And not just in the free software sense. There are a lot of great ideas out there that don't have the capacity to become traditionally successful ventures. Either the capital isn't there (as in your case), the idea doesn't have enough potential to really stand on its own, patenting would be difficult because of prior art or there isn't a very strong business case to be made. In any of these situations, the idea might still be valuable to someone, somewhere and it would be a shame for it to fall by the wayside. Publishing is typically a good thing to do, IMO. If the idea is valuable to someone, hopefully they'll eventually find it and make use of it. If they do or they don't you're still no worse off than when you started, and if your idea is eventually taken up you can always point to your publication as credit to your major contribution to the field.
Besides, even if you could patent the tech if you don't have the capital to start a venture and attract investment you're going to have a very hard time enforcing the patent (Not to mention a lot of people would consider it ethically reprehensible if you were just sitting on a patent for the sake of sitting on a patent). Enforcing IP is a very costly proposition, especially if your idea ends up being implemented by someone with pockets that are millions or billions deeper than yours.
There was recently a talk given by Oliver Smithies (Nobel prize for inventing gene knock-out mice) that was sponsored by the university's tech transfer department to discuss "missed opportunities". He had a large number of inventions that have become central technologies in genetics and molecular biology (gel electrophoresis is one of the more notable ones) but never patented any, choosing instead to publish. The tech transfer folks were trying to bill it as a "lesson learned" about patenting potentially valuable technologies, but Smithies didn't seem at all regretful. A friend of mine asked him then, "You refer to these as missed opportunities, but is that how you really think of them?" to which he replied, loosely paraphrased, "No". There are a number of situations where I believe, even though it may be legal and financially lucrative to do so, the world would be better off if the inventor chooses not to patent a technology, as Smithies did. This is certainly an extreme example, but there are many others that come to mind- cochlear implants, for example. Just some food for thought.
Exactly, how can a technology brought to market in 2001 violate a patent filed in 2006? Or, how come a patent that applies to a technology that was brought to market in 2001 be granted when it was filed in 2006?
At my alma mater we've produced positron beams as intense as 6e8 positrons per second. AFAIK this is the most intense beam ever generated, yet in the low energy case where electron-positron annihilation generates 2 gamma rays at 511keV each, this would only generate a power output of 1.6e-5 watts (and it takes a 1MW reactor to generate that output). So you are correct in asserting that antimatter is currently a very poor potential energy source.
Agreed. I think a lot of people are missing that being able to cut out the multi-billion-dollar used game market is a lot more important to Sony than reducing piracy of music- and a lot more ominous for the user. Its the ultimate lock-in, like if Apple were to decide one day to force iTunes users to only be able to listen/sync to music purchased from iTMS. Sony here is giving a giant middle finger to the first-sale doctrine.
You can easily get one that will fit your budget of $1,200. The ultrabay drive is hot-swappable and you can get a Li-polymer battery to slide in there for extra staying power. Also, Lenovo has kept Thinkpad customer service to essentially the same level of quality that it was under IBM which, in my experience, has been nothing short of fantastic.
It actually does have to do with HD video. While the device can't natively play at 720p (the screen isn't high-res enough), connecting to the (admittedly too expensive at $90) AV dock gives HDMI output at 720p.
Exactly, you payed for the device, not the free games you downloaded for the device. It'd be one thing if they included ads on games that came pre-loaded or on other integral features but these are apps you downloaded on your own prerogative for free, its not at all unreasonable to have ads on them. I got a chance to play around with a friend's Zune HD and I've got to say I'm really, really impressed with it. MS didn't try to make it anything its not- its a media player first and foremost. Having apps can be nice, but there's a lot of people out there that just want a PMP that plays media really well and that's what the Zune is (especially with the amazing music-discovery capabilities when integrated with a Zune Pass).
The problem with CCFL's is that short duty-cycle usage shortens their lifetimes. This makes them great for things like porch lighting, living rooms etc where they'll be on for hours at a time, but poor for things like bathrooms where they may be on for 10 minutes at a time tops. When used in situations that extend their lifetimes, CCFLs are indeed much more cost-effective than LEDs are currently, but as is usually the case, a mixed application of both will always be the winner. Also, I've noticed (in a very unscientific study) that some of the slightly more expensive brands of CCFLs actually do give more consistent performance in the long run.
