3d integration should become practical when 3d cooling (channels? pipes? something else?) can also be easily integrated into the silicon.
That's being tried by IBM. But it's probably not going to be useful for portable and mobile devices. IBM is looking at it for high-density server farms.
Others have described where to get the knobs, sliders, switches, and indicators, and how to hook them up. For the panel itself, there's Front Panel Express, which makes nice looking front panels with any desired cutouts and permanent lettering.
If this is to be a commercial product, the device should present itself as a collection of USB Human Interface Devices. That spec covers everything from a steering wheel to a touchpad.
I personally think this is rather retro, but it's certainly buildable.
3D transistors aren't all that new; high power devices have been 3D for decades. Making 3D transistors this small is new. I wonder how long the lifetime is. The smaller the device gets, the worse the electromigration problem gets. The number of atoms per gate is getting rather small.
Note that this is different from making 3D chips. That's about making an entire IC, then laying down another substrate and making another IC on top of it. Or, in some cases, mechanically stacking the chips with vertical interconnects going through the substrate. The density improves, but the fab cost goes up, the yield goes down, and getting heat out becomes tougher. We'll see that for memory devices, but it may not be a win for CPUs.
I'd rather have 8mb/s, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week than 100mb/s intermittently.
Broadband providers should be required to advertise the highest speed you can run continuously for a month, alongside the price for that including all fees and taxes.
Although I'm only vaguely familiar with the so-called Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement, I've read enough about it to know that calling it "streamlined" is a major misnomer. The rules behind SSUTA are sufficiently complex as to require computer software to calculate taxes due on particular kinds of items purchased by residents of particular states.
Yes. The problem is that SSUTA is backwards-compatible with existing state sales tax laws, which are different in each state, include local taxes, and have all sorts of weird exemptions. There are even places where a tax boundary doesn't align with a ZIP code boundary, and the street address has to be standardized and looked up to determine the taxing jurisdiction.
This is because SSUTA is an interstate compact, put together by people with limited political clout. Nobody was in a strong enough position to standardize nationwide what gets taxed. However, at least they did agree on a standard set of definitions, and then each state has a table. There's a company trying to hammer all this into XML and put it out on an RSS feed, but trying to get all the states to get their act together and fix their data errors has been tough. Getting state legislatures to adhere to the SSUTA rule that rates can only change at the beginning of a calendar quarter has been tough. Federal legislation can get all the states standardized on little stuff like that.
18 U.S.C. 2154: Production of defective war material, war premises, or war utilities:
(a) Whoever, when the United States is at war, or in times of
national emergency as declared by the President or by the Congress,
with intent to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the United
States or any associate nation in preparing for or carrying on the
war or defense activities, or, with reason to believe that his act
may injure, interfere with, or obstruct the United States or any
associate nation in preparing for or carrying on the war or defense
activities, willfully makes, constructs, or causes to be made or
constructed in a defective manner, or attempts to make, construct,
or cause to be made or constructed in a defective manner any war
material, war premises or war utilities, or any tool, implement,
machine, utensil, or receptacle used or employed in making,
producing, manufacturing, or repairing any such war material, war
premises or war utilities, shall be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than thirty years, or both.
For some reason, charges aren't being brought under that law. A few CEOs doing 30 years in the Federal pen would put a big dent in the problem.
Phone screens and tablets are output-mostly devices. Their primary function is content delivery, not content creation. Inherent in the touchscreen concept is that pointing, dragging, and viewing work work well, but input is slow and difficult.
Exporting the output-mostly metaphor to desktop machines is painful for people who do any significant input or content creation. But that's what seems to be happening. This reflects what the average user is now doing with a computer - watching TV. A third of Internet traffic is now Netflix.
Incidentally, while the low end is struggling with point and drag UIs, the high end of 3D animation and engineering systems is finally getting that problem solved. 3D content creation systems have been painful for two decades. Finally, programs like Autodesk Inventor have managed to make 3D drawing and navigation fluid, without requiring vast numbers of hotkeys or multiple 2D views. You do, however, need something with a sharper point than a finger, like a mouse or tablet, to get work done in that space.
When the original Macintosh came out,it was crippled by the provision of only one diskette drive, and no slot for a second one. Users were constantly changing disks (since the OS and applications lived on one diskette), or had to get an external drive. There was a knockoff Macintosh, recognizable by the inclusion of two diskette drives. It looked good, like an improved version of the original.
