yes and no. there are certainly scientists doing these calculations, and they predict that certain nitrogen compounds may be harder then diamond; however, the calculations are not wholly reliable.
by the way, when computer power/price goes another factor of a ~ 10,000, we will really be able to do this sort of calculation routinely
beyond low atomic number elements (carbon, nitrogen) I do not beleive the calculations are that good; nor are they that good for more complex materials (e.g;, despite an immense amount of work, no one understands the cupric oxide high temp superconductors)
you are right, tin, the element denoted by the symbol Sn from the latin stannum is soft
TiN, Titanium Nitride is a very hard substance commonly used to coat tools; next time you are at the hardware store, if you look in teh drill bit section, u will c yellowish colored drill bits - the yellow is a layer of TiN
BTW, TiN coating is millions, if not tens or hundreds of million a year
The 2001 edition of the annual review of materials research, http://www.annualreviews.org/, has a nice review of the field of super hard materials. the authors point out that scratching a diamond is not, in intself, much evidence of anything; in the real world lots of soft scratch hard examples can be found. The authors of this article also point out that one of the few flaws of diamond is that it reacts with iron, so you can't diamond coat cutting tools; instead, you have to use much softer things like boron nitride or TiN. Nanotubes could have a major commercial future if they are harder then TiN, non reactive to iron, but softer then diamond.
full citation SYNTHESIS AND DESIGN OF SUPERHARD MATERIALS; J Haines, JM Léger, G Bocquillon Annual Review of Materials Research, Vol. 31: 1-23
to think the candidates have nothing better to do then write multipage answers to every little group that poses some questions. Would anyone intelligent enough to walk and chew gum at the same time actually think that the candidates themselves even saw the questions ?
uhh..the thing about pharma or biotech apps, is that they require a lot of DIFFERENT liquids..this may not sound like much, but in practice simply keeping the solutions dust free is hard..
I don't quite see an app for this, but maybe i am dense
also, this principle of controlled non turbulent mixing of fluid streams in microchannels has been demonstrated, at least 6 years ago by a company developing a T sensor; point is, anyone could have done this in the last 8 years, so hats off to colorado if they r smart enuf to understand why u shd
It has been known for a LONG time that solutions of "pluronic" , available by the tank car load from BASF, will gel as you raise the temperature of the liquid above RT, and the gel melts again at a still higher temp Again, hydrogen bonding, but intrapolymer activity
I forget the exact details,but you can get brochures from basf with this info. Also, this has been used to prepare temp dep loading gels for capillary sequencing of DNA
I have tried firefox, and opera, and they did not work as well as IE. Since I am (in a lake wobegon sense) an avg user, I assume that many people will also have problems. So, it is irrelevant that firefox is free; if it does not work, you still need IE. (note that I am NOT saying why they don't work, that is a whole/. article by itslef)
Do you have any documentation to back up yr claim that FDA cfr 21 boosts costs ?, or that consumers would prefer cheaper, less reliable parts ?
In my experinence, many fda rules are the sort of things you would be doing anyway, if you wre producing a quality product . Like, if you are changing the inside of a blood bag, you have to show that the change does not harm the blood. real basic, simple stuff, kinda rare in computer world.
(fade to hospital corridor, surgeion in green coming down the hall to crying family) SIG: Sorry guys, but that 59 cent electrode we used shored out, and we could not start your kid's heart. Guess we shd have gone with the name brand, but those discount electrodes looked good.. CF member: thats ok doc. we understand how important it is to have compitition in the device field.
OR: when windows fails to load a.mov file,it is bad; when a family member dies because of a software but, it is worse.
As I am sure you know, just to get some circuit boards and a plastic housing and reliable software can add up, and since most med devices are produced in small lots, you cant spread your rnd costs out.
