Originally the DVD consortium created the TLA for "Digital Video Disk", but it was quickly realized that it would be used for more - audio, data, etc. There were a few attempts to use "Digital Versitile Disk", but they were stillborn and the official line is that it has no meaning beyond the three letter designation of "DVD".
Ah, but (to play devil's advocate), just because speciation has been observed in other creatures doesn't make human evolution from chimpanzees a fact. Until there is definitive proof that we evolved from chimps it remains a theory.
Now, that said, believing that speciation does occur and then stating that it didn't occur to us is a pretty silly argument. It places humans in a special case scenario, which is pretty freaking unlikely. And since (to me at least), the belief in God presumes a special-case argument then dissolving the other special cases starts eating away at the fundamental one -- that there's a God personally interested in you.
All the same, macro-evolution isn't a fact quite yet, although there's one hell of a lot of evidence supporting the theory. But until there is observed evolution from one genus to another, one family to another, all the way to kingdoms, it can't be called a fact.
Ok, first off I'm an atheist, but I was raised a Catholic.
The Catholic Church is one of the few that buys the whole "original sin" concept. Many of the protestant churches threw it out as a matter of course when they split from the Church during the Reformation or later.
Christ did not come to redeem Original Sin alone, even in the Catholic Church (although in it that aspect is heavily pushed, as do any religions that say an unbaptized child goes to Limbo/Purgatory/etc).
The creation myth and the coming of Christ are not irretrievably linked. Attempting to state that they are shows a deep misunderstanding of Christian beliefs and belittles the issue.
Frankly, I went to read the parent post and honestly felt ill from how short sighted and stupid the AC was.
The idea of "it doesn't matter, because I didn't do anything wrong" is all very fine and dandy until you find out that trumped up charges are being brought up against someone you care about because they managed to piss off some minor bureaucrat. And that's exactly the kind of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes, and precisely what the Constitution is supposed to protect against.
Or, at least, that would probably be the case if this were a product written for your U.S.-based employer
Hint - you have a shitty employer. Look for another job as soon as possible.
Good employers don't pull that bullshit, because they know it destroys employee morale. As long as there's someone around that knows the project, you should go on vacation. If there isn't, the release should be delayed.
Sure, they can get it "done", but will it be done worth a crap? Probably not. It'll be overtime, overbudget, and unsupportable. Because they don't have a clue about computer science, good practices, how to write good, solid, maintainable code, etc.
Recently we were interviewing for a Java programmer to come in and take over an outsource disaster. Neither myself nor the senior coder know Java -- we're both C/C++ guys. But we did know that it was a Unix environment (and staying that way) and that the candidate would need to be architect level and have a clue.
So we asked some basic Unix questions and a bunch of general CS questions. And I'm sorry, but if you code in Java, using threads galore, and don't know what the f*ck a race condition is, or what a deadlock is, and how to prevent them then just leave. Yes, they're technical questions. And anyone with a solid foundation in computer science should be able to answer them, explain why they're bad, and give some ways to avoid/fix them.
Do I expect you to code a quicksort in front of me? Nope. But if I ask for an efficient way to go about sorting then I'd like for you to be able to discuss it.
And for God's sake -- if you don't know the answer to a question, don't flail about acting as if you'll think of the answer. Say "I don't know". If you don't know it, but know where to find the answer (e.g. - man page), even better.
When I got hired, using much the same questions as what we used, I didn't know everything. Particularly not the C++ stuff since I'd done mostly C. But I made it clear that I knew my boundaries, that I was willing and able to learn, and that I had a solid foundation to build on. Sure, the interview wound up lasting 4 hours overall, but I got a call the next day.
I'm one of two coders for a project. We recently needed to hire another coder for a different piece of the project. We wound up doing most of the technical interview portion because our boss knew that we knew more about coding than he does, and because the new guy would have to work with us. If we didn't think the new hire was worth a crap then there was no point in moving on with the process.
Neither of us are managers -- my coworker was one in days gone by, but got out of that job because he didn't want to be one. I've made it abundantly clear that I have no desire to be a manager, and that I'd be a crappy one if it was tried.
