Wow thanks for bringing my attention to such an interesting and fascinating guy. From what you write he sounds like a truly brilliant engineer and businessman man. Of course only a tiny proportion of all products make the dominating and long lasting impact on the market that you seem to want, think the light bulb, printing press or the integrated circuit. However an even tinier amount of inventions ever make it to the market or generate any revenue at all! This guy has been able to do that over and over again!
Over 220 patents! Enough said indeed! Wow, when does he even have time to come up with all these ideas, yet alone file for patent, start companies and make money. Fantastic!
But since it should be strictly more difficult to design a codec for voip (latency matters) that implies that they are doing a very good job. Unless the sound samples in the test were only spoken words. Then I agree that it is an unfair/unnecessary comparison.
I honestly didn't notice until I read the news item! And that's a complement, I hate when my favorite sites completely change style. The changes I can see so far looks good too.
And not to forget: keeping the viewer's 100% attention just so they don't miss the skip button once it appears. Forcing the viewer to interact with the ad is probably more worth than them actually watching the remaining 15s of the ad.
Replying to my self here. Zooming the image up in gimp seems to indicate that there is in fact some fussyness built into the font already. Pretty clever way of getting our brains to fill in the missing gaps, allowing for instance W to be only four pixels wide (not "technically" enough to get all the features). So even though I found it a bit hard to read I must say it's a pretty cool attempt. Would be interesting to read the ideas and thoughts behind it all but TFA doesn't state much.
Is there fuzzy-ness built into the font or is that just firefox interpolating when I'm zooming in? One pixel is way to small on my screen to be able to read this, but maybe with larger pixels it would be ok. I guess I have to try to zoom in in gimp.
What is the definition of all here? Does it for instance include Europe or anything outside of the US? Before we haven't been able to watch anything on Hulu.
They wrote their own webserver/php-interpretor to increase the performance with "half or [one] percent"? Wow, that's quite daring I'd say. Note I did not RTFA so probably they saw more performance increase or some other use, otherwise it seems like a likely miss-directed investment.
Could you give an example or references to a flexible chip invented in the 80's? (which was your initial assumption). I'm honestly just very curious. Maybe then we can figure out why it's still being developed as the "next big thing".
Wish I had mod-points. This is really I feel the best explanation for the color of the sky. So simple and nice. Pleases the child within me at least:)
Then if you really want to know why air is slightly blue you can go in to the whole physics about refraction of light at different wavelengths or whatever. But that I guess would be the same answer as to why is Fanta yellow.
Also looking at the videos from that web-page it seems to me that the developers have contributed significantly to the project, especially in coming up with innovative controls for the game suiting the iphone.
To me the whole thing also seems pretty clear, they are not doing anything wrong at all.
Wikipedia doesn't imply that Gallium is rare and lists Semiconductors and specifically LEDs as one of the main application.
Even if you are right I don't think we are talking about much Gallium here. The article doesn't say anything about layer thickness but I would assume it is in the order of 1um. Assuming a square wafer 15cm * 15cm * 1um = 0.0225 cm3. Density of Galium is around 6g/cm3 so on the wafer we need 0.135g of Galium (ignoring that the layer also includes aluminum and nitride).
I have no idea of the efficiency of material use when depositing the layer but even if you need 10 gram of Ga it doesn't sound like that much to me for 150 000 light bulbs. World production in 2007 of Ga was 184 tonnes (wikipedia) so giving up some of that should give us plenty of light bulbs for everyone. And it would seem like a pretty useful cause to me since changing to LED would reduce energy use and CO2-emissions from households quite a lot.
That's what I thought. The question is what the efficiency of that would be. I guess even micro waves at some optimal frequency has some absorbency in the atmosphere. Even on earth power transfer is not without loss. And I haven't heard anyone proposing to start using micro waves instead of electrical wires.
The only reason I can come to think of for putting solar cells in space would be higher power concentration per area. Thus requiring less amount of solar cells (assuming now that the price of the solar cells or land area is the dominant cost factor). According to the wikipedia article the power per area is only ten to eight times higher then on earth surface. But there would be so many other factors making this system more expensive than solar cells on earth. Even if the sunlight power was 100 times more in space than here you would have to make very optimistic calculations for this to "fly".
Well stuff has been put up in space before. No biggie. What I'm wondering is how they plan to get the energy back down here.
Any one have links to actual engineering proposals of how Space Solar Power would work and its benefits? Seems to me like "space" is not one of them, there is plenty of desert and whatnot to put solar cells in here on earth with much less maintenance cost and of course the possibility of running wires to get the energy to wherever it is actually needed.
I can't be bothered to do the math of how many possibilities that would be at this time of night, but it'll certainly go faster than continuing to download it from nobody. Not quite so. Because if you do the math (and if mine is correct at this late hour) you would see that it actually takes a pretty long time(tm). Imagine if only 1MB was missing. You would have to calculate the hash of every single possible 1MB file, so that is 2^8000000=~10^2300000 files. If you had a computer that could, quite unrealistically, calculate one hash each clock-cycle at 1GHz that would still take you 10^2299991 seconds. As a reference the universe according to Wikipedia is roughly 10^17 seconds old.
