If you have ever seen a Mac install you would realize that Win95 has a crappy installation process. Bringing up a white box under Win95 can be a nightmare because of the lack of self-booting CD ROMS. And then you have to reboot 8 times just to get through to the Internet. And it is nearly blind. Not to mention that it is intolerant of where you install it.
One thing Linux developers have a tendency to do is to fall into the trap of making Linux match Win this or that in certain features. Bzzzt. Linux needs to set HIGHER standards if it is going to achieve world domination.
What you really need is a process that has a multiple levels - a brain dead process for newbies to get them up and running, an intermediate mode with a few options and a chance to override some things, and an expert mode where everything is wide open. RedHat anyway fails on the brain dead mode, and by a lot. It is still amazing to me that they don't have a button you can push that will get you to a setup that will act as a standard home client machine that connects with an ISP with only some basic info - phone number, user name, password...
I love working with Linux - the bang/buck ratio is far greater than anything I have used. But that first week of getting sendmail and ppp up was a killer, and I am very experienced with computers compared to the average user.
I really don't understand the point of getting excited about this. The police can probably already match paper and ink, and minute impressions in the paper from handling to identify a specific printer.
All this would do is make the job slightly easier.
Dead tree copies aren't the big thing copyright holders would be afraid of, either. They are lossy copies.
The only major reason I could see this being worth anything would be to catch people printing kiddie porn or money.
To my way of thinking, the fact that the HGP stuff is being done primarily so that companies can patent sections of DNA is the big whammy, since it prevents legitimate, perhaps non-profit, perhaps not, organizations from developing medical technologies without paying through the nose for the information.
This is not my understanding of what a patent means at all. When you obtain a patent, you are granted an exclusive right to the commercial benefits of the technology you patent in exchange for publication of the patent. If you patent a gene sequence, the patent in fact must fully disclose that sequence. Patents are by definition not copyrighted; they are fully public domain. This means the information becomes freely available.
In addition there is a clear exemption in the patent law for uses in research; that is you can take any patent there is and perform research using the technology disclosed without infringing in any way. Therefore it seems to me that patenting genetic sequences has exactly the opposite effect on research that you describe; the information becomes free, and anyone can conduct research using the information.
What a patent DOES restrict is the ability to exploit the technology in a commercial (i.e. money making) application. You will have to obtain a license if you plan to use the result of your work including the patented geneic code in a commercial product.
People also have to remember that the life of a patent is limited to 20 years after the filing. Given the state of the art in biotech these days, it seems to me to be quite clear that it may well take that long for most commercial inventions based on the genetic code to reach the market.
It is not at all clear to me that the patenting of genetic codes is in fact at all important in as a practical matter. Perhaps from other points of view, yes. But will it affect progress in any way? I doubt it.
Napsters tools are no more inherently tools for pircacy than ftp is.
It seems to me that Napster's primary use profile is in fact the illegal trading of mp3 files that infringe on copyrights. Napster makes claims that its tools can be used legally, but buglar's tools can be used legally, too. And the possesion of such tools is illegal in many places.
Tools like cp, ftp and so on have by far their major use in prefectly legal applications. A brick can be used aid a burglary too; but that is not it's primary use.
In fact, if a country joins a body such as the WTO, one agrees to accept all their rulings, not just the ones you agree to.
All treaties or contracts require you to give something in order to get something.
Canada disagreed with the similar forced importation of MMT (a gasoline additive which hasn't been proved safe yet) but had to not only allow it, but also pay a significant penalty to the manufacturer for trying to prevent it's import.
To begin with the case was a NAFTA, not a WTO issue. Canada was in fact on very thin ice because they were unable to ban the use of MMT under their own environmental laws. They only recourse they had was to try to ban importation and interprovincial sale. This put them in an extremely bad position under NAFTA. Rather than try their case under NAFTA they agreed to a settlement with Ethyl and in fact the case was never really adjudicated under NAFTA.
The U.S. disgarees with the WTO overturning the ban on tuna-containing-dolphins, but was forced to submit, on pain of substantial fines.
The US had to SLIGHTLY modify the zero tolerance dolphin by-catch law it had to accept a 0.1% bycatch percentage. The modified law was supported by many major environmental groups including Greenpeace and the WWF. As part of this almost all Latin American countries have adopted 0.1% by-catch limits.
Here is a statement regarding the legislation:
Teresa Platt of the US Fishermens Coalition is still optimistic: "It is higly likely that the legislation will pass as it is supported by the tuna fishing interests in twelve countries, five major environmental groups, several unions, over a hundred resource and property rights groups, the Clinton administration, key Democrats and the Republican leadership in Congress.
To me this tuna bycatch agreement seems like a real step forward.
Re:I really dislike this sort of article
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The thing about globalization is that it is an increase in vertical hierarchies.
This is a side effect of the evolution of human society. First we had the family, then the tribe, then the village, city, nation, and now we are making the transition to a global society. Each of those steps has incurred increased vertical hierarchies.
If you want to withdraw from that, well, all I can say is that you are swimming upstream.
No, these two are not related at all. There is a long history of common carriers being immune to content liability. You cannot go after the telephone company because they accept a phone call to a bookie.
Napster is a different beast altogether. They are benefitting directly by supporting a file format that is widely, perhaps even predominately used for the purpose of copyright infringement. Such a benefit could well be recoverable by the infringed. This is no different from cases in the past where the movie and music industry have sued manufacturers of tape recorders and gotten fees attached to the sale of blank tapes and recorders as a means of recovering their losses.
Re:I really dislike this sort of article
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First problem is that there is no mechanism that implements their responsibility to population. Governments have this mechanism -- they can be re-elected, overthrown or in the very worst case placed in situation where they have either to make decision that population demands, or get rid of large part of population.
In current circumstances there is a very real mechanism - if a country believes it is better off not participating it can simply not participate. There is no manditory membership, which is quite unlike being a citizen who is subject to mandatory rules (i.e. laws) of the nation he is a member in.
In addition you are neglecting the representative nature of participants in global organizations. In the US elected officials represent the citizens in determination of their vote. Citizens do not have a direct say in each and every rule or law that is passed. Similarly governments represent their citizens in international organizations. If they do a poor job of it, their constituents will boot them out of office.
While UN is based on the idea that countries' influence on UN policy is not entirely based on its political, military or economical strength (and if it was, such organization would be near to worthless), and even heavily US-dominated NATO allows every country to veto a decision.
This is not correct. The UN does not allow any and all individual countries to veto decisions. The UN only allows members of the Security Council, which includes all the major world powers on a permanent basis and some representatives from the General Assembly on a rotating basis to veto decisions THAT ARE BEFORE THE SECURITY COUNCIL. Many decisions taken at the UN are in fact implemented solely by majority or 2/3 vote in the General Assembly. One of the main power struggles at the UN is always which matters are taken before the Security Council, and which are voted on by the General Assembly. Many organizations within the UN have a long history of adopting policies that the US does not agree with because they are in fact controlled and funded by the General Assembly where the US has neither a veto or more than a single vote along with the 180 or so individual nations present. All of this is why Congress sometimes has a tough time getting payment of dues passed.
In general treaties have power over governments while government have power over companiess
Historically governments abide by treaties only when it is to their best interest. Governments are the makers and breakers of treaties at their own whim. A treaty at an international level has no power over a government other than the self interest of that goverment.
but when large international organization is controlled by companies, and its power is accepted by governments through treaties, it gives companies one more, and very efficient way to affect governments' policies, something that they would do by only indirect, less efficient ways otherwise.