Well, sticking with some of the more idiotic premises of the original poster...
1) You create document. 2) Software maker patents format. 3) Patent ruled invalid because the software maker didn't follow basic patent law and apply for the patent prior to testing or release (depends on the country, but most of Europe and Japan requires patent applications to be filed prior to testing. The US gives a 1 year grace period, but the patent still has to be applied for prior to commercial usage -- the product can only be used for testing purposes in that grace period)
Ok, so assume that the company isn't absolutely stupid and knows basic intellectual property law.
1) Company files for patent, releases software. 2) For some idiotic reason you still use software to create your own document. 3) Company changes rules for using said software, which you don't agree with. 4) You retain copyright on the documents, start a class action suit to sue Company for unlawfully restricting your access to your own intellectual property. Patent is ruled unenforcable, or it's ruled that you have an implicit license to the patent since that capability was given to you through the software.
People are being overly stupid with this. They're thinking of worst case scenarios that won't happen because they can't. I don't care how dimly you may view MS, the Justice department, the RIAA, etc. -- this kind of thing won't be allowed. Companies won't allow someone to seize their property in such a manner, nor will consumers. Nor will the government, which uses the same software as the majority of the world. Maybe in some dark, twisted universe of your own self-hatred, but not in this one.
Modern IDE CD-RW's don't make frisbees. Even under heavy CPU load the various techs like Smart-Burn and ExacLink prevent buffer underruns.
If you make a frisbee nowadays it's because either the media was bad or you tried to burn at too high a speed for the media. That's about it.
Yes, I used to be a SCSI head. Then I got over it, took a look at modern IDE devices, and realized just how much a waste of money it is for the consumer.
But in the real world, on a desktop PC, they don't in nearly all cases (yes, someone doing something very specialized can, but, guess what? You're not most cases).
I had an all SCSI system. I finally got tired of how slow and noisy it was, plus the Plextor CD-RW was toast for the 3rd time in 3 years. Replaced it all with IDE and the disk subsystem became vastly faster.
Yeah, it was older SCSI drives -- SCSI2, but even new they're more expensive than an equivalent IDE drive. The price/performance ratio just isn't there for SCSI on the desktop anymore.
Oh, and this is an older system with only ATA33, so the IDE drive is actually being limited by the max transfer rate of the bus. And the new drive is over twice the capacity of the three older SCSI drives. The new CD-RW is 52/32/12 vs the 4/2/1 that was in there... and while 3 years newer the new CD-RW cost all of $60 shipped. The original drive cost over $300.
As others have mentioned, Plextor does. I believe there are some Toshiba models still available too. Just do a search on Pricewatch and you'll see who has what. I know that Newegg carries the Plextor.
Of course, you'll pay a hefty premium ($50 more for the Plextor SCSI, or 300% compared to Lite-On, Cyberdrive, or other inexpensive CD-RWs) and get a much slower drive (12/10/32 vs 40/12/40 or 40/12/52).
Unfortunately you don't have any choice in the matter for your instance. But people building workstation PCs with all SCSI are (by and large) just screwing themselves now.
First off, those are stellar benchs for the Itanium2. And I agree that this was a total fluff piece for Opteron -- as others have pointed out, it's nothing but rehashed info from other sites and AMD press releases.
I'm not a POWER4 advocate either -- the chip may be cleaner than x86 (wow, that's not hard), but proprietary is proprietary.
Back to Hammer vs Itanium though. I am much, much more excited about the pending Hammer/Opteron release than I am about Itanium2 or McKinley or whatever. Why? Because Hammer is made for consumer systems. Itanium (w/ or w/o the "2") is still priced somewhere in the stratosphere and it's performance on desktop systems is abysmal. Sure, the SPEC numbers are pretty, but there's no software out there, the compilers continue to suck, and I don't expect either situation to improve anytime soon. When Hammer comes out there will be a plethora of software that will already run (and probably run faster, even in 32-bit mode) and compiling 64-bit apps will be relatively straight forward. VLIW is a nifty idea, but we're nowhere close to optimizing code perfectly now. Adding on the additional layer of VLIW makes the problem even worse.
