If the politics don't get us, the aftereffects of off-shoring not only our manufacturing, but our R&D will.
Years back, I saw MIT futurist Lester Thoreau give a speech. He cited the worthlessness of Carter's "Global 2000" report, because it (quite correctly) began with "If present trends continue..." and went on to say that the one surety is that present trends never continue - they always change. I cling to that, because present trends really, really suck badly.
I see some signs of hope already. It appears that India has fully employed its employable tech-trained population. They've been giving double-digit pay raises there for years, and though their salaries are still lower than in the US, the difference is no longer so compellingly extreme. Same type of thing for China, except there the effects of a generation of one-child are starting to show. If only we in the US haven't completely destroyed our educational system and workforce by the time trends change...
Sometimes I think the big multinationals see all of this and know what's happening - and they plan to jettison the US as a marketplace as India and China grow their middle-class marketplaces. Then as Indian and Chinese middle-classes start to get lazy and overpaid, they'll have a bumper crop of desperate low-pay workers in the devastated US economy.
So the obvious thing to do, for those disappointed in how the Democrats have accomplished their agenda, is to vote Republican.
Would you rather have a party that is ineffective pushing an agenda you agree with, or a party that is effective at pushing an agenda you don't agree with?
> Welcome to the future, where mathematical (and probably physical) laws of the universe are the sole and lawful > property of hairless apes in business suits.
And we can certainly hope that today's Bilski decision negates some of this fear.
I could go on to speculate on Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat", the desire of some to "rebuild mountains out of Intellectual Property" and negate it, and general Supreme Court voting records, but that's for another time and topic.
As we've scaled deep into the submicron region, it's been getting harder and harder to turn the devices really "off". Leakage current has been rising and has been quite noticable for several generations now.
So the idea of doing useful work with subthreshold current sounds neat (OK, I just went and read TFA.)
Still sounds neat, but...
In deep submicron part of the reason for the subthreshold leakage problems is control of Leff. (The effective channel length of the FETs.) There's a thing called "line length variation" which means that channel lengths in different parts of the chip will be different, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly. Threshold voltage (Vt) is a strong function of channel length, making subthreshold leakage also a strong function of channel length. Performance characteristics will vary widely across the chip, likely much more than conventional transistor operation.
This will make it tough to scale down, (in feature size) scale up, (in chip size) and make manufacturable.
JFK and MM checked into their hotel room. She put on her glasses and began giving him political advice, both domestic and international - helping him run the country. He gave her career advice. Later they discussed how the "affair cover" wasn't going to last forever, and they'd have to think of a new way to exchange advice and information.
A quick look at google/Wikipedia, and it appears that the next expiration date for "Steamboat Willie" is around 2019, so that's when "limited time" will be redefined yet again.
When I was about 5 (almost 50 years ago) we were visiting relatives, and they took us to see where a coal mine had been buring underground for years. The ground was warm and slightly smelly, but that's about as far as I remember. Most of my memories of that are seeing family slides and hearing stories. The relatives were in the Altoona area, though.
Does anyone else find it odd to see the EFF and MPAA on the same side for a court case?
The EFF's motivations I understand. I guess I need to RTFA, but my gut-level guess at the MPAA's motivation is, "Only big guys like us (MafiAA) who can afford a stable of lawyers and a few purchased legislators deserve copyright protection."
To continue, way back then, there were lots of commercial attempts at online services, like CompuServe, AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, etc, etc, etc. They all had one common feature - they were OWNED from the start, and their owners wanted the whole pie.
The internet WON because it wasn't owned, it wasn't limited to one owner's profit-oriented vision.
Fast-forward and you'll see that the same types of commercial interests that failed to produce an internet now are trying to get back to the same point - owning the whole thing, and limiting it to their own profit-oriented vision. In addition, they've taken the original robust routing concepts, gutted it, and turned it into a whole bunch of failure locations called "peering points" that of late seem to fail for business, not technical reasons.
