... Germany has a good approach... paired with apprenticeships where they are mentored with real hands on work (note: there is a difference between apprenticeship and "intern" or "coop" like we have in the USA where a college student sits in front of a computer all day with no hands on work). Also, if you want to get an engineering PhD you have the option of being paired with a private company and basing your thesis on real work you do at a real job. USA academics look down upon private sector work and consider it work done by people who couldn't cut it in academia,...
I'm not sure where you went to school in America, but that hasn't been my experience at all. I held two internships as an undergrad, and both were very hands-on and I worked on real problems. And yes for the second one I did spend most of my time on a computer (or at a whiteboard, reading references, or working out algorithms on paper)... but how is that not hands-on? Real work in many fields takes place mainly on computers. The analysis we were doing was based on well-known phenomenon that only needed to be simulated. Eventually I moved on to board layout, which of course it both very hands on and completely computer based.
Do you really expect universities to be the same as industry? If they were, we would only need one or the other. Universities tend to look at problems with more open questions, or investigate things with higher risk of not working out. That's because they aren't trying to turn a profit, they are trying to find things out. They figure out many fundamental things, so that then industry can take that information and turn it into commercial processes and products.
A classic example is Gallium-Nitride semiconductor devices. It's a very hot field in industry right now, it will be very promising for RF power electronics among other applications, it is certainly capable of knocking GaAs from its pedestal and it will give RFCMOS more competition at the low end where it has been gaining share. But ~15 years ago no company would have touched it... GaN was considered very risky and not likely to work very well. It was only after NSF and the DOD agencies have pumped millions of dollars into universities, and more recently into industry (e.g. Triquint), to figure out the problems in growing it and making devices that industry began to catch on and see what they were missing.
Most engineering doctoral projects that I'm familiar with are funded by an industry partnership, a DoD agency, or the NSF, which you can roughly rank in order of technology readiness level expected by the customer at the conclusion of the grant, i.e. how close it is to being put into a product. Not all of them will end up being practical, but you can't always know that before you start, that's the point in doing it. I know of at least two fellow students who are basing their thesis research entirely on projects they are working on in industry. A minority to be sure, but that it simply because it can be hard to find companies interested in doing research relevant to your exact field. The opportunity for industry work is there for those with enough motivation.
Just my 2 cents, maybe things don't work as well in other regions of the US.
If you say things like that you need to be careful of your audience. This applies whether or not you are joking. If she had said it out loud and the wrong person overhead, the same thing would have happened. Posting it on Facebook just means that all 300 of her "friends" can "overhear" her - and maybe more depending on her privacy settings.
Re:Are there scanners that accept a stack of sheet
on
The DIY Book Scanner
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· Score: 1
$1000? I averaged under $500 per year on textbooks in college (graduated 1.5 years ago). It will vary based on the school you attend, the books your professors assign, and what effort you put into finding used copies or buying old editions and getting updated problem sets from the library copies or from classmates. Of course it also depends on the major you're in, I'm an engineer and I think the price gouging isn't quite as severe in this field.
But $1000 per semester... geez... that's just not okay.
Your fear is an overreaction, I see no reason for a scanner company to file a lawsuit here. Even if they did, it would be for patent infringement, not copyright infringement.
First, this guy isn't selling his scanner, he just built one for himself. So there's no reason for a lawsuit to be filed.
Second, I doubt that he he infringes on any patent help by a company that manufactures a book scanner. The trickiest thing about these scanners is the page turning and the software for OCR and correction for page curvature. This guy implements neither.
Third, specialist companies aren't in the habit of suing independent hackers. Even if he was selling the scanner, he would have to charge a hell of a lot more than $300 for it because of the time spent developing and building it, and for things like marketing, quality control, support, and overhead. It's a fact ignored by many DIY websites touting a "homemade widget for less than the greedy corporations are charging". And even then, this scanner would not compare with the $20,000 model because of lack of automatic page turning if nothing else.
Now maybe you're thinking of textbook companies suing the guy, not the manufacturer of the $20,000 book scanner. That's slightly more plausible. Most books have the boilerplate "You cannot store an electronic copy of this book" notice, but there is a good case for fair use. But even so it would be simple copyright infringement, not circumvention of copy protection mechanisms, which is what the DMCA is mainly about.