International organizations (regardless of who they are controlled by) can only affect the actions of soverign nations on a very marginal basis. The inability of the WTO to reach a consensus on some relatively simple trade issues in fact highlights the degree of marginalization that is present. If there were in fact some international cabal of companies running the WTO, we would not see this level of disarray.
I really dislike this sort of article
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To me this article is really lacking. Certainly organizations like the WTO can do a lot of harm, but the fact of the matter is that globalization cuts both ways, both good and bad. Authors like this may have some pet ox gored, but the long term effects of globalization contain too many positive effects to ignore.
Global trade clearly benefits consumers in a lot of ways by making the marketplace more competitive. If a country is a low cost producer, or the goods they produce are of higher quality they should not be excluded from a market for nationalistic reasons. Consumers in Japan pay far more for food than in the US, and it is only because of government interference with trade that they do so. Surely there would be dislocation in the Japanese farm community if Japan imported more food - BUT the same money that is spent on subsidies not could be spent to restructure the Japanese economy, and the labor that is inefficiently spent on food production could be applied to far better value added activities that would ultimately result in improving the standard of living in Japan.
Concerns about WTO creating a more stable system of government are interesting - but what is the alternative? The 20th Century has been marked by the two greatest wars in human history. One of the great hopes of globalization is that it will make war obsolete. Nations will become interdependent and have far more to lose by going to war. The ultimate hope is that the productive capacities used to maintain armies at large fractions of GDPs in third world countries will be turned towards production of consumer necessities.
Many third world countries are concerned about globalization resulting in massive cultural changes. Certain globalization will result in cultural change. But what ways of life are worth maintaining at the expense of illiteracy, poverty and disease?
Globalization is often cited as a powerful force towards democratization and rule of law rather than law of ruler. It appears now that any totalitarian regime that engages in open competition will have powerful forces towards openness directed at it. Rampant inefficiencies due to corruption will be forced out of existence. Stong man governments (the Phillipines and Indonesia are powerful recent examples) will be forced out of power.
What are the downsides? Certainly in an interdependent global society some lack of local soveriegnty is lost. Is this a bad thing? In my opinion xenophobia and nationalism have been the two greatest forces for destruction over the history of mankind.
Losing the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest is painful, and should be avoided, but we should also work to prevent mass murder at the hands of despots. Is the sacrifice of a few trees to prevent a world war worthwhile?
I think so.
The fact is that we have an unusual opportunity to positively influence future history by globalization. The key is not whether we want to globalize, but to understand the reasons for it, and to manage our institutions to take advantage of the benefits.
One thing that people everywhere will have to get used to is that world organizations will have some unusual powers. It is impossible to manage a global economy with national level institutions. There will probably be a lot of problems at the start, and some xenophobic reaction to these problems. But the potential is worth it.
People on/. realize very well that the Internet is already beyond the regulatory capacity of any one nation. Even in China the government has found that it's goals of trade with the west are inconsistent with their desire to censor news. They are finding that their only choice is to favor openness because the alternative is the gulag and stagnation.
The future of mankind is with transparency at the world level, not with petty xenophobic nationistic views. The goals we need to be working for are making the international organizations needed for globalization transparent and open, while not being blind to the ultimate benefits of globalization.
It seems to me that the same model that is used by a lot of farmers - establishment of a cooperative - would benefit unrecognized artists considerably.
The commercial music does not serve most artists well; we can certainly take that for a fact. Some artists hit it big, but the vast majority do not get fair recognition for their work.
In the days of the internet we have the establishment of a new means of reaching lots of people with a far less investment of capital than was previously required. It is quite possible to bootstrap oneself into national recognition ala/.
Farmers have long recognized that a single farm cannot gain direct access to distribution channels because of capital and volume requirements. However, by forming a cooperative they are able to provide enough capital and volume to in fact 'cut out the middleman'. Artists now have the same opportunity to take matters into their own hands. Sites like mp3.com are obviously using the same business model that the conventional music industry does, but via a new distribution channel. This business model does not serve the needs of most artists.
I believe that the correct approach would be the establishement of a artist's cooperative designed to use the internet as a distribution medium. The business philosophy could be taken from examination of farmer's cooperatives, and the distribution model from examination of several successful low-capital or bootstrapped internet startups.
According to the article, the federal drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, "is threatening to arrest any doctor who merely mentioned to a patient that marijuana might alleviate the suffering caused by AIDS, cancer, or other serious ailment."
It seems to me that this is rather weak evidence that any doctor is having his First Amendment rights trampled on. Until such an arrest actually occurs, this to me is just some mouthing off by a person who has no actual power to put his thought into action.
The author was making the point that so many people are being caught up in the 'drug net' that significant percentages of some social groups are losing the right to vote. Only ten states currently banish felons for life. And, yes, if you've done the time I do think you should get the vote back.
This is not a case where individual rights are being eroded. As the original correspondent noted, disenfranchising felons has been practice in the US for a long time.
Since the early 1980's the Supreme Court has authorized cascading exceptions to this rule, allowing police helicopters to peer into windows, highway troopers to search the passengers of cars whose drivers appear suspicious, and, most notoriously, state agents to smash down doors without warning and without evidence of a crime."
This is not new! Police have had hot pursuit search powers for much longer than the early '80s. Even under the Consitution there are exceptions to requirements for search warrants - customs agents, for example are not required to obtain warrants before conducting searches.
Beginning in 1974 the Supreme Court blessed the unholy idea that property could be seized and sold by the government without arrest, conviction, or due process.
This is one that is real, and very much a problem. One of the tricks is that by seizing property you can impoversh the accused, making it impossible for him to pay for legal defense.
On facing an accuser in a criminal trail
Again, this is a long established principle, not something new. The fact is that some law enforcement agents must remain anonymous to be able to do their work. Like most Constitutional issues, there are no absolutes. You have the right to do xyz UNLESS it infringes on the right of somebody else to do something important.
Do you really think the NSA doesn't do this, too? What are the checks and balances there?
If the NSA is doing this, they are in rather deep trouble. It is illegal for the NSA to gather information on US Citizens. The ECPA (Electronic Communications and Privacy Act) also contains a lot of restrictions on what sorts of things can be intercepted, by who, and how. If the NSA has been intercepting stuff like email and reading the content without obtaining court orgers they can be hit by some pretty stiff penalties under the ECPA too.
Congress as well as civil liberties organizations are really putting some heat on the NSA right now. EPIC is suing because of disclosure requirements that the NSA has not met under our FOIA - goverment agencies are required to disclose internal documents when requested unless they can prove that there are some sound reasons like national security not to. Congress also has an investigation going which the NSA has refused to provide testimony for - Congress' response was to cut funding for the NSA legal department by 33%. This is the ultimate check and balance that Congress holds over the executive branch in the US.
There were some incidents like this in the 60's with the CIA which is also forbidden to gather intelligence within the US. The results were not pleasant for those guilty of this.
The FBI has the right to gather information of US citizens - but the FBI does not have black budgets, and they are generally required to be much more open about their activities than the NSA or CIA. Ultimately any information that the FBI can present in a court in the US has to pass a variety of tests under the Unreasonable Search and Seizure provisions in the Constitution, too.
In a related story published in April on Wired, the use of redirect hyperlinks to track email by Deja is described.
Deja is basically tracking your creation of an email response to an article on their site.
According to the article:
"Deja News could also record -- and log -- the use of the link, the IP address of the sender, and the addressee's email [address]."
The ACLU has some rather pithy comments on Deja's practices in this area, including the possibility that Deja is in violation of the Electronics Communications Privacy Act by intercepting these transactions.
