Template lifetime is still being studied but the short term studies show surprising template resiliency. Extrapolated results indicate that template manufacturing costs will be competitive with optical mask costs. Its still an open question but its not nearly as bad as you would expect. The template is coated with a thin film of some sort before each imprint and this film prevents material from sticking to the template. I don't know about the mechanical stress for this particular technique but a similar technique called Step and Flash Imprint Lithography only requires very low pressure on the template.
I've just heard a talk on a very similar technique that does not require heating and melting the substrate. This process squishes a liquid polymer between the template and the substrate so that the polymer fills the gaps in the template. Then they cure the polymer with UV light, lift off the template and then more or less follow the standard etching process.
The first thing you would wonder about is problems with air gaps and bubbles but they say that this has not been a problem.
They also say that template lifetime does not appear to be an issue but they need to do a longer term study on this.
One of the bigger problems they were facing was pattern alignment because the liquid polymer acts as a lubricant and the template tends to slide around as its being pressed down. They say they have addressed this problem with more rigid and precise mechanics.
Its very interesting technology and its expected that this technology will begin showing up in corporate research fabs - rather than academic research - by next year.
The same way they make phase shift masks for optical lithography. They use an ebeam writer to expose a pattern onto a photoresist layer on a quartz substrate. Then they develop the resist, etch away the quartz and then strip the resist.
The lifetime of the template is an open question but research on a similar process that I've seen showed that the template lifetime was sufficient to make this process economically feasible.
According to the Princeton site, this process only eliminates the photoresist developing process. Etching and photo resist stripping is still required and therefore you still have to use a lot of unfriendly chemicals. So only some of the chemicals are eliminated. Still some reduction is better than no reduction.
The same way they make phase shift masks for optical lithography. They use an ebeam writer to expose a pattern onto a photoresist layer on a quartz substrate. Then they develop the resist, etch away the quartz and then strip the resist. Ebeam writers have very high resolution and printing patterns of this size is not a problem.
Re:Great for stamping holes. How about traces?
on
Nanoimprint Lithography
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Contact holes are generally the toughest features to print. I'm sure they chose the contact arrays as demo images because of that fact. Lines are just as easily printable with this technique and in fact I've just seen a demo of a very similar technique that showed exactly this type of capability. ie. Brick patterned lines printed using a type of contact imprint lithography.
From the article "Software sucks because users demand it to." This is according to Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft.
Yeah, we demand that you give us shitty software!
If this is MS's marketing strategy then it explains a lot. Fscking morons. How do people like this get to be CTO?
He also says, "If Microsoft had not kept pumping up Word with new features, the product would no longer exist."
That's also a load of crap. My expectations of a word processor have not changed substantially in 10 years. I want text formatting, spell checking and the ability to insert tables and graphics. That's about it. Automated TOC generation and real time spell checking are about the only features added in the last 10 years that I've found useful. The rest of it is useless to me and useless I expect to 99% of the market. Most of the auto-"correct" features I have to turn off because they often turn out to be auto-incorrect. Also the last couple of versions have been buggier and therefore less useful than previous versions. I expect this is due to feature bloat. Real improvements to Word could be made by organizing the UI in a better way, but MS won't do this because they love legacy. So users are stuck with the same poorly organized, poorly worded menus they had 10 years ago. Word exists today because MS squeezed all competition out of the market. I use Word because my company mandates it, and for no other reason. We have a legacy of Word format documents.
Every corporate project I've worked on in the last 10 years has been marketing driven. Not only that but the requirements change from day to day. Which in my estimation means that the marketing guys aren't doing their jobs. They will tell you that the market changes fast and we have to adapt, but the truth is that its their job to predict the market ahead of time. That's their job right? Granted it's not an easy task, but the point of marketing is to gauge the market and determine what we need to build now in order to meet market demands later. Again, I've never seen it work that way. Instead, marketing delivers what the market demands are today and expects solutions squeezed into a schedule that is already bursting at the seams.
But wait, it gets worse. When the crappy product goes to market then engineering gets blamed for delivering a bad design. And, on the rare occasion when engineering says "No" and that answer is accepted (rarely happens), then engineering is blamed for losing the sale. Its a lose/lose situation and at no time is marketing *ever* held accountable for *anything*.
Its all very discouraging.
The main problem as I see it is a lack of well defined requirements. If engineering knows what to build and is given the resources then they can get the job done. But, when the requirements are constantly changing then it means we really don't know what we're building and nobody should be surprised if the final product isn't solid, given that environment.
