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CCD Image Sensor Inventors Win $500,000 Award
saskboy writes "CCD inventors were honoured this week. According to CBC News, "Willard Boyle, a Canadian scientist who helped invent the light-sensitive chip, accepted (the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize) in the U.S. on Tuesday. Boyle and George Smith will share the $500,000 US award for the invention of the "Charge-Coupled Device (CCD), a light-sensitive component at the heart of digital cameras and other widely used imaging technologies," the U.S. National Academy of Engineering said." Those other devices include the Hubble Space Telescope, and orthoscopic medical instruments. "Boyle and Smith came up with the idea for the device while working at Bell Laboratories in 1969. 'It was after maybe an hour's work,' Boyle recalled. 'We went over to the blackboard and we had some sketching there. We went down to our models lab and made one.'""
Take a jar and fill it with marbles. At some point, there just isn't any way to fit more marbles into the jar without breaking either some of the marbles or the jar itself. Consider that between each marble is a little space left over. All that space is wasted, even though you can't fit any more marbles into the jar!
Now empty the jar and fill it with bread. Once the jar is full, you can press down on the top of the bread and make more room. In fact, you can pretty much keep stuffing bread into the jar for quite a long time. Eventually you'll reach the saturation point and no new bread can be entered into the jar. However, the amount of bread in the jar is many times greater than the number of marbles which we just removed. There was less space between each piece of bread than there was between each marble because the bread is malleable whereas the marble requires a fixed size.
There's a limit to the pixel density achievable with CCDs. Once the pixelsites get too close together, they interfere with each other electrically and throw off the sensor. CCDs are a nice stopgap measure, but they aren't the bread in the example above.
Don't you get it....1969. Not yesterday, not the day before....1969. Most of you pups were still your dad's dreams if he was alive then.
Unfortunately everyone else that utilized the CCD struck it rich, not Boyle himself. I saw this on Daily Planet yesterday, and how they were sort of joking about it. He didn't get rich because he didn't own the rights to the patent, his company did. That's what happens when you get paid to research / invent.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
I honestly can't figure out if you're serious or not. Probably doesn't help that you were modded insightful- now you seem to be moderated funny, but I suspect you were not trying to be...
What a bunch of crap. You're buying partially into the romanticization of historical inventors, and ignoring the fact that you only really hear about the people who were NOT shut down, the projects that were not abandoned because of penny pinchers, etc.
Talking about the "good old days" when inventors just picked money from trees, never had to justify research, didn't struggle against powermongering and corporate politics etc...is a bunch of pure, complete, uneducated, knee-jerk bullshit.
Please help metamoderate.
"We were on the doorstep of the solar system almost 40 years ago. Now we're all parked in front of plasma televisions bought on 28% credit watching "reality shows." Talk about toilet-ramming the future. This is what happens when entire generations of education are wasted on purpose. What a fucking waste."
You're too kind. 'Wasted' implies a mere passive neglect, rather than 'subverted' which is more the truth.
You assume an educated population is desirable - bzzzt wrong, they want you as dumb as can be and easy to control. You're right, we passed that golden age up, smart and independent thinkers are not desirable in
a the new regime. Its just too - 'unpredictable'.
Nobody wants rogue minds working on their own, people who might not be 'on side'. They're scared. They're frightened shitless of progress, of technology, of people like us who might turn their little world on its head with a single daydream. Their way is to subvert technology, Einstein gives us e=mc2 and they figure out how to make bombs. These guys invent CCDs and they stick them on every street corner to spy on people.
Little exposes the malignant pathology of a person so much as the uses they seek in technology.
But don't cry for the plasma TV generation. They are actually happy, They relish their ignorance, it protects them and they will defend the right to be a dumbass to the hilt. That shiny box made in China means more to them than any idea, any morality, any person. We are in the minority, depressed and traumatised watching the silence of the lambs, powerless to help or inform. Sometimes I'd like to unlearn everything I know, take a job in the car wash and sit in front of a 56" expensive toy I don't own while I drink cheap beer, but it doesn't work that way, no turning back the hands of time.
please may I have a +5 funny mod too, you weak spineless cowards.