As the head of an exoskeleton development program at Stanford pointed out to me, falling over with this thing on would be akin to a normal soldier falling over with over 100 lbs of gear (which they do have to carry from time to time): it sucks no matter what. Your only recourse at that point is to detach yourself from the load, get up, and then get your buddies to help you back into it.
From what I have heard, these exoskeletons would not be used in a typical combat zone, like a beach landing or in urban warfare. The mechanized soldier's job would primarily be to get loads of supplies (food, ammo, batteries, weapons) to a remote location not easily accessible by vehicle or aircraft. It augments the soldier's current capabilities.
One result from the second Grand Challenge that lots of people harped about was the fact that Stanley, the winning (and hence, fastest) entry, completed the course with an average speed of only about 19 mph. "19 mph?" quoted some of the the nay-sayers, "we're supposed to get excited about that?"
One thing that TFA points out, which wasn't mentioned many other places, was that the course rules stated a maximum vehicle velocity of 25 mph. Ideally, then, the fastest possible average speed for any entrant would likewise have been 25 mph. Stanley, at times, wanted and could have gone faster than that, and held back due to the rule-imposed speed limit. In that context, 19 mph is actually quite good, considering the terrain would have forced it to slow down over bumps and turns.
I should rephrase it. It is true that the employees, their skills, and their knowledge are not property, not in the same way that a patent, manufacturing plant, or marketed product is. But, one has to admit that such a collection of skilled people constitutes something of great value. I guess "intellectual capital" would be a more accurate description.
Seagate may have a lot of reasons for wanting to absorb Maxtor. Certainly Seagate will ultimately profit from it, since Maxtor was a decently profitable company (recent slumps in its stockprice nothwithstanding). Eliminating a brand name it has to compete against in the increasingly difficult hard drive market is another.
I actually think that one of the larger reasons has to do with intellectual property. After being around for a bunch of years, Maxtor has a store of worthwhile patents on hard drive technology that Seagate could have a good use for. Being a competitor, it might have been difficult (read: $$$) or impossible for Seagate to license a Maxtor technology with Maxtor as an independent entity. There is also the intellectual property stored up in Maxtors employees: good talent can be hard to find, and if Seagate is expanding and developing more new technologies, it may have been a lot easier to just buy Maxtor (and gain its employees) rather than try expand its workforce at the slow pace of engineering and management recruiting/hiring.
Another thing to consider, for all those who might raise the hell-cry of "Activist Judge!", is the fact that the Judge is hardly the usual candidate for a so-called activist judge. In fact, the man is probably the last person who would ever be given that title by the neo-cons. From an article in the NY Times from several days ago:
Now this political hot potato has fallen into the lap of a judge who is highly attuned to politics. He is a lifelong Republican appointed to the federal bench in 2002 by President Bush.
He ran for Congress 10 years earlier (he lost by one percentage point) and later considered running for governor. His supporters include Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, and his mentor is Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania and homeland security secretary.
The article summary: "An unnamed Dartmouth student was visited by Homeland Security for requesting a copy of Mao Zedong's Little Red Book for a class project."
The first sentences of TFA: "A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called 'The Little Red Book.'"
And I am saying if variable pricing is inevitable, then I would hope it would end up being something like this - driven by market demand and such, rather than having the *AA dictate it from on high based on what their artist contracts say or what they want to push. Whether the format is direct (where demand increases the price point, as advocated in TFA) or inverted (where more popular songs actually decrease in price, as advocated by others in this thread), the devil is in the details, and I wouldn't sign off on one plan or the other without more information.
It could result in a very interesting form of entertainment and groupie behavior - tracking trends in an artist's price point. "Britney Spears was down 10 cents today amid rumors..." "Gainers lead decliners by a margin of 2 to 1 in heavy trading..." "Overall the iTunes Music Index topped 10000 for the first time ever today, fueling speculation of an impending downloaded music bubble..."
Perhaps it is secondary to the point of the article itself, but did anyone else find the quality of the writing, particularly the final page, to be atrocious? There were a number of spelling errors that would have been flagged by even the most basic of spell-checkers, and the style of the concluding paragraphs was glib to say the least.
