Even further back than doom, was the sequal to Wolfenstien, Spear of Destiny. Somewhere on the 4th level (i think) there was a secret wall panel (not unusual in that game) after moving a few more walls, you were confronted by an invincible Pac Man ghost that would chase you areound the maze that was the game. I always wondered if there was any way to beat it. But in terms of shear suprise during a game, that was it. One of the coolest things that ever happened to me while gaming. --Mike
I see what you are saying, however if in the end, we just dissappear from existance, I'd rather be a robot than a nothing.
Greene, not only smart, but a good teacher too
on
The Elegant Universe
·
· Score: 2
While I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, Brian Greene did teach my intro physics class. Little did we, as freshmen, realize that most of the classes we would take in the future would compare to Brian's class. He explained things clearly, had time for students, and had the hardest damn tests I've ever taken. All in all, I think that he may be the coolest physisist since Feynman.
Kind of reminds me of the time when everyone was scared that their kids might be playing Dungeons and Dragons. A person could spend hours talking about weapons. According to myth, AD&D was even responsible for making kids into satanists (not that there's anything wrong with that). Once something newer comes along, this whole thing with video games will blow over. And when knitting clubs become the mainstream outlet of youth culture in the year 2525, people will yell that knitting is causeing all of society's ills. (Unless Cleopatra 2525 is right, in which case we'll be fighting the evil surface robots.)
The work was done by a grad student, Benjamin W. Chui, at Stanford with a grant from IBM. His thesis was published last month (which is rare for a thesis). Essentially he used a micromachined silicon cantilever with piezorestive elements. The tip was higly resistive as well. To make a pit, the device would be heated by resistance as it was dragged along the surface. To read the pit, the divece had a piezoelectric or resistive element that would sense the tip bending into the pit.
If you are very interested in this sort of thing, (Fatbrain doesn't have this book yet) go here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/079238358 3/102-1637548-3888018
Recently I took a course with one of the founders of computer graphics, Professor Don Greenburg. This is a man who was doing pixel based computer graphics before computer monitors had pixels. And two Scientific American *covers*. He's now actively pushing Cornell to create an online University. His opinion is that the changes yet to come, once everyone figures out how to use this technology, are going to be larger than expected, sooner than expected. To illustrate that point, he showed a 4 or 5 year old SGI machine that cost a quarter million and a $4000 dye sub printer next to each other. In the same room he had a PC running one of the newest accelerators and an inkjet. Both could keep up with their more expensive counterpart. The point being that the things that are happening in the labs right now with regard to video technology and teaching technology will be available to the general public at some point.
Currently the largest university in this country is the U. of Phoenix. It's online! According to the Prof. this is just the begining. What you have to do is not look at the technological limitations of the web today, but rather look 10 years or 20 years in the future. An online university will not replace the Ivies overnight. But the cost of a B&M education is getting to be more and more and more. The government won't support such increases. What is gained by being at a B&M school?
Social interaction With 10 million or even 1 million people in a class, most large cities could hold discussion groups for the course. Video conferencing will be better in 20 years, and so maybe classroom like social interaction will be possible.
Research There are only about 50-60 schools that can really be considered research institutions. A number more may have smaller research programs. This means that there are approximately 5 billion people on this planet will will not attend a research university. Don't worry, new ways will be found for people to earn PhDs and such. Already half the PhD candidates I know are already supported by business. Perhaps some sort of non profit think tank could be created to do basic research.
Cheating First of all cheating goes on at B&M universities all of the time. In a computerized course with a whole lot of people you can bet there will be cheating too. But never underestimate the ingenuity of people who are creating the new digital universities. I've personally always thought grades are stupid (I'm TAing a class and it kills me to have to give anyone a grade). So maybe the best thing to do would be to get rid of grades. I can think of a number of ways to do evaluation in a computer based course, probably better than what is used now. The simplest of which would be software that activly helps students through problems as they are working through them.
The benefits of an online school could be tremendous. I'd love to trade in some of my lectures for ones taught by the best in a given field. There also exists a potential for lifetime learning. I'm sure half of what I've learned in the last 6 years will be obsolete by the time I graduate in 3. Better to be able to take a course anytime it is needed, as opposed to at the age of 18.
Of course there will be problems, but this means opportunities for us! How do you give anyone any sort of individual attention? Grading (as mentioned before)? Money? Copyright? Degree? Advising?
