You're the second person to post a note impugning the USAID/Macedonia projects, plausibly. Do you have a specific reference? Especially as a US agency is backing the program, I want to know more about how it's being (allegedly) abused.
There's also the chance to write apps to a Linux API on an FPGA. I'd love to see one of those MicroBlaze/uCLinux chips interfaced directly with one of these TI DSP/MVLinux chips, running multiprocessors. You can even put multiple MB/uCL instances on a single FPGA, with gates to spare. Which are gates that can be used to solve multiproc problems in ways unavailable to fixed-config chips like x86, PPC, or even the TI DSP. How about a Beowulf cluster in gates of these...
I downloaded a (previously) rare DVD of the Grateful Dead at Tivoli Gardens, Denmark (4/17/72), and it was as great as its legend said it would be. After watching it 5 or 6 times with friends, I changed my mind about owning a music DVD, and bought several GD videos (from PBS, of all places). Official releases, they each turned out to be just as boring as I thought they would be - 1990s shows featuring fat old men in low gear. The music was good (to my tastes), but why would I spend $20 on discs that can play only in DVD players, not my car CD player or discman, let alone stream from my Icecast server to my desks around town? I already had the same soundboard, traded among friends in true Deadhead fashion.
So this week's content misers, the Grateful Dead, are not only hypocritical. They're showing how even the original P2P sharers can screw up the marketing/distribution coup handed them by Internet sharing, by forcing us to buy crapola products once they've (re)gained the monopoly. Ingrates. I miss Jerry.
What, are you TrollMods Macedonian or something? Before your attack mods took effect, we actually got a couple of responses with very interesting info about the Macedonian WiFi, context for the Ubuntu story. So it really seem like you're medieval American theocrats, or more likely their zombie slaves. I'm going to burn you with a flag now.
The other reply to your comment (though AC) disputes your criticism. And the story I cited doesn't say it's free - it explicitly says WiFi costs $18:mo, though it omits transfer fees (and surely plenty of other finer details). And what's the relevance of Cermerikic's "Bosnian descent"? Where are you getting your info, and what's your stake in the postwar Balkans?
Programmers use source code to be productive. We use each others' open source to be even more productive. That makes us worth more money. The people against open source "on principle" are dragging us down. Too bad we have to drag them along with us as we produce ever more.
In my experience programmers are more dogmatic, rigid, order-obsessed than most people. Often pleasingly, when they're on the right track. But it's usually their major malfunction, too - they aren't just order freaks, but aren't good at distinguishing people from machines when interacting. The bugs in their software are mirrored by bugs in their behavior.
They had those bushleague limits while their bosses were telling corporate customers to throw away Unix for their network operations. With all the inhouse advantages (money, expertise, source code) of running Microsoft's own systems. What serious enterprise defects do you think MS astroturf is covering up these days? No wonder so many corporations have switched to Linux. Not only does the OS work better, and you get the source code to fix it when it doesn't, but it isn't backed by a giant spin machine pretending it isn't a toy.
And no, TrollMods, this poll doesn't count as that: I'm not on any Linux marketing payroll, and what I say is actually true.
"Ready to ship"? How about if they just do more shipping? Better promotion of idle/orphan projects and tighter project management would keep Debian releases at a useable speed while retaining their valuable stability. One valuable technique would be promoting bugfixing on neglected packages to more active projects which depend on them down the chain. That is already in the interest of the dependant projects, but coordination from overall Debian management would produce more cooperation across projects, especialy in that productive "upchain crossroads". It leverages open source, open projects, and mutual selfinterest along with expertise in the code in question. That counts as "internal processes", though not as internal as focusing only on the core Debian team.
The feature size is the operational size, with the characteristics that come from small sizes: speed, efficiency, sensitivity, multiplicity. The part as a whole can be much larger than the feature size. So even the 45nm feature size of the devices we're discussing in this thread are composed of much larger parts. The gaps are in fact the part of the device that matters, especially in micro (or nano) electronics, where "electron holes" are part of the essential mechanism. The question is how small can we make the operative portion of the device, because that's where the gains come from. The size of the enzyme is as relevant as the size of the die in a microprocessor: not very. What's relevant is the precision of the geometric distribution of the material, even if accuracy is statistical, in electronics (or photonics) or enzymes. The chemical processes don't necessarily scale up more easily with smaller features per se, but smaller features at nano or pico scale are manipulable by us today only with chemistry, which then offers better scalability than mechanical processes like laser etching or just plain photolithograpy.
