Free Republic

Typically, today’s budget PCs come with 4GB of RAM. A mid-range configuration may offer double that, and high-end gaming systems and workstations go as high as 16GB or more. There’s no doubt which way the wind’s blowing, either: Windows 8 supports up to 128GB of physical memory (assuming you’re running the 64-bit edition), while Windows 8 Pro can go up to 512GB. Does anyone really need this much RAM? Memory isn’t as expensive as it used to be, but there’s obviously no point paying for gigabytes of RAM from which you’ll receive no material gain. Does more equal faster? Many...

A Hongqi-10 ship-based missile defence cell installed on a Chinese warship. Photo: SCMP Pictures China has shown off the People's Liberation Army's latest hardware on primetime state television, an advanced short-range missile defence system said to have a “high success rate” destroying incoming missiles and aircraft. The Hongqi-10 (Reg Flag 10) surface-to-air missile was shown in China Central Television's evening news bulletin Wednesday being fired from ships and land-based mobile launchers, and exploding in the sky on impact with its target. It will protect warships against rockets over a limited area, and will be used alongside an “area defence system”...

At a time when many U.S. defense programs are facing the budget ax, Tucson-based Raytheon Missile Systems is looking forward to an important stream of new international business from a ship-defense missile system co-developed with Germany. On Wednesday, Raytheon commemorated the first delivery of a new version of the Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) to the U.S. Navy with a ceremony at its sprawling airport-area missile plant. RAM — which gets its name from its spinning action in flight — is a 30-year-old, cooperative program between the U.S. and German governments with industry support from Raytheon and RAMsys of Germany. Deployed...

The two-week partial shutdown of the U.S. government, affecting 800,000 federal employees, has experts uncertain about how automotive sales will be affected. Ford, GM and Ram all seem to be expecting strong sales numbers for October, especially in the booming pickup truck segment, but none seem certain how the shutdown could impact consumers' future big-ticket spending decisions. That's because the shutdown increased consumer anxiety about the overall U.S. economy, according to a story by Consumer Affairs Editor Kelsey Mays at Cars.com, and consumer confidence has not increased much since the shutdown ceased. Apparently there's no shortage of opinions about how...

Hardware makers often sing the praises of their latest and greatest flash memory, but the folks at Crossbar are ready to show them up with resistive RAM (RRAM) that they've been quietly working on. Compared to NAND, RRAM comes in at half the size and boasts 20 times faster write speeds (140MB/s), reads data at 17MB per second, guzzles 20 times less power and has 10 times more endurance. Since RRAM is non-volatile memory, it can keep data even when it's powered off, á la NAND. As if that weren't enough, 3D stacking construction allows for several terabytes of storage,...

Raytheon ship-defense missile passes Navy testing The Navy has completed the first series of developmental and operational testing of a ship-defense missile system made by Tucson-based Raytheon Missile Systems. In at-sea testing of Raytheon’s Rolling Airframe Missile Block 2, the system's missiles engaged two targets in “tactical dual-salvo scenarios” designed to demonstrate the advanced missile's defensive capabilities. The missiles “successfully engaged high-speed, maneuvering and sub-sonic, maneuvering targets,” with all four missiles meeting test objectives, Raytheon said in a news release. Raytheon and its manufacturing partner, RAMSYS of Germany, were awarded the second U.S. Navy RAM Block 2 low-rate production contract...

In a court settlement with the EPA, Edge Products, a manufacturer of electronic power modules for diesel engines, has agreed to pay a $500,000 fine for manufacturing and selling electronic devices that allowed owners of Chevy, GMC, Ford and Dodge/Ram diesel pickup trucks (2007 and later) to remove the programming for diesel particulate filters from their vehicles. The Ogden, Utah, company is reported to have sold more than 9,000 units from January 2009 through April 2011. This is said to have resulted in an estimated 158 tons of excess particulate matter emissions — the equivalent of 422 new long-haul semitrailers...

US Navy Fires Raytheon Griffin® Missile From RAM Launcher Naval-launched Griffin demonstrates sea-based anti-ship capability NATIONAL HARBOR, Md., April 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Navy achieved a first when it fired Raytheon Company's (NYSE: RTN) combat-proven Griffin B missile from a Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) launcher. "Griffin enables sailors to defend against small, fast-moving surface craft employed by pirates and other non-traditional threats," said Harry Schulte, vice president of Raytheon Missile Systems' Air Warfare Systems product line. "Griffin provides warfighters with a powerful capability that is ready today without the time and expense of development because the weapon is...

Micron is getting into a spin over STT-MRAM and getting into bed with a Singaporean research institute to develop it. The background is that NAND is facing increasing problems over write endurance and write power as the process size reduces from 29-20nm to 19-10nm ... and then below 10nm. The problem is exacerbated as bits are added to the cells to make 2-bit and 3-bit multi-level cell flash. NAND suppliers and technology developers are anticipating this by developing follow-on technologies centred around the idea of non-volatile, resistive RAM (RRAM), which is faster to access than flash and has a longer...

