I don't think anyone out there is saying that from a $/GB perspective that SSD's are a bargain.
But here are two key points:
1) Not everyone needs 1TB of storage (about $100, and practically entry level now for hard drives). Especially on laptops, a $350 32GB SSD (also entry level) can get you quite far, especially if it is reserved for the OS and applications. You can pick up a 32GB SSD for a reasonable price, and get the really good performance, and use a big, cheap HD for media files.
2) Many people view the extra performance + lower power consumption + greater reliability as worth the premium price, and that makes them a value. Just because they can't compete on a $/GB basis doesn't make them a bargain to some people.
There's a big difference between manufacturing a chip and designing one. Unless Apple suddenly acquires the capital and know how to run a fab, manufacturing is best left to foundries like TSMC.
I'd even be surprised if they did the design completely in-house. Most likely it would be a collaborative effort with an already established low-power design house like ARM.
I'd like to see a follow-up book on all the crazy shit that's out there like the penis enlargers, the motorized belts that vibrate your fat away, oddly shaped ergonomic chairs and desks, ionic air purifiers, the automatic muscle exercisers, yadda yadda yadda.
Flip through a SkyMall catalog on an airplane some time and you'll find tons of examples of devices like this that supposedly improve your body or health. (Also, a magnet stand that magically ages your wine collection 100 years in minutes!!) This industry is even less regulated that alternative medicine but can be just as dangerous, if not more so. At a minimum, they lend credence to the saying, "a fool and his money are soon parted."
Not only that, but it's not like the silicon used in today's chips is low grade crap. The purity standards for electronic grade silicon are pretty insane considered to the standards of most things we think of as "pure", including pharmaceuticals. (Seven to eight 9's purity is not uncommon). And yet its produced in great volumes relatively cheaply.
Who is this Dr. Justin Lawrence and why is he being cited as the authoritative naysayer for this technology? He doesn't seem to have any reasons to be unimpressed other than this cliche:
"It's one thing to demonstrate something in a lab but it's another thing to be able to produce it cheaply and efficiently enough to distribute it to the mass market," Lawrence said.
If only it were that simple. Since these people already lack the ability to reason logically and think critically, "prove" means something different to them than it does to you. They will gladly point you to a posting on CoastToCoastAM.com or WhatReallyHappened.org as proof. These postings frequently cite anonymous sources with intimate knowledge of secret programs in the government. That should be all the proof you need right?
How many voters are informed enough about economics? You know, there are very smart (but ignorant) people out there that want to impose a 100% income tax for salaries over some threshold, say $300,000/yr. They can perform all the mathematical analysis to say what the added tax revenue would be, how the money would be distributed, etc. But they do not seem to understand the major fallacy in their proposal: that if there is a 100% tax on income over $300,000, then there would be no incentive to earn more than that. It would make no difference to someone if they earned $300,000 or $3,000,000. So obviously, the tax revenues would plummet.
Knowledge of economics is just as important as knowledge of science, yet no one seems to really care about how well the average voter (or politician for that matter) knows.
You have a fairly low id number, so I take it you're an old timer. Welcome to the new Slashdot, soon to be renamed SlashDigg, where a bunch of immature adolescent boys who spew inflammatory summaries and comments have taken over.
Just because someone (or some government) is guilty of hypocrisy doesn't mean their message should be dismissed out of hand.
If drive across the country in a 5MPG monster truck and pass out books (printed on non-recycled paper) criticizing our governments inaction on climate change, I might be a hypocrite, but my message might still be sound and worth considering. (However, being a hypocrite does make me lose all sense of being authority on the matter).
Since everyone will be living in abject poverty, no one will be able to afford the goods that the robots produce, and thus the wealthy robot owners ("kings" and "nobles") will have nothing better to do than wage robot warfare against each other.
The commoners ("serfs") will live in feuds in which they spend most of their days repairing robots and mining the resources needed for their Lord's robot army upkeep.
Let's face it... the definition of IT is going to continuously evolve as people get more computer savvy and applications and hardware get more sophisticated.
My hunch is that many of those jobs were low level and barely passable as "IT" anymore.
Remember that in the late 70's/early 80's, you could make $60K/year for doing data entry. Typing skills and knowledge of a key program like Lotus 123 made you a god. Now of course you could pick any random 12 year old off the street and have him perform that job to perfection.
If the purpose of the Firehose is to vet articles, it's not doing a good job.
