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This recent article about MIT's holographic display efforts might interest you.

Stick to c/c++. Read and learn everything these guys did and wrote: D.Knut, B.Stroustrup, G.Booch and so on. Some links: http://www.techreview.com/InfoTech/17831/page1/ http://sztywny.titaniumhosting.com/2006/07/23/stif f-asks-great-programmers-answers/

Payback depends on how you measure it.

If you measure it as "payback of the purchase price", it could be as little as 2.5 years, depending on the specific technology.

If you measure it as ERoEI, it's generally acknowledged by everyone except die-hard solar power advocates that the ratio of Energy Returned over Energy Input for solar is less than 1, unless you use very very recent strained Silicon-based technology, which barely hit break-even earlier this year.

If you use thin film technology the purchase price payback grows to 4 years, and the Payback ERoEI drops to about 0.8.

There's also the little problem of there being a shortage of polycrystaline Silicon, from which solar cells are made. This shortage is expected to last through at least 2008, since it takes about 3 years to build a manufacturing plant for it, and that's what would have to happen to reduce the cost overhead.

So for right now, any decision to switch to solar by Google is going to be an economic one, rather than an environmental one.

This makes sense, since Larry Page and Sergey Brin are invested in a Solar power startup, Nanosolar http://www.techreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=170 25&ch=biztech; they provided the initial seed funding, according to a release on Nanosolar's web site: http://www.nanosolar.com/pr5-6.htm (see second release at this page).

Since Nanosolar is a thin-film photovoltaic shop, we are looking at a longer economic payback time; their output capacity after their plant is built will be 430MW of cells per year, so this will eaither be the first run cells, or it will be about a day and a half of cell output at their full production capacity.

FWIW, the 1.6MW capacity is going to put them at ~1/500th of the total US Solar capacity, which as of this year is at 927MW, for just this one installation. Comparatively, total US solar capacity is only 85% of the output of one of the two reactors at Diablo Canyon (1087MW each), while total US wind power capacity is 10,000MW and growing by 3,000MW in 2006 alone, according th AWEA (the American Wind Energy Association).

-- Terry

..maybe check out HP's new air cooling rig instead.

http://www.techreview.com/printer_friendly_article .aspx?id=16963

Yeah, the ad... not very helpful.

Are you seriously sugesting that Suns decline had nothing to do with Microsofts tactics.

No. It's a dog-eat-dog world. It's sad, I know, but there is no use in whining about it too much. Sun's forte has always been its microprocessor design know-how, IMO. That's where they should have concentrated their passion and resources. And I'm not talking about going head to head against big boys like Intel and AMD. Intel and AMD are good at what they do (within their chosen paradigm) and no third party is going to unseat them. However there is a huge market for embedded processors. There is always room for improvements. There is even room for a revolution in the microprocessor business, seeing that the current paradigm has not changed much since the days of Babbage and Lady Lovelace. Aren't all CPUs optimized for the algorithm? Isn't it time we move to a different software model, one that will solve all the nastiest problem in computing: unreliability? I think so. This is Sun's opportunity to kick some ass, IMO. They may even have a chance to kill multiple birds with one stone. There is a possibility of unseating the all-powerful Microsoft/Intel/AMD/x86 cartel from its lofty perch. I'm sure many on this forum would like that.

Is Sun up to it? I don't think so. There is a need for vision as balls. Schwartz seems more like a "cafe latte" kind of guy. I don't hink he has what it takes. According to a recent article at Technology Review, he "failed to bring up two keys areas in Sun's past: semiconductors and microprocessor architecture". We'll see.

As a former security officer in the military, I can comment a little bit on the effectiveness of ID cards. A good high tech ID card, like the Army's new CAC card can be very effective in promoting security. It is hard for the average street crook or ID theft artist to re-create. It's not impossible to forge, but it takes a significant ammount of money and time. Here's the kicker though, loss of the ID card must be reported immediately and updated in a database that contains all ID information. Also, it's not enough to simply look at a card to verify someone's identity. Reference must be made to the database to ensure a forgery isn't being used. How will this create better security? It would allow the government to track terrorism suspects on a national basis (I know, loss of personal privacy is "bad", but that's one of the only ways to reduce the risk of domestic terrorism and nievety doesn't necessarily equal security). I have more to say, but I don't want to write a whole essay right here.

