Americans understand what the effects of Chyrnoble were, and what 3 mile island could have been.
No they don't. Media are still spreading the myth that thousands have died du to chernobyl. This is simply false:
AFAIK there are documented 8 cases of death due to cancer caused by fallout in the local affected area (That is there have not been found any increased likelyhood of cancer except for one form which have claimed 8 lives).
There have not been found any adverse effect on plant and animal life in the restricted area (except that they seem to thrive du to no humans in the area)
Except for the initial 240 or so diagnosed cases of acute radiation syndrome of which 28 died immidiatly and 14 in the later years (http://www.ibrae.ac.ru/english/natrep-2001.htm) there doesen't seem to be any major loss of life.
You cannot destroy nuclear waste: it stays around for tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
Yes you can. As long as it is radioactive it can potentially be used for further reactions (actually it isn't even a requirement that it is radioactive, only stable iron cannot be used for energy production through fission or fusion).
We only need to store it until we have found a efficient way to harness the energy in these by-products.
High speed circuits like modern CPUs does indeed use BJTs, but obviously not exclusively. BJTs have the disadvantage of a low input impedance which is what causes higher power consumption. However they offer far higher drive strenghts so they are nice for driving highly loaded nets like pads, buses og clocks.
Also extreme high speed dynamic logic will often use BJTs on their driver stage.
However one should make sure not to confuse max frequency of a transistor with the maximum clock rate supported by a technology/design. While related they are certanly not the same (and the lattter depends on a whole additional set of factors like capasative loading threshold voltages, logic depth etc.)
+5V is not ground. Don't use it as such. Using +5V to sink current can cause havoc with power regulation.
A much safer way to regulate voltage is to get a few power diodes (3A rating should be enough for just about any kind of reasonable fan rig) and put them in series with your fans. Each diode (if it is a Si device) will reduce voltage by 0.7V.
Do I believe Rambus should spend more time inovating and less time litigating? Of course. But they didn't have the 20 billion dollars to startup a manufacturing plant so they licensed the technology to a company that did. Shouldn't they be able to claim the 00.75% royalty that they are asking for?
You are mistaken if you think that a semiconductor manufacturer needs to own a fab.
Most semiconductor companies are 'fabless-foundries'. That is they design and sell the circuits, but outsource the manufacturing. (as opposed to selling or licencing IP only)
Regular structures like memory can (and are) be made with redundancy. When the die is checked any defective rows are identified and a laser cuts predefined tracks to route the memory interface to the functioning rows.
Since memory make up a significant part of a modern CPU this improves yield quite a bit.
Also I believe some designs have been able to cut out non-functioning ALUs so they can use those dies for low cost versions.
Efficiency of a machine is directly dependent on the temperature diffrence that drives it. In case of nuclear we can produce and utilize with wery few components, a very high temperature indeed. Hence efficiency.
The thing that you have neglected to mention is that, right now, there is no long-term solution to the nuclear waste problem
There is: Build reactors that can be driven by this waste. Until you reach stable iron you can gain energy this way. The implementation is merely a research project.
Some of the isotopes have half lifes on the order of 10^6 years...
Bombard them with neutrons to reduce this (and release energy at the same time).
To reproduce low frequencies the speaker surface must move a fairly large distance. The problem is that this movement actual creates a doppler shift in the high frequencies, creating a "muddy" sound.
While this is essentialy true, it isn't the most significant problem with large panel speakers. These are large enough that the surface won't have to move much. (of cource if you make them small you're screwed).
Panel speakers traditionally got two problems:
They tend to be dipoles which means the got to be huge or have no bass. Once the path from the rear of the driver to the front becomes small compared to the acoustic wavelenght it exhibits an acoustic short which works to cancel and phaseshift LF sounds.
Also any driver which active surface is larger than the wavelenght of the sounds it reproduce will exhibit beaming and comb filtering since for a given point in space the path to two different points on the driver will be different. For large drivers the difference can become significant compared to wavelenghts and interference ensues.
