You think M$ has anything to do with this 'issue'. You think that the dropping of the M$ case 6 years ago and this are in any way related. You think that Apple better start spending some R&D money more 'wisely'
For those that don't want to take the time to look at the article (and before it gets/.'ed), here is the meat:
"The nanomaterials Altair is developing are the next generation of electrode materials for lithium-ion batteries and Altair's research and product development is laying the ground work for a new generation of ultra high power lithium ion batteries." commented Dr. K. M. Abraham. "A key requirement to the above applications is the ability to recharge the battery very quickly, for example in a few minutes. Current Li Ion batteries are incapable of such quick charge times because of the chemistry of the anode materials. Altair has found a solution to this with their nano-sized lithium titanium oxide."
"Altair's nanomaterials, which have a virtually zero strain crystal lattice, eliminate the main cause for battery electrode material fatigue, which limits rechargeable battery life, increasing the number of recharge and discharge cycles from a few hundred to many thousand cycles," said Dr. Vassilis G. Keramidas. "I find Altair's development strategy and proposed research direction sound and a necessary step in establishing the Li-Ion electrochemistry as a viable contender for large battery applications."
Sounds promising (though if I hear the nano prefix again it'll make me barf). So no, it's not a new way to recharge batteries Li-Ion batteries, it's new batteries that can be recharged faster.
Let's hope that they can manage the lawsuits after the first batch starts to catch fire.
But don't invent Yet Another Bi-pedal Locomotion Technique, that problem is solved more than enough to move on to the next problem.
Nope, I'm sorry, but it has barely begun to being solved (and this article is in the right direction).
Asimo does not solve the problem, it merely over-engineers it into oblivion. Linearizing every joint and making it look somewhat realistic does not solve the problem, that's why it can only run 30 minutes or so on a charge (pun intended).
What this guy is saying is not really new, cell phones technology is an advance in that direction, and can anyone say Bluetooth?. However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, he is not a radio expert by any means. So let me put this forward:
Scenario 1: We trash all the existing technology in favor of this new and improved one. Everyone owns a jog/car/home radio that can act as a repeater, low power transmission at the source is all that is needed. This would work great in cities, as long as, everyone keeps their radio powered-up, nobody minds the (large) losses in battery life due to the necessary transmission power (and more than inneficient transmission antennas and paths). if you decide to go driving out of town, well, you better turn on your CD player anyway, or, wait a minute, the FCC allocated some spectrum to satelite radio, right?, but that's clearly a no-no.
Scenario 2: We admit that there are applications that would benefit from this kind of thinking. Hey, guess what, we are doing that already, packet radio, 802.11 (not really there, but most of the radio technology, if not the protocol itself, is already there), Bluetooth (exactly the scheme this guy proposes), ultra-wide-band radio, and we keep going...
Spread spectrum is not the solution, it is a more efficient technology, true, but its capacity is also limited, in all of the writer's slides he does not account for the "noise" that is introduced to the channel by the presence of other transmitters (for your neighbours cell phone, yours is just noise). In the case of "older" technologies, this is even worse, other transmitters generate noise that is strongly correlated with your signal, so there is no way to separate them (and no signal processing magic can do that, no matter what software guys say).
Antennas is another issue completely ignored by the writer, while we can have very efficient, small, directional antennas at high frequencies (GHz ranges), at low frequencies (i.e. AM band) we need 150 square meter antennas to get any hope of directionality, and a reasonable fraction of that to get any hope of transmitter efficiency. So, sorry, physics are not in this proposal favor (stick with the software please).
I agree that there are some valid points to be made, and that more (high) bandwith should be allocated for these kind of applications, but I percieve that the FCC is moving in that direction already.
I'm a student at GATECH which also charges students for a technology fee, one of the reasons being that it's easier to get such fee past the regents than a tuition increase, and that there is always a need for new technology that would not be covered in any other form (it's easy to buy computers for research, but unless large industry donors are interested in a particular program, it's hard to find the money for classroom computers). I have also been one of the student members of the technology fee commitee (2 undergrad students, 2 grad students, 4 faculty) for the last 3 years.
Georgia Tech also asks for computers being owned by undergrad students, and curiously this instead of reducing the demand for campus clusters, has increased it, as the well as the demand for campus printers. All the dorms and the greeks have campus internet connectivity, and wireless access is being implemented on many buildings (some of it from these technology funds).
The process in place (which we will be modifying very soon) requires that schools, departments, and student organizations write proposals requesting the use of such fees. And once a year the schools rank their proposals, and the main commitee reviews these proposals and suggest fund assignments accordingly.
Being in a campus-wide committee lets us see the clear disparity between campus entities, while some are asking for $500K+ mostly useless items in their proposals, others just ask for $1K- for memory upgrades to their 300MHz computers.
Over the last 3 years I have seen the technology requests raise from 35 or so proposals to 130, and from barely $2E6 to almost $9E6. Of these, about 2/3 are computers, or somewhat computer related proposals. However a significant amount, which are normally large ticket items, are for tools that could not be funded otherwise. i.e. mass spectrometers, CNC machines, oscilloscopes, plasma cutters, compressors, pumps, differential GPS systems, liquid flow demostration equipment, electric properties labs, etc.
However the majority of the funds are being used for campus-wide or college-wide software licenses, computer clusters, presentation-enabled rooms, student participations systems, "smart" boards, student-managed web/mail/file/streaming servers, video cameras, video editing stations, bewolf clusters, and even basic security systems (as a means to protect our investments).
We do make a point of not spending the funds in basic infrastructure (like lab remodeling) or salaries (unless a short-term student position is very-well justified), or on items that are mostly research-oriented, or clearly professor-centric (i.e. a new top of the line laptop, or palm device).