Besides that there is the information theory problem too. If the hash is 128bit long then every 2^128th file will have the same hash. This might seem unlikely if you only compare a few files (such as all the files ever created by man) but compared to the 2^8000000 hashes we where going to calculate it is actually quite substantial.
I wasn't to impressed by dolphine (form the screenshot) instead I must recommend the new file manager from the latest Xfce: thunar. It is everything that Nautilus is except that it doesn't open new annoying windowses for every directory and it starts much faster. It's simple, straight forward and looks very smooth (I generally prefere gtk-2/gnome-look over KDE). I don't run the rest of xfce (E17 and whatever apps I need) but I havn't run in to any problems so far.
"My research shows that the mobility of charges along isolated chains can be as high as the mobility of charges in conventional semiconductors," Prins told LiveScience. "When the organization of the polymer chains in electronic devices is optimized, all-plastic electronic devices can be developed that benefit from this high mobility."
This means that a bulk of this material will conduct a lot worse than silicon (propably in the order of other conducting polymers). Infact what they have meassured is the absolute maximum conductance which will only occure if you somehow get all the chains to line up in the final substrate. And well infact even then you won't get that good conductance since the polymer chains are finit in length.
I'm sure this is a very interesting material and an important scientific step in characterizing it, it's just not as big news as the headline make it.
24-bit color of course means 24 bits of information in one dot (being enough to represent 2^24 colors but thats not of any importance). Very stupid of me. So yet again we learn the importance of making correct calculations. Now I to call bogus on this.
From what I can tell you're using the color information wrong. You divided the number of bits (21.6 gigabit) by 24 assuming a total of 24 colors. But you said to assume 24 bits of colors yielding a total of 2^24 different colors in one dot, right? Doing the same calculations on that numbers gives a 30dpi which is quite possible.
Calculations: 2.7GB per square inch = 21.6gigabit per square inch. Each dot carry 2^24 bits of information due to color so we only need 21.6*1024^3 / 2^24 = 1382.4 dots per square inch Square root of that equals about 37 dpi.
I'm not saying that the article might be bogus. It all seems to come down to what color depth you can get on a paper (and doing the correct calculations, so please correct me if I got something wrong). From the posts it seems like the ones that claim this is bogus counts with a very low color depth, like 3 colors or 8 colors. While the ones who believe this might be true counts with a very high color depth, 2^24 or something. I think 24 bits seems a bit high, although I must admit that I don't know anything about that.
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Wow thanks for bringing my attention to such an interesting and fascinating guy. From what you write he sounds like a truly brilliant engineer and businessman man. Of course only a tiny proportion of all products make the dominating and long lasting impact on the market that you seem to want, think the light bulb, printing press or the integrated circuit. However an even tinier amount of inventions ever make it to the market or generate any revenue at all! This guy has been able to do that over and over again!
Over 220 patents! Enough said indeed! Wow, when does he even have time to come up with all these ideas, yet alone file for patent, start companies and make money. Fantastic!
But since it should be strictly more difficult to design a codec for voip (latency matters) that implies that they are doing a very good job. Unless the sound samples in the test were only spoken words. Then I agree that it is an unfair/unnecessary comparison.
oops should of course be "compliment" not "complement".
Still not allowing editing of submitted comments I notice...
I honestly didn't notice until I read the news item! And that's a complement, I hate when my favorite sites completely change style. The changes I can see so far looks good too.
Yeah I remember my friends dad using something similar for their Windows 3.11 computer. So that should have been mid 90s.
And not to forget: keeping the viewer's 100% attention just so they don't miss the skip button once it appears. Forcing the viewer to interact with the ad is probably more worth than them actually watching the remaining 15s of the ad.
Replying to my self here. Zooming the image up in gimp seems to indicate that there is in fact some fussyness built into the font already. Pretty clever way of getting our brains to fill in the missing gaps, allowing for instance W to be only four pixels wide (not "technically" enough to get all the features). So even though I found it a bit hard to read I must say it's a pretty cool attempt. Would be interesting to read the ideas and thoughts behind it all but TFA doesn't state much.
Is there fuzzy-ness built into the font or is that just firefox interpolating when I'm zooming in? One pixel is way to small on my screen to be able to read this, but maybe with larger pixels it would be ok. I guess I have to try to zoom in in gimp.
What is the definition of all here? Does it for instance include Europe or anything outside of the US? Before we haven't been able to watch anything on Hulu.
Ah thanks, that explains it. Either I'm just tired or the summary makes the quote easy to miss understand.
They wrote their own webserver/php-interpretor to increase the performance with "half or [one] percent"? Wow, that's quite daring I'd say. Note I did not RTFA so probably they saw more performance increase or some other use, otherwise it seems like a likely miss-directed investment.
