They tried in Elizabeth NJ back in '95. They couldn't get the yields up to a commericially viable level. They spent close to 100 million on the project before canning it.
What happened? A new process using UV light to etch polymer film was rushed from pilot stage to commercialization way too fast.
Why did it happen? Several Active matrix TFT plants were coming online soon in East Asia. Allied Signal (now Honeywell) was planning to apply their film to the surface of Passive LCD displays to improve the apparent brightness and readability from an angle. Allied Signal was looking to commericialize the product and hopefully get laptop manufactuers to standardize on it before Active Matrix display prices fell due to increased supply from East Asia.
Those were the.com glory days . . . when companies didn't have to actually make money to be perceived as successful . . . just a lot of users.
Dialpad is still around . . . but it costs money now . . .
Is this really something the public can accept?
on
Nuclear Batteries
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Remember all the worry about children swallowing small watch batteries several years ago (leading to battery compartments on nearly all young children's toys requiring a screwdriver or other device to open)? Now we can worry about our children swallowing nuclear batteries . . .
Seriously, the technology is interesting, but if we can't even convince the general public to permit isolated quantities of nuclear material in bunkers that can withstand the impact of a 737, a containment history that very nearly 100%, and with failsafe systems that are now nearly impossible to circumvent, then how can we convince this same uneducated public to adopt nuclear batteries?
If you told the general public that smoke detectors have a radioactive isotope, how many of them would throw them away?
The other contributing feature is: We build the most complicated things that human beings have ever built.
First of all, you can't see what you're building, and you're building a lot of them. You're building transistors you can't see, and the biggest transistor budget we have is a product that comes out next year called Montecito, from the Itanium processor family. It has 1.75 billion transistors in it.
This guy's smugness is a more than a little ridiculous . . . Unlike Newton, who said that he stood of the shoulders of giants . . . this guys thinks he is a giant.
It sounds so incredibly smug. I would say that building something with a lot of transistors is like building something with a lot of bricks (how many bricks/stones in the Great Wall of China?). . . If you count bricks, or rivets, or grams of steel, there are lots of complicated things out there that humans have built . . . Many of these things take a lot more labor and a lot larger organization than Intel . . . Saturn 5's, Great Pyramids, etc. Some things are even intangible . . . the supply chain and resourcing used to move the military might of the US to Europe during WWII for example. At one time there were over one million US troops based in the UK alone . . . and that doesn't consider their supplies and equipment. Not to say Intel doesn't do complex and amazing things, they do . . . but let's keep it in perspective.
And finally for that matter, if I build a multi-processor system am I making a more complicated device than he is? I'm using move transitors than he is . . .
Is this really a "private" initiative? What makes it private? The article doesn't really say . . .
AMSAT is a private organization, but the article fails to identify where the funding comes from . . . if a probe or experiment from a private university is launched into space or performed on the space station, is that a "private space experiment" because the experiment came from a private organization? If the funding is from public sources (like the National Science Foundation in the USA), does that make it a public project even though it originated in a private university? Or is this now a public project because of the public funds?
Once again, a journalist doesn't clarify what he/she is talking about . . . what does private initiative mean? Does it simply mean that a private group came up with the idea? Or developed the idea? Or funds the idea? Or executes the idea? Or owns the data and results from the idea?
I heard a rumor that part of the reason blank Dual Layer DVD's are so expensive (besides the fact that the technology is new and that margins are probably high at the top of the performance curve) is that production yields of dual layer blank platters are currently very low . . . Has anyone heard anything similar? Or was this a groundless rumor?
I think that Flash RAM has limitations as to the number of times it can be rewritten . . . the number of possible rewrites is high (10's of thousands or more), but a swapspace in a hard disk would eventually read/write flash RAM into oblivion . . .
So I guess Microsoft is going to use "Taxpayer Source" to compete with open source . . . in other words, have "taxpayer funded government-paid" people find security flaws in Microsoft software so that Microsoft doesn't have to pay its own people to do it.
