimab has attracted investments from Polaris Venture Partners, SV Life Sciences, OrbiMed Advisors, and Borealis Ventures. But Adimab COO Errik Anderson admitted that Google's investment was not just financial. In an interview with Xconomy, Anderson said that “...it was clear that Google Ventures immediately understood our value proposition—that a prolific discovery platform can drive even greater productivity when integrated with advanced computational tools.”

 

Some interesting times ahead for supercomputing and for Google; that’s for sure.

 

More information:

• Adimab http://www.adimab.com/index.html
  
• Google Collaborates with D-Wave on Possible Quantum Image Search http://www.physorg.com/news180107947.html
  
• Google demonstrates quantum computer image search http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1827...age-search.html
  
• Google Pours “Incredible” Computing Power into Antibody Drug Discovery With Adimab http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/02/03/g...ingle_page=true
  
• Guns, Tumors And The Limits Of The Human Eye http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...oryId=122561355
  

© 2010 PhysOrg.com

 

 

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a just-published paper in the magazine Science, IBM researchers demonstrated a radio-frequency graphene transistor with the highest cut-off frequency achieved so far for any graphene device - 100 billion cycles/second (100 GigaHertz).

Ads by Google

Atomistix ToolKit - Atomic-scale simulations of nanoelectronic devices - quantumwise.com

 

This accomplishment is a key milestone for the Carbon Electronics for RF Applications (CERA) program funded by DARPA, in an effort to develop next-generation communication devices.

The high frequency record was achieved using wafer-scale, epitaxially grown graphene using processing technology compatible to that used in advanced silicon device fabrication.

"A key advantage of graphene lies in the very high speeds in which electrons propagate, which is essential for achieving high-speed, high-performance next generation transistors," said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research. "The breakthrough we are announcing demonstrates clearly that graphene can be utilized to produce high performance devices and integrated circuits."

Graphene is a single atom-thick layer of carbon atoms bonded in a hexagonal honeycomb-like arrangement. This two-dimensional form of carbon has unique electrical, optical, mechanical and thermal properties and its technological applications are being explored intensely.

Uniform and high-quality graphene wafers were synthesized by thermal decomposition of a silicon carbide (SiC) substrate. The graphene transistor itself utilized a metal top-gate architecture and a novel gate insulator stack involving a polymer and a high dielectric constant oxide. The gate length was modest, 240 nanometers, leaving plenty of space for further optimization of its performance by scaling down the gate length.

It is noteworthy that the frequency performance of the graphene device already exceeds the cut-off frequency of state-of-the-art silicon transistors of the same gate length (~ 40 GigaHertz). Similar performance was obtained from devices based on graphene obtained from natural graphite, proving that high performance can be obtained from graphene of different origins. Previously, the team had demonstrated graphene transistors with a cut-off frequency of 26 GigaHertz using graphene flakes extracted from natural graphite.

Endret 7. februar 2010 av b-real

[b-real]

(PhysOrg.com) -- Google is developing a translator for its Android smartphones that aims to almost instantly translate from one spoken language to another during phone calls.

 

Head of translation services at Google, Franz Och, said he believed almost instant speech-to-speech translation should be possible if the accuracy of voice recognition and machine translation can be improved. He said Google is working on this, and he expected the technology to “work reasonably well” in a few years. There has been a great deal of progress in voice recognition and machine translation in recent years, especially the latter, thanks to funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Google's system would analyze speech in the same way as a human interpreter, listening to a package of speech to gather the full meaning before it attempts to translate. It will improve in accuracy the more it is used.

Google already has a website translation program for 52 languages, with an expanding database that continually improves its accuracy. It also has a voice recognition application for smart phones to allow users to search the web by speaking their commands into the phone. The new system will combine the two technologies, and will use the database Google has built up by crawling websites in different languages to improve its understanding of them.

