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For the first time in years, hardware startups are trying to break into the market. Their gambit: Inexpensive special-purpose machinesSPECIAL REPORT: NEXT-GENERATION COMPUTERS>> Steve Dewitt remembers an incident that occurred soon after he joined startup Azul Systems three years ago. He walked out to the driveway of his Silicon Valley home to pick up the morning newspaper and ran into a neighbor -- Bob Evans, a legendary former IBM (IBM) executive who oversaw the development of the mainframe computer in the 1960s that led to Big Blue's industry dominance. Dewitt had recently told Evans of Azul's plan to create a...

FR Team ranking up to number 1782 of 41608

Folding@Home update: 3 Work Units completed, 2 computers, 138 points, overall team rank #15,162

Any Freepers "folding@home"???? For those not familiar with F@H -> some diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer and even "mad cow" disease are believed to be linked to protein (mis)folding. A scientist team from Stanford University studies this phenomenon to try and find a cure to these diseases. To do this, they have designed a software (folding@home) which enables people to donate unused power from their computer to speed up medical research!

OCTOBER 3, 2005 SPECIAL REPORT: OPEN SOURCE Open Source: Now It's an Ecosystem This software movement is branching into not just mainstream business applications but also the associated services. And VCs are eager to help Eighteen months ago John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor decided to quit their jobs at Epiphany, a maker of customer-relationship software. The trio wanted to target the same market, but write a new application developed using open-source code. It took them only three months to create the program and just another month to close their first round of funding. Little more than a year...

The experiment, done at the company's Cambridge, England, labs, is a step toward developing a new generation of highly powerful processors. By Peter Clarke,  EE Times Sept. 1, 2005 URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170102712 LONDON — A team at Hitachi’s Cambridge Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England has developed a silicon device for quantum computing: a quantum-dot charge “qubit”. This structure, based on Hitachi's many years of work on single-electron devices, is the first step in the development of a quantum computer based on conventional silicon technology, according to Hitachi Europe Ltd. Quantum computers make use of quantum bits (qubits), which...

The hidden currents powering Intel's next gen chips Out of order speculation By: Thursday 18 August 2005, 07:20 AT NEXT WEEK'S Intel developer forum, the firm is due to announce a next generation x86 processor core. The current speculation is this new core is going too be based on one of the existing Pentium M cores. I think it’s going to be something completely different. If it was just a Pentium M variant I don’t think there’d be such a fuss about it. Intel is portraying this as the biggest change since the original P4, yet there have been several...

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) today released price cuts for its line of desktop PC-use processors, including the Sempron and Athlon 64 lines. In addition, the chip vendor noted that production of Socket-A Semprons will be completely phased out by the end of the third quarter.Prices for AMD’s mainstream Sempron lineup fell by up to 25%. In addition, AMD cut prices for dual-core Athlon 64x2 processors 8-12%. AMD also launched the Athlon 64x2 3800+ processor, which at US$354, is the company’s lowest priced dual-core processor.Unit prices for AMD Athlon 64 2800+, 3000+ and 3200+ remained unchanged, whereas prices for faster Athlon...

The researchers behind the Screensaver-Lifesaver project – which uses the ‘idle time’ of millions of computers worldwide to screen for anti-cancer drugs – are now turning their attention to fighting pancreatic cancer. The Screensaver-Lifesaver project is run out of the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) Centre for Computational Drug Discovery under the direction of Professor Graham Richards, Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. In a recent joint statement with the NFCR and Dr. Daniel Von Hoff of the Center for Targeted Cancer Therapies at the University of Arizona and the Translational Genomics Research Institute,...

Microsoft (MSFT) on Monday plans to make its biggest push yet to popularize 64-bit computing on everyday computers. At a conference here, Chairman Bill Gates is expected to announce the general availability of the first desktop version of Windows to support 64-bit processing chips, which can access bigger chunks of memory and move data around faster than 32-bit chips in wide use on PCs since the 1980s. About 2,800 hardware developers are expected here at the Microsoft-sponsored Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHec) this week to hear where Microsoft is driving the tech industry, and learn what they can do. The...