A wonderful book about the suit brought by some wobourn MA parents whoose children develooped cancer (also a gd movie with j travolta). The point is, both sides had very eminent professors of geology to testify about movement of chemicals thru groundwater; both experts were total BS artists.
so just because some guy with a big rep at mit says its so, dont mean its so (sort of lke 80 bucks does not guarantee a good bike lock)
In (i think) the 60s, jack vance had a novel about people who crash on the big planet,which has roughly the surface of jupiter (>>earth) but 1g due to lack of metals.
not as technical as ringworld, but the same idea that a lot of wierd things happen in a large space
Maybe I am just feeling superior, but I am surprised that/.ers actually find it news that, as one poster put it, the mainstream media is not even a good stenographer ? Challenge: find the earliest ref to this; probably in ancient greece or babylonia
Then there are these posts that suggest taking in a wide variety of sites (such as drudge) to get a balanced point.. ludicrous. At some point, you have to be an adult, and make a judgement that some sources of information are mostly useless. There might be somthing usefull and true on druge, but why spend the effort, when there are more sites of higher quality then you could look at in 100 lifetimes ?
Beyond this, there is a broader problem - most of the issues discussed are far beyond the ability of anyone on/. to personally check. WMDS - how many of us have the pyschcological and technical and language skills to go through the 1,000s of page of documents on this ?
This is an unsettling point of view because it implies we have to live with a lot of uncertainty, but it raises the interest ing question, how much do you need to know to make a decision >
how on earth is the idea that schools are not about education but about socialization and control in any way original ? I am sure lots of/.ers could cite the obvious references..
How do u measure "accuracy" ? Who is the arbiter of what is or is not biased ? Is it really necessary to know how accurate each political candidate is on each issue ?
Just because the hp/compaq strategy did not work out, does not mean that the alternative - being a printer comany - would have worked out. Been down to compusa lately ? printers are sold to drive cartridge sales, and it is hard to see epsom vs hp vs whatever going in hps favor. Printers, if not this year, in a year or two will be like cell phones.. a cut throat market of semi disposable units dominated by asia
As for this employee loyalty thing...it is easy to look good on a bicycle going downhill with a tailwind. For a long time, for whatever reason, hp was in a good posistion, and then they were not, adn whenever that happens, formerly great companys start firing people. Its like companies doing really basic researcy: only companies with monopoly power, like the old att or ibm, can afford tht.
PS: whenever I check out prices in the sunday paper, hp looks cheaper then dell. PPS: MY boss, who is now in his 70's, told me that hp stands for high priced...
If memory serves, in the 80's, the DoD was developing analog or digital computers based on hydraulics, for fighter planes, so the planes computer capability could survive the emp from a nuclear blast
Of those 7,000,000 patents, how many are WORTH challinging ? Most patents actually have no value, other then to the lawyers who get paid to file them, and the PR people who put out another press release. My guess, of those 7e6 patents, probably 1% actually have any real value, or have enough value that it would pay to hire a lawyer
also, if re exams have been allowed only since 1982, then the first 3 or 4e6 patents are no longer valid.
as the old patent atty says, millions try, thousands make money....
Finally, most large companies are pretty carefull; if IBM or merck or ford or PPG files a patent, they have probably done a lot of work before filing. So, there is the same problem with this statistic ( x out of 7e6 ) as with mutal fund statistiscs: survivorship bias. most of the bad, challengable patents (or bad mutual funds) don't survive review by corporate (of course, these are stats; u can always find lots of conter examples; but are they statisctically significant ?
I am very surprised that evveryone says what THEY want, but no one has mentioned that CONTROL over your environment is a key pyschological factor. If you feel that you have some control and power, you will be a better and more productive employee. I am also very surprised that no one has mentioned ergonmic furniture for typing; I constanlty go into biotech companies with 150K/yr execs with desks that are not set up for typing.
The point about cube farms is not that they are productive or nonproductive; it is that the bosses have offices; egro, the cubies are less imp, have less control over their environment; this leads to loss of self esteem, etc.. perhaps an exagerated example, but it makes the point.
The other thing is that you can divide people into focused productive people who don't really care that much, and non focused people who do.. many of the most productive people i know would not notice if you painted there office scarlet one night; they are focused on getting their work done.
So, the ideal workplace would have a range of environments, ranging from unfinished brick with wires on the floor,where people who are so inclinded could drill (literally) holes in the walls, to dark beige caves; people would get assigned to what works for them.
Any system has waste and abuse - that is human nature. The question is, is govt worse then private sector, or our views distorted by selective reporting (eg, the difference in ability to obtain public vs private records) political bias, etc
The other thing - most of what we call "govt waste" seems to be run by small/med buisnesses, which, I would imagine, are mostly run by republicans...