Jobs was furious. There were radio announcements in Silicon Valley warning against the fake Macintosh.
There's a classic "Build a Complete Metalworking Shop from Scrap" set of books. This set of books really does describe how to build machine tools starting from scrap and hand tools. The author was originally thinking of recovery after a nuclear war, when there would be plenty of scrap around.
The big problem was VTOL
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Building vertical takeoff into the thing was the big mistake. Historically, VTOL aircraft have not been very successful, despite many attempts. However, the USMC has the Harrier, almost the only VTOL aircraft that works. So VTOL capability was specified for the F-35. This complicated the design enormously. (Look at the video, with all those hatches opening and huge nozzles deploying). I admire Lockheed-Martin for making that work at all. That's where the money went.
The best fighters have been clean, simple beasts, like the F-16. Trying to combine fighter, bomber, stealth, and VTOL guarantees an expensive aircraft. Usually something important is lost, like range, bomb load, or turn radius. Or, most importantly, number of aircraft. In an air war, the side that runs out of fighters first loses.
The music industry is tiny. North American total music recorded music sales are about $12 billion a year. In comparison, Apple revenue is about $63 billion a year, and Google revenue is about $23 billion.
We can't have some two-bit dying industry mess up one of the major engines of economic growth in America.
The US does not need more engineers. Salaries aren't going up. This has been discussed before on Slashdot.
As for attrition, that's by design. The classic paper is "The Cooling-Out Process in Higher Education": "The cooling-out process in higher education is one whereby systematic discrepancy between aspiration and avenue is covered over and stress for the individual and system is minimized. The provision of readily available alternative achievements in itself is an
important device for alleviating the stress of consequent failure and so
preventing anomic and deviant behavior. The general result of cooling-out
processes is that society can continue to encourage maximum effort without
major disturbance from unfulfilled promises and expectations."
"Cooling out" in this context comes from a criminal term, "cooling out the mark": keeping the victim of a con game from coming back with cops or a baseball bat. It's not about being cool.
The alternative is tougher admission standards. If you can get into MIT, you have a 91% chance of coming out with a degree. Cal Poly, 40%.
One alternative is better vocational education. In the US, that's a dirty word, because all kids should go to college. In Germany, it works. German makes it hard to fire people. As a result, there's an incentive to train and retrain existing employees. Germany also has a functional apprenticeship system.
Most businesses shouldn't be retaining payment card data. Just pass it to the bank, do the transaction, and keep the last 4 digits of the credit card number for checking purposes. If you operate that way, PCI data never reaches DropBox.
If the business does retain credit card data, usually for recurring billing, much higher levels of security are required. Those are the most vulnerable systems, the ones that are worth breaking into. Merchants that do that have to comply with a long list of tough requirements. They also face big penalties if they screw up. None of that data should ever enter DropBox.
Remember when Sony screwed up? Their ability to take credit cards was shut down for weeks by Visa International and MasterCard. Visa sent in outside auditors. Sony had to pay for all that, plus a big penalty.
And that's the good case. A small merchant who violates the PCI standards and has a data leak may have their merchant account cancelled and won't be able to get another one.
The PCI standards are quite straightforward. There are only a few data items that have to be protected. They really do have to be protected; organized crime is constantly trying to get hold of that data to turn it into money.
Every system since the "web of trust" in the early 90s that has had a fuzzy answer of "somewhat trusted" has failed.
Right. "Web of trust" systems are vulnerable to all the attacks used for search spam - link farms, social spamming, and phony reviews. In any system where unique new identities can be created cheaply, "web of trust" systems are hopeless.
Actually, SiteTruth has a database of 15 million US businesses and about 1.5 million UK businesses. That's just the public demo version. The real version, which we can't yet show publicly, plugs into Dun and Bradstreet's database of 200 million businesses worldwide.
The minimum standard for a commercial site is the presence of a valid street address. There's a legal basis for that. If it has ads, and doesn't have a valid business address behind it, it's a bottom feeder.
VMware's original edge was their code patching hack which allowed visualization on hardware that didn't really support it. Once x86 machines got some virtualization hardware support, that hack was no longer needed, and anybody could write a hypervisor.
Now most of the virtualization issues are more about systems for managing instances of virtual machines. The hypervisor itself is a small part of the overall product.