So they are claiming up to 500/320 when all 12 channels are used in a RAID 0-like configuration while Intel achieves their 250/170 doing something similar with 10 channels? That makes more sense, thanks!
And Intel's enterprise-class SSDs already offer sustained speeds of up to 250MB/s read and 170MB/s write, wouldn't read speeds of approximately 500MB/s and write speeds of over 300MB/s be expected?
After re-reading your post, I should probably also clarify that the University's IT infrastructure and services provided to students is one of the best I've ever seen, from personal experience its light-years ahead of UNC Chapel Hill and a lot more user-friendly and headache-free than GaTech's. I've heard similar stories from many friends that have gone on to grad school. With regards to Wi-Fi access, they use a fairly platform-agnostic web-based authentication portal supplemented by the ability to register your mac address (also a web-based tool) so you don't have to keep logging in. All VPN access either goes through Kerberos/AFS, SSH/SCP or, if you're checking out a virtual machine through the Virtual Computing Lab, RDP or a remote X-session. Remote printing is also a web-based interface and while some courses may require windows-only apps many, if not all, of these are available remotely (Solidworks and AutoCAD are the only two big ones that come to mind) and in computer labs.
As a recent grad I can speak to the fact that NCSU supports Linux in a big way by deploying it in computer labs, supporting it for students, having a very active LUG (the mailing list is very friendly, they meet several times a month and host regular install-fests), making Linux desktops available remotely through a Virtual Computing Lab and giving students remote access to a couple of on-campus beowulf clusters. To the best of my knowledge support is strongest in the College of Engineering and in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. I believe most of the other Colleges (Life Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Textiles, Natural Resources etc) tend to use a mix of Windows and Mac workstations (and I'd heard somewhere that Design uses exclusively Macs).
Didn't they already try this with their turbocache stuff? I seem to recall the general consensus being that it doesn't really offer any remarkable benefits. Regardless of how fast the cache is, eventually you run apps or open files that can't live on it 24x7 and you're going to revert to magnetic HD performance limits. This might improve some battery life and performance for some apps, but its not going to give you the across-the-board speed and battery life boosts that SSDs do. While this would certainly result in a better experience for the average computer user, I feel like its going to be relegated as a middle-ground between HDDs and SDDs, augmenting the low end, but by no means obsoleting the high-end.
Really? I travel internationally at least once a year and this is news to me. Aside from putting my shoes through the x-ray (oh boo-hoo you have to spend 30 seconds taking off your shoes) and the exact same 30 seconds it takes at the immigration counter (ok, the lines can be annoying though) I've never run into anything that makes "flying a mode of travel that is completely unattractive" especially since its still a lot faster, quite affordable and not entirely uncomfortable (Its been my experience that its mostly US Air and AA that have drastically lowered the quantity and quality of service they offer, which is why I simply don't use them anymore, its not like they're any cheaper). Oh, but don't let that stop you from bitching and moaning about how travel by air hasn't changed significantly (except in the quality of the free snacks you get on domestic flights) in the past 15 years or so that I can recall international travel.
As an NRI who's spent a great deal of time in India as well, I'd say your assessment is pretty accurate. What's interesting, though, is that there's been a trend of late for people like me (born, raised and educated abroad) to come back. Most of these re-patriots tend to be interested / involved in socially-minded ventures (development work, social enterprise, health-care etc) but there's a growing population of entrepreneurial youth that have shifted back to their cultural home whether out of ambition or idealism. India faces a host of unique challenges moving forward that most MNCs simply are not equipped to or interested in dealing with. Whether this will really result in change on a large scale is very much so in the air, but its certainly fascinating and there's a lot of potential there.
They have the size, money and production facilities to make this work. Others are coming too. But will they be able to change US' customers mindset?
I think you nailed it on the head right there- the problem isn't technology but culture. Not just the culture of the consumer either, but the culture of the company in charge. Tata is, historically, a very socially-focused company. Its historical roots are deeply intertwined with the Indian people and it shows in a lot of the work they do. Amartya Sen has an excellent essay on the history of Tata in The Argumentative Indian. Americans and American companies need to learn to dream again.
