I agree that the effort you have to put in has to be pretty low and the value of the feedback you get has to be better. There are some things where this is already the case. And, if you add in a social aspect it can actually be fun and compelling. For tracking your bike rides and runs, check out Strava - http://www.strava.com./ It does really still appeal to those who are already pretty motivated to ride. But it does stoke up that motivation a little. It is sort of addictive to see how you are doing, and they really do provide enough value in their feedback. They will be on the panel at the VLAB event discussing personal analytics businesses at Stanford - http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438.
There is a group at Google called PACO - http://code.google.com/p/paco/ PACO is a tool for building your own personal tracking experiments. This is very much at the project stage. They will be demoing at the VLAB event "The Uploaded Life: Personal Evolution through Self Tracking" at Stanford on March 20th - http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
Is this a type of thing that could develop into a business? Come to the event to hear a discussion on that question and more with Gary Wolf Co-Founder of the Quantified Self and Three-Time Tour de France Winner Greg LeMond. There will also be a presentation by the company Healthrageous, which is tackling the general health problem using biometric devices, machine learning and virtual digital coaching to help regular people achieve better health.
People may find it uncomfortable to be reminded, but that is why simple feedback like looking in the mirror or weighing yourself can be so helpful in improving oneself. Ideally, with regular feedback, not just once a year learning that you have wasted a lot of time, you can keep on track without too much pain.
Check out this company that has a product that gives continuous feedback about posture - http://www.lumoback.com./ I know I would do better with my back pain if I had their product. They will be demoing at the VLAB event on March 20th at Stanford - The Uploaded Life - http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
I really wanted to get the word out about this event coming up at Stanford. I feel like a bit of a fool for not putting the link in the submission!
There will be a panel discussing just this topic at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB). VLAB puts on a great event. If you are in the area you should definitely join us!
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 6:00 - 7:00pm Networking and Refreshments 7:00 - 8:30pm Panel Discussion and Q&A Where:
Stanford Graduate School of Business CEMEX Auditorium at the Knight Management Center
Moderator:
Gary Wolf, Co-Founder, The Quantified Self & Editor, Wired Magazine
Panelists:
Rick Lee, CEO of Healthrageous
Mark S. Gainey, Co-Founder Strava, Inc
Leslie Ziegler: Creative Director, Rock Health
Greg LeMond, Three-Time Winner of the Tour de France
Event Description
Large companies, as well as, garage hackers are leveraging smaller, cheaper sensors and powerful mobile devices are accelerating the virtuous circle of goal setting, data collection, analysis and social motivation necessary to stimulate lasting and steady gains in health, sports performance or other areas of self evolution.
What happens when we add the power of Social/Mobile and always-on personal devices to the evolving health markets. Peer pressure (social reinforcement) and data tracking have significantly contributed to the success of the $11B self improvement and $55B weight loss markets. Legacy business such as Weight Watchers have relied on snippets of painstakingly input data. How will the game be changed when personal data goes from a drop in the bucket to an ocean?
What new perspectives do start ups provide using sensors and on-line services, to disrupt and support the incumbents in self evolution and health? And, what is needed for break-out success?
What new opportunities will exist in widespread tracking?
How do you keep users engaged long enough to make meaningful changes?
Will a start-up create virality to accelerate growth, become a category killer?
What are the challenges of collecting and applying meaningful data?
What incentives are effective to encourage adoption outside of tracker enthusiasts and early adopters?
Can a single offering service survive or will those aggregating multiple data streams dominate?
Can these services grow on an ad based model or is a subscription necessary?
How are companies using social motivation to encourage consistent engagement and long term participation?
