So 1.4% are completely delusional and have deployed an unreleased product?
1.4% are probably small, tech-savvy companies who are willing to risk it on the release candidate. If they were already on Vista, it isn't that difficult of a jump compatibility-wise.
The difference is one of purpose. He doesn't just want to learn how to write a program in HDL (although it is helpful for verifying designs, certainly), he wants to learn how to design on an FPGA. This means that he needs to be focusing on hardware implementations of logic and what that requires him to do in Verilog/VHDL, rather than using the same logic he would use in another language and use the different syntax.
Sure, it may be possible to take a program in C and turn it into hardware, but it will never be as fast as designing the proper hardware logic. What is the purpose of turning fast software into slow hardware? It's not worth learning if you don't do it right.
Correct, but the only time you should be creating non-implementable HDL code is to produce test cases for your implementable HDL cases, or placeholder modules that will be replaced with implementable code.
but that dosnt mean 6/10 wont deploy it. I imagine plenty of those are just waiting to see how well or not it plays out for other companies.
Right, it just means 6/10 don't plan to deploy it by the end of next year. I'm sure there will still be holdouts, but this survey has nothing to do with 2011, 2012, and so on.
Of course then you burn that money in an even short amount of time, but then at least we'd have put people on Mars. The amount of money you spend is irrelevant if you don't take into account what you get back for it.
So? Both would end up being short-term projects. The difference being that a Mars trip would be mostly travel, with a brief period of exploration and science. With the ISS, even 15 years before de-orbit is still 15 years of science. That puts the ISS at a full 12 years ahead on science (even estimating a full Mars mission with 1 year of on-planet exploration and experiments during a 1-year transit there and another on the way back).
Add that the ISS has a large crew, certainly more than a Mars mission, and the ISS still gets more research time per dollar, just a different kind of research.
De-orbiting the ISS is an active choice, however. It's expensive to keep manned and operational. I suppose they could simply abandon it and leave it up there, but it's going to come down eventually. If I understand correctly, its orbit is so low that it experiences drag from Earth's atmosphere, which means it regularly needs a boost, and therefore fuel. I guess they prefer to have it come down in a controlled manner, so nobody gets hit on the head with the thing.
(I may have started by expressing the hope that the ISS stays up there for a while, but I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place? Shouldn't we be figuring out how to mine asteroids instead?)
You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc. My guess is to why we hear less about ISS science is that it's harder to write in a pop-culture headline. At least with the others you get pretty pictures or the ability to wildly extrapolate (liquid water, therefor aliens) or fear-monger (black holes sound scary, microscopic ones must be even more frightening). Zero gravity is so 1990, so regardless of how useful the research, your average person not interested in science will not care, and thus think it's a waste. You just can't pitch the importance to them.
There's no other location where we can do long-term scientific research in zero gravity, so we would do well to keep the ISS if we plan to keep learning from it.
Optical routers will bring router delays down, eventually, so pings will be closer to their theoretical limits.
I don't think it's meant to be all-encompassing, but that's a typical internet misunderstanding. Given a ping of 50 or less would make enough games playable for those who did not want the dedicated hardware in their house (like, for that one game on another platform you want to try). This will be a nice niche service, just not a replacement.
I'm still waiting for a high-quality graphical update to the old board game. Even incorporating the MechWarrior RPG rules. Basically Mech Commander using the old turn-based rules instead of scrambling to do simple things.
So the developers laziness or technological limitations are just cause for forcing players to choose specific loadouts?
No, it's the game canon. Most Mechs are not intensely customizable. They have some hardpoints for mounting, and it makes sense that some hardpoints might not have the hardware to accept any old weapon. Energy weapon hardpoints will have large power and coolant conduits. ACs and Missiles will have smaller energy/coolant conduits, and ammo feed mechanisms. Additional modifications would not be within the realm of possiblity for a mercenary lance or other small combat group.
It seems a fair assumption that the MadCat designers (in canon) would not find the need to place ammo feeds into the arms (where the PPCs were located) or high-power conduits to the missile pods.