Today, it is all about squeezing the current manufacturing advantage in order to conquer middle earth and lock down brave AMD into its current 90 nm shire - although it is blossoming and as green as it can possibly be....
Yet we don't believe that Intel is going to drop the elfish Pentium brand with the next generation micro architecture.
I love Tolkien as much as any geek, but I find this analogy to be way over the top.
Intel is going to focus on its reorientation towards a platform company, but it won't be able to change the simple fact that performance decides over victory of defeat - whether you simply refer to processing speed by parallelism or clock speed, or you go for the increasingly important performance per Watt benchmark. One thing is for sure, though: The upcoming years will be all but boring.
What does "performance decides over victory of defeat" mean? And I especially love the final sentence - it is like something from the old Batman TV series. "Will our heros meet a fiery doom at the hands of the Riddler? Can Batman overcome once again and save Gotham? Tune in next week for another exciting episode!" [cue the music and credits].
It is interesting that, of all that TFA talks about, the poster decided to spin it towards the supposed Google caste system, which occupies that final 1/5 of the article. The other 80% of the article focuses more on how the hugimongousness of Google has altered the way of doing business in Silicon Valley: the venture capitalists, the MBAs who think they know how to capitalize on a good idea when they see one, the risk-taking technologists and start-ups, the ambitious entrepeneur who just wants to make a shitload of money selling an idea to someone larger, and the fact that Google has yet to shell out serious money to buy out a majoy company like AOL, but seem willing to acquire the long-odds small companies that have sprouted up in their wake. The focus of TFA is how Google's bucking the trend in the world of mergers and acquisition and venture capital, which has in turn ruffled the feathers of more entrenched high-tech business interests.
From RTFA, I am wondering if this new discovery will actually be of much use to anyone. The apparatus involves cooling down to a few millikelvin. I am guessing that this is so that the thermal noise in the circuit is greatly reduced, and also because the superconducting threshold of whatever their Johnson capacitor is made from might in fact be that cold. Pure copper becomes a superconductor, but not until several degrees Kelvin, I believe.
In any event, cooling down to such temperatures implies a couple of things: lots and lots of very expensive equipment to cool down a tiny tiny volume of space. Even the first transistors didn't require such great lengths.
The article also makes reference to the capacitance of the Johnson capacitor changing signs depending on the state of the qubit, which is part of how the whole thing works. Does this mean that someone has discovered negative capacitance? Whoa! What would that mean?
I think that the plan is to place the satellites at the two lagrangian points that lie along Earth's orbit, which are +/- 60 degrees with respect to Earth. With 120 degrees of angular separation between them, they'll be able to resolve stuff with great depth perception, in close to real time (minus the transmission delays, computer time, etc.). In order for the earth to travel that same 120 degree arc along its orbit would take roughly four months, a much longer time scale than most interesting (or dangerous) solar phenomena.
It is true that the langrange points are spaced pretty far apart, both in terms of angular and distance separation. On the other hand, the ability to discern things in 3D is a function of the baseline distance. For humans, it's 10-20 cm, and we can judge distance out to a couple dozen meters at best. I believe, based on what I've heard here and in the articles, that they'll be stationed at L4 and L5, which are +/- 60 degrees along earth's orbit, or at 120 degree angular separation when they are looking at the sun. If one were to compare that with a human's eyes, that would be roughly equivalent to staring a little in front of your nose. The human brain can construct a lot of depth perception at that range, even if it gives you a headache pretty quick.
Along with the headache thing - I don't think that the purpose of this mission is to create nifty stereoscopic pictures of the sun for you and I to look at, like with red/blue glasses. Instead, they'll plug the data into some computers and run some vision algorithms on them to come up with a 3D-spatial map of what's out there, which we could then pan/tilt/zoom and fly through to get a better sense of what's going on. With a baseline distance of something like 100 million kilometers, you would be able to construct a very clear 3D map of everything between the Earth and the Sun, down to whatever the resolution of the cameras are.
With a camera at L3, which is opposite the sun from the Earth, we would have three satellites spaced 120 degrees apart, almost the same distance from the sun, and able to give us a complete 360 degrees of 3D image. Then we just have to wait for holographic projectors to catch up!
