If you can show me a shipping product with a single nanotube transistor, I'll eat my hat. STM tips are a pretty limited market. I can't find any references to commercial buckypaper composities either.
We actually have a buckyball (C60) ion gun for use with our Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (TOF-SIMS). As far as I know, these ion guns are the only existing commercial use for buckyballs. It isn't exactly a huge market.
Fullerenes have been around for nearly 25 years now. It they had anything more than hype, they'd be commercialized by now. I'm not saying it isn't possible, but none of the press releases I've ever read about fullerenes has lead to anything more than another press release.
I got the MCE Optibay and replaced my optical drive with an SSD, which I now boot from. I still have my 500GB hard drive for large amounts of data, but for most routine work, the SSD really flies. I've yet to need my optical drive since I did it.
At $129, the Optibay is kind of pricy for what you get, but they're throwing in an external enclosure for your optical drive, which helps make up for it.
And what Apple wants to do with this interconnect is to replace things like DVI/Display Port, Firewire/USB, (e)SATA, etc., all on one bus.
I think this is probably what Apple is after. As I look at my Macbook Pro, I have the following connectors: MagSave (power), Ethernet, FW800, miniDP, USBx2, SD card, line-in, and headphones. You could probably get rid of Ethernet, FW, miniDP, and USB and replace them with Light Peak. Since I'm rarely using more than two of those at a time, you could probably reduce the number of ports and start shrinking devices.
The other thing that Apple seems to be targeting is the optical drive. I think you're going to see Apple dropping optical altogether, and moving OS delivery to SD cards. Most other software/media will be downloads.
Shiira is WebKit based, which means it is the same basis as Safari and Chrome. If Shiira is faster than Safari, it is probably using a more recent WebKit build than the currently shipping Safari. You can also get Safari with leading-edge daily builds of WebKit from http://webkit.org/. When WebKit introduced the Squirrelfish and then Squirrelfish Extreme Javascript engines, they were available in the WebKit daily builds first.
If nothing else, WebKit has really pushed standards compliance and speed.
Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing.
In iTunes Preferences: Go to "Advanced". Uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library". iTunes will leave your files where they are and just index them.
Personally I like the way iTunes organizes my music and keeps the actual files out of my way, but YMMV.
Actually, the NTSB should be involved in this investigation. I think you can get up to 5 organizations joining to investigate a crash.
1) Country of Origin (Brazil)
2) Country of Destination (France)
3) Country of Carrier (France)
4) Country of Airframe Manufacturer (France/Germany/EU)
5) Country of Engine Manufacturer (US)
Notice that #5 was US. The engines on the plane in question were GE.
No, they said the polycarbonate they used for a blast shelter was "basically bulletproof", which they later showed is an exaggeration.
OTOH, for what they were using it for, their polycarbonate blast shield was perfectly safe. It wouldn't stop a bullet, but it would stop any number of much slower moving objects.
Then your teacher taught you wrong. K is significantly more reactive than Na. It also reacts hotter and usually ignites the hydrogen gas produced by the reaction.
I had a Newton eMate 300 that got 24 hours on a charge (If you didn't use the backlight).
But if you want a fast processor, a video card, color, backlit, WiFi, and a modern web browser in your laptop, you're going to get less.
Webkit seems to have gotten a lot of "wins" across the board. Not only does Apple use it everywhere, but Nokia uses for their phones, Google uses it for Chrome and Android.
There must be something about the code base that makes it appealing to these companies.
I'd be more than happy to be a poll worker (I'd even forfeit my salary to be one), except for the simple fact that one has to be a registered Democrat or Republican to be a poll worker in Ohio,
No they don't. You just have to be a registered voter.
Few young people realize that until the 1964-1968 time period it was possible to bring your dollars to the government and get precious metal on demand. This gave the dollar real worth.
To paraphrase Terry Prachett: "This was true, so long as nobody actually asked for it." The government NEVER had enough gold on hand to back every single dollar in circulation. The last time I had a friend insist that we should be on the gold standard, I did a quick back of the envelope calculation. If you took all the refined gold in the world, all of it, and used it to back the US dollar only, then the price of gold would have to skyrocket to something like $2,000/oz. This assumes that the price would not go up as you try to buy more gold. There simply isn't enough gold, and the rate of gold production was not keeping up with economic growth in the US and around the world.