I've got a Garmin and love it. It's made to sit easily on the dash, has a bigger screen than a phone, doesn't need cell coverage, and doesn't keep me from using my phone.
Best justification for my standalnoe GPS, IMO. Comparing the size of the screen I want to be able to glance at while driving and the size of a screen that can comprtably fit into my pocket, they don't overlap.
Putting the two together just gives you a phone that runs out of batteries too quickly, and a GPS that's hard to navigate by.
I think what you hit on perfectly here is that the graphics need to serve the game. The 3D graphics in 5 were more technical and higher resolution, but they weren't as good for the game. Being turn based top-down/isometric meant that with 2D there was much better separation and identification of units and items.
In a driving game, for example, high fidelity 3D makes the game more playable rather than less. The judge of graphics should be playability, rather than resolution/poly count/texturing.
What makes you think laser light travels in a straight line? (In fact, all light travels in straight lines...) I guess since you have only ever seen laser pointers (And "ray" guns in SciFi) you have made a silly assumption. Laser light could just as easily be radiated in an isotropic fashion. (Guess you might need to look up some of my terms:-)
Hmm, probably because all current optical data transmission is directional, rather than isotropic. Since an isotropic laser makes no sense for the application, I'm not sure why you bring it up. Maybe to give you an opportunity to be condescending as an Anonymous Coward?
Perhaps it's you that made the silly assumption that an Electrical Engineer doesn't know what 'isotropic' means.;-)
Since when does Japan care about US Intellectual Property law? Sorry for sounding so harsh, but part of the reason the American semiconductor industry died is the Japanese companies didn't pay licensing on the patents for RAM. It's no wonder they could build it cheaper.
Even today, I have several friends who design stearing columns for most of the major automakers. Toyota buys the minimum run of columns, then takes the shipment and reverse engineers it to build them on their own. No licensing or anything, so my friend's company just barely breaks even (the minimum order is just enough to cover the engineering costs).
So now they're going to use the system that they ignore because they'll make money off of it? Fuck. That. Shit.
Well, in this case we're talking about lasers traveling through a crystal and being turned on and off with another laser. Unlike electrons and holes in a semiconductor (which drift and move around, causing leakage current), lasers travel in a straight line until they are made to change direction. The laser paths could even cross without interfering with each other.
The only issue I can imagine is scattering, due to dust (practically non-existent in cleanroom manufacturing of this quality) or the transistor crystal. It isn't mentioned how much light is scattered, but I doubt it would be enough to cause significant noise in, even an open system. Since the control laser seems to be a different frequency and direction from the signal laser, even if there was significant scattering, it would just increase the noise in the data. It would not result in undesired transistor switching
As for small boxes, you misunderstand my point. Photons are just light, so putting an opaque material between transistors reduces leakage light to zero. For the processor as a whole, this means a similar opaque package as all silicon chips are enclosed. Between transistors, it is possible to etch channels in an opaque substrate where the light could travel, no 'boxes' needed.
do quantum transistors suffer from leakage? if so, while this is an excellent piece of engineering on it's own, it's pretty useless in practice as any data would just get lost in the fudge.
Well leakage in electronic circuits comes from current flowing through the semiconductor while it is in an "off" state. Quantum photonics doesn't deal with current (or even electricity), so there would not be the same kind of leakage. I'm not aware of a comparable phenomenon specific to quantum states, but I'm just an EE, so some physicist might prove me wrong.
Everything in the article focused on the heat loss, energy efficiency and potential throughput, but no reasons were specifically given as to why this would succeed where Electronic processors have broken down other than 'Photons are beter than Electrons'.
How close can these new transistors get before they start contaminating each other's states?
Would these not be more suceptable to outside interference (Stray cosmic rays, shining a torch on it?)
Okay, maybe not the shining a torch on it. But if a single molecule transistor is hit by a stray photon, it *will* affect it's state surely. If so are they going to have abour 20 transistors doing the calculations and matching them for discrepencies?