The ones that work look nothing like these, we won't hear about them for 20 years, nor will the enemy get their hands on them.
These are the tests we hear about. We WANT the enemy to find them, reverse engineer them, and copy them. Looking at these test vehicles will set them back YEARS!
But see, that's exactly why I made my remark. I've been watching the characteristics of these "transistors" the process guys give us degrade with each generation. Active current is kept under fairly decent control, but standby current is rising fast. For a silly joke, I like to think of 2 lines on a chart, active and standby currents, and wonder when standby will surpass active.
BTW, in spite of your saying the device isn't suitable for digital circuitry - analog circuitry is a heck of a lot tougher. By the time it's not fit for digital, it's been unfit for analog for a few generations.
Oh, and one other thing... When do the electrons start tunneling out of the wire? They alread tunnel through our "thin" gates, so we have to use thicker gates for sensitive analog circuits.
It'll take a really wicked manufacturing process to ever make, too. 7 atoms? What if you get only 6? What if you get 8? What if one is slightly off position? We've already been at sub-100nM processes for years now, and things are already too "grainy" for real comfort.
Oh yeah, what's the difference between "on" current and "off" current?
Not a troll at all. I share others' fear at the loss of manned spaceflight. But having watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" not long before watching the moon landing at age 13, I'm also saddened that there's no orbiting Hilton, no Clavius Base, or any of the really neat stuff.
What I read out of Obama's plan is that after 50 years, the task of getting stuff into LEO ought to be something mundane and well within the realm of private enterprise. The fact that we're still stalled with LEO still a major task this much later is a clear sign that we haven't been progressing well. It seems that there are perpetual NASA critics, no matter what they do. I remember seeing posts on Usenet in years past that NASA is killing the private spaceflight business by continuing to develop LEO capability. We've switched directions how many times in the past 40 years, and still gotten nearly nowhere. Let's see what happens when we try fostering private enterprise. The pessimist in me says private space launch will just start making it when some future administration changes mission again, putting NASA directly in competition with them.
We haven't had a decent space plan since getting to the moon. We have had some lofty goals, but never proper commitment or funding. We've also had changing directions every administration or so.
Perhaps the worst thing about Obama's plan is that it is a little more in line with reality instead of wishes?
If it were "the same" it wouldn't be the internet. You would be on AOL and I would be on CompuServe, and we wouldn't be talking at all. There would be corporate alliances, with some consumer products pushing you to CompuServe, some to AOL, some to GEnie, some to Prodigy, etc. If there were such a thing as Linux or *bsd, they'd be on none-of-the-above - they'd be on a thousand small-scale BBSes all over the world. Many of those BBSes would call each other at night when the rates were low, syncing with each other, and specializing in finding short-hop routes to avoid long-distance charges.
Business never "got it" with the internet, because they were all too busy trying to own the entire pie. WE found the internet and beat them over the head with it, and they came along.
But they still don't get it, because they still want to own the pie. The goose laid the golden egg, and keeps laying them. Yet the business community can't recognize that, and is actively trying its hardest to kill the goose.
This is Slashdot - it's not all young whippersnappers - there are some other grey-hairs around here who remember the good old days at 300 baud - when 1200 baud was blazingly high speed.
Too bad I let my mod points lapse before seeing this.
I have the feeling that for this vacancy, Obama could have nominated Thomas, Scalia, or Roberts and the Right would have been screaming about "Socialist activist nominations." Maybe that's unfair, but it fits the pattern.
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me to see the seat go unfilled until at least November. Then in November it will either backfire on the Republicans, or it may well go unfilled until a True Conservative (TM) is elected in 2012.
Your old suicide code only works for wrist slitting, drug overdoese, and self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Would you like to add train, cliff, bridge, or building jumping or electrocution to your capabilities? Please press "OK" to update.
Bogust suggests that cross-platform software may be making developers lazy, and turning software into one big cross-platform monoculture.
