Thanks. From my Physics lessons, I always assumed that if "electron holes" were travelling in one direction, electrons were travelling in the opposite direction.
That's because boron has only three outer-shell electrons and can make only three of four bonds that carbon normally does in the diamond lattice. The result is a missing electron or "hole" that can move freely through the crystal, allowing the diamond to conduct positive charge.
I'm a bit confused about this paragraph. If a diamond can only conduct positive charge, then it would be a power source? Have they discovered unlimited energy?
It is really amazing to consider that we now have a "spy" satellite orbitting Mars relaying images of the surface back to us on Earth, and that it's sensors are good enough to show us photos of the landing of the rover on the surface. Just incredible.
I wonder how long it will be before Beagle is found this way...
Re:Here is What Comparisons of Laptops and Desktop
on
Dell's Gaming Monster
·
· Score: 1
What's wrong is that laptop keyboards should have developed an industry standard form factor and connection standard long ago. Likewise, the small card that is the video card for my laptop should be easily replaced, and easily connected to the monitor, which should also be easily replaced.
Amen to that! After having the opportunity to disassemble my laptop in order to replace the backlight of the 14" LCD (a $15 miniature fluorescent tube). This required removing four plastic tabs, removing four screws to the bezel, removing another ten screws holding the LCD in place, removing another two screws holding the backlight in place, fiddling around with metal and plastic holders, unsoldering the old custom
connector and insulation, resoldering the new connector, fiddling with the metal and plastic holders, resealing the LCD frame, reattaching the
LCD to the backplate, refixing the bezel and putting all the sticky tabs in place.
Given the fragility of this component, I do wonder why it is necessary at all (couldn't it be replaced by something solid state like LED's or microlasers, or at least have a access panel at the back of the laptop.
Reminds me of the time I first heard about "Silicon Highway" on Granada Men and Motors. I spent fours hours staying up late to watch this program. I was extremely disappointed to find it was only about nude women with plastic surgery rather than the latest advances in computer technology.
If you're playing the level where you have to use the Jumblehopper to travel cross country, you can actually jump over the mountain tops, over the volcano lake, and down into the underground cavern. The neatest thing was that you could actually bounce out of the cavern, stand on the ocean and see the entire cavern system. (You have to choose a specific point on the mountain tops - somewhere to the left, otherwise you'll never make it across).
I also tried to see if it was possible to use the rocket pack to bounce the large balloon into the cavern. Unfortunately, every time I tried, the balloon would start to rapidly bounce around in a confined space, before shooting upwards into space (I think it reached escape velocity, and I could never find it again!).
We're working with an industrial use colour camera sensor - basically your typical digital CCD array with the rest of the camera removed (no auto-focus, white-balance, flash etc...) Pixels are arranged in a groups of 2x2 (Red, Green, Green, Blue). In bright scenes, the signal strength can bleed between the individual colour cells, which is extremely tricky to compensate for. However, If you take individual frames of each light wavelength that you are interested in using a monochrome camera, by using colour filters of your choice, you not only get a higher resolution, but you also know exactly the sensitivity of the CCD for that frequency.
Also, the human vision system also performs white-balancing on it's own. If you've ever looked through a window at dusk in Winter, you'll notice that outside will appear with a blue tint, while if you're outside, all the rooms inside will appear to have an orange/yellow tint. Your eyes are trying to get the average colour to white.
It seems a good idea. But it would be really interesting if you could extend it to film and video production. One topic that interests me is the concept of automatically identifying the location of individual frames or scenes in adverts and movies. Some locations are fairly easy (downtown LA, Eiffel Tower, Tower of London), but sometimes things are a bit harder eg. looking for a streetname, telephone number on a vehicle).
Many of the old series, have helicopter fly overs in downtown cores. I always wonder how the view differs from now to back then, if a film camera were to follow the exact same path (eg. In the title sequence of ChiPs, are those large squares of green space still there in downtown LA?).
If a camera could store the pan, tilt, zoom and rotation along with the GPS coordinates, this could be possible.
It's extremely annoying, given that mechanics and plumbers (or even totally unskilled jobs like shunting boxes around a warehouse, which I did for a year or so a while back) can earn you almost as much as it's possible to earn with a degree these days.
It certainly amazes me about the earning potential of a plumber. However, many of these plumbers are doing more than just unblocking sinks and loos as they are also qualified to repair/install electric showers/water heaters. So they are more of electrical engineers rather than just plunger-plunkers. 40 pounds/hour isn't a bad salary:)
Personally, I blame the people who did computing degrees around the time of the dot com boom because they needed a degree and heard it was "where the money was".