Further, I don't understand people who think that the rate of inflation should be pegged solely to the rate of gold mining. Gold isn't particularly rare in the earth's crust, but it is costly to extract. If someone were to develop new technology that extracted gold at significantly cheaper prices, your currency would collapse. This isn't unprecedented. Remember that aluminum was once considered a precious metal until Charles Martin Hall developed an inexpensive electrolytic process for extracting it. From what I hear, there is a new technology coming down the pipe to bring the price of extracting titanium down to the level of aluminum. If something similar happened to gold, a gold-backed currency would be destroyed. In an economy with a fiat currency, you'd just start using the new, cheap gold as a good roofing material.
I doubt they're using any of those. Rose's metal uses lead, and the other two contain large percentages of indium and gallium, both of which are getting pretty expensive. Much of the world's gallium goes into GaAs and GaN, whereas the indium goes into indium tin oxide (or ITO), which is a transparent conductor that goes into all LCD screens.
Supposedly transparent aluminum is highly scratch resistant. I'd like to see it used in PDA, cellphone, and Gameboy screens.
Sure, if you don't mind paying thousands of dollars for your PDA, cellphone or Gameboy. Sapphire (not transparent aluminum, see above rant) is much more expensive to produce than ordinary (silica) glass. That is why it gets used in high end watches (glass is hard to scratch, but sapphire is even harder still). The other major use is in supermarket barcode scanners. In that application, glass would get scratched up way too quickly by cans, glass bottles, etc. So they use sapphire plates on top of glass because they require little to no maintenance.
Single crystals of alumina (Al2O3) are transparent. They are known as sapphire if clear or blue. With slight chromium impurities, they are known as ruby. They are a ceramic, not a metal. There are three oxygen atoms for every two aluminum atoms, which makes it 60%at oxygen. It is not aluminum. It would make more sense to say your watch is made of oxygen, but not by much.
Just saying "aluminum" implies the metallic structure, which will never be transparent despite the fervent hopes of many a Star Trek fan. The inherent availability of free electrons in the conduction band of metallic aluminum will ensure that is will not be transparent in any thickness greater than a few hundred nanometers. Truly transparent, metallic aluminum would be a breakthrough on par with a working transporter.
IAAPhDMS (I Am A PhD in Materials Science), and this has been your Pedantic Slashdot Rant from a Expert(TM) for today.
Back on topic. These metallic glasses (Vitraloy and the like) have been around for a decade now and have very interesting properties. They are not, however, transparent. Not even a little bit.
I think PPC is definitively in the past for Desktop and Laptop Macs. There are too many apps out there that are now either Intel-Mac only (not many, but a few), or certain features only work on Intel Macs. Even from Apple.
For example: iMovie '08 won't decode AVCHD movies on PowerPC hardware. I was really disappointed to find that I couldn't edit stuff from my Panasonic camcorder with my old Dual G5 Powermac. I have to do all my editing on my MacBook instead.
That building also posed a problem for Cleveland's SWAT teams when a crazy former student charged in and started shooting people. The SWAT team found it difficult to operate in a building with no right angles.
I think it's pretty clear that the culprit was some kind of filler text on a template or a joke. This is probably the web team's fault and no one else's.
That is almost certainly true. This happens now and then with Apple. I think the web team like to insert little jokes when they are mocking up pages and then sometimes forget or maybe "forget" to change them before the pages go live. I think when either Panther or Tiger (or maybe the XServe) came out, one of the pages promised fewer "blinkenlights" for a short time. Some of them get left in, like the "Do not eat iPod shuffle" one.
I bet they'll release a kit when they're sure they've frozen the API.
Apple recently released the Human Interface Guidelines for the iPhone, which says at one point: "Currently, developers create web applications for iPhone, not native applications." (emphasis added). I suspect the iPhone API is still very much in flux, which probably explains the fairly small updates we've seen so far.
Apple hasn't shied away from games on the iPod, so why not the iPhone? Because the API isn't set in stone yet. Once Apple firms it up, you'll probably start to see third party games from companies like EA. If that works out, then you may finally see a public API.
My wife used to use an iTrip (one of the ones that you had to tune by playing special audio files on the iPod). When she got a Nano, we got her a Belkin one that came with a car charger. It was awful. It broke pretty quickly, so when I was at an Apple store, I picked up a Monster iCarPlay, which combines a charger with the transmitter. It also has an autoscan feature to find an unoccupied frequency.
