First, the Slashdot article is terrible. The article isn't about "why Linux is failing on the desktop", it's about why a kernel developer who was trying to improve scheduling performance quit.
The scheduling issue is interesting. I used to work on mainframe schedulers, I've done real-time work, and I'm familiar with the issue in game implementation, so I know how hard this is. We could do better than what we have now, but not by some magic fix to the scheduler. We have to look at interactivity as a real time problem.
It is, too. Alan Kay used to say that there is no more excuse for a delay between pressing a key on a computer and having something happen than there is on a piano.
We haven't been faithful to that, and it subtly drives users nuts.
One useful idea from the real time world is explicit "sporadic scheduling". Some real time operating systems have this. A process can explicitly request that it wants, say, 10ms of CPU time every 100ms.
The scheduler must reject that request if the system is overbooked. If it does accept the request, the scheduler has committed that much resource to the process. If the process overruns its time slot, it loses priority and an overrun is tallied.
This is what an audio or video player should be using. This is how you get audio and video that don't pause or skip. For this to work, the player must be able to calculate, for each system it runs on, exactly what resources are needed to play the current content. This may take more analysis and benchmarking than many programmers are used to doing. It's worthwhile to make overruns visible to tools outside the application, so that users can detect broken applications. To a real time programmer, overrunning your time slot means "broken". You have to think that way.
On the interactivity front, it's useful for a thread to be able to request a high priority for a short period after an event, with a priority drop to follow quickly if it keeps the CPU too long. That's how you get the mouse cursor to track reliably. Of course, the thread that handles mouse events has to pass off all the real work to other threads, not stall the thread handling fast events.
It's also probably time to end paging to disk. When it works, paging at best doubles the effective RAM. But paging inherently results in long unexpected delays. If you want interactivity, don't page. Real-time systems don't. Neither do game consoles.
RAM is so cheap that it's not worth it. (1GB starts at US$56 today at Crucial.) Paging devices maxed out around 10,000 RPM since the 1960s, and haven't improved much since. Give it up. Today, paging is in practice mostly a means for dealing with memory hogging apps. (Hint: open "about.config" in Firefox and turn off "browser.cache.memory.enable". so it doesn't save screen dumps of each page for faster tab switching.) It's probably time for Linux to not page interactive processes by default.
This implies an operating system that says "no" when you put on too much load, instead of cramming it in and doing it badly. Open too many windows of video, and at some point the player won't open another one. There's nothing wrong with that, but most Linux/Unix apps don't handle resource rejections from the operating system well.
The "self winding digital watch" people have run into the problem that that status-symbol types don't think it's a status symbol, and with the rotating counterweight, the things are both big and expensive to manufacture.
Solar powered watches are more useful. I have a $50 model from Casio, which is both solar powered and updates itself from WWVB, so it pretty much maintains itself.
Self-winding mechanical watches often need a powered winder, a device to rotate them when not in use. Then you have to change the batteries in the winder, or plug it in.
EU policy is to use tarrifs to induce industries to locate facilities within the Single European Market. That's what the EU is all about. They're trying not to make the mistake the US did, of losing manufacturing to low-wage countries.
The first book and movie had a sense of wonder. The Order of the Phoenix in movie form is more about blowing stuff up. The new book has enough violence for a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
The final book has not just a war, but torture scenes, refugees, and ethnic cleansing. It's about the Final Solution to the Mudblood Problem. The movie version might have Voldemort addressing the Death Eaters from a dais backed by tall vertical banners.
Yes, Firefox has a memory-hog problem. But it's not that "Firefox is too big".
The memory hog problem comes from the Firefox "feature" of storing recently rendered pages as images. That creates the illusion that the browser is "faster". Until you run out of memory and the system starts paging.
You can turn off that feature by opening "about:config" and setting "browser.cache.memory.enable" to "false". Memory usage will go down and page redraw time may increase slightly. You probably won't notice. The content is still being cached, just not as a bitmap of the page. That feature wasn't really a win. Most page delays are on initial loading, for which caching doesn't help.
QNX has had user space drivers along somewhat similar lines for many years. In QNX, all the drivers are in user space, which makes for a much smaller kernel. Here's a simplified article on QNX driver writing.