High end computing has always been a totally different realm from desktop computing anyway. I don't really expect the Hammer/Opteron to compete in that realm -- it's too limited by the load of crap that comes with x86. But it's a far better future desktop computing solution than anything Intel has to offer thus far, and that's why you see so many people excited about it.
Very cool... thanks for the update. I was at TI 6 years ago, and they were one of the first fabs with any automated cassette delivery. It was also one of the few 300 mm fabs worldwide.
Of course, the other fab I worked in was.35 micron and 200 mm. The differences in clean room practices between the two were so severe as to be laughable.
Not at the time... but they're old now. DM4 (ok, it was old), DM5/DP1 (both brand new at the time, DM5 wasn't even finished when I started). They certainly didn't have the sealed pods at the time, but DP1 was the first TI fab to use the robotic rail system.
FWIW, I was in the automation group, so we got pretty wide exposure to most of the fab systems.
The control system may work with the pods now, but it didn't then. Our control system was paperless as well, even in DM4, but that doesn't help when a technician miscounts and winds up putting one wafer into the PVD twice.
The only cleanroom paper was carried by engineers and maintenance workers. I guess the tech foreman had a pad too, but I don't recall the regular workers having them. All the recipes were online -- that was one of the primary things we automated to eliminate mistakes.
As others have pointed out, the system is for moving wafers, not loading them into the machines. This is nothing new -- I worked at Texas Instruments several years ago and they had a rail system moving lots around the fabs, keyed to barcode scanners and a Unix backend (we used Solaris on oodles of Sparc 5's).
Honestly, it's not clear from the article if the rail system does end-to-end transport, or if it's just a lot shuttle. At TI it was just a shuttle - you'd ask for the next lot to be processed for a particular machine and the system would retrieve the lot and move the tray to you. A technician would pick the basket up off the rail and then use vacuum wands to move the wafers into the loading mechanism for the machine. Once processing was done, vacuum wand the wafers back into the basket and place it back on the track.
This process is error prone -- TI would only hire technicians with at least a high school diploma, but it's still human intensive and distractions can (and did) cause problems. Grab the wafer by the wrong side? Toast. Vacuum seal break while moving the wafer? Shatter. Drop the basket? Many shatters. Accidentilly forget which wafers have been processed already (many of the machines could only load 5 or 10 wafers, and a lot was 24 wafers)? Bad things happen when you double-dope or double-etch wafers.
If IBM's new automation system is end-to-end, meaning that the rail system somehow automatically loads and unloads the wafers to/from machines then that's a real advancement. It would allow you to eliminate 80% of the humans from inside the fab, and humans are one of the primary causes of particles. When you start talking about 65 nm processes, you have to seriously consider eliminating humans as much as possible from the environment. Or at least having them wear self-contained suits -- hair, skin, and clothing all shed humongous particles at a frightening rate (to a silicon wafer that is). And don't even think about being a smoker.
Uh... do you have any idea how much fabs cost? Six years ago a state-of-the-art fab, which was designed to manufacture nothing smaller than 0.15 micron transistors (and 0.25 was top notch at the time) cost nearly $1.5B.
Once in full production the fab paid for itself in under 9 months. Amazing what happens when fabbing lots (a lot is 12 or 24 wafers, at least where I worked) that have a street value of $250,000.
Chip costs won't rise. They'll continue to fall, just as they always have. Building a fab is indeed a large investment, but if you have the money to invest then it's one that'll pay for itself in a very short amount of time.
Frankly, $2.5B for a 65 nm (aka 0.065 micron) fab is a good value. Sure, if they're starting off with 150 nm or 130 nm equipment they'll have to replace nearly everything to go down to 90 or 65 nm, but that's probably less than a billion per cycle. Equipment is no big deal -- the building itself is a huge deal. Getting all the tolerances tight enough for 65 nm work costs a LOT of money.
