In my experience, the "propietary NVidia driver" & Ubuntu organs simply couldn't handle multiple monitors, let alone docking/undocking a laptop while handling the multiple monitor situation, even remotely gracefully.
Thus, even as a 'computer tinkerer', I decided to figure out how to make Vista less annoying, since it already works, rather than spend another week of time I don't have to get Ubuntu to handle basic things I need to do for my work.
I really did give it a shot (4 days of spare time between actual work each day), but it was so far from easy or obvious, and every config file had a different format, it really just wasn't worth my time to figure out. A couple friends who told me to go with Ubuntu (since I was hoping to usurp Vista on the new work Laptop) were not surprised that it wasn't remotely easy to get docking/undocking with multiple monitors to work. I'm sure if your work actually requires you to be in front of a computer all day it's not so painful to fix it up, but if you just need your computer to work correctly for the hour or two you use it during the work day, it's much more difficult to justify the time investment.
btw, that article about linux users being jerks to someone who accidentally got Ubuntu was hilarious. But thus is the nature of posting comments: people tend to be as nasty as possible, since they'll probably never meet the poster face to face.
i envision the sort of ropes hikers use... but i don't think there's much money to be made there.
Get started by writing up a business proposal and see if you can get the government to spend millions of dollars more than they really need to on a ball-robot which replaces the functionality of a rope. I'm sure you could get some DARPA guys excited by that.
From the Paper, as referenced in the article, on OpticsExpress:
2.1 Fiber fabrication Three tubes of optical quality silica were sleeved concentrically to yield an overall cladding with outer diameter about 50 mm and inner diameter of 3.5 mm. A section of bulk silica rod was joined to one end of this tube assembly to act as a seal for the silicon core, which would be molten during the draw. This approach to layering of concentric tubes was utilized since a single glass tube of those dimensions was not commercially available. Such a thick-walled cladding tube was chosen to mitigate potential issue with the weight of the molten silicon leaking out or otherwise deforming the softened cladding glass during the draw. A rod of silicon measuring about 3 mm in diameter by about 40 mm in length, which had been core drilled out of a Czochralski-grown single crystal boule, was sleeved into this end-sealed silica tube assembly
from the OpticsExpress paper: "measured propagation losses were 4.3 dB/m at 2.936 μm" 100x more than regular fiber, at wavelengths we don't use for communications... I'm not sure if I see how this is useful.
I suppose it's cool to have a Process to make Si-core fibers, but it's not like computer chips need 2 km of fibers inside, and it's clearly not useful for C-band optical communication,
Seems like it's just a buzzword due to "Silicon" being placed nearby "photonics".
*maybe* you can couple to chips better, simply because light's more tightly confined by the high-index Si?
Intel is also on the forefront of photonic interconnects for Processors. HP just jumped on board a year or two ago. Often they fund university research and then try to implement it viably in CMOS or current fab processes.
the researchers that make 200-400GHz transistors today DO in fact worry very much about tunneling. (I'm thinking of InP/InGaAsP transistors)
Quantum wells are around 5-10nm wide, so anything approaching ~20nm would at least have to account for that sort of quantum effect. So density may have a difficult limit to breach, but smaller lithography certainly makes high speed transistors easier to implement on CMOS.
USB is so crappy comparatively. USB *may* be good for transfers, but only as long as you only have one drive being accessed on the entire hub. The moment you attach a digital camera/iPod to the same hub, USB demosntrates it's utter crappiness.
Firewire is infinitely more stable than USB 2, and it appears to have always been like that in my experience. Three FW drives being simultaneously R/W'd have never shown any hiccups, for years now.
I recently made the mistake of putting one of my (3) external drives into a USB case; it drops out any time I sync my Canon PowerShot, iPod, iRiver or ANY other device that needs an actual datarate on the USB. This is the 2nd USB encolsure I've tried, I'm going back to all-FW. (This happens on my Toshiba (Windoze) Laptop and also on my MacMini (OS X).)