Enzymes and DNA are natural nanotech (and smaller). They're good examples of using arbitrarily narrow spaces between larger building blocks as precision devices, especially in controlling information. And their efficiency also comes with inherently parallel production methods, leading to better parallelism in their useful operation. So I say that mastering the nano is a way to master the pico, directly by operating with nanoscale building blocks in picoscale feature sizes - between the blocks.
Aren't they also offering nationwide WiFi too? If Macedonia kicks America's tech butt while we devolve into some medieval theocracy, I'm going to burn a flag or something.
Can anyone else verify Girard's gripes with the GUI type?
"They try and make it less illegible by bolding up the fonts but it's really fuzzy and on my 22" monitor at 1600x1200, I'm constantly squinting to read things (and I have near-perfect vision). Maybe things look better on the twin 30" LCD setups that you see in all of Apple's user profiles [Kevin Bacon dork-cred references omitted]
I think Apple is assuming that everyone is running on larger monitors now but they forgot about that resolution thing that also increases, nulling any increase in physical scale."
If that's accurate criticism, I can probably trust the rest of his review, including believing that failure to properly manipulate RAW formats is Aperture's defect, not Girard's. Otherwise, his whole review is discredited. Apple certainly didn't "forget" their displays have fixed resolutions at given physical sizes. Who's got Aperture running on a 22" 1600x1200 monitor?
I'm surprised that Perl's CPAN archive doesn't have structured searching at smaller granularity than module name or freeform metadata. Maybe once the archives let us find code by content, we'll get version control databases that store each line in a record, each block as references in a separate table, maybe even referential integrity of variables as foreign keys. I'd love my editor to pull code from DB storage, padding whitespace only in the presentation layer per my preferences.
I'd really love to see datamining techniques for factoring, optimizing and profiling code. Not to mention the enforcement efficiencies for source license "due diligence" comparisons beyond grep. It's bizarre that programs are still so united with a hierarchical directory filesystem that scopes are enforced per-file, while class scopes have only lexical (not purely structural or referential) implementation. Relational math is rigorous enough that its direct combination with a compiler ought to produce even more revolutions than it would with an editor.
Miami isn't really "the South", unless you mean "South New York". Though it's "dirty" is most of the ways the rest of Dixie is dirty, plus lots of the ways NYC is dirty, without the grime. Your sleazy BellSouth experience is an example.
One approach to nanotube quality control is to make them cheap and dirty, then separate them chemically or mechanically (centrifuge, phoresis etc). Especially with different electromagnetic properties by which to separate them. Doping nanotubes for different chirality, especially heterogenous chirality in a single tube surface, is one of the more compelling avenues for nanocomputing research. Tubes a few dozen nanometers in diameter and dozens of centimeters long (10K:1 ratio), which is a pretty long wire. Solution processing is yielding plenty of results for nanotubes, and the "fundamental production" problems you predict don't even prohibit Si/DNA coupling techniques (another nanotechnique).
I don't know why you're so pessimistic. Even if those avenues were hitting real obstacles, or faced implicit physical contradictions, the field is extremely young. Especially in shrinking engineering, even small gains create new tools which enable breakthroughs. The actual limits to microengineering we now face, heat dissipation, parallelization, silicon featuresize and others, are the reason nanoengineering is seeing so much investment. We are already seeing nanoRAM announcements even here on Slashdot, and even today we saw buckyball films announced for PEM-type electronics. I see no "sound barrier" for nanotech yet - to the contrary, I see nanotech slipping past the micro "barrier" ever more quickly.
Let's say you make a lattice of 1Å (100pm) atoms with bond lengths of 1Å. The 3D geometry of the lattice can bring the atoms into proximity limit by their electrical repulsion and the angles of their bonds. That proximity can be shorter than their bond length - it can be nearly any size or shape. This is how enzymes make active sites with feature details at highly precise scales. Another analogous example, especially at these scales, is how relatively large wavelengths can combine to create differential beat frequencies at relatively much smaller scales. When we make devices out of intervals and gaps, we can get asymptotically small. This is, of course, how we already reach those nanoscales from our mesoscale starting engineering.
What's interesting about these kinds of small features, and chemical processes for their assembly is that they make not only smaller features, but also many more of them simultaneously. So nanocrystalline chemistry offers solutions (pun intended:) to both scaling resolutions smaller and aggregates bigger.
There is no bottom - hence Richard Feynman's famous lecture title, which I stole with pride:).
What kind of insecure sissy TrollMod finds that simple geopolitical projection from the facts "Flamebait"? Disagree with a post, or stay out of geopolitics, where people actually get hurt, if you can't take the harsh reality.
