"Warp Drive" as a concept should not be patentable. If it were, then someone could claim a patent on all faster-than-light travel.
What *is* patentable is a specific implementation of the warp drive concept. Someone else could build a warp drive in a different way, but they couldn't copy your design.
That's the main idea behind patents, although it is partially corrupted now.
I see what you're getting at and I don't disagree. However, as you know this stuff is really complicated and you need to be specialized in your career to be effective.Most of these jobs are for Electrical Engineers, a few could be also held by people who studied Computer Science or Mechanical Engineering. I'm an Analog/Mixed-Signal Engineer and while I know Verilog and how to run verification tools, I'm frankly not as competent at those roles as specialists are. It is the way of the world.
I agree you could retrain a product engineer to become a verification engineer but a company would rather bring in a fresh out from India on an H1-B.
One organizes many contributions using any number of industry-standard design methodologies. Designing airplanes and cars uses even more engineers.
I suspect NVIDIA is slightly exaggerating and are counting the contribution of many "overhead" engineers that provide value for the whole engineering organization, such as people who work on design tools, design kits, methodology and the like.
You're right, there are many repeated subunit but each unit needs a team to be optimized.
For a chip this complex you need:
Logic Designers (who come up with high-level models for the chip and define the instruction set / hardware interface) Front-end engineers that write Verilog and/or VHDL (I have no idea what NVIDIA uses) Implementation engineers (who do place and route and parasitic extraction) Verification engineers (who use various tools to see if everything is as it should be) Packaging engineers (who work closely with vendors to develop a custom package for the chip/module) Module engineers (since we have 3D stacked memories on this device the module engineering is far from trivial) Thermal Engineers (3D modules typically have very complex thermal requirements) Signal Integrity engineers (since we're going so fast just getting a signal from point A to point B is hard) Analog/Mixed Signal engineers (for clocking, serial I/O development) Integration Engineers (for modeling how to put all this together) System Engineers (for figuring out if this is all going to work) Software Engineers (for low-level software dev) CAD Engineers (for developing and maintaining an appropriate computer-aided design flow) Foundry Engineers (for working with the foundry on the physical production of the wafers... anything this big and complex will need process customization) ESD engineers (for figuring out and implementing an ESD strategy) Library Engineers (for customizing and optimizing the standard cell library used in the chip) Product Engineers (for solving production problems as they arise) Test Engineers (for developing and implementing tests to show the chip is working as expecting) Application Engineers (who work with early adopters to integrate this chip into their systems)
and on and on and on...
As you can see, an army of engineers is required for a chip this complex to see the light of day. On simpler chips, many of these roles can be played by the same people, but in a chip this big, they need to divide the work or it would never get done.
I guess you could call it on schedule at the moment since they've slipped at least nine times since the project was announced in 1997. According to the initial schedule it should already have been in orbit almost nine years!
The vast majority of people who use daycare do it because they have to. Kids need a place to sleep and food to eat. Also, a recent study showed that kids cared for by others do not develop significantly differently from children cared for exclusively by their parents. Since you'll probably be asking for a reference, here you go:
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS. (2006). The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD). Findings for Chidlren up to Age 4 ½ Years (05-4318). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
I got a better idea of what a good manager was from reading the book "The Soul of a New Machine". The problem with good managers is they look like they are doing nothing. A good manager fixes problems before they happen. You are going to need a logic analyzer next week and it shows up on your desk on Friday of this week. It is just transparent.
You do know that Tom West was a terrible manager, don't you? His team succeeded in bringing the Eagle in but then the team detonated. They ate the seed corn to get the project done and then everyone was burned out and quit. That is the epitome of bad management. He needed to push back on his bosses to change the scope of the project. A long-term, high-functioning team is MUCH cheaper in the long run than assembling a new team and destroying them for each project.
He also didn't shield his team from politics as he should have. He did to some extent but he was still a Mushroom Manager.
If you ever manage technical people, please, PLEASE read "High Output Management" by Andy Grove and act like that. Please don't act like Tom West.
