But, that's really the point. You're human, you can move. Heck, that's what I'm working on doing. I've purchased some land in a cooler place and I'm heading that way as soon as I can drum up the contracts I need.
Whatever your summers have been in very recent times, they weren't the same 50, 100, 200, 300, 400, or 500 years ago and they won't be the same 50, 100, 200, 300 or more years in the future. The expectation that we seem to have developed that the weather in an area won't change over our lifetime is not born out by history. Those who are saying "but its been this way all my life" are missing the point. Your lifetime is not even a noticeable spec on the timeline. Go back a mere few decades more, and I bet you'll find it was different.
Creationist, evolutionist, it doesn't really matter which point of view you come from, the end truth is the same. The miles deep layer of life completely encompassing the planet IS the correction mechanism. It has evolved to manage the environment. Evolution theory has been missing the boat in concentrating on first order effects. Their are second, third, and so on layers of orders of symbiotic relationships amongst the life forms on the planet. Combined, the whole system has an (observed) ability to recover from disasters that is quite beyond anything we could come up with.
And by the way, whether you believe in evolution or creationism, you should at least be able to acknowledge that it will likely be many lifetimes before mankind will even posess the capacity to completely understand our ecosystem, much less come up with anything better. If not, when you start understanding how much mumbo-jumbo your "science" is, we'll talk again.
The first step in learning is realizing that you don't know.
Every year of this planet's life it has been permanently changed from the year before. It's a continuously changing system that has amazing resiliency. If you believe some, we had dinosaurs here millions of years ago. We don't now. Perhaps we should view that change as one that shouldn't have happened, dig up their DNA, recreate them, and wipe ourselves out of their way.
Life is all about change. Species will come and go and like species may in fact come again. Mankind's "permanent" change on this planet hardly even amount to a measurable fraction of the changes it's been through.
You're wrong. Our planet can indeed be looked at as a complex living organism built around a stone. In fact, to understand its weather patterns, it MUST be looked at that way. The various bacterias, plankton, algaes, etc. have a tremendous moderating impact. And moderating doesn't always mean "calming" or "smoothing". Sometimes, a moderation involves swinging to an extreme for a while to achieve a balance again.
I too like all of the things you spoke of. I spend two weeks camping in Yellowstone every year that are what keeps me going. But, our cities and waterways are not less polluted because of a cultural shift, they are less polluted because of a technological growth that will continue.
I'm just saying we need a dose of reality. For example, every year they harp on the ozone levels in St. Louis being too high. We have all sorts of special restrictions in place trying to bring them down. But they are just starting to figure out that its not us at all. The forests to our west contain a tree that produces over 80% of our ozone in the summer. And the numbers of that tree are increasing. We can't win... that is unless we start paying people to save the environment by cutting down all of their treees. And what's wrong with not winning? We can always move! That's what they used to do when nature caused problems in one place. Rather than trying to change it, just move to another.
We think we know it all, and really we know next to nothing. No amount of supercomputer power can ever accurately predict our effects on our planet or its effects on us because ever little thing here is a variable that must be taken into account.
The only thing hurt in the long terms by these changes is our control freak egos.
All we're seeing here is our planet's self-correction mechanisms at work. There is likely nothing that we mere humans can do to permanently change the planet. It's design contains a complex system of checks and balances that we might actually be able to understand a fraction of in another 1000 years or so. We argue on the basis of the understanding of a few variables in a system with nearly infinite variables and it laughs at us.
But why fright? I would love a 10 degree drop in St. Louis. Enough to cut the oppressive humid heat out of the summers and get the snow cold enough to stay snow instead of becoming mucky slush in the winter. It would be a refreshing break. And the glaciers of North America need another boost. They've been disappearing in places.
The problem with us is that our cities are now too large and our roots too deep. We build expecting the rivers and coasts to stay where they are, not realizing that where they are is not where they were 50 years ago. Then we try to hold nature back. We confine rivers to courses that bottleneck their flood waters, we build dikes to keep the ocean at bay, we water to keep the deserts at bay... STOP!!! If nature wants to move a river or change a coast, let it! If people have the money to build there, let them! But don't get upset when their homes are swept away. They should know and accept the risk. We need to learn to build with the expectation of change... even welcoming it. Build so that change enhances.