Gallium Arsenide is the material the LED chip is made of, and it is most definitely in your home and not the fabrication plant. Granted, it's usually in a plastic envelope, but as GP said it can easily leech into water when it is thrown out.
Well then I guess that unlike me you will be screwed whenever your internet goes down;-)
To start you should separate local network and internet connectivity, in the companies I've worked at you can access many resources including instant messaging and some documentation over an intranet.
When I'm at work (RF circuit engineer) the big thing that I use the internet for is searching vendors like Digikey and Mouser for parts, and downloading datasheets. If the internet goes down, then I have the gigantic paper catalogs they always send me (currently serving as monitor stands), and a pretty good collection of datasheets to refer to. Much of the software that I use requires the company's local network to function in order to connect to the license server. And I need the local network working to email internal colleagues, but I can pick up the phone or walk to their desk if necessary.
So for me the internet going down would be a bearable inconvenience, but the local network in our company going down would be pretty bad.
Fair catch. But win this one in court and then they just point out that it says nothing about guaranteed rates. Used more then 1Gb? 1Kbyte/sec maximum it is for you then.
But from TFS, from info in the second article:
Verizon will charge $50 for each additional gigabyte over the 5Gb limit on the unlimited data plan.
They are clearly *not* just going to throttle you when you have used enough, they will keep charging you more at 5 cents/MB. So in a way it is "unlimited", but only in the sense that your bill for that month is also unlimited...
The two solutions have completely different goals.
Any Sonos node is controllable by a touchscreen wireless remote (or your Iphone!) which will show you your music library and playlists and such, and let you select what to play in any room with a Sonos receiver. Your music is shared over ethernet, if you have wiring to every node location, or wireless if you plug the wireless base station ("Zone Bridge") into your network somewhere. It's a luxury system which works wonderfully and is simple to setup and use. A wireless setup bundle with speakers will run you $1150....
Running wires to every room in the house is much cheaper, but it means that if you want to start music playing you need to walk back to whatever room your computer is and change it. It's not as easy to set up and it's not easy to use. Plus you'll still need a splitter and receivers at every speaker set, unless you only plan on running one set up speakers at once.
This doesn't seem like a bad idea, because these labels may end up being cheaper and they can't fall off or be switched. So it helps out large processors and grocery stores.
However, for uses like citrus twists in beverages, citrus wedges or wheels in drinks, and citrus zest for flavoring I don't want anything marring the skin of my fruit. Sure I could work around the labels, but I don't necessarily want to, it means I can use less of the fruit.
The thing about math is that it isn't by itself a very practical field. Its true value, its great value, is in its support of other technical fields. Engineering and the physical sciences depend critically on math to solve problems. Heck, a degree in computer science (real computer science, many universities these days are more of a software degree) is practically a math degree with an emphasis in computer applications.
The ones who really understand the math behind the systems that they work on are often the ones with the best intuition about how a system will work, and they tend to have a lot of people working underneath them to take theory and ides into reality and products. But as fields mature the amount of math the average person in that field uses will decrease, and while there is some fantastic math providing the foundation of computer science, I don't think you need it all that often.
While I am all for the next paradigm, and even support efforts to work printable and 3D electronics, I have serious doubts that it would every be capable of surpassing planar silicon chips for sheer power and scalability in digital electronics.
The density is going to be incredibly hard to scale, even more so if people will be printing these on home fab systems. It's just not easy to print really small things with something resembling an ink-jet device. Whereas with silicon chips they have to worry about the wavelength of the UVlight used in photoresist exposure, it's a very different scale.
3D chips have also been worked on for a long time... the big drawback is heat extraction. You can include thermal vias and the like, but then your density decreases even more, and that's just within the device, you still need to extract it to the outside environment. Printable electronics are also going to suffer from speed drawbacks as the resistivity of interconnects and contacts will be greater, process control will be worse so you cannot run at as large a fraction of maximum spec. It also creates yet more heat (I^2R). You can already mix optical and electronics devices in a variety of material systems. Putting them in printable systems will be problematic as I'm not aware of good printable optical waveguide processes. I'm not sure if you mean "flexible" as "can be bent", but if you do then keep in mind that making something flexible means a lot fewer layers if you want it to be reliable, mitigating advantages of the 3D building. Although flexible circuits meant to be bent once and installed conformally to a rigid object can work with somewhat more layers if appropriate design rules are followed, but there are always limits.