What Groupon primarily attracts is cheapskates. People who are only interested in the lowest price and then move on. Belligerent assholes who come into your business with an coupon they know has expired and then scream at you for not honoring it. This is well documented by the many businesses who have lost money on the Groupon scam.
That may be one kind of customer but my wife and I used Groupon to have new experiences we otherwise never would have tried.
For example, we used Groupons to get an archery lesson, to take a massage class, to stay in a Victorian mansion turned B&B, and to take guided kayak tour of a local slough.
The businesses *might* have made money on us (I have no idea about their cost structures) but without Groupon they never would have seen us as customers because a full-price archery lesson (for example) wouldn't have attracted us as customers.
I think service business might make money on Groupon, I don't know. It seems a few services and "experience" businesses are always on Groupon.
Turning a neuron "off" doesn't make much sense unless you are destroying it.
Neurons work in two ways, they are either "excitatory" in which case they tend to create further firing, or "inhibitory" in which case they tend to suppress further firing. I'll assume you meant "making it more inhibitory" when you said turning it off.
We are a long way from such things, but you could imagine the utility of "turning off" or making neurons more inhibitory in the case of Parkinson's Disease where there is too much superflous random firing that leads to tremor.
Another case where we might want to calm the neurons are in people that experience PTSD or severe depression.
Yet another case is Epilepsy. You can kind of think of Epilepsy as a "neural storm" (this is a ROUGH analogy). So, one option to control it is if you can sense a seizure starting up you can shut down it's ability to propagate through the brain.
These are just some of the possible uses of "switching a neuron off".
Again, the summary was highly misleading. Optogenetics only works with GENETICALLY MODIFIED neurons, so won't easily work as a therapeutic technique. That's OK, because what it is used for is basic neuroscience research.
The idea is if you want to look at specific neural pathways you can optogenetically modify them to light up when you are shining a laser on them AND they are performing a task you are interested in. You can think of an optogenetically modified neuron as a neuron that you can probe at high speeds.
This is exciting because you can see, for example, functional connectivity at full speed in real, operating brains. This could enable the creation of a functional connectome which is kind of a traffic map of the brain (neurological connection studies give you the road map, optogenetics can give you the traffic). Previous techniques (such as neurotransmitter tagging) are far too slow to make such a "traffic map".
Prior to this "sonogenetics" research, only really flat specimens could be used since lasers cannot penetrate deeply. This is nice development.
What do you think Microsoft hardware is? Made in a factory in Redmond by Microsoft employees? Hahaha. Microsoft has long had their hardware designed by ODMs and made by CMs. According to this article [infoworld.com], Taiwanese company Pegatron makes the Surface tablets, and is also an iPad supplier.
*Every* American electronics company these days outsources their manufacturing and frequently their design to Asian companies. No one does any of that stuff here any more, except defense contractors of course.
I'm an Apple fan and I'm concerned they are falling into the trap of customer confusion. For example, when I bought my iPad (which I love) I went to the Apple Store and picked up the iPad. It was done quickly and I was a happy customer. Now, there are *5* different iPads.
Which one do I pick? Christ, I have to research this now? What's my use case? How important is screen size, battery life, cost, etc etc etc.. This is why I hated buying anything from Dell.
On a related note, which Apple laptop should you buy? MacBook, Air, Pro? What's the difference? Customer confusion leads to customer paralysis.
Apple's been down this road before. In the mid 90s there were so many different Apple models, Performa, Centris, Quada, God knows what else, that I had no idea what to get. You know which one I got? None of them. That's when I finally went to PC.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs' genius when he returned to Apple was to make it EASY to buy a Mac. Just get an iMac. Pick the color and you're done. Want an iPod or an iPhone? You didn't need to research and weigh the pros and cons of 5 different models. Now you do. I strongly believe a good part of why Apple revived was a clean product line with minimal choices.
I fear Apple is making a mistake that may come back to bite them.
I remember seeing a lot of private label printers and monitors in the Dell catalog over the years. They also have a history of selling Microsoft products. I recall significant catalog space for the Zune, for instance.
You started out claiming that writing code only you can decipher is a good thing for a programmer (otherwise you're "thinking like a manager". Now you're backpedaling to the old "well I'm unique and it works for me" angle.