And all you environmentalists out there, stop whining. 150 years ago this nation was so smoggy the buildings had to be scrubbed of soot every year. We were in a little ice age just 200 years ago. Its the cycle of life. You think way more of us then nature does if you think we can actually put any real dent in it. Things will change. And over the long term, they'll get better (my dream is a society with enough clean energy that we can all afford to move to massive underground complexes and restore the surface to be one big park)(oh, that means NO SOLAR PANELS MUCKING UP THE HORIZON TOO). This planet can afford for us to make our mistakes and learn from them.
There have always been 2 types of engineers
on
Engineer in a Box?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
those whose jobs it is to innovate and make the impossible possible, and those who just turn and crank. One innovator can't be replaced by 100 turn and crank guys just because the ability to innovate doesn't follow a statistical bell curve. Its not like after you get up to some obscene number of turn and crank guys, your chance of developing an innovation will reach 90% or something. It will still be at zero.
I think what this guy is lamenting is an adjustment in the ratio of innovators to turn-and-crankers that has been brought on by the anti-innovator prejudices of the SEI and other "everything must be predictable" initiatives. Very large projects that couldn't hold innovators because management was threatened by them and wouldn't pay them the six figures that they were worth were collapsing (as they should). The world reacted by saying that we can't depend on heros instead of recognizing that they needed to pay the heros more. Now all the heros, those that just instinctively know the aspects of "right" that aren't teachable are disappearing. Big surprise.
The result is that true innovation and accomplishment of the "impossible" has been going away and our economy is suffering because of it. What truly new classification of software have you seen in the last few years? I don't know about you, but the world in CompUSA has been looking pretty stagnant to me for quite some time. Mostly incremental advances, not the type of true innovation we were seeing in the late 80s before these things had really taken hold. Sales are down because the next blockbuster reason to use more CPU cycles, more RAM, more disk space, more pixels, more polygons/second, etc. hasn't been appearing.
Also, I saw several posts on here about this being because people can't do it all anymore. Bull. Some who could have done it all are being hampered by the education system telling them that they can't, others aren't allowed too, and others just stay quiet about it to avoid the backlash from those who've been brainwashed into thinking that we know such a vast amount of things that noone can do it all. It seems that the vast mindless majority is too threatened by the idea that someone can still do it all. And its become non-politically correct to hurt their self-esteem by telling them any different.
I've hear though that due to the non-random distribution of pixels in a digital array, you may have to have more than 2 pixels / LP in your conversion... Would you think that there is any truth to that?
Agreed,,,, for the end product. What film gives you that the digitals STILL don't is the ability to push the colors or crop and zoom at processing time and still have full size pictures printed with 180DPI of real detail with a full color range.
With a 48 bit color range, you can print 24 bit color even after shifting the colors. 48 is more like film and may be enough.
I've read that matching film in resolution and thus support for cropping and enlarging images will require something more on the order of a 100MP. Is there anyone out there who knows the resolution of film? I'd guess its limited by either the molecule size or the smoothness of the chemical distribution...
It's amazing to me how many people just don't get it on resolution. Resolution and text size are two completely separate issues. MS Windows is just starting too mature in this area, thankfully. It now supports much higher resolutions, but still needs some work in icons, title bars, etc. so that they draw to a certain size instead of a certain number of pixels. Suspect they'll be addressing the rest of the equation in the new 3D desktop environment.
Studies have shown that increasing resolution does far more to rest the eyes than increasing refresh rates. Apparently, our mind does a lot more to fill in those jaggies than we have been recognizing. Or, if smoothing using antialiasing is occurring, it does a lot more to interpret the fuzziness that this causes.
My dream though is still a set of glasses that can opaquely replace anything in my field of view at a resolution at least equal to the receptors in the eye. That means we need to get those 9 million plus pixels plus some down onto a tiny chip. Then we can start exploring transparent user interfaces that integrate into our world.
This is a well known question on the photo boards. The answer is 180 DPI for a person with average sight viewing at arms length. View it closer than arms length, you'll need greater resolution to reach the limits of the eye. Further away, lesser resolution.
From a CPU point of view, I run at 4800x1200 all the time because I have 3 1600x1200 screens. I don't find that it makes much of a difference at all. I do however have one very good graphics card on two of those displays (GeForce4 TI 4400). That helps a lot.
I really don't think that's true. I've learned and programmed in more than 50 languages and can say now that you move to a point where all the languages are simple instantiations of a single abstraction in my head. Some are perhaps better instantiations than others, but still, just instantiations. True knowledge is not found in the facts but rather in the patterns behind them. We've turned college degree programs into technical howtos and gotten off of the track of knowing the theory under all of it.
