When I was a co-op at Texas Instruments in 1992, their chip layout tool allowed for non-manhattan layout of any chip features and had done so for about 10 years (since the time layout was done by hand with colored pencils on acetate sheets).
The change, if any, has to be to the automated routing algorithms, finally allowing them to take advantage of something besides north-south, east-west metal lines. This is generally hard because placing one wire in a metal layer essentially prevents you from placing local wires in any other direction (think 2 dimensional). A north-south wire blocks east-west wires, so you use a different metal layer for the east-west wires and connect them to the north-south wires with vias (holes in the insulating layer between the metal layers). One decent sized diagonal wire blocks both north-south and east-west wires in the entire layer, and in 1992, having a three metal layers (instead of two) seemed like an expensive luxury.
The use of two of five metal layers for diagonals and then informing the routing heuristic of these additional "half-dimensions" could easily result in the incremental performance gains being discussed. But only incremental. The hype level in the article was certainly excessive, but that's marketing's job...
As for the technical problems you mentioned, fabrication processes have certainly changed since I was last in hardware (1995), but even the mask cutters back then could rotate the mask plate to get straight lines cut in any direction they darned well pleased.
One of the coolest examples of diagonal lines I saw while working there was a 6 transistor SRAM cell that had transistors and wires going in all directions. Tiled into a RAM array, it looked like a crystal matrix.
I have never really bought into the argument that any computer program was protected speech though I do understand that computer code may contain text that deserves protection (a comment advocates a controversial position, criticizes the powers that be, is artistic, etc.)
Instead, I think that computer programs deserve much more general first amendment protection under the protection of the "freedom of the press" clause. Computer programs are much more likely to be enablers or instruments of free expression, not expressions themselves.
The internet itself is a software based, highly participatory medium that people frequently use for expressing unpopular or controversial views. As such, the software that runs the internet (Slashdot) looks a lot more like a printing press than a pamphlet produced by that press (this slashdot post).
Now, it doesn't make sense to assume that every program is an enabler of free speech, since a program can do whatever the developer wrote it to, but a program which is an enabler of expression, including a system which allows for fair use of copyrighted material, most certainly is deserving of protection under the freedom of the press clause of the first amendment.
As for accepting a degraded version of the original for fair use purposes. Although the highest quality version may not be required for every fair use, it doesn't make any sense for the copyright holder to determine what level of quality will be necessary for the specific use that the work is copied for.
The criticism of a musical recording may require a very high fidelity sample of the original work to point out flaws or otherwise effectively comment, while a dialog review of a movie scene may not need more than a grainy reproduction to make it's points. For other fair uses, including safe backup for personal use, only a full quality reproduction can possibly be considered adequate.
Finally, many works in mediums with dense information coding (like e-books) there is no lesser fidelity to degrade to. If you can't obtain the relevant portion of the original information, you simply can't use it.
In the end, although full quality reproduction of the original work may not be required for each and every fair use, there will always be cases where the highest possible fidelity is required and the copyright holder is not the correct person to have the decision making power over what quality level is appropriate.
Even worse is the fact that when I was discussing a patent with a patent attorney, I was advised that I should not even think about doing a prior art search so that if there was a conflict with prior art, I could deny any assertion that my patent was knowingly improperly filed. I was actually discouraged by my attorney from learning if my idea had already been invented.
Not only is the system royally f**cked up, but it appears to be getting worse, by design.
Any one-sided transmission can assert anything you like about your location. The receiver can use the transmission and other available information to *disprove* an assertion made within the transmission (you aren't at 45N90W because that's where I'm standing) but can't *verify* the assertion without some sort of reliable test.
It could be something like a tightbeam transmission to the asserted location (which must then be encoded and sent back to us), but what you've actually done there is verify that the person making the assertion has a receiver at the tested location.
An Orwellian "1984"-esque surveillance system would allow for visual verification of asserted location (and depending on the available data, verification that you aren't anywhere else either (you don't have a doppel at the claimed location)), but would come at a serious cost of privacy, hopefully made obvious by my choice of a definition.
In short, I'm not interested in paying for the installation of an infrastructure that allows you or anyone else to verify my current location...
The result of this solution is a set of probability functions describing the likely locations of the outbound electrons within the calculated domain. The approximation used (limiting the calculation domain with an arbitrary boundary) is most likely done by describing the areas outside of the boundary in terms of the probability wave approaching the boundary (once the electrons are far enough from the proton, treat it as a QED two electron problem) and remove the region outside the boundary from the calculation domain.
The result of this hack is an arbitrarily close approximation of the actual electron probability functions. In QED, you don't generally look for an exact prediction of the electron's location. Most of the time you are looking for a usefully accurate model. The breakthrough is finding a way to make the problem computationally tractable (which is done by the "large distance" approximation). Finding a way to calculate the large distance in terms of the near distance in all cases is the big deal here.
There are two difficulties with any Newtonian three body model (where gravity is the dominant force). The first is gathering complete information (where are all of the interacting objects). The second is computer errors including the position rounding error (at 32 bits, or whatever) and the sampling error (how often does the computer recalculate *all* of the vectors based on updated positions?). Ballistic models that describe interacting particles in terms of probability functions can be much more successful, but run into difficulty during interpretation (the electron really can be in five different places, the spaceship cannot).
By reducing distant bodies to planar gravity fields (large distance approximation), we end up with spacecraft like the Galileo probe that made it to Jupiter with only a few small course corrections to make up for the slight inaccuracies in the approximated model. But beware, it's still just a useful model. Don't expect to hit the center ring halfway across the solar system with your eyes closed based on any model. You'll need to correct (or update) your model with empirical data to make it actually work.
