I believe it is used in pharmeceuticals and as a food additive (e.g. to Coke). In fact, I believe that's why decaf and regular coffee are the same price - the cost of extracting the caffeine is offset by selling the extracted caffeine.
Would these plants upset the global caffeine market?
At the end of last year the USB Implementation Forum met _ Microsoft is on the board of directors while the chairman/president is Jason Ziller of Intel _ and decided that the matter was perhaps too clear, too transparent to the customer.
And so what if the Dead Sea Scrolls are in Hebrew and Aramaic? You can certanly translate them!
Yes and no... there are some ambiguities about translation of the bible. Some words only appear a few times, or even once, making their meaning impossible to know for sure. The meanings of words also change over time, so a word that meant something when the bible was translated into greek, say, might have been given a different meaning than when it was first written down.
This is not to say that translation is impossible or a useless effort. It's just to say that the exact meaning of a given word is often ambigous. Often, these (in my view, somewhat silly) arguments about what the bible says center around individual words.
For example, does "four corners" mean four geometric corners? Does it mean "prominent places", or was it a colloquial expression?
(My favorite one is when the Israelites were building the Tabernacle in the desert, and they used "Dolphin Skins". Where did they get Dolphin skins from? It's a funny little thing, and you wonder if the text is really refering to the skins of animals we call dolphins, or something else. But dolphin skins? From Egypt?)
The whole topic of translating ancient texts (not just the bible) is a facinating one. If you're interested in an alternate english translation of the bible, the Jewish Publication society put one out under the name "Tanakh" (the Jewish word for the bible). Every page there are footnotes with the comment "meaning of original hebrew uncertain" , or providing an alternate translation.
DISCLAIMER - I am not a linguist or biblical scholar. (IANALOBS)
I'm no longer in the CMOS biz, but let me take a stab at it.
Polysilicon has been the gate material of choice because it is much easier to process. However, metal would reduce the resistance of the gate. (The gate acts like a little capacitor, and the resistance of the gate affects the amount of time it takes to charge up and discharge, which affects the switching time.) I think the processing ease of Polysilicon is lost when you don't use Silicon dioxide as the gate material - for example, if you used a high-K dielectric. I don't know if metal is inherently more compatible with high-k materials, just that it's less compatible with SiO.
They also mention the metal gives a "tunable work function" (probably by adjusting the silicon/nickel ratio), which I would guess would change the turn on voltage of the transistor. Tuning the turn on voltage could certainly tweak up the speed a bit.
I don't know how long the rocket plans to be in space, but fault tolerance is pretty important up there. It doesn't sound like they are using radiation hardened components. Radiation can flip bits in both flash memory, sram, and dram, not to mention random logic nodes inside a processor.
I'm not sure what the probability of a logic flip is, given the die size and the length of the mission. But how will the software hold up to these random changes?
I had an idea about this. Suppose you had a decompiler that worked like a compiler in reverse. That is, the first pass is to take the machine code and generate syntactically valid source code. Then, go through a series of optimizations - but instead of optimizing for performance, optimize for human readability.
You wouldn't get the same source code you put in (all your local variable names would be different, for one thing) - but you could get something useful that could be modified.
It would be non-trivial to implement something like this, of course. But I wonder if it could be done.
I certainly wouldn't hire an insecure prick for any job. Especially if he was so insecure he was grasping for straws as to why he wasn't succeeding. You think because someone doesn't speak english without an accent they're stupid? How's your hindi?
Many of the chipset makers feel that their 'drivers' are also their IP
I believe this is the main reason for the lack of driver support. I was at some trade show or the other, and I asked a wireless ethernet card vendor if they had Linux support. The reply was that the software driver was a significant part of the engineering effort, and they considered it a big part of their "value added".
Most of the silicon in the world is actually used in processing metal, including steel, of various kinds.
Only a small fraction is actually turned into wafers, and the expense in that process has less to do with turning silica into silicon, but turning impure silicon into really, really pure, single crystal silicon. [It's actually a really cool process, I wish I could remember the details. It involves bonding the silicon to something, and distilling it.] And this cost is very small compared to the cost of turning a wafer into chips.
This discovery, if it actually saves money, will have some impact on the steel industry, but practically none on the semiconductor industry.
I never understood the American Christian obsession with creationism and biblical literalism.
The creation story in the bible takes up the first couple of chapters of the first book. (Biblical chapters are very short!). The rest of the bible is legal code, moral code, and history. Clearly, the main thrust of the bible is not to explain our physical world, but our moral world.
For one thing, many of my classes were science/math, with equations, greek symbols, etc. Writing out these things on computer takes FAR longer than doing it by hand.
Imagine taking Organic chemistry, and trying to copy down a chemical structure!
And getting the proffesor's lecture notes is no substitute - the point of note-taking is to jot down the things YOU think are relevant. It's one of the skills you're supposed to be learning in school.