The same is true of operating systems, RF systems, and other disciplines. Disciplines are merely instantiations of fields of knowledge. A single 4 year degree should be able to teach several fields of knowledge. I learned at least 4 that I can think of in computer engineering. After that, everything else is just instantiating your knowledge with new parameters.
The mistake I think we make today is to believe that in order to understand a field we must be able to perform in that field without reference. I understand several fields at a deeper level and can perform better than those that don't need a reference in the fields because I understand the reasons behind their reference.
The idea that information has become too voluminous for one individual to learn is also false. Rather, the art of applying abstract knowledge to predict or understand great volumes of detailed information without actually having to know those great volumes has been lost.
When going through college, I didn't do homework as a rule. Couldn't see the sense in practicing such obvious things. I noticed that in general I didn't even have to listen in class or read the book. For instance, in Calculus, most of the thought process of solving the problems on one test was implied by the thought process of solving the problems on the last test. It was relatively easy to go into the test cold and simply solve the problems based on a slight stretch from past experience.
When one knows the sequence of steps that have been used historically in developing knowledge, the next step is usually implied (hence the reason it became the next step (not, in most cases, because someone was particularly brilliant, but rather because they were in the right place at the right time to be the one person of the many possible ones to develop that step).
"If this theory holds true it may explain why some humans who are repeatedly exposed to HIV don't get sick."
Well, duuuhhhh. Pick almost any virus in existence and SOME one of the billions of us out there has immunity due to a genetically superior immune system. But looking at that person's genetics almost never results in a viable non-genetic treatment approach. And genetic treatment approaches aren't going to pan out in mass until they get to the point of designing enzymes/proteins or whatever that are targeted to actually repair the specific DNA flaw present.
It sure would be nice if we'd allocate money for research according to the number of man-years a disease is taking from the population. Then real problems like cancer and heart disease will get there due. I can't do anything (other than commit suicide) to reduce my chance of getting those to less than 1 chance in 1000s, but all that I have to do to avoid AIDs is keep it in my pants and stay away from needles. Sure there are exceptions, but there in the noise.
This continuing trend to greater specialization is killing our ability to innovate. Different specialists can never communicate well enough to replace a multi-disciplined individual. Teamwork can only go so far. There is no substitute for knowing it all.
I think you're talking about the guys that were working with polymer films. They were going to print large amounts of circuitry on films and then fold the films many times over. Speed wasn't going to be as high as silicon type circuitry, but surface area of the "chip" was measured in square feet instead of millimeters. I'd be interested in what happened to those guys... they were hoping to be in production about 18 months ago if I remember right.
Let's abandon these industries and create an open data industry with a different economic model. Donations to open data organizations could provide the funding to take scripts that are donated (or even produced in a collaborative fashion by the community), film raw footage, and supply it to a collaborative editing community that produces many versions of the movie. The best would rise to the top in normal open software style. The results would be free to all.
What we need is open data, not open hardware. The basic PC hardware design is about as open as things can get.
We should create movie, music, literature and other organizations that create open data on a non-profit charity like model. They would solicit donations and produce new data when the donations reach a level high enough to pay for it's creation. Perhaps we could even encourage the donation of scripts, lyrics, editing time, etc.... Or raw, unedited files could be distributed and the community could submit edits in the same way that patches are developed. You could even end up with divergent mixes of movies and music....
Ahhh. But unless nanotechnology can convert energy to matter (I wouldn't discount the possibility given some of the strange things they've found at that level), you've not addressed the main issue. The main issue was too much energy absorption and too little reflection, or changed distribution of energy absorption/reflection. The pollution involved in solar cell manufacture and disposal is of concern, but somewhat lesser.
I sure hope the "solar-cell covered Earth" is not the future. Its one of the most ecologically devastating possibilities I can imagine.
a) Plating large areas of the Earth with solar cells would create a far more efficient green-house effect than green house gasses. Basically, green house gasses trap solar energy to heat the Earth by bouncing it back in when it is on its way back out. Solar cells trap solar energy even sooner by absorbing it and converting it to electricity which will eventually be (mostly) converted to heat. And the goal is to trap as much of that energy as possible. If we cover large areas of the Earth with solar cells, we will change the reflectivity unless the solar cells are carefully managed to absorb only what would have been absorbed by the ground and the passage back out of the atmosphere. But human nature says that that management will not occur. Instead, we would carefully strive to convert every bit of energy we could. We'd also likely have arguments over who could absorb how much in the same way we now argue over who can release how much gasses.
b) The localized weather effects would likely hit sooner and be even more devastating. I've heard many times statements along the lines of "just plate Arizona, New Mexico, and/or the California desert areas and you could provide much of the countries needs". Such irresponsible thinking seems to be rampant. Essentially, you'd be capturing the heat of those areas and shipping it to other parts of the country. The effects would be chaotic and very difficult to predict.
c) And for those who would say just put the cells in space and beam the power, now you're catching energy that would have never reached Earth and delivering it here to heat things up.
d) What about the toxic effects of mining, production, and eventual disposal?