Translation of speech will provide much bigger challenges than text translation, however. Mr Och said the task is difficult because everyone has a different voice, pitch, and speed of speaking. The huge variety of accents, dialects and colloquialisms also presents problems that some linguistics experts, such as David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University in Wales, consider insurmountable. If it does prove possible, and becomes available to the average user, it may help preserve languages and avoid a globalized language monoculture.

Google expects to release a “basic version” of the translation application in a couple of years. Apple’s iPhone already has a speech translator called Jibbigo, which is available for English/Spanish and English/Japanese.

[L4r5]

http://www.amobil.no/artikler/google_vil_s..._samtaler/74790

Du er litt treig, b-real.

[b-real]

http://www.amobil.no/artikler/google_vil_s..._samtaler/74790

Du er litt treig, b-real.

Merde

[b-real]

http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/24516/

 

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Online payments service PayPal says its suspension of certain transactions in India could last months.

 

In a post on PayPal's blog Tuesday, spokesman Anuj Nayar wrote that the company will keep blocking personal payments to and from India as it works out questions that Indian regulators have posed. The payments were initially suspended Jan. 28, after regulators questioned whether PayPal payments should be regulated like wire transfers of cash.

However, local bank withdrawals, which had also been suspended, should be available within a few days, Nayar said.

The size of PayPal's India business is not publicly disclosed, but it appears to be relatively small. In 2008, $4 billion of PayPal's $60 billion in transactions came from the region it defines as Asia, and the vast majority was from Australia, PayPal's fourth-largest market.

PayPal is part of eBay Inc.

 

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

[b-real]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10450626-64.html

Micron to buy Numonyx in $1.3 billion stock deal

 

Micron Technology is beefing up its flash memory chip portfolio by acquiring Numonyx, one the largest makers of flash in the world.

Micron and Numonyx said Tuesday that they have reached an agreement whereby Micron will acquire Numonyx in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $1.27 billion.

Numonyx was created by Intel and STMicroelectronics back in 2008 and combined Intel's NOR flash memory business and STMicro's NAND flash business.

Micron is the largest memory chip manufacturer in the U.S., and Geneva-based Numonyx is the world's largest supplier of NOR flash--which has different applications than NAND flash, which Micron already manufactures. NAND is used for data storage in mobile devices such as Apple's iPhone and its upcoming iPad, while NOR has traditionally been used in cell phones.

"Acquiring Numonyx...positions Micron to offer the most comprehensive, cost-competitive solutions in the industry," Steve Appleton, chairman and CEO of Micron, said in a statement. The transaction will allow Micron offer "a broad portfolio of DRAM, NAND and NOR memory products," according to a company statement. Micron would also increase the size of its global manufacturing footprint and gain access to Numonyx's customer base.

The transaction is subject to regulatory review and is expected to close within three to six months.

[b-real]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/microsoft-patents-automatic-device-pairing-system.ars

 

 

A recent patent application (via WMPowerUser.com) describes a system devised by Microsoft to enable automatic pairing of devices over short-range wireless connections such as Bluetooth and Wireless USB. With this system, after an initial manual pairing, say between a phone and a PC, would allow those devices to automatically pair with other related devices, such as a second PC.

 

The pairing mechanism would act as an alternative to the preexisting pairing mechanisms already built in to these protocols, and would require device support for both sides of the operation. Public key cryptography is used to securely share pairing information among different devices; that information might be transmitted via USB key, network connection or any other convenient method. The described system respects uesr identities, so merely pairing with a computer would not mean that anyone logged into the machine would be able to use an automatically paired device.

 

Scenarios in which suitably enabled devices would be useful are not too hard to envision. Having phones automatically paired to all the PCs you own is perhaps the most obvious example of when this would be useful, but more broadly any peripheral could be used: headsets that you pair with your PC but also work automatically with your phone, mice that work with every PC you own, and so on.