You want a good product here's what you do. Write a very good Marketing Requirments document. Make sure it covers all of the *important* details. Have engineering analyze the requirments and come up with a first order schedule. Then you start writing software/hardware/system requirements documents, followed by design documents. All of the important documents need to be peer reviewed. Then you can make another schedule estimate and start building it. CMM level 2 compliance helps keep the checks and balances in place but of course you still need good designers.
I'm working on a project now that is taking this approach and it is definitely working. The only question is whether or not the Marketroids are going to drag the requirements around all over the map when we are midstream.
I'm going out a limb here and assuming that the tivo has a low power standby mode. If so then when the unit powers up to record a show it is costing the consumer a small increase in their energy bill. The cost may be small but the point is that the energy purchase is involuntary. Also when you multiply the energy cost by millions of tivo units, it starts to look a lot less innocuous.
You may want to reword that. It absolutely is intrusive when a corporation can remotely activate and control a device in millions of households. Doesn't matter if the unit was being used or not, the fact that they've left their "fingerprints" behind is clear evidence of intrusion.
You may also want to take notice that in many cases this action was taken against the users wishes. This is evidenced by the fact that many of these users have complained quite loudly.
I don't know much about how the tivo works but I'm willing to bet that it has a low power standby mode and that by powering up to record a show it is therefore costing the consumer a small increase in their energy bill. Multiply that by millions of tivo units to see the overall energy cost. If my assumption is correct then this is another example of intrusion.
To say that this is "not intrusive in the slightest" is not correct.
I still don't think so. If the platform independent Internet itself didn't drive the broadband market then I don't see how a single proprietary console can. There are 100's of millions of home computers in the U.S. (200 million I think but don't quote me) compared to 5 or 6 million XBox consoles. As far as telecommunication clients go, the XBox barely registers on the scale. I also doubt MS will be willing to invest the billions needed to expand the network infrastructure, especially when such expansion would be taken advantage of as much by their competitors as themselves. They would have to lock down the new network to be XBox only and they can't afford to make such an obvious move given the current anti-trust situation. XBox will not be the broadband driver, its way too small in terms of market share.
"No more logging into 50 servers to find a good game as all the servers will be listed centrally."
Excuse me? What games are you playing? Every online game I play already has this capablility built in, its called a server browser. Buddy lists are also supported for many online games and networks. Many of these buddy lists are not restricted to a single game, GameSpy for instance. This is nothing new and is not unique to XBoxLive.
The XBox only supports broadband connections and it doesn't look like broadband access is going to expand anytime soon. They *may* be able to capture a sizable portion of the broadband console market but that market is itself only a small slice of the overall online console market.
We like seeing Enron fail because they bilked consumers, investors and even their own employees out of billions of dollars. We like seeing the bad guys get their due.
During California's rolling blackouts, Ken Lay said something to the effect of "At least the Titanic went down with the lights on." Pretty ironic considering the state of his own company now. Its called karma.
Rest assured Enron's competitors are not feeling all warm and fuzzy over Enron's failure, indeed FERC is widening their investigation. And, which of Enron's competitors owns a tv network?
I don't know about this long variable naming thing. Certainly unique and meaningful names are appropriate but I've seen this taken to an extreme and it was very cumbersome code to read and modify. We once had a contractor whose variable names were literally entire english sentences.
Something like this: if (theUserHasRequestedToFaxTheDocumentAndThePrinterH asAFaxModem) {
if(theUserHasRequestedNotificationAfterTheDocument Has BeenSuccessfullyTransmitted)
{
etc. I am not exaggerating. I probably wouldn't have believed it myself except that I saw it with my own eyes.
I'll tell you why this sucks. You can't tell what the variable is at a glance, you have to read the whole dumb sentence. This makes analyzing the code a big pain in the ass especially when all of the variables are like this and some of them start or end with very similar phrases.
Code is speech and speech conveys an idea. In the case of code speech, the idea that is conveyed is a mathematical one. Changing the form of the equation does not change its function. So, its not the code that is important, its the function of the code.
I think you are correct. One coin toss will not allow you to pick 1 choice from a list of 1000. It requires a minimum of 10 tosses to perform a binary "search" of a list that size.
Still 47% accuracy is pretty awful for a critical system.
Yes, *but* Uureal Tournament 2003 and Unreal 2 will both be out for Win/Mac this year. So I don't see Unreal Championship as being all that exclusive, at least in terms of game play or engine capability. It will have different maps and weapons but that's probably about it.
Besides FPS games just don't cut it without a mouse or suitable mouse replacement. That's been said many times but its an entirely valid point. Given the choice, I'de much rather play UT2003 with KB/mouse than UC with a joystick. Since I will have the choice, I won't buy UC. Yes, I do have an xbox and its probably going on ebay soon.