We have some responsibility when making responses to try to be correct factually, but there is even greater responsibility at the level of those posting an article. This seemed more like a gossip than a thoughtful post.
Everybody who is anybody is making chips at.13 today. Everybody who is anybody is at roughly the same stage as IBM in bringing up.09-.10 technology. So why the bolstering of IBM who has anything but a pristine past and the bashing of others who are just as good and bad? Instead, why don't we here who is making progress on.07 and who might be leaping forward to the early use of.01 features (by thinking out of the box).
This is just a reminder that we can never be secured in any part of our lives by technology. The only path back to a secure society is the path that leads back to teaching people that noone is responsible for their actions but themselves and that intentionally irresponsible actions will be punished according to the effect of the action even when the effect goes way beyond the original intentions.
Actually, DSL is not entirely a distance vs speed compromise. The screwy XDSL the phone companies deployed was totally unnecessary. They took ADSL, a 7MB technology, and lowered the power so that the home side wouldn't require a filter. Then, after they had already agreed on everything and started deployment, they realized that the real world was different then the lab and that they would indeed need filters on the home side and thus visits to the homes (which is what they were trying to avoid).
True ADSL was designed with the goal of going further and faster. They could fix that problem for starters.
After they fix that, they still have further ?DSL generations already designed that push the limits to 60MB and beyond, but they are taking a one size fits all approach instead. They seem to be working along the lines of deploy XDSL nationwide, then switch everyone to ADSL, then switch everyone to HDSL, then switch everyone to VDSL, etc.
That approach is ridiculously slow. We can't wait 5-10 years per generation. This is where I think the tiered approach can help. All of the above should be available to me now for different prices. They've apparently made infrastructure mistakes if they can't put different switch types in different slots on their side.
As I understand it, they've also already made infrastructure mistakes in deploying the fiber as they've deployed a lot of cheap fiber that was easier to deploy but isn't capable of upgrade to the higher speeds. If it's going to take a decade or more to deploy an infrastructure, they need to make sure that its one that will carry the signals of the next decade.
In 2 to 3 years we should have terabyte hard drives. 8 years after that we'll have petabyte mass media. So, 11 years from now we'll have petabyte mass media at consumer prices. We should also at that time have processors approximately equivalent to today's processors revved to 384 GHz. Combine this with good eyeglass based displays and we should have the juice for computers to interact with us by replacing things in our field of view (show us virtual paper held in our real hands and allow us to set it down on desks and file it in cabinets type stuff). This kind of paradigm will allow for tremendous growth in ease of use as they will finally adjust to our world instead of us to theirs.
But the communications link is going to get left in the dust. We can only compress so much. The only bottleneck in the next true leap in human-machine interaction that is more serious than the communications one is the software one.
Actually, normal corn is nearly non-existent in the US now and is rapidly being contaminated across all of North America. Pollen from the genetic crops is spreading far and wide.
I liken some of Zimbabwe's worries to someone patenting a virus that infects all programs worldwide and then claiming rights to the infected programs. The bio industry has already gone after farmers whose crop was unintentionally cross-pollinated claiming that they did it on purpose. There are valid points in Zimbabwe's concerns.
I think I'm OK with tiered pricing, but we need to get back to something akin to Moore's law on it. I've been very disappointed with the deployment methods and speeds of broadband. I've been on DSL now for 2 1/2 years. My speed should have doubled at least once by now, but I don't see it happening anytime soon. Hard drives are doubling every year. PCs are still doubling every 18 months or so. But the wide area link has not been following Moore's since we outgrew POTS. It used to be that I could get a new modem and boost my speed every year or two. Now that the big guys are in control and continuously undershooting on the infrastructure rollout, I think we're on a decade long plan. This is very very bad.