The article discusses that the goal is to improve the efficiency of solar cells to 50%. As I mention earlier in this thread, silicon-based semiconductor photovoltaics top out at a theoretical efficiency of about 25-26%. Other semiconductor technologies top out somewhere around 35%. These are the two technologies people think about when they imagine solar cells. I think the outlook for discovering and commercializing a semiconductor-based solar cell that's 50% efficient in the next 50 months to be very poor. I won't get into the physics, but the theoretical limitations have to do with the fact that semiconductor photovoltaics make inefficient use of the solar spectrum: a red photon will produce as much electrical energy as a blue photon, even though the blue photon is more energetic.
But solar power is not limited merely to what one can do with photovoltaics. When people talk about the many terawatts of solar power that falls on the surface of the earth, most of that solar goes into two things: photochemistry (like in plants) or to heating the earth's surface. Plants make very efficient use of the solar power that falls on them, and a black, nonreflective object will convert the incident solar power to heat (or reradiated infrared light) with extremely high efficiency. If we could focus efforts to developing technologies that capture sunlight first into chemistry or raw heat and converting that to electricity, rather than the direct conversion to electricity that photovoltaics do, we may have a better chance of reaching the 50% goal.
For instance, there was (is?) a solar power project that in the California desert that was a solar-thermal generator. Hundreds of mirrors focused sunlight onto a tower, much like the Archimedes death ray (which has received some press in/. lately). Instead of trying to burn a ship, the focused sunlight heated sodium to about 1200 Celcius, which liquified it. That sodium was passed through a heat exchanger to boil water, which made steam, which turned a turbine, in a similar closed-cycle technology to a nuclear plant.
I'll admit this isn't much use in the battlefield, which is what DARPA is aiming for, but it is not out of the question to consider a smaller solar thermal unit for an encampment, which used a different medium than sodium.
I'm not sure exactly what their motivation is for doing so, but the overwhelming majority of commodity solar cells (in terms of volume, not necessarily capacity) are manufactured by big oil companies such as Shell and BP. One could think of it as a slightly profitable PR stunt, along the lines of:
"We're not evil oil companies, we make solar cells, too!"
Or it could be a poorly executed attempt at product diversification, like:
"Oil ain't going to be around forever, ya know, that's why we are making big investments in solar. Never mind the fact that it represents less than 1% of our business. Even though the we'll be making gozillions of dollars on oil until the day all our board of directors are dead and cold, we want to make sure that the next generation will have alternatives, and our company a future.
Or, it could be like the parent mentions - a way to quash real innovation and development in solar:
"These researchers might really be on to something, something that will make solar a viable competitor if it ever gets out into the open. Better just buy them out and keep it under wraps.
As far as TFA goes, I doubt that they'll have much success. The best solar cells out there, triple junction GaAs (with some other elements thrown in, like P and In) cells, can do about 30% efficiency, but are hidiously expensive and useful only for high-end applications like satellites. The upper end of silicon-based solar cells, which can take advantage of the fact that the semiconductor industry lives and breathes silicon technology and supply, are hovering just over 20%. But, the maximum theoretical efficiencies of these two technologies are about 35% and 25%, respectively, give or take a few percentage points.
Bottom line, if you want to make 50% efficient solar cells, you are going to have your work cut out for you. Traditional semiconductors won't cut it, unless you want to try and find some more exotic chemistries, or try and merge several chemistries together to make better use of the solar spectrum, both of which would be more expensive than the state of the art. One could try and discover something new, or further develop something currently below the radar, but being able to perfect it and manufacture it in volume as a commercial demonstration with 50 months will be very difficult, possibly impossible.
It is possible that the standard audio/mic jack in most cellphones could be phased out in favor of wireless (Bluetooth, or something else) headphones, but I don't think it very likely in the foreseeable future. One only finds bluetooth capabilities in higher-end phones, and the bluetooth headsets are likewise a fairly pricey item. While I'm sure that the cost of that sort of thing will go down in the future, I don't think that all that added technology (and cost!) will be able to supplant a $0.02 audio jack - the market simply wouldn't support it. Remember that a lot of people get their phones free (or close to it, $20) with their service plans, and none of those cheaper models have bluetooth in them.