Compare the American sentiment toward government with how people feel in France and Germany, for example. Where many Americans tend to place government in the problem set, I get the feeling that many Europeans place government in the solution set.
I think that a lot of the problems people feel with their government, particularly the federal government arise from the sheer size of the US, and it's cultural diversity.
It is impossible for the federal government to do ANYTHING that doesn't gore some ox somewhere, so people would rather have it do nothing. This sort of problem doesn't exist, say in France, where you have really only two major groups - those who live in Paris, and those who are beneath notice by the Parisiennes.
Do Americans feel anywhere nearly as strongly about their state governments? I really don't think so.
More than 3 billion Web hits per day and 300 million page requests per day against up to 2 terabytes of data" and wasn't even using the W2K Advanced Datacenter Server.
That is a very large assumption considering we have no idea what the load is or where the bottleneck is. Given the experience of the Pathfinder (which crushed all previous load records two years ago) this could be in fact exceeding the 300 million page load/day rate, and with a much higher image load than shown in the Unisys demo.
You can have a datacenter with 100 trillion page load per day capacity be useless if your backbone provider can't handle the load. As the Chicago Mercantile Exchange found out.
By the way, did you ask youself exactly WHY the Advanced Datacenter Server wasn't used by Unisys? Or why they needed over 100 CPUs for this 'proof of concept'? What the hell is the manageability of that many servers, anyway?
AT&T: Perhaps, but I am not aware of what basic science things they have invented aside from some applied computer science stuff (C, Unix, etc).
How about the transistor? Or the laser? Or Information Theory? The solar cell, and perhaps the communications satellite? Cellular phones? How about the first photonic computer? How about Radio Astronomy including the Big Bang remnant radiation? The application of statistics to the social sciences? Or waveguide optical fibre (making transoceaninc optical cables possible).
AT&T had the best industrial labs in the world before they spun them off as Lucent. No other lab in the world has come close to contributing as much. Eleven workers at Bell Labs have been awarded Nobel Prizes.
Schawlow and Townes Invent the Laser
The invention of the laser, which stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, can be dated to 1958 with the publication of the scientific paper, Infrared and Optical Masers, by Arthur L. Schawlow, then a Bell Labs researcher, and Charles H. Townes, a consultant to Bell Labs. That paper, published in Physical Review, the journal of the American Physical Society, launched a new scientific field and opened the door to a multibillion-dollar industry.
The work of Schawlow and Townes, however, can be traced back to the 1940s and early 50s and their interest in the field of microwave spectroscopy, which had emerged as a powerful tool for puzzling out the characteristics of a wide variety of molecules. Neither man was planning on inventing a device that would revolutionize a number of industries, from communications to medicine. They had something more straightforward in mind, developing a device to help them study molecular structures.
The beginnings at Bell Labs Townes, armed with a Ph.D. degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology, joined Bell Labs in 1939, where he worked on a variety of problems, including microwave generation, vacuum tubes, and magnetics. He then moved on to solid-state physics, studying electron emissions from surfaces. One day, about a year after Townes arrived at Bell Labs, Mervin Kelley, then director of Townes' laboratory, informed the group, "On Monday, I want you to start a radar bombing system." Townes wasn't enthusiastic about the assignment, but realized that World War II had invaded the quiet hallways of Bell Labs. "We worked at it pretty hard, and after about a year we had a system which we put in an airplane, and actually used. It worked.
For those who are interested in the history of the first transistor, here is an excerpt from "The TRANSISTOR - A Crystal Triode" by Fink and Rockett in ELECTRONICS 21, 68-71 (Sep 1948), describing the work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories:
"Although investigation of semiconductors at BTL dates back a number of years, with the end of the war a concentrated basic research progrm was undertaken."
"The group on semiconductors, led by William Shockley, one of this country's leading solid-state physicists, was seeking answers to three basic questions: (1) physically, what is a semiconductor, (2) how doers its physical nature produce its observed properties, and (3) how does the fabrication and processing of the material affect its physical nature? Among the semiconductors studied were silicon, copper oxide, and germanium."
"A great deal of empirical information had been amassed on these substances during their use, particularly as detectors in microwave equipment ("Crystal Rectifiers", H.C. Torrey and C.A. Whitmer, Mcgraw-Hill, 1948). In particular it was known that their resistivities were determined chiefly by impurities, and furthermore that their resistivities could be varied over wide ranges by applying various external influences (light in the case of photocells, electric potential in the case of rectifiers and detectors, or temperature in the case of Thermistors)."
"Likewise, a high potential applied externally (without making contact) to a semiconductor should change its resistivity. Using a sheet of germanium as one plate of a capacitor, Shockley and his colleagues measured the change in resistance produced by changing the voltage across the capacitor. The change in resistance was much smaller than anticipated in the light of prevailing theory. Conclusion: something wrong with theory. So John Bardeen, a theoretical physicist in the group, devised a theory of surface states that would account for the measured change as well for older known effects unexplained by previous theories."
"The new theory suggested new experiments, which, when performed, called for refinements in the theory. While W.H. Brattain and John Bardeen were following up the consequences of the refined theory of surface states they invented the Transistor."
The discovery was made in December 1947, but not announced to the world at large until July, 1948, after additional devices has been fabricated and tested.
------------------------------------------------ ------------------------ Further details are given by J. Bardeen and W.H. Brattain themselves in their introduction to "Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action", published simultaneously in BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL 28, 239-277 (Apr 1949) and PHYSICAL REVIEW 75, 1208-1225 (1949) as follows:
"The properties of germanium as a semi-conductor and as a rectifier have been investigated by a group working under the direction of K. Lark-Horovitz at Purdue University. Work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories was initiated by R.S. Ohl before the war in connection with the development of silicon rectifiers for use as detectors at microwave frequencies. Research and development on both germanium and silicon rectifiers during and since the war has been done in large part by a group under J.H. Scaff. The background of information obtained in these various investigations hs been invaluable."
[A summary of the wartime weapons research can be found in "Development of Silicon Crystal Rectifiers for Microwavve Radar Receivers" by Scaff and Ohl, BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL 26, 1-30 (Jan 1947)]
"The general research program leading to the transistor was initiated and directed by W. Shockley. Work on germanium and silicon was emphasized because they are simpler to understand than most other semi-conductors. One of the investigations undertaken was the study of the modulation of conductance of a thin film of semi-conductor by an electric field applied by an electrode insulated from the film. [described in "Modulation of Conductance by Surface Charges" by Shockley and Pearson, PHYSICAL REVIEW 74, 232 (July 15, 1948)] If, for example, the film is made one plate of a parallel plate condenser, a charge is induced on the surface. If the individual charges which make up the induced charge are mobile, the conductance of the film will depend on the voltage applied to the condenser. The first experiments performed to measure this effect indicated that most of the induced charge was not mobile. This result, taken along with other unexplained phenomena such as the small contact potential difference between n- and p- type silicon and the independence of the rectifying properties of the point contact rectifier on the work function of the metal point, led one of the authors [Bardeen, "Surface States and rectification at metal semiconductor contact", PHYSICAL REVIEW 71, 717-727 (1947)] to an explanation in terms of surface states. This work led to the concept that space charge barrier layers may be present at the free surfaces of semi-conductors such as germanium and silicon, independent of a metal contact. Two experiments immediately suggested were to measure the dependence of contact potential on impurity concentration and to measure the change of contact potential on illuminating the surface with light. Both of these experiments were successful and confirmed the theory. [Brattain & Shockley, PHYSICAL REVIEW 72, 345L (1947)] It was while studying the latter effect with a silicon surface immersed in a liquid that it was found that the density of surface charges and the field in the space charge region could be varied by applying a potential across an electrolyte in contact with the silicon surface. While studying the effect of field applied applied by an electrolyte on the current voltage characeristic of a high-back-voltage germanium rectifier, the authors were led to the concept that a portion of the current was being carried by holes flowing near the surface. Upon replacing the electrolyte with a metal contact transistor action was discovered."
