The next obvious step is to label ALL food with the exact sequence of the plant/animal. Educated consumers will then easily be able to determine the safety and even the flavorfulness of their food. Don't like that pesky CMV promoter? Don't eat it.
This is a much superior proposal to the worthless "GMO" label, that only tells you if some scientist did something (no telling what). And, you'll find out what all of those changes inserted with "natural" techniques involve -- most of which are far more "interesting" than the GMO modifications.
Might take some space on the label, of course, but use a small font.
This is the latest in a very very long series of failures of optical interconnect in multiprocessors, in the computer room, and at the desktop. Since the '80s people have told us that wires will never keep working, and optics is the only solution. They have been wrong, and continue to be wrong. I was even blasted by a respected physicist that told me that there was an inherent power advantage for optics. That was wrong also. Optics is great if you need to go across the ocean, but don't tell me you want to go across the cabinet with it.
A Course in Mathematics for Students of Physics (Vols. 1&2),
Paul Bamberg and Shlomo Sternberg;
This is the book you will wish was used for your intro calculus text. It covers linear algebra and vector calculus done "right." Specifically, it makes the crucial distinction between vectors and one-forms, and you will be annoyed to realize you have been fooled all these years by poor instruction.
The Geometry of Physics,
Theodore Frankel;
An excellent introduction to differential geometry and its application not just to GR but to other areas of physics as well. Highly recommended.
A First Course in General Relativity,
Bernard Schutz;
I found this book helpful in some specific areas -- notably understanding the notions of the stress-energy tensor.
Gravitation,
Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, & John Wheeler;
This is the classic text, and is comprehensive and comprehensible. I like Wheeler's way of thinking about physics, and it shows through here. There is the standard joke, that this is a text which not only discusses gravitation, but also attempts to demonstrate it by its high mass.
You can't make vacuum devices with holes, so there are not the complementary devices needed for CMOS like operation. We would be working with a technology similar to N-channel FETs, with all the problems of low-output state power dissipation. It won't scale to high integration levels. That said, the technology probably has niche applications in high temperature and rad-hard environments.
Can't anyone keep the difference between silicon and silicone straight?
Silicon: element, component of semiconductors
(and some blue LEDs made from silicon carbide);
Silicone: compound, used for breast implants
I live in this building. There are serious problems, some with leaks, but most with the fundamental design. A good example is the placement of fire exits. In any rational building, the fire exits are near the elevators. You probably have never thought about why that is true -- it's just something that rational building designers do. Well, this building does NOT do this. Two important results. (1) No visitor can find the fire exits. (2) You can't lock the building. When the fire alarm goes off, you must be able to get to the fire exits. If you have just stepped off the elevator, the path from the elevator to the fire exit must be open, and can never be locked.
The paper was written by two people, not one. Whatever happened to poor David Boggs, who seems never to be mentioned. Punditry has its place, I guess, if you want to be famous.
Apparently they are comparing this transistor speed to the speed of flash memory transistors, which are remarkably slow. I would definitely not get excited about the raw speed of these devices. It is interesting to see discrete biomolecular structures used as an engineering vehicle, and we'll see a lot more of this soon.
Note that the FIRST project supported by DARPA (then ARPA, a brand new organization created in response to Sputnik) in 1959 or so was Arecibo, the large "radio telescope" in Puerto Rico. The project was initially a large RADAR dish, not a telescope. The telescope features were added as an afterthought. It is the scene, of course, of the James Bond movie which we are all thinking about. This dual use idea goes WAY back.
Just because you "bought" your iPOD, don't think you have a right to use it. If they have their way, you'll license the right to listen to music on it, and pay a subscription fee, just like Sirius or XM now.
In an ideal world, this circuit would still dissipate energy. Overlap power is (relatively) a small contiibutor to total dissipation. Most of the dissipation comes from charging and discharging the capacitances of the circuit. This dissipation is C V**2 F, independent of the pullup/pulldown overlaps.
C V**2 F dissipation is avoidable with charge recovery techniques using adiabatic charging and discharging techniques (which requires inductors, on or off chip).