Ah, so in other words we should go back to the old days of apprenticeship and merely allow the curious to move forward.
Sure. Go for it. After all, the last 10000 years of human society clearly had a far better education level and standard of living than we do today.
Or, hell, we don't even have to go back that far. Go look at some of the areas of the world that don't have mandatory schooling. They're top notch. Just last week I was thinking of moving to sub Saharan Africa because they have the best quality of life in the world.
The reality is that you're completely wrong. Even as far back as Socrates and Plato the teacher posed questions to the student. Did students ask questions too? Sure. And *gasp* -- they can now too. If you want to bitch about the (US) educational system, bitch about the funding. Teachers work harder than just about any other profession (hrm, an 8 hour day with no breaks plus another 4-8 hours of planning and grading after school hours), pay them relatively little, make them pay for class supplies out of their own budget, and expect them to educate and morally instruct our children at the same time. With little or no parental backup.
The other minor fact you forgot to mention is the expansion of knowledge in the past 150 years. The concept of a Renaissance Man is dead -- because there is no way for one person to hold the sum of human knowledge now. You can (and should) have a broad base of education, but "jack of all trades, master of none" is becoming increasingly true. Without modern schooling it's impossible to tutor our youth in even a small amount of the knowledge base. Do you know what literacy rates were prior to mandatory education? How many of the illiterate learned basic math, much less algebra?
You hit the nail on the head - VHS tapes were produced in either NTSC or PAL formats. There were very few VCR's sold that could play back both (or translate between the two to the output device), so there was an effective barrier between markets.
DVD doesn't have this same issue, so there would be no barrier whatsoever.
As for US/Japan - I don't know. I know that friends of mine that were into Anime had a hell of a time getting tapes here in the US, but I have no idea how hard it was for Japan to get US videos.
I mean seriously, does ANYONE see DVD region-encoding as ANYTHING but a ludicrously obvious effort by producing companies to introduce market control and artificial scarcity, thus allowing inflated pricing?
Well, if you're totally ignorant about the entire industry I suppose you could see it as that alone.
The reality, however, is that one company often doesn't own the distribution rights worldwide... or in all formats. This is less common now (for movies, for TV syndication it's still very common), but it still impacts modern day reality because of old distribution agreements.
Paramount may have produced the movie. Domestic (US) home viewing rights may have been sold to Warner Bros (now AOL/Time-Warner). European distribution rights may be owned by Universal. Distribution in Asia or Africa may be owned by more regional companies.
And while this mostly affects older movies and (new or old) TV shows, it does have impact on new movies. A movie produced in the US may not hit foreign markets for 2-4 months, during which dubbing and other region-specific changes are made. By the time the movie premieres in Asia it may be coming out on DVD in the US. Having it available worldwide would cause some obvious problems.
Is region encoding used for artificial scarcity? Sure. Especially in Australia, and in some cases the US (mostly for TV shows, where syndication rights have royally screwed up ownership legalities). But you can bet that similar technology will be included in every digital medium for the forseeable future -- the industry is built around the concepts, and there's legacy titles that have rather nasty ownership issues that dictate this be a necessity. Will there be some people who hack the technology away? Sure. But it's going to be a small minority of people, particularly in the cash cow countries like the US.
Re:This is really a dumb solution - better one her
on
Crypto Leash for Laptops?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe because most users tend to use passwords that are trivial to break?
And when forced to not use a trivial password they then write the password down on a sticky pad that gets attached to the notebook or put in the notebook carry bag?
Slashdot Mirror
No, it stands for nothing at all.
Originally the DVD consortium created the TLA for "Digital Video Disk", but it was quickly realized that it would be used for more - audio, data, etc. There were a few attempts to use "Digital Versitile Disk", but they were stillborn and the official line is that it has no meaning beyond the three letter designation of "DVD".
Who cares about the bots? The cameras would stop working. And you'd get a hefty, multi-million dollar bill from Comedy Central for that one.
I believe evolution did have a part in creation. Just not human creation.
So what makes humans so special?