The UK market more or less collapsed around August 2001, when various telecom companies decided to layoff staff. I was changing jobs at the time and one HR manager told me that it had become complete chaos with every office being blanketed with a blizzard of CV's. Thousands of graduates were firing off thousands of CV's to hundreds of agencies who were then firing off hundreds of thousands of CV's to every company they had heard from.
Many companies were trying to recruit as many graduates as possible, but were limited by the number of project managers available (there are 40,000 unemployed contractors who would be willing to take up these positions, but the companies just want someone with the highly specialised technical skills relevant to their field who wants to make the permanent change). Instead of advertising for the post of project manager, some companies would advertise for senior software engineers, and then try and convince the hapless individual that their skills were out of date/rusty or had the attitude of "what can you do that graduates can't do?" in order to make them into moving into management. Others would admit that the graduates didn't really understand anything, and they needed someone to work full time training them up.
I don't object to people having the opportunity to go to university, but they should be able to demonstrate the knowledge/motivation/enthusiasm/personality to carry them through. And the number of places available should match the number of positions available (as in accounting/pharmacy). But none of this would have applied 4-5 years ago, when the dot com boom was at its peak.
With 3 general purpose CPUs and a unified memory system, you can do things like generate a single tree and have each processor modify the tree in memory slightly before sending it to the GPU. Voila! Instant forest with quickly generated unique trees.
More likely developers will use two CPU's for the graphics, and one CPU for the AI and collision detection.
If you are sending 30,000 pieces of mail a week, your bond would only be $30.00. If people like your email, you will never have to pay the toll, but if they don't like it, then you will be subject it.
But how do you handle the situation where spammers CC a spam to 100+ E-mail addresses. Do you waive the bond if only one recipient, a majority of the recipients or if all recipients accept the message?
It won't take spammers long to create dummy accounts to accept E-mail in order to avoid paying bonds.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK, there are around 40K+ unemployed contractors. It seems employers are only looking for experienced staff to work as project managers in order to take on as many graduates as possible.
It's not just the record companies who are to blame. Back in the 80's, there was an incredible burst of creativity. Part of this was due to part-time musicians being paid to play in pubs/nightclubs and gaining experience as to what worked and didn't work for them.
Now many of these places actually *charge* the same musicians to perform, as the owners argue that there's no guarantee that they will bring in more customers or revenue.
I shit you not, every time somebody would call on this line, a fucking klaxon goes off.
I believe that. I used to work in the helpdesk of a large company back in the late 80's. At that time, Ethernet networks were fairly new to the company (cards cost $1000+ for 10 Mbits/sec). On occasions, the odd card would either start transmitting unrelentlessly (referred inhouse as jabbering), start sending out truncated packets (runts), or just not talking at all (sulking). We actually had two Ethernet backbones; if one failed, engineers would run relentlessly up all 15+ floors of the building switching lines until the network was restored and the offending PC was identified.
The precursor to all of this was a single telephone call... Has anyone noticed that the network is dead?
Quickly followed by an avalanche of a thousand plus callers, all asking the same thing.
To keep the PHB happy, everyone had to run around frantically, to appear as if they were actually doing something. Sitting down quietly at a LAN analyzer and an Ethernet address map of the building was the last thing management wanted to see.
Sun graphics hardware uses intelligent FBRAM (framebuffer RAM). The transparency calculations are handled by the video memory chips themselves, so you need only write the alpha you want, then pixblt the data to memory instead of the read/blend/write cycle.
It has the highest rate of MRSA and hospital infection in the developed world,
This was due to Mrs T. deciding that it was more cost-effective to outsource the cleaning staff to third party contractors, rather than having in-house staff assigned to each ward.
Early government research had realised that it was better to have three types of disinfectant to clean wards. Really strong stuff to clean the floors, mild stuff to clean walls, doors and door handles, and weak stuff to clean the ceilings. Having in-house staff meant that the cleaners had "latent knowledge" about which areas needed the most attention, and took pride in keeping their individual wards clean. But now, it's just a minimum wage job.
Installing layers of managers and administrators was another of Mrs T's ideas. The media was always full of stories about how various hospitals and wards had been built and were lying empty and unused while others had waiting lists (mainly because the regional authorities had planned urban growth and had built the hospitals first). This led to the development of the internal market where different areas could buy services from each other - now being extended to buying treatments from abroad.