Anyway, I feel that this is a very exciting development; one of the things that this time will be remembered for creating. I just want to find out how I can get involved.
First of all, I never meant to imply that anyone on/. had any real clue about the legal system:)
Actually, I'm not a programmer, I just used that as an example because I thought it would be more effective in this particular forum. Lastly, this post is going to be shorter than an appropriate response to your (well written) previous post should be.
Don't misunderstand me. I think that the legal profession is very important. And I certainly realize that a solution such as, "get rid of patents", or "make big companies pay more for a patent" has problems. What I guess bugs me at an emotional level is people taking advatage of the legal system by using the letter of the law instead of the spirit.
I've got to run. Sorry I haven't written more, but that was a good post.
There's a major difference. In engineering professions and medical professions, the complexity is *required* to do the job. In the legal system, right now the complexity is still in the job, but I'm asking why it has to be there. Does always following logic exactly in the legal profession always lead to the correct answer?
If I were in court, of course I'd want a million dollar lawyer. But that does not make me *right*, it makes me rich. That is not a good way for a legal system to work.
Somehow, a long time ago, people decided that the law should make sense, it should be logical. As there are more and more laws, built upon previous laws and precedent, we have created a logical nightmare. Maybe the best thing would be to not worry about the logic of the law and look back at the logic of the situation.
It is my personal opinion that while logical reasoning in court is meant to make things as fair as possible, it has instead, due to the complexity of law, become a briar patch in which the most skilled lawyer can convice a judge of the veracity and logic of their arguement.
Maybe when a law is not doing what it was intended to do, the offending party should be penalized even though they didn't break the letter of the law. I don't know, it's late, I'm tired, I'm just trying to see what others think.
Anyway, my feeling is that most people reading Slashdot are fairly bright. And we have not only a right, but an obligation to involve ourselves in the legal and political process. (I am not involved in the film industry, and may not even be considered a film buff, but I sure as hell have opinions on all aspects of a film's creation -- same concept, just the legal system is more important.)
And the legal system is not as hard to understand as most people would imagine. When I got a ticket for something that a police officer didn't even see and in fact I hadn't done, I went to a lawyer. He said that I could either retain him for 500 dollars or I could look up similar cases (which he found in a database) and fight the case on my own. I won. IANAL, but I've won in court. And anyone who hacks kernels or has a PhD in astrophysics, should have no trouble learning or even intuiting some of the fundamentals of the legal system. (I know, the devil is in the details, but the idea is sane.)
The reason that I think that most people on Slashdot disagree with you is twofold. First of all, most people in the US (assuming most of/. is US based) have had a lot of exposure to JudeoChristian religion. I was certainly inquisitve and was always the kid in the back of the sunday school class asking why? why? why? why? why? My experience was that my teachers didn't understand what they were teaching and the rabbis couldn't explain it to my satisfaction either. And I began to believe in one morality, the only one that made sense to me which I think I learned before going to school. The golden rule. It basically says, Don't hit someone over the head with a plastic shovel if you wouldn't like to be hit over the head with a plastic shovel.
I've lived my life (yes I am still young) by this rule because it was the only morality that truly made sense to me. And I feel that a percentage of/. would feel the same. That's why there are often attacks on the Christian morality. In my opinion Gay rights is the most important issue in this country today. I am not gay (not that there's anything wrong with it:) (Would that be IANAH?) But gay rights is important because it pits my morality directly against the idea of a gloabal morality handed down by God.
At the start I said two reason's right? Here's the second.
While growing up I learned like a sponge. Reading everything (10 magazines a month, a few books too.) I wanted to know why everything happened. And I took everything people told me at face value. This includes everybody, from they guy at the fruit stand, to my parents, to my teachers. At some point I realized that I had been lied to... misled and many issues... adult issues. It seems like most people are able to shift and relearn everything quickly. I didn't. It is my guess that a good number of/.ers also don't like the idea that knowlege might be denied to children.
I am a firm believer that we don't have to protect children because children won't search out what they don't want to see. It is only when it is forbidden that it becomes interesting. I've written this on/. before, but it bares repeating. A study was done (in Europe, I believe) where children were shown hand drawn sketches of naked penises and vaginas. There was no reaction. Except maybe bordom. When kids are ready, they will search this stuff out, not before.
The problem that most/.ers seem to have is when other people's moraility makes it into law that would affect them in any way. So before you start talking about Censorware and how it helps preserve morality, please remember that even our definitions of what constitues morality greatly differs. And while I might not agree with your morality, I feel that you should be allowed to practices it. I just don't feel that your morality should have any basis in the law that governs me.