The settings you have on the N90 are nothing less than what you will find on most prosumer digital cameras today. You can adjust the white-balance, contrast, color saturation, color effects and what have you. In our tests, we found that for the White Balance mode, the automatic worked best and we recommend that you don't play around much with this setting, as we feel the sensor adjusts a lot better if you simply set it to auto.
All those kinds of camera settings are things that professional (or at least, experienced amateurs) use to adjust the photo quality when they are taking stills, in a studio, and have the time to actually adjust the settings and do some experimenting. When using a cellphone camera, how much time are you going to spend tinkering with these various settings before taking a candid shot in a dark nightclub of you and some hot chick that you'll never have a chance of seeing again? And would she stick around long enough for you to do so?
My point here is that the presence of these features, while quite a feat considering the size of the phone compared to a pro camera, is just plain superfluous, because no one who uses this phone's camera is going to spend the time messing around with them on the fly.
The biggest problem we've had with this phone is that as much as it touts itself as a multimedia phone, it doesn't have the regular 2.5/3.5 headphone jack input, which means that you are left with the bundled headphone package. Although it's decent, it's not suitable for even the sensible aficionados let alone the audiophiles. The least you would expect after spending so much on a phone is a decent pair of earphones, but apparently our thinking is too wishful. There are no equalizer settings...
I admit that not having the standard headphone jack is just plain stupid design (unless Nokia plans on introducing a high end headset sometime, $$$ Profit), but really: since when has any audiophile given any cellphone the time of day. And why would they want to? Since when is pristine audio playback quality a selling point? The lack of equalizer settings is, I guess, a moot point, if the playback quality makes it unlikely you'd hear much difference. Once again; since when has having an equalizer been a selling point in a cellphone? My own cellphone is a midrange model (Motorola V220), but are these two items something that's standard with high-end cellphones? Why not just buy an iPod or other dedicated MP3 player, whose playback quality can be assured?
It's a work in progress, undoubtedly. I think Steve Jobs is really psyched for Apple to do this, but isn't yet satisfied with what they've come up with. FrontRow, which they just put out, it an excellent step in the right direction: it's downright beautiful, with a really slick UI.
And, most importantly, they designed the remote right! Compare Apple's to Microsoft's.
I seem to recall another problem that Apple had with IBM, which spurred the switch to Intel, was the speed roadmap on the G5 processors. Not only were the projections on power consumption not coming down, but the horizon for faster and faster clockspeeds did not look good. It has taken a long time for the POWER line, expressed in Apple hardware, to move from 1 GHz to 2 GHz, and it seems to be have been stalled at just below 3 GHz for a while now.
I know that clockspeed is hardly the best measure of a CPU's capabilities, but within the same line of chips it is a decent measure to show how much further you can push the architecture, and how well you are smoothing the kinks in your fab lines. Apple have been able to press on with more powerful computers by going to dual processor, and now dual core dual processor machines. Those machines are real powerhouses though, both in terms of number crunching and electrical demand.
An interesting question: one which I don't know the answer to offhand. For what it's worth, the latest issue of IEEE's Spectrum magazine has a good article on the reallocation and what the end of analog TV will mean.
In the end, I doubt that municipalities will be able to get ahold of much of the allocated spectrum for this kind of use. They will get a large slice of it for their own use, but will mostly be given over to emergency bands - like 911. On the open market, I doubt that municipalities will be able to compete with the bids of larger telcos for the commercially-available pieces of the spectrum.
[I won't even get into the semantic debate that has raged in this thread already]
I was rather dissappointed by the lack of detailed images, and details, that resulted from the taking apart of the iPod. The reviewer described his awe at how nicely it all fit together, and the innovation that went into getting all that technology into such a small package. But, aside from a listing of the major ICs, and a couple of unmarked images showing snippets of PCB, it was really difficult to get a sense of how much and how well the circuitry is crammed in there.
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As the head of an exoskeleton development program at Stanford pointed out to me, falling over with this thing on would be akin to a normal soldier falling over with over 100 lbs of gear (which they do have to carry from time to time): it sucks no matter what. Your only recourse at that point is to detach yourself from the load, get up, and then get your buddies to help you back into it.