The dissipation of energy is only necessary when you have no inductors. You can move charge from one node to another if you have an inductor to store the energy as magnetic field.
Adibatic logic allows logic which dissipates (in the limit of slow operation) zero energy.
Note that this is an *application* not an issued patent. While I have no trust of the existing patent examination process, we should at least give them the opportunity to examine and reject this before getting too upset. Not that this excuses Microsoft for wasting all of our time (or worse) by filing it.
I agree completely. Light is too big -- the poster that thinks you can use 13 nm radiation hasn't tried to make it in silicon, and has not thought about what it will do to the electronics or the material structures of the silicon device.
As you say, there are no good low power nonlinearities. High power nonlinearities are easy to find -- the vacuum is nonlinear at high enough power levels. But I know of no optical nonlinearities which are functional at low -- or even modest -- power densities. This is important because it affects the packing density of the circuitry (see below).
The article uses a faulty metric -- the speed of propagation of signals is not the important criterion for designing a computer, but rather the delay in reaching the next gate. This depends as much or more on the density of the components (and the dimensionality of the construction technique) as it does on the speed. If components are spaced a foot apart, then it takes more than a nanosecond to reach them no matter what. While it is true that properly buffered CMOS on-chip wiring is only about 3% of the speed of light, the density (and required low power) of CMOS allows billions of gates to be reached in a nanosecond. Optical technology has a LONG WAY to go in reaching this point, let alone exceeding it. By then, 3-D silicon will make these numbers dramatically higher.
Also, superconducting on-chip interconnect will make on-chip silicon wiring dramatically faster (10x?) and is a much much easier technology that BEC.
I have always thought that the real reason for Intel's interest in LCOS was the ability to decrypt content and display it from the same chip. This would make most attacks on DRM protected material quite difficult. By making LCOS displays on the chip technology as the decryption/decompression engine, they could control the DRM food chain quite effectively. Meanwhile, don't forget that there are still many players successfully manufacturing LCOS displays. Intel just is not one of them.
You may still be able to buy one for Christmas.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't wait to start building with Lego superconducting magnets. And the liquid helium distribution system!
The next obvious step is to label ALL food with the exact sequence of the plant/animal. Educated consumers will then easily be able to determine the safety and even the flavorfulness of their food. Don't like that pesky CMV promoter? Don't eat it. This is a much superior proposal to the worthless "GMO" label, that only tells you if some scientist did something (no telling what). And, you'll find out what all of those changes inserted with "natural" techniques involve -- most of which are far more "interesting" than the GMO modifications. Might take some space on the label, of course, but use a small font.
Hard to drive to, but if you are in Puerto Rico, this is a must. It's even bigger than that. You can pretend you are James Bond running around.
This is the latest in a very very long series of failures of optical interconnect in multiprocessors, in the computer room, and at the desktop. Since the '80s people have told us that wires will never keep working, and optics is the only solution. They have been wrong, and continue to be wrong. I was even blasted by a respected physicist that told me that there was an inherent power advantage for optics. That was wrong also. Optics is great if you need to go across the ocean, but don't tell me you want to go across the cabinet with it.
The Geometry of Physics, Theodore Frankel; An excellent introduction to differential geometry and its application not just to GR but to other areas of physics as well. Highly recommended.
A First Course in General Relativity, Bernard Schutz; I found this book helpful in some specific areas -- notably understanding the notions of the stress-energy tensor.
Gravitation, Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, & John Wheeler; This is the classic text, and is comprehensive and comprehensible. I like Wheeler's way of thinking about physics, and it shows through here. There is the standard joke, that this is a text which not only discusses gravitation, but also attempts to demonstrate it by its high mass.
You can't make vacuum devices with holes, so there are not the complementary devices needed for CMOS like operation. We would be working with a technology similar to N-channel FETs, with all the problems of low-output state power dissipation. It won't scale to high integration levels. That said, the technology probably has niche applications in high temperature and rad-hard environments.