"The germanium used in the transistor is an n-type or excess semi-conductor with a resistivity of the order of 10 ohm-cm, and is the same as the material used in high-back-voltage germanium rectifiers." ["Preparation of High Back Voltage Germanium Rectifiers" by J.H. Scaff and H.C. Theuerer, NATIONAL DEFENSE RESEARCH COMMITTEE 14-555 (Oct 24, 1945)]
"Our discussion has been confined to the transistor in which two point contacts are placed in close proximity on one face of a germanium block. It is apparent that the principles can be applied to other geometrical designs and to other semi-conductors. Some preliminary work has shown that transistor action can be obtained with silicon and undoubtedly other semi-conductors can be used."
Later that year, William Shockley extended the theory from simple metal- semiconductor junctions to full semiconductor-semiconductor junctions, and suggested that the behavior of a transistor made from such junctions would be easier to predict than that of the point-contact transistors made so far. From the introduction to "The Theory of p-n Junctions in Semiconductors and p-n Junction Transistors", BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL 28, 435-489 (July 1949):
"As is well known, silicon and germanium may be either n-type or p-type semiconductors, dependig on which of the concentrations Nd of donors or Na of acceptors, is the larger. If, in a single sample, there is a transition from one type to the other, a rectifying photosensitive p-n junction is formed. The theory of such junctions is in contrast to those of ordinary rectifying junctions because, on both sides of the junction, both electron flow and hole flow must be considered. In fact, a major portion of the hole current may persist into the n-type region and vice- versa. In later sections we show how this feature has a number of interesting consequences"...
"A p-n junction may act as an emitter in the transistor sense, since it can inject hole current into n-type material."
"The p-n-p transistor has the interesting feature of being calculable to a high degree. One can consider such questions as the relative ratios of width to length of the n-region and the effect of altering impurity contents and scaling the structure to operate in different frequency ranges."
With the assistance of several others (Morgan, Sparks, & Teal), Shockley went on to produce a working p-n junction transistor in 1951, and in 1952 he went on to develop the theory behind the field-effect transistor, which is the type most commonly used today in computer chips. ["A Unipolar Field-Effect Transistor", PROCEEDINGS OF THE I.R.E. 40, 1365+ (Nov 1952)]
Essentially this article points out that since the sound reproduced at f/2 (the sampling frequency divided by 2) is derived from only two samples per second, the error in sound reproduced is actually larger than the sound itself . This means at 20 kHz you actually have more than 50% distortion in the CD audio format.
Other factors include introduction of phase inaccuracies from the introduction of a 18-db/octave anti-aliasing filter at the 22 KHz cutoff frequency. Loss of phase accuracy of course leads to odd cancellations in the room sound field.
In addition it has long been known that the stereo sound field quite poorly reproduced by only two speakers. For decades experimenters have known that at least a center channel improves the sound image dramatically. Home theatre enthusiasts have also become very aware of the practical benefits of a seperate subwoofer channel and amplifier. At the very least they no longer have the problem of tweeter burnout from distortion harmonics induced by amplifier overload.
Take a look at http://fagersta.com/electronics/audio.html for more information.
I'm convinced that `99 will go down in history as the year that turned out the most original, well made, moving movies EVER.
Several of the Movies you listed were from 98 - Pvt Ryan, and Shakespeare in Love already won Oscars for '98.
Even if all the films you listed were from 99', 1939 woul still be the best BY FAR .
Wizard of Oz Gunga Din Gone With The Wind Beau Geste Stagecoach Drums Along The Mowhawk Goodbye Mr. Chips Hell's Kitchen Hound of The Baskervilles Hunchback of Notre Dame I Take This Woman Man in The Iron Mask Mr. Smith Goes To Washington Ninotchka Of Mice and Men Young Mr. Lincoln
There has never been, nor is it likely there ever will be a year in cinema to match 1939.
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WHAT AN EXTRA-ORDINARY CONCEPT
I cannot believe that NSI is try to posit that anyone submitting a Whois query is in fact agreeing to the above contract, whose terms may be changed by NSI at any time! Man, I wish I had this kind of imagination. Just think - under the above they could change the terms and claim a retroactive charge of $1 per Whois query!
Let's see if I can extend this to my own purposes.. hmmm
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A whole lot, I am afraid. Lots of businesses use internal software developed under VB that would represent a huge cost to redo for Linux. There is no accounting software for Linux. Many AS400 applications have Windows clients, but no Linux clients. There is no HR software for Linux.
Well, it seems to me that/. has been 'having a good time' by yanking my chain too many times over the past few days. Much like the boy who cried wolf, when the facts don't back up the assertions, people discredit those making the assertions. I personally am at the point where I don't take any of these stories at face value any more./. has recently not been much better than the Weekly World News in terms of its veracity.
In this case we have a story claiming Mr. Simpson is under investigation by the FBI for treason. On some checking of additional sources (something any journalist is trained to do) we find that in fact he is not under investigation (the matter was closed with no action some 6 years ago) and in fact there was no allegation of treason at any time (only suspicion of illegal crypto export).
Now we have a bunch of voices screaming about abusive FBI behavior when it is hardly clear that such behavior existed at any time in this case.
To me this is a pretty sad state of affairs, and one not at all conducive towards actually identifying where real problems exist.
All these "reasons" are based in an idealized world that has very little reflection in reality.
Hmmm. Even after I gave you a concrete example of a drug that in fact I take every day that was the real result of one of these publications.
The fact is that I am very experienced in industrial R&D, having worked in such environments for over 20 years. The events I listed IN FACT are REAL and occur in industrial situations on a routine basis. If you don't believe me, look up the topics of chiral and controlled release phramceutical research and development.
A large part of the existing IP/patent law problem are lawyers who think they know how IP works but actually have no idea. Lawyers really should talk to IP creators more, whether they be scientists, hobbiests or inventors.
Hmmm. Since I am an inventor with 10 issued patents I should then have a pretty good idea of what motivates inventors, right? Well, I can tell you from my experience the reason that most inventors want patents is because if they don't produce either in an industrial or academic environment they will be out on their ear and have to feed their family by flipping burgers. The number of practicing inventors that have any hope of achieving anything approaching 'glory' is a miniscule and irrelevant percentage of the total.
I just hope NASA doesn't become too focused on a pure crash landing.
Unfortunately, but in what seems to have become a rather typical event on/., the posting here, and responses to it focus in on the first few lines of the article and does not examine the topic in any depth.
The actual crash landing probes are hitchhiking on a much larger probe that will (hopefully) be making a soft landing at the south pole and be doing all sorts typical stuff like grabbing soil samples, listening to the wind throug a mike (run by Linux), taking pictures and doing it's best to disturb the local population.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have ever seen a Mac install you would realize that Win95 has a crappy installation process. Bringing up a white box under Win95 can be a nightmare because of the lack of self-booting CD ROMS. And then you have to reboot 8 times just to get through to the Internet. And it is nearly blind. Not to mention that it is intolerant of where you install it.
One thing Linux developers have a tendency to do is to fall into the trap of making Linux match Win this or that in certain features. Bzzzt. Linux needs to set HIGHER standards if it is going to achieve world domination.