San Francisco Bay Area Event (March 20 @ 6 PM, Stanford GSB Cemex Auditorium) — The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking
Description:
What happens when we add the power of Social/Mobile and always-on personal devices to the evolving health markets? What are the successful Quantified Self business models that entrepreneurs are now exploring? Join the conversation at the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) event, The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking, on Tuesday, March 20th at the Stanford School of Business Cemex Auditorium. 6:00 - 7:00 pm Demos, Networking and Refreshments; 7:00 - 8:30 pm Panel Discussion, moderated by Gary Wolf, Co-Founder of The Quantified Self and contributing editor to Wired. Panelists include three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond. Event website: http://bit.ly/yGBApV
The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) is the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth and success of high-tech entrepreneurial ventures by connecting ideas, technology and people.
I have received a number of spam messages from some author I had never heard of before, sending me to her Amazon listing. After the third round of spamming I decided to make a note of it on the page for the book, creating a review titled "Please don't buy books from this spammer." I used my real name and account, gave an accurate description of what had happened and a fairly objective review of what I could glean about the book. I also observed that the other reviews appeared to be shills, so I gave a little review of their reviews as well. None of what I said was mean or vindictive, just matter of fact.
It has been a week since I wrote that review and I thought to check for it today. There is no trace of it. I was not notified in any way that it was unacceptable or that it had been removed. If you are curious, you can check out the books here, but please do not buy from this spammer! I think you will see immediately how poorly the book is written and what obvious shills the reviewers are. It is almost funny, if it weren't for the spamming.
Of course any comments you leave about that book, or feedback you send to Amazon about their pulling reviews is up to you.
Okay, this is a bit off-topic, but the standard synchrotron brightness units are Photons per second per square millimeter per.1% band width, measured at the spot in the endstation. Speaking of source brightness you would use square milliradians instead of millimeters. The.1% band width is a funny unit which refers to deltaE/E, so the brightness here is really a function of energy. In the visible, for yellow light like the sun,.1%bw is about.0022eV at 2.2eV=570nm. For the Fe K-edge, where they may have been working, the energy is 7112eV, which gives.1%bw=7.112eV, so at 7112eV you are counting all photons with energies between 7112eV and 7119eV or so. Synchrotrons typically have a peak brightness somewhere up in the X-Ray energies, which makes sense because they are designed to be X-Ray sources. For that reason it doesn't make much sense to compare the brightness of a synchrotron with that of the sun. They are really such different sources. When I see a comparison like that I usually just dismiss it and read on. They would have said something more useful if they had compared to dental X-Ray brightness. I tend to cut science reporters a little slack though. It is hard to give people an idea of what is really going on in science when there are so many details that you have to know for real understanding. Of course, when the science reporter's words are further interpreted for the Slashdot abstract by someone like Hugh Pickens, you have to give them even less weight.
An economic disincentive for our kids to do homework. That is not what we as a nation or any society on this planet need. Somehow I think we are missing part of the proposal. Of course I haven't looked into it beyond one of the links. I just don't see how anyone is going to find this arrangement appealing! There will be a massive outcry if they try to force this on people and it will die an even more pathetic death than Vista. Well, that is my first reaction and I don't think I care enough to look into any further... Heh.
And Apple is just the company to deliver it. The whole system for watching TV, whether it is movies or other regular TV, is broken. It is a pain in the ass. There is too much chaos. Apple has done a very good job, judging by market success, at creating an orderly, pleasing user experience for both music players and smart phones. You can count on it that they are working on something for video delivery, and video on the iPod is not the end of it. As far as it being announced soon, that too is plausible. They have certainly had enough time to work on it. Technology has advanced since the Apple TV, which didn't interest me but, I am certainly curious to see what they come up with next for that space.
Kurzweil's argument is that if you make an estimate of the processing power of the human brain, computers will reach that level of processing power for a cost of $1000 by around the year 2020. He says nothing about the number of transistors, which, by 2020 will be about 250 billion, considering a doubling every 1.5 years and that Intel just released a 2 billion transistor chip. The human brain is estimated to have about 100 billion neurons.