In regards to switching games on the fly and getting IM type buddy messages, I don't see any reason why this requires central game servers. MS can have central servers for IM, while the game servers run on separate boxes. Both data streams don't need to come from the same server.
Here's the scenario, you're playing a game on server A, and you're connected to the central IM server B. You get a buddy message from server B telling you your buddy is on server C, you disconnect from A and connect to game server C. Neither central game servers, complex message passing nor magic is required. All that is required is separate connections for game data and IM data.
I read your armadillo site awhile back. At the time you were working on the guidance system and found that the radar you were planning to use would not work because it only provided data in one dimension. IIRC.
Are you now using an inertial guidance system or is there a better alternative? I assume that GPS does not provide enough accuracy for low speed guidance.
This type of recycling fee is already built into the cost of rechargeable batteries.
http://www.rbrc.org/licensee/
According to this web site, 90% of rechargeable battery manufacturers are members of this organization. They recycle the batteries and they are funded by the battery makers, which means that a recycling fee is built into the cost of any battery bearing the RBRC symbol.
So, according to your argument Jerry Sanders is testifying on idealogical grounds and even if he was the CEO of a software company that competes with MS, he would still give the same testimony. Sorry, but I'm just not buying that "little nugget of truth" of yours.
Your argument is as much speculation as anyone elses but without supporting circumstantial evidence. The job of the CEO is to grow the business, ideaologies most often not withstanding.
I agree. Furthermore, music sharing as I see it is a form of advertising. The only difference where downloading is concerned, is that the user gets to pick what they want to listen to rather than the music industry making that choice. When I was in highschool my friends would make mix tapes for each other. I was exposed to a lot of new music that way and consequently ended up purchasing many records. That's a form of advertising and what's more, it's advertising with zero cost to the industry. It's also targeted advertising which is always more efficient, but as I've said, its advertising which is not controlled by the industry. Maybe that's what they don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
Template lifetime is still being studied but the short term studies show surprising template resiliency. Extrapolated results indicate that template manufacturing costs will be competitive with optical mask costs. Its still an open question but its not nearly as bad as you would expect. The template is coated with a thin film of some sort before each imprint and this film prevents material from sticking to the template. I don't know about the mechanical stress for this particular technique but a similar technique called Step and Flash Imprint Lithography only requires very low pressure on the template.
I've just heard a talk on a very similar technique that does not require heating and melting the substrate. This process squishes a liquid polymer between the template and the substrate so that the polymer fills the gaps in the template. Then they cure the polymer with UV light, lift off the template and then more or less follow the standard etching process.
The first thing you would wonder about is problems with air gaps and bubbles but they say that this has not been a problem.
They also say that template lifetime does not appear to be an issue but they need to do a longer term study on this.
One of the bigger problems they were facing was pattern alignment because the liquid polymer acts as a lubricant and the template tends to slide around as its being pressed down. They say they have addressed this problem with more rigid and precise mechanics.
Its very interesting technology and its expected that this technology will begin showing up in corporate research fabs - rather than academic research - by next year.
The same way they make phase shift masks for optical lithography. They use an ebeam writer to expose a pattern onto a photoresist layer on a quartz substrate. Then they develop the resist, etch away the quartz and then strip the resist.
The lifetime of the template is an open question but research on a similar process that I've seen showed that the template lifetime was sufficient to make this process economically feasible.
According to the Princeton site, this process only eliminates the photoresist developing process. Etching and photo resist stripping is still required and therefore you still have to use a lot of unfriendly chemicals. So only some of the chemicals are eliminated. Still some reduction is better than no reduction.
The same way they make phase shift masks for optical lithography. They use an ebeam writer to expose a pattern onto a photoresist layer on a quartz substrate. Then they develop the resist, etch away the quartz and then strip the resist. Ebeam writers have very high resolution and printing patterns of this size is not a problem.
Contact holes are generally the toughest features to print. I'm sure they chose the contact arrays as demo images because of that fact. Lines are just as easily printable with this technique and in fact I've just seen a demo of a very similar technique that showed exactly this type of capability. ie. Brick patterned lines printed using a type of contact imprint lithography.
From the article "Software sucks because users demand it to." This is according to Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft.
Yeah, we demand that you give us shitty software!
If this is MS's marketing strategy then it explains a lot. Fscking morons. How do people like this get to be CTO?
He also says, "If Microsoft had not kept pumping up Word with new features, the product would no longer exist."