I think the main advantage of these lays in areas besides competing with large-scale silicon digital circuits. I think that it could be well suited for creating for simple circuits that don't do much, but need to be cheap and small. Heck, integrated resistors and capacitors are already used by various circuit board fabricators. It's still rather expensive, but it has promise for decreasing the size of many devices and eventually becoming cheaper to manufacture.
"Packages become smaller so shipping new phones costs less energy. Shops can store more phones in the same space, so the chance that the phone you want is out of stock will become smaller..."
The boxes for small but expensive things usually has little to do with the size of the product being sold. USB keys are typically sold in large plastic blister packs, my latest Logitech mouse game in a (compared to the mouse) gigantic box. People just aren't as happy when something expensive comes in a tiny box, or at least that is what retailers and manufacturers assume.
It's remarkable that a flaw like this still exists. Well I take that back... it's entirely unsurprising, I just got caught up in the excitement that Windows 7 is going to be better than Vista and forgot to lower my expectations.
I tried this under the Windows 7 RTM and found that it still works, although interestingly enough, if you do it from a batch file, then you receive the error: "A subdirectory or file.\dirname(spaces) already exists.", where it has the name of the directory you made as well as the number of spaces that you put after it.
Curious that it checks for a batch file but not the command prompt... perhaps they assume you can trust the latter but not the former. You can't trust either, but the flaw shouldn't exist in the first place.
(and sorry I'm removing my positive moderation by posting)
It's mentioned offhandedly in the article, and more definitively in the research paper that "The amount of learning correlated with the degree of cortical atrophy and was a good indicator of recovery".
It seems to me that getting a better indicator of recovery potential is well worth the money spent on research.
You appear to be opposed to the vegetative being kept alive unnecessarily. If anything this research will give families a better understanding of the odds of recovery of loved ones in a vegetative state, and make it easier for them to pull the plug if recovery potential is negligible, so perhaps you might end up supporting it.
It's also good to keep in mind that "we" (we being both taxpayers and private industry) fund a lot of research on all sorts of things, because for every new idea that turned out to be amazingly useful there are a lot of other ideas that need to be explored and then cast aside as useless/unprofitable/impossible/etc.
The 007 movie collection has pulled the wool over the eyes of modern martini drinkers. True aficionados know that a martini is to be stirred and not shaken (or at least they fully understand the tradeoffs between the two). And no, it has nothing to do with "bruising the gin", those people don't know what they're talking about either. Some could make a case for the increased water dilution and ice shards in shaking. But the real reason to stir a martini is so that you can serve it crystal clear in a cocktail glass; a shaken drink will be cloudy with bubbles unless you allow it to sit for >30sec after shaking.
And don't even get me started on the topic of vodka "martinis";-)
Wow, I completely forgot to respond to your mention of diamond as a semiconductor. The way I understand that issue is that diamond could become the best semiconductor material ever - the fastest and highest-powered transistors, even good options for optical devices. But it's very difficult to make devices, and it's at least a decade or two behind the other materials that I mentioned, none of which have been developed to the level of sophistication that silicon has been.
There are many semiconductor materials besides silicon in commercial-scale production. There are a lot of factors to consider, but the benefits of non-silicon materials tends to be along the lines of: higher breakdown voltage, higher electron mobility, and higher thermal conductivity or device max temperature. Some of them can really shine in these areas, but so far what they're mainly good for is optical devices (LEDs, lasers) and high frequency (communication, radar, EW).
There are a few reasons why they aren't as good as silicon digital circuits. The first is that silicon is a very easy material to work with. We can grow huge boules of it with very few defects, making huge wafers with high yields, which is great for mass-production. Silicon dioxide, grown right out of the silicon, makes a great insulator for MOSFET gates. We can, in a single fab run, produce both N-channel and P-channel MOSFET (you need BOTH for CMOS). All of the other materials being researched or even manufactured lag behind on all counts. In fact I'm not aware of any commercially produced MOSFETs in any other material - they are usually JFETs which are slow, or heterojunction transistors, which requires a very expensive process of growing layers of a composition of materials which changes over the z-axis on top of a regular wafer. Just about everything other than silicon is also more fragile, thus lower yield and reliability. Not to mention we've already spent a TON of money perfecting everything about silicon fab, it would take billions to match it and reach production levels with any other material, even if it were possible.
