It picks up at the end and does have a nice denouement. I agree that the first hundred or so pages is a bit slow, but I think that's intentional.
My only complaint would involve a spoiler. Let's just say that it's hard to get into some of the minor characters -- they're not as fleshed out as I'd like. But what would that take, another hundred pages?
I said it above... I just finished the review copy.
I think there's a pretty decent finish. Depending on how you count it, maybe 40-50 pages worth. I won't spoil the ending to say much more, but I doubt it was written in 24 hours and it wraps up a number of questions.
I just finished reading the 900-or-so pages of my "advanced reader's copy."
There's definitely a clear end. It might be nice to have a bit more denouement, but it's not like some of his other books. It's a reasonably satisfying ending.
The more small patterns you have in the image (or section of the image near the top), the worse the menu bar looks.
I have my Mac set to change the desktop once a day. At first, everything was great -- it was picking images with sky at the top -- essentially solid color. Then it brought up a zen rock garden, which is one of my favorite images.
On Leopard, it makes the menus unreadable. The dark/light pattern in the rocks makes it impossible to find letters in the menu. I've also found many pictures will make it difficult to read or identify menu extras on the right side of the screen.
They need to fix this ASAP. Oh, and the new Finder icons are horrible too. There's zero color contrast to identify the different folders.
Actually, Stan Williams (of HP) admits that the rotaxanes have nothing to do with the switching. It's the platinum wires forming Pt and platinum oxide nanoparticles.
I don't think it's published yet, but I've heard him give several talks about that.
Nice to see another person on here trying to talk actual science.:-)
You've hit on a key problem. (I do research in this area.)
You can make smaller wires than carbon nanotubes. You can make molecular wires much like you can make molecular transistors. (As I've mentioned elsewhere commenting on this article, there are lots of previous experiments showing single-molecule transistors and wires.)
But it's not always clear how we start to "solder" molecular transistors and molecular wires (or nanotubes) together.
There are a couple avenues open, such as using light instead of electrical current. Electrons move around very slowly compared to c.
Meh. Photonics is really hard to do on the scale of a chip. You could multiplex easier, but remember that with current CPUs, the wires are much smaller than the wavelength of visible or infrared light.
Plus, electrons aren't traveling very far on a chip. So even if you get the photons working, you're not saving a lot of time per gate.
Lots of work, little advantage = little reason to switch to photonic computing.
Now if you're talking networking or telecommunications, then you've got something. Bet we'll see all-optical switching at some point.
It's "science by press release," so yes, it's very much a guess.
Honestly, I'm not sure that molecular electronics will be faster than a high quality silicon or other conventional semiconductor. The speed of charge transfer is slower -- at least for the kinds of molecules people use right now. Switching speeds are slower too (though nowhere near the "several minutes" quoted here.)
No, the smaller dimensions don't really help "give more space" to compensate.
If the switching speed of an individual transistor is really on the order of minutes, you have a really, really slow chip. No "nanoscale" is going to help you here.
That's not to say that there aren't faster molecular electronic devices. Despite what the article says, there have been single-molecule transistor experiments for several years. Some can switch on and off much, much faster. (Sorry, I don't know actual speeds from our lab, but I'd guess in the microseconds or nanoseconds at least.)
I work in the field of molecular electronics -- I'm sorry, but this doesn't sounds "revolutionary."
It's hard to comment before I've read the article, but there are a lot of other, very reliable single-molecule transistor experiments. In 2002, Nature called it a "discovery of the year." (Sorry, can't find the URL right now.)
There have been pretty good single-molecule transistor measurements in other groups since then.
Granted, if they're able to image the single molecular wire, that's a solid advance over other techniques. But it's hardly the solution to a 20-year old puzzle.
(By the way, it's more like 30 years since it was shown how a molecule could function as a switch. The first paper on the subject was published in 1973.)
I think you hit on one "theme" that I see in a lot of what Apple is doing right now on the software-side. They have so much software designed to allow users to easily "create."
So their developer tools and AppleScript (and now CoreData and Automator) allow a user to easily create custom applications. It helps that the developer tools are included with the OS. My mom might not care, but it sure helps me!