Nuclear... forget it, politically it just isn't going to happen.
There are currently proposals for 20 new nuclear reactors in the US under review. Still, a pretty sorry state considering China has 20 already under construction or planned to enter service in the next 6 years or so, India has 16, heck Bulgaria and Romania each plan to have a new power plant in service by 2015. Internationally, the climate for nuclear power is improving significantly. I only hope a pro-nuclear Secretary of Energy can help push America back into establishing a complete fuel cycle and expanding its nuclear generation capabilities.
Vivek Wadhwa had some interesting research on the topic a while back on his businessweek column.
More than half of Silicon Valley startups were founded by immigrants over the last decade. These immigrant-founded tech companies employed 450,000 workers and had sales of $52 billion in 2005.
The problem isn't that employing foreign nationals sends money and innovation out of the country, because most of those foreign nationals want to stay! If we guaranteed permanent residency and eventually citizenship for all employed and productive foreign nationals that came over on H1B's, all of this talent and money would stay in the country, buying houses, cars and creating more jobs than they themselves take up.
We determined that foreign nationals residing in the U.S. were named as inventors in 25.6% of international patent applications filed from the U.S. in 2006. This increased from 7.6% in 1998. When trying to understand the reason for the 337% increase, we uncovered some worrying statistics. As of Sept. 30, 2006, there were 1,181,505 educated and skilled professionals waiting to gain legal permanent-resident status.
These workers were on visas like the H-1B. To make matters worse, there is yearly allotment of only 120,000 permanent resident visas for such skilled workers and a 7% limit on how many visas can go to immigrants from any one country. So immigrants from populous countries such as India and China could be waiting decades for a permanent resident visa unless immigration quotas are relaxed.
Anecdotal evidence and media reports supported what we feared--that highly skilled workers are getting frustrated with the immigration process and are seeing greater opportunities in countries like India and China.. Tens of thousands are returning home.
I'm sure someone else can explain this better than I, but I believe it has a great deal to do with the weight of redundancy. Every additional propulsion modality adds weight not just from the hardware itself but from the different fuels that each modality would require and, even if the fuel is the same, providing the differing fuel pressures required by the different modalities (jet engine vs liquid-fueled rocket motor). I imagine its still cheaper to use a propulsion method that is highly efficient across a limited range of altitudes because the weight savings make up for the extra fuel burnt at non-ideal altitudes.
This lower barrier to entry puts the platform on par with online flash games, not portable consoles. Even the platform itself is best suited to the type of game you play to pass the 5-30 minutes it takes your train/bus/etc to reach its destination. While the size of the iPhone market is significant, comparing it to the DS/PSP market is comparing apples to oranges. Every DS/PSP owner bought theirs to play games on, what percentage of iPhone owners would even care about a new $30 FPS for their phone, let alone want to kill the battery for their primary means of communication with it?
Maybe not directly, but carriers do dictate and direct a lot of handset development. Really its the "promote" part of that statement that matters- Verizon puts a lot of money into marketing the BBerry Storm, AT&T helps market the iPhone etc. The argument is that without exclusive handsets there's less motivation to do this. There is some truth to that argument, but a more open ecosystem when it comes to mobile phones in the United States can only be a good thing for consumers.
This relatively simple procedure opens the door to industrial-scale manufacture
No, it doesn't. There's no specificity, you can't control the polymerization to the extent needed to build something useful at the nanoscale, the wires are precipitating out of solution because they're attracted to themselves and each other more strongly than they're attracted to the solvent, that's a problem because you have no way of actually building anything with them. That's why people have been doing this sort of things with metal colloids for over a decade and there's been no "industrial-scale" use for them discovered in anything but colloidal form because you're basically just creating fancy-shaped aggregates. Until there's a technology available that will selectively aggregate nanoscale materials into arbitrary shapes (rather than a bunch of copies of the same repeating structure in solution) in a manner where certain shapes and functional units can be fixed to where they need to be on a chip or in a machine there isn't going to be a use.
Interesting chemistry, but to imagine that nanotech has any applications that require more synthetic control than bulk colloids or coatings within the next decade (or 5) is pure hype.