After thinking aoubt this for a while I think that it may be a brilliant strategy on MS's part . . .
If the government of a country has the source code of the software to examine for security flaws, doesn't this give MS a defense against liability from future lawsuits? For example, if the UK government gets to inspect the source code, continues to use MS-Office, and then has a major problem due to hackers hacking MS-Office; MS can say that the software was given a clean bill of health by the British government, so MS shouldn't be held liable.
I know that no defense is necessarily bulletproof, but this is just going to give MS's legal dept. more ammunition so that that MS can get away with writing sloppy code and not be found as grossly negligent.
Are any of these governments already using open source technologies? I wonder if this effort is to get governments to switch back to MS products or only to prevent others from joining those that have already defected from Microsoft's empire . . .
Alos, are any of these governments developing countries? Or southeast Asian? In other words is Microsoft entrusting the code to any governments that seem to take a blind eye to software piracy?
This is an interesting project, but until this becomes economically effective, can we really expect it to become mainstream?
The average size of a middle class newly constructed house seems to be 2000-2500 square feet in many areas of the US (this statement is anecdotal . . . based on what I've seen, but I think its a reasonable estimate). In the US, energy costs are cheap. And I assume that the $117,000 cost of construction cited in the article does not include the lot . . . the actual cost of a home like this in city suburbia may be more like $170,000 (or more, I assumed a $50k lot)
What does this pilot demonstrate? Not much . . . energy efficient/energy generating small homes have been demonstrated many times before. They've even become somewhat mainstream in some areas of Europe . . . Demonstrating that "it can be done" is reinventing the wheel. Mass producing a highly desirable house is the challenge.
This is no different than eletrics in the automobile industry . . . hybrids and electrics have been around for awhile; the key is creating a cost effective highly desirable product (like the Prius).
In the case of an unbalanced few rich versus many poor in a democratic country, it is in the best interest of the rich to manipulate the poor to continue to vote for politicians that will preserve the status quo. This is perhaps mjost easily visible in rich democratic European countries such as the UK, Spain and the Netherlands that still have royal families that are subsidized by the governments. These are some of the richest families in the world, but they continue to be subsized through state provided security, state provided royal palaces, state provided transportation, etc. Why don't these people in these democratic countries vote for politicians to abolish these policies? Because through careful marketing and public showmanship, these royal families have managed to convince the public that preserving the royal family subsidies is in the best interest of the country.
On a wider scale, the rich in the US have convinced the middle/poorer classes that universal health care, caps on perscription drug prices, and meaningful national housing subsidies for the working poor are not in their best interests of the public.
If the public in democratic countries would get together as a voting block, they could easily change these problems by voting for politicians that would address these issues. . . but they don't. Until this changes, don't expect the status quo to change.
Actually, last I checked (which was several years ago), the power companies in the US are required to buy generated power from independent generators. Normally, if the generator is a net consumer, the generating party is given a credit for the power generated against the power consumed. The net effect is that one "rolls back the meter" in terms of billing.
As I said before, it has been a long time since I've looked into this . . . it is entirely possible laws may have changed considering the deregulation of the US electric power industry.
Has anyone found a laptop this small actually useful . . . or is it mainly for WoW factor?
Personally, I find smaller laptops that aren't even this small have keyboards that are too small to seriously use and sometimes with screens too difficult to read.
Perhaps this is useful as a laptop for a casual user that uses it in a very limited way, or for someone with serious space constraints (e.g. someone touring on a motorcycle, or backpacking), but does anyone really expect laptops this small to actually become mainstream?
Then again, perhaps laptops like these are the Plymouth Prowlers of the laptop industry. A PR and marketing stunt for branding and to get people into shops, without an expectation that one would actually sell a lot of these, but they might help sway people into buying more conventional laptops of the same brand . . .
Villalonga was expelled by political pressure, since in Spain, american practices like stock options are considered bribery and corruption.