The Linux approach has the problem that Linux doesn't have the message passing primitives that QNX does. So there's a special purpose mechanism to hook up these new user-space drivers to the I/O system calls. In QNX, "open", "close", "read", and "write" are actually C library functions that call MsgSend to do the work.
(System V IPC isn't really suitable; it's asynchronous, which means a few extra scheduler events for every message pass when you try to use it for something that works like a subroutine call. Long story.)
Unfortunately, on x86 hardware, you can't protect the system from a user level driver and still give the driver direct hardware access. IBM VM mainframes get this right, but x86 does not. On the other hand, you can have channel drivers for the various types of x86 channels (SCSI, FireWire, USB, etc.) and make other drivers work through them.
User-level drivers cost you at least one extra memory copy of the data. That's not too bad in practice. I did a FireWire video camera driver for QNX, and when transmitting 640x480 24 bit images at 15fps, it took about 3% of a Pentium 4 CPU.
It's a student project, and it shows. The article is superficial. The first two sources listed are Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks. There's a page on the Simpsons. You get the general idea.
Their "experimental work" consisted of playing "freeslots.com". They didn't even notice that the "free slots" programs are set to have an expectation greater than zero when played in free mode. In fact, it's quite difficult to lose at "freeslots".
Industry analysis of player psychology has gone way beyond the stuff mentioned in this student paper. The big breakthrough was when slot machines started accepting player affinity cards. Today's casinos have the player's entire history, at the per-click level, on file, and considerable effort goes into mining that data. Some studies have compared what players have thought they won versus the casino's history of their track record. Many players don't even know that they're losing, let alone how much.
If you want to read about this subject, start with Super Casino, an 1999 inside look at some major Las Vegas properties.
The "free" part of Wikia is people working for free for Wikia. Wikia may have the same problem AOL did with the Fair Labor Standards Act. AOL used to have unpaid "community leaders" with some administrative powers, but they had to stop doing that, or pay them.
Wikia exists to monetize fancruft. The largest Wikia projects are related to Star Wars, DC Comics, Doom, Yu-Gi-Oh, Halo, etc. That doesn't lead to a search engine, unless
your searches are mostly about Wookies.
Google's main search engine doesn't take that many people to implement, extend, and run. About 50-60 smart people really make Google search go. A few hundred more take care of the software systems that support search. It's not that big an operation.
Most of the new hires at Google aren't on the search engine technology side of the business. Take a look at Google's job openings. Only a few of those jobs are anywhere close to the guts of the search engines.
First, the article is the NJIT press release, with essentially the same text and pictures.
Second, this is yet another of those overhyped "minor advance in materials science" articles. The abstract for the technical article says only "The results indicate that C60 decorated SWCNTs are promising additives for performance enhancement of polymer photovoltaic cells." There's no mention of "paintable solar cells".
"Paintable solar cells" have been talked up before (they were mentioned on Slashdot two years ago) but nobody has actually made that work.
There's this fantasy that you somehow spray something on your roof and get power out. But it's not likely to work.
Some guy at the University of Toronto has been hping this for several years now. He got quite a bit of press in 2005. But his actual cells were, according to Business Week, 3 orders of magnitude worse than existing technology, were more expensive to make, and had a limited lifetime.
I was much more impressed when I went to a talk by Mark Pinto, the VP of Applied Materials' solar unit. He spoke for an hour and a half, and never mentioned "eco" or "green". He's a manufacturing exec, and he sees this as a manufacturing cost problem.
They know what to do; they just need to do it bigger, faster, and cheaper. Which is what Applied Materials does, very successfully, for ICs and flat panel displays. He has charts showing that in high-sun areas like southern Spain, solar power can now be cheaper than existing electricity sources. So they're building a big solar panel plant there. As the materials improve, they'll convert to new materials and processes, just like they do for ICs. And as with ICs and flat panel displays, they expect to follow the cost curve down.
Their existing generation of solar panel fab is derived from their flat panel display fab equipment, but they expect that, over time, those technologies will diverge. They'd like a roll-to-roll solar cell process, and bought a company with one that sort of works, but if it doesn't, they think they can do OK with something that works like a huge wafer fab, with each wafer covering five square meters.
I've been reading some of the book images. It reads like a hoax. "And Hermione was struggling to her feet in the wreckage, and three redheaded men were grouped on the ground where the wall had blasted apart". That reads like fan fiction. Rowling's style is considerably more polished.