I think in a few years' time, we'll see technology that could be adapted to a garage electronics shop. Some things might still have to be purchased from a commercial vendor, like silicon wafers and such, but I've seen plenty of articles in MIT Technology Review during the last 5 years that really look like they could allow hobbyists to cheaply produce their own microelectronics.

I think the hard part is going to be getting our hands on the software needed to design the things though. Here's some info that might might get you started if you want to browse for more ideas - http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2004May/bch20040 525025304.htm

And banks.

not for us... unless you have a fiber line

In decent sized cities, more and more businesses are using fiber lines. And oh by the way, it's becoming more popular in homes too.

Still sound far-fetched?

Well according to this article http://www.techreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/fea ture_terror.asp a few of the terrorist organizations have put out edicts to use credit card fraud over the internet to fund there terrorist activities. Law enforcement should be doing more.

The article blurb referred to Technology Review as a "leading science journal". It isn't. It's a magazine. I like to think it's a good magazine, as I've written for it, but it is most definitely not a scientific journal.

If you like good analysis of current events with a liberal flavor, no one beats The New Yorker ' talk of the town'. You learn a lot about writing and argumentation just by reading their articles plus their cartoons have a well deserved fame. Too bad they almost never write about technology.

To follow current technological trends, you can turn to the MIT technology review is not as watered down as popular science but still is broad on coverage.

Finally, for bad algorithms and outdated programming techniques, you can waste your time with Dr. Dobbs Journal. I don't know if it's not what it used to be or if it has always been bad.

MS speach recognition is awful. Try Naturally Speaking Not great but from what I've seen and read it's the best out there.

Do nott forget to use a high quality headset (NOT a standalone microphone) such as one from Plantronics* or Logitech and try to get it posistioned the same way every time.

A short history on Naturally Speaking.
It was originally created by DragonSoft. Infact there was an article on the company and the Husband and Wife who started in in MIT's Technology Review back in the good ol days (around 1998) when you'd count off the weeks until the 1 issue per quarter would arrive.

They were then bought out by Lernout and Hauspie who had their own speach recognition software. Dragon Naturally Speaking was then integrated into L&H's product. If I recall correctly the integrated product didn't work very well.

L&H was then bought out by ScanSoft where Dragon Naturally Speaking lives today.

I'm not sure why I bothered to write all this (and I've probably got some of it wrong) this early in the morning. Oh well

-TMF

I've found you can get the plantronics headsets _much_ cheaper online. For example the Audio .90 which sells at circuit city for $30 can be had for $15

I recently read an article about hybrid cell phones that are capable of transparently switching to an in-range WiFi network to save money on calls. Phones like this would still be usable if there aren't hotspots everywhere, and better yet, if they become popular, they will produce demand to build even more hotspots.
One thing I worry about, however, is that free hotspots may become overcrowded with people carrying out high-bandwidth VOIP conversations. I guess operators of free hotspots will have to take up the practice of using the highest channel so that all the WiFi phones pick up the commercial networks first.

SANTA CLARA, Calif, June, 24, 2003 -- Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, HP, Intel Corporation, Princeton University, the University of Washington and more than 60 universities from around the world have joined together to form PlanetLab, a global test bed for inventing and testing prototype Internet applications and services. The researchers aim to spark a new era of innovation by using "overlay" networks to upgrade and expand the Internet's features and capabilities.

PlanetLab may lead to new ways of protecting the Internet from viruses and worms. It could also enable new capabilities, such as persistent storage, the idea of giving the Internet a "memory." For example, 100 years from now a piece of data could still be found, even though the original computer on which it was posted no longer exists. In addition, this research could influence the future design of servers and network processors.

Upgrading the Internet The Internet has been based on a small set of software protocols that direct routers inside the network to forward data from source to destination, while applications run on computers connected to the edges of the network. The simplicity of the software model enabled the Internet to rapidly scale into a critical global service; however, this success now makes it difficult to create and test new ways of protecting it from abuses, or from implementing innovative applications and services.