Is this fraud worse then CEOs using the company plane for ski trips ?
For cryin out load, do u have any idea how much an extra 128 meg of ram costs ? the amount of money lost even thinking about this is more then the cost of the ram.
meanwhile, "bloated" systems deliver features that people want...
when you learn that, that computer sales = marketing, then you are no longer a stupid geek, but someone who understands somethign about the cmputer biz.
sorry to be so vitriolic, but this arguing about ram has been going on forever, and it is Such a total waste of time. RAM costs nothing. users want features. its life - get over it.
A phd doesn't imply anything. If it comes with good work, and good recs and from a top univ, then you might be considered smart and productive; if you haven't done anything with your 5/6 years, and your recs are bad, then you are an overpaid donkey. and every permutation in between. just as technology follows a path from small company/innovative to commoditization, so does ed requirements in an industry; its not that anyone needs a phd, but many cutting edge technologies come out of universitys, and those people have phds. Google is fortunate - they have a monopoly posistion (at least de facto for now) and that allows them to hire top talent; as soon as the cash flow drys up, the phds go; look at the formerly world class att res labs.
There are a small number of companys that consistently do good science, such as ibm and corning and 3m; i suspect they hire phds because innovation is a character trait of people who are not interested in money, and those people often wind up getting phds, because it is a fun way to get to play with toys and do cool stuff.
when a major multinational corporation, releases "new products" that are over priced and are "cool" because they have decorations that amount to 5 cents of shiny plastic,and a few hours with solidworks (=common cad program)/. drools.
When a major multinational corporation releases a major upgrade to an OS used by millions,and distributes the upgrade for free, they are the evil empire.
seems to be a lack of consistency here
actually, this country was built on exploitation of natural resources, treating workers as disposable, and goverment handouts...you do know that DARPA subsidized the internet for many years ? You do know that Dupont was built on WW1 money ? YOu do know that the great industrial combines of the 1800, the railroads, steel, coal etc recieved either govt money or police protection ?...
Capitilism is overated because people confuse the soviet union (a political system) with socialism
Slashdot Mirror
yes and no. there are certainly scientists doing these calculations, and they predict that certain nitrogen compounds may be harder then diamond; however, the calculations are not wholly reliable. by the way, when computer power/price goes another factor of a ~ 10,000, we will really be able to do this sort of calculation routinely beyond low atomic number elements (carbon, nitrogen) I do not beleive the calculations are that good; nor are they that good for more complex materials (e.g;, despite an immense amount of work, no one understands the cupric oxide high temp superconductors)
you are right, tin, the element denoted by the symbol Sn from the latin stannum is soft TiN, Titanium Nitride is a very hard substance commonly used to coat tools; next time you are at the hardware store, if you look in teh drill bit section, u will c yellowish colored drill bits - the yellow is a layer of TiN BTW, TiN coating is millions, if not tens or hundreds of million a year
The 2001 edition of the annual review of materials research, http://www.annualreviews.org/, has a nice review of the field of super hard materials. the authors point out that scratching a diamond is not, in intself, much evidence of anything; in the real world lots of soft scratch hard examples can be found. The authors of this article also point out that one of the few flaws of diamond is that it reacts with iron, so you can't diamond coat cutting tools; instead, you have to use much softer things like boron nitride or TiN. Nanotubes could have a major commercial future if they are harder then TiN, non reactive to iron, but softer then diamond.
full citation SYNTHESIS AND DESIGN OF SUPERHARD MATERIALS; J Haines, JM Léger, G Bocquillon
Annual Review of Materials Research, Vol. 31: 1-23
to think the candidates have nothing better to do then write multipage answers to every little group that poses some questions.
Would anyone intelligent enough to walk and chew gum at the same time actually think that the candidates themselves even saw the questions ?