Ah, but (to play devil's advocate), just because speciation has been observed in other creatures doesn't make human evolution from chimpanzees a fact. Until there is definitive proof that we evolved from chimps it remains a theory.
Now, that said, believing that speciation does occur and then stating that it didn't occur to us is a pretty silly argument. It places humans in a special case scenario, which is pretty freaking unlikely. And since (to me at least), the belief in God presumes a special-case argument then dissolving the other special cases starts eating away at the fundamental one -- that there's a God personally interested in you.
All the same, macro-evolution isn't a fact quite yet, although there's one hell of a lot of evidence supporting the theory. But until there is observed evolution from one genus to another, one family to another, all the way to kingdoms, it can't be called a fact.
Ok, first off I'm an atheist, but I was raised a Catholic.
The Catholic Church is one of the few that buys the whole "original sin" concept. Many of the protestant churches threw it out as a matter of course when they split from the Church during the Reformation or later.
Christ did not come to redeem Original Sin alone, even in the Catholic Church (although in it that aspect is heavily pushed, as do any religions that say an unbaptized child goes to Limbo/Purgatory/etc).
The creation myth and the coming of Christ are not irretrievably linked. Attempting to state that they are shows a deep misunderstanding of Christian beliefs and belittles the issue.
I think this is the first time I've ever seen someone's sig get /.'d.
And I like Bujold too... damnit.
Bravo and well said.
Frankly, I went to read the parent post and honestly felt ill from how short sighted and stupid the AC was.
The idea of "it doesn't matter, because I didn't do anything wrong" is all very fine and dandy until you find out that trumped up charges are being brought up against someone you care about because they managed to piss off some minor bureaucrat. And that's exactly the kind of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes, and precisely what the Constitution is supposed to protect against.
Or, at least, that would probably be the case if this were a product written for your U.S.-based employer
Hint - you have a shitty employer. Look for another job as soon as possible.
Good employers don't pull that bullshit, because they know it destroys employee morale. As long as there's someone around that knows the project, you should go on vacation. If there isn't, the release should be delayed.
Sure, they can get it "done", but will it be done worth a crap? Probably not. It'll be overtime, overbudget, and unsupportable. Because they don't have a clue about computer science, good practices, how to write good, solid, maintainable code, etc.
Recently we were interviewing for a Java programmer to come in and take over an outsource disaster. Neither myself nor the senior coder know Java -- we're both C/C++ guys. But we did know that it was a Unix environment (and staying that way) and that the candidate would need to be architect level and have a clue.
So we asked some basic Unix questions and a bunch of general CS questions. And I'm sorry, but if you code in Java, using threads galore, and don't know what the f*ck a race condition is, or what a deadlock is, and how to prevent them then just leave. Yes, they're technical questions. And anyone with a solid foundation in computer science should be able to answer them, explain why they're bad, and give some ways to avoid/fix them.
Do I expect you to code a quicksort in front of me? Nope. But if I ask for an efficient way to go about sorting then I'd like for you to be able to discuss it.
And for God's sake -- if you don't know the answer to a question, don't flail about acting as if you'll think of the answer. Say "I don't know". If you don't know it, but know where to find the answer (e.g. - man page), even better.
When I got hired, using much the same questions as what we used, I didn't know everything. Particularly not the C++ stuff since I'd done mostly C. But I made it clear that I knew my boundaries, that I was willing and able to learn, and that I had a solid foundation to build on. Sure, the interview wound up lasting 4 hours overall, but I got a call the next day.
Maybe in a big corporation.
I'm one of two coders for a project. We recently needed to hire another coder for a different piece of the project. We wound up doing most of the technical interview portion because our boss knew that we knew more about coding than he does, and because the new guy would have to work with us. If we didn't think the new hire was worth a crap then there was no point in moving on with the process.
Neither of us are managers -- my coworker was one in days gone by, but got out of that job because he didn't want to be one. I've made it abundantly clear that I have no desire to be a manager, and that I'd be a crappy one if it was tried.
Well, sticking with some of the more idiotic premises of the original poster...
1) You create document.