First of all, photons are better than electrons for the reason I gave above, and because all of our long-distance and high data-rate information transmission is already optical. Instead of going from light to silicon and back, sticking with light reduces latency. It also improves efficiency, as the photon's energy is harnessed to perform the switching.
As for interference, if the molecule only responds to photons, shielding it from outside photons is trivial. It's called a box. I also get the impression FTA that the output of the transistor is well controlled, meaning that interference could be minimized or removed completely very easily.
The article raises more questions than it answers. Maybe I just don't know enough about quantum computing, but I'd like the answers all the same.
When has any quick article about a new tech breakthrough given all the answers?
I hesitate to say because it feels too goddamn obvious but higher efficiency leads to lower cost-per-kWh, so you really should care.
That's partly true. However, there's an interplay between peak/average efficiency and environmental factors of the light. This means that two panels with the same peak efficiency might produce wildly different ammounts of energy. For example, a panel that maintains its efficieny in dim light would be better suited to the Pacific Northwest or other cloudy climates, while one with a high peak efficiency only in bright light is best for Southwestern sunny states.
But as you yourself said, the important part is the cost-per-kWh break even point. This is completely unrelated to efficiency. A panel with 50% efficiency compared to some standard panel that has 10% the cost per area is more cost effective per kWh. Same with a panel that costs 4x as much but only produces 50% more energy. The question is, which kind of efficiency do you care about? Typically quoted efficiency (ammount of energy converted) is essentially a measure of space efficiency: how much area it takes to meet your power requirements.
The more important question for most people, I believe, is 'how much does the energy cost?' and that's where the cost per kWh value comes from. Ideally this measure will be determined accross the panel's lifetime, meaning the value is directly comparable to your current power cost. Do the panels provide energy at 1 cent per kWh cheaper? If so, there is no (economic) reason not to use as many as is practical. You might not get as much energy as with 'high-efficiency' cells, but your total bill will go down.
You raise a good point with the curmudgeon angle. I can't stand playing shooters with a console controller, I need a mouse and keyboard. But this does not discount that there are people very, very good with the console controller. You probably can't argue the inherent superiority of one over the other but you can certainly see how personal preference can enter into it.
Actually, you can. Keyboard and mouse is superior compared to a game pad.
Let's be fair. The Mouse is better than a thumbstick for aiming, but a thumbstick is better for movement, especially in games involving stealth or other minor movements.
That said, the keyboard has more buttons and is more configurable, but it's definitely a tradeoff with the analog input on a controller.
However, your argument fails to account for 2009 technology. Recycling creates pollution, recycling many times takes much more energy then just dumping them in a landfill.
What you forget to take into account is that all the materials used in electronics manufacturing are non-renewable resources. In time the energy needed to recycle these resources will come from renewable sources, but we have only a limited supply of silicon, cadmium, nickel, copper, etc.
That said, the only way that manufacturers are going to make their electronics easier to recycle will be by footing them with a portion of the bill. The simpler it is to scrap the parts by component material, the less they have to pay.
I'd say there's a crucial difference. In the case of Iran, the technology is an export of oppressive technologies to an oppressive regime. In China's case, Green Dam is an internal program (supposedly) developed by Chinese coders. Regardless of how oppressive the program is (very oppressive), Sony is not developing it.
This doesn't make it alright or a good thing, but China would install this stuff on PCs either way. In the case of Iran, without foreign technology they would not have been able to filter internet transmissions.
Well that's my question. Does it scale linearly with the number of qubits? The article is not very clear about that.
I see no indication that the number of atoms per qubit will scale at all in relation to anything but time spent in a quantum state. It's purely speculation (given a single data point) to assume that this number will scale at all just because qubits are added. It's also speculation to assume they won't, but it seems the more logical guess. The obvious correlation would be between number of atoms and ease of reading them.
As for being only 2 qubits, that's just to make the prototype simpler to create.
Slashdot Mirror
"We have already deployed Windows 7 1.4%
So 1.4% are completely delusional and have deployed an unreleased product?
1.4% are probably small, tech-savvy companies who are willing to risk it on the release candidate. If they were already on Vista, it isn't that difficult of a jump compatibility-wise.