That may be true, but he's missing the real issue. As long as those products are viewed as some sort of computing device, one expects them to do what computing devices do, and the hardware is capable of that. Computing devices, those that are Turing complete, are general purpose. The platform may impose constraints like speed and memory - consider them to be challenges. (limitations by another name)
No, the real issue here is that one buys a piece of hardware which is a general purpose computing device, with very livable hardware constraints. THEN the provider artificially constrains that system.
Here's the issue another way... We're used to buying physical things, which become ours, and we can do with as we please. We're used to buying books, movies, and music, and understand that we're not supposed to make illegitimate copies of them. (The question of what constitutes "illegitimate" is a quagmire, of course.)
More and more physical things come with embedded computing devices. Those embedded computing devices run software. Those who wrote the software are making more obvious limitations upon the "permissible" use of that hardware that is shipped with their software.
The iStuff wasn't the beginning of this trend, merely the current, most blatant example. But remember, it's getting hard to find any item of significance that doesn't have some sort of embedded computing these days. Imagine if practically everything you buy comes with license restrictions. artificially limiting what you can do with the product, enhancing the makers' revenue streams, etc. Since I have "car analogy" in my signature, imagine a car (with built-in GPS, of course) that starts bucking, misfiring, and generally misbehaving when you drive into a non-dealer repair or aftermarket accessory shop.
I've come to the conclusion that "human nature" isn't good enough any more. We have bigger, more powerful, more destructive toys. It's time that we have to become better, to handle them. Failure to do so will be self-correcting, probably painfully.
Slashdot Mirror
If the politics don't get us, the aftereffects of off-shoring not only our manufacturing, but our R&D will.
Years back, I saw MIT futurist Lester Thoreau give a speech. He cited the worthlessness of Carter's "Global 2000" report, because it (quite correctly) began with "If present trends continue..." and went on to say that the one surety is that present trends never continue - they always change. I cling to that, because present trends really, really suck badly.
I see some signs of hope already. It appears that India has fully employed its employable tech-trained population. They've been giving double-digit pay raises there for years, and though their salaries are still lower than in the US, the difference is no longer so compellingly extreme. Same type of thing for China, except there the effects of a generation of one-child are starting to show. If only we in the US haven't completely destroyed our educational system and workforce by the time trends change...
Sometimes I think the big multinationals see all of this and know what's happening - and they plan to jettison the US as a marketplace as India and China grow their middle-class marketplaces. Then as Indian and Chinese middle-classes start to get lazy and overpaid, they'll have a bumper crop of desperate low-pay workers in the devastated US economy.
So the obvious thing to do, for those disappointed in how the Democrats have accomplished their agenda, is to vote Republican.
Would you rather have a party that is ineffective pushing an agenda you agree with, or a party that is effective at pushing an agenda you don't agree with?
> Welcome to the future, where mathematical (and probably physical) laws of the universe are the sole and lawful
> property of hairless apes in business suits.
And we can certainly hope that today's Bilski decision negates some of this fear.
I could go on to speculate on Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat", the desire of some to "rebuild mountains out of Intellectual Property" and negate it, and general Supreme Court voting records, but that's for another time and topic.
As we've scaled deep into the submicron region, it's been getting harder and harder to turn the devices really "off". Leakage current has been rising and has been quite noticable for several generations now.
So the idea of doing useful work with subthreshold current sounds neat
(OK, I just went and read TFA.)
Still sounds neat, but...
In deep submicron part of the reason for the subthreshold leakage problems is control of Leff. (The effective channel length of the FETs.) There's a thing called "line length variation" which means that channel lengths in different parts of the chip will be different, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly. Threshold voltage (Vt) is a strong function of channel length, making subthreshold leakage also a strong function of channel length. Performance characteristics will vary widely across the chip, likely much more than conventional transistor operation.
This will make it tough to scale down, (in feature size) scale up, (in chip size) and make manufacturable.