Conclusion: USB2 is still for slow devices, like cameras, mp3 players, printer. USB2 sucks for high-data rate devices, like drives.
i honestly thought this/. story was a joke. I'm glad some slashdotter has been waiting in in front of the apple store just in case something happens... inevitably attracting passersby who stop to witness the happening you're apparently waiting for.
(actually, they mention that regular matter is not detected via gravitational effects, they simply observed the absorption spectrum. However, when the gasses are highgly ionized, there are no electrons spinning around waiting to absorb the light, and thus the ionized Hydrogen does not yield an easily detectable absorption. (see 2nd article) "dark matter", non-regular matter, is detected via the gravitational lensing effects. )
"Astronomers caution that the missing baryonic matter is not to be confused with "dark matter," a mysterious and exotic form of matter that is only detected via its gravitational pull."
"The presence of highly ionized oxygen (and other elements) between the galaxies is believed to trace large quantities of invisible, hot, ionized hydrogen in the universe. These vast reservoirs of hydrogen have largely escaped detection because they are too hot to be seen in visible light, yet too cool to be seen in X-rays."
The second article is certainly great for explaining most of the technical aspects, such as how you know what light passed through before it got to your eye/lens, by observing the spectrum. The missing piece is that they must have very detailed knowledge of what the un-modified spectrum of a Quasar is, and i wonder how those became so accurate.
Can't wait for hydrogen-powered gigantic ram-jet space engines.
it's actually a pretty useful article. I'm gonna make sure my work computer doesn't auto-install SP3, 'cuz I know it's kinda buggy and not acting perfectly correctly, which would likey lead to these BSoD/non-booting systems people are experiencing.
however i do agree that I had no idea there was a new SP until I read the article about some people's updates breaking...
I Agree, I can't believe that Windoze user have, for years now, become completely accustomed to erasing their entire hard drive to fix a problem! In fact, that's a typical way to speed up your computer! I'm not in IT or CS, and I've watched CS majors/engineers do this as their standard solution for their windoze PC, it's totally retarded. Even a person with an in-depth knowledge of computers can't fix a buggy Windoze PC.
Even to fix a program that's acting wierdly, you have to uninstall the entire program and re-install it, losing everything in the process.
I know that Linux folk and Mac folk (like myself) can actually fix problems. I think the last time I wiped a startup drive was 6 years ago, within 4 days of buying the new computer (I figured I'd partition before I did more to it). And having use-accessible preference files usually lets one fix an unhappy application, as any mac person knows.
actually, the roughness would cause electrons (or holes) to recombine or otherwise get lost at the surface defects, and (as you said) increase the heat while decreasing the current, in general requiring more power and generating more heat, all bad I think.
So it's still good for wires. You can see their wires are only 100nm apart, without touching.
the problem is the "green ones" are Silicon crystal, meaning they are part of the same crystal as the substrate and thus semiconductor (which you can make diodes/transistors out of). The blue ones are glass (quartz), a highly resistive dielectric, which you can only make resistors out of. The end result must be that the semiconductor (or metal i suppose) is smoother.
I haven't found the original paper, but i'd guess they wafer bonded the Si substrate and quartz plate. To Stoofa's point, i do wonder why the quartz is so smooth on it's surface, maybe it's just very well polished? Also to Stoofa's point, how did they define the quartz with smoother sidewalls than the Silicon?
maybe they'll extend this First Proof-of-concept to the 45nm scale, but their demo. is already at 70nm (lines) and 50nm (dots).
the lines demonstration is a big deal to Intel's optical waveguiding, as it'll reduce the sidewall scattering loss of the waveguides considerably. I'd imagine the dots would be great for transistor gates.
Simple melting by direct heating has previously been shown to smooth out the defects in plastic structures.