From what I have heard, these exoskeletons would not be used in a typical combat zone, like a beach landing or in urban warfare. The mechanized soldier's job would primarily be to get loads of supplies (food, ammo, batteries, weapons) to a remote location not easily accessible by vehicle or aircraft. It augments the soldier's current capabilities.
One result from the second Grand Challenge that lots of people harped about was the fact that Stanley, the winning (and hence, fastest) entry, completed the course with an average speed of only about 19 mph. "19 mph?" quoted some of the the nay-sayers, "we're supposed to get excited about that?"
One thing that TFA points out, which wasn't mentioned many other places, was that the course rules stated a maximum vehicle velocity of 25 mph. Ideally, then, the fastest possible average speed for any entrant would likewise have been 25 mph. Stanley, at times, wanted and could have gone faster than that, and held back due to the rule-imposed speed limit. In that context, 19 mph is actually quite good, considering the terrain would have forced it to slow down over bumps and turns.
I for one would like to thank all of the PSU enthusiasts for increasing the entropy of the universe, one KW-hr at a time...
I should rephrase it. It is true that the employees, their skills, and their knowledge are not property, not in the same way that a patent, manufacturing plant, or marketed product is. But, one has to admit that such a collection of skilled people constitutes something of great value. I guess "intellectual capital" would be a more accurate description.
Seagate may have a lot of reasons for wanting to absorb Maxtor. Certainly Seagate will ultimately profit from it, since Maxtor was a decently profitable company (recent slumps in its stockprice nothwithstanding). Eliminating a brand name it has to compete against in the increasingly difficult hard drive market is another.
I actually think that one of the larger reasons has to do with intellectual property. After being around for a bunch of years, Maxtor has a store of worthwhile patents on hard drive technology that Seagate could have a good use for. Being a competitor, it might have been difficult (read: $$$) or impossible for Seagate to license a Maxtor technology with Maxtor as an independent entity. There is also the intellectual property stored up in Maxtors employees: good talent can be hard to find, and if Seagate is expanding and developing more new technologies, it may have been a lot easier to just buy Maxtor (and gain its employees) rather than try expand its workforce at the slow pace of engineering and management recruiting/hiring.
Another thing to consider, for all those who might raise the hell-cry of "Activist Judge!", is the fact that the Judge is hardly the usual candidate for a so-called activist judge. In fact, the man is probably the last person who would ever be given that title by the neo-cons. From an article in the NY Times from several days ago:
Now this political hot potato has fallen into the lap of a judge who is highly attuned to politics. He is a lifelong Republican appointed to the federal bench in 2002 by President Bush.
He ran for Congress 10 years earlier (he lost by one percentage point) and later considered running for governor. His supporters include Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, and his mentor is Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania and homeland security secretary.
Bart Simpson: Aw, they were just about to show some close-ups of the rod!
The article summary: "An unnamed Dartmouth student was visited by Homeland Security for requesting a copy of Mao Zedong's Little Red Book for a class project."
The first sentences of TFA: "A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called 'The Little Red Book.'"
Dartmouth != UMass Dartmouth.
The student attends the University of Massachusettes at Dartmouth, which goes by the shorter name "UMass Dartmouth." This is not to be confused with Dartmouth College, which, considering that it predates the founding of the United States, is the proper institution to be called by that one-word name.
let the mod-down begin...
And I am saying if variable pricing is inevitable, then I would hope it would end up being something like this - driven by market demand and such, rather than having the *AA dictate it from on high based on what their artist contracts say or what they want to push. Whether the format is direct (where demand increases the price point, as advocated in TFA) or inverted (where more popular songs actually decrease in price, as advocated by others in this thread), the devil is in the details, and I wouldn't sign off on one plan or the other without more information.
It could result in a very interesting form of entertainment and groupie behavior - tracking trends in an artist's price point. "Britney Spears was down 10 cents today amid rumors..." "Gainers lead decliners by a margin of 2 to 1 in heavy trading..." "Overall the iTunes Music Index topped 10000 for the first time ever today, fueling speculation of an impending downloaded music bubble..."
cool.
Perhaps it is secondary to the point of the article itself, but did anyone else find the quality of the writing, particularly the final page, to be atrocious? There were a number of spelling errors that would have been flagged by even the most basic of spell-checkers, and the style of the concluding paragraphs was glib to say the least.