Compare this to France, where they also have "free" health service. The difference is that all the hospitals, dentists and doctors are privately run, but everyone is required to contribute to a compulsory private insurance scheme. Visitors can also pay privately.
As an example, I had to see a dentist while in France. I was able to book an appointment to see the dentist the next day. Instead of taking standard photographic X-rays which required development, she took digital X-rays which were available immediately and were logged into a digital patient case history.
Unfortunately in the UK, nearly all the dentists are moving into the private market. This is due to the number of new cosmetic treatments which are available, but the government won't fund. However, there is a catch to this. Private dentists seem to charge ridiculous high amounts for treatment. A basic set of X-rays would cost around 100 pounds ($150 dollars), a filling would cost 100 (150) and a wisdom tooth extraction 500 (750). In the latter case, this cost me only 10 on the NHS.
What I don't get is why didn't they just make the GPU a generic RISC with say 32/32 registers [ALU/FPU] and a set of instructions that fast graphics would require [say saturated X bpp operations, fast division, etc...]
This was tried in the past, with TI's TIGA (Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture) which supported the TMS34010 and TMS34020/34082 graphics coprocessors. This was a really neat architecture which accelerated 2D and basic 3D operations. Unfortunately, the CPU chip manufacturers (Intel, etc...) would identify the bottlenecks and optimise their CPU's so that the next generation chips would be faster than a current generation CPU/GPU. "Local Bus" basically whacked out TIGA from the market. A real shame, since you could write your own extensions which had complete access to GPU memory (maybe this was a bad thing). They even got as far as having a trapezium rendering algorithm (halfway to rendering triangles).
Going back to the present day, look for the extensions like ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program. According to Microsoft's plans, these will at least have identical instruction sets. I wonder how long it will be before we can completely define an entire graphics pipeline using a single program.
(This would probabl require virtual "clip_vertex", "render_triangle" function calls).
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. From my Physics lessons, I always assumed that if "electron holes" were travelling in one direction, electrons were travelling in the opposite direction.
That's because boron has only three outer-shell electrons and can make only three of four bonds that carbon normally does in the diamond lattice. The result is a missing electron or "hole" that can move freely through the crystal, allowing the diamond to conduct positive charge.
I'm a bit confused about this paragraph. If a diamond can only conduct positive charge, then it would be a power source? Have they discovered unlimited energy?
It is really amazing to consider that we now have a "spy" satellite orbitting Mars relaying images of the surface back to us on Earth, and that it's sensors are good enough to show us photos of the landing of the rover on the surface. Just incredible.
I wonder how long it will be before Beagle is found this way...
What's wrong is that laptop keyboards should have developed an industry standard form factor and connection standard long ago. Likewise, the small card that is the video card for my laptop should be easily replaced, and easily connected to the monitor, which should also be easily replaced.
Amen to that! After having the opportunity to disassemble my laptop in order to replace the backlight of the 14" LCD (a $15 miniature fluorescent tube). This required removing four plastic tabs, removing four screws to the bezel, removing another ten screws holding the LCD in place, removing another two screws holding the backlight in place, fiddling around with metal and plastic holders, unsoldering the old custom connector and insulation, resoldering the new connector, fiddling with the metal and plastic holders, resealing the LCD frame, reattaching the LCD to the backplate, refixing the bezel and putting all the sticky tabs in place.
Given the fragility of this component, I do wonder why it is necessary at all (couldn't it be replaced by something solid state like LED's or microlasers, or at least have a access panel at the back of the laptop.
I just checked ... it was "silicone highway"
.. always thinking about chips.
That's my problem
Reminds me of the time I first heard about "Silicon Highway" on Granada Men and Motors. I spent fours hours staying up late to watch this program. I was extremely disappointed to find it was only about nude women with plastic surgery rather than the latest advances in computer technology.
If you're playing the level where you have to use the Jumblehopper to travel cross country, you can actually jump over the mountain tops, over the volcano lake, and down into the underground cavern. The neatest thing was that you could actually bounce out of the cavern, stand on the ocean and see the entire cavern system. (You have to choose a specific point on the mountain tops - somewhere to the left, otherwise you'll never make it across).
I also tried to see if it was possible to use the rocket pack to bounce the large balloon into the cavern. Unfortunately, every time I tried, the balloon would start to rapidly bounce around in a confined space, before shooting upwards into space (I think it reached escape velocity, and I could never find it again!).
Perhaps you could have a weight that would sink to the bottom, and have the beads tied to the weight by threads or wires?
