IBM says it has made a significant advance towards creating mind-bendingly powerful quantum computers with it superconducting 3D qubit device.

With experts hoping to construct a full working quantum computer in the next decade or so, the ability by IBM boffins to reduce errors in quantum processing and withhold information has made this even more likely.

Qubits, or quantum bits, are the basic units of information used to process information in a quantum computer. Unlike ‘bits’ used in regular computers, which can switch between 0 and 1, quantum bits can be either 0 or 1. Rather more perplexingly, the weird world of quantum mechanics means that they can also be both at the same time.

It is this ability to exist in multiple states that opens up potential for massively increased computing power.

Alan Turing, born a century ago this year, is best known for his wartime code-breaking and for inventing the 'Turing machine' – the concept at the heart of every computer today. But his legacy extends much further: he founded the field of artificial intelligence, proposed a theory of biological pattern formation and speculated about the limits of computation in physics. In this collection of features and opinion pieces, Nature celebrates the mind that, in a handful of papers over a tragically short lifetime, shaped many of the hottest fields in science today.

Sebastian Krahmer (@steaIth, c-skills) made and released a nice SSH/HTTP(S) multiplexer: sshttp. Such a program is needed when you want to share your HTTP (or HTTPS) port with SSH to be able to use SSH when behind a network that only allows outbound connections to HTTP (or HTTPS) and does not bother to do protocol inspection. Learn more by reading the readme.

I was previously using sslh but sshttp has a killer feature: it uses Linux IP_TRANSPARENT feature with netfilter trickery (marking + specific routing table) to pass the original IP to destination (sshd or httpd). Since it's a great program, not necessarily easy to set up (not yet? packaged), in this post I'm sharing my setup.

Microprocessor Systems 1 is a one-semester course taken by third year Electronic, Electronic/Computer and Computer Engineering students. It covers the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of a typical microprocessor- based computer, the Motorola MC68000, and equips students with a knowledge of the architecture, the associated assembly language, input/output programming techniques, exceptions (including interrupts) and exception-handling techniques. The module concludes with a simple introduction to the bus and instruction timing estimation.
This course is intended to enable students to design and develop programmes and programme 'architectures', to test and debug programs and to analyse and modify their execution behaviour, based on a thorough familiarity with the low-level architecture of a computer.

The Reverse Asynchronous JavaTM and XML (AJAX) technology enables dynamic content to be delivered to the browser, thus improving application performance by eliminating the need for constant polling. This technology can be used in many scenarios to deliver an excellent user experience.

For example, a news portal can push the news to a user's browser when it becomes available, without needing user action and without needing to keep refreshing or re-rendering the whole page. Another scenario is to display an up-to-date task list to which the server pushes the new task once it is created, so that the task owner doesn't need to keep pulling the updates.

In this article we go through all the steps needed to leverage Reverse AJAX in portlets using Dojo CometD implementation. We develop a Task List portlet that displays a set of tasks assigned to the logged-in user and to which the server keeps pushing any new tasks, using reverse AJAX.

A federal appeals court is rejecting an appeal from a bank-fraud defendant who has been ordered to decrypt her laptop so its contents can be used in her criminal case.

Colorado federal authorities seized the encrypted Toshiba laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu in 2010 with valid court warrants while investigating alleged mortgage fraud, and demanded she decrypt it by typing in her password. In January, U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn ordered the woman, who faces decades in prison if convicted, to decrypt the laptop by the end of February.

Her attorney appealed, hoping to win a reprieve based on the assertion that being forced to decrypt her laptop amounts to a breach of the woman’s Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination.

Forcing a criminal suspect to decrypt hard drives so their contents can be used by prosecutors is a breach of the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

Nach all den Diskussionen um die journalistischen und ethischen Standards bei Fefes Blog möchte ich nun an die Öffentlichkeit treten und einen lange unbeachteten Punkt in den Diskurs werfen: die Arbeitsbedingungen in der Redaktion von Fefes Blog.

Unter vorgehaltener Hand werden diese oft mit denen der Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter und Transgender-Berufstätigen bei FoxConn verglichen: Unter unwürdigen Umständen müssen die Schreiberlinge mit einem menschenfeindlichen Zeitdruck klarkommen, selbständig CMS ohne jegliche GUI bedienen und die Zumutungen eines cholerischen Chefs ertragen. Die im Webteam beschäftigten Arbeiter mussten in mühevoller monatelanger Kleinarbeit XSLT-Filter schreiben, um jegliche Spuren des 150 Server starken verteilten Echtzeit-Java- und php-Backends zu vertuschen, außerdem Randgruppen-Browser für die Inkompatibilitätstests benutzen und Markov-Ketten-Generatoren für Füllabsätze trainieren.

Steve Kordek, who revolutionized the game of pinball in the 1940s by designing what became the standard two-flipper machine found in bars and penny arcades around the world, died on Sunday at a hospice in Park Ridge, Ill. He was 100.