If you are going to attack his argument the place to start is his estimate of the computing power of the human brain, because it is there that he is fudging a little. We don't really know what it would take to simulate some of the finer aspects of the brain. What does it mean to speak of the processing power of the brain? It is so different from a computer, isn't it? I don't really know. I think some people would argue that you can reduce the actions of the brain to an equivalence with a digital computer, at least so far as the outward appearance goes. Let's not talk about consciousness because we are not even close to understanding what it is in scientific terms, let alone reproducing it.
It is a shame you spent so much time arguing against 1 transistor = 1 neuron, when no one has even claimed that. There are many interesting points to be argued in his prediction. So please try to understand them a little before spouting off and wasting other people's time.
As an undergrad in physics you need to learn about the fundamental laws that have been established before you came on the scene. I believe that, from a physics point of view, it is important to have a class that teaches about computers from the lowest level, giving a good overview of how gates are made from transistors, binary logic is implemented with gates, and how to program a little in assembly language. More specific classes on programming can be left to the computer science department and upper division classes in computational methods. I do believe that a basic programming course in the computer science department should be required for the undergraduate physics degree. This is completely separate from the question of what tool you will use for analyzing data, which is what you are talking about when you consider Excel.
As for the specific tools the students use for solving problems or analyzing data, sometimes Excel is all that is needed, and it is part of a physics education to develop a sense for the right tool for the job. It was suggested in another post to encourage the use of MatLab, which is one good choice among many powerful tools. Each has trade-offs and a learning curve. I have used Excel, Kaleidagraph, Mathematica, Labview, Matlab, Maple, Origin, Igor and others. A friend of mine uses MathCad very effectively. Excel will not do the job of one of these more sophisticated analysis tools. Because it takes a while to climb the learning curve on any of these it is important to choose one and stick with it. I never had the benefit of a class that covered one of these but it would be a great idea.
Nevertheless it is not the place of these tools to teach you programming. Understanding the fundamentals of how to program well deserves a class of its own. I studied Fortran for my first computer class as a physics major, which would probably still be just fine. C might be more appropriate now. Some of the above tools can also call routines written in C. I don't have a broad enough perspective to come up with the best curriculum for such a course off the top of my head, but it is certainly more than can be contained within the context of Excel.
Didn't the Computer Science department at your university ever offer a programming class geared toward physics and engineering students?
I am in the Bay Area and noticed that Comcast is doing this also with newsgroup traffic. When I discontinued service in January I would get a sustained 12Mbps download. Now I see that it will jump up to 12 for a second then down to 6Mbps. It doesn't really bother me though. I used to rate limit myself anyway so there would be bandwidth left over for other things and other people within my home. I prefer this solution to having Comcast suddenly terminate my service like some other people reported happening for heavy usage.
About 20 years ago I had an account with BofA and they didn't seem so bad. Around that time they jacked up their fees on everything and changed their terms so as to make it much more likely to collect those fees. I left them pretty quickly. Since then they have bought a number of financial institutions I was using. Every time they have changed the terms and thoroughly destroyed good companies. It has happened again with MBNA. I just closed two credit cards I had with them. I find it hard to believe that anyone stays with them. There are so many better options. Anyone who is still doing business with BofA, I encourage you to make the effort to get out Now. Trust me, you will be much happier.
Wow! I am looking forward to being able to run "several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes." That will be 5, maybe 6 thousand concurrent processes, probably as many as 100 times as many as on my server at home! Cool!
I have to say, the statement, "It's our job to prove we are right and we are working on that." says to me that he is not much of a scientist and more of a nut-job. Scientists don't set out to "prove" their theories, they set out to test them. Just the fact that he is talking about proving his theory tells me that he has lost it as a scientist, if he ever really was one.
... and consider this GUI with the hardware that will be available then. Technology for head mounted displays is being refined as well as alternate input devices. Once the price and usability of these interfaces has improved we will really see a need for a 3D GUI such as this. Now is the time to be refining the technology to deliver it too. Sun is positioning themselves well, I think.
Imagine this in an enhanced reality context. The background is what you see around you. Instead of using a mouse you use your hands and fingers. This type of 3D GUI definitely figures into the future.