Rice is still fairly popular, though she hasn't done anything very well, among the Bush zombie army - even as they shuffle away from their decomposing leader. So it's no surprise to see TrollMods out in force against pointing out her Bush-league inadequacy. "Redundant" to what? For quoting her illiterate letter, with corrections? Or is it just redundant to call these Bushitters stupid?
Nanochem promises to allow even tinier feature sizes. The atoms in a molecule are about half a nanometer across, but they can form structures with gaps even smaller. Benzene rings have diameters also about 0.5nm, and can be made in regular arrays as nanotubes. More complex structures can twist these feature spaces even closer, and in vast numbers of regular arrangement. Their production through chemical, rather than mechanical, engineering promises more efficiency, lower cost, and larger production yields.
We are now looking at the nanometer from above, pulling our micrometer structures towards the new horizon. Once across it, we will still use nanometer-scale engineering to produce picometer (and smaller) scale results.
Re:Nearly perpetual motion is a commonplace, Doc.
on
Artificial Tornadoes
·
· Score: 1
Well, it looks like the device is just described in perpetual motion terms - the energy input comes from the Sun (as usual). It's a fancy convection system, which is getting press (and grants from the locals) because tornadoes are the local specialty in the region. So I'll stand by my comments that this research is really interesting as R&D in harnessing natural tornadoes. Because the inefficiencies, especially construction/maintenance/recycling of the towers, seems noncompetitive with other solar technologies.
Rice has been on the road, insisting on her "diplomatic" message that the EU shut up on resistance to Rice's cabal's torture flights out of their covert EU hub.
OK, an obnoxious Anonymous Coward, lying about what I said by misquoting me in both your posts, with analysis like "good luck with that" and "Seriously. Get Help", closing with "Over and out", tells me that cliches (that I did not post) are worthless. The irony is so complete, that I'll hold you to your promise to shut up now.
Regardless of the ridiculous jive you're spewing, Anonymous retard Coward, the fact is that the US backs up even arguments in which it is correct with force - military, economic and otherwise - rather than persuasion much of the time. As illustrated in this example, as I clearly described. You, Anonymous moron Coward, have nothing but luck to go on: the bad luck to come to a battle of wits unarmed.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't wait until Apple Computer starts selling downloads of the Beatles movies, and Apple Lawyer Records sues them again.
You're the second person to post a note impugning the USAID/Macedonia projects, plausibly. Do you have a specific reference? Especially as a US agency is backing the program, I want to know more about how it's being (allegedly) abused.
There's also the chance to write apps to a Linux API on an FPGA. I'd love to see one of those MicroBlaze/uCLinux chips interfaced directly with one of these TI DSP/MVLinux chips, running multiprocessors. You can even put multiple MB/uCL instances on a single FPGA, with gates to spare. Which are gates that can be used to solve multiproc problems in ways unavailable to fixed-config chips like x86, PPC, or even the TI DSP. How about a Beowulf cluster in gates of these...
I downloaded a (previously) rare DVD of the Grateful Dead at Tivoli Gardens, Denmark (4/17/72), and it was as great as its legend said it would be. After watching it 5 or 6 times with friends, I changed my mind about owning a music DVD, and bought several GD videos (from PBS, of all places). Official releases, they each turned out to be just as boring as I thought they would be - 1990s shows featuring fat old men in low gear. The music was good (to my tastes), but why would I spend $20 on discs that can play only in DVD players, not my car CD player or discman, let alone stream from my Icecast server to my desks around town? I already had the same soundboard, traded among friends in true Deadhead fashion.
So this week's content misers, the Grateful Dead, are not only hypocritical. They're showing how even the original P2P sharers can screw up the marketing/distribution coup handed them by Internet sharing, by forcing us to buy crapola products once they've (re)gained the monopoly. Ingrates. I miss Jerry.
Moderation -2
50% Troll
50% Flamebait
What, are you TrollMods Macedonian or something? Before your attack mods took effect, we actually got a couple of responses with very interesting info about the Macedonian WiFi, context for the Ubuntu story. So it really seem like you're medieval American theocrats, or more likely their zombie slaves. I'm going to burn you with a flag now.
The other reply to your comment (though AC) disputes your criticism. And the story I cited doesn't say it's free - it explicitly says WiFi costs $18:mo, though it omits transfer fees (and surely plenty of other finer details). And what's the relevance of Cermerikic's "Bosnian descent"? Where are you getting your info, and what's your stake in the postwar Balkans?
Programmers use source code to be productive. We use each others' open source to be even more productive. That makes us worth more money. The people against open source "on principle" are dragging us down. Too bad we have to drag them along with us as we produce ever more.