Perhaps this is because Telefonica is not truly a private company in the US sense of the word. The national government has "golden shares" that give it controlling interest and the political group in power still appoints several board members. This practice of holding golden shares was declared illegal by a European Union court, but the practice remains in Spain. The same can be said of Repsol and other large corporations in Spain. It is unfortunate that at the top of large Spanish coporations who you know in the government is often more important that what you can do . . .
If you used your government connections to get the job and you are still accountable to the government and the government can fire you, then perhaps you are a government employee. Then such things as stock options would be seen as compensation from the government . . . or stealing from the government depending on how you look at it.
MS's going on a patent spree to mop up anything that their R&FD department might have left on the floor is really no surprise . . . it just adds to their already exapnsive war chest. Now not only can they use these patents as cross licensing material or use these to threaten to sue the little guy that doesn't play ball, but they also have something in their back pocket for the future . . .
I don't think that MS will try to sue the open source community . . . where will the money come from? And they won't sue IBM, because IBM has a patent library that would put MS's to shame and the cost of such a war would make it a pyrric victory at best. But if anything bubbles out of the open source community to become a major software money maker (not a major services moneymaker like Linux has become, but software moneymaker like Netscape (that grew out of NCSA Mosaic) in its early days that attracted so much investment capital that MS became worried and went into a head to head war with Navigator vs. Inet. Explorer). I'm sure that if MS could, they would have launched a patent war against Netscape. And I'm sure that if they could, they would currently launch a patent war against Google. Next time there is a Netscape or a Google that threatens MS, they are going to have a collection of patents to throw at the competition.
How did Mercury, believed to be 60 percent iron, end up with an oversize core, a thin shell of a crust and the highest density in the solar system? Was its crust blasted away in the distant past by a cataclysmic impact? Was it boiled away in the extreme heat of the young, nearby sun? Or were metals for some reason concentrated in the inner region of the solar nebula that coalesced to form the sun and planets?
Perhaps my knowledge is a little dated, but I thought that the inner four planets have higher density because the sun stripped the inner solar system of light gasses like hydrogen due to the larger mass and higher gravitational field of the sun during the formation of the sun and the solar system. Outer planets are gas giants because the Sun's (or the pre-sun center of the accretion disk ) gravitational field was not strong enough to grab the light elements from the portion of the solar system that would become the gas giants (further from the center of the pre solar system accretion disk). Also, this was thought to be why Pluto is an oddball (far away from the sun, but a frozen rock of a planet) that might be an escaped moon or oort cloud refugee.
Can anyone confirm this? Or am I citing stone age planetary science that is no longer valid?
I had heard that mailing a copy to yourself is not a good way to time/date stamp material.
Such "sealed, mailed envelopes" usually don't hold up in court as they are attacked by the opposition as possibly tampered with . . . there is no true standard for doing this securely . . . in fact in the US, there is no postal requirement that an envelope be sealed in a way that it cannot be reopened . . . one could mail empty unsealed envelopes to oneself and then fill them with material later.
In other words, a postmark is proof of mailing, not proof of contents.
The press release seems rather lacking. It doesn't say anything about whether the intention of this project was to get wireless into homes or residential areas or not. It only cites an area of 6 square miles as the goal. Was this in residential, government, or business areas? Is this the entire city limits or a small portion? Is it only in public areas (streets, parks & goverement buildings)? Are there holes in the coverage? 'Citywide' could mean that a significant areas is covered across the city but that there might still be significant gaps in the coverage.
I for one am unimpressed. The press release is simply too ambiguous.
but don't think the structure of DNA was some world shattering new paradigm.
So genetic engineering, targeted antibodies therapy, the human genome project, identification of genetic markers for disease, DNA ID of criminals, DNA analysis for evolutional divergence and the countless other uses of the knowledge and manipulation of the DNA structure don't qualify as a new paradigm in the biological sciences? The structure of DNA enabled and continues to enable new science in many different fields.