For me, the most important reason I like RPN is that I don't have to save intermediate results and recall them later. They are pushed onto the stack. This turns out to be a much more intuitive and easy way to evaluate large expressions. You don't have to remember that you saved the 1st and 4th parts of the numerator in memory slots 1 and 2 and that the two parts of the denominator are in slots 3 and 4. If you don't ever need to evaluate complicated expressions RPN might not be that much of an advantage to you.
This is just the sort of business model that Michael Robertson likes. If anything it is the opposite of SCO's model. He had a similar approach with mp3.com. Build the business in a space where you are certain to be sued. Build it as quickly as possible and make money before you are sued out of existance... but maybe you survive. mp3.com burned out pretty quickly but Lindows is doing pretty well.
His sipphone company hasn't made quite as big a splash yet, but he is probably looking for some toes to step on there as well.
I searched and found the original announcement from the university. It still doesn't say much, but it has suffered a little less distortion from ignorant journalists.
The FT article that was linked to in the post says that an optical fiber is used for reading. This reminded me of Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NFSOM) which is a technique used by a research group where I was a graduate student. To read more about it look under techniques at the Awschalom Group web page. For this NFSOM technique an optical fiber is tapered and coated with a metal to produce a tip with an aperature of ~100 nm. With a spot size of 100nm square it would be possible to fit about 1 Tera bit in the space of a credit card. Of course, this does not sound like a completely solid state device. The optical tip must scan over the recording material.
I also found another article which seems to have been written by a more clueful journalist. They report that the data is stored on layers within the substrate. With the areal density that might be accessible using NFSOM and 16 recording layers within the material it might be possible to reach the densities they are claiming.
It certainly seems that technology like this could take a long time to be developed into a product, but the university announcement does say that they have already received some patents on the technology and they sound optimistic about how much more work is needed. That stance is probably geared to attract venture capital more than anything, but who knows?
-Dan
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the effort you have to put in has to be pretty low and the value of the feedback you get has to be better. There are some things where this is already the case. And, if you add in a social aspect it can actually be fun and compelling. For tracking your bike rides and runs, check out Strava - http://www.strava.com./ It does really still appeal to those who are already pretty motivated to ride. But it does stoke up that motivation a little. It is sort of addictive to see how you are doing, and they really do provide enough value in their feedback. They will be on the panel at the VLAB event discussing personal analytics businesses at Stanford - http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438.
There is a group at Google called PACO - http://code.google.com/p/paco/ PACO is a tool for building your own personal tracking experiments. This is very much at the project stage. They will be demoing at the VLAB event "The Uploaded Life: Personal Evolution through Self Tracking" at Stanford on March 20th - http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
Is this a type of thing that could develop into a business? Come to the event to hear a discussion on that question and more with Gary Wolf Co-Founder of the Quantified Self and Three-Time Tour de France Winner Greg LeMond. There will also be a presentation by the company Healthrageous, which is tackling the general health problem using biometric devices, machine learning and virtual digital coaching to help regular people achieve better health.
People may find it uncomfortable to be reminded, but that is why simple feedback like looking in the mirror or weighing yourself can be so helpful in improving oneself. Ideally, with regular feedback, not just once a year learning that you have wasted a lot of time, you can keep on track without too much pain.
Check out this company that has a product that gives continuous feedback about posture - http://www.lumoback.com./ I know I would do better with my back pain if I had their product. They will be demoing at the VLAB event on March 20th at Stanford - The Uploaded Life - http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
I really wanted to get the word out about this event coming up at Stanford. I feel like a bit of a fool for not putting the link in the submission!
There will be a panel discussing just this topic at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB). VLAB puts on a great event. If you are in the area you should definitely join us!