Today, it is all about squeezing the current manufacturing advantage in order to conquer middle earth and lock down brave AMD into its current 90 nm shire - although it is blossoming and as green as it can possibly be....
Yet we don't believe that Intel is going to drop the elfish Pentium brand with the next generation micro architecture.
I love Tolkien as much as any geek, but I find this analogy to be way over the top.
Intel is going to focus on its reorientation towards a platform company, but it won't be able to change the simple fact that performance decides over victory of defeat - whether you simply refer to processing speed by parallelism or clock speed, or you go for the increasingly important performance per Watt benchmark. One thing is for sure, though: The upcoming years will be all but boring.
What does "performance decides over victory of defeat" mean? And I especially love the final sentence - it is like something from the old Batman TV series. "Will our heros meet a fiery doom at the hands of the Riddler? Can Batman overcome once again and save Gotham? Tune in next week for another exciting episode!" [cue the music and credits].
This rant is now over.
It is interesting that, of all that TFA talks about, the poster decided to spin it towards the supposed Google caste system, which occupies that final 1/5 of the article. The other 80% of the article focuses more on how the hugimongousness of Google has altered the way of doing business in Silicon Valley: the venture capitalists, the MBAs who think they know how to capitalize on a good idea when they see one, the risk-taking technologists and start-ups, the ambitious entrepeneur who just wants to make a shitload of money selling an idea to someone larger, and the fact that Google has yet to shell out serious money to buy out a majoy company like AOL, but seem willing to acquire the long-odds small companies that have sprouted up in their wake. The focus of TFA is how Google's bucking the trend in the world of mergers and acquisition and venture capital, which has in turn ruffled the feathers of more entrenched high-tech business interests.
From RTFA, I am wondering if this new discovery will actually be of much use to anyone. The apparatus involves cooling down to a few millikelvin. I am guessing that this is so that the thermal noise in the circuit is greatly reduced, and also because the superconducting threshold of whatever their Johnson capacitor is made from might in fact be that cold. Pure copper becomes a superconductor, but not until several degrees Kelvin, I believe.
In any event, cooling down to such temperatures implies a couple of things: lots and lots of very expensive equipment to cool down a tiny tiny volume of space. Even the first transistors didn't require such great lengths.
The article also makes reference to the capacitance of the Johnson capacitor changing signs depending on the state of the qubit, which is part of how the whole thing works. Does this mean that someone has discovered negative capacitance? Whoa! What would that mean?
Billions and billions of devices...
Ah, if only Carl Sagan were alive to hear that comment!
I think that the plan is to place the satellites at the two lagrangian points that lie along Earth's orbit, which are +/- 60 degrees with respect to Earth. With 120 degrees of angular separation between them, they'll be able to resolve stuff with great depth perception, in close to real time (minus the transmission delays, computer time, etc.). In order for the earth to travel that same 120 degree arc along its orbit would take roughly four months, a much longer time scale than most interesting (or dangerous) solar phenomena.
It is true that the langrange points are spaced pretty far apart, both in terms of angular and distance separation. On the other hand, the ability to discern things in 3D is a function of the baseline distance. For humans, it's 10-20 cm, and we can judge distance out to a couple dozen meters at best. I believe, based on what I've heard here and in the articles, that they'll be stationed at L4 and L5, which are +/- 60 degrees along earth's orbit, or at 120 degree angular separation when they are looking at the sun. If one were to compare that with a human's eyes, that would be roughly equivalent to staring a little in front of your nose. The human brain can construct a lot of depth perception at that range, even if it gives you a headache pretty quick.
Along with the headache thing - I don't think that the purpose of this mission is to create nifty stereoscopic pictures of the sun for you and I to look at, like with red/blue glasses. Instead, they'll plug the data into some computers and run some vision algorithms on them to come up with a 3D-spatial map of what's out there, which we could then pan/tilt/zoom and fly through to get a better sense of what's going on. With a baseline distance of something like 100 million kilometers, you would be able to construct a very clear 3D map of everything between the Earth and the Sun, down to whatever the resolution of the cameras are.