And though I have no doubt that Godel and Gian Carlo-Rota are very brilliant individuals, why would you use the words of mathematicians turned philosophers to belittle the work of people that work in the biological sciences/chemistry? Perhaps a reference from someone involved in the science in question would have more merit than the philosophical postulates of mathematicians.
Also,
One thing is for certain. The first step is acknowleding that whatever consciousness is, it is not the product of a machine.
Perhaps I am a bit lost here, but what did this postulate claimed to be a certainty (without any references to why such a statement is claimed to be certain) have to do with my original post?
Is this site for real or is this just a great big troll topic from the editors of/.? If it was April 1st I would assume that this was a joke . . . What does a one sided voluntary non-fact-checked database prove about anything? Absolutely nothing at all . . .
The submission window doesn't say anything about this fella absconding your copyright on the writing that you submit. Isn't this guy claiming copyright on material written by the submitters? He does not make the assertion that he is merely copyrighting the "collection" of works by a variety of authors . . . he is claiming a copyright on all the content. Not respecting copyrights of submitters himself undermines any shred of credibility his site may have had . .
Huh? The article that you cite undermines the last line of your post . . .
From your post:
They got the Nobel Prize for their discovery. She wasn't included in the prize, even though she was critical in the discovery of the molecule's structure.
From the articleA debate about the amount of credit due to Franklin continues. What is clear is that she did have a meaningful role in learning the structure of DNA and that she was a scientist of the first rank.
The article you cite says that there is debate about the amount of credit that Franklin is due. It say that her role is clearly "meaningful" but in your post you say that she was "critical in the discovery of the molecule's sturcture."
Either the citation isn't the best, or it may have been "stretched" in the post? Either way, a reader of the linked article would have difficulty with the strong language in the post.
Slashdot Mirror
What happened? A new process using UV light to etch polymer film was rushed from pilot stage to commercialization way too fast.
Why did it happen? Several Active matrix TFT plants were coming online soon in East Asia. Allied Signal (now Honeywell) was planning to apply their film to the surface of Passive LCD displays to improve the apparent brightness and readability from an angle. Allied Signal was looking to commericialize the product and hopefully get laptop manufactuers to standardize on it before Active Matrix display prices fell due to increased supply from East Asia.
They failed . . .
Dialpad is still around . . . but it costs money now . . .
Seriously, the technology is interesting, but if we can't even convince the general public to permit isolated quantities of nuclear material in bunkers that can withstand the impact of a 737, a containment history that very nearly 100%, and with failsafe systems that are now nearly impossible to circumvent, then how can we convince this same uneducated public to adopt nuclear batteries?
If you told the general public that smoke detectors have a radioactive isotope, how many of them would throw them away?
This guy's smugness is a more than a little ridiculous . . . Unlike Newton, who said that he stood of the shoulders of giants . . . this guys thinks he is a giant.
It sounds so incredibly smug. I would say that building something with a lot of transistors is like building something with a lot of bricks (how many bricks/stones in the Great Wall of China?). . . If you count bricks, or rivets, or grams of steel, there are lots of complicated things out there that humans have built . . . Many of these things take a lot more labor and a lot larger organization than Intel . . . Saturn 5's, Great Pyramids, etc. Some things are even intangible . . . the supply chain and resourcing used to move the military might of the US to Europe during WWII for example. At one time there were over one million US troops based in the UK alone . . . and that doesn't consider their supplies and equipment. Not to say Intel doesn't do complex and amazing things, they do . . . but let's keep it in perspective.
And finally for that matter, if I build a multi-processor system am I making a more complicated device than he is? I'm using move transitors than he is . . .
AMSAT is a private organization, but the article fails to identify where the funding comes from . . . if a probe or experiment from a private university is launched into space or performed on the space station, is that a "private space experiment" because the experiment came from a private organization? If the funding is from public sources (like the National Science Foundation in the USA), does that make it a public project even though it originated in a private university? Or is this now a public project because of the public funds?
Once again, a journalist doesn't clarify what he/she is talking about . . . what does private initiative mean? Does it simply mean that a private group came up with the idea? Or developed the idea? Or funds the idea? Or executes the idea? Or owns the data and results from the idea?