What you really need is a process that has a multiple levels - a brain dead process for newbies to get them up and running, an intermediate mode with a few options and a chance to override some things, and an expert mode where everything is wide open. RedHat anyway fails on the brain dead mode, and by a lot. It is still amazing to me that they don't have a button you can push that will get you to a setup that will act as a standard home client machine that connects with an ISP with only some basic info - phone number, user name, password...
I love working with Linux - the bang/buck ratio is far greater than anything I have used. But that first week of getting sendmail and ppp up was a killer, and I am very experienced with computers compared to the average user.
I really don't understand the point of getting excited about this. The police can probably already match paper and ink, and minute impressions in the paper from handling to identify a specific printer.
All this would do is make the job slightly easier.
Dead tree copies aren't the big thing copyright holders would be afraid of, either. They are lossy copies.
The only major reason I could see this being worth anything would be to catch people printing kiddie porn or money.
To my way of thinking, the fact that the HGP stuff is being done primarily so that companies can patent sections of DNA is the big whammy, since it prevents legitimate, perhaps non-profit, perhaps not, organizations from developing medical technologies without paying through the nose for the information.
This is not my understanding of what a patent means at all. When you obtain a patent, you are granted an exclusive right to the commercial benefits of the technology you patent in exchange for publication of the patent. If you patent a gene sequence, the patent in fact must fully disclose that sequence. Patents are by definition not copyrighted; they are fully public domain. This means the information becomes freely available.
In addition there is a clear exemption in the patent law for uses in research; that is you can take any patent there is and perform research using the technology disclosed without infringing in any way. Therefore it seems to me that patenting genetic sequences has exactly the opposite effect on research that you describe; the information becomes free, and anyone can conduct research using the information.
What a patent DOES restrict is the ability to exploit the technology in a commercial (i.e. money making) application. You will have to obtain a license if you plan to use the result of your work including the patented geneic code in a commercial product.
People also have to remember that the life of a patent is limited to 20 years after the filing. Given the state of the art in biotech these days, it seems to me to be quite clear that it may well take that long for most commercial inventions based on the genetic code to reach the market.
It is not at all clear to me that the patenting of genetic codes is in fact at all important in as a practical matter. Perhaps from other points of view, yes. But will it affect progress in any way? I doubt it.
Napsters tools are no more inherently tools for pircacy than ftp is.
It seems to me that Napster's primary use profile is in fact the illegal trading of mp3 files that infringe on copyrights. Napster makes claims that its tools can be used legally, but buglar's tools can be used legally, too. And the possesion of such tools is illegal in many places.
Tools like cp, ftp and so on have by far their major use in prefectly legal applications. A brick can be used aid a burglary too; but that is not it's primary use.
In fact, if a country joins a body such as the WTO, one agrees to accept all their rulings, not just the ones you agree to.
All treaties or contracts require you to give something in order to get something.
Canada disagreed with the similar forced importation of MMT (a gasoline additive which hasn't been proved safe yet) but had to not only allow it, but also pay a significant penalty to the manufacturer for trying to prevent it's import.
To begin with the case was a NAFTA, not a WTO issue. Canada was in fact on very thin ice because they were unable to ban the use of MMT under their own environmental laws. They only recourse they had was to try to ban importation and interprovincial sale. This put them in an extremely bad position under NAFTA. Rather than try their case under NAFTA they agreed to a settlement with Ethyl and in fact the case was never really adjudicated under NAFTA.
The U.S. disgarees with the WTO overturning the ban on tuna-containing-dolphins, but was forced to submit, on pain of substantial fines.
The US had to SLIGHTLY modify the zero tolerance dolphin by-catch law it had to accept a 0.1% bycatch percentage. The modified law was supported by many major environmental groups including Greenpeace and the WWF. As part of this almost all Latin American countries have adopted 0.1% by-catch limits.
Here is a statement regarding the legislation:
Teresa Platt of the US Fishermens Coalition is still optimistic: "It is higly likely that the legislation will pass as it is supported by the tuna fishing interests in twelve countries, five major environmental groups, several unions, over a hundred resource and property rights groups, the Clinton administration, key Democrats and the Republican leadership in Congress.
To me this tuna bycatch agreement seems like a real step forward.
The thing about globalization is that it is an increase in vertical hierarchies.
This is a side effect of the evolution of human society. First we had the family, then the tribe, then the village, city, nation, and now we are making the transition to a global society. Each of those steps has incurred increased vertical hierarchies.
If you want to withdraw from that, well, all I can say is that you are swimming upstream.
No, these two are not related at all. There is a long history of common carriers being immune to content liability. You cannot go after the telephone company because they accept a phone call to a bookie.
Napster is a different beast altogether. They are benefitting directly by supporting a file format that is widely, perhaps even predominately used for the purpose of copyright infringement. Such a benefit could well be recoverable by the infringed. This is no different from cases in the past where the movie and music industry have sued manufacturers of tape recorders and gotten fees attached to the sale of blank tapes and recorders as a means of recovering their losses.
First problem is that there is no mechanism that implements their responsibility to population. Governments have this mechanism -- they can be re-elected, overthrown or in the very worst case placed in situation where they have either to make decision that population demands, or get rid of large part of population.
In current circumstances there is a very real mechanism - if a country believes it is better off not participating it can simply not participate. There is no manditory membership, which is quite unlike being a citizen who is subject to mandatory rules (i.e. laws) of the nation he is a member in.
In addition you are neglecting the representative nature of participants in global organizations. In the US elected officials represent the citizens in determination of their vote. Citizens do not have a direct say in each and every rule or law that is passed. Similarly governments represent their citizens in international organizations. If they do a poor job of it, their constituents will boot them out of office.
While UN is based on the idea that countries' influence on UN policy is not entirely based on its political, military or economical strength (and if it was, such organization would be near to
worthless), and even heavily US-dominated NATO allows every country to veto a decision.
This is not correct. The UN does not allow any and all individual countries to veto decisions. The UN only allows members of the Security Council, which includes all the major world powers on a permanent basis and some representatives from the General Assembly on a rotating basis to veto decisions THAT ARE BEFORE THE SECURITY COUNCIL. Many decisions taken at the UN are in fact implemented solely by majority or 2/3 vote in the General Assembly. One of the main power struggles at the UN is always which matters are taken before the Security Council, and which are voted on by the General Assembly. Many organizations within the UN have a long history of adopting policies that the US does not agree with because they are in fact controlled and funded by the General Assembly where the US has neither a veto or more than a single vote along with the 180 or so individual nations present. All of this is why Congress sometimes has a tough time getting payment of dues passed.
In general treaties have power over governments while government have power over companiess
Historically governments abide by treaties only when it is to their best interest. Governments are the makers and breakers of treaties at their own whim. A treaty at an international level has no power over a government other than the self interest of that goverment.
but when large international organization is controlled by companies, and its power is accepted
by governments through treaties, it gives companies one more, and very efficient way to affect governments' policies, something that they would do by only indirect, less efficient ways otherwise.
International organizations (regardless of who they are controlled by) can only affect the actions of soverign nations on a very marginal basis. The inability of the WTO to reach a consensus on some relatively simple trade issues in fact highlights the degree of marginalization that is present. If there were in fact some international cabal of companies running the WTO, we would not see this level of disarray.
To me this article is really lacking. Certainly organizations like the WTO can do a lot of harm, but the fact of the matter is that globalization cuts both ways, both good and bad. Authors like this may have some pet ox gored, but the long term effects of globalization contain too many positive effects to ignore.
