TFA claims:
"At first glance, the mobile phone looks exactly like a conventional cell phone."
...but I disagree. It looks big and clunky. Frankly I don't think this feature is worth the added bulk, cost, complexity, and battery-usage. This will remain a gimmick until it can be integrated seemlessly into current cellphones, and more importantly, until the interface is actually smooth and efficient.
In practice I agree with you. However, that is because most collaborative books are self-contained chapters that some editor casually reads over and then glues together. The editor is, in fact, *not allowed* to make sweeping changes to the style of a particular chapter, since the author in question would legitimately get angry. Each author is given his own "right" to describe things as he sees fit.
In a wiki project, the final editor can pick the version of each wiki article he likes best, and he can mercilessly modify and change the style so that it sounds good. If anyone doesn't like it, they can of course fork the book based on the version they liked better.
The point is that the wiki style, by getting rid of this "ownership of the author" has the potential to make collaborative projects actually be better.
In practice, of course, this requires quite a good editor... so we'll see how well it turns out.
No matter what (self-proclaimed) nerds say, being a "nerd" does not involve loving *all* things nerdy. For every single one of us, there will be slashdot stories that will be outside our area of expertise (where "expertise" may be what you do at work, or what you do in your spare time). I think the point of "news for nerds" is that alot (though not all) will find the news to be of interest, whereas the rest may very well learn about something new closely related to other things they like. When a story pops up that really has nothing to do with you (and doesn't interest you), you can always skip it... what I find amazing is not the fact that 10% of stories are about things that I really don't care about... but the fact that 90% of stories are about things that I do care about. That's alot better that most news sources (for a person like me, that is).
I love(d) Buffy and Angel... but somehow firefly didn't have the same magic. My point? I think Joss is very talented, but you have to have the right mix of talent in all departments (actors, writers, director, cinematography, etc. etc.) for a project to really work. I don't know why firefly didn't mesh the way Buffy and Angel did (and indeed many people will probably disagree with me anyway), but I'm not confident this movie will be any different.
Times have not changed. I would say most serious gamers still just play with a few dice, a character sheet, and some scrap paper. It's all imagination based, like it's always been.
Sometimes a part of a game (like combat) can require sketching out the geometry (or using coins or even figurines as stand-ins for character locations). Other times, it can be fun to generate 3D maps of a building or ship or whatever. But ultimately, it boils down to imagination, and when you're highly concentrated on the role-playing itself, all those props are ignored.
There are some features that Firefox has that IE simply will not be able to reproduce. Why? Because Firefox is built by people who care only about the user having a good web experience, whereas IE is built by MS, and ultimately they have to make money. So somewhere, they will compromise on quality in order to make some cash, and the user will eventually notice this.
For instance, Firefox blocks popups and a simple extension makes it blocks ads everywhere. IE7 may block popups, but do you think they will make it easy to block all ads? Considering that MS needs those ads all over the web to sell their products, I doubt it. I don't think they would want everyone checking their free hotmail and surfing MSN without seeing all those ads all over the place. Plus, other big companies would put pressure on MS (whereas Mozilla is largely immune to such things).
I'm sure there are many other examples. Of course, I'm not so naive as to think that Firefox's market share will grow to 95% over the next year, but for the users who enjoy "quality of web browsing experience" and who have already switched to Firefox (or will do so as soon as they try it out for a week!), IE7 will have nothing to offer.
I agree with this post, and I think the replies to it are missing something when they say that backwards compatibility is important. How many email addresses do you have right now? I have about 6, with most of them forwarding to 2 key mailboxes. I do this partly to avoid spam (always give out the email address I don't care about to untrustworthy sources). The point is that I am already doing alot of work to avoid spam.
If I started using this hypothetical "email 2.0", I would, of course, keep an old "email 1.0" account running on my computer. At first only tech-savy people would use email2.0, but that would be enough for the technology to be deployed.. and eventually, when other people find out that it's possible to send and receive authenticated email without getting any spam, they would switch too.
My point is that it is not an "all or nothing" situation. We are all accustomed to evolving along with the technology, and maintaining multiple standards at the same time. Give us email 2.0, and email clients that can accept both the old and the new standard... and then, in 5 years, we can ditch the old standard.
Of course, we are moving in this direction with secure SMTP connections... but more needs to be done.
Modern magnetic HDD stores on the order of 100 Gb in a 3.5 inch platter, which is ~0.4 Gb/cm^2.