With all the publicity from Slashdot, I wonder if MS will file a copyright infringement lawsuit against the guy? I'm sure they have plans for a line of treehouses that this guy has just trampled all over:o)
Slashdot Mirror
But, that's really the point. You're human, you can move. Heck, that's what I'm working on doing. I've purchased some land in a cooler place and I'm heading that way as soon as I can drum up the contracts I need.
Whatever your summers have been in very recent times, they weren't the same 50, 100, 200, 300, 400, or 500 years ago and they won't be the same 50, 100, 200, 300 or more years in the future. The expectation that we seem to have developed that the weather in an area won't change over our lifetime is not born out by history. Those who are saying "but its been this way all my life" are missing the point. Your lifetime is not even a noticeable spec on the timeline. Go back a mere few decades more, and I bet you'll find it was different.
Creationist, evolutionist, it doesn't really matter which point of view you come from, the end truth is the same. The miles deep layer of life completely encompassing the planet IS the correction mechanism. It has evolved to manage the environment. Evolution theory has been missing the boat in concentrating on first order effects. Their are second, third, and so on layers of orders of symbiotic relationships amongst the life forms on the planet. Combined, the whole system has an (observed) ability to recover from disasters that is quite beyond anything we could come up with.
And by the way, whether you believe in evolution or creationism, you should at least be able to acknowledge that it will likely be many lifetimes before mankind will even posess the capacity to completely understand our ecosystem, much less come up with anything better. If not, when you start understanding how much mumbo-jumbo your "science" is, we'll talk again.
The first step in learning is realizing that you don't know.
Every year of this planet's life it has been permanently changed from the year before. It's a continuously changing system that has amazing resiliency. If you believe some, we had dinosaurs here millions of years ago. We don't now. Perhaps we should view that change as one that shouldn't have happened, dig up their DNA, recreate them, and wipe ourselves out of their way.
Life is all about change. Species will come and go and like species may in fact come again. Mankind's "permanent" change on this planet hardly even amount to a measurable fraction of the changes it's been through.
You're wrong. Our planet can indeed be looked at as a complex living organism built around a stone. In fact, to understand its weather patterns, it MUST be looked at that way. The various bacterias, plankton, algaes, etc. have a tremendous moderating impact. And moderating doesn't always mean "calming" or "smoothing". Sometimes, a moderation involves swinging to an extreme for a while to achieve a balance again.
I too like all of the things you spoke of. I spend two weeks camping in Yellowstone every year that are what keeps me going. But, our cities and waterways are not less polluted because of a cultural shift, they are less polluted because of a technological growth that will continue.
I'm just saying we need a dose of reality. For example, every year they harp on the ozone levels in St. Louis being too high. We have all sorts of special restrictions in place trying to bring them down. But they are just starting to figure out that its not us at all. The forests to our west contain a tree that produces over 80% of our ozone in the summer. And the numbers of that tree are increasing. We can't win... that is unless we start paying people to save the environment by cutting down all of their treees. And what's wrong with not winning? We can always move! That's what they used to do when nature caused problems in one place. Rather than trying to change it, just move to another.
We think we know it all, and really we know next to nothing. No amount of supercomputer power can ever accurately predict our effects on our planet or its effects on us because ever little thing here is a variable that must be taken into account.
The only thing hurt in the long terms by these changes is our control freak egos.
All we're seeing here is our planet's self-correction mechanisms at work. There is likely nothing that we mere humans can do to permanently change the planet. It's design contains a complex system of checks and balances that we might actually be able to understand a fraction of in another 1000 years or so. We argue on the basis of the understanding of a few variables in a system with nearly infinite variables and it laughs at us.
But why fright? I would love a 10 degree drop in St. Louis. Enough to cut the oppressive humid heat out of the summers and get the snow cold enough to stay snow instead of becoming mucky slush in the winter. It would be a refreshing break. And the glaciers of North America need another boost. They've been disappearing in places.
The problem with us is that our cities are now too large and our roots too deep. We build expecting the rivers and coasts to stay where they are, not realizing that where they are is not where they were 50 years ago. Then we try to hold nature back. We confine rivers to courses that bottleneck their flood waters, we build dikes to keep the ocean at bay, we water to keep the deserts at bay... STOP!!! If nature wants to move a river or change a coast, let it! If people have the money to build there, let them! But don't get upset when their homes are swept away. They should know and accept the risk. We need to learn to build with the expectation of change... even welcoming it. Build so that change enhances.