The original Predator UAV had auto return home on data link loss capability. And there have been upgrades since. So yes, it is a true robot.
Boeing recently demonstrated the ScanEagle, a smaller UAV able to lock onto and follow a truck autonomously. So autonomous operation is getting serious. The goal is to have more air vehicles than operators, with long-endurance UAVs cruising around looking for something to image or kill. Operators take over when things get interesting.
Incidentally, the ground control station for Predators runs X-Windows and Motif.
Jitterbug, "the phone for boomers and beyond", is exactly that. They offer two models, Dumb and Dumber. The Dumb model has a big numeric keypad. They couldn't resist putting in a display, though. The Dumber model has no numeric keys, just three huge buttons: "Operator", "Tow" (or some other preselected legend), and "911". The phone produces a "comforting dial tone".
They couldn't resist including menus, arrow keys, voicemail, a phone book, and a recent call list, either. But not GPS tracking, which might make sense given the target market.
The phone book is preloaded when the phone is ordered. Updating it thereafter can be done by fax (!), live operator assistance, or a web site, but not from the phone itself.
It sounds cute, but it's another minor advance in materials science, and a long way from being a new display technology.
The basic problem is that it requires a big array of electromagnets, one per pixel. Fabricating large arrays of electromagnets is expensive; it's hard to fabricate coils using an IC process. And it doesn't scale down well; tiny coils are tough to make. It's also hard to contain a magnetic field in a small space. So electrostatic devices, like LCDs, and emission devices, like plasma panels, tend to win out.
Previous technologies shot down by this fact include magnetic bubble and magnetic core memories. They worked, but they never got either cheap or tiny.
A few years ago, Upside magazine went bust. Since I own Downside, I looked into buying their domain, but the assets of Upside were eventually acquired by another tech publishing firm.
The article didn't mention Upside, although they mentioned The Industry Standard and Business 2.0, which also tanked.
We also lost Silicon Valley's newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. It's been purchased by an outfit that runs cheesy suburban throwaways, and is being brought down to that level. It's still published, but nobody cares.
And Murdoch is buying the Wall Street Journal. Soon, there will be very few information sources that actually go out and dig out news.
The most "location aware" portable thing right now is Helio. It has GPS. It has Myspace integration. It can display all the pizza outlets near you. It has "Buddy Beacon", so your Myspace buddies show up on a map display. It's a true 3G device. Does music, video, data, and voice phone.
What it doesn't have is customers.
The Helio store in Palo Alto is across from the Apple store. And nobody is buying.
The day the iPhone came out, the Helio staff were playing GTA on the store's big display, due to a total lack of customers.
Receivers that use both GPS and GLONASS satellite signals have been available for years. Maxim just announced a new receiver chip which receives both and only costs $2.95 in quantity, so that capability is likely to become more available.
GLONASS was in bad shape after the USSR tanked, but new GLONASS satellites are being launched again, and the constellation is currently about half populated. As of today, 11 GLONASS satellites are functioning, 5 are down, and one new one is being brought into position. 24 operational satellites are a full set.
The earlier GLONASS sats only had a two year design life, but the latest models have a 7 year design life, and they're going for a 10-year model. They launch a new batch every December, so they're starting to catch up.
First, it's a Roland the Plogger story, so it's probably wrong.
Second, it's another one of those "we made some minor advance in materials science on a laboratory scale and this will change the world Real Soon Now" stories. It's too early to be making claims like that. All they have is a new material that might be good for something. Maybe.
Third, it's one of those surface chemistry/crystal chemistry as "nanotechnology" stories. "Nanotechnology" has turned into a buzzword for getting funding for surface chemistry work.
OK, first we get past the blogodreck from some site that wants traffic, and look at the Range Fuels site.
This is funded by Kosla Ventures, which is Vinod Kosla's venture capital fund. That's a good sign; he has a decent track record as a VC. (He was one of the founders of Sun, but he later invested in Excite.) Anyway, they're not looking for money; they've got that.
People have been working on cellulostic ethanol for a while. It's not that hard to do; it's hard to do cost-effectively. Here's an overview of the known approaches. Range Fuels uses a heat-driven process, which of course takes energy to run, but is standard chemical engineering. There's other R&D underway to develop a bioengineered enzyme that will digest cellulose at commercially feasible rates. Such enzymes have been created, but they're too slow and making the enzymes costs too much. Work continues.