 

Of course, filing a patent does not mean that this will ever materialize in any shipping product, and there's no indication thus far that this will form a part of Windows Phone 7 Series. That said, phones and PCs are probably the best-suited devices to this kind of technology as, being software-driven, they're the easiest to update to include this kind of extension. Seamless wireless syncing (Zune already performs syncing over WiFi, unlike iPhone), including seamless wireless pairing, would certainly be another way in which Microsoft could distinguish its phone platform from the iPhone, and would enable the company to promote the more connected, less wired merits of Windows Phone.

 

 

[b-real]

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is planning to overhaul the desktop panel and integrate social networking features in Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx. One of the key components of this effort is the Me Menu, which shipped in the Lucid alpha 3 last week.

The Me Menu, which Canonical unveiled in December, provides a unified interface for managing your presence on instant messaging and social networking services. A text box that is embedded in the menu allows users to publish status messages to all of their accounts. The menu also provides easy access to the standard account and identity configuration tools.

 

The Me Menu expands on the concept of Ubuntu's existing presence menu, which was included in the panel session applet in Ubuntu 9.04. Like the original presence menu, the new Me Menu is designed to work with GNOME's Empathy instant messaging client. When you post a status message in the menu, it will be propagated to all of your Empathy accounts. The social networking functionality in the new Me Menu is powered by Gwibber, my open source microblogging client.

 

 

[b-real]

Moving one step closer to world domination, Google has acquired the cloud photo editing service Picnik, giving users a way to edit, crop, touch-up, and add effects to their photos, without needing a stand-alone application. Says Google's official blog: More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Today, we're excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your web browser. We're not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we'll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we'd like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks. We're very impressed with the Picnik team and the product they've created, and we're excited to welcome them to Google. We're looking forward to collaborating closely with them to improve the online photo editing experience on the web. In the meantime, we encourage you to head to Picnik, import some of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr or Facebook and try your hand at photo editing in the cloud! For more information on Picnik (and integration with Google), please read here: Google Acquires Picnik

[b-real]

NVIDIA's Next Generation ION Announced, Optimus + a 16-core Version

[b-real]

Obama letter litt på sløret til Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative

[b-real]

NVIDIA 196.75 kills video cards

Endret 5. mars 2010 av b-real

[b-real]

Google buys DocVerse, steps closer to Office collaboration

 

Google has acquired a company that allows Microsoft Office users to edit their documents collaboratively on the Web. The acquisition of DocVerse will undoubtedly allow users who are married to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to edit their documents through Google's services, thanks to a "small, nimble team of talented developers who share [Google's] vision."

 

Both Google and DocVerse made their announcements Friday afternoon, with each noting that transitioning to cloud document storage and collaboration has been somewhat of a challenge for Office users. "Unfortunately, today, individuals are still forced to make a choice between those two worlds," reads the DocVerse blog post. "Google's acquisition of DocVerse represents a first step to solve these problems."

 

Google says that current DocVerse users will be able to continue using the service as usual, but that new signups have been closed until the company is "ready to share what's next." This is no doubt a foreshadowing of Google's plan to integrate DocVerse's capabilities into Google Docs, which allows users to collaborate simultaneously on Google-hosted word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.

 

The move is just another step in Google's strategy to chip away at Microsoft's dominance in the productivity space. Of course, there are other ways for Office users to share documents online—SharePoint is a popular solution among businesses, for example—but the functionality is still quite different from what's offered through Google Docs. The DocVerse acquisition, combined with Google's recently announced file-storage capabilities, will help beef up Google Docs to the point where it will be even harder for small businesses to resist signing up for Google Apps

[unundindur]

Jeg hadde satt stor pris på en test av 26" - 27,5" skjermer i det nedre prissjiktet. Det begynner å bli mange som er interessert i dette, og etterhvert også en rekke kandidater. Når jeg har søkt på nettet generellt virker det knapt som noen har gjort en grundig sammenligning/test av dem, hverken på engelsk eller norsk.