Search market share seems not to be affected much by search quality. In early 2008, Yahoo was the first search engine to add a group of special purpose subengines for weather, stocks, celebrities, and such. Nobody noticed. Yahoo's market share did not improve. After about six months, Google copied that idea. Now all the search engines have similar "verticals", often offering their own in-house content.
Because users aren't that sensitive to search quality, Google can optimize search results for revenue. Google has a monkey on their back: the bottom-feeder sites that exist for AdSense traffic. 94% of Google revenue is ads. 30% of that is AdSense. We measure 36% of AdSense domains as "bottom feeders". If Google fixed their search quality problems, their revenue would drop maybe 10%.
Bing doesn't have that problem. They run ads on search result pages, but their third-party program only started recently and is little used. Bing is probably driving more revenue to Google AdSense sites than to their own third-party ads. Bing could get much tougher on web spam if they chose. Until recently, they've mostly tried to match Google's results, but lately they've been going beyond that.
Then they added the caveat 'What if % is an expensive operation? how would you work around it?'
Do they program really low end microcontrollers, or what?
That's a reasonable question for people hired to program very low end microcontrollers. Something in the ATTiny11L class, price about $0.35 each, might need that. If, for example, you're writing code for a transponder key for a car, you might have to cram a crypto algorithm into a device that only has 8-bit add, subtract, and shift. This sort of thing is Not Fun. Especially since you usually have to program the thing in assembler.
Around $5 per CPU, you generally get enough machine to support C.
If OSs hadn't failed so bad on isolation, we wouldn't need so much virtualization. "Virtual machine monitors" are just operating systems with a rather simple application API. Microkernels, if you will.
If it's using too much power when it's not supposed to be doing anything, it's probably doing something it shouldn't be doing when it's not supposed to be doing anything.
That's been tried. One GE design had huge blocks of ice with boron as an emergency cooling system. Sequoyah Nuclear Generating Station in Tennessee uses that technology. It's not considered a good idea any more. There's a finite supply of coolant, but the waste heat from the reactor keeps on coming.
Slashdot Mirror
3d integration should become practical when 3d cooling (channels? pipes? something else?) can also be easily integrated into the silicon.
That's being tried by IBM. But it's probably not going to be useful for portable and mobile devices. IBM is looking at it for high-density server farms.
Others have described where to get the knobs, sliders, switches, and indicators, and how to hook them up. For the panel itself, there's Front Panel Express, which makes nice looking front panels with any desired cutouts and permanent lettering.
If this is to be a commercial product, the device should present itself as a collection of USB Human Interface Devices. That spec covers everything from a steering wheel to a touchpad.
I personally think this is rather retro, but it's certainly buildable.
3D transistors aren't all that new; high power devices have been 3D for decades. Making 3D transistors this small is new. I wonder how long the lifetime is. The smaller the device gets, the worse the electromigration problem gets. The number of atoms per gate is getting rather small.
Note that this is different from making 3D chips. That's about making an entire IC, then laying down another substrate and making another IC on top of it. Or, in some cases, mechanically stacking the chips with vertical interconnects going through the substrate. The density improves, but the fab cost goes up, the yield goes down, and getting heat out becomes tougher. We'll see that for memory devices, but it may not be a win for CPUs.
I'd rather have 8mb/s, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week than 100mb/s intermittently.
Broadband providers should be required to advertise the highest speed you can run continuously for a month, alongside the price for that including all fees and taxes.
Although I'm only vaguely familiar with the so-called Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement, I've read enough about it to know that calling it "streamlined" is a major misnomer. The rules behind SSUTA are sufficiently complex as to require computer software to calculate taxes due on particular kinds of items purchased by residents of particular states.
Yes. The problem is that SSUTA is backwards-compatible with existing state sales tax laws, which are different in each state, include local taxes, and have all sorts of weird exemptions. There are even places where a tax boundary doesn't align with a ZIP code boundary, and the street address has to be standardized and looked up to determine the taxing jurisdiction.
This is because SSUTA is an interstate compact, put together by people with limited political clout. Nobody was in a strong enough position to standardize nationwide what gets taxed. However, at least they did agree on a standard set of definitions, and then each state has a table. There's a company trying to hammer all this into XML and put it out on an RSS feed, but trying to get all the states to get their act together and fix their data errors has been tough. Getting state legislatures to adhere to the SSUTA rule that rates can only change at the beginning of a calendar quarter has been tough. Federal legislation can get all the states standardized on little stuff like that.
Also, only 24 states have signed up, not 44.