I was hesitant about it, because I always hear that Monster products are overpriced. This was pricey (~$100), but it was only $20 more than the other combo units the Apple store had, and I figured I'd just return it if it turned out to suck. The audio quality is much, much better than the iTrip or the Belkin one. Like night and day. The interface is a little fussy, and the autoscan feature is a little hit or miss. It seems to be somewhat polarization sensitive. You'll get a different result if you rotate the transmitter 90 degrees. I found that the best thing to do was to run the autoscan with the transmitter sitting wherever you are going to set the iPod. That way it will at least pick a station it can overpower.
Hardwiring it or using a cassette adaptor would be better, but if you're willing to spend $100, the Monster one is pretty good, if pricey.
No, MacBooks and MacBook Pros suffer from this chipset limitation (it is actually about 3.3GB or so), and MacOS X is 64bit capable. Mac Pros can handle up to 16GB of memory.
I'm pretty sure Santa Rosa lifts that particular restriction, but I don't have a source for that.
I think it goes beyond knowing they may lose the case. I think they know that they not only will lose the case, but Cisco also has a couple of employees who are potentially on the hook for perjury right now for fraudulently signing that affidavit claiming that they've been using the trademark for years when they clearly had not. They even submitted a forged picture with a sticker on the outside of the shrinkwrap, claiming it was an actual product being sold by Cisco. Cisco wants to find a way out of this without going to trial, but they can't look to their shareholders like they gave up the potentially very valuable trademark "iPhone" for nothing.
A good CZ is very difficult to tell from a diamond. A lousy CZ will look as bad as a lousy diamond. Finding a good CZ can be tough, since there isn't much demand for CZ. Also, was the person showing you the CZ trying to sell you a diamond? If so, they probably picked a crappy one to convince you diamond was better.
Check out moissanite sometime. Since Charles & Colvard have a patent on the use of moissanite as a gemstone, they keep the quality high. They try to position as a high-end diamond substitute. They also come in a green color that is somewhat hard to find, but is quite unusual looking. My wife has a green one in their engagement ring and people can't figure out what it is. I think you can find moissanite at any JC Penny now, though I don't know if JC Penny carries good quality diamonds to compare it to.
Note: I didn't say it has a higher thermal conductivity than diamond. I said that it fools the testing machines that are looking for CZ. Compared to cubic zirconia, silicon carbide has a very high thermal conductivity. You can't get much lower than CZ and still have it look like a diamond.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can show me a shipping product with a single nanotube transistor, I'll eat my hat. STM tips are a pretty limited market. I can't find any references to commercial buckypaper composities either.
We actually have a buckyball (C60) ion gun for use with our Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (TOF-SIMS). As far as I know, these ion guns are the only existing commercial use for buckyballs. It isn't exactly a huge market.
Fullerenes have been around for nearly 25 years now. It they had anything more than hype, they'd be commercialized by now. I'm not saying it isn't possible, but none of the press releases I've ever read about fullerenes has lead to anything more than another press release.
I got the MCE Optibay and replaced my optical drive with an SSD, which I now boot from. I still have my 500GB hard drive for large amounts of data, but for most routine work, the SSD really flies. I've yet to need my optical drive since I did it.
At $129, the Optibay is kind of pricy for what you get, but they're throwing in an external enclosure for your optical drive, which helps make up for it.
And what Apple wants to do with this interconnect is to replace things like DVI/Display Port, Firewire/USB, (e)SATA, etc., all on one bus.
I think this is probably what Apple is after. As I look at my Macbook Pro, I have the following connectors: MagSave (power), Ethernet, FW800, miniDP, USBx2, SD card, line-in, and headphones. You could probably get rid of Ethernet, FW, miniDP, and USB and replace them with Light Peak. Since I'm rarely using more than two of those at a time, you could probably reduce the number of ports and start shrinking devices.
The other thing that Apple seems to be targeting is the optical drive. I think you're going to see Apple dropping optical altogether, and moving OS delivery to SD cards. Most other software/media will be downloads.
Shiira is WebKit based, which means it is the same basis as Safari and Chrome. If Shiira is faster than Safari, it is probably using a more recent WebKit build than the currently shipping Safari. You can also get Safari with leading-edge daily builds of WebKit from http://webkit.org/. When WebKit introduced the Squirrelfish and then Squirrelfish Extreme Javascript engines, they were available in the WebKit daily builds first.
If nothing else, WebKit has really pushed standards compliance and speed.
Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing.
In iTunes Preferences: Go to "Advanced". Uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library". iTunes will leave your files where they are and just index them.
Personally I like the way iTunes organizes my music and keeps the actual files out of my way, but YMMV.