Anyway, this doesn't look like the big cellulostic ethanol breakthrough. But it's progress.
"Information technology" is a lot like stationary engineering as a career. Once upon a time, around 1900, stationary engineering was the hot field to get into. People were needed to run the high technology that made the wheels of the world go around - steam engines, generating plants, heavy industrial machinery. It was a new field - vast amounts of machinery were being built and installed, the technology was advancing rapidly, and the world was changing drastically as, for the first time in history, power was being made and distributed in quantity.
A century later, there are about 120,000 stationary engineers in the US. It's a union job, and a good one. Regular hours, OK working conditions, some shift work. It's a routine job, but one that needs to be done. That's where "information technology" is going.
Information technology was once a showpiece operation. Company computers were in glass-walled rooms and people would look in on the shiny machinery. Now they're racks in dark basements and warehouses. The same thing happened to stationary engineering. Steam engines and generating stations were once showpieces. Today, facilities like that are in bleak locations. Visited a boiler room lately?
Of the three really good young people, all with robotics and control experience, who worked on our DARPA Grand Challenge robot vehicle, two are now in financial engineering. One is running a hedge fund out of Santa Fe that's driven by program trading. One is in the Bahamas with an offshore fund. The third is running an iPhone group at Apple.
But these are top people.
If you can handle the math, get an undergrad CS degree, then an MBA.
If you're further down the food chain, an IT career is an option.
mutexlock.h - queuing and locking primitives in C++ for QNX. Little primitives that have to be right, and are hard to code correctly. These ran on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle.
algebra3.h - basic functions for 2D, 3D, and 4D matrices and vectors, all in C++ and all inline.
The basic code is from Graphics Gems, but it's been rewritten to be 100% inline. Useful for game and graphics work. Used as part of Falling Bodies.
obvious.c - the original obvious password detector, from 1984. Use this to decide if a password is "strong enough". Rejects all English words, yet doesn't require access to a dictionary file. Note this is in K&R C; it predates ANSI C.
Slashdot Mirror
First, the Slashdot article is terrible. The article isn't about "why Linux is failing on the desktop", it's about why a kernel developer who was trying to improve scheduling performance quit.
The scheduling issue is interesting. I used to work on mainframe schedulers, I've done real-time work, and I'm familiar with the issue in game implementation, so I know how hard this is. We could do better than what we have now, but not by some magic fix to the scheduler. We have to look at interactivity as a real time problem.
It is, too. Alan Kay used to say that there is no more excuse for a delay between pressing a key on a computer and having something happen than there is on a piano. We haven't been faithful to that, and it subtly drives users nuts.
One useful idea from the real time world is explicit "sporadic scheduling". Some real time operating systems have this. A process can explicitly request that it wants, say, 10ms of CPU time every 100ms. The scheduler must reject that request if the system is overbooked. If it does accept the request, the scheduler has committed that much resource to the process. If the process overruns its time slot, it loses priority and an overrun is tallied.
This is what an audio or video player should be using. This is how you get audio and video that don't pause or skip. For this to work, the player must be able to calculate, for each system it runs on, exactly what resources are needed to play the current content. This may take more analysis and benchmarking than many programmers are used to doing. It's worthwhile to make overruns visible to tools outside the application, so that users can detect broken applications. To a real time programmer, overrunning your time slot means "broken". You have to think that way.
On the interactivity front, it's useful for a thread to be able to request a high priority for a short period after an event, with a priority drop to follow quickly if it keeps the CPU too long. That's how you get the mouse cursor to track reliably. Of course, the thread that handles mouse events has to pass off all the real work to other threads, not stall the thread handling fast events.
It's also probably time to end paging to disk. When it works, paging at best doubles the effective RAM. But paging inherently results in long unexpected delays. If you want interactivity, don't page. Real-time systems don't. Neither do game consoles. RAM is so cheap that it's not worth it. (1GB starts at US$56 today at Crucial.) Paging devices maxed out around 10,000 RPM since the 1960s, and haven't improved much since. Give it up. Today, paging is in practice mostly a means for dealing with memory hogging apps. (Hint: open "about.config" in Firefox and turn off "browser.cache.memory.enable". so it doesn't save screen dumps of each page for faster tab switching.) It's probably time for Linux to not page interactive processes by default.