For most people, doing competent work that can be understood and extended in your absence is not only a good idea, it is the very essence of professionalism.
And in 99 cases of 100, his son will end up unemployed. That's why Europe prefers stability, being an older culture, they've learnt that it's better for 100 sons to all be employed, than 1 son is rich while the other 99 starve.
And yet, historically, the United States has significantly lower unemployment than Europe.
You're correct but earlier cryo-EM cameras are also tailored to the bio industry. This advancement is huge, don't get me wrong, it's just it was made 8 years ago. Take for example the K2 Summit camera.
It's a winner in structural biology. The reason you care about seeing atoms in structural biology is you're trying to design drugs that physically interlock with important molecules. You have to see the atoms to truly know the structural layout of a molecule.
This is not a worthy story. Cryo-EM is a fast growing, exciting field but higher resolution electron microscopes that what this article trumpets have been available for years. For example, the TEAM microscope built in 2008 at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has a resolution of 50 pm:
Slashdot Mirror
They also have to include (at least in the US) things like MS' share of COBRA payments until the people laid off get new jobs.
Since most of the job losses are in Finland, I expect the high cost is due to Finnish employment regulations.
"Warp Drive" as a concept should not be patentable. If it were, then someone could claim a patent on all faster-than-light travel.
What *is* patentable is a specific implementation of the warp drive concept. Someone else could build a warp drive in a different way, but they couldn't copy your design.
That's the main idea behind patents, although it is partially corrupted now.
A lot of my wife's employees make about that or less. They live in San Francisco. It isn't enough to buy a house on but it is enough to live.
I see what you're getting at and I don't disagree. However, as you know this stuff is really complicated and you need to be specialized in your career to be effective.Most of these jobs are for Electrical Engineers, a few could be also held by people who studied Computer Science or Mechanical Engineering. I'm an Analog/Mixed-Signal Engineer and while I know Verilog and how to run verification tools, I'm frankly not as competent at those roles as specialists are. It is the way of the world.
I agree you could retrain a product engineer to become a verification engineer but a company would rather bring in a fresh out from India on an H1-B.
One organizes many contributions using any number of industry-standard design methodologies. Designing airplanes and cars uses even more engineers.
I suspect NVIDIA is slightly exaggerating and are counting the contribution of many "overhead" engineers that provide value for the whole engineering organization, such as people who work on design tools, design kits, methodology and the like.
You're right, there are many repeated subunit but each unit needs a team to be optimized.
For a chip this complex you need:
Logic Designers (who come up with high-level models for the chip and define the instruction set / hardware interface)
Front-end engineers that write Verilog and/or VHDL (I have no idea what NVIDIA uses)
Implementation engineers (who do place and route and parasitic extraction)
Verification engineers (who use various tools to see if everything is as it should be)
Packaging engineers (who work closely with vendors to develop a custom package for the chip/module)
Module engineers (since we have 3D stacked memories on this device the module engineering is far from trivial)
Thermal Engineers (3D modules typically have very complex thermal requirements)
Signal Integrity engineers (since we're going so fast just getting a signal from point A to point B is hard)
Analog/Mixed Signal engineers (for clocking, serial I/O development)
Integration Engineers (for modeling how to put all this together)
System Engineers (for figuring out if this is all going to work)
Software Engineers (for low-level software dev)
CAD Engineers (for developing and maintaining an appropriate computer-aided design flow)
Foundry Engineers (for working with the foundry on the physical production of the wafers... anything this big and complex will need process customization)
ESD engineers (for figuring out and implementing an ESD strategy)
Library Engineers (for customizing and optimizing the standard cell library used in the chip)
Product Engineers (for solving production problems as they arise)
Test Engineers (for developing and implementing tests to show the chip is working as expecting)
Application Engineers (who work with early adopters to integrate this chip into their systems)
and on and on and on...
As you can see, an army of engineers is required for a chip this complex to see the light of day. On simpler chips, many of these roles can be played by the same people, but in a chip this big, they need to divide the work or it would never get done.