Unfortunately, at 20$ for 30 sheets of the special (3"x4") photo paper it needs, I don't see it being successful.
Especially since the price for 40 sheets of 4"x6" ZINK paper for the PanDigital printer is $15.99, or better than 1/3 the price per unit area.
18 U.S.C. 2154: Production of defective war material, war premises, or war utilities:
(a) Whoever, when the United States is at war, or in times of national emergency as declared by the President or by the Congress, with intent to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the United States or any associate nation in preparing for or carrying on the war or defense activities, or, with reason to believe that his act may injure, interfere with, or obstruct the United States or any associate nation in preparing for or carrying on the war or defense activities, willfully makes, constructs, or causes to be made or constructed in a defective manner, or attempts to make, construct, or cause to be made or constructed in a defective manner any war material, war premises or war utilities, or any tool, implement, machine, utensil, or receptacle used or employed in making, producing, manufacturing, or repairing any such war material, war premises or war utilities, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than thirty years, or both.
For some reason, charges aren't being brought under that law. A few CEOs doing 30 years in the Federal pen would put a big dent in the problem.
Phone screens and tablets are output-mostly devices. Their primary function is content delivery, not content creation. Inherent in the touchscreen concept is that pointing, dragging, and viewing work work well, but input is slow and difficult.
Exporting the output-mostly metaphor to desktop machines is painful for people who do any significant input or content creation. But that's what seems to be happening. This reflects what the average user is now doing with a computer - watching TV. A third of Internet traffic is now Netflix.
Incidentally, while the low end is struggling with point and drag UIs, the high end of 3D animation and engineering systems is finally getting that problem solved. 3D content creation systems have been painful for two decades. Finally, programs like Autodesk Inventor have managed to make 3D drawing and navigation fluid, without requiring vast numbers of hotkeys or multiple 2D views. You do, however, need something with a sharper point than a finger, like a mouse or tablet, to get work done in that space.
Answers.com is an ad-heavy content farm. Why would anyone want a login there?
When the original Macintosh came out,it was crippled by the provision of only one diskette drive, and no slot for a second one. Users were constantly changing disks (since the OS and applications lived on one diskette), or had to get an external drive. There was a knockoff Macintosh, recognizable by the inclusion of two diskette drives. It looked good, like an improved version of the original.
Jobs was furious. There were radio announcements in Silicon Valley warning against the fake Macintosh.
There's a classic "Build a Complete Metalworking Shop from Scrap" set of books. This set of books really does describe how to build machine tools starting from scrap and hand tools. The author was originally thinking of recovery after a nuclear war, when there would be plenty of scrap around.
Building vertical takeoff into the thing was the big mistake. Historically, VTOL aircraft have not been very successful, despite many attempts. However, the USMC has the Harrier, almost the only VTOL aircraft that works. So VTOL capability was specified for the F-35. This complicated the design enormously. (Look at the video, with all those hatches opening and huge nozzles deploying). I admire Lockheed-Martin for making that work at all. That's where the money went.
The best fighters have been clean, simple beasts, like the F-16. Trying to combine fighter, bomber, stealth, and VTOL guarantees an expensive aircraft. Usually something important is lost, like range, bomb load, or turn radius. Or, most importantly, number of aircraft. In an air war, the side that runs out of fighters first loses.
The music industry is tiny. North American total music recorded music sales are about $12 billion a year. In comparison, Apple revenue is about $63 billion a year, and Google revenue is about $23 billion.
We can't have some two-bit dying industry mess up one of the major engines of economic growth in America.
FEMA uses that system regionally for hurricane and tornado alerts. It's not a big deal.
The US does not need more engineers. Salaries aren't going up. This has been discussed before on Slashdot.
As for attrition, that's by design. The classic paper is "The Cooling-Out Process in Higher Education": "The cooling-out process in higher education is one whereby systematic discrepancy between aspiration and avenue is covered over and stress for the individual and system is minimized. The provision of readily available alternative achievements in itself is an important device for alleviating the stress of consequent failure and so preventing anomic and deviant behavior. The general result of cooling-out processes is that society can continue to encourage maximum effort without major disturbance from unfulfilled promises and expectations."
"Cooling out" in this context comes from a criminal term, "cooling out the mark": keeping the victim of a con game from coming back with cops or a baseball bat. It's not about being cool.
The alternative is tougher admission standards. If you can get into MIT, you have a 91% chance of coming out with a degree. Cal Poly, 40%.