/. realize very well that the Internet is already beyond the regulatory capacity of any one nation. Even in China the government has found that it's goals of trade with the west are inconsistent with their desire to censor news. They are finding that their only choice is to favor openness because the alternative is the gulag and stagnation.
Global trade clearly benefits consumers in a lot of ways by making the marketplace more competitive. If a country is a low cost producer, or the goods they produce are of higher quality they should not be excluded from a market for nationalistic reasons. Consumers in Japan pay far more for food than in the US, and it is only because of government interference with trade that they do so. Surely there would be dislocation in the Japanese farm community if Japan imported more food - BUT the same money that is spent on subsidies not could be spent to restructure the Japanese economy, and the labor that is inefficiently spent on food production could be applied to far better value added activities that would ultimately result in improving the standard of living in Japan.
Concerns about WTO creating a more stable system of government are interesting - but what is the alternative? The 20th Century has been marked by the two greatest wars in human history. One of the great hopes of globalization is that it will make war obsolete. Nations will become interdependent and have far more to lose by going to war. The ultimate hope is that the productive capacities used to maintain armies at large fractions of GDPs in third world countries will be turned towards production of consumer necessities.
Many third world countries are concerned about globalization resulting in massive cultural changes. Certain globalization will result in cultural change. But what ways of life are worth maintaining at the expense of illiteracy, poverty and disease?
Globalization is often cited as a powerful force towards democratization and rule of law rather than law of ruler. It appears now that any totalitarian regime that engages in open competition will have powerful forces towards openness directed at it. Rampant inefficiencies due to corruption will be forced out of existence. Stong man governments (the Phillipines and Indonesia are powerful recent examples) will be forced out of power.
What are the downsides? Certainly in an interdependent global society some lack of local soveriegnty is lost. Is this a bad thing? In my opinion xenophobia and nationalism have been the two greatest forces for destruction over the history of mankind.
Losing the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest is painful, and should be avoided, but we should also work to prevent mass murder at the hands of despots. Is the sacrifice of a few trees to prevent a world war worthwhile?
I think so.
The fact is that we have an unusual opportunity to positively influence future history by globalization. The key is not whether we want to globalize, but to understand the reasons for it, and to manage our institutions to take advantage of the benefits.
One thing that people everywhere will have to get used to is that world organizations will have some unusual powers. It is impossible to manage a global economy with national level institutions. There will probably be a lot of problems at the start, and some xenophobic reaction to these problems. But the potential is worth it.
People on
The future of mankind is with transparency at the world level, not with petty xenophobic nationistic views. The goals we need to be working for are making the international organizations needed for globalization transparent and open, while not being blind to the ultimate benefits of globalization.
It seems to me that the same model that is used by a lot of farmers - establishment of a cooperative - would benefit unrecognized artists considerably.
/.
The commercial music does not serve most artists well; we can certainly take that for a fact. Some artists hit it big, but the vast majority do not get fair recognition for their work.
In the days of the internet we have the establishment of a new means of reaching lots of people with a far less investment of capital than was previously required. It is quite possible to bootstrap oneself into national recognition ala
Farmers have long recognized that a single farm cannot gain direct access to distribution channels because of capital and volume requirements. However, by forming a cooperative they are able to provide enough capital and volume to in fact 'cut out the middleman'. Artists now have the same opportunity to take matters into their own hands. Sites like mp3.com are obviously using the same business model that the conventional music industry does, but via a new distribution channel. This business model does not serve the needs of most artists.
I believe that the correct approach would be the establishement of a artist's cooperative designed to use the internet as a distribution medium. The business philosophy could be taken from examination of farmer's cooperatives, and the distribution model from examination of several successful low-capital or bootstrapped internet startups.
According to the article, the federal drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, "is threatening to arrest any doctor who merely mentioned to a patient that marijuana might alleviate the suffering caused by AIDS, cancer, or other serious ailment."
It seems to me that this is rather weak evidence that any doctor is having his First Amendment rights trampled on. Until such an arrest actually occurs, this to me is just some mouthing off by a person who has no actual power to put his thought into action.
The author was making the point that so many people are being caught up in the 'drug net' that significant percentages of some social groups are losing the right to vote. Only ten states currently banish felons for life. And, yes, if you've done the time I do think you should get the vote back.
This is not a case where individual rights are being eroded. As the original correspondent noted, disenfranchising felons has been practice in the US for a long time.
Since the early 1980's the Supreme Court has authorized cascading exceptions to this rule, allowing police helicopters to peer into windows, highway troopers to search the passengers of cars whose drivers appear suspicious, and, most notoriously, state agents to smash down doors without warning and without evidence of a crime."
This is not new! Police have had hot pursuit search powers for much longer than the early '80s. Even under the Consitution there are exceptions to requirements for search warrants - customs agents, for example are not required to obtain warrants before conducting searches.
Beginning in 1974 the Supreme Court blessed the unholy idea that property could be seized and sold by the government without arrest, conviction, or due process.
This is one that is real, and very much a problem. One of the tricks is that by seizing property you can impoversh the accused, making it impossible for him to pay for legal defense.
On facing an accuser in a criminal trail
Again, this is a long established principle, not something new. The fact is that some law enforcement agents must remain anonymous to be able to do their work. Like most Constitutional issues, there are no absolutes. You have the right to do xyz UNLESS it infringes on the right of somebody else to do something important.
Do you really think the NSA doesn't do this, too? What are the checks and balances there?
If the NSA is doing this, they are in rather deep trouble. It is illegal for the NSA to gather information on US Citizens. The ECPA (Electronic Communications and Privacy Act) also contains a lot of restrictions on what sorts of things can be intercepted, by who, and how. If the NSA has been intercepting stuff like email and reading the content without obtaining court orgers they can be hit by some pretty stiff penalties under the ECPA too.
Congress as well as civil liberties organizations are really putting some heat on the NSA right now. EPIC is suing because of disclosure requirements that the NSA has not met under our FOIA - goverment agencies are required to disclose internal documents when requested unless they can prove that there are some sound reasons like national security not to. Congress also has an investigation going which the NSA has refused to provide testimony for - Congress' response was to cut funding for the NSA legal department by 33%. This is the ultimate check and balance that Congress holds over the executive branch in the US.
There were some incidents like this in the 60's with the CIA which is also forbidden to gather intelligence within the US. The results were not pleasant for those guilty of this.
The FBI has the right to gather information of US citizens - but the FBI does not have black budgets, and they are generally required to be much more open about their activities than the NSA or CIA. Ultimately any information that the FBI can present in a court in the US has to pass a variety of tests under the Unreasonable Search and Seizure provisions in the Constitution, too.
In a related story published in April on Wired, the use of redirect hyperlinks to track email by Deja is described.
Deja is basically tracking your creation of an email response to an article on their site.
According to the article:
"Deja News could also record -- and log -- the use of the link, the IP address of the sender, and the addressee's email [address]."
The ACLU has some rather pithy comments on Deja's practices in this area, including the possibility that Deja is in violation of the Electronics Communications Privacy Act by intercepting these transactions.
Not to worry though, Deja is a member of TrustE.
What icon would be appropriate? The Southern Cross? A marsupial? A shrimp on a barbie?
This page has a configuration guide for deploying a system in a C2-evaluated configuration.
Try 1:
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
Type mismatch: 'CInt'
/security/inc/scripts.txt, line 279
Try 2:
The page cannot be displayed
There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it Cannot be displayed.
Please try the following:
Open the www.microsoft.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
Click the Refresh button, or try again later.
HTTP 500 - Internal server error
Internet Information Services
Technical Information (for support personnel)
More information:
Microsoft Support
Try 3:
Same as Try 2. Guess I'll install Linux instead. At least RedHat's Web Site is up.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hmmmm. This means you can't serve web pages on a C2 NT system?