Infra-red filters also work with web-cams (At least with a Logitech web-cam and a Hoya-72 IR filter).
We're working with an industrial use colour camera sensor - basically your typical digital CCD array with the rest of the camera removed (no auto-focus, white-balance, flash etc...) Pixels are arranged in a groups of 2x2 (Red, Green, Green, Blue). In bright scenes, the signal strength can bleed between the individual colour cells, which is extremely tricky to compensate for. However, If you take individual frames of each light wavelength that you are interested in using a monochrome camera, by using colour filters of your choice, you not only get a higher resolution, but you also know exactly the sensitivity of the CCD for that frequency.
Also, the human vision system also performs white-balancing on it's own. If you've ever looked through a window at dusk in Winter, you'll notice that outside will appear with a blue tint, while if you're outside, all the rooms inside will appear to have an orange/yellow tint. Your eyes are trying to get the average colour to white.
Wear a hand free phone headset throughout.
Use 'Nam style jargon' such as 'what's the ETA?', 'who's on recon?' and 'Charlie don't surf!'
And I thought I was the only person playing Counterstrike on my laptop.....
to just install sheet metal roofing over the ground where the cars are parked?
Don't worry....the mice will fed extra large rations of low-gravity cheese.
It seems a good idea. But it would be really interesting if you could extend it to film and video production. One topic that interests me is the concept of automatically identifying the location of individual frames or scenes in adverts and movies. Some locations are fairly easy (downtown LA, Eiffel Tower, Tower of London), but sometimes things are a bit harder eg. looking for a streetname, telephone number on a vehicle).
Many of the old series, have helicopter fly overs in downtown cores. I always wonder how the view differs from now to back then, if a film camera were to follow the exact same path (eg. In the title sequence of ChiPs, are those large squares of green space still there in downtown LA?).
If a camera could store the pan, tilt, zoom and rotation along with the GPS coordinates, this could be possible.
It's extremely annoying, given that mechanics and plumbers (or even totally unskilled jobs like shunting boxes around a warehouse, which I did for a year or so a while back) can earn you almost as much as it's possible to earn with a degree these days.
:)
It certainly amazes me about the earning potential of a plumber. However, many of these plumbers are doing more than just unblocking sinks and loos as they are also qualified to repair/install electric showers/water heaters.
So they are more of electrical engineers rather than just plunger-plunkers. 40 pounds/hour isn't a bad salary
Personally, I blame the people who did computing degrees around the time of the dot com boom because they needed a degree and heard it was "where the money was".
The UK market more or less collapsed around August 2001, when various telecom companies decided to layoff staff. I was changing jobs at the time and one HR manager told me that it had become complete chaos with every office being blanketed with a blizzard of CV's. Thousands of graduates were firing off thousands of CV's to hundreds of agencies who were then firing off hundreds of thousands of CV's to every company they had heard from.
Many companies were trying to recruit as many graduates as possible, but were limited by the number of project managers available (there are 40,000 unemployed contractors who would be willing to take up these positions, but the companies just want someone with the highly specialised technical skills relevant to their field who wants to make the permanent change). Instead of advertising for the post of project manager, some companies would advertise for senior software engineers, and then try and convince the hapless individual that their skills were out of date/rusty or had the attitude of "what can you do that graduates can't do?" in order to make them into moving into management. Others would admit that the graduates didn't really understand anything, and they needed someone to work full time training them up.
I don't object to people having the opportunity to go to university, but they should be able to demonstrate the knowledge/motivation/enthusiasm/personality to carry them through. And the number of places available should match the number of positions available (as in accounting/pharmacy). But none of this would have applied 4-5 years ago, when the dot com boom was at its peak.
How about comets - wouldn't they hit the ground and bury themselves under the impact debris, and then gradually melt away?
With 3 general purpose CPUs and a unified memory system, you can do things like generate a single tree and have each processor modify the tree in memory slightly before sending it to the GPU. Voila! Instant forest with quickly generated unique trees.
More likely developers will use two CPU's for the graphics, and one CPU for the AI and collision detection.
If you are sending 30,000 pieces of mail a week, your bond would only be $30.00. If people like your email, you will never have to pay the toll, but if they don't like it, then you will be subject it.
But how do you handle the situation where spammers CC a spam to 100+ E-mail addresses. Do you waive the bond if only one recipient, a majority of the recipients or if all recipients accept the message?
It won't take spammers long to create dummy accounts to accept E-mail in order to avoid paying bonds.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK, there are around 40K+ unemployed contractors. It seems employers are only looking for experienced staff to work as project managers in order to take on as many graduates as possible.