This is the third time I've heard about STEAM in the last two days. Why a new buzzword?
Once we add "arts" shouldn't we just call it "education"?
Are we in such strange times that a standard, well-rounded education is now "innovated"?
Jesus wept.
I guess you could call it on schedule at the moment since they've slipped at least nine times since the project was announced in 1997. According to the initial schedule it should already have been in orbit almost nine years!
I guess that's "on schedule" for NASA.
He is providing services to low-income kids in the Palo Alto area . That includes East Palo Alto.
Since you're so interested in demographics...
A few facts about East Palo Alto:
White alone 1,754 â" 6.2%
Black or African American alone 4,458 â" 15.8%
Hispanic or Latino (of any race) 18,147 â" 64.5%
The vast majority of people who use daycare do it because they have to. Kids need a place to sleep and food to eat. Also, a recent study showed that kids cared for by others do not develop significantly differently from children cared for exclusively by their parents. Since you'll probably be asking for a reference, here you go:
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS. (2006). The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD). Findings for Chidlren up to Age 4 ½ Years (05-4318). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
I got a better idea of what a good manager was from reading the book "The Soul of a New Machine".
The problem with good managers is they look like they are doing nothing.
A good manager fixes problems before they happen. You are going to need a logic analyzer next week and it shows up on your desk on Friday of this week.
It is just transparent.
You do know that Tom West was a terrible manager, don't you? His team succeeded in bringing the Eagle in but then the team detonated. They ate the seed corn to get the project done and then everyone was burned out and quit. That is the epitome of bad management. He needed to push back on his bosses to change the scope of the project. A long-term, high-functioning team is MUCH cheaper in the long run than assembling a new team and destroying them for each project.
He also didn't shield his team from politics as he should have. He did to some extent but he was still a Mushroom Manager.
If you ever manage technical people, please, PLEASE read "High Output Management" by Andy Grove and act like that. Please don't act like Tom West.
What Groupon primarily attracts is cheapskates. People who are only interested in the lowest price and then move on. Belligerent assholes who come into your business with an coupon they know has expired and then scream at you for not honoring it. This is well documented by the many businesses who have lost money on the Groupon scam.
That may be one kind of customer but my wife and I used Groupon to have new experiences we otherwise never would have tried.
For example, we used Groupons to get an archery lesson, to take a massage class, to stay in a Victorian mansion turned B&B, and to take guided kayak tour of a local slough.
The businesses *might* have made money on us (I have no idea about their cost structures) but without Groupon they never would have seen us as customers because a full-price archery lesson (for example) wouldn't have attracted us as customers.
I think service business might make money on Groupon, I don't know. It seems a few services and "experience" businesses are always on Groupon.
If it can be excitatory, and inhibitory ... shouldn't there be a corresponding "not doing a damned thing" state?
That would be "dead". You don't need optogenetics for that.
Turning a neuron "off" doesn't make much sense unless you are destroying it.
Neurons work in two ways, they are either "excitatory" in which case they tend to create further firing, or "inhibitory" in which case they tend to suppress further firing. I'll assume you meant "making it more inhibitory" when you said turning it off.
We are a long way from such things, but you could imagine the utility of "turning off" or making neurons more inhibitory in the case of Parkinson's Disease where there is too much superflous random firing that leads to tremor.
Another case where we might want to calm the neurons are in people that experience PTSD or severe depression.
Yet another case is Epilepsy. You can kind of think of Epilepsy as a "neural storm" (this is a ROUGH analogy). So, one option to control it is if you can sense a seizure starting up you can shut down it's ability to propagate through the brain.
These are just some of the possible uses of "switching a neuron off".
Again, the summary was highly misleading. Optogenetics only works with GENETICALLY MODIFIED neurons, so won't easily work as a therapeutic technique. That's OK, because what it is used for is basic neuroscience research.
The idea is if you want to look at specific neural pathways you can optogenetically modify them to light up when you are shining a laser on them AND they are performing a task you are interested in. You can think of an optogenetically modified neuron as a neuron that you can probe at high speeds.