GarageBand -- create music easily.
iMovie, iDVD -- create movies easily and export to DVDs.
Heck, even Keynote now has features to make interactive kiosk presentations.
The list goes on, of course. But so much seems to be putting the power into the user's hands to become a content creator, not just a consumer.
I wouldn't say it works "fine" with Safari -- there are definitely problems compared with trying it in Firefox on my Mac right now. I can see why they put up that notice.
For example, I tried finding my hometown by double-clicking to center and then zooming in. In Firefox, this worked without noticeable problems. In Safari, I'd keep ending up in the Atlantic Ocean because the double click wouldn't really recenter -- it'd move about halfway.
Another case: I tried to get directions for someplace I'm going this weekend. In Safari, the map didn't actually show up -- I saw a computed path and a blue background, but no roads or text where the map should be, just blue color. Zooming in and out didn't reload the map either. Again, in Firefox, there was no problem.
So yes, it works (somewhat) in Safari, and I'm glad you can click through the warning and try it. But it's definitely not the same experience in other browsers yet.
I prefer to hope it's a sophomore slump
on
Blink
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you that the Tipping Point was better.
But I think he has a gift for finding interesting anecdotes and a general ability to spin them together.
So I'm hoping it's just a "sophomore slump" and later books will improve. In many ways, I just thought Blink lacked focus and tighter editing.
Tipping Point vs. Blink
on
Blink
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You might be disappointed by Blink.
I think Gladwell had a ton of great stories like he did in Tipping Point. But I think Blink is a bit more diffuse -- no equivalent to the classification system in TP that you mention.
I like the concept of "thin-slicing" and very much enjoyed the stories in Blink. But I didn't think there was a core argument that stuck together, just a brief concept and some surrounding stories. I'm still not sure I know how to apply the idea of thin slicing myself or how to improve my abilities, other than to assume that with increasing expertise, it'll improve.
In another post, I suggested that people wait for the paperback or borrow it from the library. Blink is a solid book, but IMHO not worth the $$ right now.
I really like Gladwell's writing style and how he manages to pull together a wide variety of interesting anecdotes.
I wanted to strongly recommend Blink, but I can't.
His first book, The Tipping Point, is much much better -- it has a tighter thesis and keeps a much better argument. By the end of Blink, I was increasingly annoyed that Gladwell kept mentioning previous points and restating his thesis. Enough already, I remember your concept and I'd rather not be beaten over the head with it.
When I finished Blink, I was also left unsatisfied. I love the concept of "thin slicing" and I loved the anecdotes. But unlike The Tipping Point, where he brought it all together successfully, when I finished Blink, I had little sense of where to go next.
Here's the problem -- Gladwell basically credits the intuition of experts. From art historians to Van Riper, the success stories are those who have honed an incredible expertise in an area. But Gladwell doesn't successfully explain how the rest of us can begin to hone our "thin slicing" abilities. (Honestly, I don't think he knows himself.)
In the end, I think it's a book people should read -- but borrow it from a friend or get it from the library. It's not worth the money in hardcover. (This from a family-owned bookstore person!) Better yet, wait for the paperback.
Right, I agree with you that OLEDs are quite different from other display technologies. And I'm interested to hear that SED are so close to the market -- last time I heard any noise suggested they were still some time off. (PR department or not.)
But I still think in the long run, that OLED or similar technology wins. For one, each individual element is light-emitting, meaning you can easily have pixels composed of hundreds or thousands of individual OLEDs -- to prevent "dead pixel" problems. Maybe, just maybe, FED could do that too with these nanotube-sized elements. (I'm still skeptical with the current pricing for nanotubes.)
For another, I still haven't seen a competing technology that looks like it offers higher energy efficiency. Hey, I'm a scientist. Real-world energy efficiency is important, and I haven't measured actual devices recently. But CRTs, FEDs, and SEDs all throw away a few volts just to get a red phosphor to light up. Whereas an OLED requires much lower turn-on voltage.
In the end, may be best display tech win. They're all a lot better than old CRTs!
The article is interesting and IMHO, new display technologies will always find their niche. But I've always thought the "next-gen" technology to beat LCD flat-screen or plasma displays was going to be OLEDs.