Anyone remember the old SNL skit?
JFK and MM checked into their hotel room. She put on her glasses and began giving him political advice, both domestic and international - helping him run the country. He gave her career advice. Later they discussed how the "affair cover" wasn't going to last forever, and they'd have to think of a new way to exchange advice and information.
When was the last copyright extension...
A quick look at google/Wikipedia, and it appears that the next expiration date for "Steamboat Willie" is around 2019, so that's when "limited time" will be redefined yet again.
When I was about 5 (almost 50 years ago) we were visiting relatives, and they took us to see where a coal mine had been buring underground for years. The ground was warm and slightly smelly, but that's about as far as I remember. Most of my memories of that are seeing family slides and hearing stories. The relatives were in the Altoona area, though.
The picture looked to me as if the Mole Man attacked, and the FF were out of town. The walls looked practically vertical.
Does anyone else find it odd to see the EFF and MPAA on the same side for a court case?
The EFF's motivations I understand. I guess I need to RTFA, but my gut-level guess at the MPAA's motivation is, "Only big guys like us (MafiAA) who can afford a stable of lawyers and a few purchased legislators deserve copyright protection."
Is it about making food better, or making food more profitable.
Sometimes those two interests align, but many times they don't
Profitability as the highest, if not only motive has done a lot to strengthen the distrust of genetically modified food.
To continue, way back then, there were lots of commercial attempts at online services, like CompuServe, AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, etc, etc, etc. They all had one common feature - they were OWNED from the start, and their owners wanted the whole pie.
The internet WON because it wasn't owned, it wasn't limited to one owner's profit-oriented vision.
Fast-forward and you'll see that the same types of commercial interests that failed to produce an internet now are trying to get back to the same point - owning the whole thing, and limiting it to their own profit-oriented vision. In addition, they've taken the original robust routing concepts, gutted it, and turned it into a whole bunch of failure locations called "peering points" that of late seem to fail for business, not technical reasons.
The ones that work look nothing like these, we won't hear about them for 20 years, nor will the enemy get their hands on them.
These are the tests we hear about. We WANT the enemy to find them, reverse engineer them, and copy them. Looking at these test vehicles will set them back YEARS!
I missed a post in there - it didn't show the one you were responding to, and I thought you were responding to me. My mistake.
But see, that's exactly why I made my remark. I've been watching the characteristics of these "transistors" the process guys give us degrade with each generation. Active current is kept under fairly decent control, but standby current is rising fast. For a silly joke, I like to think of 2 lines on a chart, active and standby currents, and wonder when standby will surpass active.
BTW, in spite of your saying the device isn't suitable for digital circuitry - analog circuitry is a heck of a lot tougher. By the time it's not fit for digital, it's been unfit for analog for a few generations.
Oh, and one other thing... When do the electrons start tunneling out of the wire? They alread tunnel through our "thin" gates, so we have to use thicker gates for sensitive analog circuits.
It'll take a really wicked manufacturing process to ever make, too. 7 atoms? What if you get only 6? What if you get 8? What if one is slightly off position? We've already been at sub-100nM processes for years now, and things are already too "grainy" for real comfort.
Oh yeah, what's the difference between "on" current and "off" current?
Don't forget, temperature is a function of scarcity. Up the thread was the phrase, "If you were the last man on Earth..." It cuts both ways.
Not a troll at all. I share others' fear at the loss of manned spaceflight. But having watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" not long before watching the moon landing at age 13, I'm also saddened that there's no orbiting Hilton, no Clavius Base, or any of the really neat stuff.
What I read out of Obama's plan is that after 50 years, the task of getting stuff into LEO ought to be something mundane and well within the realm of private enterprise. The fact that we're still stalled with LEO still a major task this much later is a clear sign that we haven't been progressing well. It seems that there are perpetual NASA critics, no matter what they do. I remember seeing posts on Usenet in years past that NASA is killing the private spaceflight business by continuing to develop LEO capability. We've switched directions how many times in the past 40 years, and still gotten nearly nowhere. Let's see what happens when we try fostering private enterprise. The pessimist in me says private space launch will just start making it when some future administration changes mission again, putting NASA directly in competition with them.