If each surface atom on a material encodes one bit of data, then your storage density depends on the density of your material. For example, let's say that the atoms are on a square grid, and are spaced by 0.15 nm (i.e.: 1.5E-10 m, the length of a typical carbon-carbon bond). That means that you have about 4E15 atoms per cm^2. So if each atom one holds a bit, that means about 600,000 Gb/cm^2.
Of course, actually using each atom to store a single bit may or may not be feasible. On the other hand, using the entire volume of a material (which you seem to think won't happen) may be possible. Various (far-fetched) nanotech proposals exist. Assuming we're allowed to use the entire volume of the material, and conservatively estimating that it requires ~6 atoms to store a single bit, Drexler calculates you should be able to get ~5 bits/nm^3, or 5E21 bits/cm^3 (refer to Drexler, Nanosystems, p. 366).
This is all quite far off. It will require alot of work for us to get anywhere near these values. But in terms of fundamental limits, we have quite a way to go!
I can't answer on behalf of IBM or the millipede project, but if you want my opinion (as an academic researcher who uses similar technology), then I'd guess:
1. Competitive to HDD, since the tips don't seek very far (100 microns max) and since data output from multiple tips can be done in parrallel (in principle, 4000 bits at once, depending on data contiguity, etc.). The time required to actually 'melt' the divots might be the limiting factor, but again that should be offset by the ability to write 4000 bits at once.
2. Room temperature is fine for piezos and cantilevers. Even cold temperatures should be fine. I imagine the material they use would stop responding properly if the device were too hot (above 70 C maybe), but if placed in a computer case away from the hottest components, it should be fine.
3. Even though each tip uses local heating, I don't think the device temperature would be very high. In read mode, the cantilevers are passive and the piezo doesn't generate much heat (I use AFMs at work, and they don't generate heat the way a magnetic HDD does).
4. As I describe in another post, each array in principle alloys thousands of tips to read/write together, at the same time. Stacking a bunch of arrays in a real device is straight-forward.
5. Failure rate might be a problem, and needs consideration. In the lab, sometimes I can use a tip for a long time without damage, but sometimes they can snap off. If the device is properly designed I would guess failure rates for each tip would be okay. Polymer degredation or aging is a very real problem. Presumably they are optimizing that as best they can. I think initial devices will probably have extensive error correction, so that if one tip dies, it can recover the data from that region and write it somewhere else.
6. The current cost for MEMS tips batch-processed like this can be from 1$ per tip to as much as 50$ per tip, depending what you want. So an array might cost thousands of dollars. Of course, the tips are use are for a small market (academic research). It is easier to use lithography to make a bunch of chips than to make a Pentium chip, though, so I imagine if it went into mass production, it wouldn't cost more than 100$ per array. So competitive with HDD.
7. My guess: initial devices to hit the market will have 10 redundant arrays with tons of error-checking. The storage will be competitive with magnetic drives and transfer rates will be too. Cost will be a bit higher, but after being in production for about 5 years, most figures of merit will be better than HDD, and cost will be down to what we're currently used to paying for storage.
But these are, of course, just my (hopefully educated) guesses.
The article quotes 10,000 read/write cycles. Given that this number is probably a slight exagerration for PR purposes, it's a good start, but needs optimizing. Hopefully by the time this technology makes it to market, that will have increased that number enough that it will be competitive with magnetic drives. I think that this will definately be a viable replacement for flash drives.
The technology uses localized heating of a polymer past its glass transition. There is no reason that this should cause much material degredation if it is done properly (i.e.: avoiding temperature spikes, and engineering polymers that have an accessibly low glass-transition temperature while also being robust against thermal cycling). I think with enough engineering this could be done. There is alot of research on heating polymers past the glass-transition temperature, so they won't be reinventing the wheel or anything.
For those interested, here are some advantages I see to this technology:
1. Increased storage density. More importantly, this prototype is not near any fundamental limit. Hence, it would appear that there is plenty of room to reduce the dimensions of the MEMS tips to increase storage densities way past what a magnetic drive can do.
2. Data transfer rate. In principle, the thousdands of different tips can all return data at the same time, compared to, say, 4 bits returned at once from a 4-platter HDD. Of course, in real situations, not all 4000 bits will necessarily be of interest, but I think with smart caching and device layout the throughput should be very high (i.e.: contiguous bits in a file are spread out so that the entire file is read by the 4000 tips without anything moving).