This implies an operating system that says "no" when you put on too much load, instead of cramming it in and doing it badly. Open too many windows of video, and at some point the player won't open another one. There's nothing wrong with that, but most Linux/Unix apps don't handle resource rejections from the operating system well.
The "self winding digital watch" people have run into the problem that that status-symbol types don't think it's a status symbol, and with the rotating counterweight, the things are both big and expensive to manufacture.
Solar powered watches are more useful. I have a $50 model from Casio, which is both solar powered and updates itself from WWVB, so it pretty much maintains itself.
Self-winding mechanical watches often need a powered winder, a device to rotate them when not in use. Then you have to change the batteries in the winder, or plug it in.
EU policy is to use tarrifs to induce industries to locate facilities within the Single European Market. That's what the EU is all about. They're trying not to make the mistake the US did, of losing manufacturing to low-wage countries.
The first book and movie had a sense of wonder. The Order of the Phoenix in movie form is more about blowing stuff up. The new book has enough violence for a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
The final book has not just a war, but torture scenes, refugees, and ethnic cleansing. It's about the Final Solution to the Mudblood Problem. The movie version might have Voldemort addressing the Death Eaters from a dais backed by tall vertical banners.
Yes, Firefox has a memory-hog problem. But it's not that "Firefox is too big".
The memory hog problem comes from the Firefox "feature" of storing recently rendered pages as images. That creates the illusion that the browser is "faster". Until you run out of memory and the system starts paging.
You can turn off that feature by opening "about:config" and setting "browser.cache.memory.enable" to "false". Memory usage will go down and page redraw time may increase slightly. You probably won't notice. The content is still being cached, just not as a bitmap of the page. That feature wasn't really a win. Most page delays are on initial loading, for which caching doesn't help.
QNX has had user space drivers along somewhat similar lines for many years. In QNX, all the drivers are in user space, which makes for a much smaller kernel. Here's a simplified article on QNX driver writing.
The Linux approach has the problem that Linux doesn't have the message passing primitives that QNX does. So there's a special purpose mechanism to hook up these new user-space drivers to the I/O system calls. In QNX, "open", "close", "read", and "write" are actually C library functions that call MsgSend to do the work. (System V IPC isn't really suitable; it's asynchronous, which means a few extra scheduler events for every message pass when you try to use it for something that works like a subroutine call. Long story.)
Unfortunately, on x86 hardware, you can't protect the system from a user level driver and still give the driver direct hardware access. IBM VM mainframes get this right, but x86 does not. On the other hand, you can have channel drivers for the various types of x86 channels (SCSI, FireWire, USB, etc.) and make other drivers work through them.
User-level drivers cost you at least one extra memory copy of the data. That's not too bad in practice. I did a FireWire video camera driver for QNX, and when transmitting 640x480 24 bit images at 15fps, it took about 3% of a Pentium 4 CPU.
It's a student project, and it shows. The article is superficial. The first two sources listed are Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks. There's a page on the Simpsons. You get the general idea.
Considerable work has been done on gambling psychology, but they didn't find it. There's an online Journal of Gambling Issues, with papers like Slot machine structural characteristics: Distorted player views of payback percentages. There's an annual trade show, Global Gaming Expo, and even an institute of higher learning devoted to the subject, the International Gaming Institute, part of (inevitably) the University of Las Vegas.
Their "experimental work" consisted of playing "freeslots.com". They didn't even notice that the "free slots" programs are set to have an expectation greater than zero when played in free mode. In fact, it's quite difficult to lose at "freeslots".
Industry analysis of player psychology has gone way beyond the stuff mentioned in this student paper. The big breakthrough was when slot machines started accepting player affinity cards. Today's casinos have the player's entire history, at the per-click level, on file, and considerable effort goes into mining that data. Some studies have compared what players have thought they won versus the casino's history of their track record. Many players don't even know that they're losing, let alone how much.
If you want to read about this subject, start with Super Casino, an 1999 inside look at some major Las Vegas properties.
free search engines such as Wikia
The "free" part of Wikia is people working for free for Wikia. Wikia may have the same problem AOL did with the Fair Labor Standards Act. AOL used to have unpaid "community leaders" with some administrative powers, but they had to stop doing that, or pay them.