If we were to go back about 5 years, the discussions on a forum such as Slashdot would have meant something. As a forum of computer literate people, our opinions would be accounted for in the decision on domain name issues, because as a group we are fairly qualified to help in the process. I've read much of this topic, and there are many good ideas on how domain name issues should be handled. What pisses me off is that none of the good ideas on this topic count for jack.
I guess that's what annoys me so much about the current domain name problem. I don't feel like I can make one bit of difference in the solution. It's now up to the government and business.
I remember reading an article on dot.com advertising. They were saying that the space above a urinal at a night club was actually a hot property. Because at a urinal, guys look straight ahead and nowhere else.
I have a friend who when he was feeling angst, would sit alone in his room blasting Nine Inch Nails music. And that's kind of what I'm feeling right now.
I agree that advertiser supported services, such as TV, Internet, and magazines, may have lower prices. However, I'm becoming more and more annoyed at the distractions. I don't watch MTV anymore because I can't stand the spinning logo in the corner. I always throw a window over the top of IM because I don't want to see blinking ads. I use The Proxomitron to kill animated GIFs.
I never really had a problem with advertisments until they started interfering with my focus and my time. Sometimes I'd rather just outright pay for content instead of having to waste time and energy on an ad.
Some might say that we have a choice. Unfortunatly that is just not true anymore. Like any other mass consumer good, the majority will always win, and the majority wants cheap at any cost. (I can't *buy* a way to message my friends w/o advertisments - and the MSM/AIM thing killed development of IM for BeOS).
All I want is a choice. I want a list of the expected return per advertisment, so that I can decided whether to pay off the company directly for use of their services.
My worst nightmare is being stuck on the side of the road at 2am and have to listen to an advertisement for Chucky Cheese before I can call a tow truck.
I realize that most of what I wrote is not directly related to web on cell technology. However, the reason that I would want such a technology is convience. Anything that lessens the convience of a cell phone can and will make me angry, especally if I can't decide to turn it off. And in today's slow speed cellular networks and with today's small screens, the impact of advertising will be especially annoying.
Oh and one more thing. Someone was joking about double click and how they would be able to track your cell phone usage. Well it's more than that. GTE has a working system that can track a ESN to within a couple of feet by using the timing that signals return to base stations.
To simplify my last post. Photolithography is used because it is fast. E-beam exists today, but is very slow. IBM has got a fast E-beam system. This is the breakthrough, NOT smaller transistors, which have been made already, SLOWLY.
Research is being done. But Silicon has such nice electrical properties is so easy to fab compared to most other materials that all other contenders end up filling only niche markets. (III-V materials come to mind)
Optics are a pain in the neck to fabricate right now in any form. Someday, maybe, but not yet.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this statement. But E-Beam is done in a lab 100 feet from my office on a daily basis. It's been done to 20nm at Cornell on standard equipment. The problem with E-beam is that you have to draw your components. Photolith, OTOH, is a parallel process whereby the entire wafer is exposed at once. And that's why it is fast. The E-beam system here would take the greater part of a month to pattern an entire 3 inch wafer.
My best guess is that IBM has demonstrated 2 things. A reliable columnated electron source (it may already exist) and some sort of electron "optics" (I know that makes no sense). But some reliable way of manipulating wide streams of electrons. The trick would be to make a 6 inch wide electron beam that has really good homogeneous characteristics.
I've taken a bunch of CS courses and most of my friends are CS majors, so I realize how much pride you take in your code. However, bloat, whether it be from lazy coding or 3rd and 4th generation languages, is a fine use of computer speed. (There, I said it.) I know business people who can use VB; It's certainly a lot better than COBOL. Extra features... why can't I have it all? Shortened design times? That's worth a lot of money.
I've read the articles on the so called wizards of programming, the people who could squeeze code into the smallest space. I agree it's really neat, but in the real world, product design time is probably the most crucial design feature.
Slashdot Mirror
Even further back than doom, was the sequal to Wolfenstien, Spear of Destiny. Somewhere on the 4th level (i think) there was a secret wall panel (not unusual in that game) after moving a few more walls, you were confronted by an invincible Pac Man ghost that would chase you areound the maze that was the game. I always wondered if there was any way to beat it. But in terms of shear suprise during a game, that was it. One of the coolest things that ever happened to me while gaming. --Mike
I see what you are saying, however if in the end, we just dissappear from existance, I'd rather be a robot than a nothing.