Just to give a quick run-down of other popular materials as I understand them, and leaving out anything optical since I'm not into that:
GaAs - the cheapest microwave material out there. Very common in cell phones and other consumer electronics. However it is being replaced by silicon which is far cheaper and can include tons of digital circuitry on the same chip for processing. It is being commercially produced on a large scale.
GaN - an up-and-coming material, it looks like it might become the new high-power radio frequency device material of choice for its high breakdown voltage (up to about 50V in current commercial devices). Applications include cell phone base stations. It's still too expensive to be common. Commercial production exists and is increasing.
SiC - like GaN it is a good material for high power devices (high voltage, high thermal conductivity, high max temperature), it is cheaper, but it will not reach the same frequencies that GaN will.
SiGe - It's cheap because it uses silicon, but still more expensive than straight silicon. Not quite as good as GaAs, GaN, etc. Commercially produced by at least a couple companies, we'll see if its market expands.
ABCS - antimonide-based compound semiconductors can be used in extremely low power consumption RF amplifiers. Frighteningly expensive, and very fragile, both mechanically and voltage-wise. Still very much a lab product, not commercial.
InP - It's the material from which the fastest devices are made (over 780GHz power-gain cutoff frequency). Not quite as fragile as ABCS but close. A number of companies have InP production lines, but they're still very much a specialist product with an impressive price tag.
I am also not a fan of Quicktime nor iTunes, and I'll tell you why. If I pin it down to a single factor, it's the lack of choice and configurability. On both VLC and winamp I have to do at least a little bit of customizing from the default install before I'm happy. The Mac software doesn't have a whole lot that you can change. I agree that the Mac software probably fares well against Windows media player, but that's hardly a good competitor with which to compare it.
For audio I used to use foobar2000, which is almost endlessly endlessly configurable, and can be configured to your exact desires. It's awesome, but even if you just install skins that other people make, it's more effort than the average audio player to set up. So now I use Winamp, which works quite well with the default skin, but can be customized and it ships with good visualizations (not that I usually have them on).
For video I used to use Media Player Classic, I liked its simple interface that had everything I needed. But now I usually use VLC, just because it has all the codecs I need built in. Neither WMP nor Quicktime can play all of my media out of the box, and the automatic codec downloaders can't even get an XVID codec, nor do they support the MKV container format.
As for the Mac OS's, I've never been a big fan. I tend to despise flashy graphics, so the Mac application bar (or whatever you call it) has never done it for me. I seem to also recall that switching between windows was a little awkward, I think they would minimize back down to the icon you started on. Maybe I just needed to get used to it more, and I'm sure it would have helped, but I'm a simple guy and even now that I'm running Windows 7 on a fast computer I set it back to the classic windows theme. I also usually raise my start bar to two or three rows tall, because on most of my computers I tend to have at least a dozen windows open at any given time.
If it wasn't for Google Chrome and Firefox, we would still be using IE6.
I think you mean "If it wasn't for Firefox, we would still be using IE6." Opera also deserves a little credit, but it was really Firefox that forced MS to finally push out a new version of IE. Chrome is a fine browser, and it might keep MS on its toes now, but it is a pretty recent addition to the browser wars.
$40k? I know clearances aren't cheap, but even assuming a total overhead rate of 500% and $50k/year that works out to 320 hours worth of work. It's certainly the correct order of magnitude, but I'm willing to bet it costs less than half of that. Furthermore, in my experience, limited to graduate studies at a single university, most engineering professors have held clearances at some point in their lives, and the re-investigation is much cheaper than the first investigation. And several of these clearances were paid for by defense companies that the professors have consulted with at some point in their careers. And just for fun, I googled it: http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/generalinfo/a/security2_4.htm. The cost according to this article, for top secret clearance, is $3-15k.
The contract is clearly worth more than $6k, and the summary clearly states only that the professor was paid $6k. You think the entire contract went to one person? Professors tend to consult at the high level, helping the company determine what approach they will use, checking up on the peons to make sure everything is going well, not getting into the details that less expensive people will attend to. The contract as a whole would almost certainly have been worth at least $50k, and that's at the low end of Phase I research.