On the one hand, OLEDs still have some problems with lifetimes--even research devices that I saw in grad school might degrade quickly. And of course I haven't seen anyone really give proof that single-walled nanotubes (SWNT) used in these FEDs can be produced cost-effectively.
However, unlike these technologies, OLEDs have already been produced as prototypes in sizes as large as 40" (by Seiko Epson) and being used in products like Digital Cameras and MP3/Ogg players and being mass-produced by companies like Sony.
Yeah, talk about Car-Parinello. Great stuff, but I know past versions have sucked up >1GB per node for even small jobs. But I'd love to get my hands on some CP simulations with 400-500 CPUs at once.
Other open-source comp. chemistry packages include MPQC (Massively Parallel Quantum Chemistry): http://www.mpqc.org/
I don't know if you have the same settings as me. In my case, my preferences are set to open new tabs in the background -- so the dialog box appeared over the test page while the Citibank page loaded.
While it does seem somewhat insecure, I don't believe this is "critical" for Safari, particularly if you don't have the "Select new tabs as they are created" preference checked. You'll see exactly the behavior you described, which IMHO is the way around this problem.
I've heard from several sources (one being NPR, though I can't find a URL) that with current immigration rates, that the Latino vote in Texas would essentially serve as a third party and possibly more aligned with Democratic interests than Republican interests. This might mean that in 2008, Texas is a "swing state" and 3rd parties that more closely fit Latino priorities would do very well.
Slashdot Mirror
It picks up at the end and does have a nice denouement. I agree that the first hundred or so pages is a bit slow, but I think that's intentional.
My only complaint would involve a spoiler. Let's just say that it's hard to get into some of the minor characters -- they're not as fleshed out as I'd like. But what would that take, another hundred pages?
I said it above... I just finished the review copy.
I think there's a pretty decent finish. Depending on how you count it, maybe 40-50 pages worth. I won't spoil the ending to say much more, but I doubt it was written in 24 hours and it wraps up a number of questions.
I just finished reading the 900-or-so pages of my "advanced reader's copy."
There's definitely a clear end. It might be nice to have a bit more denouement, but it's not like some of his other books. It's a reasonably satisfying ending.
The more small patterns you have in the image (or section of the image near the top), the worse the menu bar looks.
I have my Mac set to change the desktop once a day. At first, everything was great -- it was picking images with sky at the top -- essentially solid color. Then it brought up a zen rock garden, which is one of my favorite images.
On Leopard, it makes the menus unreadable. The dark/light pattern in the rocks makes it impossible to find letters in the menu. I've also found many pictures will make it difficult to read or identify menu extras on the right side of the screen.
They need to fix this ASAP. Oh, and the new Finder icons are horrible too. There's zero color contrast to identify the different folders.
I haven't used it myself, but it's certainly for real (as in, contributed code back to the gtk trunk)
http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx
Cheers... -Geoff
Gee, someone from SourceForge reading Slashdot. Who'd have thought. ;-) You'd think they were part of the same group or something.
Good to hear that there's work on a new download system!
Actually, Stan Williams (of HP) admits that the rotaxanes have nothing to do with the switching. It's the platinum wires forming Pt and platinum oxide nanoparticles.
I don't think it's published yet, but I've heard him give several talks about that.
Nice to see another person on here trying to talk actual science.
You've hit on a key problem. (I do research in this area.)
You can make smaller wires than carbon nanotubes. You can make molecular wires much like you can make molecular transistors. (As I've mentioned elsewhere commenting on this article, there are lots of previous experiments showing single-molecule transistors and wires.)
But it's not always clear how we start to "solder" molecular transistors and molecular wires (or nanotubes) together.
"Made out of molecules"? What do you think they're made out of now? Rainbows and unicorns?
Chips aren't made out of molecules. Current semiconductors are made out of various forms of silicon crystal.
That's a lattice -- there aren't individual "silicon molecules" anywhere in there.
Just FYI.
There are a couple avenues open, such as using light instead of electrical current. Electrons move around very slowly compared to c.
