By(Image: D-Wave)Can’t wait to get your hands on a shiny new quantum computer? The good news is that you can buy one today, if you have $15 million to spare. The bad news is nobody knows if it actually is one.“You can buy a quantum computer today – if you have $15 million spare”D-Wave Systems of Burnaby, Canada, is the upstart breaking in on the quantum action.

Its flagship model, known as D-Wave Two, or Vesuvius, contains 512 superconducting loops of niobium metal, each containing a Josephson junction. But be warned, this is no quantum laptop.

The whizzy-looking black box it’s housed in, along with its supporting cryogenic system and supercomputer interface, fills a room 10 metres squared. Perhaps surprisingly then it runs on just 15 kilowatts, less than a thousandth of the power devoured by Tianhe-2, the world’s fastest supercomputer.A full 512-qubit performance would leave rivals in the dust, but D-Wave doesn’t worry about being able to address each qubit individually, with having all the qubits entangled together or even operating properly as Josephson junctions. So it’s not clear that they actually are qubits, and as to whether it really outperforms ordinary computers.“We’re not in the business of trying to prove whether it’s quantum or not,” says Bo Ewald, CEO of D-Wave USA. “We don’t know how much coherence we’ve got, but we’ve shown that eight qubits were entangled and some external work showed 40 were entangled.” He believes all the loops are entangled, but doesn’t want to spend megabucks proving it: “Trying to measure this means turning it into an experimental physics device.

We’re more focused on just using it as a computer.”(Image: D-Wave). It’s a computer with only one application: an optimisation algorithm that searches for the best solution to a given problem. That’s enough for D-Wave’s first two customers. Google is using it in machine learning for its head-mounted display Google Glass; so far it has put the D-Wave machine to work finding quicker ways to recognise certain objects in an image.

Lifeless planet gameplay. Broward Marine subsequently added seven more AMS-Class, 173′ Minesweepers for the U.S. At the height of the Minesweeper program, Broward Marine became the largest private employer in Broward County, Florida. Broward Marine was building a 144' minesweeper every 45 days and a 173' minesweeper every 90 days.

Those can be transplanted back into traditional computers, making them more efficient at the task.Lockheed Martin is using the machine to find out where its aircraft software might go wrong. The company gives its aircraft control system a bad result – such as the aircraft nose going in the wrong direction when the pilot pulls up on the stick – and asks the D-Wave machine to look for input scenarios that might lead there.D-Wave thinks it’ll find more customers in medical imaging, financial planning and delivery scheduling, but the company is open to offers.

It might also be worth noting that Google has now started investing in other quantum technologies: in September the company announced a partnership with UCSB to build an Xmon-based quantum computer.Read more: ““More on these topics:.

It's an incredible stretch to extrapolate from WinRT and suggest that x86 Windows will disable running arbitrary executables anytime in the foreseeable future. Surely no one actually believes that Microsoft is planning to turn away the huge mass of customers currently doing that with Enterprise apps, random Shareware, etc in Windows 7/8 any time soon.

We aren't going to agree about the ad. I literally never saw it in Minesweeper until I went looking for it today, and it's clearly a generic CPM based display ad instead of something invasive based on your activity. Focusing on these nearly-hidden ads in ancillary apps seems like the pinnacle of bikeshedding to me.

edit: Not to say that your opinion is wrong or mine is better. I just can't get on board with all of the fuss I've been seeing lately about these ads. Having been using Windows 8 as my primary desktop OS for about a year, I never see the ads. I have to hunt for them to even verify that they're still there when another blog post pops up about them.