As far as I understand it (I do some research in quantum physics but NOT quantum information), this quantum cryptography works roughly due to the fact that measurement collapses the quantum wavefunction (destroys the nice quantum properties) of the photons being transmitted.
However recent work shows that not all quantum measurements have to collapse the wavefunction. Thus, there may already be a chink in the QC armour.
Quantum computing uses entanglement of any "quantum things" e.g. atoms, photons -- not just electrons -- as a resource to perform massively parallel computations.
Whilst a decent quantum computer appears to be pretty far off, quantum computers with about 8 qubits already exist. Scalability is the hard thing since the more qubits you add, the worse your problems with decoherence (where the environment messes up your lovely quantum entanglement) become.
I'm working in a lab doing "Quantum Chaos" experiments (manipulating cold atoms to investigate the difference between quantum and chaotic physics). We use the free (as in beer) version of RTLinux to run all our experiments, as timing is important and we didn't want to implement a hard real-time system. I coded most of the gui for the experimental interface using Borland Kylix and everything works quite nicely (apart from some evil memory leaks).
The real problem is the hardware - a real guru set that up for us. He wrote the "drivers" for the I/O cards himself (although that's meant to be a little easier in RTLinux than for normal linux) and also got a scientific grade CCD camera working even though the only linux drivers available were outrageously outdated. Sadly, we will definitely face some issues in the future if we want to upgrade to a new kernel!
Personally, I think the only way to move data files around is with a decent shell. Rename is perfect for all those times I put the wrong parameter in the file names of 160 different data sets. Most of the time our lab works quite smoothly with regard to the OS itself, and it's certainly an improvement on the old Win95/Scientific workplace combo of the past!
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As far as I understand it (I do some research in quantum physics but NOT quantum information), this quantum cryptography works roughly due to the fact that measurement collapses the quantum wavefunction (destroys the nice quantum properties) of the photons being transmitted. However recent work shows that not all quantum measurements have to collapse the wavefunction. Thus, there may already be a chink in the QC armour.
Quantum computing uses entanglement of any "quantum things" e.g. atoms, photons -- not just electrons -- as a resource to perform massively parallel computations. Whilst a decent quantum computer appears to be pretty far off, quantum computers with about 8 qubits already exist. Scalability is the hard thing since the more qubits you add, the worse your problems with decoherence (where the environment messes up your lovely quantum entanglement) become.
I'm working in a lab doing "Quantum Chaos" experiments (manipulating cold atoms to investigate the difference between quantum and chaotic physics). We use the free (as in beer) version of RTLinux to run all our experiments, as timing is important and we didn't want to implement a hard real-time system. I coded most of the gui for the experimental interface using Borland Kylix and everything works quite nicely (apart from some evil memory leaks).
The real problem is the hardware - a real guru set that up for us. He wrote the "drivers" for the I/O cards himself (although that's meant to be a little easier in RTLinux than for normal linux) and also got a scientific grade CCD camera working even though the only linux drivers available were outrageously outdated. Sadly, we will definitely face some issues in the future if we want to upgrade to a new kernel!
Personally, I think the only way to move data files around is with a decent shell. Rename is perfect for all those times I put the wrong parameter in the file names of 160 different data sets. Most of the time our lab works quite smoothly with regard to the OS itself, and it's certainly an improvement on the old Win95/Scientific workplace combo of the past!