Some panel speaker technologies also suffer from beeing very hard on the amps (el-stat).
In short it's hard to justify making a panel speaker.
Remember that it is a panel doesen't make it thin unto itself. If you don't want a dipole you still need the box, and if it is a dipole the problems above occurs and it will still have to stand out from the wall to avoid interference from back wall reflections.
"The CO2 is not being transformed back into pure carbon (coal) and oxygen. If the bacteria assembled the carbon atoms from the carbon dioxide back into coal, you'd have a point, but instead they do something entirely different (photosynthesis) with the carbon dioxide."
Sure. They crate sugar of it. That'ts even worse, as the energy contained in that molecule is even higher than for pure carbon.
And when you run out of sunlight (i.e. nighttime) what do these bacteria do? Why, they do the same any photosynthesizing organism do. They burn sugar and creates CO2...
This was a rather entertainingly naive view of the problem (it at all CO2 is a problem...).
The issue is of cource that you will need as much energy to split CO2 into C and O2 as you got from greating CO@ from C and O2 in the first place.
The suggested coal powerplant with solar collectors would, if they can make it work, be just a solar powerplant as the burning of carbon nets zero energy surplus.
This begs the question of if this really is an efficient solar plant?
And what about nighttime? Does your turbines really enjoy beeing cooled and reheated every day, or are you planning to spend energy on storing the CO2 until morning...
Fujitsu has recently released out with a series of silent drives. New bearings and a choice of high-performance or silent access patterns (i.e. how the head is moved) makes the difference. They are supposed to keep well below 30dBspl
WD announced their whisperdrives quite a while ago, but seem to mostly push those into OEM channels.
Rumors say that IBM (whose latest 75gxp series are allready quite silent) are to announce a silent drive.
Also to minimize noise you can get rubber suspensions for you desktop drives to mount them in a 5.25" bay. (Allthough watch the temp. rubber isn't a good heat conductor)
The beauty of a HDD player is that you don't need to carry anything else, no CDs, no memory cards, no MDs.
Transfering the data to the drive is painless, and done only rarely.
Under no circumstance should the jukebox be your only copy of the music, you should have backups. I keep cd-r backups, but unlike mp3-cd players I don't need to carry them around.
Also any pc on the up&up got a usb port today. With my Archos unit i can plug it into any pc and get access to my files.
Of cource, in stead of buying an SDMI compliant closed device with poor battery time and large dimentions. You could get a similarly functioning device like the Archos Jukebox or NEO 25 that can be mounted like a common drive off the usb port. And don't obstruct the user in any way on how he should handle his files.
The 'correct' region for the ISS is actually region 8 which is reserved for 'international venues' like cruiseliners and aircraft (And now also the ISS technically).
Remember there are 8 regions in the system, but the world is divided in just 6. Region 8 is for aircraft and such. Region 7 is reserved for future expansion.
The common (simplified) relation is P=afCVdd^2 Where f is clock frequency, C is total capasative load, Vdd is the core voltage and a is a scaling factor between 0-1 which is a weighted average of the switching rate of all nodes related to f.
Reduction of feature size greatly reduces C, and will also permit a reduction of Vdd.
So yes there is an almost linear mathematical relationship between frequency and power as long as you dont change the other significant factors (Vdd, a, Cl). However as the delay of a gate a bit simplified can be modelled as t=kCl/BVdd where k is a constant typically at around 3, Cl is the gate load and B the conductance of the open circuit to Vdd or Vss (ground). B depends on transistor dimentions (higher B means bigger transistors, which means higher Cl for the preceeding gate).
Thus when you lower f you can exploit this by lowering Vdd and/or reducing C. (Its then generally preferable to lower Vdd until you reach the limits of what you can support, then reduce C to speed, this due to the quadratic relationship between Vdd and P)
Norewegian much hyped 'signature' trains stopped due to a computer malfuction due to intolerance of the date 31-12-2000 (that is 12-31-2000 for you guys over on the other side of the pond)...
