Sony's expectation for the XEL-1 was never anything other than establishing brand recognition as the leaders in OLED. The truth is that while the display cost ~2500, the manufacturing costs probably were around ~5K as a function of the very lossy shadow mask technology they use for deposition of the organic material. The project was never sustainable, nor intended to be.
The technologies for manufacturing remain very immature, but the major display manufacturers, material developers and equipment vendors are investing major resources into solutions. A better bellweather for display technologies may be the Koreans (Samsung, LG) and the Taiwanese (AUO, etc). These folks are chasing the rabbit pretty hard.
There is also a Silicon Valley startup that is developing an interesting solution named Kateeva. Spun out of MIT, the company is developing a solution that marries the material advantages of evaporation with the simplified deposition approach of ink-jet. More information (and video!) at this recent article from Technology Review.
Khosla is one of the planet's largest investor in biofuels. He has engaged in rather disheartening attacks on any plan that suggests electrons can replace liquid carbons molecules. See his recent statements on how plug in hybrids will forever be "toys."
He may very well be right in some instances, but given the vitriol he has spilled against alternatives to his investments, it's hard to trust his statements as honest assessments.
Gore, on the other hand, has been even handed in suggesting there is no silver bullet to our energy and climate crises.
All that being said, PV cost and efficiency has historically been closer to Khosla's estimate than it has been to Gore's. But that has been mostly as a function of investment. Now that billions upon billions are being invested in the space, I think we'll see the cost curve start to look more attractive.
Yeah, but Applied has yet to prove they can deliver a/full automated fab/ for solar panel production. Note that they've never delivered a full fab for anything, mostly because there isn't a chip fab in the world that is turn key and completely automated.
Note also that they have booked billions of dollars of orders before they even have a working prototype or even a finished process.
I'm very happy to see Applied succeed here. But let's not underestimate the difficulty they have set before them.
Being unrealistic about alternative energy solutions has led to a boom and bust in the biofuels space (something I am also bullish on). AltE is a great challenge and we're in an exciting period of it's renaissance, but let's remain level headed about our chances of success.
With a paper trail it becomes extremely easy to sell votes or be coerced into voting. The voter has the receipt to prove to a third party they fulfilled their previously agreed upon obligation.
" Further, the compounds appear to have few limits on how they are delivered to patients. Although early indications are for application of CSAs with an ointment or cream, pills or injections may also be developed - if the compound gets to market. "
this actually makes perfect sense considering the economics and regulatory hurdles of FDA clinical trials. *
for a topical NDA (New Drug Application), the costs of a full trial is in the range of 5K-10K per patient. for NDAs that are injected or ingested, the costs are an order of magnitude higher.
furthermore, clinical trials have four steps. pre-clinical, phase 1, phase 2 and phase 3. at each stage, the chances of the trial failing increases quite significantly, resulting in major financial losses. in other words, if the company spends $300M to bring a drug to phase 3 but fails at that stage, the entire cost is completely sunk.
for ingested or injected, the risks of failing at a later stage are much higher than topical drugs. in fact, 1 in 5 drugs that reach phase 3 pass.
considering that the article states that the product is both an anti-viral and anti-fungal agent, there are many applications in the topical space from warts to foot fungus. my guess is that the pharma company will try to quickly bring the drug to market as a topical for these areas due to the above reasons while preparing for clinical trials for HIV/AIDS in parallel.
*the numbers used here are conjected, but scale is about right.
That's even worse! My faith in their engineering was shaken a bit by the fact that they couldn't migrate their systems reliably. It's even worse that they roll back data two days.
And I'm not a script kiddie that hasn't worked with large systems. Shit happens, I know that. But this is some nasty shit that typically is avoided.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that you understood that the moral of the story was not that the computer was dead but that his community had passed away.
That is cause for mourning and is the prime motivation for all of his groundbreaking work.
The technology is certainly a critical component, but I have never seen RMS waver from his main commitment which is to his community of fellow hackers.
Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google and noted Lisp hacker, wrote a wonderful essay on this subject which you and your father should read: http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
Some choice quotes:
" If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a
graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had
only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and through stock options is no doubt much richer than I'll ever be.
"This assumes that some people already have the qualities necessary for being a great designer; the job is to properly coax them along. Alan Perlis put it more succinctly: "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers".
Personally, as a person who contracts and hires hackers, my experience is similar to Norvig's. The best people I've worked with have often not gotten a degree or gone to a "no-name state school."
