"At the heart of the computers made by HashFast and similar startups such as KnCMiner and Butterfly Labs is a chip known as an ASIC, or an application specific integrated circuit. Unlike the general purpose Intel (INTC) chip powering a PC or an ARM (ARMH)processor in a smartphone, an ASIC typically performs a single function extremely well. A security company might make an ASIC to speed up the encryption of data, for example. For Bitcoin-mining toolmakers like HashFast, the goal is to make an ASIC that is precisely tuned to crunch Nakamoto’s algorithms. 'It would take 70,000 of Intel’s fastest chips to match one of ours,' de Castro says...
In August, Austin (Tex.)-based CoinTerra announced two Bitcoin computer designs, which it dubbed GoldStrike and TerraMiner. So far the company has $20 million in presales. Ravi Iyengar, a veteran chip designer, runs the startup. Iyengar has worked at Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and, most recently, Samsung, where he led a team that developed chips for the company’s phones and tablets. After hearing about Bitcoin, Iyengar quit his job to use his experience to outrace other Bitcoin-mining startups. Iyengar has watched Intel, IBM, Apple, Samsung, and other heavyweights slug it out in the chip business for years. 'No arms race in the history of the chip industry even comes close to this,' he says."
"In historical studies, prosopography is an investigation of the common characteristics of a historical group, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable, by means of a collective study of their lives, in multiple career-line analysis. Prosopographical research has the aim of learning about patterns of relationships and activities through the study of collective biography, and proceeds by collecting and analysing statistically relevant quantities of biographical data about a well-defined group of individuals. This makes it a valuable technique for studying many pre-modern societies."
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"Bringing art from exhibition spaces to urban streets, the figurines disrupt one's preoccupation in the metropolis and ask city dwellers to be more aware of their surroundings and notice the small details. All figurines in Foundin are individuals seeking to be found in one way or another, just like every one of us. By shrinking human figures to miniature plastic models, the project places a miniature city within a city and explores how we, the higher and larger beings, interact with much smaller counterparts."
4. Massive, colorful isometric drawings of the world's nuclear plants.
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"Copilevitz was on hand again in 2001, when Florida lawmakers made their own attempt to crack down in high-cost fundraising. They passed a law forcing charities to declare on mailers and fliers how much they spend on solicitors.
Copilevitz filed suit on behalf of two charities, including the Committee for Missing Children, No. 13 on the Times/CIR list... He won yet again. Copilevitz convinced a federal judge that spending 86 percent of donations on professional solicitors – as the Committee for Missing Children had done that year – does not make a charity unworthy of support."
Today's 1957 Language Tip:
-AL NOUNS. There is a tendency to invent or revive unnecessary verbal nouns of this form. The many that have passed into common use (as trial, arrival, refusal, acquittal, proposal) have thereby established their right to exist. But when words of some age (as revisal, refutal, appraisal [q.v.], accusal) have failed to become really familiar & remained in the stage in which the average man cannot say with confidence offhand that they exist, the natural conclusion is that there is no work for them that cannot be adequately done by the more ordinary verbal nouns in -ion (revision), -ation (refutation), & -ment (appraisement). When there is need on an isolated occasion for a verbal noun that shall have a different shade of meaning from those that are current (e.g. accusal may suggest itself as fitter to be followed by an objective genitive than accusation; cf. the accusal of a murder, the accusation of a murder), or that shall serve when none already exists (there is e.g. no noun beheadment), it is better to make shift with the gerund (the accusing, the beheading) than to revive an unfamiliar accusal or invent beheadal. The use of new -al nouns, however, is due only in part to a legitimate desire for the exactly appropriate form. To some writers the out-of-the-way word is dear for its own sake, or rather is welcome as giving an air of originality to a sentence that if ordinarily expressed would be detected as commonplace. They are capable of writing bequeathal for bequest, or allowal for allowance. Except for this dislike of the normal word, we should have had account instead of recountal in Of more dramatic interest is the recountal of the mission imposed upon Sir James Lacaita. Surprisal, supposal, decrial may be among the hundreds of needless -al words that have been actually used.
Observe that appraisal has now established its right to exist.
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