Meh. Photonics is really hard to do on the scale of a chip. You could multiplex easier, but remember that with current CPUs, the wires are much smaller than the wavelength of visible or infrared light.
Plus, electrons aren't traveling very far on a chip. So even if you get the photons working, you're not saving a lot of time per gate.
Lots of work, little advantage = little reason to switch to photonic computing.
Now if you're talking networking or telecommunications, then you've got something. Bet we'll see all-optical switching at some point.
It's "science by press release," so yes, it's very much a guess.
Honestly, I'm not sure that molecular electronics will be faster than a high quality silicon or other conventional semiconductor. The speed of charge transfer is slower -- at least for the kinds of molecules people use right now. Switching speeds are slower too (though nowhere near the "several minutes" quoted here.)
-Geoff
No, the smaller dimensions don't really help "give more space" to compensate.
If the switching speed of an individual transistor is really on the order of minutes, you have a really, really slow chip. No "nanoscale" is going to help you here.
That's not to say that there aren't faster molecular electronic devices. Despite what the article says, there have been single-molecule transistor experiments for several years. Some can switch on and off much, much faster. (Sorry, I don't know actual speeds from our lab, but I'd guess in the microseconds or nanoseconds at least.)
I work in the field of molecular electronics -- I'm sorry, but this doesn't sounds "revolutionary."
It's hard to comment before I've read the article, but there are a lot of other, very reliable single-molecule transistor experiments. In 2002, Nature called it a "discovery of the year." (Sorry, can't find the URL right now.)
There have been pretty good single-molecule transistor measurements in other groups since then.
Granted, if they're able to image the single molecular wire, that's a solid advance over other techniques. But it's hardly the solution to a 20-year old puzzle.
(By the way, it's more like 30 years since it was shown how a molecule could function as a switch. The first paper on the subject was published in 1973.)
-Geoff
I think you hit on one "theme" that I see in a lot of what Apple is doing right now on the software-side. They have so much software designed to allow users to easily "create."
So their developer tools and AppleScript (and now CoreData and Automator) allow a user to easily create custom applications. It helps that the developer tools are included with the OS. My mom might not care, but it sure helps me!
GarageBand -- create music easily.
iMovie, iDVD -- create movies easily and export to DVDs.
Heck, even Keynote now has features to make interactive kiosk presentations.
The list goes on, of course. But so much seems to be putting the power into the user's hands to become a content creator, not just a consumer.
What's the problem? If you go to "Advanced" settings for an IMAP account, there's a box that you can check for:
"Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes"
Works OK for me...
I wouldn't say it works "fine" with Safari -- there are definitely problems compared with trying it in Firefox on my Mac right now. I can see why they put up that notice.
For example, I tried finding my hometown by double-clicking to center and then zooming in. In Firefox, this worked without noticeable problems. In Safari, I'd keep ending up in the Atlantic Ocean because the double click wouldn't really recenter -- it'd move about halfway.
Another case: I tried to get directions for someplace I'm going this weekend. In Safari, the map didn't actually show up -- I saw a computed path and a blue background, but no roads or text where the map should be, just blue color. Zooming in and out didn't reload the map either. Again, in Firefox, there was no problem.
So yes, it works (somewhat) in Safari, and I'm glad you can click through the warning and try it. But it's definitely not the same experience in other browsers yet.
I agree with you that the Tipping Point was better.
But I think he has a gift for finding interesting anecdotes and a general ability to spin them together.
So I'm hoping it's just a "sophomore slump" and later books will improve. In many ways, I just thought Blink lacked focus and tighter editing.
You might be disappointed by Blink.
I think Gladwell had a ton of great stories like he did in Tipping Point. But I think Blink is a bit more diffuse -- no equivalent to the classification system in TP that you mention.
I like the concept of "thin-slicing" and very much enjoyed the stories in Blink. But I didn't think there was a core argument that stuck together, just a brief concept and some surrounding stories. I'm still not sure I know how to apply the idea of thin slicing myself or how to improve my abilities, other than to assume that with increasing expertise, it'll improve.
In another post, I suggested that people wait for the paperback or borrow it from the library. Blink is a solid book, but IMHO not worth the $$ right now.
I really like Gladwell's writing style and how he manages to pull together a wide variety of interesting anecdotes.
I wanted to strongly recommend Blink, but I can't.
His first book, The Tipping Point, is much much better -- it has a tighter thesis and keeps a much better argument. By the end of Blink, I was increasingly annoyed that Gladwell kept mentioning previous points and restating his thesis. Enough already, I remember your concept and I'd rather not be beaten over the head with it.
When I finished Blink, I was also left unsatisfied. I love the concept of "thin slicing" and I loved the anecdotes. But unlike The Tipping Point, where he brought it all together successfully, when I finished Blink, I had little sense of where to go next.
Here's the problem -- Gladwell basically credits the intuition of experts. From art historians to Van Riper, the success stories are those who have honed an incredible expertise in an area. But Gladwell doesn't successfully explain how the rest of us can begin to hone our "thin slicing" abilities. (Honestly, I don't think he knows himself.)
In the end, I think it's a book people should read -- but borrow it from a friend or get it from the library. It's not worth the money in hardcover. (This from a family-owned bookstore person!) Better yet, wait for the paperback.
In the meantime, read The Tipping Point!
Right, I agree with you that OLEDs are quite different from other display technologies. And I'm interested to hear that SED are so close to the market -- last time I heard any noise suggested they were still some time off. (PR department or not.)
But I still think in the long run, that OLED or similar technology wins. For one, each individual element is light-emitting, meaning you can easily have pixels composed of hundreds or thousands of individual OLEDs -- to prevent "dead pixel" problems. Maybe, just maybe, FED could do that too with these nanotube-sized elements. (I'm still skeptical with the current pricing for nanotubes.)
For another, I still haven't seen a competing technology that looks like it offers higher energy efficiency. Hey, I'm a scientist. Real-world energy efficiency is important, and I haven't measured actual devices recently. But CRTs, FEDs, and SEDs all throw away a few volts just to get a red phosphor to light up. Whereas an OLED requires much lower turn-on voltage.
In the end, may be best display tech win. They're all a lot better than old CRTs!
The article is interesting and IMHO, new display technologies will always find their niche. But I've always thought the "next-gen" technology to beat LCD flat-screen or plasma displays was going to be OLEDs.
On the one hand, OLEDs still have some problems with lifetimes--even research devices that I saw in grad school might degrade quickly. And of course I haven't seen anyone really give proof that single-walled nanotubes (SWNT) used in these FEDs can be produced cost-effectively.
However, unlike these technologies, OLEDs have already been produced as prototypes in sizes as large as 40" (by Seiko Epson) and being used in products like Digital Cameras and MP3/Ogg players and being mass-produced by companies like Sony.
Previous Slashdot stories on OLEDs:3 7 m l?tid=137 2 34.shtml l ?tid=137&tid=141&tid=159&tid=184&tid=186&tid=188
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/15/20172
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/03/04/0127213.sht
http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/03/09/0112
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/05/05/004227.shtm
And 8 of the top 25 by my count. Not bad at all--and quite a chance from the last few rankings, where Intel really ruled.
Yeah, talk about Car-Parinello. Great stuff, but I know past versions have sucked up >1GB per node for even small jobs. But I'd love to get my hands on some CP simulations with 400-500 CPUs at once.
Other open-source comp. chemistry packages include MPQC (Massively Parallel Quantum Chemistry): http://www.mpqc.org/
-Geoff
I don't know if you have the same settings as me. In my case, my preferences are set to open new tabs in the background -- so the dialog box appeared over the test page while the Citibank page loaded.
While it does seem somewhat insecure, I don't believe this is "critical" for Safari, particularly if you don't have the "Select new tabs as they are created" preference checked. You'll see exactly the behavior you described, which IMHO is the way around this problem.
-Geoff
I've heard from several sources (one being NPR, though I can't find a URL) that with current immigration rates, that the Latino vote in Texas would essentially serve as a third party and possibly more aligned with Democratic interests than Republican interests. This might mean that in 2008, Texas is a "swing state" and 3rd parties that more closely fit Latino priorities would do very well.
-Geoff