And all you environmentalists out there, stop whining. 150 years ago this nation was so smoggy the buildings had to be scrubbed of soot every year. We were in a little ice age just 200 years ago. Its the cycle of life. You think way more of us then nature does if you think we can actually put any real dent in it. Things will change. And over the long term, they'll get better (my dream is a society with enough clean energy that we can all afford to move to massive underground complexes and restore the surface to be one big park)(oh, that means NO SOLAR PANELS MUCKING UP THE HORIZON TOO). This planet can afford for us to make our mistakes and learn from them.
those whose jobs it is to innovate and make the impossible possible, and those who just turn and crank. One innovator can't be replaced by 100 turn and crank guys just because the ability to innovate doesn't follow a statistical bell curve. Its not like after you get up to some obscene number of turn and crank guys, your chance of developing an innovation will reach 90% or something. It will still be at zero.
I think what this guy is lamenting is an adjustment in the ratio of innovators to turn-and-crankers that has been brought on by the anti-innovator prejudices of the SEI and other "everything must be predictable" initiatives. Very large projects that couldn't hold innovators because management was threatened by them and wouldn't pay them the six figures that they were worth were collapsing (as they should). The world reacted by saying that we can't depend on heros instead of recognizing that they needed to pay the heros more. Now all the heros, those that just instinctively know the aspects of "right" that aren't teachable are disappearing. Big surprise.
The result is that true innovation and accomplishment of the "impossible" has been going away and our economy is suffering because of it. What truly new classification of software have you seen in the last few years? I don't know about you, but the world in CompUSA has been looking pretty stagnant to me for quite some time. Mostly incremental advances, not the type of true innovation we were seeing in the late 80s before these things had really taken hold. Sales are down because the next blockbuster reason to use more CPU cycles, more RAM, more disk space, more pixels, more polygons/second, etc. hasn't been appearing.
Also, I saw several posts on here about this being because people can't do it all anymore. Bull. Some who could have done it all are being hampered by the education system telling them that they can't, others aren't allowed too, and others just stay quiet about it to avoid the backlash from those who've been brainwashed into thinking that we know such a vast amount of things that noone can do it all. It seems that the vast mindless majority is too threatened by the idea that someone can still do it all. And its become non-politically correct to hurt their self-esteem by telling them any different.
I've hear though that due to the non-random distribution of pixels in a digital array, you may have to have more than 2 pixels / LP in your conversion... Would you think that there is any truth to that?
Agreed,,,, for the end product. What film gives you that the digitals STILL don't is the ability to push the colors or crop and zoom at processing time and still have full size pictures printed with 180DPI of real detail with a full color range.
With a 48 bit color range, you can print 24 bit color even after shifting the colors. 48 is more like film and may be enough.
I've read that matching film in resolution and thus support for cropping and enlarging images will require something more on the order of a 100MP. Is there anyone out there who knows the resolution of film? I'd guess its limited by either the molecule size or the smoothness of the chemical distribution...
It's amazing to me how many people just don't get it on resolution. Resolution and text size are two completely separate issues. MS Windows is just starting too mature in this area, thankfully. It now supports much higher resolutions, but still needs some work in icons, title bars, etc. so that they draw to a certain size instead of a certain number of pixels. Suspect they'll be addressing the rest of the equation in the new 3D desktop environment.
Studies have shown that increasing resolution does far more to rest the eyes than increasing refresh rates. Apparently, our mind does a lot more to fill in those jaggies than we have been recognizing. Or, if smoothing using antialiasing is occurring, it does a lot more to interpret the fuzziness that this causes.
My dream though is still a set of glasses that can opaquely replace anything in my field of view at a resolution at least equal to the receptors in the eye. That means we need to get those 9 million plus pixels plus some down onto a tiny chip. Then we can start exploring transparent user interfaces that integrate into our world.
This is a well known question on the photo boards. The answer is 180 DPI for a person with average sight viewing at arms length. View it closer than arms length, you'll need greater resolution to reach the limits of the eye. Further away, lesser resolution.
From a CPU point of view, I run at 4800x1200 all the time because I have 3 1600x1200 screens. I don't find that it makes much of a difference at all. I do however have one very good graphics card on two of those displays (GeForce4 TI 4400). That helps a lot.
I really don't think that's true. I've learned and programmed in more than 50 languages and can say now that you move to a point where all the languages are simple instantiations of a single abstraction in my head. Some are perhaps better instantiations than others, but still, just instantiations. True knowledge is not found in the facts but rather in the patterns behind them. We've turned college degree programs into technical howtos and gotten off of the track of knowing the theory under all of it.