There are alternatives to the Creative nomad/D.A.P.
PJB have been mentioned, but is unfortunaltly rather steeply priced.
Then there is the neo 25 and archos units. neo 25 have been on the market a while, but I don't know too much of it.
The archos unit is rather smaller than the creative and mounts up as a common USB hdd. Which means it's a breeze to move files with and you don't need any special software to transfer files to it (other than the driver I presume).
Also there is no indication that it contains user-hostile copy protection devices.
"They need to push some kind of easy to use send mom the video campaign. I started sending my relatives mp3s of me talking to them already rather than a typee letter. Sure they are larger, but it si almost like a one sided phone call. The technology is here and a 1 meg donload over 56k is about 5 minutes, which is not that bad. If Mac could make this the NORM"
Then I hope I don't know any mac users. With anything from 20-200 mails pr. day I rather not have even a small percentage of these as large binary objects.
Beside, I read much faster than anyone can speak legibly. Having to listen to a spoken message is rather tedious compared to reading it.
It's nice to have the ability to send audio in mail (allthough it got nothing to do with the GUI/UI in general but rather just that part of that interfaces you to mail), mut it must not be made default.
Overheard a clerk today in a local store who said they excpected 50 additional units in by wednsday, but their current stock was either reserved or sold.
Only half-way. A lot of silicon is devoted to SSE2, which if memory serves, is 64-bit. As soon as you see how fast programs are(when they're compiled with a SSE2-aware compiler), you'll start to wonder if maybe Intel processors arn't really x86 any more...:)
And the x87 compatible FPUs both the P4, athlon PIII etc uses got even longer wordlengths (80 bit ?).
Don't confuse the 'bitism' of a CPU with it's FPUs wordlength.
Traditionally a n-bit CPU is so labelled because it accesses memory in n-bit chunks. It was also at times used to refer to the width of the adressbus, but this have fallen into disuse in later years.
See my first argument - the P4 can no longer truely be called "32-bit". And the P4 actually runs strictly 32-bit floating-point ops slower than the PIII(significantly slower), but those nice SSE2 instructions are supposed to be absolutely blazing.
Hmmm... as far as I can recall there is nothing special about the SSE2 ALU (and there is only one). While the SIMD nature of SSE2 instructions can give a nice boost, it's not given that any application will benefit from them. Also this did leave the P4 with very weak x87 performance which is acutally widely used and will be present in legacy code at least 5 years more (speculation).
If the PPro can be used as a guideline I'd guess there will shortly be a new iteration of the netbus core with improved performance for x87 (much like the improved the 16 bit code performance the PII got over the PPro)
It seems to me that the P4 is at present a silly purchase. It's no good for SMP, it makes no sense to buy one in order to upgrade the CPU later when they get up to speed (the socket will change), and it's performance is uneven and a poor match for it's price. You must also use RDRAM which is still rather expensive (but does indeed seem to give a performance boost this time around as the CPU has improved off-chip transfer capasity).
It will take quite a while before P4 optimized applications will show up, until then the P4 makes little or no sense to buy.
As for the future performance of this core w.r.t attainable clockspeed I'd be carful with my speculations. Remember that we originally expected the merced (now itanium) core to be the next generation core after the P6 core. That we now got this Netbus inbetween does seem to indicate that this really is just a stopgap effort to remain competitive until the itanium becomes viable. This does of cource does not mean the netbus is _bad_, but it might point to a rather short life.
After all it seems we need to get away from the ridiculously complex decode/predict algorithms modern CPUs (Both x86 and risc) utilizes, however compiler tech is still a problem for VLIW (which othervise IMO has great promise)
They seem to have forgotten about the fdiv bug in the original pentium 60/66. That as I recall caused a rather lot of media contoversy and was not helped by the fact that intel initially refused to take returns based on that this wouldn't affect the average user...