uhh..the thing about pharma or biotech apps, is that they require a lot of DIFFERENT liquids..this may not sound like much, but in practice simply keeping the solutions dust free is hard.. I don't quite see an app for this, but maybe i am dense also, this principle of controlled non turbulent mixing of fluid streams in microchannels has been demonstrated, at least 6 years ago by a company developing a T sensor; point is, anyone could have done this in the last 8 years, so hats off to colorado if they r smart enuf to understand why u shd
It has been known for a LONG time that solutions of "pluronic" , available by the tank car load from BASF, will gel as you raise the temperature of the liquid above RT, and the gel melts again at a still higher temp
Again, hydrogen bonding, but intrapolymer activity
I forget the exact details,but you can get brochures from basf with this info. Also, this has been used to prepare temp dep loading gels for capillary sequencing of DNA
I have tried firefox, and opera, and they did not work as well as IE. /. article by itslef)
Since I am (in a lake wobegon sense) an avg user, I assume that many people will also have problems. So, it is irrelevant that firefox is free; if it does not work, you still need IE. (note that I am NOT saying why they don't work, that is a whole
Do you have any documentation to back up yr claim that FDA cfr 21 boosts costs ?, or that consumers would prefer cheaper, less reliable parts ?
.mov file,it is bad; when a family member dies because of a software but, it is worse.
In my experinence, many fda rules are the sort of things you would be doing anyway, if you wre producing a quality product . Like, if you are changing the inside of a blood bag, you have to show that the change does not harm the blood. real basic, simple stuff, kinda rare in computer world.
(fade to hospital corridor, surgeion in green coming down the hall to crying family)
SIG: Sorry guys, but that 59 cent electrode we used shored out, and we could not start your kid's heart. Guess we shd have gone with the name brand, but those discount electrodes looked good..
CF member: thats ok doc. we understand how important it is to have compitition in the device field.
OR: when windows fails to load a
As I am sure you know, just to get some circuit boards and a plastic housing and reliable software can add up, and since most med devices are produced in small lots, you cant spread your rnd costs out.
A wonderful book about the suit brought by some wobourn MA parents whoose children develooped cancer (also a gd movie with j travolta). The point is, both sides had very eminent professors of geology to testify about movement of chemicals thru groundwater; both experts were total BS artists. so just because some guy with a big rep at mit says its so, dont mean its so (sort of lke 80 bucks does not guarantee a good bike lock)
In (i think) the 60s, jack vance had a novel about people who crash on the big planet,which has roughly the surface of jupiter (>>earth) but 1g due to lack of metals. not as technical as ringworld, but the same idea that a lot of wierd things happen in a large space
Maybe I am just feeling superior, but I am surprised that /.ers actually find it news that, as one poster put it, the mainstream media is not even a good stenographer ? Challenge: find the earliest ref to this; probably in ancient greece or babylonia
/. to personally check. WMDS - how many of us have the pyschcological and technical and language skills to go through the 1,000s of page of documents on this ?
Then there are these posts that suggest taking in a wide variety of sites (such as drudge) to get a balanced point.. ludicrous. At some point, you have to be an adult, and make a judgement that some sources of information are mostly useless. There might be somthing usefull and true on druge, but why spend the effort, when there are more sites of higher quality then you could look at in 100 lifetimes ?
Beyond this, there is a broader problem - most of the issues discussed are far beyond the ability of anyone on
This is an unsettling point of view because it implies we have to live with a lot of uncertainty, but it raises the interest ing question, how much do you need to know to make a decision >
how on earth is the idea that schools are not about education but about socialization and control in any way original ? I am sure lots of /.ers could cite the obvious references..
How do u measure "accuracy" ? Who is the arbiter of what is or is not biased ? Is it really necessary to know how accurate each political candidate is on each issue ?
Just because the hp/compaq strategy did not work out, does not mean that the alternative - being a printer comany - would have worked out. Been down to compusa lately ? printers are sold to drive cartridge sales, and it is hard to see epsom vs hp vs whatever going in hps favor. Printers, if not this year, in a year or two will be like cell phones.. a cut throat market of semi disposable units dominated by asia
As for this employee loyalty thing...it is easy to look good on a bicycle going downhill with a tailwind. For a long time, for whatever reason, hp was in a good posistion, and then they were not, adn whenever that happens, formerly great companys start firing
people. Its like companies doing really basic researcy: only companies with monopoly power, like the old att or ibm, can afford tht.
PS: whenever I check out prices in the sunday paper, hp looks cheaper then dell.
PPS: MY boss, who is now in his 70's, told me that hp stands for high priced...
