What will the startup time of such a monolythic application be like?
Take OpenOffice as an example, the startup time scales QUADRATICALLY with the version number:
Starting OOdraw on my laptop:
69 secs for opening oodraw2 (1.9.126)
21 secs for opening oodraw (1.1.4)
So (2.0/1.1)^2 = 3.3, and 69s/21s = 3.3
Seriously, I love linux for the fact that I can use 'old hardware', but why do I have to wait QUADRATICALLY longer to start the same basic application?
I'll be sticking with Openoffice 1.1 over OO2 or Staroffice8 thank you very much.
The sync software is terrible (mentioned in the article),
For those of you interested, I'm happily synching the Treo 650 with JPilot over a bluetooth connection to my Laptop running Ubuntu Linux.
This article was helpful getting this setup:
That's funny, I've been using the Treo 650 on Cingular for at least 3 months and it is rock solid. You just have to be careful using 3rd party apps. There are some applications out there which tend to make it less stable, ditch those and find replacements which don't to that. My best guess therefore is that there is an application everybody in your office uses that crashes the Treo. I realize those apps may be hard to ditch.
On a side note, it is quite sad to see that a single application can crash the total OS. I hope when Palm switches to Linux this will all be over, with better resource management and all that.
Now regarding wifi extendability. There are SD wifi cards out there that work with other palms, and there is a ROM hack that allows you to use this SD wifi card on your treo 650. Haven't tried this one myself yet. Yes it's a shame that you have to do this ugly hack to get it running, and it may not be what you want to do for all the treos your company uses.
Just to point out that the leader of this research group, Wulfgang Ketterle, 2nd from the right in the picture, shared the physics nobel prize in 2001
http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/2001/
"for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates"
Basically the current article is about the same type of system that landed him The Prize
Disclaimer: I wrote that last paper, there are many more papers about nanotube transistors, but these are some of the most cited ones.
There are even single-atom transistors around, see
Coulomb blockade and the Kondo effect in single-atom transistors, Jiwoong Park, Abhay N. Pasupathy, Jonas I. Goldsmith, Connie Chang, Yuval Yaish, Jason R. Petta, Marie Rinkoski, James P. Sethna, Hector D. Abruna, Paul L. McEuen & Daniel C. Ralph, Nature 417, pages 722-725 (2002). http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/lassp_data/mceuen/hom epage/Publications/Co-02pub.pdf
So I made this DVD myself that I want to play on my fancy new RFID enabled DVD player. There must be some legacy mode on the player that allows me to play it right?
Now how about just frying the RFID chip on the DVD, voila: it looks like a regular DVD
DVD playback is a thorny issue, mostly because of the legalities revolving around DeCSS...
I thought this was all settled? There is no DMCA violation because it is used to for interoperability. What other legal issues are there?
If there is no legal issue, then extremetech is just perpetuating the myth that OSS programs have all sorts of legal issues. yes I know, gif encoding, mp3 decoding aside DeCSS was one of the cases where this was not an issue.
Interesting hypothesis. Indeed, microwave radiation could simply heat up the surroundings of DNA and that would break the DNA. How does this work?
Microwave radiation couples to the dipole moment of water molecules, which makes them vibrate harder, causing a local rise in temperature, much like in a microwave oven. See this wikipedia article
Cells are very sensitive to heat: see this interesting article (in response to a question from a 13 year old, mind you)
"yes, DNA is distroyed if a living thing
is heated: the cells of the organism are degraded by the heat, and that liberates enzymes, called DNAses, that eat away the DNA. So the cell destroys its own DNA when it is dying."
Or the increase of heat could directly change the DNA. DNA first melts and afterwards at higher local temperature bonds may break.
I have no idea which of these mechanisms may be stronger, but it is not too surprising to see degradation of DNA under the influence of RF radiation, even though direct breaking of bonds is energetically unlikely, as the parent rightfully points out.
For those not in the know, this technique, although interesting, is NOT persistent, i.e. : drop the power, and loose your data. Hardly a solution for harddrive technology. Memory: yes, harddrive: no.
The effect they are using is a non linearity in the restoring force of a doubly clamped beam. It is well known that if you have a nonlinear restoring force
F = kx + k_3 x^3, for sufficiently large driving power, the amplitude close to resonance becomes bistable. (This system is called a Duffing oscillator).
switching from one stable state to another is accomplished by driving the system at sufficiently high or low power, such that the bistability vanishes and the system is force into the high or low state. A simple hysteresis problem...