On a separate point, the worst developers I've ever had to work with were MIT grads. Arrogant pricks who neither understood engineering nor teamwork. People who have been in the industry longer than I have said MIT hackers have long had reps for not playing well with others. Other "top" schools aren't that much different.
Actually, NO ARCH DOES NOT REQUIRE A CENTRAL ARCHIVE AT ALL.
that's displays a rather fundamental misunderstanding of how arch works, and fairly amusing too. usually, people complain that arch lacks a central server, and that's why it should be avoided.
This, my friend, is so completely untrue that it's mind boggling. Considering that Sloan has sponsored the.LRN project, the open source courseware system that rivals any proprietary system, you're head is deeply up your ass.
Alas. That's generally where MIT students spend their time.
There are at least two projects that are similar to what you are requesting:
LinuxFund.org: From teh FAQ: Issuing development grants for projects which may not be suitable for commercial or volunteer efforts but which will enhance the long-term vitality of the Open Source. All projects we fund will become Open Source. To be more clear, the projects that we aim to fund are the development and the documentation of Open Source.
That is *precisely* why this is cool. He's funded an existing open source project to make it better. According to the about section, they've contracted the lead Composer developer to extend and improve the existing code-base.
If the rubric for giving props to a company is building entirely new applications and products (and introducing all the bugs and problems that suggests) rather than supporting (with money!) existing projects, then only the companies that make the worst decisions will be applauded.
dotLRN is the free and open source alternative to Blackboard and WebCT.
It is released under the GPL. It is totally open source, supporting PostgreSQL as well as Oracle.
It was originally funded and built by the Sloan School of Business at MIT and has recently been adopted by the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the University of Bergen in Norway and parts of Cambdridge University in England.
This past weekend I attended the dotLRN Seminar in Copenhagen and over 70 people from over 20 institutions worldwide were present. dotLRN's future is very bright!
Also, you can rest assured that no learning institution will ever face silliness such as this.
That's technically true. But since Jim and folks originally built it as a product to sell, they probably would not choose Tcl because it would take a lot more work selling it.
Believe me. I know. I need to sell AOLserver all the time. I love doing it, but the bigotry and phobia against Tcl is a real hard climb.
If nsd used Perl or Python, it would be the toast of the/. world. For no other reason than buzzword compliance.
talli
Some of the largest websites in the world use Tcl
on
Tcl Core Team Interview
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Some of the largest websites in the world use Tcl as their scripting language, including AOL.com, Netscape.com, Mapquest.com and DigitalCities.com.
This is because they use AOLserver which is a massively scaleable and powerful web application server. Some of its features are:
Multi-threaded - It's been multi-threaded since its original development in 94 or 95.
Native DB API and DB connection pooling
Embedded scripting language, which is Tcl, which allows for extremely fast development. It also allows for.ADP pages, like.ASP,.JSP or.PSP pages.
The reason Tcl is the embedded language is that AOLserver was developed in the early nineties, when Tcl was the hot new language. If the system were to be developed today, I'm sure that the developers would have chosen Python, Perl or some other more buzzword compliant language that has a strong following.
That being said, Tcl in AOLserver still rocks for developing DB backed websites. In fact, the Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) is a complete web toolkit for building just these kinds of sites. The Sloan School of Management at MIT recently funded the development of an open source course management system called dotLRN that is build using the OpenACS as its foundation.
So Tcl isn't just a GUI tool or a glue language. It's also a great language for web scripting!
Some of the largest sites in the world use Tcl almost exclusively, including AOL.com, Netscape.com and Mapquest.com. They use it because it is the embedded scripting language in the web app server AOLserver.
The people that will be most upset about the move towards open courseware will be the text book publishing industry.
The reason that college text books are so expensive is not to have fat profit margins, but because the publishing houses spend so much money up front on not only writing, producing and distributing the texts themselves, but also writing, producing and distributing the professor's materials for teaching!
At top rated schools like MIT, professors don't do this. But think of all the JC's, the Maine A&T, etc where the professors are not well paid, Nobel-caliber social and physical scientists, and you'll get an idea of the size of the market for teaching materials.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony's expectation for the XEL-1 was never anything other than establishing brand recognition as the leaders in OLED. The truth is that while the display cost ~2500, the manufacturing costs probably were around ~5K as a function of the very lossy shadow mask technology they use for deposition of the organic material. The project was never sustainable, nor intended to be.