It's not just the record companies who are to blame. Back in the 80's, there was an incredible burst of creativity. Part of this was due to part-time musicians being paid to play in pubs/nightclubs and gaining experience as to what worked and didn't work for them.
Now many of these places actually *charge* the same musicians to perform, as the owners argue that there's no guarantee that they will bring in more customers or revenue.
I shit you not, every time somebody would call on this line, a fucking klaxon goes off.
I believe that. I used to work in the helpdesk of a large company back in the late 80's. At that time, Ethernet networks were fairly new to the company (cards cost $1000+ for 10 Mbits/sec). On occasions, the odd card would either start transmitting unrelentlessly (referred inhouse as jabbering), start sending out truncated packets (runts), or just not talking at all (sulking). We actually had two Ethernet backbones; if one failed, engineers would run relentlessly up all 15+ floors of the building switching lines until the network was restored and the offending PC was identified.
The precursor to all of this was a single telephone call... Has anyone noticed that the network is dead?
Quickly followed by an avalanche of a thousand plus callers, all asking the same thing.
To keep the PHB happy, everyone had to run around frantically, to appear as if they were actually doing something. Sitting down quietly at a LAN analyzer and an Ethernet address map of the building was the last thing management wanted to see.
Like it is some sort of (*snort snort*) magical orchestra?
It's "space muzak", specially designed for those long trips down to the intergalactic shopping mall.
Sun graphics hardware uses intelligent FBRAM (framebuffer RAM). The transparency calculations are handled by the video memory chips themselves, so you need only write the alpha you want, then pixblt the data to memory instead of the read/blend/write cycle.
You might want to read the paper titled FBRAM: A new Form of Memory Optimized for 3D Graphics
It has the highest rate of MRSA and hospital infection in the developed world,
This was due to Mrs T. deciding that it was more cost-effective to outsource the cleaning staff to third party contractors, rather than having in-house staff assigned to each ward. Early government research had realised that it was better to have three types of disinfectant to clean wards. Really strong stuff to clean the floors, mild stuff to clean walls, doors and door handles, and weak stuff to clean the ceilings. Having in-house staff meant that the cleaners had "latent knowledge" about which areas needed the most attention, and took pride in keeping their individual wards clean. But now, it's just a minimum wage job.
Installing layers of managers and administrators was another of Mrs T's ideas. The media was always full of stories about how various hospitals and wards had been built and were lying empty and unused while others had waiting lists (mainly because the regional authorities had planned urban growth and had built the hospitals first). This led to the development of the internal market where different areas could buy services from each other - now being extended to buying treatments from abroad.
Compare this to France, where they also have "free" health service. The difference is that all the hospitals, dentists and doctors are privately run, but everyone is required to contribute to a compulsory private insurance scheme. Visitors can also pay privately.
As an example, I had to see a dentist while in France. I was able to book an appointment to see the dentist the next day. Instead of taking standard photographic X-rays which required development, she took digital X-rays which were available immediately and were logged into a digital patient case history.
Unfortunately in the UK, nearly all the dentists are moving into the private market. This is due to the number of new cosmetic treatments which are available, but the government won't fund. However, there is a catch to this. Private dentists seem to charge ridiculous high amounts for treatment. A basic set of X-rays would cost around 100 pounds ($150 dollars), a filling would cost 100 (150) and a wisdom tooth extraction 500 (750). In the latter case, this cost me only 10 on the NHS.
What I don't get is why didn't they just make the GPU a generic RISC with say 32/32 registers [ALU/FPU] and a set of instructions that fast graphics would require [say saturated X bpp operations, fast division, etc...]
This was tried in the past, with TI's TIGA (Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture) which supported the TMS34010 and TMS34020/34082 graphics coprocessors. This was a really neat architecture which accelerated 2D and basic 3D operations. Unfortunately, the CPU chip manufacturers (Intel, etc...) would identify the bottlenecks and optimise their CPU's so that the next generation chips would be faster than a current generation CPU/GPU. "Local Bus" basically whacked out TIGA from the market. A real shame, since you could write your own extensions which had complete access to GPU memory (maybe this was a bad thing). They even got as far as having a trapezium rendering algorithm (halfway to rendering triangles).
Going back to the present day, look for the extensions like ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program. According to Microsoft's plans, these will at least have identical instruction sets. I wonder how long it will be before we can completely define an entire graphics pipeline using a single program.
(This would probabl require virtual "clip_vertex", "render_triangle" function calls).