Slashdot Mirror
... Germany has a good approach ... paired with apprenticeships where they are mentored with real hands on work (note: there is a difference between apprenticeship and "intern" or "coop" like we have in the USA where a college student sits in front of a computer all day with no hands on work). Also, if you want to get an engineering PhD you have the option of being paired with a private company and basing your thesis on real work you do at a real job. USA academics look down upon private sector work and consider it work done by people who couldn't cut it in academia, ...
I'm not sure where you went to school in America, but that hasn't been my experience at all. I held two internships as an undergrad, and both were very hands-on and I worked on real problems. And yes for the second one I did spend most of my time on a computer (or at a whiteboard, reading references, or working out algorithms on paper)... but how is that not hands-on? Real work in many fields takes place mainly on computers. The analysis we were doing was based on well-known phenomenon that only needed to be simulated. Eventually I moved on to board layout, which of course it both very hands on and completely computer based.
Do you really expect universities to be the same as industry? If they were, we would only need one or the other. Universities tend to look at problems with more open questions, or investigate things with higher risk of not working out. That's because they aren't trying to turn a profit, they are trying to find things out. They figure out many fundamental things, so that then industry can take that information and turn it into commercial processes and products.
A classic example is Gallium-Nitride semiconductor devices. It's a very hot field in industry right now, it will be very promising for RF power electronics among other applications, it is certainly capable of knocking GaAs from its pedestal and it will give RFCMOS more competition at the low end where it has been gaining share. But ~15 years ago no company would have touched it... GaN was considered very risky and not likely to work very well. It was only after NSF and the DOD agencies have pumped millions of dollars into universities, and more recently into industry (e.g. Triquint), to figure out the problems in growing it and making devices that industry began to catch on and see what they were missing.
Most engineering doctoral projects that I'm familiar with are funded by an industry partnership, a DoD agency, or the NSF, which you can roughly rank in order of technology readiness level expected by the customer at the conclusion of the grant, i.e. how close it is to being put into a product. Not all of them will end up being practical, but you can't always know that before you start, that's the point in doing it. I know of at least two fellow students who are basing their thesis research entirely on projects they are working on in industry. A minority to be sure, but that it simply because it can be hard to find companies interested in doing research relevant to your exact field. The opportunity for industry work is there for those with enough motivation.
Just my 2 cents, maybe things don't work as well in other regions of the US.
Ah, you're worried about catching an infection ;-)
If you say things like that you need to be careful of your audience. This applies whether or not you are joking. If she had said it out loud and the wrong person overhead, the same thing would have happened. Posting it on Facebook just means that all 300 of her "friends" can "overhear" her - and maybe more depending on her privacy settings.
$1000? I averaged under $500 per year on textbooks in college (graduated 1.5 years ago). It will vary based on the school you attend, the books your professors assign, and what effort you put into finding used copies or buying old editions and getting updated problem sets from the library copies or from classmates. Of course it also depends on the major you're in, I'm an engineer and I think the price gouging isn't quite as severe in this field.
But $1000 per semester... geez... that's just not okay.
Your fear is an overreaction, I see no reason for a scanner company to file a lawsuit here. Even if they did, it would be for patent infringement, not copyright infringement.
First, this guy isn't selling his scanner, he just built one for himself. So there's no reason for a lawsuit to be filed.
Second, I doubt that he he infringes on any patent help by a company that manufactures a book scanner. The trickiest thing about these scanners is the page turning and the software for OCR and correction for page curvature. This guy implements neither.
Third, specialist companies aren't in the habit of suing independent hackers. Even if he was selling the scanner, he would have to charge a hell of a lot more than $300 for it because of the time spent developing and building it, and for things like marketing, quality control, support, and overhead. It's a fact ignored by many DIY websites touting a "homemade widget for less than the greedy corporations are charging". And even then, this scanner would not compare with the $20,000 model because of lack of automatic page turning if nothing else.
Now maybe you're thinking of textbook companies suing the guy, not the manufacturer of the $20,000 book scanner. That's slightly more plausible. Most books have the boilerplate "You cannot store an electronic copy of this book" notice, but there is a good case for fair use. But even so it would be simple copyright infringement, not circumvention of copy protection mechanisms, which is what the DMCA is mainly about.
How much HF is involved in this process? Because that stuff can be extremely dangerous if the battery were to break or burst.
