Free Republic

 AUSSIE MICROSOFT CALENDAR MESS The Commonwealth Games are coming to Melbourne in March this year http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/ and normally that would not matter to us except that it's going to cause a major upheaval for users of Microsoft Office, Exchange and Windows.  It'll mostly affect our Aussie friends but also anyone who deals with the Great Southern Land. The problem is also a sharp indictment of Microsoft's spotty support for changing time zones.  Changes in daylight savings arrangements do happen so paying customers of Windows and Office are entitled to expect more elegant technologies to deal with this real world situation.  ...

Welcome to the folding at home thread. The previous thread has gotten too large, so we move on to yet another. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's members, or it's founders, it is comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing, who have banded together, to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via Distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimers, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 777th place,...

OK, new thread to celebrate reaching a major milestone! Within a few hours Team FreeRepublic will be in the Top1000!!!! We should pass Dean for America, around noon tommorrow. Other liberal teams want to challenge us (DUmmies and Kos) but we're humiliating them beyond description.

Apologies if this is cross posted on the wrong board... While surfing around yesterday, I saw this post... http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1547014/posts?page=1,50 I got to thinking, which was a big mistake cause it started me crying. You see, I've lost more than 7 family members to Cancer...the most recent was my sweet Niece. She was only 31 and left behind 2 awesome little boys, and devastated my Sister, as well. I have friends that have lost loved ones too, and some that are still living in fear of the day that the test comes back with bad old news...again. Smile is a friend...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 104 processors and 76 users. We have a number of new users in the team, with Clara Lou, fzx12345, SamfromLivingston, brityank, manwiththehands and Tami all popping onto the hit list this week. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. Malsua is continuing to add systems and now accounts for 10% of the FR total. Great...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 65 processors. ArgentCent is the latest to have joined our happy band of folders and jumps in at # 36 with his first completed WU. We now have 51 members in the team, and about 45 active participants. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. One of these will probably be the new Numero Uno...

FreeRepublic Team Ranked #1,550 (of 41,708 teams)

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...