2) Software maker patents format.
3) Patent ruled invalid because the software maker didn't follow basic patent law and apply for the patent prior to testing or release (depends on the country, but most of Europe and Japan requires patent applications to be filed prior to testing. The US gives a 1 year grace period, but the patent still has to be applied for prior to commercial usage -- the product can only be used for testing purposes in that grace period)
Ok, so assume that the company isn't absolutely stupid and knows basic intellectual property law.
1) Company files for patent, releases software.
2) For some idiotic reason you still use software to create your own document.
3) Company changes rules for using said software, which you don't agree with.
4) You retain copyright on the documents, start a class action suit to sue Company for unlawfully restricting your access to your own intellectual property. Patent is ruled unenforcable, or it's ruled that you have an implicit license to the patent since that capability was given to you through the software.
People are being overly stupid with this. They're thinking of worst case scenarios that won't happen because they can't. I don't care how dimly you may view MS, the Justice department, the RIAA, etc. -- this kind of thing won't be allowed. Companies won't allow someone to seize their property in such a manner, nor will consumers. Nor will the government, which uses the same software as the majority of the world. Maybe in some dark, twisted universe of your own self-hatred, but not in this one.
Modern IDE CD-RW's don't make frisbees. Even under heavy CPU load the various techs like Smart-Burn and ExacLink prevent buffer underruns.
If you make a frisbee nowadays it's because either the media was bad or you tried to burn at too high a speed for the media. That's about it.
Yes, I used to be a SCSI head. Then I got over it, took a look at modern IDE devices, and realized just how much a waste of money it is for the consumer.
As a private business they have the right to refuse to do business with you. Which is, essentially, what they have done.
Sorry that you, for some reason, think that you should be able to force companies to do business with you.
But in the real world, on a desktop PC, they don't in nearly all cases (yes, someone doing something very specialized can, but, guess what? You're not most cases).
I had an all SCSI system. I finally got tired of how slow and noisy it was, plus the Plextor CD-RW was toast for the 3rd time in 3 years. Replaced it all with IDE and the disk subsystem became vastly faster.
Yeah, it was older SCSI drives -- SCSI2, but even new they're more expensive than an equivalent IDE drive. The price/performance ratio just isn't there for SCSI on the desktop anymore.
Oh, and this is an older system with only ATA33, so the IDE drive is actually being limited by the max transfer rate of the bus. And the new drive is over twice the capacity of the three older SCSI drives. The new CD-RW is 52/32/12 vs the 4/2/1 that was in there... and while 3 years newer the new CD-RW cost all of $60 shipped. The original drive cost over $300.
As I recall, each speed increase turns out more frisbees than the last. 10x burns less reliably than 8x, etc
If you have a first-generation crappy drive, or use media that isn't designed for that burn speed then that's true.
theoretical maximum number of CDs they can burn
Yes, and HD's have a theoretical average number of hours before failure. So? All mechanical systems fail at one point or another.
yet to see a CD-R rated for more than 24x
You haven't looked recently, have you? Try here, or here, or here.
Plextor at least (apparantly) won't let you burn at a higher speed than the CD-R(W) is rated for
That's dependant on the software, not the hardware. I know you can turn it off in Nero, and probably most other CD burning software.
As others have mentioned, Plextor does. I believe there are some Toshiba models still available too. Just do a search on Pricewatch and you'll see who has what. I know that Newegg carries the Plextor.
Of course, you'll pay a hefty premium ($50 more for the Plextor SCSI, or 300% compared to Lite-On, Cyberdrive, or other inexpensive CD-RWs) and get a much slower drive (12/10/32 vs 40/12/40 or 40/12/52).
Unfortunately you don't have any choice in the matter for your instance. But people building workstation PCs with all SCSI are (by and large) just screwing themselves now.
First off, those are stellar benchs for the Itanium2. And I agree that this was a total fluff piece for Opteron -- as others have pointed out, it's nothing but rehashed info from other sites and AMD press releases.
I'm not a POWER4 advocate either -- the chip may be cleaner than x86 (wow, that's not hard), but proprietary is proprietary.