The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking
http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
When:
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
6:00 - 7:00pm Networking and Refreshments
7:00 - 8:30pm Panel Discussion and Q&A
Where:
Stanford Graduate School of Business
CEMEX Auditorium at the Knight Management Center
Moderator:
Gary Wolf, Co-Founder, The Quantified Self & Editor, Wired Magazine
Panelists:
Rick Lee, CEO of Healthrageous
Mark S. Gainey, Co-Founder Strava, Inc
Leslie Ziegler: Creative Director, Rock Health
Greg LeMond, Three-Time Winner of the Tour de France
Event Description
Large companies, as well as, garage hackers are leveraging smaller,
cheaper sensors and powerful mobile devices are accelerating the
virtuous circle of goal setting, data collection, analysis and social
motivation necessary to stimulate lasting and steady gains in health,
sports performance or other areas of self evolution.
What happens when we add the power of Social/Mobile and always-on
personal devices to the evolving health markets. Peer pressure (social
reinforcement) and data tracking have significantly contributed to the
success of the $11B self improvement and $55B weight loss markets.
Legacy business such as Weight Watchers have relied on snippets of
painstakingly input data. How will the game be changed when personal
data goes from a drop in the bucket to an ocean?
What new perspectives do start ups provide using sensors and on-line
services, to disrupt and support the incumbents in self evolution and
health? And, what is needed for break-out success?
What new opportunities will exist in widespread tracking?
How do you keep users engaged long enough to make meaningful changes?
Will a start-up create virality to accelerate growth, become
a category killer?
What are the challenges of collecting and applying meaningful data?
What incentives are effective to encourage adoption outside
of tracker enthusiasts and early adopters?
Can a single offering service survive or will those
aggregating multiple data streams dominate?
Can these services grow on an ad based model or is a
subscription necessary?
How are companies using social motivation to encourage
consistent engagement and long term participation?
http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
San Francisco Bay Area Event (March 20 @ 6 PM, Stanford GSB Cemex Auditorium) — The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking
Description:
What happens when we add the power of Social/Mobile and always-on personal devices to the evolving health markets? What are the successful Quantified Self business models that entrepreneurs are now exploring? Join the conversation at the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) event, The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking, on Tuesday, March 20th at the Stanford School of Business Cemex Auditorium. 6:00 - 7:00 pm Demos, Networking and Refreshments; 7:00 - 8:30 pm Panel Discussion, moderated by Gary Wolf, Co-Founder of The Quantified Self and contributing editor to Wired. Panelists include three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond. Event website: http://bit.ly/yGBApV
The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) is the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth and success of high-tech entrepreneurial ventures by connecting ideas, technology and people.
I have received a number of spam messages from some author I had never heard of before, sending me to her Amazon listing. After the third round of spamming I decided to make a note of it on the page for the book, creating a review titled "Please don't buy books from this spammer." I used my real name and account, gave an accurate description of what had happened and a fairly objective review of what I could glean about the book. I also observed that the other reviews appeared to be shills, so I gave a little review of their reviews as well. None of what I said was mean or vindictive, just matter of fact.
It has been a week since I wrote that review and I thought to check for it today. There is no trace of it. I was not notified in any way that it was unacceptable or that it had been removed. If you are curious, you can check out the books here , but please do not buy from this spammer! I think you will see immediately how poorly the book is written and what obvious shills the reviewers are. It is almost funny, if it weren't for the spamming.
Of course any comments you leave about that book, or feedback you send to Amazon about their pulling reviews is up to you.
-Dan
Okay, this is a bit off-topic, but the standard synchrotron brightness units are Photons per second per square millimeter per .1% band width, measured at the spot in the endstation. Speaking of source brightness you would use square milliradians instead of millimeters. The .1% band width is a funny unit which refers to deltaE/E, so the brightness here is really a function of energy. In the visible, for yellow light like the sun, .1%bw is about .0022eV at 2.2eV=570nm. For the Fe K-edge, where they may have been working, the energy is 7112eV, which gives .1%bw=7.112eV, so at 7112eV you are counting all photons with energies between 7112eV and 7119eV or so. Synchrotrons typically have a peak brightness somewhere up in the X-Ray energies, which makes sense because they are designed to be X-Ray sources. For that reason it doesn't make much sense to compare the brightness of a synchrotron with that of the sun. They are really such different sources. When I see a comparison like that I usually just dismiss it and read on. They would have said something more useful if they had compared to dental X-Ray brightness. I tend to cut science reporters a little slack though. It is hard to give people an idea of what is really going on in science when there are so many details that you have to know for real understanding. Of course, when the science reporter's words are further interpreted for the Slashdot abstract by someone like Hugh Pickens, you have to give them even less weight.