Compare the American sentiment toward government with how people feel in France and Germany, for example. Where many Americans tend to place government in the problem set, I get the feeling that many Europeans place government in the solution set.
I think that a lot of the problems people feel with their government, particularly the federal government arise from the sheer size of the US, and it's cultural diversity.
It is impossible for the federal government to do ANYTHING that doesn't gore some ox somewhere, so people would rather have it do nothing. This sort of problem doesn't exist, say in France, where you have really only two major groups - those who live in Paris, and those who are beneath notice by the Parisiennes.
Do Americans feel anywhere nearly as strongly about their state governments? I really don't think so.
More than 3 billion Web hits per day and 300 million page requests per day against up to 2 terabytes of data" and wasn't even using the W2K Advanced Datacenter Server.
That is a very large assumption considering we have no idea what the load is or where the bottleneck is. Given the experience of the Pathfinder (which crushed all previous load records two years ago) this could be in fact exceeding the 300 million page load/day rate, and with a much higher image load than shown in the Unisys demo.
You can have a datacenter with 100 trillion page load per day capacity be useless if your backbone provider can't handle the load. As the Chicago Mercantile Exchange found out.
By the way, did you ask youself exactly WHY the Advanced Datacenter Server wasn't used by Unisys? Or why they needed over 100 CPUs for this 'proof of concept'? What the hell is the manageability of that many servers, anyway?
AT&T: Perhaps, but I am not aware of what basic science things they have invented aside from some applied computer science stuff (C, Unix, etc).
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How about the transistor? Or the laser? Or Information Theory? The solar cell, and perhaps the communications satellite? Cellular phones? How about the first photonic computer? How about Radio Astronomy including the Big Bang remnant radiation? The application of statistics to the social sciences? Or waveguide optical fibre (making transoceaninc optical cables possible).
AT&T had the best industrial labs in the world before they spun them off as Lucent. No other lab in the world has come close to contributing as much. Eleven workers at Bell Labs have been awarded Nobel Prizes.
Schawlow and Townes Invent the Laser
The invention of the laser, which stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, can be dated to 1958 with the publication of the scientific paper, Infrared and Optical Masers, by Arthur L. Schawlow, then a Bell Labs researcher, and Charles H. Townes, a consultant to Bell Labs. That paper, published in Physical Review, the journal of the American Physical Society, launched a new scientific field and opened the door to a multibillion-dollar industry.
The work of Schawlow and Townes, however, can be traced back to the 1940s and early 50s and their interest in the field of microwave spectroscopy, which had emerged as a powerful tool for puzzling out the characteristics of a wide variety of molecules. Neither man was planning on inventing a device that would revolutionize a number of industries, from communications to medicine. They had something more straightforward in mind, developing a device to help them study molecular structures.
The beginnings at Bell Labs Townes, armed with a Ph.D. degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology, joined Bell Labs in 1939, where he worked on a variety of problems, including microwave generation, vacuum tubes, and magnetics. He then moved on to solid-state physics, studying electron emissions from surfaces. One day, about a year after Townes arrived at Bell Labs, Mervin Kelley, then director of Townes' laboratory, informed the group, "On Monday, I want you to start a radar bombing system." Townes wasn't enthusiastic about the assignment, but realized that World War II had invaded the quiet hallways of Bell Labs. "We worked at it pretty hard, and after about a year we had a system which we put in an airplane, and actually used. It worked.
For those who are interested in the history of the first transistor, here is
an excerpt from "The TRANSISTOR - A Crystal Triode" by Fink and Rockett in
ELECTRONICS 21, 68-71 (Sep 1948), describing the work at the Bell Telephone
Laboratories:
"Although investigation of semiconductors at BTL dates back a number of years,
with the end of the war a concentrated basic research progrm was undertaken."
"The group on semiconductors, led by William Shockley, one of this country's
leading solid-state physicists, was seeking answers to three basic questions:
(1) physically, what is a semiconductor, (2) how doers its physical nature
produce its observed properties, and (3) how does the fabrication and
processing of the material affect its physical nature? Among the
semiconductors studied were silicon, copper oxide, and germanium."
"A great deal of empirical information had been amassed on these substances
during their use, particularly as detectors in microwave equipment ("Crystal
Rectifiers", H.C. Torrey and C.A. Whitmer, Mcgraw-Hill, 1948). In particular
it was known that their resistivities were determined chiefly by impurities,
and furthermore that their resistivities could be varied over wide ranges by
applying various external influences (light in the case of photocells,
electric potential in the case of rectifiers and detectors, or temperature
in the case of Thermistors)."
"Likewise, a high potential applied externally (without making contact) to
a semiconductor should change its resistivity. Using a sheet of germanium
as one plate of a capacitor, Shockley and his colleagues measured the change
in resistance produced by changing the voltage across the capacitor. The
change in resistance was much smaller than anticipated in the light of
prevailing theory. Conclusion: something wrong with theory. So John Bardeen,
a theoretical physicist in the group, devised a theory of surface states that
would account for the measured change as well for older known effects
unexplained by previous theories."
"The new theory suggested new experiments, which, when performed, called for
refinements in the theory. While W.H. Brattain and John Bardeen were following
up the consequences of the refined theory of surface states they invented the
Transistor."
The discovery was made in December 1947, but not announced to the world at
large until July, 1948, after additional devices has been fabricated and
tested.
-----------------------------------------------
Further details are given by J. Bardeen and W.H. Brattain themselves in
their introduction to "Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action",
published simultaneously in BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL 28, 239-277
(Apr 1949) and PHYSICAL REVIEW 75, 1208-1225 (1949) as follows:
"The properties of germanium as a semi-conductor and as a rectifier have
been investigated by a group working under the direction of K. Lark-Horovitz
at Purdue University. Work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories
was initiated by R.S. Ohl before the war in connection with the development
of silicon rectifiers for use as detectors at microwave frequencies. Research
and development on both germanium and silicon rectifiers during and since the
war has been done in large part by a group under J.H. Scaff. The background
of information obtained in these various investigations hs been invaluable."
[A summary of the wartime weapons research can be found in "Development of
Silicon Crystal Rectifiers for Microwavve Radar Receivers" by Scaff and Ohl,
BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL 26, 1-30 (Jan 1947)]
"The general research program leading to the transistor was initiated and
directed by W. Shockley. Work on germanium and silicon was emphasized because
they are simpler to understand than most other semi-conductors. One of the
investigations undertaken was the study of the modulation of conductance of a
thin film of semi-conductor by an electric field applied by an electrode
insulated from the film. [described in "Modulation of Conductance by Surface
Charges" by Shockley and Pearson, PHYSICAL REVIEW 74, 232 (July 15, 1948)]
If, for example, the film is made one plate of a parallel plate condenser,
a charge is induced on the surface. If the individual charges which make up
the induced charge are mobile, the conductance of the film will depend on
the voltage applied to the condenser. The first experiments performed to
measure this effect indicated that most of the induced charge was not mobile.
This result, taken along with other unexplained phenomena such as the small
contact potential difference between n- and p- type silicon and the
independence of the rectifying properties of the point contact rectifier on
the work function of the metal point, led one of the authors [Bardeen,
"Surface States and rectification at metal semiconductor contact", PHYSICAL
REVIEW 71, 717-727 (1947)] to an explanation in terms of surface states.