If memory serves, in the 80's, the DoD was developing analog or digital computers based on hydraulics, for fighter planes, so the planes computer capability could survive the emp from a nuclear blast
Of those 7,000,000 patents, how many are WORTH challinging ? Most patents actually have no value, other then to the lawyers who get paid to file them, and the PR people who put out another press release. My guess, of those 7e6 patents, probably 1% actually have any real value, or have enough value that it would pay to hire a lawyer also, if re exams have been allowed only since 1982, then the first 3 or 4e6 patents are no longer valid. as the old patent atty says, millions try, thousands make money.... Finally, most large companies are pretty carefull; if IBM or merck or ford or PPG files a patent, they have probably done a lot of work before filing. So, there is the same problem with this statistic ( x out of 7e6 ) as with mutal fund statistiscs: survivorship bias. most of the bad, challengable patents (or bad mutual funds) don't survive review by corporate (of course, these are stats; u can always find lots of conter examples; but are they statisctically significant ?
I am very surprised that evveryone says what THEY want, but no one has mentioned that CONTROL over your environment is a key pyschological factor. If you feel that you have some control and power, you will be a better and more productive employee. I am also very surprised that no one has mentioned ergonmic furniture for typing; I constanlty go into biotech companies with 150K/yr execs with desks that are not set up for typing. The point about cube farms is not that they are productive or nonproductive; it is that the bosses have offices; egro, the cubies are less imp, have less control over their environment; this leads to loss of self esteem, etc.. perhaps an exagerated example, but it makes the point. The other thing is that you can divide people into focused productive people who don't really care that much, and non focused people who do .. many of the most productive people i know would not notice if you painted there office scarlet one night; they are focused on getting their work done.
So, the ideal workplace would have a range of environments, ranging from unfinished brick with wires on the floor,where people who are so inclinded could drill (literally) holes in the walls, to dark beige caves; people would get assigned to what works for them.
Any system has waste and abuse - that is human nature. The question is, is govt worse then private sector, or our views distorted by selective reporting (eg, the difference in ability to obtain public vs private records) political bias, etc The other thing - most of what we call "govt waste" seems to be run by small/med buisnesses, which, I would imagine, are mostly run by republicans... Is this fraud worse then CEOs using the company plane for ski trips ?
For cryin out load, do u have any idea how much an extra 128 meg of ram costs ? the amount of money lost even thinking about this is more then the cost of the ram. meanwhile, "bloated" systems deliver features that people want... when you learn that, that computer sales = marketing, then you are no longer a stupid geek, but someone who understands somethign about the cmputer biz. sorry to be so vitriolic, but this arguing about ram has been going on forever, and it is Such a total waste of time. RAM costs nothing. users want features. its life - get over it.
A phd doesn't imply anything. If it comes with good work, and good recs and from a top univ, then you might be considered smart and productive; if you haven't done anything with your 5/6 years, and your recs are bad, then you are an overpaid donkey. and every permutation in between.
just as technology follows a path from small company/innovative to commoditization, so does ed requirements in an industry; its not that anyone needs a phd, but many cutting edge technologies come out of universitys, and those people have phds.
Google is fortunate - they have a monopoly posistion (at least de facto for now) and that allows them to hire top talent; as soon as the cash flow drys up, the phds go; look at the formerly world class att res labs.
There are a small number of companys that consistently do good science, such as ibm and corning and 3m; i suspect they hire phds because innovation is a character trait of people who are not interested in money, and those people often wind up getting phds, because it is a fun way to get to play with toys and do cool stuff.
If it is truly open source, can't anyone do anything they want and call it a kernel ? Computing power grows out of the barrel of a fork !!
1st intelligent post on the list. Trust is how things work; petty theft is the price we pay.
when a major multinational corporation, releases "new products" that are over priced and are "cool" because they have decorations that amount to 5 cents of shiny plastic,and a few hours with solidworks (=common cad program) /. drools.
When a major multinational corporation releases a major upgrade to an OS used by millions,and distributes the upgrade for free, they are the evil empire.
seems to be a lack of consistency here
you r def a relation of the BOFH (grin)
actually, this country was built on exploitation of natural resources, treating workers as disposable, and goverment handouts...you do know that DARPA subsidized the internet for many years ? You do know that Dupont was built on WW1 money ? YOu do know that the great industrial combines of the 1800, the railroads, steel, coal etc recieved either govt money or police protection ?... Capitilism is overated because people confuse the soviet union (a political system) with socialism