The thing that bothers me about the general thinking on privacy is that people have a right to privacy insofar as they have an "expectation of privacy".
As technology progresses, this expectation is eroded. What does it mean to go to the store and buy a magazine? It used to be, it was public, but unless someone you knew saw you, no-one would now. It is possible now to track what magazines I buy (through credit cards, Bonus cards, etc. and the UPC code on the magazine), and form a database. The test of "expectation of privacy" is the same, but technology has lowered that expectation.
You're right, in that the test of "expectation of privacy" is the current way to determine if you have a right to privacy, and this stuff happens in public view. The question is whether we need to change either the test, or our expectations, or whether we accept an ever-vanishing amount of privacy. If millimeter wave imaging became cheap (which can look through walls), would that mean I wouldn't have the expectation to have sex in my own home without being seen?
Technology has definitely changed the picture. Privacy is no longer an issue of being seen, but also of being tracked. Just because we have lost so much privacy does not mean we can't reclaim it.
I do have animosity towards Norda. Many of the original investors in Lineo (I was an investor in a company acquired by Lineo for stock) were screwed over when Lineo foreclosed. I now own thousands of worthless shares.
Here's a stick in the eye to the Canopy group and Norda!
Many people have questioned the need for this, given that you can either 1) just run windows, or 2) run OpenOffice or AbiWord.
One really cool use would be a web-server based file translator from Microsoft Word format to other formats (say,.rtf) using Microsoft Word as the engine to do the translation. It could filter your email, and automatically translate those Microsoft Office documents into something readable. Perhaps it could even brute force some files (power point, for example) into screen captured graphics files.
But using the actual Microsoft software to do the translation would ensure that at least the file was read in correctly.
That way you'd only need one copy of office for an entire office.
I just don't want to wind up with the government somebody else deserves.
Some rights are not rights if they can be traded away. Economic coercion is still coercion. Would you trade your vote to buy antibiotics for your kid, if you had no other choice? Damn straight you would.
Song writers cannot trade away their rights to some royalties on songs. This ensures that, no matter how sleazy their business partners, they are ensured some royalities from their work. Restricting their rights actually enhances them. (I think there's an analogy in software licensing...)
My first job out of school was for an EPROM manufacturer. I was a product engineer. Part of my job was to diagnose failures that came back from the field.
Now, all of the easy diagnosis (bad memory cell, row or column) were handled by QA. The really bizarre failures came to me. Glitches that occured only after the chip was in standby for more than four seconds, errors that only occured if the addresses were accessed in a certain order, not to mention marginal voltage and temperature performance...
There are an infinite number of bizarre and subtle ways a memory chip can misbehave. It was a fun job, but I can never look at any sort of chip in the same way again.
That way you could just either go to a polling place or even an Internet site and vote using your smart card to authenticate your identity.
This would allow vote buying. Currently, even if you give me $100 to vote for your candidate, I can go in and vote however I choose anyway, and you're none the wiser.
With smart cards and a web site - here's your $100, just hand over the smart card for a day.
Slashdot Mirror
So I say: /.er warned: learn to read english properly.
Would these plants upset the global caffeine market?
Let's start talking about tort reform! (Oh wait, that doesn't apply to rich people, does it?)
At the end of last year the USB Implementation Forum met _ Microsoft is on the board of directors while the chairman/president is Jason Ziller of Intel _ and decided that the matter was perhaps too clear, too transparent to the customer.
Yes and no... there are some ambiguities about translation of the bible. Some words only appear a few times, or even once, making their meaning impossible to know for sure. The meanings of words also change over time, so a word that meant something when the bible was translated into greek, say, might have been given a different meaning than when it was first written down.
This is not to say that translation is impossible or a useless effort. It's just to say that the exact meaning of a given word is often ambigous. Often, these (in my view, somewhat silly) arguments about what the bible says center around individual words.
For example, does "four corners" mean four geometric corners? Does it mean "prominent places", or was it a colloquial expression?
(My favorite one is when the Israelites were building the Tabernacle in the desert, and they used "Dolphin Skins". Where did they get Dolphin skins from? It's a funny little thing, and you wonder if the text is really refering to the skins of animals we call dolphins, or something else. But dolphin skins? From Egypt?)
The whole topic of translating ancient texts (not just the bible) is a facinating one. If you're interested in an alternate english translation of the bible, the Jewish Publication society put one out under the name "Tanakh" (the Jewish word for the bible). Every page there are footnotes with the comment "meaning of original hebrew uncertain" , or providing an alternate translation.
DISCLAIMER - I am not a linguist or biblical scholar. (IANALOBS)
Spoken like a man afraid to sign his name to his remarks.