Gallium Arsenide is the material the LED chip is made of, and it is most definitely in your home and not the fabrication plant. Granted, it's usually in a plastic envelope, but as GP said it can easily leech into water when it is thrown out.
Well then I guess that unlike me you will be screwed whenever your internet goes down ;-)
To start you should separate local network and internet connectivity, in the companies I've worked at you can access many resources including instant messaging and some documentation over an intranet.
When I'm at work (RF circuit engineer) the big thing that I use the internet for is searching vendors like Digikey and Mouser for parts, and downloading datasheets. If the internet goes down, then I have the gigantic paper catalogs they always send me (currently serving as monitor stands), and a pretty good collection of datasheets to refer to. Much of the software that I use requires the company's local network to function in order to connect to the license server. And I need the local network working to email internal colleagues, but I can pick up the phone or walk to their desk if necessary.
So for me the internet going down would be a bearable inconvenience, but the local network in our company going down would be pretty bad.
But from TFS, from info in the second article:
They are clearly *not* just going to throttle you when you have used enough, they will keep charging you more at 5 cents/MB. So in a way it is "unlimited", but only in the sense that your bill for that month is also unlimited...
The two solutions have completely different goals.
Any Sonos node is controllable by a touchscreen wireless remote (or your Iphone!) which will show you your music library and playlists and such, and let you select what to play in any room with a Sonos receiver. Your music is shared over ethernet, if you have wiring to every node location, or wireless if you plug the wireless base station ("Zone Bridge") into your network somewhere. It's a luxury system which works wonderfully and is simple to setup and use. A wireless setup bundle with speakers will run you $1150....
Running wires to every room in the house is much cheaper, but it means that if you want to start music playing you need to walk back to whatever room your computer is and change it. It's not as easy to set up and it's not easy to use. Plus you'll still need a splitter and receivers at every speaker set, unless you only plan on running one set up speakers at once.
This doesn't seem like a bad idea, because these labels may end up being cheaper and they can't fall off or be switched. So it helps out large processors and grocery stores.
However, for uses like citrus twists in beverages, citrus wedges or wheels in drinks, and citrus zest for flavoring I don't want anything marring the skin of my fruit. Sure I could work around the labels, but I don't necessarily want to, it means I can use less of the fruit.
The thing about math is that it isn't by itself a very practical field. Its true value, its great value, is in its support of other technical fields. Engineering and the physical sciences depend critically on math to solve problems. Heck, a degree in computer science (real computer science, many universities these days are more of a software degree) is practically a math degree with an emphasis in computer applications.
The ones who really understand the math behind the systems that they work on are often the ones with the best intuition about how a system will work, and they tend to have a lot of people working underneath them to take theory and ides into reality and products. But as fields mature the amount of math the average person in that field uses will decrease, and while there is some fantastic math providing the foundation of computer science, I don't think you need it all that often.
While I am all for the next paradigm, and even support efforts to work printable and 3D electronics, I have serious doubts that it would every be capable of surpassing planar silicon chips for sheer power and scalability in digital electronics.
The density is going to be incredibly hard to scale, even more so if people will be printing these on home fab systems. It's just not easy to print really small things with something resembling an ink-jet device. Whereas with silicon chips they have to worry about the wavelength of the UVlight used in photoresist exposure, it's a very different scale.
3D chips have also been worked on for a long time... the big drawback is heat extraction. You can include thermal vias and the like, but then your density decreases even more, and that's just within the device, you still need to extract it to the outside environment. Printable electronics are also going to suffer from speed drawbacks as the resistivity of interconnects and contacts will be greater, process control will be worse so you cannot run at as large a fraction of maximum spec. It also creates yet more heat (I^2R). You can already mix optical and electronics devices in a variety of material systems. Putting them in printable systems will be problematic as I'm not aware of good printable optical waveguide processes. I'm not sure if you mean "flexible" as "can be bent", but if you do then keep in mind that making something flexible means a lot fewer layers if you want it to be reliable, mitigating advantages of the 3D building. Although flexible circuits meant to be bent once and installed conformally to a rigid object can work with somewhat more layers if appropriate design rules are followed, but there are always limits.
