Category Archives: Old posts

Quantum Chip Helps Crack Code (IEEE News)

Posted on by
Reply

BY ANNE-MARIE CORLEY // SEPTEMBER 2009

Photo: Jonathan Matthews/University of Bristol

3 September 2009—Modern cryptography relies on the extreme difficulty computers have in factoring huge numbers, but an algorithm that works only on a quantum computer finds factors easily. Today in Science, researchers at the University of Bristol, in England, report the first factoring using this method—called Shor’s algorithm—on a chip-scale quantum computer, bringing the field a tiny step closer to realizing practical quantum computation and code cracking.
Quantum computers are based on the quantum bit, or qubit. A bit in an ordinary computer can be either a 1 or a 0, but a qubit can be 1, 0, or a ”superposition” of both at the same time. That makes solving certain problems—like factoring—exponentially faster, because it lets the computer try many more solutions at once. The race is on to find the ideal quantum computer architecture, with qubit contenders that include ions, electrons, superconducting circuits, and in the University of Bristol’s case, photons.
Fork me on GitHub

Flexible Inorganic LED Displays ( IEEE News)

Posted on by
Reply
by John Rogers

Photo: D. Stevenson and C. Conway/Beckman Institute/University of Illinois


21 August 2009—Organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, are seen as the successor to liquid crystal technology for small, pixel-dense displays like the ones in laptops, smartphones, and digital cameras. Conventional inorganic LEDs, which are poised to put incandescent and fluorescent lightbulbs out to pasture, have never been in the race, because the processing techniques used to make them don’t allow scaling down to the resolution required for a pocket-size display.

Analysis of openSUSE 11.1

Posted on by
Reply


Hi there. It has been some time since I wrote my own news. The reason is that lately IEEE has had these great articles that I wanted to share with you. Hoped you like them. Now back to business.

I have for long been a fan of Fedora due to its openness and available packets for almost everything and moreover flexibility of RedHat helped me through the deadly marshes of Linux world. However Fedora lacked something. That something was user friendliness. True it does have community friendliness but it lacks the friendliness which new users who have no experience with linux need. I new user to Linux must not be chocked to death with driver problems or repository clashes and dual-boot bugs.

OpenSUSE has many pros but many out-of-the-box bugs too. Let’s start from the installation.
Continue reading →

The Universal Handset

Posted on by
Reply


BY PETER KOCH, RAMJEE PRASAD // APRIL 2009

Time was when most radio sets had no software at all, and those that had any didn’t do much with it. But Joseph Mitola III, an engineer working for a company called Eâ¿¿Systems (now part of Raytheon), envisioned something very different—a mostly digital radio that could be reconfigured in fundamental ways just by changing the code running on it. In a remarkably prescient article he wrote in 1992 for the IEEE National Telesystems Conference, he dubbed it software-defined radio (SDR).
A few short years later, Mitola’s vision became reality. The mid-1990s saw the advent of military radio systems in which software controlled most of the signal processing digitally, enabling one set of electronics to work on many different frequencies and communications protocols. The first example was the U.S. military’s Speakeasy radio, which allowed units from different branches of the armed forces to communicate effectively for the first time. But the technology was costly and rather unwieldy—the first design took up racks that only a large vehicle could carry around.