For an example of a Duffing oscillator in a related system, look at figure 3 in this publication http://www.its.caltech.edu/~postma/pdf/APL83_1240. pdfAppl. Phys. Lett 83, 1240 (2003) (pdf file)... yes, this is a shameless plug;-)
In general, agreed. However, the paper is scheduled to appear in PRE (see other reply to your post)
In fact, a lot of journals (e.g. Science, Nature) do not allow you to seek attention outside of the science community. You can present your results at conferences, but not at press conferences. (If per chance a reporter is present in a scientific meeting and puts it on the cover of the NY Times, no big deal). If you violate this, they may withdraw your paper.
In addition, reporting the main findings of a paper in the mass media may compromise the novelty of the work and thus its appropriateness for Science. Authors are free to present their data at scientific meetings but should not overtly seek media attention or give copies of the figures or data from their manuscript to any reporter, unless the reporter agrees to abide by Science's press embargo. If a reporter attends an author's session at a meeting and writes a story based only on the presentation, such coverage will not affect Science's consideration of the author's paper. (For more information, please see the embargo entry in the Science Contributors FAQ.)
There seems to be some confusion. Only the people entering the US on a Visa need to have their fingerprints taken. Tourists coming from countries that are participating in the Visa waiver program do not have to do this.
Disclaimer: I am a Dutch citizen on a J1 visa, and upon arrival back in the US last monday (jan 5), I also had to have my fingerprints taken, even though The Netherlands is part of the Visa Waiver Program, and as a tourist I thus, if I were a tourist, wouldn't have to do this.
This brings me to my main problem with this method, it is quite inadequate. Why are only visa holders screened like this? Can tourists not me terrorists?
I would really like for Jackson to make a movie about the Once and Future King by T.H. White. If you haven't read it yet, please do. It's a brilliant book, the descriptions are vivid, and the Arthur story is told in a very original way. E.g, Merlin is living backwards in time, and the way it is written up is very intelligent, as well as funny.
He should include the last part of the book though, The book of Merlin which was found in the private collection of White after he died. It makes the story much more complete and ends in the same sprit as the book starts in The Sword in the Stone
Slashdot Mirror
Take OpenOffice as an example, the startup time scales QUADRATICALLY with the version number:
Starting OOdraw on my laptop:
69 secs for opening oodraw2 (1.9.126)
21 secs for opening oodraw (1.1.4)
So (2.0/1.1)^2 = 3.3, and 69s/21s = 3.3
Seriously, I love linux for the fact that I can use 'old hardware', but why do I have to wait QUADRATICALLY longer to start the same basic application?
I'll be sticking with Openoffice 1.1 over OO2 or Staroffice8 thank you very much.
Why sell 'the ultimate device' right away and have a hard time topping yourself, when you can sell slightly better devices all the time?
This way, you drive people along a slow but certain upgrade path which leads to a nice constant revenue stream.
Plus, converging devices probably also means more competition. All cell phone manufacturers start making mp3 players and vice versa.
For those of you interested, I'm happily synching the Treo 650 with JPilot over a bluetooth connection to my Laptop running Ubuntu Linux. This article was helpful getting this setup:
http://howto.pilot-link.org/bluesync/fb.html
The keyring software I run to securely store passwords also happily syncs with Jpilot.
On a side note, it is quite sad to see that a single application can crash the total OS. I hope when Palm switches to Linux this will all be over, with better resource management and all that.
Now regarding wifi extendability. There are SD wifi cards out there that work with other palms, and there is a ROM hack that allows you to use this SD wifi card on your treo 650. Haven't tried this one myself yet. Yes it's a shame that you have to do this ugly hack to get it running, and it may not be what you want to do for all the treos your company uses.
"for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates"
Basically the current article is about the same type of system that landed him The Prize
There is an interesting part where Michael goes to congress and asks them what is in the Patriot Act. Hardly anybody knows.
That movie is definitely +5 Insightful, or +5 Flamebait, depending on your point of view
Carbon nanotubes are molecules, and are well known to work as transistors, even at room temperature. For instance, see these papers:
Room-temperature transistor based on a single carbon nanotube9 .pdf
S. J. Tans, A. R. M. Verschueren, and C. Dekker
Nature 393, pages 49-52 (1998)
http://www.mb.tn.tudelft.nl/publications/nat393_4
Carbon nanotubes single-electron transistors at room temperature.9 3_76.pdf
H.W.Ch. Postma, T.F. Teepen, Z. Yao, M. Grifoni, C. Dekker
In: Science 293 pages 76-79 (2001)
http://www.mb.tn.tudelft.nl/publications/science2
Disclaimer: I wrote that last paper, there are many more papers about nanotube transistors, but these are some of the most cited ones.