Outcry from amongst others the scientific community changed their minds eventually, but they got a lot of bad press over it.
I quess we should also mention the segmented memory architecture they utilized in the 286 days (which haunted us for a rather long while after the 286 was dead.)
"We are the Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. Mathmathics are irrelevant. You will be approximated."
Holo storage is still just research i'm afraid. (although you could possibly say multilayered discs is adequatly similar)
The problem with optical storage is that we are limited by the wavelenghts of the light we are using, as well as the mechanical precision of the optics). At present it seems even good'ol stonage tech like magnetic storage beats optical.
Obviously in order for a product to be marketable it need to have a reasonable MTBF, but I don't see any neccecary reason why fabricating an assembly of multiple probes will be much more fragile than a single probe. Remember they will likly be placed in a single assembly. If they crash, they will do so under the same conditions that a single probe would do so.
From the article it's indicated that the principle is based on atomic forces, not electric. (Which jibes better with the explanation of the bending needle).
Are you sure you didn't think of tunneling effects which can be used for similar devices (remember the STM?)
The article goes on about how the assumption that no two prints are identical haven't been proven. This is of cource rather obvious, this statement cannot be proven, it can only be strengthened by failing to falsify it.
There is never any proof that is 100% watertight (other than in mathematics and other formal logic systems). The legal system will always have to settle for reasonable proof.
If an investigator picks up a suspect and his prints happen to match the perps, then you will have a hard time to prove you didn't do it. But remember it must also be proven that the prints that were found are indeed the criminals.
It's wery unlikly in my view that the fingerprint matching is ever the weakest link in the chain of evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans understand what the effects of Chyrnoble were, and what 3 mile island could have been.
No they don't. Media are still spreading the myth that thousands have died du to chernobyl. This is simply false:
AFAIK there are documented 8 cases of death due to cancer caused by fallout in the local affected area (That is there have not been found any increased likelyhood of cancer except for one form which have claimed 8 lives).
There have not been found any adverse effect on plant and animal life in the restricted area (except that they seem to thrive du to no humans in the area)
Except for the initial 240 or so diagnosed cases of acute radiation syndrome of which 28 died immidiatly and 14 in the later years (http://www.ibrae.ac.ru/english/natrep-2001.htm) there doesen't seem to be any major loss of life.
You cannot destroy nuclear waste: it stays around for tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
Yes you can. As long as it is radioactive it can potentially be used for further reactions (actually it isn't even a requirement that it is radioactive, only stable iron cannot be used for energy production through fission or fusion).
We only need to store it until we have found a efficient way to harness the energy in these by-products.
High speed circuits like modern CPUs does indeed use BJTs, but obviously not exclusively. BJTs have the disadvantage of a low input impedance which is what causes higher power consumption. However they offer far higher drive strenghts so they are nice for driving highly loaded nets like pads, buses og clocks.
Also extreme high speed dynamic logic will often use BJTs on their driver stage.
However one should make sure not to confuse max frequency of a transistor with the maximum clock rate supported by a technology/design. While related they are certanly not the same (and the lattter depends on a whole additional set of factors like capasative loading threshold voltages, logic depth etc.)
+5V is not ground. Don't use it as such. Using +5V to sink current can cause havoc with power regulation.
A much safer way to regulate voltage is to get a few power diodes (3A rating should be enough for just about any kind of reasonable fan rig) and put them in series with your fans. Each diode (if it is a Si device) will reduce voltage by 0.7V.
Do I believe Rambus should spend more time inovating and less time litigating? Of course. But they didn't have the 20 billion dollars to startup a manufacturing plant so they licensed the technology to a company that did. Shouldn't they be able to claim the 00.75% royalty that they are asking for?
You are mistaken if you think that a semiconductor manufacturer needs to own a fab.