This is exciting because you can see, for example, functional connectivity at full speed in real, operating brains. This could enable the creation of a functional connectome which is kind of a traffic map of the brain (neurological connection studies give you the road map, optogenetics can give you the traffic). Previous techniques (such as neurotransmitter tagging) are far too slow to make such a "traffic map".
Prior to this "sonogenetics" research, only really flat specimens could be used since lasers cannot penetrate deeply. This is nice development.
I'm not sure what *you're* smoking.
What do you think Microsoft hardware is? Made in a factory in Redmond by Microsoft employees? Hahaha. Microsoft has long had their hardware designed by ODMs and made by CMs. According to this article [infoworld.com], Taiwanese company Pegatron makes the Surface tablets, and is also an iPad supplier.
*Every* American electronics company these days outsources their manufacturing and frequently their design to Asian companies. No one does any of that stuff here any more, except defense contractors of course.
That is simply not true. Many electronics companies have outsourced their manufacturing but they still mostly keep the design in-house. The Surface was designed in Redmond, WA, (http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/31/microsoft-surface-3-design/)
Apple products are famously designed for the most part in Cupertino. Amazon designs its Kindles in Silicon Valley. I could go on...
I'm an Apple fan and I'm concerned they are falling into the trap of customer confusion. For example, when I bought my iPad (which I love) I went to the Apple Store and picked up the iPad. It was done quickly and I was a happy customer. Now, there are *5* different iPads.
Which one do I pick? Christ, I have to research this now? What's my use case? How important is screen size, battery life, cost, etc etc etc.. This is why I hated buying anything from Dell.
On a related note, which Apple laptop should you buy? MacBook, Air, Pro? What's the difference? Customer confusion leads to customer paralysis.
Apple's been down this road before. In the mid 90s there were so many different Apple models, Performa, Centris, Quada, God knows what else, that I had no idea what to get. You know which one I got? None of them. That's when I finally went to PC.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs' genius when he returned to Apple was to make it EASY to buy a Mac. Just get an iMac. Pick the color and you're done. Want an iPod or an iPhone? You didn't need to research and weigh the pros and cons of 5 different models. Now you do. I strongly believe a good part of why Apple revived was a clean product line with minimal choices.
I fear Apple is making a mistake that may come back to bite them.
I remember seeing a lot of private label printers and monitors in the Dell catalog over the years. They also have a history of selling Microsoft products. I recall significant catalog space for the Zune, for instance.
"Cheapest Functional Computer For Students?"
An Arduino running Haskel?
A VIC-20 running VIC-Forth?
You started out claiming that writing code only you can decipher is a good thing for a programmer (otherwise you're "thinking like a manager". Now you're backpedaling to the old "well I'm unique and it works for me" angle.
For most people, doing competent work that can be understood and extended in your absence is not only a good idea, it is the very essence of professionalism.
Wow. You're right. It's only been four hours and your comment is already a mess.
And in 99 cases of 100, his son will end up unemployed. That's why Europe prefers stability, being an older culture, they've learnt that it's better for 100 sons to all be employed, than 1 son is rich while the other 99 starve.
And yet, historically, the United States has significantly lower unemployment than Europe.
I had my sense of humor surgically removed in graduate school, apparently.
You're correct but earlier cryo-EM cameras are also tailored to the bio industry. This advancement is huge, don't get me wrong, it's just it was made 8 years ago. Take for example the K2 Summit camera.
http://www.gatan.com/products/tem-imaging-spectroscopy/k2-direct-detection-cameras
It's a winner in structural biology. The reason you care about seeing atoms in structural biology is you're trying to design drugs that physically interlock with important molecules. You have to see the atoms to truly know the structural layout of a molecule.
How is my statement implausible or ridiculous?
This is not a worthy story. Cryo-EM is a fast growing, exciting field but higher resolution electron microscopes that what this article trumpets have been available for years. For example, the TEAM microscope built in 2008 at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has a resolution of 50 pm:
http://foundry.lbl.gov/facilities/ncem/expertise.html#team1
I personally saw individual gold atoms deposited as a nanobridge on a graphene substrate. In 2010.