Good point - I'll have to agree with you on that one.
...which has been overambitious and underfunded.
We haven't had a decent space plan since getting to the moon. We have had some lofty goals, but never proper commitment or funding. We've also had changing directions every administration or so.
Perhaps the worst thing about Obama's plan is that it is a little more in line with reality instead of wishes?
If it were "the same" it wouldn't be the internet. You would be on AOL and I would be on CompuServe, and we wouldn't be talking at all. There would be corporate alliances, with some consumer products pushing you to CompuServe, some to AOL, some to GEnie, some to Prodigy, etc. If there were such a thing as Linux or *bsd, they'd be on none-of-the-above - they'd be on a thousand small-scale BBSes all over the world. Many of those BBSes would call each other at night when the rates were low, syncing with each other, and specializing in finding short-hop routes to avoid long-distance charges.
Business never "got it" with the internet, because they were all too busy trying to own the entire pie. WE found the internet and beat them over the head with it, and they came along.
But they still don't get it, because they still want to own the pie. The goose laid the golden egg, and keeps laying them. Yet the business community can't recognize that, and is actively trying its hardest to kill the goose.
This is Slashdot - it's not all young whippersnappers - there are some other grey-hairs around here who remember the good old days at 300 baud - when 1200 baud was blazingly high speed.
I suspect it depends on where you see the greater threat to your personal liberty...
The government, with laws and regulation...
OR
Corporations and/or other people, with economic coercion.
Too bad I let my mod points lapse before seeing this.
I have the feeling that for this vacancy, Obama could have nominated Thomas, Scalia, or Roberts and the Right would have been screaming about "Socialist activist nominations." Maybe that's unfair, but it fits the pattern.
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me to see the seat go unfilled until at least November. Then in November it will either backfire on the Republicans, or it may well go unfilled until a True Conservative (TM) is elected in 2012.
Your old suicide code only works for wrist slitting, drug overdoese, and self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
Would you like to add train, cliff, bridge, or building jumping or electrocution to your capabilities?
Please press "OK" to update.
Bogust suggests that cross-platform software may be making developers lazy, and turning software into one big cross-platform monoculture.
That may be true, but he's missing the real issue. As long as those products are viewed as some sort of computing device, one expects them to do what computing devices do, and the hardware is capable of that. Computing devices, those that are Turing complete, are general purpose. The platform may impose constraints like speed and memory - consider them to be challenges. (limitations by another name)
No, the real issue here is that one buys a piece of hardware which is a general purpose computing device, with very livable hardware constraints.
THEN the provider artificially constrains that system.
Here's the issue another way...
We're used to buying physical things, which become ours, and we can do with as we please.
We're used to buying books, movies, and music, and understand that we're not supposed to make illegitimate copies of them. (The question of what constitutes "illegitimate" is a quagmire, of course.)
More and more physical things come with embedded computing devices. Those embedded computing devices run software. Those who wrote the software are making more obvious limitations upon the "permissible" use of that hardware that is shipped with their software.
The iStuff wasn't the beginning of this trend, merely the current, most blatant example. But remember, it's getting hard to find any item of significance that doesn't have some sort of embedded computing these days. Imagine if practically everything you buy comes with license restrictions. artificially limiting what you can do with the product, enhancing the makers' revenue streams, etc. Since I have "car analogy" in my signature, imagine a car (with built-in GPS, of course) that starts bucking, misfiring, and generally misbehaving when you drive into a non-dealer repair or aftermarket accessory shop.
I've come to the conclusion that "human nature" isn't good enough any more. We have bigger, more powerful, more destructive toys. It's time that we have to become better, to handle them. Failure to do so will be self-correcting, probably painfully.