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Showing posts from May, 2015

IBM Shows Off a Quantum Computing Chip

IBM Shows Off a Quantum Computing Chip A new superconducting chip made by IBM demonstrates a technique crucial to the development of quantum computers. When cooled down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the four dark elements at the center of the circuit in the middle of this image can represent digital data using quantum mechanical effects. A superconducting chip developed at IBM demonstrates an important step needed for the creation of computer processors that crunch numbers by exploiting the weirdness of quantum physics. If successfully developed, quantum computers could effectively take shortcuts through many calculations that are difficult for today’s computers. IBM’s new chip is the first to integrate the basic devices needed to build a quantum computer, known as qubits, into a 2-D grid. Researchers think one of the best routes to making a practical quantum computer would involve creating grids of hundreds or thousands of qubits working together. The circ

Getting started with the Facebook SDK for PHP

Getting started with the Facebook SDK for PHP The Facebook SDK for PHP provides developers with a modern, native library for accessing the Graph API and taking advantage of Facebook Login. Usually this means you're developing with PHP for a Facebook Canvas app, building your own website, or adding server-side functionality to an app that already uses the  Facebook SDK for JavaScript . Download the SDK The Facebook SDK for PHP v4 requires PHP 5.4 or greater. If you're using  Composer  as a package manager for PHP, which we recommend, installing the SDK is as easy as adding a require entry for the Facebook SDK for PHP to the  composer.json  file in the root of your project: { "require" : { "facebook/php-sdk-v4" : "4.0.*" } } Then run composer with the install parameter, and it will download the newest version. If you're using the autoloader as part of Composer, the Facebook namespace will be available for u

GraphQL Introduction

GraphQL Introduction May 1, 2015 by Nick Schrock At the React.js conference in late January 2015, we revealed our next major technology in the React family:  Relay . Relay is a new way of structuring client applications that co-locates data-fetching requirements and React components. Instead of placing data fetching logic in some other part of the client application – or embedding this logic in a custom endpoint on the server – we instead co-locate a  declarative  data-fetching specification alongside the React component. The language of this declarative specification is GraphQL. GraphQL was not invented to enable Relay. In fact, GraphQL predates Relay by nearly three years. It was invented during the move from Facebook's HTML5-driven mobile applications to purely native applications. It is a query language for graph data that powers the lion's share of interactions in the Facebook Android and iOS applications. Any user of the native iOS or Android app in the last