Wire wrapped construction was a great step forward in reliability from the solder of the PDP-1 and PDP-6 computers.
Can't anyone keep the difference between silicon and silicone straight? Silicon: element, component of semiconductors (and some blue LEDs made from silicon carbide); Silicone: compound, used for breast implants
I live in this building. There are serious problems, some with leaks, but most with the fundamental design. A good example is the placement of fire exits. In any rational building, the fire exits are near the elevators. You probably have never thought about why that is true -- it's just something that rational building designers do. Well, this building does NOT do this. Two important results. (1) No visitor can find the fire exits. (2) You can't lock the building. When the fire alarm goes off, you must be able to get to the fire exits. If you have just stepped off the elevator, the path from the elevator to the fire exit must be open, and can never be locked.
Another example of fine high quality reporting by New Scientist. It's a shame to see a formerly somewhat respectable rag turn into this.
The paper was written by two people, not one. Whatever happened to poor David Boggs, who seems never to be mentioned. Punditry has its place, I guess, if you want to be famous.
Apparently they are comparing this transistor speed to the speed of flash memory transistors, which are remarkably slow. I would definitely not get excited about the raw speed of these devices. It is interesting to see discrete biomolecular structures used as an engineering vehicle, and we'll see a lot more of this soon.
Note that the FIRST project supported by DARPA (then ARPA, a brand new organization created in response to Sputnik) in 1959 or so was Arecibo, the large "radio telescope" in Puerto Rico. The project was initially a large RADAR dish, not a telescope. The telescope features were added as an afterthought. It is the scene, of course, of the James Bond movie which we are all thinking about. This dual use idea goes WAY back.
Just because you "bought" your iPOD, don't think you have a right to use it. If they have their way, you'll license the right to listen to music on it, and pay a subscription fee, just like Sirius or XM now.
In an ideal world, this circuit would still dissipate energy. Overlap power is (relatively) a small contiibutor to total dissipation. Most of the dissipation comes from charging and discharging the capacitances of the circuit. This dissipation is C V**2 F, independent of the pullup/pulldown overlaps. C V**2 F dissipation is avoidable with charge recovery techniques using adiabatic charging and discharging techniques (which requires inductors, on or off chip).
The dissipation of energy is only necessary when you have no inductors. You can move charge from one node to another if you have an inductor to store the energy as magnetic field. Adibatic logic allows logic which dissipates (in the limit of slow operation) zero energy.
Note that this is an *application* not an issued patent. While I have no trust of the existing patent examination process, we should at least give them the opportunity to examine and reject this before getting too upset. Not that this excuses Microsoft for wasting all of our time (or worse) by filing it.
As you say, there are no good low power nonlinearities. High power nonlinearities are easy to find -- the vacuum is nonlinear at high enough power levels. But I know of no optical nonlinearities which are functional at low -- or even modest -- power densities. This is important because it affects the packing density of the circuitry (see below).
The article uses a faulty metric -- the speed of propagation of signals is not the important criterion for designing a computer, but rather the delay in reaching the next gate. This depends as much or more on the density of the components (and the dimensionality of the construction technique) as it does on the speed. If components are spaced a foot apart, then it takes more than a nanosecond to reach them no matter what. While it is true that properly buffered CMOS on-chip wiring is only about 3% of the speed of light, the density (and required low power) of CMOS allows billions of gates to be reached in a nanosecond. Optical technology has a LONG WAY to go in reaching this point, let alone exceeding it. By then, 3-D silicon will make these numbers dramatically higher.
Also, superconducting on-chip interconnect will make on-chip silicon wiring dramatically faster (10x?) and is a much much easier technology that BEC.
But the physics is sure cool.
I have always thought that the real reason for Intel's interest in LCOS was the ability to decrypt content and display it from the same chip. This would make most attacks on DRM protected material quite difficult. By making LCOS displays on the chip technology as the decryption/decompression engine, they could control the DRM food chain quite effectively. Meanwhile, don't forget that there are still many players successfully manufacturing LCOS displays. Intel just is not one of them. You may still be able to buy one for Christmas.