The technologies for manufacturing remain very immature, but the major display manufacturers, material developers and equipment vendors are investing major resources into solutions. A better bellweather for display technologies may be the Koreans (Samsung, LG) and the Taiwanese (AUO, etc). These folks are chasing the rabbit pretty hard.
There is also a Silicon Valley startup that is developing an interesting solution named Kateeva. Spun out of MIT, the company is developing a solution that marries the material advantages of evaporation with the simplified deposition approach of ink-jet. More information (and video!) at this recent article from Technology Review.
Disclosure: I do have an interest in Kateeva...
Khosla is one of the planet's largest investor in biofuels. He has engaged in rather disheartening attacks on any plan that suggests electrons can replace liquid carbons molecules. See his recent statements on how plug in hybrids will forever be "toys."
He may very well be right in some instances, but given the vitriol he has spilled against alternatives to his investments, it's hard to trust his statements as honest assessments.
Gore, on the other hand, has been even handed in suggesting there is no silver bullet to our energy and climate crises.
All that being said, PV cost and efficiency has historically been closer to Khosla's estimate than it has been to Gore's. But that has been mostly as a function of investment. Now that billions upon billions are being invested in the space, I think we'll see the cost curve start to look more attractive.
Yeah, but Applied has yet to prove they can deliver a /full automated fab/ for solar panel production. Note that they've never delivered a full fab for anything, mostly because there isn't a chip fab in the world that is turn key and completely automated.
Note also that they have booked billions of dollars of orders before they even have a working prototype or even a finished process.
I'm very happy to see Applied succeed here. But let's not underestimate the difficulty they have set before them.
Being unrealistic about alternative energy solutions has led to a boom and bust in the biofuels space (something I am also bullish on). AltE is a great challenge and we're in an exciting period of it's renaissance, but let's remain level headed about our chances of success.
Actually, please slashdot readers, excuse me. Ben is a student of Ron Rivest, so I am full of shit.
Going to go tattoo RTFM on the inside of my eyelids now...
With a paper trail it becomes extremely easy to sell votes or be coerced into voting. The voter has the receipt to prove to a third party they fulfilled their previously agreed upon obligation.
Take a look at Ben Adida's work on this http://benlog.com/ http://ben.adida.net/ and http://ben.adida.net/presentations/
" Further, the compounds appear to have few limits on how they are delivered to patients. Although early indications are for application of CSAs with an ointment or cream, pills or injections may also be developed - if the compound gets to market. "
this actually makes perfect sense considering the economics and regulatory hurdles of FDA clinical trials. *
for a topical NDA (New Drug Application), the costs of a full trial is in the range of 5K-10K per patient. for NDAs that are injected or ingested, the costs are an order of magnitude higher.
furthermore, clinical trials have four steps. pre-clinical, phase 1, phase 2 and phase 3. at each stage, the chances of the trial failing increases quite significantly, resulting in major financial losses. in other words, if the company spends $300M to bring a drug to phase 3 but fails at that stage, the entire cost is completely sunk.
for ingested or injected, the risks of failing at a later stage are much higher than topical drugs. in fact, 1 in 5 drugs that reach phase 3 pass.
considering that the article states that the product is both an anti-viral and anti-fungal agent, there are many applications in the topical space from warts to foot fungus. my guess is that the pharma company will try to quickly bring the drug to market as a topical for these areas due to the above reasons while preparing for clinical trials for HIV/AIDS in parallel.
*the numbers used here are conjected, but scale is about right.
That's even worse! My faith in their engineering was shaken a bit by the fact that they couldn't migrate their systems reliably. It's even worse that they roll back data two days.
And I'm not a script kiddie that hasn't worked with large systems. Shit happens, I know that. But this is some nasty shit that typically is avoided.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that you understood that the moral of the story was not that the computer was dead but that his community had passed away.
That is cause for mourning and is the prime motivation for all of his groundbreaking work.
The technology is certainly a critical component, but I have never seen RMS waver from his main commitment which is to his community of fellow hackers.
> Me, I use Zope. I think it's always been multithreaded.
/really/ don't give a shit about scalability. Fair enough.
So you
Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months, not that the speed will necessarily increase.
Nice call, CmdrScriptKiddie.
Some choice quotes:
Personally, as a person who contracts and hires hackers, my experience is similar to Norvig's. The best people I've worked with have often not gotten a degree or gone to a "no-name state school."
On a separate point, the worst developers I've ever had to work with were MIT grads. Arrogant pricks who neither understood engineering nor teamwork. People who have been in the industry longer than I have said MIT hackers have long had reps for not playing well with others. Other "top" schools aren't that much different.