The same is true of operating systems, RF systems, and other disciplines. Disciplines are merely instantiations of fields of knowledge. A single 4 year degree should be able to teach several fields of knowledge. I learned at least 4 that I can think of in computer engineering. After that, everything else is just instantiating your knowledge with new parameters.
The mistake I think we make today is to believe that in order to understand a field we must be able to perform in that field without reference. I understand several fields at a deeper level and can perform better than those that don't need a reference in the fields because I understand the reasons behind their reference.
The idea that information has become too voluminous for one individual to learn is also false. Rather, the art of applying abstract knowledge to predict or understand great volumes of detailed information without actually having to know those great volumes has been lost.
When going through college, I didn't do homework as a rule. Couldn't see the sense in practicing such obvious things. I noticed that in general I didn't even have to listen in class or read the book. For instance, in Calculus, most of the thought process of solving the problems on one test was implied by the thought process of solving the problems on the last test. It was relatively easy to go into the test cold and simply solve the problems based on a slight stretch from past experience.
When one knows the sequence of steps that have been used historically in developing knowledge, the next step is usually implied (hence the reason it became the next step (not, in most cases, because someone was particularly brilliant, but rather because they were in the right place at the right time to be the one person of the many possible ones to develop that step).
"If this theory holds true it may explain why some humans who are repeatedly exposed to HIV don't get sick."
Well, duuuhhhh. Pick almost any virus in existence and SOME one of the billions of us out there has immunity due to a genetically superior immune system. But looking at that person's genetics almost never results in a viable non-genetic treatment approach. And genetic treatment approaches aren't going to pan out in mass until they get to the point of designing enzymes/proteins or whatever that are targeted to actually repair the specific DNA flaw present.
It sure would be nice if we'd allocate money for research according to the number of man-years a disease is taking from the population. Then real problems like cancer and heart disease will get there due. I can't do anything (other than commit suicide) to reduce my chance of getting those to less than 1 chance in 1000s, but all that I have to do to avoid AIDs is keep it in my pants and stay away from needles. Sure there are exceptions, but there in the noise.
This continuing trend to greater specialization is killing our ability to innovate. Different specialists can never communicate well enough to replace a multi-disciplined individual. Teamwork can only go so far. There is no substitute for knowing it all.
I think you're talking about the guys that were working with polymer films. They were going to print large amounts of circuitry on films and then fold the films many times over. Speed wasn't going to be as high as silicon type circuitry, but surface area of the "chip" was measured in square feet instead of millimeters. I'd be interested in what happened to those guys... they were hoping to be in production about 18 months ago if I remember right.
Let's abandon these industries and create an open data industry with a different economic model. Donations to open data organizations could provide the funding to take scripts that are donated (or even produced in a collaborative fashion by the community), film raw footage, and supply it to a collaborative editing community that produces many versions of the movie. The best would rise to the top in normal open software style. The results would be free to all.
What we need is open data, not open hardware. The basic PC hardware design is about as open as things can get. We should create movie, music, literature and other organizations that create open data on a non-profit charity like model. They would solicit donations and produce new data when the donations reach a level high enough to pay for it's creation. Perhaps we could even encourage the donation of scripts, lyrics, editing time, etc.... Or raw, unedited files could be distributed and the community could submit edits in the same way that patches are developed. You could even end up with divergent mixes of movies and music....
Ahhh. But unless nanotechnology can convert energy to matter (I wouldn't discount the possibility given some of the strange things they've found at that level), you've not addressed the main issue. The main issue was too much energy absorption and too little reflection, or changed distribution of energy absorption/reflection. The pollution involved in solar cell manufacture and disposal is of concern, but somewhat lesser.
I sure hope the "solar-cell covered Earth" is not the future. Its one of the most ecologically devastating possibilities I can imagine.
a) Plating large areas of the Earth with solar cells would create a far more efficient green-house effect than green house gasses. Basically, green house gasses trap solar energy to heat the Earth by bouncing it back in when it is on its way back out. Solar cells trap solar energy even sooner by absorbing it and converting it to electricity which will eventually be (mostly) converted to heat. And the goal is to trap as much of that energy as possible. If we cover large areas of the Earth with solar cells, we will change the reflectivity unless the solar cells are carefully managed to absorb only what would have been absorbed by the ground and the passage back out of the atmosphere. But human nature says that that management will not occur. Instead, we would carefully strive to convert every bit of energy we could. We'd also likely have arguments over who could absorb how much in the same way we now argue over who can release how much gasses.
b) The localized weather effects would likely hit sooner and be even more devastating. I've heard many times statements along the lines of "just plate Arizona, New Mexico, and/or the California desert areas and you could provide much of the countries needs". Such irresponsible thinking seems to be rampant. Essentially, you'd be capturing the heat of those areas and shipping it to other parts of the country. The effects would be chaotic and very difficult to predict.
c) And for those who would say just put the cells in space and beam the power, now you're catching energy that would have never reached Earth and delivering it here to heat things up.
d) What about the toxic effects of mining, production, and eventual disposal?