I think the main advantage of these lays in areas besides competing with large-scale silicon digital circuits. I think that it could be well suited for creating for simple circuits that don't do much, but need to be cheap and small. Heck, integrated resistors and capacitors are already used by various circuit board fabricators. It's still rather expensive, but it has promise for decreasing the size of many devices and eventually becoming cheaper to manufacture.
"Packages become smaller so shipping new phones costs less energy. Shops can store more phones in the same space, so the chance that the phone you want is out of stock will become smaller..."
The boxes for small but expensive things usually has little to do with the size of the product being sold. USB keys are typically sold in large plastic blister packs, my latest Logitech mouse game in a (compared to the mouse) gigantic box. People just aren't as happy when something expensive comes in a tiny box, or at least that is what retailers and manufacturers assume.
It's remarkable that a flaw like this still exists. Well I take that back... it's entirely unsurprising, I just got caught up in the excitement that Windows 7 is going to be better than Vista and forgot to lower my expectations.
I tried this under the Windows 7 RTM and found that it still works, although interestingly enough, if you do it from a batch file, then you receive the error: "A subdirectory or file .\dirname(spaces) already exists.", where it has the name of the directory you made as well as the number of spaces that you put after it.
Curious that it checks for a batch file but not the command prompt... perhaps they assume you can trust the latter but not the former. You can't trust either, but the flaw shouldn't exist in the first place.
(and sorry I'm removing my positive moderation by posting)
It's mentioned offhandedly in the article, and more definitively in the research paper that "The amount of learning correlated with the degree of cortical atrophy and was a good indicator of recovery".
It seems to me that getting a better indicator of recovery potential is well worth the money spent on research.
You appear to be opposed to the vegetative being kept alive unnecessarily. If anything this research will give families a better understanding of the odds of recovery of loved ones in a vegetative state, and make it easier for them to pull the plug if recovery potential is negligible, so perhaps you might end up supporting it.
It's also good to keep in mind that "we" (we being both taxpayers and private industry) fund a lot of research on all sorts of things, because for every new idea that turned out to be amazingly useful there are a lot of other ideas that need to be explored and then cast aside as useless/unprofitable/impossible/etc.
Gizmodo has an excellent article with video from their tour of the Lego factory. It's a must-see for people who like seeing how things are made: http://gizmodo.com/5022769/exclusive-inside-the-lego-factory
The 007 movie collection has pulled the wool over the eyes of modern martini drinkers. True aficionados know that a martini is to be stirred and not shaken (or at least they fully understand the tradeoffs between the two). And no, it has nothing to do with "bruising the gin", those people don't know what they're talking about either. Some could make a case for the increased water dilution and ice shards in shaking. But the real reason to stir a martini is so that you can serve it crystal clear in a cocktail glass; a shaken drink will be cloudy with bubbles unless you allow it to sit for >30sec after shaking.
And don't even get me started on the topic of vodka "martinis" ;-)
Wow, I completely forgot to respond to your mention of diamond as a semiconductor. The way I understand that issue is that diamond could become the best semiconductor material ever - the fastest and highest-powered transistors, even good options for optical devices. But it's very difficult to make devices, and it's at least a decade or two behind the other materials that I mentioned, none of which have been developed to the level of sophistication that silicon has been.
There are many semiconductor materials besides silicon in commercial-scale production. There are a lot of factors to consider, but the benefits of non-silicon materials tends to be along the lines of: higher breakdown voltage, higher electron mobility, and higher thermal conductivity or device max temperature. Some of them can really shine in these areas, but so far what they're mainly good for is optical devices (LEDs, lasers) and high frequency (communication, radar, EW).
There are a few reasons why they aren't as good as silicon digital circuits. The first is that silicon is a very easy material to work with. We can grow huge boules of it with very few defects, making huge wafers with high yields, which is great for mass-production. Silicon dioxide, grown right out of the silicon, makes a great insulator for MOSFET gates. We can, in a single fab run, produce both N-channel and P-channel MOSFET (you need BOTH for CMOS). All of the other materials being researched or even manufactured lag behind on all counts. In fact I'm not aware of any commercially produced MOSFETs in any other material - they are usually JFETs which are slow, or heterojunction transistors, which requires a very expensive process of growing layers of a composition of materials which changes over the z-axis on top of a regular wafer. Just about everything other than silicon is also more fragile, thus lower yield and reliability. Not to mention we've already spent a TON of money perfecting everything about silicon fab, it would take billions to match it and reach production levels with any other material, even if it were possible.