While I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, Brian Greene did teach my intro physics class. Little did we, as freshmen, realize that most of the classes we would take in the future would compare to Brian's class. He explained things clearly, had time for students, and had the hardest damn tests I've ever taken. All in all, I think that he may be the coolest physisist since Feynman.
Kind of reminds me of the time when everyone was scared that their kids might be playing Dungeons and Dragons. A person could spend hours talking about weapons. According to myth, AD&D was even responsible for making kids into satanists (not that there's anything wrong with that). Once something newer comes along, this whole thing with video games will blow over. And when knitting clubs become the mainstream outlet of youth culture in the year 2525, people will yell that knitting is causeing all of society's ills. (Unless Cleopatra 2525 is right, in which case we'll be fighting the evil surface robots.)
So does that mean that a stripper in Alabama can't look at pictures of herself naked?
Is everyone on this thread from Cornell? Dylan is an OO Lisp and the only place I've ever seen it used is in a certain Cornell CS class.
Just a question... but was this startup "Ensim"?
The work was done by a grad student, Benjamin W. Chui, at Stanford with a grant from IBM. His thesis was published last month (which is rare for a thesis). Essentially he used a micromachined silicon cantilever with piezorestive elements. The tip was higly resistive as well. To make a pit, the device would be heated by resistance as it was dragged along the surface. To read the pit, the divece had a piezoelectric or resistive element that would sense the tip bending into the pit.
8 3/102-1637548-3888018
If you are very interested in this sort of thing, (Fatbrain doesn't have this book yet) go here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/07923835
You are right. That was one of the best Trek episodes ever... if only because it was campy in the way of TOS by visiting TOS!!!
Recently I took a course with one of the founders of computer graphics, Professor Don Greenburg. This is a man who was doing pixel based computer graphics before computer monitors had pixels. And two Scientific American *covers*. He's now actively pushing Cornell to create an online University. His opinion is that the changes yet to come, once everyone figures out how to use this technology, are going to be larger than expected, sooner than expected. To illustrate that point, he showed a 4 or 5 year old SGI machine that cost a quarter million and a $4000 dye sub printer next to each other. In the same room he had a PC running one of the newest accelerators and an inkjet. Both could keep up with their more expensive counterpart. The point being that the things that are happening in the labs right now with regard to video technology and teaching technology will be available to the general public at some point.
Currently the largest university in this country is the U. of Phoenix. It's online! According to the Prof. this is just the begining. What you have to do is not look at the technological limitations of the web today, but rather look 10 years or 20 years in the future. An online university will not replace the Ivies overnight. But the cost of a B&M education is getting to be more and more and more. The government won't support such increases. What is gained by being at a B&M school?
Social interaction
With 10 million or even 1 million people in a class, most large cities could hold discussion groups for the course. Video conferencing will be better in 20 years, and so maybe classroom like social interaction will be possible.
Research
There are only about 50-60 schools that can really be considered research institutions. A number more may have smaller research programs. This means that there are approximately 5 billion people on this planet will will not attend a research university. Don't worry, new ways will be found for people to earn PhDs and such. Already half the PhD candidates I know are already supported by business. Perhaps some sort of non profit think tank could be created to do basic research.
Cheating
First of all cheating goes on at B&M universities all of the time. In a computerized course with a whole lot of people you can bet there will be cheating too. But never underestimate the ingenuity of people who are creating the new digital universities. I've personally always thought grades are stupid (I'm TAing a class and it kills me to have to give anyone a grade). So maybe the best thing to do would be to get rid of grades. I can think of a number of ways to do evaluation in a computer based course, probably better than what is used now. The simplest of which would be software that activly helps students through problems as they are working through them.
The benefits of an online school could be tremendous. I'd love to trade in some of my lectures for ones taught by the best in a given field. There also exists a potential for lifetime learning. I'm sure half of what I've learned in the last 6 years will be obsolete by the time I graduate in 3. Better to be able to take a course anytime it is needed, as opposed to at the age of 18.
Of course there will be problems, but this means opportunities for us! How do you give anyone any sort of individual attention? Grading (as mentioned before)? Money? Copyright? Degree? Advising?
Anyway, I feel that this is a very exciting development; one of the things that this time will be remembered for creating. I just want to find out how I can get involved.