Tax records, resumes, photo albums--the modern hard drive can keep increasingly larger volumes of information at the ready. But that can turn into a problem when it comes to effectively erasing the devices. There are a number of options for cleansing the drives of unwanted computers, from special wiping software to destruction services to manufacturers' recycling programs. But what many PC owners don't realize, experts say, is that these methods are often not enough.

In the world of modern mathematics, Dr. Peter D. Lax, professor emeritus at New York University, ranks among the giants. As a teenage refugee from the Nazis, he worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where met the likes of Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman and Edward Teller. As a young mathematician, he was a protégé of John von Neumann, a father of modern computing. Full Story

Chicago, IL, Feb. 11 (UPI) -- The latest wireless mobile computing technology, called WiMax, is gaining momentum at a rapid clip. WiMax will help bridge the gap between wireless fidelity and wireless telecom networks, giving mobile computer users free, or cheap, wireless access across many miles of terrain, not just inside the office or at a WiFi hot spot, such as a Starbucks or a Kinko's store.Major companies, including Lucent Technologies, Nortel, Cisco and Huawei Technologies, are moving forward with projects in the WiMax market -- known formally as Metropolitan Broadband Fixed, Portable and Mobile Applications -- and new commercial...

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Wednesday launched an initiative to accelerate innovation in science and computing in Europe. Speaking to journalists in Prague, Gates said the EuroScience Initiative will bring together talented people from universities and research centers all over Europe. "Software has become a key tool for many types of research," Gates said. The initiative also wants to support the Lisbon Strategy, a plan to make Europe the world's most competitive economy by 2010. Within the strategy, EU governments are expected to boost research and development spending, cut bureaucracy and social spending and increase education...

ARMONK, N.Y., November 16, 2004— IBM, along with representatives of the world's leading science, education and philanthropic organizations, today launched World Community Grid, a global humanitarian effort that applies the unused computing power of individual and business computers to help address the world's most difficult health and societal problems. World Community Grid will harness the vast and unused computational power of the world's computers and direct it at research designed to help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS and HIV, Alzheimer's and cancer, improve forecasting of natural disasters and support studies that can protect the world's food and...

Canary Wireless LLC, a Chicago start-up, has launched the first hand-held device that not only detects Wi-Fi hot spots and measures how strong their signals are, but can tell whether they are open for subscribers or available for a free ride to check e-mail. Wi-Fi buff Ben Kern, 34, a technology lawyer with Gordon & Glickson, who founded Canary Wireless, said, "Wi-Fi is booming, and people need an easy way to find hot spots they can use."

Optimal Drive Partitioning Dear Fred; Thank you for your fine newsletter and all the great information you provide. I will definitely renew my Plus subscription.   Now I have a question that I would like to see discussed.  I have read in one or two different publications that if you're formatting a new hard drive or reformatting an older one for some reason, that it is well to set the drive up in three [3] different partitions.  One for your O/S and Drivers, one for your Applications and one for your Data.   Now I can see the advantages...

The Reg launches downloads site By Team Register Published Thursday 16th December 2004 12:05 GMT Site offer We’re absolutely delighted in the run-up to the Festive Season™ to be able to offer our readers a little something from the Vulture Central “get-something-for-free-pay-nothing-ever” department.Indeed, we’re sure that fans of El Reg will find this a refreshing change from the inexorable “buy-now-pay-2020-at-86%-APR” Yule orgy of capitalism which has so sullied the spirit of Christmas.So, with all temptation to utter "bah humbug" pushed firmly from our minds, we direct you immediately to our all-new downloads service, offering a range of gratis and shareware...

Corporate PCs 'riddled with spyware' By John Leyden Published Thursday 2nd December 2004 17:23 GMT Corporate systems are riddled with spyware, according to a study by an anti-spyware firm. Companies voluntarily using Webroot's Corporate SpyAudit tool had an average of 20 nasties per PC, Webroot reports.Most of the items found were harmless cookies. But average five per cent of the PCs scanned had system monitors and 5.5 per cent had Trojan horse programs, the two most nefarious and potentially malicious forms of spyware. The audit - based on scans of more than 10,000 systems, used by more than 4,100 companies...