$2400 is cheap for a 3D printer, but it's still a lot more than the projected cost ($400) for the open-source version They expect to have their printer replicate itself sometime in 2008.
After working for one large, global company using development techniques that management called "Agile", I managed to reduce the concept to bumper-sticker level:
This question comes up twice a year here in Portland, OR, once in early spring and once in winter. Or at least it used to come up in winter before global warming took away our ice storms.
In early spring we usually get heavy rains, and some years (this year, for instance) we get really heavy rains and flooding. You have to figure if the cable company's TV signals get swamped by the water that underground power lines wouldn't fare well, if we had them.
And then in the winter we used to have at least one ice storm a year in which freezing rain and 100% humidity at 0 degrees Celsius would build up inch-thick casings of ice on the overhead powerlines, and a lot of them would fall down. The last time this happened in a big way there was a public outcry for putting the lines underground, until the power company (used to be an unholy-owned subsidiary of Enron) announced the capital expenditure for that would be $250 million (that's Million, with a capital 10^6).
Now that we only get an ice storm every four or five years, instead of every year, there's not so much call for burying the powerlines, but I'll bet that will change when the SUV goes extinct and we get our carbon budget back on track.
Return on Investment. The initial Apollo yielded very interresting scientific results, but not much else, it's main point was beating the soviets in the space race and putting the USA at the top. Future lunar missions will have to bring much more, and not only to scientists.
Oh, that's just unfair. You're forgetting all the technological spinoffs: Tang and Teflon-coated cookware!:-)
No, you don't need protons. What happens when a neutron hits a U-238 nucleus is that one of the neutrons is converted into a proton, and an electron is emitted, carrying off the extra negative charge. This leaves a Pu-239 nucleus. Sorry, I don't know how that maps to events on the quark level.
Although they don't occur naturally, they have similar properties to setae...
The first part of that sentence is absolutely false, since buckytubes are found in large quantities in ordinary soot, for instance from candles. The only reason we can't just burn candles to make our RAM chips is that there are a lot of different kinds of tube in the soot: single-walled tubes of different chirali ties, multi-walled (concentric) tubes with different numbers of tubes nested within, and various pieces of partially-closed carbon sheets. Buckytubes interesting properties are largely the result of having tubes of a single, known, type, so soot isn't terribly useful by itself.
The second part of the sentence is true, but not terribly important, since almost any nanostructure with long, thin parts would exhibit significant van der Waals force when brought in contact with a surface. That's how an atomic force microscope works.
I'd say the author is dependent on press releases for everything in the article, and so I wouldn't trust anything he had to say very much, especially the statement that we'll see commercial chips this year.
Speaker
Such tests are not new. In fact, General Relativity results in a slight correction to the exponent of the 1/r^2 rule. One of the first tests of GR was using it explain the procession of Mercury's orbit to within a relatively small error. And one of the things that some of these alternate theories are trying to explain is the anomalies in the trajectories of the Pioneer probes over long distances (10 billion kilometers) and times (is it really over 30 years now?). To my knowledge, distances and measurement accuracies over the solar system don't show anomalies in excess of measurement error.
Speaker
Let's see if we can come up with a list of those "gurus" lost to the industry by assimilation into the Bellevue Hole. Here are the ones I know or know of:
Gordon Bell - long-time industry visionary, one-time VP of R&D for DEC.
Jim Blinn - Remember those great CGI animations of the Voyager missions to the outer planets? That Jim Blinn
Bill Buxton
Luca Cardelli - Object-Oriented language theorist.
Ward Cunningham - Invented the Wiki. A pioneer of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design
Tony Hoare - Concurrent programming guru, among other things
Jim Kajiya - CGI researcher. Developed the first hair rendering algorithm, I think
Leslie Lamport - Creator of LaTeX, and distributed system expert
Butler Lampson - One of the developers of Ethernet. Worked on Alto and Dorado, ancestors of all desktop workstation-class computers
Turner Whited - Another well-known graphics guy
Alan Wurfs-Brock - one of the pioneers of programming-language-based virtual machine design
There are undoubtedly others I've forgotten or not heard about. Add your contribution. Maybe we can put up a monument somewhere.
