Free Republic

You know the way the world is going because you're happy it's happening. Out with the old ways of doing things -- going to work at an office, for example -- and in with doing your own thing. All the time, anywhere. I sense McDonald's understands this. It seems to have realized that people coming to work at its restaurants, greeting you as they take your order at the drive-thru and then quickly cooking your food is an outmoded concept. Instead, how about machines doing it all faster than humans ever could? Well, here's a little announcement the global burger...

Big Blue has now released Qiskit Runtime, which enables a significant acceleration of quantum calculations carried out over the cloud.Using a combination of tweaked algorithms, improved control systems and a new quantum service called Qiskit Runtime, IBM researchers have managed to resolve a quantum problem 120 times faster than the previous time they gave it a go. The simulation was run entirely on the cloud, through IBM's Qiskit platform – an open-source library of tools that lets developers around the world create quantum programs and run them on prototype quantum devices that IBM makes available over the cloud. The speed-up...

155 billion cycles which is more than Bejing IBM has been showing off its latest graphene transistor that can execute 155 billion cycles per second. It is about 50 percent faster than previous experimental transistors. The new transistor has a cut-off frequency of 155GHz. The previous one could manage 100GHz  and it was shown off last year. Top Big Blue boffin Yu-Ming Lin said that the research also shows that high-performance, graphene-based transistors can be produced at low cost using standard semiconductor manufacturing processes. In other words commercial production of graphene chips is not far away. Graphene is a...

Giants fans may have been able to see Tiki Barber in Big Blue's huddle for another season, if not for the physical beating he received playing under head coach Tom Coughlin. Barber, speaking after yesterday's press conference that formally announced his three-year broadcasting contract with NBC, implied that Coughlin has problems relating to players on the team, and that it was an "act of God" that the physical demands the coach placed on him did not result in a serious injury. "Coach Coughlin is very hard-nosed, and I didn't get a lot of time off, couldn't sit down and rest...

THIS WEEK Top-ranked and unbeaten Ohio State returns home this week to conclude the regular season against second-ranked and unbeaten Michigan. This will be the second time this year that Buckeyes have been involved in a No. 1 vs. No. 2 clash. Ohio State was No. 1 and Texas No. 2 when the two teams met in Austin Sept. 9 in a game won 24-7 by coach Jim Tressel's Buckeyes. On the line this week are both undisputed possession of the Big Ten title and a spot in the Bowl Championship Series title game on Jan. 8, 2007. This week's...

The Blue Gene/L supercomputer has broken its own record to achieve more than double the number of calculations it can do a second. It reached 280.6 teraflops - that is 280.6 trillion calculations a second. The IBM machine, at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, officially became the most powerful computer on the planet in June. The fastest supercomputers in the world are ranked by experts every six months in the Top 500 list. Blue Gene's performance, while it has been under construction, has quadrupled in just 12 months. Each person in the world with a handheld calculator would still...

It's a furious fight to the finish and the White House is on the line. What are the campaign's last-minute plans? We'll be joined by Elizabeth Edwards (search), wife of vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards, and Liz Cheney (search), senior adviser on the Bush-Cheney campaign and daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Elizaphant is in Harrisburg,Pa for a LIVE event on C-Span at 3:30 PM EDT. Please Ping all her fans.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004; Page E05 IBM Corp. plans to announce today that it has built the world's fastest supercomputer at one of its facilities in Rochester, Minn., wresting the title from a system in Japan. Dubbed the Blue Gene/L supercomputer, IBM's new system nudges past a nearly three-year-old computer speed record of 35.86 "teraflops," or trillions of calculations per second, with a working speed of 36.01 teraflops.

LOST FUMBLER If John Kerry loses Michigan, he will probably blame it on his joke writers, then Woody Hayes and the mighty Ohio State Buckeyes. But he only has himself to blame. He should have used that several-decade gap between his job in Vietnam and his job of running for president boning up on his knowledge of sports. The Prowler has documented several examples thus far, and over weekend Kerry really goofed up. To get his Ohio rallies up and rolling, Kerry used a set of jokes to open his events. In Bowling Green, his shtick went something like this:...

Bracing for the Blow By BOB HERBERT .B.M. has sent a holiday chill through its American employees with its plans to ship thousands of high-paying white-collar jobs overseas to lower-paid foreign workers. "People are upset and angry," said Arnie Marchetti, a 37-year-old computer technician at I.B.M.'s Southbury, Conn., office whose wife gave birth to their first child in August. The company has not made any announcements, and the employees do not know who will be affected, or when. The uncertainty about whose jobs may be sent to India or China, the two main countries in the current plans, has...

The new superbomb is an upgrade of an already devastating weapon used by the Americans against al Qaeda and the Taliban. *Nicknamed Big Blue, it contains 21,000lb of conventional high explosive, an increase from the 15,000lb BLU-82 "daisy cutter" used at least four times on tunnels and caves in Afghanistan. * It was originally designed to clear helicopter-landing zones in Vietnam and works by detonating a few feet above ground level and destroying everything in its path. * The warhead is packed with Gelled Slurry Explosive, which is detonated with a high explosive booster. The slurry is poured into the...