The equation is probably more along the lines of:
Red Hat + Oracle + Dell vs IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun
As such, I'm of the opinion that the first team is far more organized and focused than the second and therefore stronger.
And while Suse *used* to be the preferred distro for Oracle, in my experience it is now RHEL that Oracle prefers.
Actually, NO ARCH DOES NOT REQUIRE A CENTRAL ARCHIVE AT ALL.
that's displays a rather fundamental misunderstanding of how arch works, and fairly amusing too. usually, people complain that arch lacks a central server, and that's why it should be avoided.
It's Unix on the backend, either Oracle or PostgreSQL. The system simply doesn't run on Windows. Although the system is web-based.
.NET over Lisp.
That's funny about
This, my friend, is so completely untrue that it's mind boggling. Considering that Sloan has sponsored the .LRN project, the open source courseware system that rivals any proprietary system, you're head is deeply up your ass.
Alas. That's generally where MIT students spend their time.
LinuxFund.org: From teh FAQ: Issuing development grants for projects which may not be suitable for commercial or volunteer efforts but which will enhance the long-term vitality of the Open Source. All projects we fund will become Open Source. To be more clear, the projects that we aim to fund are the development and the
documentation of Open Source.
Pubsoft.org: They seem to do something similar.
Of course, I'm sure the FSF would be delighted to broker a donation to a specific project or developer.
That is *precisely* why this is cool. He's funded an existing open source project to make it better. According to the about section, they've contracted the lead Composer developer to extend and improve the existing code-base.
If the rubric for giving props to a company is building entirely new applications and products (and introducing all the bugs and problems that suggests) rather than supporting (with money!) existing projects, then only the companies that make the worst decisions will be applauded.
oops, my bad. figured they were the same system. sorry bout that. oh, and fuck you too, asshole.
It was originally funded and built by the Sloan School of Business at MIT and has recently been adopted by the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the University of Bergen in Norway and parts of Cambdridge University in England.
This past weekend I attended the dotLRN Seminar in Copenhagen and over 70 people from over 20 institutions worldwide were present. dotLRN's future is very bright!
Also, you can rest assured that no learning institution will ever face silliness such as this.
talli
Philip Greenspun didn't write this. Ben Adida did, and it's a big difference.
Philip started arsDigita and the arsDigita Community System (ACS). Ben started the Open arsDigita Community System community (OpenACS).
Ben wrote the article to answer people why the community worked to promote PostgreSQL and not MySQL.
talli
That's technically true. But since Jim and folks originally built it as a product to sell, they probably would not choose Tcl because it would take a lot more work selling it.
/. world. For no other reason than buzzword compliance.
Believe me. I know. I need to sell AOLserver all the time. I love doing it, but the bigotry and phobia against Tcl is a real hard climb.
If nsd used Perl or Python, it would be the toast of the
talli
This is because they use AOLserver which is a massively scaleable and powerful web application server. Some of its features are:
The reason Tcl is the embedded language is that AOLserver was developed in the early nineties, when Tcl was the hot new language. If the system were to be developed today, I'm sure that the developers would have chosen Python, Perl or some other more buzzword compliant language that has a strong following.
That being said, Tcl in AOLserver still rocks for developing DB backed websites. In fact, the Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) is a complete web toolkit for building just these kinds of sites. The Sloan School of Management at MIT recently funded the development of an open source course management system called dotLRN that is build using the OpenACS as its foundation.
So Tcl isn't just a GUI tool or a glue language. It's also a great language for web scripting!
talli
Some of the largest sites in the world use Tcl almost exclusively, including AOL.com, Netscape.com and Mapquest.com. They use it because it is the embedded scripting language in the web app server AOLserver.
So yes, it is used quite heavily.
talli
Alas, they don't write their own material anyway.
The people that will be most upset about the move towards open courseware will be the text book publishing industry.
The reason that college text books are so expensive is not to have fat profit margins, but because the publishing houses spend so much money up front on not only writing, producing and distributing the texts themselves, but also writing, producing and distributing the professor's materials for teaching!
At top rated schools like MIT, professors don't do this. But think of all the JC's, the Maine A&T, etc where the professors are not well paid, Nobel-caliber social and physical scientists, and you'll get an idea of the size of the market for teaching materials.
t
So it seems that those of us who sell PostgreSQL to client will have an easy answer for whether or not it can scale.
talli