3. Low seek times. In a HDD, the head must move by many centimeters in order to seek randomly. In Millipede, the entire surface moves by, at most, 100 micrometers to find a new location. It probably uses piezoelectrics, which are fast and robust. Thus, I see seek times being lower (at least in a mature device).
4. Scalable. This prototype has a single array of tips on a single polymer layer. Obviously it is straightforward to build real devices using 10 or 20 of these arrays stacked. Unlike the platters in a HDD, these arrays could be seeking independantly, so if properly designed, performance could be very good (like RAID maybe?).
5. Heat. The piezos shouldn't heat up too much, and even though the tips themselves use pinpoint heating to deform the polymer, I think the bulk device heat would be lower than a HDD spinning at 10k rpm. Less noise too.
6. Cost. By using established MEMS technology (i.e.: the same lithography used to make microchips nowadays) I don't think implementation costs (and future scaling) will be too expensive (as compared to some more far-fetched nanotech ideas).
This has been in the works for a long time, but I think we may actually see real devices soon! (6 years?) I think this technology has real potential, and I think IBM is right to pursue it.
Actually, the slashdot article you reference is not the IBM millipede project, but another company trying to implement a rather similar idea. But the fact that two different companies are competing on a new technology hardly makes the separate stories dupes!
I think the idea is that instead of wasting power on a uniform back-lighting that is modulated pixel-by-pixel with LCD, each OLED-pixel only emits as much light as is required for it to display properly. So it's really the reduced wastage due to pixel-by-pixel illumination.
Of course this is true for conventional LEDs, as long as it is patterned pixel-by-pixel. OLEDs promise to be cheaper to build, thus making this technology reasonably affordabel. As far as I know, the OLED energy conversion is not that efficient, but the device architecture is more efficient.
Considering how poorly most people secure their WiFi, does this mean that I'll be able to hack together something and play other people's video games without their knowledge? Or, more realistically, does this mean that I'll be able to join multi-player WiFi games without being explicitly asked to join? Will gamers start driving around looking for open Nintendo WiFis to satisfy their gaming needs?
Or will Nintendo provide idiot-proof WiFi security (which could then be transplanted to other WiFi solutions...) ?
For the record, NASA has not confirmed it is cancelling the Voyager missions. In yesterday's issue of Nature, NASA spokes-woman Gretchen Cook-Anderson is quoted as saying "There's been no final decision at NASA headquarters to terminate any of these missions, despite what budget figures may imply." The missions are uncertain, and physicists are lobying NASA to maintain funding... but nothing is final yet.
I think the "better option" that most astrophysicists are looking forward to is the James Webb Telescope. It's a primarily IR-telescope, but in terms of its mission statement it will largely replace what Hubble is doing now. Hubble has already survived longer than originally intended (due to many well-executed repair missions). More years could be squeezed out of Hubble with more repair missions, but if what you want is a brand-new telescope, the James Webb Telescope will keep astronomers busy for many years.
For those who can't get the PDF, here it is in plain text:
FCC OPENS ACCESS TO NEW SPECTRUM FOR WIRELESS BROADBAND IN THE 3650 MHZ BAND
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC or Commission) adopted rules to open access to new spectrum for wireless broadband in the 3650-3700 MHz band (3650 MHz). The Commission adopted a hybrid approach that draws from both the Commission's unlicensed and licensed regulatory models and provides for nationwide, non-exclusive licensing of terrestrial operations in the band utilizing technologies employing contention-based protocols. This streamlined licensing mechanism with minimal regulatory entry requirements will encourage multiple new entrants and stimulate the rapid expansion of wireless broadband services -- especially in rural America -- by Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) and other entities with limited resources. The Commission also provided an opportunity for the introduction at 3650 MHz of a variety of new wireless broadband technologies, such as Wi-Max, into the band.
Under the Commission's approach, there is no limit on the number of licenses that can be granted, and each licensee will be authorized to operate on a shared basis with other licensees on all 50 megahertz of the band, subject to restrictions in geographic areas occupied by grandfathered Fixed Satellite Service (FSS) and Federal Government stations. Licensees will also be required to register all system base stations electronically with the Commission. Base station registration will enable licensees to locate each other's operations and will facilitate protection of grandfathered stations from interference. This type of licensing and registration will enable the Commission to monitor the use of this spectrum as new technologies and services develop.