With a camera at L3, which is opposite the sun from the Earth, we would have three satellites spaced 120 degrees apart, almost the same distance from the sun, and able to give us a complete 360 degrees of 3D image. Then we just have to wait for holographic projectors to catch up!
The article discusses that the goal is to improve the efficiency of solar cells to 50%. As I mention earlier in this thread, silicon-based semiconductor photovoltaics top out at a theoretical efficiency of about 25-26%. Other semiconductor technologies top out somewhere around 35%. These are the two technologies people think about when they imagine solar cells. I think the outlook for discovering and commercializing a semiconductor-based solar cell that's 50% efficient in the next 50 months to be very poor. I won't get into the physics, but the theoretical limitations have to do with the fact that semiconductor photovoltaics make inefficient use of the solar spectrum: a red photon will produce as much electrical energy as a blue photon, even though the blue photon is more energetic.
/. lately). Instead of trying to burn a ship, the focused sunlight heated sodium to about 1200 Celcius, which liquified it. That sodium was passed through a heat exchanger to boil water, which made steam, which turned a turbine, in a similar closed-cycle technology to a nuclear plant.
But solar power is not limited merely to what one can do with photovoltaics. When people talk about the many terawatts of solar power that falls on the surface of the earth, most of that solar goes into two things: photochemistry (like in plants) or to heating the earth's surface. Plants make very efficient use of the solar power that falls on them, and a black, nonreflective object will convert the incident solar power to heat (or reradiated infrared light) with extremely high efficiency. If we could focus efforts to developing technologies that capture sunlight first into chemistry or raw heat and converting that to electricity, rather than the direct conversion to electricity that photovoltaics do, we may have a better chance of reaching the 50% goal.
For instance, there was (is?) a solar power project that in the California desert that was a solar-thermal generator. Hundreds of mirrors focused sunlight onto a tower, much like the Archimedes death ray (which has received some press in
I'll admit this isn't much use in the battlefield, which is what DARPA is aiming for, but it is not out of the question to consider a smaller solar thermal unit for an encampment, which used a different medium than sodium.
I'm not sure exactly what their motivation is for doing so, but the overwhelming majority of commodity solar cells (in terms of volume, not necessarily capacity) are manufactured by big oil companies such as Shell and BP. One could think of it as a slightly profitable PR stunt, along the lines of:
"We're not evil oil companies, we make solar cells, too!"
Or it could be a poorly executed attempt at product diversification, like:
"Oil ain't going to be around forever, ya know, that's why we are making big investments in solar. Never mind the fact that it represents less than 1% of our business. Even though the we'll be making gozillions of dollars on oil until the day all our board of directors are dead and cold, we want to make sure that the next generation will have alternatives, and our company a future.
Or, it could be like the parent mentions - a way to quash real innovation and development in solar:
"These researchers might really be on to something, something that will make solar a viable competitor if it ever gets out into the open. Better just buy them out and keep it under wraps.
As far as TFA goes, I doubt that they'll have much success. The best solar cells out there, triple junction GaAs (with some other elements thrown in, like P and In) cells, can do about 30% efficiency, but are hidiously expensive and useful only for high-end applications like satellites. The upper end of silicon-based solar cells, which can take advantage of the fact that the semiconductor industry lives and breathes silicon technology and supply, are hovering just over 20%. But, the maximum theoretical efficiencies of these two technologies are about 35% and 25%, respectively, give or take a few percentage points.
Bottom line, if you want to make 50% efficient solar cells, you are going to have your work cut out for you. Traditional semiconductors won't cut it, unless you want to try and find some more exotic chemistries, or try and merge several chemistries together to make better use of the solar spectrum, both of which would be more expensive than the state of the art. One could try and discover something new, or further develop something currently below the radar, but being able to perfect it and manufacture it in volume as a commercial demonstration with 50 months will be very difficult, possibly impossible.
It is possible that the standard audio/mic jack in most cellphones could be phased out in favor of wireless (Bluetooth, or something else) headphones, but I don't think it very likely in the foreseeable future. One only finds bluetooth capabilities in higher-end phones, and the bluetooth headsets are likewise a fairly pricey item. While I'm sure that the cost of that sort of thing will go down in the future, I don't think that all that added technology (and cost!) will be able to supplant a $0.02 audio jack - the market simply wouldn't support it. Remember that a lot of people get their phones free (or close to it, $20) with their service plans, and none of those cheaper models have bluetooth in them.