The PlanetLab concept was born when Intel researchers gathered a group of leading network and distributed systems researchers to discuss the implications of a new, emerging class of global services and applications on the Internet. This new class of services is designed to operate as "overlay" networks, which have emerged as a way of adding new capabilities to the Internet. The concept of an overlay or "on top of" approach might be familiar from text books where additional details are added to an image by laying a transparent sheet containing new graphics on top of an existing page. An example of this is overlaying an image of human muscles on top of an illustration of bones to show how the body works.

These overlay networks incorporate the Internet for packet forwarding, but integrate their own intelligent routers and servers on top of the Internet to enable new capabilities without affecting its performance today. These applications are decentralized, with pieces running on many machines spread across the global Internet, they can self-organize to form their own networks, and include some form of application processing inside the network (instead of at the edges), adding new intelligence and capabilities to the Internet.

One example of an overlay network enabling a new kind of Internet application is robust video multicasting. Today, a standard Web site that receives too many requests for the same video clip can bog down or crash; however, if this site were supported by an overlay network of smart routers and globally distributed content storage sites, it could redirect requests on-the-fly, sending them across the Internet to the nearest available content site to ensure the best viewing experience while keeping the site up and running.

Sometimes you just have to say screw it, w

He'd left it open to facilitate use by visitors, but no longer.

Mideast 'intelligence' is 90% political. The GOP think that everything's connected while Howard Dean's supporters think that nothing's connected. It's incredibly hard to disprove any connection. Heck, with Stanley Millgram's six degrees of separation theory and the recent evidence it's probably easy to establish connections between former Iraqi government officials and the taliban. To make these kinds of conclusions based on 3rd hand media reports is difficult.

The bottom line is that someone who killed 300,000 people who disagreed with him politically amidst other horrible acts has been arrested.

All of humanity should be celebrating that.

"the bit" Nanotube Transistors Make Memory referred to in my previous post. Scuse me.

Now, don't be TOO optimistic... This court upheld the Sonny Bono Perpetual Copyright Act. BUT, that perpetual copyright coupled with the insane powers the DMCA grats a copyright holder may sway them...

They tags may someday be that small (doubt it), but they will always need an antenna. Currently 1/2" is about the smallest realistic antenna.

Nothing says the antenna has to be straight, though.

Think before you post, people. If radio transmitting devices smaller than half an inch were impossible, why would the military be investing very heavily in stuff like this?!?

What if we could bill the HW, OS, and apps vendors for our lost time due to crashes? I'm sure systems would improve in a hurry!

What's needed is legislation making vendors liable for losses due to faulty computer systems. Remember, carmakers cared more about styling than safety until Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed alerted the industry and consumers to the need for things like safety belts. Now we have federal safety standards for automobiles.

I'm sure the libertarian-leaning tech community will freak out as soon as they read this. But "self-regulation" will only take the computer industry so far towards total reliability. As computer systems govern more aspects of our modern lives, government regulation seems inevitable in my view.

No, high voltage is much better for distributing power. Changing voltages used to be much harder with DC. It may still be for really high currents and voltages, I dunno.

Entirely correct. With the advent of high-power semiconductors, it is becoming possible to efficiently step down DC voltages for power transmission (Tech Review article, full text is unfortunately "premium content"). With DC transmission, considerable savings can be achieved because fewer conductors are needed - one DC line can be stepped down into a full array of AC voltages and phases for customer use.

Edison was still wrong, though - DC was entirely impractical in his time

Nicotine helps prevent Alzheimer's Disease, or at least reduce its severity. My Masters thesis was on this subject, and it seems there is a long-established correllation between smoking and lower-than-expected incidences of A.D. in the general population.

Put simply, nicotine may help because the brain cells destroyed by Alzheimer peptides respond to nicotine-like neurotransmitter; a surplus of neurotransmitter could mean that the remaining brain cells function at a higher rate, thereby offsetting the negative effect of cell death.

The socio-economic arguments against a direct effect of caffeine do not really apply to nicotine - smoking is not AFAIK limited to a particular stratum of society, quite the opposite.

What a choice: "Sanity with lung cancer, or dementia, sir?" .