Back to Hammer vs Itanium though. I am much, much more excited about the pending Hammer/Opteron release than I am about Itanium2 or McKinley or whatever. Why? Because Hammer is made for consumer systems. Itanium (w/ or w/o the "2") is still priced somewhere in the stratosphere and it's performance on desktop systems is abysmal. Sure, the SPEC numbers are pretty, but there's no software out there, the compilers continue to suck, and I don't expect either situation to improve anytime soon. When Hammer comes out there will be a plethora of software that will already run (and probably run faster, even in 32-bit mode) and compiling 64-bit apps will be relatively straight forward. VLIW is a nifty idea, but we're nowhere close to optimizing code perfectly now. Adding on the additional layer of VLIW makes the problem even worse.
High end computing has always been a totally different realm from desktop computing anyway. I don't really expect the Hammer/Opteron to compete in that realm -- it's too limited by the load of crap that comes with x86. But it's a far better future desktop computing solution than anything Intel has to offer thus far, and that's why you see so many people excited about it.
Very cool... thanks for the update. I was at TI 6 years ago, and they were one of the first fabs with any automated cassette delivery. It was also one of the few 300 mm fabs worldwide.
.35 micron and 200 mm. The differences in clean room practices between the two were so severe as to be laughable.
Of course, the other fab I worked in was
You must have been in one of the older fabs
Not at the time... but they're old now. DM4 (ok, it was old), DM5/DP1 (both brand new at the time, DM5 wasn't even finished when I started). They certainly didn't have the sealed pods at the time, but DP1 was the first TI fab to use the robotic rail system.
FWIW, I was in the automation group, so we got pretty wide exposure to most of the fab systems.
The control system may work with the pods now, but it didn't then. Our control system was paperless as well, even in DM4, but that doesn't help when a technician miscounts and winds up putting one wafer into the PVD twice.
The only cleanroom paper was carried by engineers and maintenance workers. I guess the tech foreman had a pad too, but I don't recall the regular workers having them. All the recipes were online -- that was one of the primary things we automated to eliminate mistakes.
As others have pointed out, the system is for moving wafers, not loading them into the machines. This is nothing new -- I worked at Texas Instruments several years ago and they had a rail system moving lots around the fabs, keyed to barcode scanners and a Unix backend (we used Solaris on oodles of Sparc 5's).
Honestly, it's not clear from the article if the rail system does end-to-end transport, or if it's just a lot shuttle. At TI it was just a shuttle - you'd ask for the next lot to be processed for a particular machine and the system would retrieve the lot and move the tray to you. A technician would pick the basket up off the rail and then use vacuum wands to move the wafers into the loading mechanism for the machine. Once processing was done, vacuum wand the wafers back into the basket and place it back on the track.
This process is error prone -- TI would only hire technicians with at least a high school diploma, but it's still human intensive and distractions can (and did) cause problems. Grab the wafer by the wrong side? Toast. Vacuum seal break while moving the wafer? Shatter. Drop the basket? Many shatters. Accidentilly forget which wafers have been processed already (many of the machines could only load 5 or 10 wafers, and a lot was 24 wafers)? Bad things happen when you double-dope or double-etch wafers.
If IBM's new automation system is end-to-end, meaning that the rail system somehow automatically loads and unloads the wafers to/from machines then that's a real advancement. It would allow you to eliminate 80% of the humans from inside the fab, and humans are one of the primary causes of particles. When you start talking about 65 nm processes, you have to seriously consider eliminating humans as much as possible from the environment. Or at least having them wear self-contained suits -- hair, skin, and clothing all shed humongous particles at a frightening rate (to a silicon wafer that is). And don't even think about being a smoker.
Uh... do you have any idea how much fabs cost? Six years ago a state-of-the-art fab, which was designed to manufacture nothing smaller than 0.15 micron transistors (and 0.25 was top notch at the time) cost nearly $1.5B.
Once in full production the fab paid for itself in under 9 months. Amazing what happens when fabbing lots (a lot is 12 or 24 wafers, at least where I worked) that have a street value of $250,000.