Most semiconductor companies are 'fabless-foundries'. That is they design and sell the circuits, but outsource the manufacturing. (as opposed to selling or licencing IP only)
Regular structures like memory can (and are) be made with redundancy. When the die is checked any defective rows are identified and a laser cuts predefined tracks to route the memory interface to the functioning rows.
Since memory make up a significant part of a modern CPU this improves yield quite a bit.
Also I believe some designs have been able to cut out non-functioning ALUs so they can use those dies for low cost versions.
How do you know that nuclear power is efficient?
Efficiency of a machine is directly dependent on the temperature diffrence that drives it. In case of nuclear we can produce and utilize with wery few components, a very high temperature indeed. Hence efficiency.
The thing that you have neglected to mention is that, right now, there is no long-term solution to the nuclear waste problem
There is: Build reactors that can be driven by this waste. Until you reach stable iron you can gain energy this way. The implementation is merely a research project.
Some of the isotopes have half lifes on the order of 10^6 years...
Bombard them with neutrons to reduce this (and release energy at the same time).
To reproduce low frequencies the speaker surface must move a fairly large distance. The problem is that this movement actual creates a doppler shift in the high frequencies, creating a "muddy" sound.
While this is essentialy true, it isn't the most significant problem with large panel speakers. These are large enough that the surface won't have to move much. (of cource if you make them small you're screwed).
Panel speakers traditionally got two problems:
They tend to be dipoles which means the got to be huge or have no bass. Once the path from the rear of the driver to the front becomes small compared to the acoustic wavelenght it exhibits an acoustic short which works to cancel and phaseshift LF sounds.
Also any driver which active surface is larger than the wavelenght of the sounds it reproduce will exhibit beaming and comb filtering since for a given point in space the path to two different points on the driver will be different. For large drivers the difference can become significant compared to wavelenghts and interference ensues.
Some panel speaker technologies also suffer from beeing very hard on the amps (el-stat).
In short it's hard to justify making a panel speaker.
Remember that it is a panel doesen't make it thin unto itself. If you don't want a dipole you still need the box, and if it is a dipole the problems above occurs and it will still have to stand out from the wall to avoid interference from back wall reflections.
"The CO2 is not being transformed back into pure carbon (coal) and oxygen. If the bacteria assembled the carbon atoms from the carbon dioxide back into coal, you'd have a point, but instead they do something entirely different (photosynthesis) with the carbon dioxide."
Sure. They crate sugar of it. That'ts even worse, as the energy contained in that molecule is even higher than for pure carbon.
And when you run out of sunlight (i.e. nighttime) what do these bacteria do? Why, they do the same any photosynthesizing organism do. They burn sugar and creates CO2...
Sorry folks. You can't fight entropy.
This was a rather entertainingly naive view of the problem (it at all CO2 is a problem...).
The issue is of cource that you will need as much energy to split CO2 into C and O2 as you got from greating CO@ from C and O2 in the first place.
The suggested coal powerplant with solar collectors would, if they can make it work, be just a solar powerplant as the burning of carbon nets zero energy surplus.
This begs the question of if this really is an efficient solar plant?
And what about nighttime? Does your turbines really enjoy beeing cooled and reheated every day, or are you planning to spend energy on storing the CO2 until morning...
Fujitsu has recently released out with a series of silent drives. New bearings and a choice of high-performance or silent access patterns (i.e. how the head is moved) makes the difference. They are supposed to keep well below 30dBspl
WD announced their whisperdrives quite a while ago, but seem to mostly push those into OEM channels.
Rumors say that IBM (whose latest 75gxp series are allready quite silent) are to announce a silent drive.
Also to minimize noise you can get rubber suspensions for you desktop drives to mount them in a 5.25" bay. (Allthough watch the temp. rubber isn't a good heat conductor)
"Considering that hustle and bustle that most laptops get at the typical airport, this is going to become more and more important."