The p4 chips contains some asynchronous or clockless elements. Modern chips are running so fast that some data from some parts takes longer than from other parts to get to where it is going and therefore the rest of the chip as to wait for it to complete the clock cycle. Clockless chips do away with the clock and data is used when it arrives.

see http://www.techreview.com/articles/tristram1001.as p" and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/14/185023 9&mode=thread&tid=137

And as for the funkyness, anything to deal with clockless chips is funky

Signatures are a waste of bandwith

Yeah, but a disaster should take some lives don't you think?

There is one bridge on the list

I had just never thought of the little RD/SD lights as transmitting any information, under the refresh rate of my eye.
Steven Leeb of MIT plans to use exactly this principle to transmit data to devices through flourescent lights.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/leo060601.asp

There's a technology in developement that could get rid of the short-life battery forever. Take a look at this link : Air-Zinc Fuel Cell

I think your right in this. I'm sure there are other sites out there like disinfo.com, but the rise of weblogging is where the heart is begining to beat, IMO.

Take a look at this article.

This isn't some new miracle pulled out of the hat by the Japanese. For example, an MIT Technology Review article on some American work on a methanol fuel cell is here. A whole bibliography on recent Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFCs) work is here.

MIT's magazine the Technology Review recently did an article on PayPal. Here is the link:

http://techreview.com/magazine/dec01/schwartz.asp
I found the article interesting, I am personally kind of torn on the PayPal issue. I have an account, but am hesitant to push it. I just don't get the "warm and fuzzies" from PayPal, though it is by far the simplest and easist thing out there that I have found to accet the occassional payment.

-MS2K

There's an interesting article on PayPal's fraud-busting success. http://www.techreview.com/magazine/dec01/schwartz. asp

Cheers, Peter

Take a second look at the screenshot of the Microsoft desktop -- even they get bitten by their own stupid extensions to the Latin-1 character set ("can?t", "they?re", "don?t").

"Smart quotes". Not.

they both reference the same article http://www.techreview.com/magazine/oct01/tristrama ll.asp

It's a really interesting and challenging field of study. A nice story about the history of clockless computing can be read here:

Technology Review: It's Time for Clockless Chips

Two quotes:

An alternative, used by Theseus and others, is to open up a separate communication channel on the chip. Clocked chips represent ones and zeroes using low and high voltages on a single wire; "dual-rail" circuits, on the other hand, use two wires, giving the chip communications pathways, not only to send bits, but also to send "handshake" signals to indicate when work has been completed. Fant additionally proposes replacing the conventional system of digital logic with what he calls "null convention logic," a scheme that identifies not only "yes" and "no," but also "no answer yet"--a convenient way for clockless chips to recognize when an operation has not yet been completed. All of these ideas and approaches are different enough that executing them could confound the mind of an engineer trained to design to the beat of a clock.

In 1997, Intel developed an asynchronous, Pentium-compatible test chip that ran three times as fast, on half the power, as its synchronous equivalent.

This topic reminded me of an article in this month's edition of Tech Review about the impact of patents to university. They indeed can become a significant source of income and can be put back to more research, especially for private universities. There's a table ranking universities based on their license income from patents. MIT is not surprising judging by the proportion of their license revenue compared to their research expenditure, which is only 2.2%. Compare this with Florida State University, whose license revenue is 43.2% of their research expenditure. It's basic economics.

This topic reminded me of an article in this month's edition of Tech Review about the impact of patents to university. They indeed can become a significant source of income and can be put back to more research, especially for private universities. There's a table ranking universities based on their license income from patents. MIT is not surprising judging by the proportion of their license revenue compared to their research expenditure, which is only 2.2%. Compare this with Florida State University, whose license revenue is 43.2% of their research expenditure. It's basic economics.

He is more concise and he offers some simple rules that would help stem the tide if everyone abided by them.

The meat of his point is summed up in the following paragraph:

Just because we have become electronically interconnected, we have not acquired the automatic right to send a message to anyone we wish, nor the automatic obligation to respond to every message we receive.

Here, here!

Michael Dertouzos, Chair of MIT's Computer Science Department and columnist for The MIT Technology Review said it better in an article titled The People's Computer: E-mail: Freedom or Jail?.

He is more concise and he offers some simple rules that would help stem the tide if everyone abided by them.