Just to give a quick run-down of other popular materials as I understand them, and leaving out anything optical since I'm not into that:
GaAs - the cheapest microwave material out there. Very common in cell phones and other consumer electronics. However it is being replaced by silicon which is far cheaper and can include tons of digital circuitry on the same chip for processing. It is being commercially produced on a large scale.
GaN - an up-and-coming material, it looks like it might become the new high-power radio frequency device material of choice for its high breakdown voltage (up to about 50V in current commercial devices). Applications include cell phone base stations. It's still too expensive to be common. Commercial production exists and is increasing.
SiC - like GaN it is a good material for high power devices (high voltage, high thermal conductivity, high max temperature), it is cheaper, but it will not reach the same frequencies that GaN will.
SiGe - It's cheap because it uses silicon, but still more expensive than straight silicon. Not quite as good as GaAs, GaN, etc. Commercially produced by at least a couple companies, we'll see if its market expands.
ABCS - antimonide-based compound semiconductors can be used in extremely low power consumption RF amplifiers. Frighteningly expensive, and very fragile, both mechanically and voltage-wise. Still very much a lab product, not commercial.
InP - It's the material from which the fastest devices are made (over 780GHz power-gain cutoff frequency). Not quite as fragile as ABCS but close. A number of companies have InP production lines, but they're still very much a specialist product with an impressive price tag.
I am also not a fan of Quicktime nor iTunes, and I'll tell you why. If I pin it down to a single factor, it's the lack of choice and configurability. On both VLC and winamp I have to do at least a little bit of customizing from the default install before I'm happy. The Mac software doesn't have a whole lot that you can change. I agree that the Mac software probably fares well against Windows media player, but that's hardly a good competitor with which to compare it.
For audio I used to use foobar2000, which is almost endlessly endlessly configurable, and can be configured to your exact desires. It's awesome, but even if you just install skins that other people make, it's more effort than the average audio player to set up. So now I use Winamp, which works quite well with the default skin, but can be customized and it ships with good visualizations (not that I usually have them on).
For video I used to use Media Player Classic, I liked its simple interface that had everything I needed. But now I usually use VLC, just because it has all the codecs I need built in. Neither WMP nor Quicktime can play all of my media out of the box, and the automatic codec downloaders can't even get an XVID codec, nor do they support the MKV container format.
As for the Mac OS's, I've never been a big fan. I tend to despise flashy graphics, so the Mac application bar (or whatever you call it) has never done it for me. I seem to also recall that switching between windows was a little awkward, I think they would minimize back down to the icon you started on. Maybe I just needed to get used to it more, and I'm sure it would have helped, but I'm a simple guy and even now that I'm running Windows 7 on a fast computer I set it back to the classic windows theme. I also usually raise my start bar to two or three rows tall, because on most of my computers I tend to have at least a dozen windows open at any given time.
I think you mean "If it wasn't for Firefox, we would still be using IE6." Opera also deserves a little credit, but it was really Firefox that forced MS to finally push out a new version of IE. Chrome is a fine browser, and it might keep MS on its toes now, but it is a pretty recent addition to the browser wars.
Sure you can, but good luck collecting ;-)
$40k? I know clearances aren't cheap, but even assuming a total overhead rate of 500% and $50k/year that works out to 320 hours worth of work. It's certainly the correct order of magnitude, but I'm willing to bet it costs less than half of that. Furthermore, in my experience, limited to graduate studies at a single university, most engineering professors have held clearances at some point in their lives, and the re-investigation is much cheaper than the first investigation. And several of these clearances were paid for by defense companies that the professors have consulted with at some point in their careers. And just for fun, I googled it: http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/generalinfo/a/security2_4.htm. The cost according to this article, for top secret clearance, is $3-15k.
The contract is clearly worth more than $6k, and the summary clearly states only that the professor was paid $6k. You think the entire contract went to one person? Professors tend to consult at the high level, helping the company determine what approach they will use, checking up on the peons to make sure everything is going well, not getting into the details that less expensive people will attend to. The contract as a whole would almost certainly have been worth at least $50k, and that's at the low end of Phase I research.
Nice tip, thanks! I'm going to try that out, along with the companion twohundredsitups.com.