The Commission found that the public record developed in this proceeding supports multiple users sharing this spectrum through the use of "contention-based" protocols to minimize interference among fixed and mobile operations. New fixed and mobile stations will therefore be required to use contention-based protocols, which will reduce the possibility of interference from co-frequency operation by managing each station's access to spectrum. The Commission concluded that this approach is a reasonable, cost-effective method for ensuring that multiple users can access the spectrum.
The Commission gave all licensees the mutual obligation to cooperate and avoid harmful interference to one another. Mobile stations also will be required to positively receive and decode an enabling signal transmitted by a base station. The Commission determined that this approach will ensure that mobile stations operate within range of registered base stations, thereby avoiding interference to grandfathered FSS and Federal Government stations. Fixed stations will be allowed to operate with a peak power limit of 25 Watts per 25 megahertz bandwidth, and mobile stations with a peak power limit of 1 Watt per 25 megahertz bandwidth.
The Commission kept the existing allocations for the band, grandfathering previously licensed primary incumbent FSS earth station operations and three Federal Government radiolocation stations, entitling them to interference protection from new wireless licensees. To protect these incumbent operations, the Commission established circular protection zones around them - 150 km for FSS earth stations and 80 km for Federal Government stations - and prohibited new terrestrial licensees from operating within these zones unless they negotiate agreements with the incumbents. The Commission determined that new FSS stations should be allowed on a secondary basis and denied several petitions for reconsideration of an earlier decision in this proceeding that established the existing FSS, FS and MS allocations.
The Commission also concluded that there should be no eligibility restrictions
This is good news for companies making
mobile devices with lots of storage. After all, that storage is not very useful if there isn't infrastructure (i.e.: bandwidth) available to transfer data easily.
This might also help out community wireless attempts, since at least one part of the technology is being standardized, and the licenses are rather long (10 years).
As a matter of fact, I don't think what they were originally doing was "evil." Once you read their description of it, it does seem legit: the words were there as part of an internal indexing system.
Even if they were purposefully increasing the ranking of their pages on their own engine, I don't consider that such a bad thing.
However, I do feel that google has done the right, "non-evil" thing by promptly responding to this situation and changing it. The company could have pulled out any number of explanations or even ignored the situation entirely. Instead, they took the high road and simply fixed the problem so that everything is legit again.
That's why I think it is an example of them enforcing the "don't be evil" thing. Granted, the "don't be evil" thing has alot to do with PR and corporate image... but I still admire Google for taking the opposite approach to companies like Microsoft.
I think TFA is right. The massive scrutiny that this put linux under has increased confidence in linux a great deal. If there were indeed "copyright infringements" somewhere in the source, I think they would have become very public during that case. I think other companies will not be willing to attack linux without any basis.
I think we FOSS/linux advocates can point to this case as a nice reference when making our point. We can say that linux was put under quite a bit of scrutiny, and seemd to pass the test (in terms of IP, security, etc.)...
just as a side-note: it is possible to publish a description of a vulnerability/weakness without publishing example code that exploits said weakness. Thus, even if providing exploit code is illegal, we can still put pressure on a company to fix a security hole by publicizing an explanation of a security vulnerability.
(Admitedly, this description could probably be turned into code very quickly by any hacker, but that's not the point.)
In any case, the article in question is about copyright violation, not making exploit-publication illegal.
Re:Future viability in question?
on
Gnome 2.10 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As a windows user migrating over to linux, I really tried to get a good sense of which desktop was "better" and would be supported in the coming years. I was never able to get a good answer. Both have their pros and cons, and both have an enthusiastic user base. So I think both KDE and GNOME are with us for a good while now... which is a good thing!
As often occurs, I think one of the problems here is that some people (and especially the legal people) want a clear cut-off between "journalist" and "non-journalist." In the real world, such sharp boundaries do not exist.
I think blogging is really highlighting the fact that this boundary does not exist. Is there really a fundamental difference between a well-written and researched blog and an article written by a journalist and then posted online?
Basically we have a spectrum from "crappy ranting blog" to "mediocre blog" to "good blog"/"decent online article" to "great blog"/"online article" and finally "articles in highly respected newspapers," etc.
We will never come up with a satisfactory definition. So perhaps each case should be judged on its own merits?
Slashdot Mirror
TFA claims:
...but I disagree. It looks big and clunky. Frankly I don't think this feature is worth the added bulk, cost, complexity, and battery-usage. This will remain a gimmick until it can be integrated seemlessly into current cellphones, and more importantly, until the interface is actually smooth and efficient.