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And not just in the free software sense. There are a lot of great ideas out there that don't have the capacity to become traditionally successful ventures. Either the capital isn't there (as in your case), the idea doesn't have enough potential to really stand on its own, patenting would be difficult because of prior art or there isn't a very strong business case to be made. In any of these situations, the idea might still be valuable to someone, somewhere and it would be a shame for it to fall by the wayside. Publishing is typically a good thing to do, IMO. If the idea is valuable to someone, hopefully they'll eventually find it and make use of it. If they do or they don't you're still no worse off than when you started, and if your idea is eventually taken up you can always point to your publication as credit to your major contribution to the field.
Besides, even if you could patent the tech if you don't have the capital to start a venture and attract investment you're going to have a very hard time enforcing the patent (Not to mention a lot of people would consider it ethically reprehensible if you were just sitting on a patent for the sake of sitting on a patent). Enforcing IP is a very costly proposition, especially if your idea ends up being implemented by someone with pockets that are millions or billions deeper than yours.
There was recently a talk given by Oliver Smithies (Nobel prize for inventing gene knock-out mice) that was sponsored by the university's tech transfer department to discuss "missed opportunities". He had a large number of inventions that have become central technologies in genetics and molecular biology (gel electrophoresis is one of the more notable ones) but never patented any, choosing instead to publish. The tech transfer folks were trying to bill it as a "lesson learned" about patenting potentially valuable technologies, but Smithies didn't seem at all regretful. A friend of mine asked him then, "You refer to these as missed opportunities, but is that how you really think of them?" to which he replied, loosely paraphrased, "No". There are a number of situations where I believe, even though it may be legal and financially lucrative to do so, the world would be better off if the inventor chooses not to patent a technology, as Smithies did. This is certainly an extreme example, but there are many others that come to mind- cochlear implants, for example. Just some food for thought.
Exactly, how can a technology brought to market in 2001 violate a patent filed in 2006? Or, how come a patent that applies to a technology that was brought to market in 2001 be granted when it was filed in 2006?
At my alma mater we've produced positron beams as intense as 6e8 positrons per second. AFAIK this is the most intense beam ever generated, yet in the low energy case where electron-positron annihilation generates 2 gamma rays at 511keV each, this would only generate a power output of 1.6e-5 watts (and it takes a 1MW reactor to generate that output). So you are correct in asserting that antimatter is currently a very poor potential energy source.
Don't give them ideas! At least patents eventually expire now.
Oh its been done. In fact, ordering custom DNA sequences is pretty cheap.
Agreed. I think a lot of people are missing that being able to cut out the multi-billion-dollar used game market is a lot more important to Sony than reducing piracy of music- and a lot more ominous for the user. Its the ultimate lock-in, like if Apple were to decide one day to force iTunes users to only be able to listen/sync to music purchased from iTMS. Sony here is giving a giant middle finger to the first-sale doctrine.
You can easily get one that will fit your budget of $1,200. The ultrabay drive is hot-swappable and you can get a Li-polymer battery to slide in there for extra staying power. Also, Lenovo has kept Thinkpad customer service to essentially the same level of quality that it was under IBM which, in my experience, has been nothing short of fantastic.
It actually does have to do with HD video. While the device can't natively play at 720p (the screen isn't high-res enough), connecting to the (admittedly too expensive at $90) AV dock gives HDMI output at 720p.
Exactly, you payed for the device, not the free games you downloaded for the device. It'd be one thing if they included ads on games that came pre-loaded or on other integral features but these are apps you downloaded on your own prerogative for free, its not at all unreasonable to have ads on them. I got a chance to play around with a friend's Zune HD and I've got to say I'm really, really impressed with it. MS didn't try to make it anything its not- its a media player first and foremost. Having apps can be nice, but there's a lot of people out there that just want a PMP that plays media really well and that's what the Zune is (especially with the amazing music-discovery capabilities when integrated with a Zune Pass).
The problem with CCFL's is that short duty-cycle usage shortens their lifetimes. This makes them great for things like porch lighting, living rooms etc where they'll be on for hours at a time, but poor for things like bathrooms where they may be on for 10 minutes at a time tops. When used in situations that extend their lifetimes, CCFLs are indeed much more cost-effective than LEDs are currently, but as is usually the case, a mixed application of both will always be the winner. Also, I've noticed (in a very unscientific study) that some of the slightly more expensive brands of CCFLs actually do give more consistent performance in the long run.