This is a 3.5" drive. You can't fit it into portable devices who use 2.5" drives pretty much universally.
2.5" drives are allready designed to tolerate large shocks.
That's not a bug, that's a feature.
The beauty of a HDD player is that you don't need to carry anything else, no CDs, no memory cards, no MDs.
Transfering the data to the drive is painless, and done only rarely.
Under no circumstance should the jukebox be your only copy of the music, you should have backups. I keep cd-r backups, but unlike mp3-cd players I don't need to carry them around.
Also any pc on the up&up got a usb port today. With my Archos unit i can plug it into any pc and get access to my files.
Of cource, in stead of buying an SDMI compliant closed device with poor battery time and large dimentions. You could get a similarly functioning device like the Archos Jukebox or NEO 25 that can be mounted like a common drive off the usb port. And don't obstruct the user in any way on how he should handle his files.
The 'correct' region for the ISS is actually region 8 which is reserved for 'international venues' like cruiseliners and aircraft (And now also the ISS technically).
Remember there are 8 regions in the system, but the world is divided in just 6. Region 8 is for aircraft and such. Region 7 is reserved for future expansion.
The common (simplified) relation is P=afCVdd^2 Where f is clock frequency, C is total capasative load, Vdd is the core voltage and a is a scaling factor between 0-1 which is a weighted average of the switching rate of all nodes related to f.
Reduction of feature size greatly reduces C, and will also permit a reduction of Vdd.
So yes there is an almost linear mathematical relationship between frequency and power as long as you dont change the other significant factors (Vdd, a, Cl). However as the delay of a gate a bit simplified can be modelled as t=kCl/BVdd where k is a constant typically at around 3, Cl is the gate load and B the conductance of the open circuit to Vdd or Vss (ground). B depends on transistor dimentions (higher B means bigger transistors, which means higher Cl for the preceeding gate).
Thus when you lower f you can exploit this by lowering Vdd and/or reducing C. (Its then generally preferable to lower Vdd until you reach the limits of what you can support, then reduce C to speed, this due to the quadratic relationship between Vdd and P)
Norewegian much hyped 'signature' trains stopped due to a computer malfuction due to intolerance of the date 31-12-2000 (that is 12-31-2000 for you guys over on the other side of the pond)...
Poetic justice?
There are alternatives to the Creative nomad/D.A.P.
PJB have been mentioned, but is unfortunaltly rather steeply priced.
Then there is the neo 25 and archos units. neo 25 have been on the market a while, but I don't know too much of it.
The archos unit is rather smaller than the creative and mounts up as a common USB hdd. Which means it's a breeze to move files with and you don't need any special software to transfer files to it (other than the driver I presume).
Also there is no indication that it contains user-hostile copy protection devices.
"They need to push some kind of easy to use send mom the video campaign. I started sending my relatives mp3s of me talking to them already rather than a typee letter. Sure they are larger, but it si almost like a one sided phone call. The technology is here and a 1 meg donload over 56k is about 5 minutes, which is not that bad. If Mac could make this the NORM"
Then I hope I don't know any mac users. With anything from 20-200 mails pr. day I rather not have even a small percentage of these as large binary objects.
Beside, I read much faster than anyone can speak legibly. Having to listen to a spoken message is rather tedious compared to reading it.
It's nice to have the ability to send audio in mail (allthough it got nothing to do with the GUI/UI in general but rather just that part of that interfaces you to mail), mut it must not be made default.
Overheard a clerk today in a local store who said they excpected 50 additional units in by wednsday, but their current stock was either reserved or sold.
They no longer take pre-orders.
And, uh, P4 is still 32bit...
... :)
Only half-way. A lot of silicon is devoted to SSE2, which if memory serves, is 64-bit. As soon as you see how fast programs are(when they're compiled with a SSE2-aware compiler), you'll start to wonder if maybe Intel processors arn't really x86 any more
And the x87 compatible FPUs both the P4, athlon PIII etc uses got even longer wordlengths (80 bit ?).