I don't think the purpose of Firehose is to vet articles. Rather, it's a way for Slashdot to become more Digg-like, and Digg-like content is what we get. Seriously, go back five, even two years ago and try to find front page stories in which some random person writes "I've written a controversial article on X. Click here to see my thoughts". You won't find many, but now you can find them almost daily on Slashdot. And along with the Digg-like content comes the Digg-like users, with all their conspiracy theories, hyperbole, immaturity, and general teenage boy mentalities that has driven away all but said demographic from Digg.
Fortunately, Firehose is only a gateway to the editors, and not a direct route to the front page. Thus, the decline of Slashdot has been more gradual than the decline of Digg. But you'd be hard pressed to find a true geek that isn't longing for the good old days.
But these claims really aren't as extraordinary as you might think. They've found a new catalyst that reduces the amount of energy required to split water. That's what catalysts do--they reduce the activation energy of a reaction. Life would not function without catalysts. Every enzyme in your body (there are thousands of them) is a catalyst designed to make some reaction run efficiently at body temperature.
Every few years a breakthrough catalyst is discovered that makes new reactions feasible. See for example the Grubbs' catalyst which when discovered had almost magical properties compared to the state of the art. Grubbs recently won a Nobel prize for this work.
Currently, platinum is a catalyst on the cathode, for generating hydrogen. This works well and has been known for a long time. This new research has found a useful catalyst for the anode, which generates the oxygen.
While this might be a major breakthrough, I don't find it to be extraordinary, at least in the same sense that a self-sustained cold fusion reaction is extraordinary. These results should be easy to duplicate in other labs as the materials are straightforward.
Jobs is still critical for product success
on
Apple After Jobs
·
· Score: 1
There was a story a while back in Wired about the iPhone development. A key part of the story was when the iPhone team approached Jobs with a buggy, barely-functioning prototype. Jobs coldly told them, "We don't have a product yet". This motivated them to get the phone up to par in the mere three months before its debut.
Sadly, I don't think a run-of-the-mill CEO would have had this reaction, and the employees wouldn't have had the motivation to fix things. Without jobs, the iPhone might have been the Vista of the cell phone world.
This is a weird case because to my knowledge the hardware itself is not illegal. Installing MacOS X on it is because that is a violation of Apple's EULA.
I see this case as similar to the black market cable and satellite box sellers... While owning the boxes may not be illegal in and of itself, using the box to steal cable is. And many times when these companies get busted, prosecutors go after the purchasers, using the info from the sales receipts.
I don't know if that analogy makes sense in this case, but let's say Apple wins and Pystar is forced to do a recall. Will Apple prosecute Pystar's customers if they don't return the boxes? The EULA violation problem goes away if they wipe MacOS X from the hard drive and install Ubuntu or Windows.
First, IAALE (I am a lithography engineer) working on Intel's 22nm process technology. Let's clear up a few misconceptions:
1) The name of a logic node is directly related to the size of the features being made. Those names (e.g. 65nm, 45m, 32nm, etc.) used to relate to the "half-pitch" of the minimum pitch that was printed. But that is not true today. 65nm used a minimum pitch of ~200nm, 45nm used ~140nm and 32nm is using ~100nm. The next node, 22nm is slated to use minimum a pitch of 72nm. The features discussed in this article have a pitch of 50nm, which would be equivalent to the node after 22nm, i.e. 16nm.
2) It's not hard to print features smaller than the wavelength of light. For the lens based systems we used, the Rayleigh criterion gives the minimum pitch possible: 0.25*lambda/NA, where lambda=wavelength (193nm) and NA=numerical aperature (1.35 for the best lenses). So 72nm is the minimum pitch, already much smaller than the wavelength
3) I hate to break it to these researchers, but interferometry has been used for a looong time to make gratings. Search for "interferomety lithography" on Google Scholar. The fourth link is called "Nanolithography using extreme ultraviolet lithography interferometry: 19 nm lines and spaces". That paper is from 1999. And they did that one exposure, not three (using a smaller wavelength). You would actually need at least one more exposure to divide the grating into something that resembled a logic circuit. The technique in this artcle is not practcal for a number of reasons, but we can do better than them using pitch-doubling techniques and only two exposures.
Platinum (or platinum coated) electrodes work better. And you need to add some salt to the water to get any reasonable reaction rate, since, despite many people's ideas about water, it is actually a pretty poor conductor of electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
There is significant precedent in copyright law that lists of facts or data cannot be copyrighted.
See, e.g. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
Link
I don't think anyone out there is saying that from a $/GB perspective that SSD's are a bargain.