Actually, the NTSB should be involved in this investigation. I think you can get up to 5 organizations joining to investigate a crash.
1) Country of Origin (Brazil)
2) Country of Destination (France)
3) Country of Carrier (France)
4) Country of Airframe Manufacturer (France/Germany/EU)
5) Country of Engine Manufacturer (US)
Notice that #5 was US. The engines on the plane in question were GE.
No, they said the polycarbonate they used for a blast shelter was "basically bulletproof", which they later showed is an exaggeration.
OTOH, for what they were using it for, their polycarbonate blast shield was perfectly safe. It wouldn't stop a bullet, but it would stop any number of much slower moving objects.
Then your teacher taught you wrong. K is significantly more reactive than Na. It also reacts hotter and usually ignites the hydrogen gas produced by the reaction.
I had a Newton eMate 300 that got 24 hours on a charge (If you didn't use the backlight). But if you want a fast processor, a video card, color, backlit, WiFi, and a modern web browser in your laptop, you're going to get less.
Webkit seems to have gotten a lot of "wins" across the board. Not only does Apple use it everywhere, but Nokia uses for their phones, Google uses it for Chrome and Android. There must be something about the code base that makes it appealing to these companies.
It is also not true. Check my other reply for a link to the requirements.
I'd be more than happy to be a poll worker (I'd even forfeit my salary to be one), except for the simple fact that one has to be a registered Democrat or Republican to be a poll worker in Ohio,
No they don't. You just have to be a registered voter.
Brochure from the Ohio SOS office.
Few young people realize that until the 1964-1968 time period it was possible to bring your dollars to the government and get precious metal on demand. This gave the dollar real worth.
To paraphrase Terry Prachett: "This was true, so long as nobody actually asked for it." The government NEVER had enough gold on hand to back every single dollar in circulation. The last time I had a friend insist that we should be on the gold standard, I did a quick back of the envelope calculation. If you took all the refined gold in the world, all of it, and used it to back the US dollar only, then the price of gold would have to skyrocket to something like $2,000/oz. This assumes that the price would not go up as you try to buy more gold. There simply isn't enough gold, and the rate of gold production was not keeping up with economic growth in the US and around the world.
Further, I don't understand people who think that the rate of inflation should be pegged solely to the rate of gold mining. Gold isn't particularly rare in the earth's crust, but it is costly to extract. If someone were to develop new technology that extracted gold at significantly cheaper prices, your currency would collapse. This isn't unprecedented. Remember that aluminum was once considered a precious metal until Charles Martin Hall developed an inexpensive electrolytic process for extracting it. From what I hear, there is a new technology coming down the pipe to bring the price of extracting titanium down to the level of aluminum. If something similar happened to gold, a gold-backed currency would be destroyed. In an economy with a fiat currency, you'd just start using the new, cheap gold as a good roofing material.
I doubt they're using any of those. Rose's metal uses lead, and the other two contain large percentages of indium and gallium, both of which are getting pretty expensive. Much of the world's gallium goes into GaAs and GaN, whereas the indium goes into indium tin oxide (or ITO), which is a transparent conductor that goes into all LCD screens.
Sure, if you don't mind paying thousands of dollars for your PDA, cellphone or Gameboy. Sapphire (not transparent aluminum, see above rant) is much more expensive to produce than ordinary (silica) glass. That is why it gets used in high end watches (glass is hard to scratch, but sapphire is even harder still). The other major use is in supermarket barcode scanners. In that application, glass would get scratched up way too quickly by cans, glass bottles, etc. So they use sapphire plates on top of glass because they require little to no maintenance.
Please, no.
Single crystals of alumina (Al2O3) are transparent. They are known as sapphire if clear or blue. With slight chromium impurities, they are known as ruby. They are a ceramic, not a metal. There are three oxygen atoms for every two aluminum atoms, which makes it 60%at oxygen. It is not aluminum. It would make more sense to say your watch is made of oxygen, but not by much.
Just saying "aluminum" implies the metallic structure, which will never be transparent despite the fervent hopes of many a Star Trek fan. The inherent availability of free electrons in the conduction band of metallic aluminum will ensure that is will not be transparent in any thickness greater than a few hundred nanometers. Truly transparent, metallic aluminum would be a breakthrough on par with a working transporter.
IAAPhDMS (I Am A PhD in Materials Science), and this has been your Pedantic Slashdot Rant from a Expert(TM) for today.