Korean researchers working out of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology report in a paper published in Nature Materials, that they've been able to create a non-volatile Resistance RAM (ReRam) chip capable of withstanding a trillion read/write cycles, all with a switching time of just 10ns (about a million times faster than current flash chips), paving the way for a possible upgrade to flash memory cards. ReRam chips are non-volatile, meaning they can retain stored information in the absence of power and are currently made using a Ta2O5 (tantalum) film, the new chips developed by the Samsung team uses Ta2O5-x/TaO2-x...

Press Releases Contact: Brendan Daly/Nadeam Elshami 202-226-7616 For Immediate Release 03/20/2010 Pelosi on Health Reform Vote: ‘We Are on the Verge of Making Great History for the American People’ Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats were joined by President Barack Obama this afternoon for a Democratic Caucus Meeting in the auditorium of the Capitol Visitor Center before tomorrow’s vote on health insurance reform. Below are the Speaker’s remarks: “Thank you all very much. “Thank you, John Larson. I receive your kind words on behalf of all of our courageous Members of the House of Representatives who want...

The following excerpt is from the blog of Republican Representative John Boehner of Ohio: Democrats Prepare "Slaughter Solution" to Ram Unpopular Health Care Takeover Through Congress Without a VoteThe twisted scheme by which Democratic leaders plan to bend the rules to ram President Obama's massive health care legislation through Congress now has a name: the Slaughter Solution.The Slaughter Solution is a plan by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), the Democratic chair of the powerful House Rules Committee and a key ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), to get the health care legislation through the House without an actual vote on the...

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Democratic leaders Thursday walked their rank-and-file members through last-minute agreements that could move President Barack Obama's overhaul of the nation's health care system a step closer to reality. Although some issues remained unresolved—including a divisive battle over restricting taxpayer funding of abortion—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said: "We have enough to move forward." White House officials and congressional Democratic leaders met Wednesday evening in Pelosi's office. Aides said they agreed on scaling back a health insurance tax that unions object to, and on gradually closing the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap. They were not far apart...

Googling to my heart's content on a recent eve, I decided to match "health care" with "ram" to see what would happen. What I got was about 9.8 million hits, some of them right on the nose and reflecting the current conservative meme that after more than a year, several votes, countless presidential speeches and having to look upon the face of Harry Reid some 10,000 times, the health care bill is being "rammed" through Congress - an absurdity that now has currency through sheer repetition. It is not exactly the renowned vaunted Big Lie, just a miserable little one....

Malaysia’s first submarine, the Scorpene-class KD Tunku Abdul Rahman, successfully underwent underwater trials in the South China Sea yesterday. Defence Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said a technical team was aboard during the submarine’s dive to monitor its progress under water. “The dive was successfully completed by 4pm. Everything was pronounced to be okay,” Dr Ahmad Zahid said in an SMS. The trials were carried out at the Royal Malaysian Navy base in Teluk Sepanggar, Sabah. It was earlier reported that the KD Tunku Abdul Rahman was unable to dive after a mechanical defect was discovered by engineers....

Working on someone's PC which can only handle 768MB of memory. The problem is this: crucial.com says there is a 32MB (stick?) somewhere installed in the PC, so until I find a way to disable that 32MB, I can't install one 512MB stick and another 256MB stick to equal the 768MB (because that "phantom" 32MB puts me overboard). Right now, if I put in both a 256 and a 512, it's too much memory and the screen freezes up and I get the dreaded BSOD. Any idea where crucial.com is picking up this 32MB? My guess is that it's the...

As we all know by now, auto sales are down, dropping by around 18% in 2008. Pick-ups actually fared worse, posting a decline of 26.5% over the same period. Still, the Ford F-150 and Chevy Silverado maintained their positions as the two best selling vehicles in the United States, and these two manufacturers managed to post incremental increases in total pick-up truck market share after all was said and done. Those increases came directly from the competition, especially Dodge. The full-size Ram truck managed to see its piece of the pie dwindle by almost one full percentage point. Dodge's drop...

I had a Dell Dimension 8200 computer (a full height tower CPU) that I bought new and owned for a number of years, then sold. I recently discovered two memory chips (or what I thought were memory chips) that as best I could recall, I removed when I upgraded the computer memory. The OEM memory of the computer was 512MB PC800 RDRAM (2x256). I posted the a description of two memory chips on ebay, along with a picture of the them, and sold and shipped them. I just got an email from the buyer claiming this: "What you sent is...

Intel Corporation and STMicroelectronics reached a key industry milestone today as they began shipping prototype samples of a future product using a new, innovative memory technology called Phase Change Memory (PCM). The prototypes are the first functional silicon to be delivered to customers for evaluation, bringing the technology one step closer to adoption. The memory device, codenamed "Alverstone" uses PCM, a promising new memory technology providing very fast read and write speeds at lower power than conventional flash, and allows for bit alterability normally seen in RAM. PCM has long been a topic of discussion for research and development, and...

Sick Rams Used as Ancient Bioweapons Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Once, a Weapon Nov. 28, 2007 -- Infected rams and donkeys were the earliest bioweapons, according to a new study which dates the use of biological warfare back more than 3,300 years. According to a review published in the Journal of Medical Hypotheses, two ancient populations, the Arzawans and the Hittites, engaged "in mutual use of contaminated animals" during the 1320-1318 B.C. Anatolian war. "The animals were carriers of Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularemia," author Siro Trevisanato, a molecular biologist based in Oakville, Ontario, Canada told Discovery News....