InTech Poll

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posted by Ray L. @ 6:22 AM 0 Comments Links to this post.

News Readers

While Gary Michell hasn't joined the borg with Google's new Reader.

I get most of my news through a "news aggregator" or "river of news." I've been using Radio Userland for over three years for this. Many people have switched over to Google Reader, but Google has gotten so big, that I'm hesitant to use it. A river of news means that I get a long list of feeds from the most recent to the oldest. My feeds consist of blogs and other news sources. Sometimes there's a serendipity of juxtaposition.

I think its worth a try. Its simple and works well. I've used a bunch of aggregators and this is one of the better ones.

Labels: Computing

posted by Ray L. @ 2:19 PM 0 Comments Links to this post.

A Quantum Leap

Yesterday we entered a new era in computing, when D-wave Systems demonstrated the worlds first quantum computer. The announcement caught some observers by surprise.

Speculation about quantum computing has been assumed to be something decades away. Some of us wondered if it is even possible. Quantum computers hold the promise of solving complex computations simultaneously instead of the traditional one step at a time. It comes as a big surprise when D-Wave Systems Inc a company near Vancouver announced that they will be demonstrating their new Quantum Computer.

While this is being hailed as a commercially viable project there are skeptics:

Today, the company was supposed to show off a quantum computer sporting 16-qubits, the most of any quantum computer, commercial or otherwise, but still way too few to do anything important. What's a qubit? Qubits, or quantum bits, are what make quantum computers different from their digital ancestors. A digital bit can be either a one or a zero but not both at the same time. A qubit can. And that lets it do many calculations at once. So quantum computers should be capable of solving certain horrendous problems faster than conventional computers. Certain types of searches, the "traveling salesman" problem, and finding the factors of large integers fall into this category.

At it's heart the D-Wave computer, called Orion, is a chip of niobium that's been cooled to near absolute zero. It relies on a dark-horse technology known as adiabatic quantum computing. It and D-Wave have many critics.

The computer solves only one type of problem, which mathematicians call a two-dimensional Isling model in a magnetic field, but through some software trickery, other problems can be recast as this problem. At the demonstration, they planned to show off its flexibility with two programs. First, they were to show how Orion runs a pattern-matching application that searches a database of molecules. The second could be called the wedding planner's dilemma, in that it is designed to figure out the best seating arrangement for a group of people according to certain constraints, such as Uncle Sam can't sit next to Aunt Jean but has to be at the same table as Grandpa Harry.

Yet, as in any new technology, proof of concept is the biggest step to overcome, and while we may never see quantum computers on our desktops. We can expect them to be more powerful and more commonplace in the near future.

Labels: computers

posted by Ray L. @ 3:33 AM 0 Comments Links to this post.

Semiconductor Search Engine www.ICMaster.com

Sometimes we build things at PCO, and other times we must reverse engineer designs so that we can repair a subassembly. We rely on our dead tree library and of course online searches. I found a new search engine for parts and Spec Sheets. Although it's in Beta, and I really haven't had a chance to run it through its paces it seems pretty decent. This is a "Hearst Publications" project, hopefully this will remain an advertiser supported site and not rely on subscription fees. They do ask that you register with a password and email address.

Icmaster.com not only provides spec sheet but some suggestions on who might be able to supply these parts. Avnet and Mouser are 2 of the major supply houses.

posted by Ray L. @ 10:45 AM 0 Comments Links to this post.