IANAL (but I've seen one on TV)
First of all, I never meant to imply that anyone on /. had any real clue about the legal system :)
Actually, I'm not a programmer, I just used that as an example because I thought it would be more effective in this particular forum. Lastly, this post is going to be shorter than an appropriate response to your (well written) previous post should be.
Don't misunderstand me. I think that the legal profession is very important. And I certainly realize that a solution such as, "get rid of patents", or "make big companies pay more for a patent" has problems. What I guess bugs me at an emotional level is people taking advatage of the legal system by using the letter of the law instead of the spirit.
I've got to run. Sorry I haven't written more, but that was a good post.
The scary part is that the professional wrestler is better than most of the other professional polititions :)
There's a major difference. In engineering professions and medical professions, the complexity is *required* to do the job. In the legal system, right now the complexity is still in the job, but I'm asking why it has to be there. Does always following logic exactly in the legal profession always lead to the correct answer?
It's late and I'm tired, but I need to vent.
/.ing
If I were in court, of course I'd want a million dollar lawyer. But that does not make me *right*, it makes me rich. That is not a good way for a legal system to work.
Somehow, a long time ago, people decided that the law should make sense, it should be logical. As there are more and more laws, built upon previous laws and precedent, we have created a logical nightmare. Maybe the best thing would be to not worry about the logic of the law and look back at the logic of the situation.
It is my personal opinion that while logical reasoning in court is meant to make things as fair as possible, it has instead, due to the complexity of law, become a briar patch in which the most skilled lawyer can convice a judge of the veracity and logic of their arguement.
Maybe when a law is not doing what it was intended to do, the offending party should be penalized even though they didn't break the letter of the law. I don't know, it's late, I'm tired, I'm just trying to see what others think.
Anyway, my feeling is that most people reading Slashdot are fairly bright. And we have not only a right, but an obligation to involve ourselves in the legal and political process. (I am not involved in the film industry, and may not even be considered a film buff, but I sure as hell have opinions on all aspects of a film's creation -- same concept, just the legal system is more important.)
And the legal system is not as hard to understand as most people would imagine. When I got a ticket for something that a police officer didn't even see and in fact I hadn't done, I went to a lawyer. He said that I could either retain him for 500 dollars or I could look up similar cases (which he found in a database) and fight the case on my own. I won. IANAL, but I've won in court. And anyone who hacks kernels or has a PhD in astrophysics, should have no trouble learning or even intuiting some of the fundamentals of the legal system. (I know, the devil is in the details, but the idea is sane.)
Anyway, this post is quickly losing focus.
So good night and happy
The reason that I think that most people on Slashdot disagree with you is twofold. First of all, most people in the US (assuming most of /. is US based) have had a lot of exposure to JudeoChristian religion. I was certainly inquisitve and was always the kid in the back of the sunday school class asking why? why? why? why? why? My experience was that my teachers didn't understand what they were teaching and the rabbis couldn't explain it to my satisfaction either. And I began to believe in one morality, the only one that made sense to me which I think I learned before going to school. The golden rule. It basically says, Don't hit someone over the head with a plastic shovel if you wouldn't like to be hit over the head with a plastic shovel.
/. would feel the same. That's why there are often attacks on the Christian morality. In my opinion Gay rights is the most important issue in this country today. I am not gay (not that there's anything wrong with it :) (Would that be IANAH?) But gay rights is important because it pits my morality directly against the idea of a gloabal morality handed down by God.
/.ers also don't like the idea that knowlege might be denied to children.
/. before, but it bares repeating. A study was done (in Europe, I believe) where children were shown hand drawn sketches of naked penises and vaginas. There was no reaction. Except maybe bordom. When kids are ready, they will search this stuff out, not before.
/.ers seem to have is when other people's moraility makes it into law that would affect them in any way. So before you start talking about Censorware and how it helps preserve morality, please remember that even our definitions of what constitues morality greatly differs. And while I might not agree with your morality, I feel that you should be allowed to practices it. I just don't feel that your morality should have any basis in the law that governs me.
I've lived my life (yes I am still young) by this rule because it was the only morality that truly made sense to me. And I feel that a percentage of
At the start I said two reason's right? Here's the second.