 

Noen av de skjermene jeg er mest spent på:

*BenQ 27" LCD M2700HD

*LG 27" LCD W2753V-PF

*HANNSG HG281DP

Endret 12. mars 2010 av unundindur

[L4r5]

1024bit RSA for fall!

Liten overdrivelse, men det er visst mulig å knekke den nå. Ulempen er at man må ha fysisk tilgang.

 

 

1024-bit RSA encryption cracked by carefully starving CPU of electricity

Since 1977, RSA public-key encryption has protected privacy and verified authenticity when using computers, gadgets and web browsers around the globe, with only the most brutish of brute force efforts (and 1,500 years of processing time) felling its 768-bit variety earlier this year. Now, three eggheads (or Wolverines, as it were) at the University of Michigan claim they can break it simply by tweaking a device's power supply. By fluctuating the voltage to the CPU such that it generated a single hardware error per clock cycle, they found that they could cause the server to flip single bits of the private key at a time, allowing them to slowly piece together the password. With a small cluster of 81 Pentium 4 chips and 104 hours of processing time, they were able to successfully hack 1024-bit encryption in OpenSSL on a SPARC-based system, without damaging the computer, leaving a single trace or ending human life as we know it. That's why they're presenting a paper at the Design, Automation and Test conference this week in Europe, and that's why -- until RSA hopefully fixes the flaw -- you should keep a close eye on your server room's power supply.

 

Lenke: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/09/1024-bit-rsa-encryption-cracked-by-carefully-starving-cpu-of-ele/

[b-real]

 

NAIROBI, Kenya — Porn Web sites can't park themselves at a ".xxx" address quite yet.

 

A global Internet oversight agency on Friday deferred a decision until June on whether to create a ".xxx" Internet suffix as an online red-light district.

 

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, initiated a 70-day process of consultations on a domain that could help parents block access to porn sites. Use of the ".xxx" suffix would be voluntary, though, and would not keep such content entirely away from minors.

 

Backers of ".xxx" have billed the proposal as a way for the adult-entertainment industry to clean up its act, though some porn sites worry that governments would wind up mandating its use, and religious groups are concerned it would legitimize porn sites.

 

Skeptics also note that porn sites would likely keep their existing ".com" storefronts, even as they set up shop in the new ".xxx" domain name, thereby giving people even more ways to find pornography online.

 

ICM Registry LLC first proposed the ".xxx" domain in 2000, and ICANN has rejected it three times already since then. But an outside panel last month questioned the board's latest rejection in 2007, prompting the board to reopen the bid.

 

"There's a lot of complex issues," ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said, without elaborating.

 

As it concluded weeklong meetings Friday in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, ICANN's board gave its chief executive and its chief lawyer two weeks to recommend options for the agency to proceed. Once the ICANN board receives the options from them, it will open them to public comment for 45 days and then make a decision at its June meeting in Brussels.

 

Stuart Lawley, ICM's chief executive, said he is looking forward to seeing proposals in the next 14 days.

 

 

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hxApKh0uIBQ2d3GQisMZB_gk87dAD9ED7SAO1

 

[b-real]

Google oppdatere Buzz:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/better-controls-for-buzz-in-your-inbox.html

[b-real]

Platform Preview gives Web developers first taste of IE9

[b-real]

IE9: Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch all but confirmed today that the next version of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer 9, will not be supported on Windows XP.Hachamovitch stopped short of explicitly saying that XP would not be supported, but said that building a "modern browser" required a "modern operating system." IE9 will be heavily dependent on hardware acceleration, courtesy of its use of Direct2D and DirectWrite; neither API is available on Windows XP.

 

That IE9 would use these features has been known since last year's PDC, and so the lack of XP support should come as a surprise to few. Nonetheless, there are sure to be some who will gripe that the newest browser (not likely to hit until next year at the earliest) won't be available for a decade-old operating system.

 

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/unsurprisingly-ie9-wont-be-supported-on-an-obsolete-os.ars

 

[b-real]

Sony langer ut imot microsoft

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0puP8nrIU8&feature=player_embedded