There are even single-atom transistors around, see
Coulomb blockade and the Kondo effect in single-atom transistors,m epage/Publications/Co-02pub.pdf
Jiwoong Park, Abhay N. Pasupathy, Jonas I. Goldsmith, Connie Chang, Yuval Yaish, Jason R. Petta, Marie Rinkoski, James P. Sethna, Hector D. Abruna, Paul L. McEuen & Daniel C. Ralph,
Nature 417, pages 722-725 (2002).
http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/lassp_data/mceuen/ho
I used windows to persue my passion ... downloading Ubuntu Linux :)
Now how about just frying the RFID chip on the DVD, voila: it looks like a regular DVD
... or is this just a when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail kind of situation?
DVD playback is a thorny issue, mostly because of the legalities revolving around DeCSS ...
I thought this was all settled? There is no DMCA violation because it is used to for interoperability. What other legal issues are there?
If there is no legal issue, then extremetech is just perpetuating the myth that OSS programs have all sorts of legal issues. yes I know, gif encoding, mp3 decoding aside DeCSS was one of the cases where this was not an issue.
Anybody care to share their insight?
Microwave radiation couples to the dipole moment of water molecules, which makes them vibrate harder, causing a local rise in temperature, much like in a microwave oven. See this wikipedia article
Cells are very sensitive to heat: see this interesting article (in response to a question from a 13 year old, mind you)
"yes, DNA is distroyed if a living thing is heated: the cells of the organism are degraded by the heat, and that liberates enzymes, called DNAses, that eat away the DNA. So the cell destroys its own DNA when it is dying."
Or the increase of heat could directly change the DNA. DNA first melts and afterwards at higher local temperature bonds may break.
I have no idea which of these mechanisms may be stronger, but it is not too surprising to see degradation of DNA under the influence of RF radiation, even though direct breaking of bonds is energetically unlikely, as the parent rightfully points out.
The effect they are using is a non linearity in the restoring force of a doubly clamped beam. It is well known that if you have a nonlinear restoring force F = kx + k_3 x^3, for sufficiently large driving power, the amplitude close to resonance becomes bistable. (This system is called a Duffing oscillator).
switching from one stable state to another is accomplished by driving the system at sufficiently high or low power, such that the bistability vanishes and the system is force into the high or low state. A simple hysteresis problem ...
For an example of a Duffing oscillator in a related system, look at figure 3 in this publication http://www.its.caltech.edu/~postma/pdf/APL83_1240. pdfAppl. Phys. Lett 83, 1240 (2003) (pdf file) ... yes, this is a shameless plug ;-)
....
unless you also have a liking for the finer shades of techno
....
and you can forget about humming the tune in the record store :)
....
"It goes a little like this Boom DaDaDa Boom, Boom DaDaDa Boom, Boom DaDaDa Boom, Boom DaDaDa BoomBoom"
In fact, a lot of journals (e.g. Science, Nature) do not allow you to seek attention outside of the science community. You can present your results at conferences, but not at press conferences. (If per chance a reporter is present in a scientific meeting and puts it on the cover of the NY Times, no big deal). If you violate this, they may withdraw your paper.
Phys Rev E is not that strict, I believe.
a quote from the Science magazine guide for authors
In addition, reporting the main findings of a paper in the mass media may compromise the novelty of the work and thus its appropriateness for Science. Authors are free to present their data at scientific meetings but should not overtly seek media attention or give copies of the figures or data from their manuscript to any reporter, unless the reporter agrees to abide by Science's press embargo. If a reporter attends an author's session at a meeting and writes a story based only on the presentation, such coverage will not affect Science's consideration of the author's paper. (For more information, please see the embargo entry in the Science Contributors FAQ.)
Disclaimer: I am a Dutch citizen on a J1 visa, and upon arrival back in the US last monday (jan 5), I also had to have my fingerprints taken, even though The Netherlands is part of the Visa Waiver Program, and as a tourist I thus, if I were a tourist, wouldn't have to do this.
This brings me to my main problem with this method, it is quite inadequate. Why are only visa holders screened like this? Can tourists not me terrorists?
He should include the last part of the book though, The book of Merlin which was found in the private collection of White after he died. It makes the story much more complete and ends in the same sprit as the book starts in The Sword in the Stone
It is a picture from the Heath group at Caltech, and the wires are made in a so-called SNAP process. Read about it in the Science article (PDF)