One alternative is better vocational education. In the US, that's a dirty word, because all kids should go to college. In Germany, it works. German makes it hard to fire people. As a result, there's an incentive to train and retrain existing employees. Germany also has a functional apprenticeship system.
Most businesses shouldn't be retaining payment card data. Just pass it to the bank, do the transaction, and keep the last 4 digits of the credit card number for checking purposes. If you operate that way, PCI data never reaches DropBox.
If the business does retain credit card data, usually for recurring billing, much higher levels of security are required. Those are the most vulnerable systems, the ones that are worth breaking into. Merchants that do that have to comply with a long list of tough requirements. They also face big penalties if they screw up. None of that data should ever enter DropBox.
Remember when Sony screwed up? Their ability to take credit cards was shut down for weeks by Visa International and MasterCard. Visa sent in outside auditors. Sony had to pay for all that, plus a big penalty.
And that's the good case. A small merchant who violates the PCI standards and has a data leak may have their merchant account cancelled and won't be able to get another one.
The PCI standards are quite straightforward. There are only a few data items that have to be protected. They really do have to be protected; organized crime is constantly trying to get hold of that data to turn it into money.
Every system since the "web of trust" in the early 90s that has had a fuzzy answer of "somewhat trusted" has failed.
Right. "Web of trust" systems are vulnerable to all the attacks used for search spam - link farms, social spamming, and phony reviews. In any system where unique new identities can be created cheaply, "web of trust" systems are hopeless.
IOW anything not in your whitelist of 11K URLs
Actually, SiteTruth has a database of 15 million US businesses and about 1.5 million UK businesses. That's just the public demo version. The real version, which we can't yet show publicly, plugs into Dun and Bradstreet's database of 200 million businesses worldwide.
The minimum standard for a commercial site is the presence of a valid street address. There's a legal basis for that. If it has ads, and doesn't have a valid business address behind it, it's a bottom feeder.
VMware's original edge was their code patching hack which allowed visualization on hardware that didn't really support it. Once x86 machines got some virtualization hardware support, that hack was no longer needed, and anybody could write a hypervisor.
Now most of the virtualization issues are more about systems for managing instances of virtual machines. The hypervisor itself is a small part of the overall product.
Search market share seems not to be affected much by search quality. In early 2008, Yahoo was the first search engine to add a group of special purpose subengines for weather, stocks, celebrities, and such. Nobody noticed. Yahoo's market share did not improve. After about six months, Google copied that idea. Now all the search engines have similar "verticals", often offering their own in-house content.
Because users aren't that sensitive to search quality, Google can optimize search results for revenue. Google has a monkey on their back: the bottom-feeder sites that exist for AdSense traffic. 94% of Google revenue is ads. 30% of that is AdSense. We measure 36% of AdSense domains as "bottom feeders". If Google fixed their search quality problems, their revenue would drop maybe 10%.
Bing doesn't have that problem. They run ads on search result pages, but their third-party program only started recently and is little used. Bing is probably driving more revenue to Google AdSense sites than to their own third-party ads. Bing could get much tougher on web spam if they chose. Until recently, they've mostly tried to match Google's results, but lately they've been going beyond that.
Incidentally, adding "social" inputs makes search worse, not better. Social inputs are too heavily spammed.
Then they added the caveat 'What if % is an expensive operation? how would you work around it?'
Do they program really low end microcontrollers, or what?
That's a reasonable question for people hired to program very low end microcontrollers. Something in the ATTiny11L class, price about $0.35 each, might need that. If, for example, you're writing code for a transponder key for a car, you might have to cram a crypto algorithm into a device that only has 8-bit add, subtract, and shift. This sort of thing is Not Fun. Especially since you usually have to program the thing in assembler.
Around $5 per CPU, you generally get enough machine to support C.
If OSs hadn't failed so bad on isolation, we wouldn't need so much virtualization. "Virtual machine monitors" are just operating systems with a rather simple application API. Microkernels, if you will.
If it's using too much power when it's not supposed to be doing anything, it's probably doing something it shouldn't be doing when it's not supposed to be doing anything.
The question is, what?
If Apple's own apps run in the sandbox, that's fine.
That's been tried. One GE design had huge blocks of ice with boron as an emergency cooling system. Sequoyah Nuclear Generating Station in Tennessee uses that technology. It's not considered a good idea any more. There's a finite supply of coolant, but the waste heat from the reactor keeps on coming.