So they are claiming up to 500/320 when all 12 channels are used in a RAID 0-like configuration while Intel achieves their 250/170 doing something similar with 10 channels? That makes more sense, thanks!
And Intel's enterprise-class SSDs already offer sustained speeds of up to 250MB/s read and 170MB/s write, wouldn't read speeds of approximately 500MB/s and write speeds of over 300MB/s be expected?
After re-reading your post, I should probably also clarify that the University's IT infrastructure and services provided to students is one of the best I've ever seen, from personal experience its light-years ahead of UNC Chapel Hill and a lot more user-friendly and headache-free than GaTech's. I've heard similar stories from many friends that have gone on to grad school. With regards to Wi-Fi access, they use a fairly platform-agnostic web-based authentication portal supplemented by the ability to register your mac address (also a web-based tool) so you don't have to keep logging in. All VPN access either goes through Kerberos/AFS, SSH/SCP or, if you're checking out a virtual machine through the Virtual Computing Lab, RDP or a remote X-session. Remote printing is also a web-based interface and while some courses may require windows-only apps many, if not all, of these are available remotely (Solidworks and AutoCAD are the only two big ones that come to mind) and in computer labs.
As a recent grad I can speak to the fact that NCSU supports Linux in a big way by deploying it in computer labs, supporting it for students, having a very active LUG (the mailing list is very friendly, they meet several times a month and host regular install-fests), making Linux desktops available remotely through a Virtual Computing Lab and giving students remote access to a couple of on-campus beowulf clusters. To the best of my knowledge support is strongest in the College of Engineering and in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. I believe most of the other Colleges (Life Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Textiles, Natural Resources etc) tend to use a mix of Windows and Mac workstations (and I'd heard somewhere that Design uses exclusively Macs).
Didn't they already try this with their turbocache stuff? I seem to recall the general consensus being that it doesn't really offer any remarkable benefits. Regardless of how fast the cache is, eventually you run apps or open files that can't live on it 24x7 and you're going to revert to magnetic HD performance limits. This might improve some battery life and performance for some apps, but its not going to give you the across-the-board speed and battery life boosts that SSDs do. While this would certainly result in a better experience for the average computer user, I feel like its going to be relegated as a middle-ground between HDDs and SDDs, augmenting the low end, but by no means obsoleting the high-end.
Really? I travel internationally at least once a year and this is news to me. Aside from putting my shoes through the x-ray (oh boo-hoo you have to spend 30 seconds taking off your shoes) and the exact same 30 seconds it takes at the immigration counter (ok, the lines can be annoying though) I've never run into anything that makes "flying a mode of travel that is completely unattractive" especially since its still a lot faster, quite affordable and not entirely uncomfortable (Its been my experience that its mostly US Air and AA that have drastically lowered the quantity and quality of service they offer, which is why I simply don't use them anymore, its not like they're any cheaper). Oh, but don't let that stop you from bitching and moaning about how travel by air hasn't changed significantly (except in the quality of the free snacks you get on domestic flights) in the past 15 years or so that I can recall international travel.
As an NRI who's spent a great deal of time in India as well, I'd say your assessment is pretty accurate. What's interesting, though, is that there's been a trend of late for people like me (born, raised and educated abroad) to come back. Most of these re-patriots tend to be interested / involved in socially-minded ventures (development work, social enterprise, health-care etc) but there's a growing population of entrepreneurial youth that have shifted back to their cultural home whether out of ambition or idealism. India faces a host of unique challenges moving forward that most MNCs simply are not equipped to or interested in dealing with. Whether this will really result in change on a large scale is very much so in the air, but its certainly fascinating and there's a lot of potential there.
They have the size, money and production facilities to make this work. Others are coming too. But will they be able to change US' customers mindset?
I think you nailed it on the head right there- the problem isn't technology but culture. Not just the culture of the consumer either, but the culture of the company in charge. Tata is, historically, a very socially-focused company. Its historical roots are deeply intertwined with the Indian people and it shows in a lot of the work they do. Amartya Sen has an excellent essay on the history of Tata in The Argumentative Indian. Americans and American companies need to learn to dream again.