-Dan
An economic disincentive for our kids to do homework. That is not what we as a nation or any society on this planet need. Somehow I think we are missing part of the proposal. Of course I haven't looked into it beyond one of the links. I just don't see how anyone is going to find this arrangement appealing! There will be a massive outcry if they try to force this on people and it will die an even more pathetic death than Vista. Well, that is my first reaction and I don't think I care enough to look into any further... Heh.
And Apple is just the company to deliver it. The whole system for watching TV, whether it is movies or other regular TV, is broken. It is a pain in the ass. There is too much chaos. Apple has done a very good job, judging by market success, at creating an orderly, pleasing user experience for both music players and smart phones. You can count on it that they are working on something for video delivery, and video on the iPod is not the end of it. As far as it being announced soon, that too is plausible. They have certainly had enough time to work on it. Technology has advanced since the Apple TV, which didn't interest me but, I am certainly curious to see what they come up with next for that space.
-Dan
Kurzweil's argument is that if you make an estimate of the processing power of the human brain, computers will reach that level of processing power for a cost of $1000 by around the year 2020. He says nothing about the number of transistors, which, by 2020 will be about 250 billion, considering a doubling every 1.5 years and that Intel just released a 2 billion transistor chip. The human brain is estimated to have about 100 billion neurons.
If you are going to attack his argument the place to start is his estimate of the computing power of the human brain, because it is there that he is fudging a little. We don't really know what it would take to simulate some of the finer aspects of the brain. What does it mean to speak of the processing power of the brain? It is so different from a computer, isn't it? I don't really know. I think some people would argue that you can reduce the actions of the brain to an equivalence with a digital computer, at least so far as the outward appearance goes. Let's not talk about consciousness because we are not even close to understanding what it is in scientific terms, let alone reproducing it.
It is a shame you spent so much time arguing against 1 transistor = 1 neuron, when no one has even claimed that.
There are many interesting points to be argued in his prediction. So please try to understand them a little before spouting off and wasting other people's time.
As an undergrad in physics you need to learn about the fundamental laws that have been established before you came on the scene. I believe that, from a physics point of view, it is important to have a class that teaches about computers from the lowest level, giving a good overview of how gates are made from transistors, binary logic is implemented with gates, and how to program a little in assembly language. More specific classes on programming can be left to the computer science department and upper division classes in computational methods. I do believe that a basic programming course in the computer science department should be required for the undergraduate physics degree. This is completely separate from the question of what tool you will use for analyzing data, which is what you are talking about when you consider Excel.
As for the specific tools the students use for solving problems or analyzing data, sometimes Excel is all that is needed, and it is part of a physics education to develop a sense for the right tool for the job. It was suggested in another post to encourage the use of MatLab, which is one good choice among many powerful tools. Each has trade-offs and a learning curve. I have used Excel, Kaleidagraph, Mathematica, Labview, Matlab, Maple, Origin, Igor and others. A friend of mine uses MathCad very effectively. Excel will not do the job of one of these more sophisticated analysis tools. Because it takes a while to climb the learning curve on any of these it is important to choose one and stick with it. I never had the benefit of a class that covered one of these but it would be a great idea.
Nevertheless it is not the place of these tools to teach you programming. Understanding the fundamentals of how to program well deserves a class of its own. I studied Fortran for my first computer class as a physics major, which would probably still be just fine. C might be more appropriate now. Some of the above tools can also call routines written in C. I don't have a broad enough perspective to come up with the best curriculum for such a course off the top of my head, but it is certainly more than can be contained within the context of Excel.