Could you give an example or references to a flexible chip invented in the 80's? (which was your initial assumption). I'm honestly just very curious. Maybe then we can figure out why it's still being developed as the "next big thing".
Wish I had mod-points. This is really I feel the best explanation for the color of the sky. So simple and nice. Pleases the child within me at least :)
Then if you really want to know why air is slightly blue you can go in to the whole physics about refraction of light at different wavelengths or whatever. But that I guess would be the same answer as to why is Fanta yellow.
Also looking at the videos from that web-page it seems to me that the developers have contributed significantly to the project, especially in coming up with innovative controls for the game suiting the iphone.
To me the whole thing also seems pretty clear, they are not doing anything wrong at all.
The source-code seem to be downloadable http://7b5labs.com/xpilotiphone
Wikipedia doesn't imply that Gallium is rare and lists Semiconductors and specifically LEDs as one of the main application.
Even if you are right I don't think we are talking about much Gallium here. The article doesn't say anything about layer thickness but I would assume it is in the order of 1um. Assuming a square wafer 15cm * 15cm * 1um = 0.0225 cm3. Density of Galium is around 6g/cm3 so on the wafer we need 0.135g of Galium (ignoring that the layer also includes aluminum and nitride).
I have no idea of the efficiency of material use when depositing the layer but even if you need 10 gram of Ga it doesn't sound like that much to me for 150 000 light bulbs. World production in 2007 of Ga was 184 tonnes (wikipedia) so giving up some of that should give us plenty of light bulbs for everyone. And it would seem like a pretty useful cause to me since changing to LED would reduce energy use and CO2-emissions from households quite a lot.
That's what I thought. The question is what the efficiency of that would be. I guess even micro waves at some optimal frequency has some absorbency in the atmosphere. Even on earth power transfer is not without loss. And I haven't heard anyone proposing to start using micro waves instead of electrical wires.
The only reason I can come to think of for putting solar cells in space would be higher power concentration per area. Thus requiring less amount of solar cells (assuming now that the price of the solar cells or land area is the dominant cost factor). According to the wikipedia article the power per area is only ten to eight times higher then on earth surface. But there would be so many other factors making this system more expensive than solar cells on earth. Even if the sunlight power was 100 times more in space than here you would have to make very optimistic calculations for this to "fly".
Well stuff has been put up in space before. No biggie. What I'm wondering is how they plan to get the energy back down here.
Any one have links to actual engineering proposals of how Space Solar Power would work and its benefits? Seems to me like "space" is not one of them, there is plenty of desert and whatnot to put solar cells in here on earth with much less maintenance cost and of course the possibility of running wires to get the energy to wherever it is actually needed.
We'll change that as soon as we get home ... we'll change alot of things.
Besides that there is the information theory problem too. If the hash is 128bit long then every 2^128th file will have the same hash. This might seem unlikely if you only compare a few files (such as all the files ever created by man) but compared to the 2^8000000 hashes we where going to calculate it is actually quite substantial.
I thought Firefox was the light version of Mozilla.
I wasn't to impressed by dolphine (form the screenshot) instead I must recommend the new file manager from the latest Xfce: thunar. It is everything that Nautilus is except that it doesn't open new annoying windowses for every directory and it starts much faster. It's simple, straight forward and looks very smooth (I generally prefere gtk-2/gnome-look over KDE). I don't run the rest of xfce (E17 and whatever apps I need) but I havn't run in to any problems so far.
This means that a bulk of this material will conduct a lot worse than silicon (propably in the order of other conducting polymers). Infact what they have meassured is the absolute maximum conductance which will only occure if you somehow get all the chains to line up in the final substrate. And well infact even then you won't get that good conductance since the polymer chains are finit in length.
I'm sure this is a very interesting material and an important scientific step in characterizing it, it's just not as big news as the headline make it.
Ooops. Please ignore this post.
24-bit color of course means 24 bits of information in one dot (being enough to represent 2^24 colors but thats not of any importance). Very stupid of me. So yet again we learn the importance of making correct calculations. Now I to call bogus on this.
From what I can tell you're using the color information wrong. You divided the number of bits (21.6 gigabit) by 24 assuming a total of 24 colors. But you said to assume 24 bits of colors yielding a total of 2^24 different colors in one dot, right? Doing the same calculations on that numbers gives a 30dpi which is quite possible.
Calculations:
2.7GB per square inch = 21.6gigabit per square inch.
Each dot carry 2^24 bits of information due to color so we only need 21.6*1024^3 / 2^24 = 1382.4 dots per square inch
Square root of that equals about 37 dpi.
I'm not saying that the article might be bogus. It all seems to come down to what color depth you can get on a paper (and doing the correct calculations, so please correct me if I got something wrong). From the posts it seems like the ones that claim this is bogus counts with a very low color depth, like 3 colors or 8 colors. While the ones who believe this might be true counts with a very high color depth, 2^24 or something. I think 24 bits seems a bit high, although I must admit that I don't know anything about that.