The difference is one of purpose. He doesn't just want to learn how to write a program in HDL (although it is helpful for verifying designs, certainly), he wants to learn how to design on an FPGA. This means that he needs to be focusing on hardware implementations of logic and what that requires him to do in Verilog/VHDL, rather than using the same logic he would use in another language and use the different syntax.
Sure, it may be possible to take a program in C and turn it into hardware, but it will never be as fast as designing the proper hardware logic. What is the purpose of turning fast software into slow hardware? It's not worth learning if you don't do it right.
Correct, but the only time you should be creating non-implementable HDL code is to produce test cases for your implementable HDL cases, or placeholder modules that will be replaced with implementable code.
but that dosnt mean 6/10 wont deploy it. I imagine plenty of those are just waiting to see how well or not it plays out for other companies.
Right, it just means 6/10 don't plan to deploy it by the end of next year. I'm sure there will still be holdouts, but this survey has nothing to do with 2011, 2012, and so on.
We could have put people on Mars for that money.
Of course then you burn that money in an even short amount of time, but then at least we'd have put people on Mars. The amount of money you spend is irrelevant if you don't take into account what you get back for it.
So? Both would end up being short-term projects. The difference being that a Mars trip would be mostly travel, with a brief period of exploration and science. With the ISS, even 15 years before de-orbit is still 15 years of science. That puts the ISS at a full 12 years ahead on science (even estimating a full Mars mission with 1 year of on-planet exploration and experiments during a 1-year transit there and another on the way back).
Add that the ISS has a large crew, certainly more than a Mars mission, and the ISS still gets more research time per dollar, just a different kind of research.
De-orbiting the ISS is an active choice, however. It's expensive to keep manned and operational. I suppose they could simply abandon it and leave it up there, but it's going to come down eventually. If I understand correctly, its orbit is so low that it experiences drag from Earth's atmosphere, which means it regularly needs a boost, and therefore fuel. I guess they prefer to have it come down in a controlled manner, so nobody gets hit on the head with the thing.
Yes, the ISS has no engines and will fall out of the sky eventually, much like Skylab. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Altitude_control
(I may have started by expressing the hope that the ISS stays up there for a while, but I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place? Shouldn't we be figuring out how to mine asteroids instead?)
You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc. My guess is to why we hear less about ISS science is that it's harder to write in a pop-culture headline. At least with the others you get pretty pictures or the ability to wildly extrapolate (liquid water, therefor aliens) or fear-monger (black holes sound scary, microscopic ones must be even more frightening). Zero gravity is so 1990, so regardless of how useful the research, your average person not interested in science will not care, and thus think it's a waste. You just can't pitch the importance to them.
There's no other location where we can do long-term scientific research in zero gravity, so we would do well to keep the ISS if we plan to keep learning from it.
Optical routers will bring router delays down, eventually, so pings will be closer to their theoretical limits.
I don't think it's meant to be all-encompassing, but that's a typical internet misunderstanding. Given a ping of 50 or less would make enough games playable for those who did not want the dedicated hardware in their house (like, for that one game on another platform you want to try). This will be a nice niche service, just not a replacement.
I'm still waiting for a high-quality graphical update to the old board game. Even incorporating the MechWarrior RPG rules. Basically Mech Commander using the old turn-based rules instead of scrambling to do simple things.
So the developers laziness or technological limitations are just cause for forcing players to choose specific loadouts?
No, it's the game canon. Most Mechs are not intensely customizable. They have some hardpoints for mounting, and it makes sense that some hardpoints might not have the hardware to accept any old weapon. Energy weapon hardpoints will have large power and coolant conduits. ACs and Missiles will have smaller energy/coolant conduits, and ammo feed mechanisms. Additional modifications would not be within the realm of possiblity for a mercenary lance or other small combat group.
It seems a fair assumption that the MadCat designers (in canon) would not find the need to place ammo feeds into the arms (where the PPCs were located) or high-power conduits to the missile pods.
I've got a Garmin and love it. It's made to sit easily on the dash, has a bigger screen than a phone, doesn't need cell coverage, and doesn't keep me from using my phone.