No, solar cells are not a panacea.
We have some responsibility when making responses to try to be correct factually, but there is even greater responsibility at the level of those posting an article. This seemed more like a gossip than a thoughtful post.
Everybody who is anybody is making chips at .13 today. Everybody who is anybody is at roughly the same stage as IBM in bringing up .09-.10 technology. So why the bolstering of IBM who has anything but a pristine past and the bashing of others who are just as good and bad? Instead, why don't we here who is making progress on .07 and who might be leaping forward to the early use of .01 features (by thinking out of the box).
This is just a reminder that we can never be secured in any part of our lives by technology. The only path back to a secure society is the path that leads back to teaching people that noone is responsible for their actions but themselves and that intentionally irresponsible actions will be punished according to the effect of the action even when the effect goes way beyond the original intentions.
Actually, DSL is not entirely a distance vs speed compromise. The screwy XDSL the phone companies deployed was totally unnecessary. They took ADSL, a 7MB technology, and lowered the power so that the home side wouldn't require a filter. Then, after they had already agreed on everything and started deployment, they realized that the real world was different then the lab and that they would indeed need filters on the home side and thus visits to the homes (which is what they were trying to avoid).
True ADSL was designed with the goal of going further and faster. They could fix that problem for starters.
After they fix that, they still have further ?DSL generations already designed that push the limits to 60MB and beyond, but they are taking a one size fits all approach instead. They seem to be working along the lines of deploy XDSL nationwide, then switch everyone to ADSL, then switch everyone to HDSL, then switch everyone to VDSL, etc.
That approach is ridiculously slow. We can't wait 5-10 years per generation. This is where I think the tiered approach can help. All of the above should be available to me now for different prices. They've apparently made infrastructure mistakes if they can't put different switch types in different slots on their side.
As I understand it, they've also already made infrastructure mistakes in deploying the fiber as they've deployed a lot of cheap fiber that was easier to deploy but isn't capable of upgrade to the higher speeds. If it's going to take a decade or more to deploy an infrastructure, they need to make sure that its one that will carry the signals of the next decade.
In 2 to 3 years we should have terabyte hard drives. 8 years after that we'll have petabyte mass media. So, 11 years from now we'll have petabyte mass media at consumer prices. We should also at that time have processors approximately equivalent to today's processors revved to 384 GHz. Combine this with good eyeglass based displays and we should have the juice for computers to interact with us by replacing things in our field of view (show us virtual paper held in our real hands and allow us to set it down on desks and file it in cabinets type stuff). This kind of paradigm will allow for tremendous growth in ease of use as they will finally adjust to our world instead of us to theirs.
But the communications link is going to get left in the dust. We can only compress so much. The only bottleneck in the next true leap in human-machine interaction that is more serious than the communications one is the software one.
Actually, normal corn is nearly non-existent in the US now and is rapidly being contaminated across all of North America. Pollen from the genetic crops is spreading far and wide.
I liken some of Zimbabwe's worries to someone patenting a virus that infects all programs worldwide and then claiming rights to the infected programs. The bio industry has already gone after farmers whose crop was unintentionally cross-pollinated claiming that they did it on purpose. There are valid points in Zimbabwe's concerns.
I think I'm OK with tiered pricing, but we need to get back to something akin to Moore's law on it. I've been very disappointed with the deployment methods and speeds of broadband. I've been on DSL now for 2 1/2 years. My speed should have doubled at least once by now, but I don't see it happening anytime soon. Hard drives are doubling every year. PCs are still doubling every 18 months or so. But the wide area link has not been following Moore's since we outgrew POTS. It used to be that I could get a new modem and boost my speed every year or two. Now that the big guys are in control and continuously undershooting on the infrastructure rollout, I think we're on a decade long plan. This is very very bad.
With all the publicity from Slashdot, I wonder if MS will file a copyright infringement lawsuit against the guy? I'm sure they have plans for a line of treehouses that this guy has just trampled all over :o)