Back on topic. These metallic glasses (Vitraloy and the like) have been around for a decade now and have very interesting properties. They are not, however, transparent. Not even a little bit.
I think PPC is definitively in the past for Desktop and Laptop Macs. There are too many apps out there that are now either Intel-Mac only (not many, but a few), or certain features only work on Intel Macs. Even from Apple.
For example: iMovie '08 won't decode AVCHD movies on PowerPC hardware. I was really disappointed to find that I couldn't edit stuff from my Panasonic camcorder with my old Dual G5 Powermac. I have to do all my editing on my MacBook instead.
That building also posed a problem for Cleveland's SWAT teams when a crazy former student charged in and started shooting people. The SWAT team found it difficult to operate in a building with no right angles.
That is almost certainly true. This happens now and then with Apple. I think the web team like to insert little jokes when they are mocking up pages and then sometimes forget or maybe "forget" to change them before the pages go live. I think when either Panther or Tiger (or maybe the XServe) came out, one of the pages promised fewer "blinkenlights" for a short time. Some of them get left in, like the "Do not eat iPod shuffle" one.
Apple recently released the Human Interface Guidelines for the iPhone, which says at one point: "Currently, developers create web applications for iPhone, not native applications." (emphasis added). I suspect the iPhone API is still very much in flux, which probably explains the fairly small updates we've seen so far.
Apple hasn't shied away from games on the iPod, so why not the iPhone? Because the API isn't set in stone yet. Once Apple firms it up, you'll probably start to see third party games from companies like EA. If that works out, then you may finally see a public API.
My wife used to use an iTrip (one of the ones that you had to tune by playing special audio files on the iPod). When she got a Nano, we got her a Belkin one that came with a car charger. It was awful. It broke pretty quickly, so when I was at an Apple store, I picked up a Monster iCarPlay, which combines a charger with the transmitter. It also has an autoscan feature to find an unoccupied frequency.
I was hesitant about it, because I always hear that Monster products are overpriced. This was pricey (~$100), but it was only $20 more than the other combo units the Apple store had, and I figured I'd just return it if it turned out to suck. The audio quality is much, much better than the iTrip or the Belkin one. Like night and day. The interface is a little fussy, and the autoscan feature is a little hit or miss. It seems to be somewhat polarization sensitive. You'll get a different result if you rotate the transmitter 90 degrees. I found that the best thing to do was to run the autoscan with the transmitter sitting wherever you are going to set the iPod. That way it will at least pick a station it can overpower.
Hardwiring it or using a cassette adaptor would be better, but if you're willing to spend $100, the Monster one is pretty good, if pricey.
No, MacBooks and MacBook Pros suffer from this chipset limitation (it is actually about 3.3GB or so), and MacOS X is 64bit capable. Mac Pros can handle up to 16GB of memory.
I'm pretty sure Santa Rosa lifts that particular restriction, but I don't have a source for that.
I think it goes beyond knowing they may lose the case. I think they know that they not only will lose the case, but Cisco also has a couple of employees who are potentially on the hook for perjury right now for fraudulently signing that affidavit claiming that they've been using the trademark for years when they clearly had not. They even submitted a forged picture with a sticker on the outside of the shrinkwrap, claiming it was an actual product being sold by Cisco. Cisco wants to find a way out of this without going to trial, but they can't look to their shareholders like they gave up the potentially very valuable trademark "iPhone" for nothing.
A good CZ is very difficult to tell from a diamond. A lousy CZ will look as bad as a lousy diamond. Finding a good CZ can be tough, since there isn't much demand for CZ. Also, was the person showing you the CZ trying to sell you a diamond? If so, they probably picked a crappy one to convince you diamond was better.
Check out moissanite sometime. Since Charles & Colvard have a patent on the use of moissanite as a gemstone, they keep the quality high. They try to position as a high-end diamond substitute. They also come in a green color that is somewhat hard to find, but is quite unusual looking. My wife has a green one in their engagement ring and people can't figure out what it is. I think you can find moissanite at any JC Penny now, though I don't know if JC Penny carries good quality diamonds to compare it to.
Note: I didn't say it has a higher thermal conductivity than diamond. I said that it fools the testing machines that are looking for CZ. Compared to cubic zirconia, silicon carbide has a very high thermal conductivity. You can't get much lower than CZ and still have it look like a diamond.
I did say that moissanite has a higher index of refraction than diamond, and that is true. See here: http://www.moissanite.com/unique_properties.cfm