Don't confuse the 'bitism' of a CPU with it's FPUs wordlength.
Traditionally a n-bit CPU is so labelled because it accesses memory in n-bit chunks. It was also at times used to refer to the width of the adressbus, but this have fallen into disuse in later years.
See my first argument - the P4 can no longer truely be called "32-bit". And the P4 actually runs strictly 32-bit floating-point ops slower than the PIII(significantly slower), but those nice SSE2 instructions are supposed to be absolutely blazing.
Hmmm... as far as I can recall there is nothing special about the SSE2 ALU (and there is only one). While the SIMD nature of SSE2 instructions can give a nice boost, it's not given that any application will benefit from them. Also this did leave the P4 with very weak x87 performance which is acutally widely used and will be present in legacy code at least 5 years more (speculation).
If the PPro can be used as a guideline I'd guess there will shortly be a new iteration of the netbus core with improved performance for x87 (much like the improved the 16 bit code performance the PII got over the PPro)
It seems to me that the P4 is at present a silly purchase. It's no good for SMP, it makes no sense to buy one in order to upgrade the CPU later when they get up to speed (the socket will change), and it's performance is uneven and a poor match for it's price. You must also use RDRAM which is still rather expensive (but does indeed seem to give a performance boost this time around as the CPU has improved off-chip transfer capasity).
It will take quite a while before P4 optimized applications will show up, until then the P4 makes little or no sense to buy.
As for the future performance of this core w.r.t attainable clockspeed I'd be carful with my speculations. Remember that we originally expected the merced (now itanium) core to be the next generation core after the P6 core. That we now got this Netbus inbetween does seem to indicate that this really is just a stopgap effort to remain competitive until the itanium becomes viable. This does of cource does not mean the netbus is _bad_, but it might point to a rather short life.
After all it seems we need to get away from the ridiculously complex decode/predict algorithms modern CPUs (Both x86 and risc) utilizes, however compiler tech is still a problem for VLIW (which othervise IMO has great promise)
They seem to have forgotten about the fdiv bug in the original pentium 60/66. That as I recall caused a rather lot of media contoversy and was not helped by the fact that intel initially refused to take returns based on that this wouldn't affect the average user...
Outcry from amongst others the scientific community changed their minds eventually, but they got a lot of bad press over it.
I quess we should also mention the segmented memory architecture they utilized in the 286 days (which haunted us for a rather long while after the 286 was dead.)
"We are the Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. Mathmathics are irrelevant. You will be approximated."
Holo storage is still just research i'm afraid. (although you could possibly say multilayered discs is adequatly similar)
The problem with optical storage is that we are limited by the wavelenghts of the light we are using, as well as the mechanical precision of the optics). At present it seems even good'ol stonage tech like magnetic storage beats optical.
Obviously in order for a product to be marketable it need to have a reasonable MTBF, but I don't see any neccecary reason why fabricating an assembly of multiple probes will be much more fragile than a single probe. Remember they will likly be placed in a single assembly. If they crash, they will do so under the same conditions that a single probe would do so.
From the article it's indicated that the principle is based on atomic forces, not electric. (Which jibes better with the explanation of the bending needle).
Are you sure you didn't think of tunneling effects which can be used for similar devices (remember the STM?)
The article goes on about how the assumption that no two prints are identical haven't been proven. This is of cource rather obvious, this statement cannot be proven, it can only be strengthened by failing to falsify it.
There is never any proof that is 100% watertight (other than in mathematics and other formal logic systems). The legal system will always have to settle for reasonable proof.
If an investigator picks up a suspect and his prints happen to match the perps, then you will have a hard time to prove you didn't do it. But remember it must also be proven that the prints that were found are indeed the criminals.
It's wery unlikly in my view that the fingerprint matching is ever the weakest link in the chain of evidence.