Many of the comments on this article leave the distinct impression that the writers have not bothered to learn anything about the beast on their own, and are either reading between the lines of the original press release, or blindly accepting whatever they find in one or more response threads.
For those who care about getting their facts at least a little straight, there's a link in the "Related Links" slashbox that points at a number of IBM articles on various aspects of the hardware architecture of Cell: http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/ . With a little more digging on Google, you can find the following presentation slides shown by some Sony engineers: http://www.research.scea.com/research/html/CellGDC 05/index.html/ which includes a presentation on programming models for the Cell SPEs.
Slashdot Mirror
$2400 is cheap for a 3D printer, but it's still a lot more than the projected cost ($400) for the open-source version They expect to have their printer replicate itself sometime in 2008.
This question comes up twice a year here in Portland, OR, once in early spring and once in winter. Or at least it used to come up in winter before global warming took away our ice storms.
In early spring we usually get heavy rains, and some years (this year, for instance) we get really heavy rains and flooding. You have to figure if the cable company's TV signals get swamped by the water that underground power lines wouldn't fare well, if we had them.
And then in the winter we used to have at least one ice storm a year in which freezing rain and 100% humidity at 0 degrees Celsius would build up inch-thick casings of ice on the overhead powerlines, and a lot of them would fall down. The last time this happened in a big way there was a public outcry for putting the lines underground, until the power company (used to be an unholy-owned subsidiary of Enron) announced the capital expenditure for that would be $250 million (that's Million, with a capital 10^6).
Now that we only get an ice storm every four or five years, instead of every year, there's not so much call for burying the powerlines, but I'll bet that will change when the SUV goes extinct and we get our carbon budget back on track.
Speaker
Speaker "You scream and then you leap."
Oh, that's just unfair. You're forgetting all the technological spinoffs: Tang and Teflon-coated cookware! :-)
Speaker
OK, fine, but who's going to liberate US? (Pronoun intended)
SpeakerToManagers
No, you don't need protons. What happens when a neutron hits a U-238 nucleus is that one of the neutrons is converted into a proton, and an electron is emitted, carrying off the extra negative charge. This leaves a Pu-239 nucleus. Sorry, I don't know how that maps to events on the quark level.
SpeakerToManagers
Or, somewhat in advance of Valentine's day, Mary.
(Hint: what deceased director of the FBI was a closet cross-dresser?)
You know, given that the topic of thethread is privacy, this post and its parent ought to get a couple of extra points for irony.
SpeakerToManagers
Such tests are not new. In fact, General Relativity results in a slight correction to the exponent of the 1/r^2 rule. One of the first tests of GR was using it explain the procession of Mercury's orbit to within a relatively small error. And one of the things that some of these alternate theories are trying to explain is the anomalies in the trajectories of the Pioneer probes over long distances (10 billion kilometers) and times (is it really over 30 years now?). To my knowledge, distances and measurement accuracies over the solar system don't show anomalies in excess of measurement error. Speaker
There are undoubtedly others I've forgotten or not heard about. Add your contribution. Maybe we can put up a monument somewhere.
Speaker
If there is, I'll give you two fivers for him.
SpeakerToManagers
Many of the comments on this article leave the distinct impression that the writers have not bothered to learn anything about the beast on their own, and are either reading between the lines of the original press release, or blindly accepting whatever they find in one or more response threads. For those who care about getting their facts at least a little straight, there's a link in the "Related Links" slashbox that points at a number of IBM articles on various aspects of the hardware architecture of Cell: http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/ . With a little more digging on Google, you can find the following presentation slides shown by some Sony engineers: http://www.research.scea.com/research/html/CellGDC 05/index.html/ which includes a presentation on programming models for the Cell SPEs.