Polysilicon has been the gate material of choice because it is much easier to process. However, metal would reduce the resistance of the gate. (The gate acts like a little capacitor, and the resistance of the gate affects the amount of time it takes to charge up and discharge, which affects the switching time.) I think the processing ease of Polysilicon is lost when you don't use Silicon dioxide as the gate material - for example, if you used a high-K dielectric. I don't know if metal is inherently more compatible with high-k materials, just that it's less compatible with SiO.
They also mention the metal gives a "tunable work function" (probably by adjusting the silicon/nickel ratio), which I would guess would change the turn on voltage of the transistor. Tuning the turn on voltage could certainly tweak up the speed a bit.
Because the WINE developers do not have access to the Windows source code, but the SCO developers did have access to the Linux source code.
Of course, don't you also have to then shell out $300 for Office XP to open those documents?
I'm not sure what the probability of a logic flip is, given the die size and the length of the mission. But how will the software hold up to these random changes?
Given the number of stops we make on long car trips with my daughter, I'd put that number closer to 99%.
And people tell me I'm going to die some day for as long as I can remember... of all the crazy ideas...
You wouldn't get the same source code you put in (all your local variable names would be different, for one thing) - but you could get something useful that could be modified.
It would be non-trivial to implement something like this, of course. But I wonder if it could be done.
I certainly wouldn't hire an insecure prick for any job. Especially if he was so insecure he was grasping for straws as to why he wasn't succeeding. You think because someone doesn't speak english without an accent they're stupid? How's your hindi?
I believe this is the main reason for the lack of driver support. I was at some trade show or the other, and I asked a wireless ethernet card vendor if they had Linux support. The reply was that the software driver was a significant part of the engineering effort, and they considered it a big part of their "value added".
Only a small fraction is actually turned into wafers, and the expense in that process has less to do with turning silica into silicon, but turning impure silicon into really, really pure, single crystal silicon. [It's actually a really cool process, I wish I could remember the details. It involves bonding the silicon to something, and distilling it.] And this cost is very small compared to the cost of turning a wafer into chips.
This discovery, if it actually saves money, will have some impact on the steel industry, but practically none on the semiconductor industry.
The creation story in the bible takes up the first couple of chapters of the first book. (Biblical chapters are very short!). The rest of the bible is legal code, moral code, and history. Clearly, the main thrust of the bible is not to explain our physical world, but our moral world.
Imagine taking Organic chemistry, and trying to copy down a chemical structure!
And getting the proffesor's lecture notes is no substitute - the point of note-taking is to jot down the things YOU think are relevant. It's one of the skills you're supposed to be learning in school.
As technology progresses, this expectation is eroded. What does it mean to go to the store and buy a magazine? It used to be, it was public, but unless someone you knew saw you, no-one would now. It is possible now to track what magazines I buy (through credit cards, Bonus cards, etc. and the UPC code on the magazine), and form a database. The test of "expectation of privacy" is the same, but technology has lowered that expectation.
You're right, in that the test of "expectation of privacy" is the current way to determine if you have a right to privacy, and this stuff happens in public view. The question is whether we need to change either the test, or our expectations, or whether we accept an ever-vanishing amount of privacy. If millimeter wave imaging became cheap (which can look through walls), would that mean I wouldn't have the expectation to have sex in my own home without being seen?
Technology has definitely changed the picture. Privacy is no longer an issue of being seen, but also of being tracked. Just because we have lost so much privacy does not mean we can't reclaim it.
Here's a stick in the eye to the Canopy group and Norda!
One really cool use would be a web-server based file translator from Microsoft Word format to other formats (say, .rtf) using Microsoft Word as the engine to do the translation. It could filter your email, and automatically translate those Microsoft Office documents into something readable. Perhaps it could even brute force some files (power point, for example) into screen captured graphics files.
But using the actual Microsoft software to do the translation would ensure that at least the file was read in correctly.
That way you'd only need one copy of office for an entire office.
Some rights are not rights if they can be traded away. Economic coercion is still coercion. Would you trade your vote to buy antibiotics for your kid, if you had no other choice? Damn straight you would.
Song writers cannot trade away their rights to some royalties on songs. This ensures that, no matter how sleazy their business partners, they are ensured some royalities from their work. Restricting their rights actually enhances them. (I think there's an analogy in software licensing...)
Now, all of the easy diagnosis (bad memory cell, row or column) were handled by QA. The really bizarre failures came to me. Glitches that occured only after the chip was in standby for more than four seconds, errors that only occured if the addresses were accessed in a certain order, not to mention marginal voltage and temperature performance...
There are an infinite number of bizarre and subtle ways a memory chip can misbehave. It was a fun job, but I can never look at any sort of chip in the same way again.
This would allow vote buying. Currently, even if you give me $100 to vote for your candidate, I can go in and vote however I choose anyway, and you're none the wiser.
With smart cards and a web site - here's your $100, just hand over the smart card for a day.