"At first glance, the mobile phone looks exactly like a conventional cell phone."
In practice I agree with you. However, that is because most collaborative books are self-contained chapters that some editor casually reads over and then glues together. The editor is, in fact, *not allowed* to make sweeping changes to the style of a particular chapter, since the author in question would legitimately get angry. Each author is given his own "right" to describe things as he sees fit.
In a wiki project, the final editor can pick the version of each wiki article he likes best, and he can mercilessly modify and change the style so that it sounds good. If anyone doesn't like it, they can of course fork the book based on the version they liked better.
The point is that the wiki style, by getting rid of this "ownership of the author" has the potential to make collaborative projects actually be better.
In practice, of course, this requires quite a good editor... so we'll see how well it turns out.
No matter what (self-proclaimed) nerds say, being a "nerd" does not involve loving *all* things nerdy. For every single one of us, there will be slashdot stories that will be outside our area of expertise (where "expertise" may be what you do at work, or what you do in your spare time). I think the point of "news for nerds" is that alot (though not all) will find the news to be of interest, whereas the rest may very well learn about something new closely related to other things they like. When a story pops up that really has nothing to do with you (and doesn't interest you), you can always skip it... what I find amazing is not the fact that 10% of stories are about things that I really don't care about... but the fact that 90% of stories are about things that I do care about. That's alot better that most news sources (for a person like me, that is).
I love(d) Buffy and Angel... but somehow firefly didn't have the same magic. My point? I think Joss is very talented, but you have to have the right mix of talent in all departments (actors, writers, director, cinematography, etc. etc.) for a project to really work. I don't know why firefly didn't mesh the way Buffy and Angel did (and indeed many people will probably disagree with me anyway), but I'm not confident this movie will be any different.
Times have not changed. I would say most serious gamers still just play with a few dice, a character sheet, and some scrap paper. It's all imagination based, like it's always been.
Sometimes a part of a game (like combat) can require sketching out the geometry (or using coins or even figurines as stand-ins for character locations). Other times, it can be fun to generate 3D maps of a building or ship or whatever. But ultimately, it boils down to imagination, and when you're highly concentrated on the role-playing itself, all those props are ignored.
There are some features that Firefox has that IE simply will not be able to reproduce. Why? Because Firefox is built by people who care only about the user having a good web experience, whereas IE is built by MS, and ultimately they have to make money. So somewhere, they will compromise on quality in order to make some cash, and the user will eventually notice this.
For instance, Firefox blocks popups and a simple extension makes it blocks ads everywhere. IE7 may block popups, but do you think they will make it easy to block all ads? Considering that MS needs those ads all over the web to sell their products, I doubt it. I don't think they would want everyone checking their free hotmail and surfing MSN without seeing all those ads all over the place. Plus, other big companies would put pressure on MS (whereas Mozilla is largely immune to such things).
I'm sure there are many other examples. Of course, I'm not so naive as to think that Firefox's market share will grow to 95% over the next year, but for the users who enjoy "quality of web browsing experience" and who have already switched to Firefox (or will do so as soon as they try it out for a week!), IE7 will have nothing to offer.
I agree with this post, and I think the replies to it are missing something when they say that backwards compatibility is important. How many email addresses do you have right now? I have about 6, with most of them forwarding to 2 key mailboxes. I do this partly to avoid spam (always give out the email address I don't care about to untrustworthy sources). The point is that I am already doing alot of work to avoid spam.
If I started using this hypothetical "email 2.0", I would, of course, keep an old "email 1.0" account running on my computer. At first only tech-savy people would use email2.0, but that would be enough for the technology to be deployed.. and eventually, when other people find out that it's possible to send and receive authenticated email without getting any spam, they would switch too.
My point is that it is not an "all or nothing" situation. We are all accustomed to evolving along with the technology, and maintaining multiple standards at the same time. Give us email 2.0, and email clients that can accept both the old and the new standard... and then, in 5 years, we can ditch the old standard.
Of course, we are moving in this direction with secure SMTP connections... but more needs to be done.
Modern magnetic HDD stores on the order of 100 Gb in a 3.5 inch platter, which is ~0.4 Gb/cm^2.