We spend an inordinate amount of time shaving 10% off our backend time but often forget the golden rule, in general the largest bottleneck is your front end. We should not feel powerless to attack the front end performance issues and can do quite a lot to improve JavaScript bottlenecks and perceived user performance.

I recently figured out how to use Socket.io and Node.js to control the speed of a CSS3 animation with a synthesizer

Nachdem der Vertrag mit dem Verleger-Zusammenschluss Independent Publisher Group ausgelaufen ist, wollte Amazon in einer neuen Vereinbarung geringere Einkaufspreise für die E-Books aushandeln. Nachdem die Verhandlungen zu keinem Ergebnis kamen entschied Amazon, die elektronischen Bücher aus dem Verkauf zu nehmen. Gedruckte Ausgaben der Verleger waren dabei nicht betroffen.

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Amazons Machtdemonstration könnte das E-Book Geschäft nachhaltig beeinflussen. Experten gehen davon aus, dass der Kindle-Hersteller seine marktbeherrschende Stellung auch in Zukunft bei Preisverhandlungen ausspielen könnte.

Bei einem Jahresumsatz von 31,4 Milliarden € erlöst Amazon 995,7 € pro Sekunde. Die Verkaufsschlager waren die Kindle-Lesegeräte und das neue Amazon Tablet Kindle Fire. Das Tablet habe sich laut Konzernchef Bezos „sowohl in den USA als auch in Europa“ hervorragend verkauft. Das Wachstum des vergangenen Jahres ging allerdings auf Kosten des Gewinns, der um beinahe die Hälfte eingebrochen ist.

Django, a Python web framework, consists of an object-relational mapper (ORM), back-end controller, and template system. MongoDB is a document-oriented database (also known as a NoSQL database) effective for scaling and high performance. In this article, learn how to call MongoDB from Python (using MongoEngine), and integrate it into a Django project in lieu of the built-in ORM. A sample web interface for creating, reading, writing, and updating data to the MongoDB back end is included.

In einer Untersuchung, die SPIEGEL ONLINE vorliegt, hat Voss untersucht, welche Gruppe von Autofahrern am meisten geblitzt wird - und welche die meisten Unfälle verursacht. Sein Fazit ist eindeutig: "Radarkontrollen führen, so wie sie aktuell durchgeführt werden, nicht zu einer Verminderung des Unfallrisikos."

"Wir kaufen euch eure Gefängnisse ab, wenn ihr uns 90% Füllstand garantiert". Die US-Bundesländer sind praktisch alle hoch verschuldet, insofern ist der Anreiz der kurzzeitigen Cash-Infusion hoch.

Das mit dem Füllstand ist ja auch genau der Anreiz, den man der Regierung einer modernen Demokratie geben will! Der Anreiz für den Staat, die Leute mehr zu kriminalisieren! Ich sehe da großartige Synergieeffekte mit ACTA und den anderen Gesetzesentwürfen der Contentmafia!

Die Berufung bei dem Ami, der gerichtlich zum Rausrücken seines Laptop-Passworts gezwungen wurde, wurde nicht angenommen. Damit ist das jetzt "Case Law", dass das Zeugnisverweigerungsrecht in den USA nicht mehr gilt

However, if the code is not recognized, Internet Explorer will accept it anyway and allow the requester full access to the user for third-party cookie purposes. Google didn’t do this “in a manner consistent with the technology,” Microsoft suggests, as it used the following message:

“P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."

Microsoft described being able to bypass its browser’s privacy settings in this way as “a nuance in the P3P specification,” but as was pointed out by El Reg last year and in academic papers in 2010, it’s a tactic that’s been widely used to circumvent the privacy wishes of the browser user. Microsoft is one of a dwindling band of companies still using P3P, and this latest admission will increase the decay in support.

Most programmers think the XQuery language was developed to satisfy a niche market: A data querying and transformation language designed to handle XML data. In the case of relational databases, the prevailing practice is to use SQL for non-XML data and use XQuery for XML. This article makes the case that the powerful programming constructs available in the XQuery language make it a better programming language than SQL, and that this improvement in expressiveness and ease of use is enough to warrant the design of databases with an increasing emphasis on XML data types.

GitHub’s geektastic 14,000-square-foot loft mirrors its mission: to democratize computer programming. GitHub.com is best thought of as Facebook for geeks. Instead of uploading videos of your cat, you upload software. Anyone can comment on your code and add to it and build it into something better. The trick is that it decentralizes programming, giving everyone a new kind of control. GitHub has shaken up the way software gets written, making coding a little more anarchic, a little more fun, and a lot more productive.

And the software world loves it. GitHub now has more than 1.3 million users, and over 2 million source code repositories — eight times the tally from just two years ago. ... Two years ago, GitHub was a team of eight, holding company meetings in San Francisco cafes. ... In July, they took over the former digs of blogging outfit Six Apart. GitHub is growing fast — and it hasn’t taken a dime of venture funding.