I heard a rumor that part of the reason blank Dual Layer DVD's are so expensive (besides the fact that the technology is new and that margins are probably high at the top of the performance curve) is that production yields of dual layer blank platters are currently very low . . . Has anyone heard anything similar? Or was this a groundless rumor?
I think that Flash RAM has limitations as to the number of times it can be rewritten . . . the number of possible rewrites is high (10's of thousands or more), but a swapspace in a hard disk would eventually read/write flash RAM into oblivion . . .
Sounds like a sneaky way to get a subsidy . . .
If the government of a country has the source code of the software to examine for security flaws, doesn't this give MS a defense against liability from future lawsuits? For example, if the UK government gets to inspect the source code, continues to use MS-Office, and then has a major problem due to hackers hacking MS-Office; MS can say that the software was given a clean bill of health by the British government, so MS shouldn't be held liable.
I know that no defense is necessarily bulletproof, but this is just going to give MS's legal dept. more ammunition so that that MS can get away with writing sloppy code and not be found as grossly negligent.
Alos, are any of these governments developing countries? Or southeast Asian? In other words is Microsoft entrusting the code to any governments that seem to take a blind eye to software piracy?
Interesting . . . wonder how long it will take to leak out of one of these offices and wind up on file sharing sites?
The average size of a middle class newly constructed house seems to be 2000-2500 square feet in many areas of the US (this statement is anecdotal . . . based on what I've seen, but I think its a reasonable estimate). In the US, energy costs are cheap. And I assume that the $117,000 cost of construction cited in the article does not include the lot . . . the actual cost of a home like this in city suburbia may be more like $170,000 (or more, I assumed a $50k lot)
What does this pilot demonstrate? Not much . . . energy efficient/energy generating small homes have been demonstrated many times before. They've even become somewhat mainstream in some areas of Europe . . . Demonstrating that "it can be done" is reinventing the wheel. Mass producing a highly desirable house is the challenge.
This is no different than eletrics in the automobile industry . . . hybrids and electrics have been around for awhile; the key is creating a cost effective highly desirable product (like the Prius).
On a wider scale, the rich in the US have convinced the middle/poorer classes that universal health care, caps on perscription drug prices, and meaningful national housing subsidies for the working poor are not in their best interests of the public.
If the public in democratic countries would get together as a voting block, they could easily change these problems by voting for politicians that would address these issues. . . but they don't. Until this changes, don't expect the status quo to change.
As I said before, it has been a long time since I've looked into this . . . it is entirely possible laws may have changed considering the deregulation of the US electric power industry.
Perhaps this is useful as a laptop for a casual user that uses it in a very limited way, or for someone with serious space constraints (e.g. someone touring on a motorcycle, or backpacking), but does anyone really expect laptops this small to actually become mainstream?
Then again, perhaps laptops like these are the Plymouth Prowlers of the laptop industry. A PR and marketing stunt for branding and to get people into shops, without an expectation that one would actually sell a lot of these, but they might help sway people into buying more conventional laptops of the same brand . . .
IBMs Java Database and now this . . . if I didnt know better, Id say that theres something of an open source release conspiracy going on. . .
MESSENGER stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging
Perhaps this is because Telefonica is not truly a private company in the US sense of the word. The national government has "golden shares" that give it controlling interest and the political group in power still appoints several board members. This practice of holding golden shares was declared illegal by a European Union court, but the practice remains in Spain. The same can be said of Repsol and other large corporations in Spain. It is unfortunate that at the top of large Spanish coporations who you know in the government is often more important that what you can do . . .
If you used your government connections to get the job and you are still accountable to the government and the government can fire you, then perhaps you are a government employee. Then such things as stock options would be seen as compensation from the government . . . or stealing from the government depending on how you look at it.