If each surface atom on a material encodes one bit of data, then your storage density depends on the density of your material. For example, let's say that the atoms are on a square grid, and are spaced by 0.15 nm (i.e.: 1.5E-10 m, the length of a typical carbon-carbon bond). That means that you have about 4E15 atoms per cm^2. So if each atom one holds a bit, that means about 600,000 Gb/cm^2.
Of course, actually using each atom to store a single bit may or may not be feasible. On the other hand, using the entire volume of a material (which you seem to think won't happen) may be possible. Various (far-fetched) nanotech proposals exist. Assuming we're allowed to use the entire volume of the material, and conservatively estimating that it requires ~6 atoms to store a single bit, Drexler calculates you should be able to get ~5 bits/nm^3, or 5E21 bits/cm^3 (refer to Drexler, Nanosystems, p. 366).
This is all quite far off. It will require alot of work for us to get anywhere near these values. But in terms of fundamental limits, we have quite a way to go!
I can't answer on behalf of IBM or the millipede project, but if you want my opinion (as an academic researcher who uses similar technology), then I'd guess:
1. Competitive to HDD, since the tips don't seek very far (100 microns max) and since data output from multiple tips can be done in parrallel (in principle, 4000 bits at once, depending on data contiguity, etc.). The time required to actually 'melt' the divots might be the limiting factor, but again that should be offset by the ability to write 4000 bits at once.
2. Room temperature is fine for piezos and cantilevers. Even cold temperatures should be fine. I imagine the material they use would stop responding properly if the device were too hot (above 70 C maybe), but if placed in a computer case away from the hottest components, it should be fine.
3. Even though each tip uses local heating, I don't think the device temperature would be very high. In read mode, the cantilevers are passive and the piezo doesn't generate much heat (I use AFMs at work, and they don't generate heat the way a magnetic HDD does).
4. As I describe in another post, each array in principle alloys thousands of tips to read/write together, at the same time. Stacking a bunch of arrays in a real device is straight-forward.
5. Failure rate might be a problem, and needs consideration. In the lab, sometimes I can use a tip for a long time without damage, but sometimes they can snap off. If the device is properly designed I would guess failure rates for each tip would be okay. Polymer degredation or aging is a very real problem. Presumably they are optimizing that as best they can. I think initial devices will probably have extensive error correction, so that if one tip dies, it can recover the data from that region and write it somewhere else.
6. The current cost for MEMS tips batch-processed like this can be from 1$ per tip to as much as 50$ per tip, depending what you want. So an array might cost thousands of dollars. Of course, the tips are use are for a small market (academic research). It is easier to use lithography to make a bunch of chips than to make a Pentium chip, though, so I imagine if it went into mass production, it wouldn't cost more than 100$ per array. So competitive with HDD.
7. My guess: initial devices to hit the market will have 10 redundant arrays with tons of error-checking. The storage will be competitive with magnetic drives and transfer rates will be too. Cost will be a bit higher, but after being in production for about 5 years, most figures of merit will be better than HDD, and cost will be down to what we're currently used to paying for storage.
But these are, of course, just my (hopefully educated) guesses.
The article quotes 10,000 read/write cycles. Given that this number is probably a slight exagerration for PR purposes, it's a good start, but needs optimizing. Hopefully by the time this technology makes it to market, that will have increased that number enough that it will be competitive with magnetic drives. I think that this will definately be a viable replacement for flash drives.
The technology uses localized heating of a polymer past its glass transition. There is no reason that this should cause much material degredation if it is done properly (i.e.: avoiding temperature spikes, and engineering polymers that have an accessibly low glass-transition temperature while also being robust against thermal cycling). I think with enough engineering this could be done. There is alot of research on heating polymers past the glass-transition temperature, so they won't be reinventing the wheel or anything.
For those interested, here are some advantages I see to this technology:
1. Increased storage density. More importantly, this prototype is not near any fundamental limit. Hence, it would appear that there is plenty of room to reduce the dimensions of the MEMS tips to increase storage densities way past what a magnetic drive can do.
2. Data transfer rate. In principle, the thousdands of different tips can all return data at the same time, compared to, say, 4 bits returned at once from a 4-platter HDD. Of course, in real situations, not all 4000 bits will necessarily be of interest, but I think with smart caching and device layout the throughput should be very high (i.e.: contiguous bits in a file are spread out so that the entire file is read by the 4000 tips without anything moving).