Chip costs won't rise. They'll continue to fall, just as they always have. Building a fab is indeed a large investment, but if you have the money to invest then it's one that'll pay for itself in a very short amount of time.
Frankly, $2.5B for a 65 nm (aka 0.065 micron) fab is a good value. Sure, if they're starting off with 150 nm or 130 nm equipment they'll have to replace nearly everything to go down to 90 or 65 nm, but that's probably less than a billion per cycle. Equipment is no big deal -- the building itself is a huge deal. Getting all the tolerances tight enough for 65 nm work costs a LOT of money.
Ah, so in other words we should go back to the old days of apprenticeship and merely allow the curious to move forward.
Sure. Go for it. After all, the last 10000 years of human society clearly had a far better education level and standard of living than we do today.
Or, hell, we don't even have to go back that far. Go look at some of the areas of the world that don't have mandatory schooling. They're top notch. Just last week I was thinking of moving to sub Saharan Africa because they have the best quality of life in the world.
The reality is that you're completely wrong. Even as far back as Socrates and Plato the teacher posed questions to the student. Did students ask questions too? Sure. And *gasp* -- they can now too. If you want to bitch about the (US) educational system, bitch about the funding. Teachers work harder than just about any other profession (hrm, an 8 hour day with no breaks plus another 4-8 hours of planning and grading after school hours), pay them relatively little, make them pay for class supplies out of their own budget, and expect them to educate and morally instruct our children at the same time. With little or no parental backup.
The other minor fact you forgot to mention is the expansion of knowledge in the past 150 years. The concept of a Renaissance Man is dead -- because there is no way for one person to hold the sum of human knowledge now. You can (and should) have a broad base of education, but "jack of all trades, master of none" is becoming increasingly true. Without modern schooling it's impossible to tutor our youth in even a small amount of the knowledge base. Do you know what literacy rates were prior to mandatory education? How many of the illiterate learned basic math, much less algebra?
You hit the nail on the head - VHS tapes were produced in either NTSC or PAL formats. There were very few VCR's sold that could play back both (or translate between the two to the output device), so there was an effective barrier between markets.
DVD doesn't have this same issue, so there would be no barrier whatsoever.
As for US/Japan - I don't know. I know that friends of mine that were into Anime had a hell of a time getting tapes here in the US, but I have no idea how hard it was for Japan to get US videos.
I mean seriously, does ANYONE see DVD region-encoding as ANYTHING but a ludicrously obvious effort by producing companies to introduce market control and artificial scarcity, thus allowing inflated pricing?
Well, if you're totally ignorant about the entire industry I suppose you could see it as that alone.
The reality, however, is that one company often doesn't own the distribution rights worldwide... or in all formats. This is less common now (for movies, for TV syndication it's still very common), but it still impacts modern day reality because of old distribution agreements.
Paramount may have produced the movie. Domestic (US) home viewing rights may have been sold to Warner Bros (now AOL/Time-Warner). European distribution rights may be owned by Universal. Distribution in Asia or Africa may be owned by more regional companies.
And while this mostly affects older movies and (new or old) TV shows, it does have impact on new movies. A movie produced in the US may not hit foreign markets for 2-4 months, during which dubbing and other region-specific changes are made. By the time the movie premieres in Asia it may be coming out on DVD in the US. Having it available worldwide would cause some obvious problems.
Is region encoding used for artificial scarcity? Sure. Especially in Australia, and in some cases the US (mostly for TV shows, where syndication rights have royally screwed up ownership legalities). But you can bet that similar technology will be included in every digital medium for the forseeable future -- the industry is built around the concepts, and there's legacy titles that have rather nasty ownership issues that dictate this be a necessity. Will there be some people who hack the technology away? Sure. But it's going to be a small minority of people, particularly in the cash cow countries like the US.
Maybe because most users tend to use passwords that are trivial to break?
And when forced to not use a trivial password they then write the password down on a sticky pad that gets attached to the notebook or put in the notebook carry bag?