PraisePlug

D-Wave out of Canada has just sold the first of its commercial quantum computers and they sold it to Lockheed-Martin. However, it wasn't as easy as your average sale. Despite the fact that D-Wave managed to make the sale, the company had to do it despite a debate over whether it truly was a quantum computer. Back in February 2007 D-Wave demonstrated a machine that could solve problems regular computers are incapable of solving, in principle that is. The reason it is only in principle is because the tests run on the computer were not impossible on a regular computer. This created a fair bit of doubt among some that the chip was actually performing quantum-mechanical computations. The computer works differently than the regular "gate model" of quantum computing where a series of quantum bits can be encoded as either 0, 1 or both simultaneously. D-Wave's machine uses something researchers are calling "adiabatic quantum computing" or "quantum annealing"

Senior year is stressful for a lot of students. Most are concentrated on getting good grades and academic honors so they can get into a good college and have a better life some day. A lot of students do a lot of hard work in order to earn money to go to college. However, two dozen students from around the country will, instead of going to college, be paid to not go to school. That's right, 24 gifted technical students from around the country will each be given a $100,000 scholarship by San Francisco tech tycoon Peter Thiel with a little catch, that they do not go to college this coming fall. Instead of going to school, these students are receiving the $100,000 so they can chase their dreams for the next two years. "It seems like the perfect point in our lives to pursue this kind of project," stated Nick Cammarata, a gifted computer programmer who recently got accepted into the esteemed computer science program at Carnegie Mellon's University. He, along with 17-year-ol

Good news recently came out of Dell as the computer company reported that its net income for the last quarter nearly tripled as Dell benefited from lower computer component costs and growth in certain areas of its more profitable product lines. Dell's shares rose 5% in extended trading, beating analysts' adjusted net income estimates but coming a bit short of revenue estimates. For Dell's first three months, which ended on April 29th, Dell earned $945 million, which equals about $0.49 per share, which was higher than the $341 million, $0.17 per share of last year. If you exclude one-time items, Dell earned $0.55 per share which easily beat the numbers expected by Wall Street. Analysts polled by FactSet estimated adjusted earnings of $0.43 per share. Revenue rose only 1% to $15.02 billion from $14.9 billion last year, which was short of the predicted $15.4 billion. Product revenue remained the same at $12.1 billion with services revenue rising 6% to $3.0 billion. Dell's

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) stated in their annual report that the revenue from software piracy in 2010 has reached record highs. The alliance stated that piracy worldwide is now costing the industry $59 billion. They also said that it seems as though the piracy is primarily occurring in emerging markets where PC growth is taking place. In terms of piracy rates according to region, the central/eastern regions of Europe and South and Central America ranked the highest. The regions all tied at 64 percent. The BSA said that the commercial value of software piracy has grown 14 percent in a mere year. The BSA represents the entire software industry. BSA president and chief executive Robert Holleyman said in a statement, “The software industry is being robbed blind. Nearly $59 billion worth of products were stolen last year — and the rates of theft are completely out of control in the world's fastest-growing markets. The irony is people everywhere value intellectual property ri

I love USB flash drives. I think these little suckers are one of the best things to hit computers since sliced bread. I used a flash drive almost every day this past semester of school and boy was it a nifty thing to keep around. Almost every piece of school work I had to do this past semester is on my trusty 2GB Toshiba flash drive. Now, my flash drive is your average one. It is nearly the same size as all other flash drives and is able to be clipped on my key chain or stuck in my pocket.However, I'm sure there are some of you reading this that prefer your flash drive to be tiny and really easy to carry around with you. Well, if tiny is how you like your gear, then you will definitely want to check out the newest USB 3.0 flash drive released by PQI because this little guy is just that, little. This newest flash drive out of PQI is known as the Traveling Disk Drive U819V and is, as PQI claims, the smallest USB 3.0 flash drive in the world. When PQI says that this thing is small, th

So, in my time as a blogger I have written about some pretty interesting things. I have also written about some pretty strange things and even some downright absurd things. However, this story may just be in a league of its own. A recent study by researchers at the University of Texas in Austin along with researchers from Yale University was set on creating the thinking of a schizophrenic mind on a computer. Yeah, that's right, they are trying to make a computer a schizophrenic by using a virtual network. Their research is based on something known as the hyperlearning theory of schizophrenia. This theory maintains that the disease schizophrenia stems from an inability to forget or ignore non-essential information. In their work, the research teams taught a series of stories to a computer model known to them as DISCERN. Using natural language processing, the computer is able to map out the different stories in a manner similar to the human brain. In the researchers' model, a sim