3. Low seek times. In a HDD, the head must move by many centimeters in order to seek randomly. In Millipede, the entire surface moves by, at most, 100 micrometers to find a new location. It probably uses piezoelectrics, which are fast and robust. Thus, I see seek times being lower (at least in a mature device).
4. Scalable. This prototype has a single array of tips on a single polymer layer. Obviously it is straightforward to build real devices using 10 or 20 of these arrays stacked. Unlike the platters in a HDD, these arrays could be seeking independantly, so if properly designed, performance could be very good (like RAID maybe?).
5. Heat. The piezos shouldn't heat up too much, and even though the tips themselves use pinpoint heating to deform the polymer, I think the bulk device heat would be lower than a HDD spinning at 10k rpm. Less noise too.
6. Cost. By using established MEMS technology (i.e.: the same lithography used to make microchips nowadays) I don't think implementation costs (and future scaling) will be too expensive (as compared to some more far-fetched nanotech ideas).
This has been in the works for a long time, but I think we may actually see real devices soon! (6 years?) I think this technology has real potential, and I think IBM is right to pursue it.
Actually, the slashdot article you reference is not the IBM millipede project, but another company trying to implement a rather similar idea. But the fact that two different companies are competing on a new technology hardly makes the separate stories dupes!
I think the idea is that instead of wasting power on a uniform back-lighting that is modulated pixel-by-pixel with LCD, each OLED-pixel only emits as much light as is required for it to display properly. So it's really the reduced wastage due to pixel-by-pixel illumination.
Of course this is true for conventional LEDs, as long as it is patterned pixel-by-pixel. OLEDs promise to be cheaper to build, thus making this technology reasonably affordabel. As far as I know, the OLED energy conversion is not that efficient, but the device architecture is more efficient.
Considering how poorly most people secure their WiFi, does this mean that I'll be able to hack together something and play other people's video games without their knowledge? Or, more realistically, does this mean that I'll be able to join multi-player WiFi games without being explicitly asked to join? Will gamers start driving around looking for open Nintendo WiFis to satisfy their gaming needs?
Or will Nintendo provide idiot-proof WiFi security (which could then be transplanted to other WiFi solutions...) ?
the summary says: Want some piece and quiet...
But I think there is a difference between piece and peace. Maybe they meant to say: Want a piece of peace and some quiet...
For the record, NASA has not confirmed it is cancelling the Voyager missions. In yesterday's issue of Nature, NASA spokes-woman Gretchen Cook-Anderson is quoted as saying "There's been no final decision at NASA headquarters to terminate any of these missions, despite what budget figures may imply." The missions are uncertain, and physicists are lobying NASA to maintain funding... but nothing is final yet.
I think the "better option" that most astrophysicists are looking forward to is the James Webb Telescope. It's a primarily IR-telescope, but in terms of its mission statement it will largely replace what Hubble is doing now. Hubble has already survived longer than originally intended (due to many well-executed repair missions). More years could be squeezed out of Hubble with more repair missions, but if what you want is a brand-new telescope, the James Webb Telescope will keep astronomers busy for many years.
For those who can't get the PDF, here it is in plain text:
FCC OPENS ACCESS TO NEW SPECTRUM FOR
WIRELESS BROADBAND IN THE 3650 MHZ BAND
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC or
Commission) adopted rules to open access to new spectrum for wireless broadband in the 3650-3700
MHz band (3650 MHz). The Commission adopted a hybrid approach that draws from both the
Commission's unlicensed and licensed regulatory models and provides for nationwide, non-exclusive
licensing of terrestrial operations in the band utilizing technologies employing contention-based
protocols. This streamlined licensing mechanism with minimal regulatory entry requirements will
encourage multiple new entrants and stimulate the rapid expansion of wireless broadband services --
especially in rural America -- by Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) and other entities with
limited resources. The Commission also provided an opportunity for the introduction at 3650 MHz of a
variety of new wireless broadband technologies, such as Wi-Max, into the band.
Under the Commission's approach, there is no limit on the number of licenses that can be
granted, and each licensee will be authorized to operate on a shared basis with other licensees on all 50
megahertz of the band, subject to restrictions in geographic areas occupied by grandfathered Fixed
Satellite Service (FSS) and Federal Government stations. Licensees will also be required to register all
system base stations electronically with the Commission. Base station registration will enable licensees
to locate each other's operations and will facilitate protection of grandfathered stations from interference.
This type of licensing and registration will enable the Commission to monitor the use of this spectrum as
new technologies and services develop.