Best justification for my standalnoe GPS, IMO. Comparing the size of the screen I want to be able to glance at while driving and the size of a screen that can comprtably fit into my pocket, they don't overlap.
Putting the two together just gives you a phone that runs out of batteries too quickly, and a GPS that's hard to navigate by.
I think what you hit on perfectly here is that the graphics need to serve the game. The 3D graphics in 5 were more technical and higher resolution, but they weren't as good for the game. Being turn based top-down/isometric meant that with 2D there was much better separation and identification of units and items.
In a driving game, for example, high fidelity 3D makes the game more playable rather than less. The judge of graphics should be playability, rather than resolution/poly count/texturing.
Since everything crashes the JVM.
Really. And all this wouldn't even be a problem if they just wrote it in Java to begin with.
Exactly, everybody would have stopped using it after the 30th time it crashed the JVM.
What makes you think laser light travels in a straight line? (In fact, all light travels in straight lines ...) I guess since you have only ever seen laser pointers (And "ray" guns in SciFi) you have made a silly assumption. Laser light could just as easily be radiated in an isotropic fashion. (Guess you might need to look up some of my terms :-)
Hmm, probably because all current optical data transmission is directional, rather than isotropic. Since an isotropic laser makes no sense for the application, I'm not sure why you bring it up. Maybe to give you an opportunity to be condescending as an Anonymous Coward?
Perhaps it's you that made the silly assumption that an Electrical Engineer doesn't know what 'isotropic' means. ;-)
Since when does Japan care about US Intellectual Property law? Sorry for sounding so harsh, but part of the reason the American semiconductor industry died is the Japanese companies didn't pay licensing on the patents for RAM. It's no wonder they could build it cheaper.
Even today, I have several friends who design stearing columns for most of the major automakers. Toyota buys the minimum run of columns, then takes the shipment and reverse engineers it to build them on their own. No licensing or anything, so my friend's company just barely breaks even (the minimum order is just enough to cover the engineering costs).
So now they're going to use the system that they ignore because they'll make money off of it? Fuck. That. Shit.
Well, in this case we're talking about lasers traveling through a crystal and being turned on and off with another laser. Unlike electrons and holes in a semiconductor (which drift and move around, causing leakage current), lasers travel in a straight line until they are made to change direction. The laser paths could even cross without interfering with each other.
The only issue I can imagine is scattering, due to dust (practically non-existent in cleanroom manufacturing of this quality) or the transistor crystal. It isn't mentioned how much light is scattered, but I doubt it would be enough to cause significant noise in, even an open system. Since the control laser seems to be a different frequency and direction from the signal laser, even if there was significant scattering, it would just increase the noise in the data. It would not result in undesired transistor switching
As for small boxes, you misunderstand my point. Photons are just light, so putting an opaque material between transistors reduces leakage light to zero. For the processor as a whole, this means a similar opaque package as all silicon chips are enclosed. Between transistors, it is possible to etch channels in an opaque substrate where the light could travel, no 'boxes' needed.
do quantum transistors suffer from leakage? if so, while this is an excellent piece of engineering on it's own, it's pretty useless in practice as any data would just get lost in the fudge.
Well leakage in electronic circuits comes from current flowing through the semiconductor while it is in an "off" state. Quantum photonics doesn't deal with current (or even electricity), so there would not be the same kind of leakage. I'm not aware of a comparable phenomenon specific to quantum states, but I'm just an EE, so some physicist might prove me wrong.
Everything in the article focused on the heat loss, energy efficiency and potential throughput, but no reasons were specifically given as to why this would succeed where Electronic processors have broken down other than 'Photons are beter than Electrons'. How close can these new transistors get before they start contaminating each other's states? Would these not be more suceptable to outside interference (Stray cosmic rays, shining a torch on it?)
Okay, maybe not the shining a torch on it. But if a single molecule transistor is hit by a stray photon, it *will* affect it's state surely. If so are they going to have abour 20 transistors doing the calculations and matching them for discrepencies?