This work led to the concept that space charge barrier layers may be present
at the free surfaces of semi-conductors such as germanium and silicon,
independent of a metal contact. Two experiments immediately suggested were
to measure the dependence of contact potential on impurity concentration
and to measure the change of contact potential on illuminating the surface
with light. Both of these experiments were successful and confirmed the
theory. [Brattain & Shockley, PHYSICAL REVIEW 72, 345L (1947)] It was while
studying the latter effect with a silicon surface immersed in a liquid that
it was found that the density of surface charges and the field in the space
charge region could be varied by applying a potential across an electrolyte
in contact with the silicon surface. While studying the effect of field
applied applied by an electrolyte on the current voltage characeristic of
a high-back-voltage germanium rectifier, the authors were led to the concept
that a portion of the current was being carried by holes flowing near the
surface. Upon replacing the electrolyte with a metal contact transistor
action was discovered."
"The germanium used in the transistor is an n-type or excess semi-conductor
with a resistivity of the order of 10 ohm-cm, and is the same as the material
used in high-back-voltage germanium rectifiers." ["Preparation of High Back
Voltage Germanium Rectifiers" by J.H. Scaff and H.C. Theuerer, NATIONAL
DEFENSE RESEARCH COMMITTEE 14-555 (Oct 24, 1945)]
"Our discussion has been confined to the transistor in which two point
contacts are placed in close proximity on one face of a germanium block.
It is apparent that the principles can be applied to other geometrical
designs and to other semi-conductors. Some preliminary work has shown
that transistor action can be obtained with silicon and undoubtedly other
semi-conductors can be used."
-----------------------------------------------
Later that year, William Shockley extended the theory from simple metal-
semiconductor junctions to full semiconductor-semiconductor junctions,
and suggested that the behavior of a transistor made from such junctions
would be easier to predict than that of the point-contact transistors
made so far. From the introduction to "The Theory of p-n Junctions in
Semiconductors and p-n Junction Transistors", BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL
28, 435-489 (July 1949):
"As is well known, silicon and germanium may be either n-type or p-type
semiconductors, dependig on which of the concentrations Nd of donors or
Na of acceptors, is the larger. If, in a single sample, there is a
transition from one type to the other, a rectifying photosensitive p-n
junction is formed. The theory of such junctions is in contrast to those
of ordinary rectifying junctions because, on both sides of the junction,
both electron flow and hole flow must be considered. In fact, a major
portion of the hole current may persist into the n-type region and vice-
versa. In later sections we show how this feature has a number of
interesting consequences"
"A p-n junction may act as an emitter in the transistor sense, since it
can inject hole current into n-type material."
"The p-n-p transistor has the interesting feature of being calculable
to a high degree. One can consider such questions as the relative ratios
of width to length of the n-region and the effect of altering impurity
contents and scaling the structure to operate in different frequency
ranges."
-----------------------------------------------
With the assistance of several others (Morgan, Sparks, & Teal), Shockley
went on to produce a working p-n junction transistor in 1951, and in 1952
he went on to develop the theory behind the field-effect transistor, which
is the type most commonly used today in computer chips. ["A Unipolar
Field-Effect Transistor", PROCEEDINGS OF THE I.R.E. 40, 1365+ (Nov 1952)]
-George Fergus
What's the point of sampling sound at 96kHz when human ear and speakers can do only (in the best case) 20kHz?
The consequences of the 44.1K sampling rate are quite severe. They can be understood in depth from the following article: Consequences of Nyquist Theorem for Acoustic Signals Stored in Digital Format
Essentially this article points out that since the sound reproduced at f/2 (the sampling frequency divided by 2) is derived from only two samples per second, the error in sound reproduced is actually larger than the sound itself . This means at 20 kHz you actually have more than 50% distortion in the CD audio format.
Other factors include introduction of phase inaccuracies from the introduction of a 18-db/octave anti-aliasing filter at the 22 KHz cutoff frequency. Loss of phase accuracy of course leads to odd cancellations in the room sound field.
In addition it has long been known that the stereo sound field quite poorly reproduced by only two speakers. For decades experimenters have known that at least a center channel improves the sound image dramatically. Home theatre enthusiasts have also become very aware of the practical benefits of a seperate subwoofer channel and amplifier. At the very least they no longer have the problem of tweeter burnout from distortion harmonics induced by amplifier overload.
Take a look at http://fagersta.com/electronics/audio.html for more information.
I'm convinced that `99 will go down in history as the year that turned out the most original, well made, moving movies EVER.
Several of the Movies you listed were from 98 - Pvt Ryan, and Shakespeare in Love already won Oscars for '98.
Even if all the films you listed were from 99', 1939 woul still be the best BY FAR .
Wizard of Oz
Gunga Din
Gone With The Wind
Beau Geste
Stagecoach
Drums Along The Mowhawk
Goodbye Mr. Chips
Hell's Kitchen
Hound of The Baskervilles
Hunchback of Notre Dame
I Take This Woman
Man in The Iron Mask
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington
Ninotchka
Of Mice and Men
Young Mr. Lincoln
There has never been, nor is it likely there ever will be a year in cinema to match 1939.
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Let's see if I can extend this to my own purposes.. hmmm
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What more is really needed? *Really* needed?
A whole lot, I am afraid. Lots of businesses use internal software developed under VB that would represent a huge cost to redo for Linux. There is no accounting software for Linux. Many AS400 applications have Windows clients, but no Linux clients. There is no HR software for Linux.
The list of missing pieces is long and imposing.
Well, it seems to me that /. has been 'having a good time' by yanking my chain too many times over the past few days. Much like the boy who cried wolf, when the facts don't back up the assertions, people discredit those making the assertions. I personally am at the point where I don't take any of these stories at face value any more. /. has recently not been much better than the Weekly World News in terms of its veracity.
In this case we have a story claiming Mr. Simpson is under investigation by the FBI for treason. On some checking of additional sources (something any journalist is trained to do) we find that in fact he is not under investigation (the matter was closed with no action some 6 years ago) and in fact there was no allegation of treason at any time (only suspicion of illegal crypto export).
Now we have a bunch of voices screaming about abusive FBI behavior when it is hardly clear that such behavior existed at any time in this case.
To me this is a pretty sad state of affairs, and one not at all conducive towards actually identifying where real problems exist.
All these "reasons" are based in an idealized world that has very little reflection in reality.
Hmmm. Even after I gave you a concrete example of a drug that in fact I take every day that was the real result of one of these publications.
The fact is that I am very experienced in industrial R&D, having worked in such environments for over 20 years. The events I listed IN FACT are REAL and occur in industrial situations on a routine basis. If you don't believe me, look up the topics of chiral and controlled release phramceutical research and development.
A large part of the existing IP/patent law problem are lawyers who think they know how IP works but actually have no idea. Lawyers really should talk to IP creators more, whether they be scientists, hobbiests or inventors.
Hmmm. Since I am an inventor with 10 issued patents I should then have a pretty good idea of what motivates inventors, right? Well, I can tell you from my experience the reason that most inventors want patents is because if they don't produce either in an industrial or academic environment they will be out on their ear and have to feed their family by flipping burgers. The number of practicing inventors that have any hope of achieving anything approaching 'glory' is a miniscule and irrelevant percentage of the total.
I just hope NASA doesn't become too focused on a pure crash landing.
/., the posting here, and responses to it focus in on the first few lines of the article and does not examine the topic in any depth.
Unfortunately, but in what seems to have become a rather typical event on
The actual crash landing probes are hitchhiking on a much larger probe that will (hopefully) be making a soft landing at the south pole and be doing all sorts typical stuff like grabbing soil samples, listening to the wind throug a mike (run by Linux), taking pictures and doing it's best to disturb the local population.