After my long tenure in the committee, this has become very clear:
If we left the IT department in charge of the money there would be nothing left for the real needs of the campus. Their proposals normally exceed 50% of the available funds, have long lists of personnel, and exagerated items (do dorm rooms really need 100Base-T ports with direct connection to the central ATM gateways?), and even though many "presentation-enabled" classrooms have been outfitted (at $20K a pop), and most of them are normally unused, we get 10+ new requests for these a year.
Students have to be part of the process, otherwise the real needs would probably be masked by an apparently good proposal that has no real use for the student body, or by a very bad one that has a great potential (this has been shown many times in our meetings).
Something that is lacking in our process, but that is clearly necessary, is that students have to be the ones that evaluate the spendings (i.e. judge how much utilization a computer cluster, or some particular software has, do a follow-up on the use of promising new technologies, verify if a piece of equipment is being applied to its intended use, etc.), after all, we are the ones being taxed with this fee.
Slashdot Mirror
You might be a conspiracy theorist if:
You think M$ has anything to do with this 'issue'.
You think that the dropping of the M$ case 6 years ago and this are in any way related.
You think that Apple better start spending some R&D money more 'wisely'
For those that don't want to take the time to look at the article (and before it gets /.'ed), here is the meat:
Sounds promising (though if I hear the nano prefix again it'll make me barf). So no, it's not a new way to recharge batteries Li-Ion batteries, it's new batteries that can be recharged faster.
Let's hope that they can manage the lawsuits after the first batch starts to catch fire.
Asimo does not solve the problem, it merely over-engineers it into oblivion. Linearizing every joint and making it look somewhat realistic does not solve the problem, that's why it can only run 30 minutes or so on a charge (pun intended).
What this guy is saying is not really new, cell phones technology is an advance in that direction, and can anyone say Bluetooth?. However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, he is not a radio expert by any means. So let me put this forward:
Scenario 1: We trash all the existing technology in favor of this new and improved one. Everyone owns a jog/car/home radio that can act as a repeater, low power transmission at the source is all that is needed. This would work great in cities, as long as, everyone keeps their radio powered-up, nobody minds the (large) losses in battery life due to the necessary transmission power (and more than inneficient transmission antennas and paths). if you decide to go driving out of town, well, you better turn on your CD player anyway, or, wait a minute, the FCC allocated some spectrum to satelite radio, right?, but that's clearly a no-no.
Scenario 2: We admit that there are applications that would benefit from this kind of thinking. Hey, guess what, we are doing that already, packet radio, 802.11 (not really there, but most of the radio technology, if not the protocol itself, is already there), Bluetooth (exactly the scheme this guy proposes), ultra-wide-band radio, and we keep going...
Spread spectrum is not the solution, it is a more efficient technology, true, but its capacity is also limited, in all of the writer's slides he does not account for the "noise" that is introduced to the channel by the presence of other transmitters (for your neighbours cell phone, yours is just noise). In the case of "older" technologies, this is even worse, other transmitters generate noise that is strongly correlated with your signal, so there is no way to separate them (and no signal processing magic can do that, no matter what software guys say).
Antennas is another issue completely ignored by the writer, while we can have very efficient, small, directional antennas at high frequencies (GHz ranges), at low frequencies (i.e. AM band) we need 150 square meter antennas to get any hope of directionality, and a reasonable fraction of that to get any hope of transmitter efficiency. So, sorry, physics are not in this proposal favor (stick with the software please).
I agree that there are some valid points to be made, and that more (high) bandwith should be allocated for these kind of applications, but I percieve that the FCC is moving in that direction already.
I'm a student at GATECH which also charges students for a technology fee, one of the reasons being that it's easier to get such fee past the regents than a tuition increase, and that there is always a need for new technology that would not be covered in any other form (it's easy to buy computers for research, but unless large industry donors are interested in a particular program, it's hard to find the money for classroom computers). I have also been one of the student members of the technology fee commitee (2 undergrad students, 2 grad students, 4 faculty) for the last 3 years.
Georgia Tech also asks for computers being owned by undergrad students, and curiously this instead of reducing the demand for campus clusters, has increased it, as the well as the demand for campus printers. All the dorms and the greeks have campus internet connectivity, and wireless access is being implemented on many buildings (some of it from these technology funds).
The process in place (which we will be modifying very soon) requires that schools, departments, and student organizations write proposals requesting the use of such fees. And once a year the schools rank their proposals, and the main commitee reviews these proposals and suggest fund assignments accordingly. Being in a campus-wide committee lets us see the clear disparity between campus entities, while some are asking for $500K+ mostly useless items in their proposals, others just ask for $1K- for memory upgrades to their 300MHz computers.
Over the last 3 years I have seen the technology requests raise from 35 or so proposals to 130, and from barely $2E6 to almost $9E6. Of these, about 2/3 are computers, or somewhat computer related proposals. However a significant amount, which are normally large ticket items, are for tools that could not be funded otherwise. i.e. mass spectrometers, CNC machines, oscilloscopes, plasma cutters, compressors, pumps, differential GPS systems, liquid flow demostration equipment, electric properties labs, etc.
However the majority of the funds are being used for campus-wide or college-wide software licenses, computer clusters, presentation-enabled rooms, student participations systems, "smart" boards, student-managed web/mail/file/streaming servers, video cameras, video editing stations, bewolf clusters, and even basic security systems (as a means to protect our investments).
We do make a point of not spending the funds in basic infrastructure (like lab remodeling) or salaries (unless a short-term student position is very-well justified), or on items that are mostly research-oriented, or clearly professor-centric (i.e. a new top of the line laptop, or palm device).
After my long tenure in the committee, this has become very clear: