Remember that CVS is a version (or revision) control system. It's not a build environment. So the question is slightly off-topic.
In answer to your questions: a) Generally developers communicate with each other! Since you have a ChangeLog or the cvs logs, if something breaks, you can go find out what's going on. One benefit of CVS is that you can generally easily track down the particular change that broken things and back it out.
b) Race conditions can occur. But then again, that's why you have such things as a "feature freeze" or a "code freeze" and you can lock files. So either you can do several ways. I tend to prefer designating someone to head the release, calling for a code freeze and then have that one person apply relevant patches.
Are you referring to IBM's proposals for "vertical transistors?" I think they're going into the prototype phase--I've seen some micrographs of them and they look pretty good. These don't require nano-design yet, but it's a step away from current chip design. It's much closer to true 3D design.
The idea is similar to real estate crunches in big cities, actually.
Why do people build big skyscrapers in Wall Street? The space is so valuable that they build up (and down) instead of out.
Well, it's the same idea here. At some point, you just can't get more transistors on the chip, so you make the transitors go up-and-down instead of side-to-side.
Voila! Better density through science.:-)
I would guess you'll see vertical transitors in memory chips in a while.
OK, so several other people have mentioned the main point--you can't think of these as continuing normal electronics. It's a whole different world because you're not using bulk properties anymore. Current silicon transistors would break down around 5 atoms or so (there are a number of papers pointing towards this barrier and I think a few have been posted to/.).
So you're now thinking about charge carried through a molecule. But here's the problem with trying to make circuits out of these. How do you connect your wires?
It's the interconnects that's the real problem.
People like Dekker have shown that you can get conduction across carbon nanotubes or DNA or other single molecules. But the trick is getting the "wires" to stick together so you can actually do something useful.
Yes, Mirkin's nanoplotter research is interesting. But you can't use it to lay out circuits until you get good molecular wires and good interconnects.
My gut feeling is that self-assembly, perhaps in combination with something like a nanoplotter, is the best way to do an interconnect. But hey, I'm only a grad student... What do I know. >:-)
A perfect integration with OSes (and base libraries) will "magically" make nearly all apps Unicode compliant, no?
No.
Remember, there's a large amount of plain ol' text lying around. Heck, all of the web (including Slashdot) is essentially just ASCII with SGML entities. Nobody will suggest converting all of this to straight Unicode.
This is why there's UTF-8, a variable-length version of Unicode that's essentially backwards-compatible.
But that's not the whole problem. You mention implementing Unicode/UTF-8 in libraries and OS'es to get "magical compliance." No such luck. If you take a lot of code out there (including some of my own), it makes assumptions that byte=char. So people use char * and perform pointer additions and so on to parse. This is fine when you have 8-bit text. But what happens when you go to 16-bit text or in the case of UTF-8 variable-length chars? Things break.
However, getting good solid implementations of UTF-8 in core libraries and OS'es will help a lot. Right now there really isn't one standard API for treating UTF-8 text. The new glibc has a good implementation, but if you want to write portable code, this is a problem--you don't have glibc on all systems (e.g. *BSD, Solaris...).
But the day will soon come when programs that are not Unicode/UTF-8 compliant are in the minority.
> The article mentioned using this stuff to fab processors.
I think they meant that you can make the modulators using current processor manufacturing technology. I'm not on the side of making actual devices, but I assume you make patterns by using a mask and depositing around it. So you're limited by your ability to make a good mask.
IIRC, similar devices are already used in routers b/c even the crystalline devices currently used are faster than any other current technology.
The military is interested in making optical-driven vehicles. Right now, you could make a weapon by disrupting the electrical signals between controls and the vehicle. (So suddenly you can't adjust your flaps on your nice F-16.) So they want to switch to optical pipes between the computer and the flaps so this won't happen.
As far as flexibility or durability, it depends on the medium they're using. You'd need to see the Science article itself. I'd concentrate more on the durability side, which is very good. I don't know why you'd want to bend it.
I don't think anyone feels there's much of a "battle" anymore in this area. Organic materials (polymers, plastics and the like) show much better effects, work faster, are more damage resistant, cheaper, are easier to process, etc. The list of advantages actually is quite long.
Inorganic crystals are currently used in devices but they're on the way out.
I'll preface my remarks by saying that I haven't read the Science article and the ZDnet article seems pretty short on scientific details. That said, this is one of my research topics, so I know a little bit about the area.
First off, I've seen some questions about the quote of "spraying" onto a chip. There are a variety of techniques, but I'm guessing they're talking about spin-coating or CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition), which are both used routinely in manufacturing.
Secondly, these electro-optic devices use "second order nonlinear optics" (for all you physics geeks). Basically, people have been using crystalline modulators like lithium niobate for years, but they're very expensive and hard to make. So most of the research in the area has gone into making organic/polymer/self-assembled modulators. The idea is that you encase your chromophore molecule (the "active ingredient") in a polymer or other strong-film environment. Then you use this film in a waveguide and use it like a switch. The best mental picture would be a railroad switch--the electrical signal switches optical tracks for the optical beam.
Without reading the published results, it's hard to know if this is really a breakthrough. My questions would be whether it's actually a new chromophore that's giving better results, a better preparation method, or something else. It sounds like they're making some change to the preparation of polymer devices, which are behind the self-assembled films many labs are making now.
Suffice to say, the *real* revolution will come if anyone can get a usable third order NLO device. This would allow optical-optical switching.
I'm obviously a bit biased, but there *are* strong, open-sourced search engines. Try ht://Dig for example www.htdig.org or if you don't like that, you should check out the excellent SearchTools.com website. Cheers, -Geoff
I think many of us would agree that it is not GPL in spirit. But nonetheless, once they've made the code available that doesn't mean folks won't be reverse-engineering their database and projects like ht://Dig won't be examining what code was released.
Ultimately, their method of business may change in unexpected ways. Let's say someone reverse-engineers their database. Suddenly their revenue stream will disappear (unless they have some sort of patent, but that's another story). So they'll have to make money on support and/or hosting the indexing/searching for people w/o the hardware.
Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. Ultimately the community will derive benefit from this code, either through cross-polinization with projects like ht://Dig, or simply by getting people interested in the concept of an open-source version of large search engines.
Thanks for the complement. I'll agree that ht://Dig more suitable for medium-sized collections, but "medium" in this case is starting to stretch to over a million URLs. In many cases, it's simply an issue of system resources--to index 250 million URLs like Google's first set, or 800 million like Juggernaut claims, you need some pretty big iron, at least in terms of RAM and RAID arrays.
We'd obviously love feedback in how well it scales since we rarely get such reports. It's an area that we'd like to improve (since many of the developers don't run "mini-Altavistas" themselves).
I haven't been able to check out the Juggernaut code since it's heavily slashdotted right now. But suffice to say, we'll be checking out whatever code they've made available to see if there are any interesting optimizations.
I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but IMHO it won't happen. For AltaVista and InfoSeek, it's *very* unlikely because they have products based on their source code.
For Google, I'm sure it's a matter of pride and self-preservation. The GPL doesn't say anything about using the code, so if it was released, there's nothing stopping another site from using the code exactly as presented.
That's not to say I wouldn't like to see the code either. It would be nice to improve the scalability of GPL'ed search engine packages like ht://Dig. In the meantime, we'll just have to read the papers and reverse-engineer.
Like many people who've replied to this article, I'm a bigger fan of your social writings. While you're right that Deep Computing didn't get much press, it's also not going to be as impressive as you imagine.
Remember the old saw about "those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it?" Many times in history have people come upon ideas like yours. After Newton, science brought about a great flurry of new ideas. The Englightenment ensued, with great optimism for solving problems. The Universe was seen as one large machine, ticking to Newtonian laws. One only needed to discover the rules and everything would be revealed.
Even until the early 1900s, science had this sort of optimism. Ever hear of David Hilbert and his great list of unsolved mathematical problems? What about blackbody radiation. Both of these brought this idealistic science to its knees. Goedel smashed Hilbert's grand ideas of proving all mathematical problems. Heisenburg and Plank smashed classical physics. Some things just can't be calculated or proved.
In my view, this has been something of the hallmark of 20th Century science. Scientists know they may never know the "real answer," but they'd like to get close. More recently, chaos theory makes this even more apparent. The story about the butterfly in Tokyo affecting the weather is in other comments.
Back to the point, DC will likely not produce the sweeping effects we'd love to see. No matter how good the models we make, they'll never do all we want, or should they. I'd be depressed if I knew the weather more than a few days in advance.:-)
On the other hand, DC will certainly make some scientific research easier. It will certainly be easier to model a few hundred thousand particle interactions in physics and chemistry (my particular interest). But we have to remember that unfounded optimism is just that.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that CVS is a version (or revision) control system. It's not a build environment. So the question is slightly off-topic.
In answer to your questions:
a) Generally developers communicate with each other! Since you have a ChangeLog or the cvs logs, if something breaks, you can go find out what's going on. One benefit of CVS is that you can generally easily track down the particular change that broken things and back it out.
b) Race conditions can occur. But then again, that's why you have such things as a "feature freeze" or a "code freeze" and you can lock files. So either you can do several ways. I tend to prefer designating someone to head the release, calling for a code freeze and then have that one person apply relevant patches.
-Geoff
Are you referring to IBM's proposals for "vertical transistors?" I think they're going into the prototype phase--I've seen some micrographs of them and they look pretty good. These don't require nano-design yet, but it's a step away from current chip design. It's much closer to true 3D design.
:-)
The idea is similar to real estate crunches in big cities, actually.
Why do people build big skyscrapers in Wall Street? The space is so valuable that they build up (and down) instead of out.
Well, it's the same idea here. At some point, you just can't get more transistors on the chip, so you make the transitors go up-and-down instead of side-to-side.
Voila! Better density through science.
I would guess you'll see vertical transitors in memory chips in a while.
-Geoff
Sigh. Another molecular electronics thread...
/.).
OK, so several other people have mentioned the main point--you can't think of these as continuing normal electronics. It's a whole different world because you're not using bulk properties anymore. Current silicon transistors would break down around 5 atoms or so (there are a number of papers pointing towards this barrier and I think a few have been posted to
So you're now thinking about charge carried through a molecule. But here's the problem with trying to make circuits out of these. How do you connect your wires?
It's the interconnects that's the real problem.
People like Dekker have shown that you can get conduction across carbon nanotubes or DNA or other single molecules. But the trick is getting the "wires" to stick together so you can actually do something useful.
Yes, Mirkin's nanoplotter research is interesting. But you can't use it to lay out circuits until you get good molecular wires and good interconnects.
My gut feeling is that self-assembly, perhaps in combination with something like a nanoplotter, is the best way to do an interconnect. But hey, I'm only a grad student... What do I know. >:-)
-Geoff
I normally wouldn't bother to reply, but most people are missing that the list is ordered by date, not some arbitrary "importance" ranking!
Sure. Anything under a BSD license is good too. The snag is that a BSD-style license allows people to include the code in proprietary products.
:-)
There is a reason, after all, that the FSF designed the GPL.
Hello? Did you even read the whole e-mail? He says "Here are some of the problems of the Motif license:"
This sounds like some pretty good examples to me...
-Geoff
A perfect integration with OSes (and base libraries) will "magically" make nearly all apps Unicode compliant, no?
No.
Remember, there's a large amount of plain ol' text lying around. Heck, all of the web (including Slashdot) is essentially just ASCII with SGML entities. Nobody will suggest converting all of this to straight Unicode.
This is why there's UTF-8, a variable-length version of Unicode that's essentially backwards-compatible.
But that's not the whole problem. You mention implementing Unicode/UTF-8 in libraries and OS'es to get "magical compliance." No such luck. If you take a lot of code out there (including some of my own), it makes assumptions that byte=char. So people use char * and perform pointer additions and so on to parse. This is fine when you have 8-bit text. But what happens when you go to 16-bit text or in the case of UTF-8 variable-length chars? Things break.
However, getting good solid implementations of UTF-8 in core libraries and OS'es will help a lot. Right now there really isn't one standard API for treating UTF-8 text. The new glibc has a good implementation, but if you want to write portable code, this is a problem--you don't have glibc on all systems (e.g. *BSD, Solaris...).
But the day will soon come when programs that are not Unicode/UTF-8 compliant are in the minority.
-Geoff
> The article mentioned using this stuff to fab processors.
I think they meant that you can make the modulators using current processor manufacturing technology. I'm not on the side of making actual devices, but I assume you make patterns by using a mask and depositing around it. So you're limited by your ability to make a good mask.
IIRC, similar devices are already used in routers b/c even the crystalline devices currently used are faster than any other current technology.
The military is interested in making optical-driven vehicles. Right now, you could make a weapon by disrupting the electrical signals between controls and the vehicle. (So suddenly you can't adjust your flaps on your nice F-16.) So they want to switch to optical pipes between the computer and the flaps so this won't happen.
As far as flexibility or durability, it depends on the medium they're using. You'd need to see the Science article itself. I'd concentrate more on the durability side, which is very good. I don't know why you'd want to bend it.
-Geoff
I don't think anyone feels there's much of a "battle" anymore in this area. Organic materials (polymers, plastics and the like) show much better effects, work faster, are more damage resistant, cheaper, are easier to process, etc. The list of advantages actually is quite long.
Inorganic crystals are currently used in devices but they're on the way out.
-Geoff
I'll preface my remarks by saying that I haven't read the Science article and the ZDnet article seems pretty short on scientific details. That said, this is one of my research topics, so I know a little bit about the area.
First off, I've seen some questions about the quote of "spraying" onto a chip. There are a variety of techniques, but I'm guessing they're talking about spin-coating or CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition), which are both used routinely in manufacturing.
Secondly, these electro-optic devices use "second order nonlinear optics" (for all you physics geeks). Basically, people have been using crystalline modulators like lithium niobate for years, but they're very expensive and hard to make. So most of the research in the area has gone into making organic/polymer/self-assembled modulators. The idea is that you encase your chromophore molecule (the "active ingredient") in a polymer or other strong-film environment. Then you use this film in a waveguide and use it like a switch. The best mental picture would be a railroad switch--the electrical signal switches optical tracks for the optical beam.
Without reading the published results, it's hard to know if this is really a breakthrough. My questions would be whether it's actually a new chromophore that's giving better results, a better preparation method, or something else. It sounds like they're making some change to the preparation of polymer devices, which are behind the self-assembled films many labs are making now.
Suffice to say, the *real* revolution will come if anyone can get a usable third order NLO device. This would allow optical-optical switching.
-Geoff
I'm obviously a bit biased, but there *are* strong, open-sourced search engines. Try ht://Dig for example www.htdig.org or if you don't like that, you should check out the excellent SearchTools.com website. Cheers, -Geoff
I think many of us would agree that it is not GPL in spirit. But nonetheless, once they've made the code available that doesn't mean folks won't be reverse-engineering their database and projects like ht://Dig won't be examining what code was released.
Ultimately, their method of business may change in unexpected ways. Let's say someone reverse-engineers their database. Suddenly their revenue stream will disappear (unless they have some sort of patent, but that's another story). So they'll have to make money on support and/or hosting the indexing/searching for people w/o the hardware.
Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. Ultimately the community will derive benefit from this code, either through cross-polinization with projects like ht://Dig, or simply by getting people interested in the concept of an open-source version of large search engines.
Thanks for the complement. I'll agree that ht://Dig more suitable for medium-sized collections, but "medium" in this case is starting to stretch to over a million URLs. In many cases, it's simply an issue of system resources--to index 250 million URLs like Google's first set, or 800 million like Juggernaut claims, you need some pretty big iron, at least in terms of RAM and RAID arrays.
We'd obviously love feedback in how well it scales since we rarely get such reports. It's an area that we'd like to improve (since many of the developers don't run "mini-Altavistas" themselves).
I haven't been able to check out the Juggernaut code since it's heavily slashdotted right now. But suffice to say, we'll be checking out whatever code they've made available to see if there are any interesting optimizations.
I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but IMHO it won't happen. For AltaVista and InfoSeek, it's *very* unlikely because they have products based on their source code.
For Google, I'm sure it's a matter of pride and self-preservation. The GPL doesn't say anything about using the code, so if it was released, there's nothing stopping another site from using the code exactly as presented.
That's not to say I wouldn't like to see the code either. It would be nice to improve the scalability of GPL'ed search engine packages like ht://Dig. In the meantime, we'll just have to read the papers and reverse-engineer.
-Geoff
Jon,
:-)
Like many people who've replied to this article, I'm a bigger fan of your social writings. While you're right that Deep Computing didn't get much press, it's also not going to be as impressive as you imagine.
Remember the old saw about "those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it?" Many times in history have people come upon ideas like yours. After Newton, science brought about a great flurry of new ideas. The Englightenment ensued, with great optimism for solving problems. The Universe was seen as one large machine, ticking to Newtonian laws. One only needed to discover the rules and everything would be revealed.
Even until the early 1900s, science had this sort of optimism. Ever hear of David Hilbert and his great list of unsolved mathematical problems? What about blackbody radiation. Both of these brought this idealistic science to its knees. Goedel smashed Hilbert's grand ideas of proving all mathematical problems. Heisenburg and Plank smashed classical physics. Some things just can't be calculated or proved.
In my view, this has been something of the hallmark of 20th Century science. Scientists know they may never know the "real answer," but they'd like to get close. More recently, chaos theory makes this even more apparent. The story about the butterfly in Tokyo affecting the weather is in other comments.
Back to the point, DC will likely not produce the sweeping effects we'd love to see. No matter how good the models we make, they'll never do all we want, or should they. I'd be depressed if I knew the weather more than a few days in advance.
On the other hand, DC will certainly make some scientific research easier. It will certainly be easier to model a few hundred thousand particle interactions in physics and chemistry (my particular interest). But we have to remember that unfounded optimism is just that.
My $0.02,
-Geoff Hutchison