But here are two key points:
1) Not everyone needs 1TB of storage (about $100, and practically entry level now for hard drives). Especially on laptops, a $350 32GB SSD (also entry level) can get you quite far, especially if it is reserved for the OS and applications. You can pick up a 32GB SSD for a reasonable price, and get the really good performance, and use a big, cheap HD for media files.
2) Many people view the extra performance + lower power consumption + greater reliability as worth the premium price, and that makes them a value. Just because they can't compete on a $/GB basis doesn't make them a bargain to some people.
Are you talking about Microsoft BOB? That was my first distro too. I wonder when MS will be coming out with a 64-bit version. :)
There's a big difference between manufacturing a chip and designing one. Unless Apple suddenly acquires the capital and know how to run a fab, manufacturing is best left to foundries like TSMC.
I'd even be surprised if they did the design completely in-house. Most likely it would be a collaborative effort with an already established low-power design house like ARM.
How about Michael de Mare's Confessions of a Recovering Preppie? It was given a 0/10 on a Slashdot book review.
I'd like to see a follow-up book on all the crazy shit that's out there like the penis enlargers, the motorized belts that vibrate your fat away, oddly shaped ergonomic chairs and desks, ionic air purifiers, the automatic muscle exercisers, yadda yadda yadda.
Flip through a SkyMall catalog on an airplane some time and you'll find tons of examples of devices like this that supposedly improve your body or health. (Also, a magnet stand that magically ages your wine collection 100 years in minutes!!) This industry is even less regulated that alternative medicine but can be just as dangerous, if not more so. At a minimum, they lend credence to the saying, "a fool and his money are soon parted."
Not only that, but it's not like the silicon used in today's chips is low grade crap. The purity standards for electronic grade silicon are pretty insane considered to the standards of most things we think of as "pure", including pharmaceuticals. (Seven to eight 9's purity is not uncommon). And yet its produced in great volumes relatively cheaply.
Yes, but it's easier if just you hit the "Turbo" button.
Who is this Dr. Justin Lawrence and why is he being cited as the authoritative naysayer for this technology? He doesn't seem to have any reasons to be unimpressed other than this cliche:
If only it were that simple. Since these people already lack the ability to reason logically and think critically, "prove" means something different to them than it does to you. They will gladly point you to a posting on CoastToCoastAM.com or WhatReallyHappened.org as proof. These postings frequently cite anonymous sources with intimate knowledge of secret programs in the government. That should be all the proof you need right?
I wish it was a strawman argument, but have a look at the Green Party's Platform page
Under "Progressive and Ecological Taxes":
That means the maximum wage would be $65.50/hr, or about $130,000/yr.
How many voters are informed enough about economics? You know, there are very smart (but ignorant) people out there that want to impose a 100% income tax for salaries over some threshold, say $300,000/yr. They can perform all the mathematical analysis to say what the added tax revenue would be, how the money would be distributed, etc. But they do not seem to understand the major fallacy in their proposal: that if there is a 100% tax on income over $300,000, then there would be no incentive to earn more than that. It would make no difference to someone if they earned $300,000 or $3,000,000. So obviously, the tax revenues would plummet.
Knowledge of economics is just as important as knowledge of science, yet no one seems to really care about how well the average voter (or politician for that matter) knows.
Are you calling the "Black Pride" movement the height of stupidity??!!! How dare ye!
You have a fairly low id number, so I take it you're an old timer. Welcome to the new Slashdot, soon to be renamed SlashDigg, where a bunch of immature adolescent boys who spew inflammatory summaries and comments have taken over.
Just because someone (or some government) is guilty of hypocrisy doesn't mean their message should be dismissed out of hand.
If drive across the country in a 5MPG monster truck and pass out books (printed on non-recycled paper) criticizing our governments inaction on climate change, I might be a hypocrite, but my message might still be sound and worth considering. (However, being a hypocrite does make me lose all sense of being authority on the matter).
It's obvious: we will go back to feudal times.
Since everyone will be living in abject poverty, no one will be able to afford the goods that the robots produce, and thus the wealthy robot owners ("kings" and "nobles") will have nothing better to do than wage robot warfare against each other.
The commoners ("serfs") will live in feuds in which they spend most of their days repairing robots and mining the resources needed for their Lord's robot army upkeep.
(I post this tongue in cheek).
Let's face it... the definition of IT is going to continuously evolve as people get more computer savvy and applications and hardware get more sophisticated.
My hunch is that many of those jobs were low level and barely passable as "IT" anymore.
Remember that in the late 70's/early 80's, you could make $60K/year for doing data entry. Typing skills and knowledge of a key program like Lotus 123 made you a god. Now of course you could pick any random 12 year old off the street and have him perform that job to perfection.