While growing up I learned like a sponge. Reading everything (10 magazines a month, a few books too.) I wanted to know why everything happened. And I took everything people told me at face value. This includes everybody, from they guy at the fruit stand, to my parents, to my teachers. At some point I realized that I had been lied to... misled and many issues... adult issues. It seems like most people are able to shift and relearn everything quickly. I didn't. It is my guess that a good number of
I am a firm believer that we don't have to protect children because children won't search out what they don't want to see. It is only when it is forbidden that it becomes interesting. I've written this on
The problem that most
If we were to go back about 5 years, the discussions on a forum such as Slashdot would have meant something. As a forum of computer literate people, our opinions would be accounted for in the decision on domain name issues, because as a group we are fairly qualified to help in the process. I've read much of this topic, and there are many good ideas on how domain name issues should be handled. What pisses me off is that none of the good ideas on this topic count for jack.
I guess that's what annoys me so much about the current domain name problem. I don't feel like I can make one bit of difference in the solution. It's now up to the government and business.
This stinks.
--Frog
Two things... 1) I'm not going to get my mother on IRC 2) IRC serves a different function than IM
Or better yet, get two free cell phones, and when one is loading an ad, use the other :)
I remember reading an article on dot.com advertising. They were saying that the space above a urinal at a night club was actually a hot property. Because at a urinal, guys look straight ahead and nowhere else.
I have a friend who when he was feeling angst, would sit alone in his room blasting Nine Inch Nails music. And that's kind of what I'm feeling right now.
I agree that advertiser supported services, such as TV, Internet, and magazines, may have lower prices. However, I'm becoming more and more annoyed at the distractions. I don't watch MTV anymore because I can't stand the spinning logo in the corner. I always throw a window over the top of IM because I don't want to see blinking ads. I use The Proxomitron to kill animated GIFs.
I never really had a problem with advertisments until they started interfering with my focus and my time. Sometimes I'd rather just outright pay for content instead of having to waste time and energy on an ad.
Some might say that we have a choice. Unfortunatly that is just not true anymore. Like any other mass consumer good, the majority will always win, and the majority wants cheap at any cost. (I can't *buy* a way to message my friends w/o advertisments - and the MSM/AIM thing killed development of IM for BeOS).
All I want is a choice. I want a list of the expected return per advertisment, so that I can decided whether to pay off the company directly for use of their services.
My worst nightmare is being stuck on the side of the road at 2am and have to listen to an advertisement for Chucky Cheese before I can call a tow truck.
I realize that most of what I wrote is not directly related to web on cell technology. However, the reason that I would want such a technology is convience. Anything that lessens the convience of a cell phone can and will make me angry, especally if I can't decide to turn it off. And in today's slow speed cellular networks and with today's small screens, the impact of advertising will be especially annoying.
Oh and one more thing. Someone was joking about double click and how they would be able to track your cell phone usage. Well it's more than that. GTE has a working system that can track a ESN to within a couple of feet by using the timing that signals return to base stations.
To simplify my last post. Photolithography is used because it is fast. E-beam exists today, but is very slow. IBM has got a fast E-beam system. This is the breakthrough, NOT smaller transistors, which have been made already, SLOWLY.
Research is being done. But Silicon has such nice electrical properties is so easy to fab compared to most other materials that all other contenders end up filling only niche markets. (III-V materials come to mind)
Optics are a pain in the neck to fabricate right now in any form. Someday, maybe, but not yet.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this statement. But E-Beam is done in a lab 100 feet from my office on a daily basis. It's been done to 20nm at Cornell on standard equipment. The problem with E-beam is that you have to draw your components. Photolith, OTOH, is a parallel process whereby the entire wafer is exposed at once. And that's why it is fast. The E-beam system here would take the greater part of a month to pattern an entire 3 inch wafer.
My best guess is that IBM has demonstrated 2 things. A reliable columnated electron source (it may already exist) and some sort of electron "optics" (I know that makes no sense). But some reliable way of manipulating wide streams of electrons. The trick would be to make a 6 inch wide electron beam that has really good homogeneous characteristics.
I also sleep... sometimes.
Mandatory Discaimer
I'm not a Microsoft fan
I've taken a bunch of CS courses and most of my friends are CS majors, so I realize how much pride you take in your code. However, bloat, whether it be from lazy coding or 3rd and 4th generation languages, is a fine use of computer speed. (There, I said it.) I know business people who can use VB; It's certainly a lot better than COBOL. Extra features... why can't I have it all? Shortened design times? That's worth a lot of money.
I've read the articles on the so called wizards of programming, the people who could squeeze code into the smallest space. I agree it's really neat, but in the real world, product design time is probably the most crucial design feature.