Nuclear... forget it, politically it just isn't going to happen.
There are currently proposals for 20 new nuclear reactors in the US under review. Still, a pretty sorry state considering China has 20 already under construction or planned to enter service in the next 6 years or so, India has 16, heck Bulgaria and Romania each plan to have a new power plant in service by 2015. Internationally, the climate for nuclear power is improving significantly. I only hope a pro-nuclear Secretary of Energy can help push America back into establishing a complete fuel cycle and expanding its nuclear generation capabilities.
As someone mentioned elsewhere: "The artificial "tree" is projected to remove as much CO2 per day as 25194 real trees."
More than half of Silicon Valley startups were founded by immigrants over the last decade. These immigrant-founded tech companies employed 450,000 workers and had sales of $52 billion in 2005.
The problem isn't that employing foreign nationals sends money and innovation out of the country, because most of those foreign nationals want to stay! If we guaranteed permanent residency and eventually citizenship for all employed and productive foreign nationals that came over on H1B's, all of this talent and money would stay in the country, buying houses, cars and creating more jobs than they themselves take up.
We determined that foreign nationals residing in the U.S. were named as inventors in 25.6% of international patent applications filed from the U.S. in 2006. This increased from 7.6% in 1998. When trying to understand the reason for the 337% increase, we uncovered some worrying statistics. As of Sept. 30, 2006, there were 1,181,505 educated and skilled professionals waiting to gain legal permanent-resident status.
These workers were on visas like the H-1B. To make matters worse, there is yearly allotment of only 120,000 permanent resident visas for such skilled workers and a 7% limit on how many visas can go to immigrants from any one country. So immigrants from populous countries such as India and China could be waiting decades for a permanent resident visa unless immigration quotas are relaxed.
Anecdotal evidence and media reports supported what we feared--that highly skilled workers are getting frustrated with the immigration process and are seeing greater opportunities in countries like India and China.. Tens of thousands are returning home.
I'm sure someone else can explain this better than I, but I believe it has a great deal to do with the weight of redundancy. Every additional propulsion modality adds weight not just from the hardware itself but from the different fuels that each modality would require and, even if the fuel is the same, providing the differing fuel pressures required by the different modalities (jet engine vs liquid-fueled rocket motor). I imagine its still cheaper to use a propulsion method that is highly efficient across a limited range of altitudes because the weight savings make up for the extra fuel burnt at non-ideal altitudes.
This lower barrier to entry puts the platform on par with online flash games, not portable consoles. Even the platform itself is best suited to the type of game you play to pass the 5-30 minutes it takes your train/bus/etc to reach its destination. While the size of the iPhone market is significant, comparing it to the DS/PSP market is comparing apples to oranges. Every DS/PSP owner bought theirs to play games on, what percentage of iPhone owners would even care about a new $30 FPS for their phone, let alone want to kill the battery for their primary means of communication with it?
Maybe not directly, but carriers do dictate and direct a lot of handset development. Really its the "promote" part of that statement that matters- Verizon puts a lot of money into marketing the BBerry Storm, AT&T helps market the iPhone etc. The argument is that without exclusive handsets there's less motivation to do this. There is some truth to that argument, but a more open ecosystem when it comes to mobile phones in the United States can only be a good thing for consumers.
This relatively simple procedure opens the door to industrial-scale manufacture
No, it doesn't. There's no specificity, you can't control the polymerization to the extent needed to build something useful at the nanoscale, the wires are precipitating out of solution because they're attracted to themselves and each other more strongly than they're attracted to the solvent, that's a problem because you have no way of actually building anything with them. That's why people have been doing this sort of things with metal colloids for over a decade and there's been no "industrial-scale" use for them discovered in anything but colloidal form because you're basically just creating fancy-shaped aggregates. Until there's a technology available that will selectively aggregate nanoscale materials into arbitrary shapes (rather than a bunch of copies of the same repeating structure in solution) in a manner where certain shapes and functional units can be fixed to where they need to be on a chip or in a machine there isn't going to be a use.
Interesting chemistry, but to imagine that nanotech has any applications that require more synthetic control than bulk colloids or coatings within the next decade (or 5) is pure hype.