The settings you have on the N90 are nothing less than what you will find on most prosumer digital cameras today. You can adjust the white-balance, contrast, color saturation, color effects and what have you. In our tests, we found that for the White Balance mode, the automatic worked best and we recommend that you don't play around much with this setting, as we feel the sensor adjusts a lot better if you simply set it to auto.
All those kinds of camera settings are things that professional (or at least, experienced amateurs) use to adjust the photo quality when they are taking stills, in a studio, and have the time to actually adjust the settings and do some experimenting. When using a cellphone camera, how much time are you going to spend tinkering with these various settings before taking a candid shot in a dark nightclub of you and some hot chick that you'll never have a chance of seeing again? And would she stick around long enough for you to do so?
My point here is that the presence of these features, while quite a feat considering the size of the phone compared to a pro camera, is just plain superfluous, because no one who uses this phone's camera is going to spend the time messing around with them on the fly.
The biggest problem we've had with this phone is that as much as it touts itself as a multimedia phone, it doesn't have the regular 2.5/3.5 headphone jack input, which means that you are left with the bundled headphone package. Although it's decent, it's not suitable for even the sensible aficionados let alone the audiophiles. The least you would expect after spending so much on a phone is a decent pair of earphones, but apparently our thinking is too wishful. There are no equalizer settings...
I admit that not having the standard headphone jack is just plain stupid design (unless Nokia plans on introducing a high end headset sometime, $$$ Profit), but really: since when has any audiophile given any cellphone the time of day. And why would they want to? Since when is pristine audio playback quality a selling point? The lack of equalizer settings is, I guess, a moot point, if the playback quality makes it unlikely you'd hear much difference. Once again; since when has having an equalizer been a selling point in a cellphone? My own cellphone is a midrange model (Motorola V220), but are these two items something that's standard with high-end cellphones? Why not just buy an iPod or other dedicated MP3 player, whose playback quality can be assured?
I just wish Apple would produce a media center
It's a work in progress, undoubtedly. I think Steve Jobs is really psyched for Apple to do this, but isn't yet satisfied with what they've come up with. FrontRow, which they just put out, it an excellent step in the right direction: it's downright beautiful, with a really slick UI.
And, most importantly, they designed the remote right! Compare Apple's to Microsoft's.
I seem to recall another problem that Apple had with IBM, which spurred the switch to Intel, was the speed roadmap on the G5 processors. Not only were the projections on power consumption not coming down, but the horizon for faster and faster clockspeeds did not look good. It has taken a long time for the POWER line, expressed in Apple hardware, to move from 1 GHz to 2 GHz, and it seems to be have been stalled at just below 3 GHz for a while now.
I know that clockspeed is hardly the best measure of a CPU's capabilities, but within the same line of chips it is a decent measure to show how much further you can push the architecture, and how well you are smoothing the kinks in your fab lines. Apple have been able to press on with more powerful computers by going to dual processor, and now dual core dual processor machines. Those machines are real powerhouses though, both in terms of number crunching and electrical demand.
An interesting question: one which I don't know the answer to offhand. For what it's worth, the latest issue of IEEE's Spectrum magazine has a good article on the reallocation and what the end of analog TV will mean.
In the end, I doubt that municipalities will be able to get ahold of much of the allocated spectrum for this kind of use. They will get a large slice of it for their own use, but will mostly be given over to emergency bands - like 911. On the open market, I doubt that municipalities will be able to compete with the bids of larger telcos for the commercially-available pieces of the spectrum.
Now, though, we can afford both the Mercedes and the F-350 flatbed.
I just hope that we don't end up with some sort of kludge for each of these: more like a Corvair and Scion xB!
[I won't even get into the semantic debate that has raged in this thread already]
I was rather dissappointed by the lack of detailed images, and details, that resulted from the taking apart of the iPod. The reviewer described his awe at how nicely it all fit together, and the innovation that went into getting all that technology into such a small package. But, aside from a listing of the major ICs, and a couple of unmarked images showing snippets of PCB, it was really difficult to get a sense of how much and how well the circuitry is crammed in there.