In my experience programmers are more dogmatic, rigid, order-obsessed than most people. Often pleasingly, when they're on the right track. But it's usually their major malfunction, too - they aren't just order freaks, but aren't good at distinguishing people from machines when interacting. The bugs in their software are mirrored by bugs in their behavior.
Right, Anonymous Coward, all the OSS workers in the world are working for free. Because "open" means "no price", right? Anonymous robot Coward.
They had those bushleague limits while their bosses were telling corporate customers to throw away Unix for their network operations. With all the inhouse advantages (money, expertise, source code) of running Microsoft's own systems. What serious enterprise defects do you think MS astroturf is covering up these days? No wonder so many corporations have switched to Linux. Not only does the OS work better, and you get the source code to fix it when it doesn't, but it isn't backed by a giant spin machine pretending it isn't a toy.
And no, TrollMods, this poll doesn't count as that: I'm not on any Linux marketing payroll, and what I say is actually true.
"Ready to ship"? How about if they just do more shipping? Better promotion of idle/orphan projects and tighter project management would keep Debian releases at a useable speed while retaining their valuable stability. One valuable technique would be promoting bugfixing on neglected packages to more active projects which depend on them down the chain. That is already in the interest of the dependant projects, but coordination from overall Debian management would produce more cooperation across projects, especialy in that productive "upchain crossroads". It leverages open source, open projects, and mutual selfinterest along with expertise in the code in question. That counts as "internal processes", though not as internal as focusing only on the core Debian team.
The feature size is the operational size, with the characteristics that come from small sizes: speed, efficiency, sensitivity, multiplicity. The part as a whole can be much larger than the feature size. So even the 45nm feature size of the devices we're discussing in this thread are composed of much larger parts. The gaps are in fact the part of the device that matters, especially in micro (or nano) electronics, where "electron holes" are part of the essential mechanism. The question is how small can we make the operative portion of the device, because that's where the gains come from. The size of the enzyme is as relevant as the size of the die in a microprocessor: not very. What's relevant is the precision of the geometric distribution of the material, even if accuracy is statistical, in electronics (or photonics) or enzymes. The chemical processes don't necessarily scale up more easily with smaller features per se, but smaller features at nano or pico scale are manipulable by us today only with chemistry, which then offers better scalability than mechanical processes like laser etching or just plain photolithograpy.
Enzymes and DNA are natural nanotech (and smaller). They're good examples of using arbitrarily narrow spaces between larger building blocks as precision devices, especially in controlling information. And their efficiency also comes with inherently parallel production methods, leading to better parallelism in their useful operation. So I say that mastering the nano is a way to master the pico, directly by operating with nanoscale building blocks in picoscale feature sizes - between the blocks.
Aren't they also offering nationwide WiFi too? If Macedonia kicks America's tech butt while we devolve into some medieval theocracy, I'm going to burn a flag or something.
Can anyone else verify Girard's gripes with the GUI type?
"They try and make it less illegible by bolding up the fonts but it's really fuzzy and on my 22" monitor at 1600x1200, I'm constantly squinting to read things (and I have near-perfect vision). Maybe things look better on the twin 30" LCD setups that you see in all of Apple's user profiles [Kevin Bacon dork-cred references omitted]
I think Apple is assuming that everyone is running on larger monitors now but they forgot about that resolution thing that also increases, nulling any increase in physical scale."
If that's accurate criticism, I can probably trust the rest of his review, including believing that failure to properly manipulate RAW formats is Aperture's defect, not Girard's. Otherwise, his whole review is discredited. Apple certainly didn't "forget" their displays have fixed resolutions at given physical sizes. Who's got Aperture running on a 22" 1600x1200 monitor?
I'm surprised that Perl's CPAN archive doesn't have structured searching at smaller granularity than module name or freeform metadata. Maybe once the archives let us find code by content, we'll get version control databases that store each line in a record, each block as references in a separate table, maybe even referential integrity of variables as foreign keys. I'd love my editor to pull code from DB storage, padding whitespace only in the presentation layer per my preferences.
I'd really love to see datamining techniques for factoring, optimizing and profiling code. Not to mention the enforcement efficiencies for source license "due diligence" comparisons beyond grep. It's bizarre that programs are still so united with a hierarchical directory filesystem that scopes are enforced per-file, while class scopes have only lexical (not purely structural or referential) implementation. Relational math is rigorous enough that its direct combination with a compiler ought to produce even more revolutions than it would with an editor.
Miami isn't really "the South", unless you mean "South New York". Though it's "dirty" is most of the ways the rest of Dixie is dirty, plus lots of the ways NYC is dirty, without the grime. Your sleazy BellSouth experience is an example.