So, to finally answer your question. The breakthrough is going the other way (from Newtonian three body to QED). Before this, however, the QED models didn't have any way to reduce the large distance wave functions to a useful approximation. Now they do. If the large distance approximation used can be applied or extended to more complex interactions, our models of quantum interactions will be dramatically improved and our ability to describe complex probabilistic events will become correspondingly more confident.
Slashdot Mirror
You're exactly right.
When I was a co-op at Texas Instruments in 1992, their chip layout tool allowed for non-manhattan layout of any chip features and had done so for about 10 years (since the time layout was done by hand with colored pencils on acetate sheets).
The change, if any, has to be to the automated routing algorithms, finally allowing them to take advantage of something besides north-south, east-west metal lines. This is generally hard because placing one wire in a metal layer essentially prevents you from placing local wires in any other direction (think 2 dimensional). A north-south wire blocks east-west wires, so you use a different metal layer for the east-west wires and connect them to the north-south wires with vias (holes in the insulating layer between the metal layers). One decent sized diagonal wire blocks both north-south and east-west wires in the entire layer, and in 1992, having a three metal layers (instead of two) seemed like an expensive luxury.
The use of two of five metal layers for diagonals and then informing the routing heuristic of these additional "half-dimensions" could easily result in the incremental performance gains being discussed. But only incremental. The hype level in the article was certainly excessive, but that's marketing's job...
As for the technical problems you mentioned, fabrication processes have certainly changed since I was last in hardware (1995), but even the mask cutters back then could rotate the mask plate to get straight lines cut in any direction they darned well pleased.
One of the coolest examples of diagonal lines I saw while working there was a 6 transistor SRAM cell that had transistors and wires going in all directions. Tiled into a RAM array, it looked like a crystal matrix.
Regards,
Ross
Instead, I think that computer programs deserve much more general first amendment protection under the protection of the "freedom of the press" clause. Computer programs are much more likely to be enablers or instruments of free expression, not expressions themselves.
The internet itself is a software based, highly participatory medium that people frequently use for expressing unpopular or controversial views. As such, the software that runs the internet (Slashdot) looks a lot more like a printing press than a pamphlet produced by that press (this slashdot post).
Now, it doesn't make sense to assume that every program is an enabler of free speech, since a program can do whatever the developer wrote it to, but a program which is an enabler of expression, including a system which allows for fair use of copyrighted material, most certainly is deserving of protection under the freedom of the press clause of the first amendment.
As for accepting a degraded version of the original for fair use purposes. Although the highest quality version may not be required for every fair use, it doesn't make any sense for the copyright holder to determine what level of quality will be necessary for the specific use that the work is copied for.
The criticism of a musical recording may require a very high fidelity sample of the original work to point out flaws or otherwise effectively comment, while a dialog review of a movie scene may not need more than a grainy reproduction to make it's points. For other fair uses, including safe backup for personal use, only a full quality reproduction can possibly be considered adequate.
Finally, many works in mediums with dense information coding (like e-books) there is no lesser fidelity to degrade to. If you can't obtain the relevant portion of the original information, you simply can't use it.
In the end, although full quality reproduction of the original work may not be required for each and every fair use, there will always be cases where the highest possible fidelity is required and the copyright holder is not the correct person to have the decision making power over what quality level is appropriate.
Regards, Ross
Even worse is the fact that when I was discussing a patent with a patent attorney, I was advised that I should not even think about doing a prior art search so that if there was a conflict with prior art, I could deny any assertion that my patent was knowingly improperly filed. I was actually discouraged by my attorney from learning if my idea had already been invented.
Not only is the system royally f**cked up, but it appears to be getting worse, by design.
Regards,
Ross
It could be something like a tightbeam transmission to the asserted location (which must then be encoded and sent back to us), but what you've actually done there is verify that the person making the assertion has a receiver at the tested location.
An Orwellian "1984"-esque surveillance system would allow for visual verification of asserted location (and depending on the available data, verification that you aren't anywhere else either (you don't have a doppel at the claimed location)), but would come at a serious cost of privacy, hopefully made obvious by my choice of a definition.
In short, I'm not interested in paying for the installation of an infrastructure that allows you or anyone else to verify my current location...
Regards, Ross
The result of this hack is an arbitrarily close approximation of the actual electron probability functions. In QED, you don't generally look for an exact prediction of the electron's location. Most of the time you are looking for a usefully accurate model. The breakthrough is finding a way to make the problem computationally tractable (which is done by the "large distance" approximation). Finding a way to calculate the large distance in terms of the near distance in all cases is the big deal here.
There are two difficulties with any Newtonian three body model (where gravity is the dominant force). The first is gathering complete information (where are all of the interacting objects). The second is computer errors including the position rounding error (at 32 bits, or whatever) and the sampling error (how often does the computer recalculate *all* of the vectors based on updated positions?). Ballistic models that describe interacting particles in terms of probability functions can be much more successful, but run into difficulty during interpretation (the electron really can be in five different places, the spaceship cannot).
By reducing distant bodies to planar gravity fields (large distance approximation), we end up with spacecraft like the Galileo probe that made it to Jupiter with only a few small course corrections to make up for the slight inaccuracies in the approximated model. But beware, it's still just a useful model. Don't expect to hit the center ring halfway across the solar system with your eyes closed based on any model. You'll need to correct (or update) your model with empirical data to make it actually work.
So, to finally answer your question. The breakthrough is going the other way (from Newtonian three body to QED). Before this, however, the QED models didn't have any way to reduce the large distance wave functions to a useful approximation. Now they do. If the large distance approximation used can be applied or extended to more complex interactions, our models of quantum interactions will be dramatically improved and our ability to describe complex probabilistic events will become correspondingly more confident.
Regards, Ross