First of all, photons are better than electrons for the reason I gave above, and because all of our long-distance and high data-rate information transmission is already optical. Instead of going from light to silicon and back, sticking with light reduces latency. It also improves efficiency, as the photon's energy is harnessed to perform the switching.
As for interference, if the molecule only responds to photons, shielding it from outside photons is trivial. It's called a box. I also get the impression FTA that the output of the transistor is well controlled, meaning that interference could be minimized or removed completely very easily.
The article raises more questions than it answers. Maybe I just don't know enough about quantum computing, but I'd like the answers all the same.
When has any quick article about a new tech breakthrough given all the answers?
Does anyone know when this science will be taught in universities?
My university has a Photonics concentration within the Electrical Engineering degree program.
As for learning this kind of cutting-edge stuff, that would happen in a graduate or post-grad program, just like any field.
Superconducting: check
Plasma: check
Rocket: check
Linux:
Three for four isn't bad.
Whatever, my Twitter account is pretty bare now. I'll take 10 cents a month to follow (and ignore) people.
I hesitate to say because it feels too goddamn obvious but higher efficiency leads to lower cost-per-kWh, so you really should care.
That's partly true. However, there's an interplay between peak/average efficiency and environmental factors of the light. This means that two panels with the same peak efficiency might produce wildly different ammounts of energy. For example, a panel that maintains its efficieny in dim light would be better suited to the Pacific Northwest or other cloudy climates, while one with a high peak efficiency only in bright light is best for Southwestern sunny states.
But as you yourself said, the important part is the cost-per-kWh break even point. This is completely unrelated to efficiency. A panel with 50% efficiency compared to some standard panel that has 10% the cost per area is more cost effective per kWh. Same with a panel that costs 4x as much but only produces 50% more energy. The question is, which kind of efficiency do you care about? Typically quoted efficiency (ammount of energy converted) is essentially a measure of space efficiency: how much area it takes to meet your power requirements.
The more important question for most people, I believe, is 'how much does the energy cost?' and that's where the cost per kWh value comes from. Ideally this measure will be determined accross the panel's lifetime, meaning the value is directly comparable to your current power cost. Do the panels provide energy at 1 cent per kWh cheaper? If so, there is no (economic) reason not to use as many as is practical. You might not get as much energy as with 'high-efficiency' cells, but your total bill will go down.
Actually, you can. Keyboard and mouse is superior compared to a game pad.
Let's be fair. The Mouse is better than a thumbstick for aiming, but a thumbstick is better for movement, especially in games involving stealth or other minor movements.
That said, the keyboard has more buttons and is more configurable, but it's definitely a tradeoff with the analog input on a controller.
However, your argument fails to account for 2009 technology. Recycling creates pollution, recycling many times takes much more energy then just dumping them in a landfill.
What you forget to take into account is that all the materials used in electronics manufacturing are non-renewable resources. In time the energy needed to recycle these resources will come from renewable sources, but we have only a limited supply of silicon, cadmium, nickel, copper, etc.
That said, the only way that manufacturers are going to make their electronics easier to recycle will be by footing them with a portion of the bill. The simpler it is to scrap the parts by component material, the less they have to pay.
I'd say there's a crucial difference. In the case of Iran, the technology is an export of oppressive technologies to an oppressive regime. In China's case, Green Dam is an internal program (supposedly) developed by Chinese coders. Regardless of how oppressive the program is (very oppressive), Sony is not developing it.
This doesn't make it alright or a good thing, but China would install this stuff on PCs either way. In the case of Iran, without foreign technology they would not have been able to filter internet transmissions.
Well that's my question. Does it scale linearly with the number of qubits? The article is not very clear about that.
I see no indication that the number of atoms per qubit will scale at all in relation to anything but time spent in a quantum state. It's purely speculation (given a single data point) to assume that this number will scale at all just because qubits are added. It's also speculation to assume they won't, but it seems the more logical guess. The obvious correlation would be between number of atoms and ease of reading them.
As for being only 2 qubits, that's just to make the prototype simpler to create.