That's also a load of crap. My expectations of a word processor have not changed substantially in 10 years. I want text formatting, spell checking and the ability to insert tables and graphics. That's about it. Automated TOC generation and real time spell checking are about the only features added in the last 10 years that I've found useful. The rest of it is useless to me and useless I expect to 99% of the market. Most of the auto-"correct" features I have to turn off because they often turn out to be auto-incorrect. Also the last couple of versions have been buggier and therefore less useful than previous versions. I expect this is due to feature bloat. Real improvements to Word could be made by organizing the UI in a better way, but MS won't do this because they love legacy. So users are stuck with the same poorly organized, poorly worded menus they had 10 years ago. Word exists today because MS squeezed all competition out of the market. I use Word because my company mandates it, and for no other reason. We have a legacy of Word format documents.
Every corporate project I've worked on in the last 10 years has been marketing driven. Not only that but the requirements change from day to day. Which in my estimation means that the marketing guys aren't doing their jobs. They will tell you that the market changes fast and we have to adapt, but the truth is that its their job to predict the market ahead of time. That's their job right? Granted it's not an easy task, but the point of marketing is to gauge the market and determine what we need to build now in order to meet market demands later. Again, I've never seen it work that way. Instead, marketing delivers what the market demands are today and expects solutions squeezed into a schedule that is already bursting at the seams.
But wait, it gets worse. When the crappy product goes to market then engineering gets blamed for delivering a bad design. And, on the rare occasion when engineering says "No" and that answer is accepted (rarely happens), then engineering is blamed for losing the sale. Its a lose/lose situation and at no time is marketing *ever* held accountable for *anything*.
Its all very discouraging.
The main problem as I see it is a lack of well defined requirements. If engineering knows what to build and is given the resources then they can get the job done. But, when the requirements are constantly changing then it means we really don't know what we're building and nobody should be surprised if the final product isn't solid, given that environment.
You want a good product here's what you do. Write a very good Marketing Requirments document. Make sure it covers all of the *important* details. Have engineering analyze the requirments and come up with a first order schedule. Then you start writing software/hardware/system requirements documents, followed by design documents. All of the important documents need to be peer reviewed. Then you can make another schedule estimate and start building it. CMM level 2 compliance helps keep the checks and balances in place but of course you still need good designers.
I'm working on a project now that is taking this approach and it is definitely working. The only question is whether or not the Marketroids are going to drag the requirements around all over the map when we are midstream.
I'm going out a limb here and assuming that the tivo has a low power standby mode. If so then when the unit powers up to record a show it is costing the consumer a small increase in their energy bill. The cost may be small but the point is that the energy purchase is involuntary. Also when you multiply the energy cost by millions of tivo units, it starts to look a lot less innocuous.
You may want to reword that. It absolutely is intrusive when a corporation can remotely activate and control a device in millions of households. Doesn't matter if the unit was being used or not, the fact that they've left their "fingerprints" behind is clear evidence of intrusion.
You may also want to take notice that in many cases this action was taken against the users wishes. This is evidenced by the fact that many of these users have complained quite loudly.
I don't know much about how the tivo works but I'm willing to bet that it has a low power standby mode and that by powering up to record a show it is therefore costing the consumer a small increase in their energy bill. Multiply that by millions of tivo units to see the overall energy cost. If my assumption is correct then this is another example of intrusion.
To say that this is "not intrusive in the slightest" is not correct.
I still don't think so. If the platform independent Internet itself didn't drive the broadband market then I don't see how a single proprietary console can. There are 100's of millions of home computers in the U.S. (200 million I think but don't quote me) compared to 5 or 6 million XBox consoles. As far as telecommunication clients go, the XBox barely registers on the scale. I also doubt MS will be willing to invest the billions needed to expand the network infrastructure, especially when such expansion would be taken advantage of as much by their competitors as themselves. They would have to lock down the new network to be XBox only and they can't afford to make such an obvious move given the current anti-trust situation. XBox will not be the broadband driver, its way too small in terms of market share.
"No more logging into 50 servers to find a good game as all the servers will be listed centrally."
Excuse me? What games are you playing? Every online game I play already has this capablility built in, its called a server browser. Buddy lists are also supported for many online games and networks. Many of these buddy lists are not restricted to a single game, GameSpy for instance. This is nothing new and is not unique to XBoxLive.
The XBox only supports broadband connections and it doesn't look like broadband access is going to expand anytime soon. They *may* be able to capture a sizable portion of the broadband console market but that market is itself only a small slice of the overall online console market.
We like seeing Enron fail because they bilked consumers, investors and even their own employees out of billions of dollars. We like seeing the bad guys get their due.