What about Shiner Brewing Co.?
If the purpose of the Firehose is to vet articles, it's not doing a good job.
I don't think the purpose of Firehose is to vet articles. Rather, it's a way for Slashdot to become more Digg-like, and Digg-like content is what we get. Seriously, go back five, even two years ago and try to find front page stories in which some random person writes "I've written a controversial article on X. Click here to see my thoughts". You won't find many, but now you can find them almost daily on Slashdot. And along with the Digg-like content comes the Digg-like users, with all their conspiracy theories, hyperbole, immaturity, and general teenage boy mentalities that has driven away all but said demographic from Digg.
Fortunately, Firehose is only a gateway to the editors, and not a direct route to the front page. Thus, the decline of Slashdot has been more gradual than the decline of Digg. But you'd be hard pressed to find a true geek that isn't longing for the good old days.
And oh yeah, Get Off My Lawn!!
But these claims really aren't as extraordinary as you might think. They've found a new catalyst that reduces the amount of energy required to split water. That's what catalysts do--they reduce the activation energy of a reaction. Life would not function without catalysts. Every enzyme in your body (there are thousands of them) is a catalyst designed to make some reaction run efficiently at body temperature.
Every few years a breakthrough catalyst is discovered that makes new reactions feasible. See for example the Grubbs' catalyst which when discovered had almost magical properties compared to the state of the art. Grubbs recently won a Nobel prize for this work.
Currently, platinum is a catalyst on the cathode, for generating hydrogen. This works well and has been known for a long time. This new research has found a useful catalyst for the anode, which generates the oxygen.
While this might be a major breakthrough, I don't find it to be extraordinary, at least in the same sense that a self-sustained cold fusion reaction is extraordinary. These results should be easy to duplicate in other labs as the materials are straightforward.
There was a story a while back in Wired about the iPhone development. A key part of the story was when the iPhone team approached Jobs with a buggy, barely-functioning prototype. Jobs coldly told them, "We don't have a product yet". This motivated them to get the phone up to par in the mere three months before its debut.
Sadly, I don't think a run-of-the-mill CEO would have had this reaction, and the employees wouldn't have had the motivation to fix things. Without jobs, the iPhone might have been the Vista of the cell phone world.
Umm...
Godwin's Law?
This is a weird case because to my knowledge the hardware itself is not illegal. Installing MacOS X on it is because that is a violation of Apple's EULA.
I see this case as similar to the black market cable and satellite box sellers... While owning the boxes may not be illegal in and of itself, using the box to steal cable is. And many times when these companies get busted, prosecutors go after the purchasers, using the info from the sales receipts.
I don't know if that analogy makes sense in this case, but let's say Apple wins and Pystar is forced to do a recall. Will Apple prosecute Pystar's customers if they don't return the boxes? The EULA violation problem goes away if they wipe MacOS X from the hard drive and install Ubuntu or Windows.
First, IAALE (I am a lithography engineer) working on Intel's 22nm process technology. Let's clear up a few misconceptions:
1) The name of a logic node is directly related to the size of the features being made. Those names (e.g. 65nm, 45m, 32nm, etc.) used to relate to the "half-pitch" of the minimum pitch that was printed. But that is not true today. 65nm used a minimum pitch of ~200nm, 45nm used ~140nm and 32nm is using ~100nm. The next node, 22nm is slated to use minimum a pitch of 72nm. The features discussed in this article have a pitch of 50nm, which would be equivalent to the node after 22nm, i.e. 16nm.
2) It's not hard to print features smaller than the wavelength of light. For the lens based systems we used, the Rayleigh criterion gives the minimum pitch possible: 0.25*lambda/NA, where lambda=wavelength (193nm) and NA=numerical aperature (1.35 for the best lenses). So 72nm is the minimum pitch, already much smaller than the wavelength
3) I hate to break it to these researchers, but interferometry has been used for a looong time to make gratings. Search for "interferomety lithography" on Google Scholar. The fourth link is called "Nanolithography using extreme ultraviolet lithography interferometry: 19 nm lines and spaces". That paper is from 1999. And they did that one exposure, not three (using a smaller wavelength).
You would actually need at least one more exposure to divide the grating into something that resembled a logic circuit. The technique in this artcle is not practcal for a number of reasons, but we can do better than them using pitch-doubling techniques and only two exposures.
Platinum (or platinum coated) electrodes work better. And you need to add some salt to the water to get any reasonable reaction rate, since, despite many people's ideas about water, it is actually a pretty poor conductor of electricity.