Didn't the Computer Science department at your university ever offer a programming class geared toward physics and engineering students?
-Dan
I am in the Bay Area and noticed that Comcast is doing this also with newsgroup traffic. When I discontinued service in January I would get a sustained 12Mbps download. Now I see that it will jump up to 12 for a second then down to 6Mbps. It doesn't really bother me though. I used to rate limit myself anyway so there would be bandwidth left over for other things and other people within my home. I prefer this solution to having Comcast suddenly terminate my service like some other people reported happening for heavy usage.
-Dan
About 20 years ago I had an account with BofA and they didn't seem so bad. Around that time they jacked up their fees on everything and changed their terms so as to make it much more likely to collect those fees. I left them pretty quickly. Since then they have bought a number of financial institutions I was using. Every time they have changed the terms and thoroughly destroyed good companies. It has happened again with MBNA. I just closed two credit cards I had with them. I find it hard to believe that anyone stays with them. There are so many better options. Anyone who is still doing business with BofA, I encourage you to make the effort to get out Now. Trust me, you will be much happier.
-Dan
Wow! I am looking forward to being able to run "several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes." That will be 5, maybe 6 thousand concurrent processes, probably as many as 100 times as many as on my server at home! Cool!
should lose his job.
I have to say, the statement, "It's our job to prove we are right and we are working on that." says to me that he is not much of a scientist and more of a nut-job. Scientists don't set out to "prove" their theories, they set out to test them. Just the fact that he is talking about proving his theory tells me that he has lost it as a scientist, if he ever really was one.
... and consider this GUI with the hardware that will be available then. Technology for head mounted displays is being refined as well as alternate input devices. Once the price and usability of these interfaces has improved we will really see a need for a 3D GUI such as this. Now is the time to be refining the technology to deliver it too. Sun is positioning themselves well, I think.
Imagine this in an enhanced reality context. The background is what you see around you. Instead of using a mouse you use your hands and fingers. This type of 3D GUI definitely figures into the future.
-Dan
For me, the most important reason I like RPN is that I don't have to save intermediate results and recall them later. They are pushed onto the stack. This turns out to be a much more intuitive and easy way to evaluate large expressions. You don't have to remember that you saved the 1st and 4th parts of the numerator in memory slots 1 and 2 and that the two parts of the denominator are in slots 3 and 4. If you don't ever need to evaluate complicated expressions RPN might not be that much of an advantage to you.
-Dan
This is just the sort of business model that Michael Robertson likes. If anything it is the opposite of SCO's model. He had a similar approach with mp3.com. Build the business in a space where you are certain to be sued. Build it as quickly as possible and make money before you are sued out of existance... but maybe you survive. mp3.com burned out pretty quickly but Lindows is doing pretty well.
His sipphone company hasn't made quite as big a splash yet, but he is probably looking for some toes to step on there as well.
The FT article that was linked to in the post says that an optical fiber is used for reading. This reminded me of Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NFSOM) which is a technique used by a research group where I was a graduate student. To read more about it look under techniques at the Awschalom Group web page. For this NFSOM technique an optical fiber is tapered and coated with a metal to produce a tip with an aperature of ~100 nm. With a spot size of 100nm square it would be possible to fit about 1 Tera bit in the space of a credit card. Of course, this does not sound like a completely solid state device. The optical tip must scan over the recording material.
I also found another article which seems to have been written by a more clueful journalist. They report that the data is stored on layers within the substrate. With the areal density that might be accessible using NFSOM and 16 recording layers within the material it might be possible to reach the densities they are claiming.
It certainly seems that technology like this could take a long time to be developed into a product, but the university announcement does say that they have already received some patents on the technology and they sound optimistic about how much more work is needed. That stance is probably geared to attract venture capital more than anything, but who knows? -Dan