The Commission found that the public record developed in this proceeding supports multiple
users sharing this spectrum through the use of "contention-based" protocols to minimize interference
among fixed and mobile operations. New fixed and mobile stations will therefore be required to use
contention-based protocols, which will reduce the possibility of interference from co-frequency operation
by managing each station's access to spectrum. The Commission concluded that this approach is a
reasonable, cost-effective method for ensuring that multiple users can access the spectrum.
The Commission gave all licensees the mutual obligation to cooperate and avoid harmful
interference to one another. Mobile stations also will be required to positively receive and decode an
enabling signal transmitted by a base station. The Commission determined that this approach will ensure
that mobile stations operate within range of registered base stations, thereby avoiding interference to grandfathered FSS and Federal Government stations. Fixed stations will be allowed to operate with a
peak power limit of 25 Watts per 25 megahertz bandwidth, and mobile stations with a peak power limit of
1 Watt per 25 megahertz bandwidth.
The Commission kept the existing allocations for the band, grandfathering previously licensed
primary incumbent FSS earth station operations and three Federal Government radiolocation stations,
entitling them to interference protection from new wireless licensees. To protect these incumbent
operations, the Commission established circular protection zones around them - 150 km for FSS earth
stations and 80 km for Federal Government stations - and prohibited new terrestrial licensees from
operating within these zones unless they negotiate agreements with the incumbents. The Commission
determined that new FSS stations should be allowed on a secondary basis and denied several petitions for
reconsideration of an earlier decision in this proceeding that established the existing FSS, FS and MS
allocations.
The Commission also concluded that there should be no eligibility restrictions
This is good news for companies making mobile devices with lots of storage. After all, that storage is not very useful if there isn't infrastructure (i.e.: bandwidth) available to transfer data easily.
This might also help out community wireless attempts, since at least one part of the technology is being standardized, and the licenses are rather long (10 years).
As a matter of fact, I don't think what they were originally doing was "evil." Once you read their description of it, it does seem legit: the words were there as part of an internal indexing system.
Even if they were purposefully increasing the ranking of their pages on their own engine, I don't consider that such a bad thing.
However, I do feel that google has done the right, "non-evil" thing by promptly responding to this situation and changing it. The company could have pulled out any number of explanations or even ignored the situation entirely. Instead, they took the high road and simply fixed the problem so that everything is legit again.
That's why I think it is an example of them enforcing the "don't be evil" thing. Granted, the "don't be evil" thing has alot to do with PR and corporate image... but I still admire Google for taking the opposite approach to companies like Microsoft.
It's nice to see that Google:
1. Actually tries to follow the "don't be evil" thing.
2. Reads slashdot.
I think TFA is right. The massive scrutiny that this put linux under has increased confidence in linux a great deal. If there were indeed "copyright infringements" somewhere in the source, I think they would have become very public during that case. I think other companies will not be willing to attack linux without any basis.
I think we FOSS/linux advocates can point to this case as a nice reference when making our point. We can say that linux was put under quite a bit of scrutiny, and seemd to pass the test (in terms of IP, security, etc.)...
just as a side-note: it is possible to publish a description of a vulnerability/weakness without publishing example code that exploits said weakness. Thus, even if providing exploit code is illegal, we can still put pressure on a company to fix a security hole by publicizing an explanation of a security vulnerability.
(Admitedly, this description could probably be turned into code very quickly by any hacker, but that's not the point.)
In any case, the article in question is about copyright violation, not making exploit-publication illegal.
As a windows user migrating over to linux, I really tried to get a good sense of which desktop was "better" and would be supported in the coming years. I was never able to get a good answer. Both have their pros and cons, and both have an enthusiastic user base. So I think both KDE and GNOME are with us for a good while now... which is a good thing!
That having been said, I use KDE.
As often occurs, I think one of the problems here is that some people (and especially the legal people) want a clear cut-off between "journalist" and "non-journalist." In the real world, such sharp boundaries do not exist.
I think blogging is really highlighting the fact that this boundary does not exist. Is there really a fundamental difference between a well-written and researched blog and an article written by a journalist and then posted online?
Basically we have a spectrum from "crappy ranting blog" to "mediocre blog" to "good blog"/"decent online article" to "great blog"/"online article" and finally "articles in highly respected newspapers," etc.
We will never come up with a satisfactory definition. So perhaps each case should be judged on its own merits?