One approach to nanotube quality control is to make them cheap and dirty, then separate them chemically or mechanically (centrifuge, phoresis etc). Especially with different electromagnetic properties by which to separate them. Doping nanotubes for different chirality, especially heterogenous chirality in a single tube surface, is one of the more compelling avenues for nanocomputing research. Tubes a few dozen nanometers in diameter and dozens of centimeters long (10K:1 ratio), which is a pretty long wire. Solution processing is yielding plenty of results for nanotubes, and the "fundamental production" problems you predict don't even prohibit Si/DNA coupling techniques (another nanotechnique).
I don't know why you're so pessimistic. Even if those avenues were hitting real obstacles, or faced implicit physical contradictions, the field is extremely young. Especially in shrinking engineering, even small gains create new tools which enable breakthroughs. The actual limits to microengineering we now face, heat dissipation, parallelization, silicon featuresize and others, are the reason nanoengineering is seeing so much investment. We are already seeing nanoRAM announcements even here on Slashdot, and even today we saw buckyball films announced for PEM-type electronics. I see no "sound barrier" for nanotech yet - to the contrary, I see nanotech slipping past the micro "barrier" ever more quickly.
Those TrollMods say everything about Rice's rightwing zombie army. Especially the nonsensical, but negative, "Redundant". GFY.
Let's say you make a lattice of 1Å (100pm) atoms with bond lengths of 1Å. The 3D geometry of the lattice can bring the atoms into proximity limit by their electrical repulsion and the angles of their bonds. That proximity can be shorter than their bond length - it can be nearly any size or shape. This is how enzymes make active sites with feature details at highly precise scales. Another analogous example, especially at these scales, is how relatively large wavelengths can combine to create differential beat frequencies at relatively much smaller scales. When we make devices out of intervals and gaps, we can get asymptotically small. This is, of course, how we already reach those nanoscales from our mesoscale starting engineering.
:) to both scaling resolutions smaller and aggregates bigger.
:).
What's interesting about these kinds of small features, and chemical processes for their assembly is that they make not only smaller features, but also many more of them simultaneously. So nanocrystalline chemistry offers solutions (pun intended
There is no bottom - hence Richard Feynman's famous lecture title, which I stole with pride
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
What kind of insecure sissy TrollMod finds that simple geopolitical projection from the facts "Flamebait"? Disagree with a post, or stay out of geopolitics, where people actually get hurt, if you can't take the harsh reality.
Moderation -2
50% Redundant
50% Overrated
Rice is still fairly popular, though she hasn't done anything very well, among the Bush zombie army - even as they shuffle away from their decomposing leader. So it's no surprise to see TrollMods out in force against pointing out her Bush-league inadequacy. "Redundant" to what? For quoting her illiterate letter, with corrections? Or is it just redundant to call these Bushitters stupid?
Nanochem promises to allow even tinier feature sizes. The atoms in a molecule are about half a nanometer across, but they can form structures with gaps even smaller. Benzene rings have diameters also about 0.5nm, and can be made in regular arrays as nanotubes. More complex structures can twist these feature spaces even closer, and in vast numbers of regular arrangement. Their production through chemical, rather than mechanical, engineering promises more efficiency, lower cost, and larger production yields.
We are now looking at the nanometer from above, pulling our micrometer structures towards the new horizon. Once across it, we will still use nanometer-scale engineering to produce picometer (and smaller) scale results.
Well, it looks like the device is just described in perpetual motion terms - the energy input comes from the Sun (as usual). It's a fancy convection system, which is getting press (and grants from the locals) because tornadoes are the local specialty in the region. So I'll stand by my comments that this research is really interesting as R&D in harnessing natural tornadoes. Because the inefficiencies, especially construction/maintenance/recycling of the towers, seems noncompetitive with other solar technologies.
Rice has been on the road, insisting on her "diplomatic" message that the EU shut up on resistance to Rice's cabal's torture flights out of their covert EU hub.
OK, an obnoxious Anonymous Coward, lying about what I said by misquoting me in both your posts, with analysis like "good luck with that" and "Seriously. Get Help", closing with "Over and out", tells me that cliches (that I did not post) are worthless. The irony is so complete, that I'll hold you to your promise to shut up now.
Regardless of the ridiculous jive you're spewing, Anonymous retard Coward, the fact is that the US backs up even arguments in which it is correct with force - military, economic and otherwise - rather than persuasion much of the time. As illustrated in this example, as I clearly described. You, Anonymous moron Coward, have nothing but luck to go on: the bad luck to come to a battle of wits unarmed.