Wikia exists to monetize fancruft. The largest Wikia projects are related to Star Wars, DC Comics, Doom, Yu-Gi-Oh, Halo, etc. That doesn't lead to a search engine, unless your searches are mostly about Wookies.
Laptops don't have a monitor at eye height, or a decent keyboard. They're limited by their geometry.
We may see the desktop computer disappear into the monitor, though.
Google's main search engine doesn't take that many people to implement, extend, and run. About 50-60 smart people really make Google search go. A few hundred more take care of the software systems that support search. It's not that big an operation.
Most of the new hires at Google aren't on the search engine technology side of the business. Take a look at Google's job openings. Only a few of those jobs are anywhere close to the guts of the search engines.
First, the article is the NJIT press release, with essentially the same text and pictures.
Second, this is yet another of those overhyped "minor advance in materials science" articles. The abstract for the technical article says only "The results indicate that C60 decorated SWCNTs are promising additives for performance enhancement of polymer photovoltaic cells." There's no mention of "paintable solar cells".
"Paintable solar cells" have been talked up before (they were mentioned on Slashdot two years ago) but nobody has actually made that work. There's this fantasy that you somehow spray something on your roof and get power out. But it's not likely to work.
Some guy at the University of Toronto has been hping this for several years now. He got quite a bit of press in 2005. But his actual cells were, according to Business Week, 3 orders of magnitude worse than existing technology, were more expensive to make, and had a limited lifetime.
I was much more impressed when I went to a talk by Mark Pinto, the VP of Applied Materials' solar unit. He spoke for an hour and a half, and never mentioned "eco" or "green". He's a manufacturing exec, and he sees this as a manufacturing cost problem. They know what to do; they just need to do it bigger, faster, and cheaper. Which is what Applied Materials does, very successfully, for ICs and flat panel displays. He has charts showing that in high-sun areas like southern Spain, solar power can now be cheaper than existing electricity sources. So they're building a big solar panel plant there. As the materials improve, they'll convert to new materials and processes, just like they do for ICs. And as with ICs and flat panel displays, they expect to follow the cost curve down.
Their existing generation of solar panel fab is derived from their flat panel display fab equipment, but they expect that, over time, those technologies will diverge. They'd like a roll-to-roll solar cell process, and bought a company with one that sort of works, but if it doesn't, they think they can do OK with something that works like a huge wafer fab, with each wafer covering five square meters.
I've been reading some of the book images. It reads like a hoax. "And Hermione was struggling to her feet in the wreckage, and three redheaded men were grouped on the ground where the wall had blasted apart". That reads like fan fiction. Rowling's style is considerably more polished.
If this isn't a hoax, the book really sucks.
The original Predator UAV had auto return home on data link loss capability. And there have been upgrades since. So yes, it is a true robot.
Boeing recently demonstrated the ScanEagle, a smaller UAV able to lock onto and follow a truck autonomously. So autonomous operation is getting serious. The goal is to have more air vehicles than operators, with long-endurance UAVs cruising around looking for something to image or kill. Operators take over when things get interesting.
Incidentally, the ground control station for Predators runs X-Windows and Motif.
This thing reads like the script for a Jerry Bruckheimer action movie.
Jitterbug, "the phone for boomers and beyond", is exactly that. They offer two models, Dumb and Dumber. The Dumb model has a big numeric keypad. They couldn't resist putting in a display, though. The Dumber model has no numeric keys, just three huge buttons: "Operator", "Tow" (or some other preselected legend), and "911". The phone produces a "comforting dial tone".
They couldn't resist including menus, arrow keys, voicemail, a phone book, and a recent call list, either. But not GPS tracking, which might make sense given the target market.
The phone book is preloaded when the phone is ordered. Updating it thereafter can be done by fax (!), live operator assistance, or a web site, but not from the phone itself.
It sounds cute, but it's another minor advance in materials science, and a long way from being a new display technology.
The basic problem is that it requires a big array of electromagnets, one per pixel. Fabricating large arrays of electromagnets is expensive; it's hard to fabricate coils using an IC process. And it doesn't scale down well; tiny coils are tough to make. It's also hard to contain a magnetic field in a small space. So electrostatic devices, like LCDs, and emission devices, like plasma panels, tend to win out.