The meat of his point is summed up in the following paragraph:

Just because we have become electronically interconnected, we have not acquired the automatic right to send a message to anyone we wish, nor the automatic obligation to respond to every message we receive.

Here, here!

You know... perhaps it is broadband. Just think:

1. feed high-speed data text to the video in
2. compress video
3. send over 28.8 line
4. decompress video
5. OCR out the data stream, and voilla. "broadband"

I wonder what Mr Claude Shannon would have said about this? Here's more info about the master.

I submitted this a week ago:

2001-06-08 16:22:29 MP3Pro codec set to debut (articles,music) (rejected)

This isn't sour grapes; I know that there are different editors with different interests and different approaches, and it certainly harms me none to have a submission rejected.

What was accepted on 6/8 - after my rejection - was Thomson Announces Royalties For MP3 Streaming> , an article which referenced the second half of the same Technology Review article that I submitted.

My submission did as the Tech Review article did: made MP3Pro the focus, and included the streaming licensing story as part two. If the editor followed the link in the submission that was posted, he had to skip past the first half of the article - detailing the debut of MP3Pro - to read the paragraphs about mp3 streaming licensing.

I don't point this out to troll. I point this out because it's interesting how /. stories are chosen. And because the readers deserve to know, especially those who rely on /. for news. If you're going to rely on a source, it's good to be aware of how that source operates -- so that it's a more "open source", so to speak.

I believe that Taco et al have hit a snag in how the community operates: what is "news" is determined by the editors. The editors are only human and it would appear they have a pretty tough job on their hands. What's worse, their own bias affects the biases of the community. Then the community is subtlely encouraged through the moderation system to promote articles based on any bias they can find.

One alternative is in use at Kuro5hin, where the community itself votes on the submitted, pending stories. This increases the importance of a strong community, while it decreases the possibility for editor bias or editor error. I'm a big fan, if you couldn't tell.

That system might be unworkable here, but it's not hard to imagine other possible systems that permit the community itself to participate in the article selection process. An increasing number of eyeballs could only help.

A place to meta-discuss /. itself would also be huge. That way, people like me could indulge in that area, instead of polluting story threads with items like this. To Taco et al, it might seem like heresy to give the community any level of editorial control. But how could that be, when the community generates 99.9% of the content?

Think about it, won't you? Thank you.

I say give Linux on the desktop time - I switched to a 100% Linux desktop about two years ago and I love it. The important thing is that there are people who have switched more recently that wouldn't have bothered two years ago. Every day all the new functionality and useability which is added to Linux makes it a viable desktop for a few more people who have slightly less of a geek threshold than the adopters the day before. Linux on the desktop may be a niche today, but that niche is growing and given time it will eventually be more than a niche. Once it hits critical mass, expect things to explode as the Microsoft tax will no longer buy anything useful (it buys compatibility with other MS users today).

The article states that the Toshiba will use a polysilicon display, which, according to this article, is one of the new low-power display technologies that is competing against the new organic displays.

As long as this new laptop does not include CD, floppy, or DVD drives, it should be very power efficient. I wonder what the power bottle kneck for such a laptop is. Does the 10GB harddrive zap too much juice? Or is it the graphics chipset? I bet the speakers are the most energy hungry parts on laptops such as this new Toshiba and the newer Sony Powerbooks.

Oh, for god's sake! Shit for brains! What is "socially open" exactly? Somewhere some IBM marketing intern is reading your post and laughing so hard he's got Evian up his nose.

Please deal with your cranio-rectal insertion issues somewhere else. (And read this and this while you're at it.)

IMB's Press Release, as well as a neat article at USA Today (believe it or not) and, finally, a very informative article at TechReview.com.

IMB's Press Release, as well as a neat article at USA Today (believe it or not) and, finally, a very informative article at TechReview.com.

We might imagine that this speaker technology would be combined with Organic LED's to produce thin, inexpensive multimedia displays. The linked article says that it's possible that the organic LED displays can be made to rollup, as well. Now, we have a high definition, inexpensive, portable display with light, color, and sound that we can unroll and place on a wall anywhere, anytime.

Discuss.

Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.

-----

Sounds like they have several drugs in the pipeline that may block some of the effects of the disease but the search is furious to find a drug that will safely block the function of the beta-amyloid peptide.