I don't think that MS will try to sue the open source community . . . where will the money come from? And they won't sue IBM, because IBM has a patent library that would put MS's to shame and the cost of such a war would make it a pyrric victory at best. But if anything bubbles out of the open source community to become a major software money maker (not a major services moneymaker like Linux has become, but software moneymaker like Netscape (that grew out of NCSA Mosaic) in its early days that attracted so much investment capital that MS became worried and went into a head to head war with Navigator vs. Inet. Explorer). I'm sure that if MS could, they would have launched a patent war against Netscape. And I'm sure that if they could, they would currently launch a patent war against Google. Next time there is a Netscape or a Google that threatens MS, they are going to have a collection of patents to throw at the competition.
How did Mercury, believed to be 60 percent iron, end up with an oversize core, a thin shell of a crust and the highest density in the solar system? Was its crust blasted away in the distant past by a cataclysmic impact? Was it boiled away in the extreme heat of the young, nearby sun? Or were metals for some reason concentrated in the inner region of the solar nebula that coalesced to form the sun and planets?
Perhaps my knowledge is a little dated, but I thought that the inner four planets have higher density because the sun stripped the inner solar system of light gasses like hydrogen due to the larger mass and higher gravitational field of the sun during the formation of the sun and the solar system. Outer planets are gas giants because the Sun's (or the pre-sun center of the accretion disk ) gravitational field was not strong enough to grab the light elements from the portion of the solar system that would become the gas giants (further from the center of the pre solar system accretion disk). Also, this was thought to be why Pluto is an oddball (far away from the sun, but a frozen rock of a planet) that might be an escaped moon or oort cloud refugee.
Can anyone confirm this? Or am I citing stone age planetary science that is no longer valid?
Such "sealed, mailed envelopes" usually don't hold up in court as they are attacked by the opposition as possibly tampered with . . . there is no true standard for doing this securely . . . in fact in the US, there is no postal requirement that an envelope be sealed in a way that it cannot be reopened . . . one could mail empty unsealed envelopes to oneself and then fill them with material later.
In other words, a postmark is proof of mailing, not proof of contents.
I for one am unimpressed. The press release is simply too ambiguous.
So genetic engineering, targeted antibodies therapy, the human genome project, identification of genetic markers for disease, DNA ID of criminals, DNA analysis for evolutional divergence and the countless other uses of the knowledge and manipulation of the DNA structure don't qualify as a new paradigm in the biological sciences? The structure of DNA enabled and continues to enable new science in many different fields.
And though I have no doubt that Godel and Gian Carlo-Rota are very brilliant individuals, why would you use the words of mathematicians turned philosophers to belittle the work of people that work in the biological sciences/chemistry? Perhaps a reference from someone involved in the science in question would have more merit than the philosophical postulates of mathematicians.
Also,
One thing is for certain. The first step is acknowleding that whatever consciousness is, it is not the product of a machine.
Perhaps I am a bit lost here, but what did this postulate claimed to be a certainty (without any references to why such a statement is claimed to be certain) have to do with my original post?
But perhaps the funniest statement is that
All Website Content © 2004 Jonathan A. Zdziarski. All Rights Reserved.
The submission window doesn't say anything about this fella absconding your copyright on the writing that you submit. Isn't this guy claiming copyright on material written by the submitters? He does not make the assertion that he is merely copyrighting the "collection" of works by a variety of authors . . . he is claiming a copyright on all the content. Not respecting copyrights of submitters himself undermines any shred of credibility his site may have had . .
From your post: They got the Nobel Prize for their discovery. She wasn't included in the prize, even though she was critical in the discovery of the molecule's structure.
From the article A debate about the amount of credit due to Franklin continues. What is clear is that she did have a meaningful role in learning the structure of DNA and that she was a scientist of the first rank.
The article you cite says that there is debate about the amount of credit that Franklin is due. It say that her role is clearly "meaningful" but in your post you say that she was "critical in the discovery of the molecule's sturcture."
Either the citation isn't the best, or it may have been "stretched" in the post? Either way, a reader of the linked article would have difficulty with the strong language in the post.