During California's rolling blackouts, Ken Lay said something to the effect of "At least the Titanic went down with the lights on." Pretty ironic considering the state of his own company now. Its called karma.
Rest assured Enron's competitors are not feeling all warm and fuzzy over Enron's failure, indeed FERC is widening their investigation. And, which of Enron's competitors owns a tv network?
I don't know about this long variable naming thing. Certainly unique and meaningful names are appropriate but I've seen this taken to an extreme and it was very cumbersome code to read and modify. We once had a contractor whose variable names were literally entire english sentences.
H asAFaxModem)t Has BeenSuccessfullyTransmitted)
r interHa sAFaxModemt hTheStandard FaxHeadere DocumentHas BeenSuccessfullyTransmitted
Something like this:
if (theUserHasRequestedToFaxTheDocumentAndThePrinter
{
if(theUserHasRequestedNotificationAfterTheDocumen
{
etc. I am not exaggerating. I probably wouldn't have believed it myself except that I saw it with my own eyes.
I'll tell you why this sucks. You can't tell what the variable is at a glance, you have to read the whole dumb sentence. This makes analyzing the code a big pain in the ass especially when all of the variables are like this and some of them start or end with very similar phrases.
Ex.
theUserHasRequestedToFaxTheDocumentAndTheP
theUserHasRequestedToFaxTheDocumentWi
theUserHasRequestedNotificationAfterTh
Now imagine pages and pages and pages of code using names like this. Excruciatingly explicit does not necessarily mean easy to understand.
Code is speech and speech conveys an idea. In the case of code speech, the idea that is conveyed is a mathematical one. Changing the form of the equation does not change its function. So, its not the code that is important, its the function of the code.
I think you are correct. One coin toss will not allow you to pick 1 choice from a list of 1000. It requires a minimum of 10 tosses to perform a binary "search" of a list that size.
Still 47% accuracy is pretty awful for a critical system.
Yes, *but* Uureal Tournament 2003 and Unreal 2 will both be out for Win/Mac this year. So I don't see Unreal Championship as being all that exclusive, at least in terms of game play or engine capability. It will have different maps and weapons but that's probably about it.
Besides FPS games just don't cut it without a mouse or suitable mouse replacement. That's been said many times but its an entirely valid point. Given the choice, I'de much rather play UT2003 with KB/mouse than UC with a joystick. Since I will have the choice, I won't buy UC. Yes, I do have an xbox and its probably going on ebay soon.
In regards to switching games on the fly and getting IM type buddy messages, I don't see any reason why this requires central game servers. MS can have central servers for IM, while the game servers run on separate boxes. Both data streams don't need to come from the same server.
Here's the scenario, you're playing a game on server A, and you're connected to the central IM server B. You get a buddy message from server B telling you your buddy is on server C, you disconnect from A and connect to game server C. Neither central game servers, complex message passing nor magic is required. All that is required is separate connections for game data and IM data.
I read your armadillo site awhile back. At the time you were working on the guidance system and found that the radar you were planning to use would not work because it only provided data in one dimension. IIRC.
Are you now using an inertial guidance system or is there a better alternative? I assume that GPS does not provide enough accuracy for low speed guidance.
What if I use my Tivo to skip the 'content' and just watch the ads does that mean the cable company owes me a credit?
"... he (Gates) has more reason to lie than most of things we fib about"
What does that mean? Rich people have more reason to lie? What the hell *was* your point anyways?
This type of recycling fee is already built into the cost of rechargeable batteries.
http://www.rbrc.org/licensee/
According to this web site, 90% of rechargeable battery manufacturers are members of this organization. They recycle the batteries and they are funded by the battery makers, which means that a recycling fee is built into the cost of any battery bearing the RBRC symbol.
So, according to your argument Jerry Sanders is testifying on idealogical grounds and even if he was the CEO of a software company that competes with MS, he would still give the same testimony. Sorry, but I'm just not buying that "little nugget of truth" of yours.
Your argument is as much speculation as anyone elses but without supporting circumstantial evidence. The job of the CEO is to grow the business, ideaologies most often not withstanding.
I agree. Furthermore, music sharing as I see it is a form of advertising. The only difference where downloading is concerned, is that the user gets to pick what they want to listen to rather than the music industry making that choice. When I was in highschool my friends would make mix tapes for each other. I was exposed to a lot of new music that way and consequently ended up purchasing many records. That's a form of advertising and what's more, it's advertising with zero cost to the industry. It's also targeted advertising which is always more efficient, but as I've said, its advertising which is not controlled by the industry. Maybe that's what they don't like.