Previous technologies shot down by this fact include magnetic bubble and magnetic core memories. They worked, but they never got either cheap or tiny.
A few years ago, Upside magazine went bust. Since I own Downside, I looked into buying their domain, but the assets of Upside were eventually acquired by another tech publishing firm. The article didn't mention Upside, although they mentioned The Industry Standard and Business 2.0, which also tanked.
We also lost Silicon Valley's newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. It's been purchased by an outfit that runs cheesy suburban throwaways, and is being brought down to that level. It's still published, but nobody cares.
And Murdoch is buying the Wall Street Journal. Soon, there will be very few information sources that actually go out and dig out news.
The most "location aware" portable thing right now is Helio. It has GPS. It has Myspace integration. It can display all the pizza outlets near you. It has "Buddy Beacon", so your Myspace buddies show up on a map display. It's a true 3G device. Does music, video, data, and voice phone.
What it doesn't have is customers.
The Helio store in Palo Alto is across from the Apple store. And nobody is buying. The day the iPhone came out, the Helio staff were playing GTA on the store's big display, due to a total lack of customers.
Receivers that use both GPS and GLONASS satellite signals have been available for years. Maxim just announced a new receiver chip which receives both and only costs $2.95 in quantity, so that capability is likely to become more available.
GLONASS was in bad shape after the USSR tanked, but new GLONASS satellites are being launched again, and the constellation is currently about half populated. As of today, 11 GLONASS satellites are functioning, 5 are down, and one new one is being brought into position. 24 operational satellites are a full set.
The earlier GLONASS sats only had a two year design life, but the latest models have a 7 year design life, and they're going for a 10-year model. They launch a new batch every December, so they're starting to catch up.
First, it's a Roland the Plogger story, so it's probably wrong.
Second, it's another one of those "we made some minor advance in materials science on a laboratory scale and this will change the world Real Soon Now" stories. It's too early to be making claims like that. All they have is a new material that might be good for something. Maybe.
Third, it's one of those surface chemistry/crystal chemistry as "nanotechnology" stories. "Nanotechnology" has turned into a buzzword for getting funding for surface chemistry work.
OK, first we get past the blogodreck from some site that wants traffic, and look at the Range Fuels site.
This is funded by Kosla Ventures, which is Vinod Kosla's venture capital fund. That's a good sign; he has a decent track record as a VC. (He was one of the founders of Sun, but he later invested in Excite.) Anyway, they're not looking for money; they've got that.
People have been working on cellulostic ethanol for a while. It's not that hard to do; it's hard to do cost-effectively. Here's an overview of the known approaches. Range Fuels uses a heat-driven process, which of course takes energy to run, but is standard chemical engineering. There's other R&D underway to develop a bioengineered enzyme that will digest cellulose at commercially feasible rates. Such enzymes have been created, but they're too slow and making the enzymes costs too much. Work continues.
Anyway, this doesn't look like the big cellulostic ethanol breakthrough. But it's progress.
"Information technology" is a lot like stationary engineering as a career. Once upon a time, around 1900, stationary engineering was the hot field to get into. People were needed to run the high technology that made the wheels of the world go around - steam engines, generating plants, heavy industrial machinery. It was a new field - vast amounts of machinery were being built and installed, the technology was advancing rapidly, and the world was changing drastically as, for the first time in history, power was being made and distributed in quantity.
A century later, there are about 120,000 stationary engineers in the US. It's a union job, and a good one. Regular hours, OK working conditions, some shift work. It's a routine job, but one that needs to be done. That's where "information technology" is going.
Information technology was once a showpiece operation. Company computers were in glass-walled rooms and people would look in on the shiny machinery. Now they're racks in dark basements and warehouses. The same thing happened to stationary engineering. Steam engines and generating stations were once showpieces. Today, facilities like that are in bleak locations. Visited a boiler room lately?
Of the three really good young people, all with robotics and control experience, who worked on our DARPA Grand Challenge robot vehicle, two are now in financial engineering. One is running a hedge fund out of Santa Fe that's driven by program trading. One is in the Bahamas with an offshore fund. The third is running an iPhone group at Apple.
But these are top people. If you can handle the math, get an undergrad CS degree, then an MBA. If you're further down the food chain, an IT career is an option.
Here's some code of mine.
The last guy to try that is serving a 40 year sentence at ADX Florence.