This process can't be applied to a microchip for two reasons. First, the key structures on a chip are not made of plastic, which melts at temperatures close to the boiling point of water, but from semiconductors and metals, which have much higher melting points.
Heating the chip to such temperatures would melt not just the structures, but nearly everything else on the chip. Second, the melting process would widen the structures and round off their top and side surfaces, all of which would be detrimental to the chip.
Chou's team overcame the first obstacle by using a [...] laser [...] because it heats only a very thin surface layer of a material and causes no damage to the structures underneath. The researchers carefully designed the pulse so that it would melt only semiconductor and metal structures, and not damage other parts of the chip. The structures need to be melted for only a fraction of a millionth of a second, because molten metal and semiconductors can flow as easily as water and have high surface tension, which allows them to change shapes very quickly.
That's pretty amazing, that the semiconductor and metal self-correct via surface tension, and by using a directed laser pulse so you only affect specific areas of the chip.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, the "propietary NVidia driver" & Ubuntu organs simply couldn't handle multiple monitors, let alone docking/undocking a laptop while handling the multiple monitor situation, even remotely gracefully.
Thus, even as a 'computer tinkerer', I decided to figure out how to make Vista less annoying, since it already works, rather than spend another week of time I don't have to get Ubuntu to handle basic things I need to do for my work.
I really did give it a shot (4 days of spare time between actual work each day), but it was so far from easy or obvious, and every config file had a different format, it really just wasn't worth my time to figure out. A couple friends who told me to go with Ubuntu (since I was hoping to usurp Vista on the new work Laptop) were not surprised that it wasn't remotely easy to get docking/undocking with multiple monitors to work.
I'm sure if your work actually requires you to be in front of a computer all day it's not so painful to fix it up, but if you just need your computer to work correctly for the hour or two you use it during the work day, it's much more difficult to justify the time investment.
btw, that article about linux users being jerks to someone who accidentally got Ubuntu was hilarious. But thus is the nature of posting comments: people tend to be as nasty as possible, since they'll probably never meet the poster face to face.
people-sized shooting stars...
i envision the sort of ropes hikers use... but i don't think there's much money to be made there.
Get started by writing up a business proposal and see if you can get the government to spend millions of dollars more than they really need to on a ball-robot which replaces the functionality of a rope. I'm sure you could get some DARPA guys excited by that.
That was the most sexually charged space video I've ever seen.
My wife wants one.
From the Paper, as referenced in the article, on OpticsExpress:
2.1 Fiber fabrication
Three tubes of optical quality silica were sleeved concentrically to yield an overall cladding
with outer diameter about 50 mm and inner diameter of 3.5 mm. A section of bulk silica rod
was joined to one end of this tube assembly to act as a seal for the silicon core, which would
be molten during the draw. This approach to layering of concentric tubes was utilized since a
single glass tube of those dimensions was not commercially available. Such a thick-walled
cladding tube was chosen to mitigate potential issue with the weight of the molten silicon
leaking out or otherwise deforming the softened cladding glass during the draw.
A rod of silicon measuring about 3 mm in diameter by about 40 mm in length, which had been
core drilled out of a Czochralski-grown single crystal boule, was sleeved into this end-sealed
silica tube assembly
from the OpticsExpress paper:
"measured propagation losses were 4.3 dB/m at 2.936 μm"
100x more than regular fiber, at wavelengths we don't use for communications... I'm not sure if I see how this is useful.
I suppose it's cool to have a Process to make Si-core fibers, but it's not like computer chips need 2 km of fibers inside, and it's clearly not useful for C-band optical communication,
Seems like it's just a buzzword due to "Silicon" being placed nearby "photonics".
*maybe* you can couple to chips better, simply because light's more tightly confined by the high-index Si?
Intel is also on the forefront of photonic interconnects for Processors. HP just jumped on board a year or two ago. Often they fund university research and then try to implement it viably in CMOS or current fab processes.
Hybrid Si Laser by UCSB
nanolithography? wtf, i just do *regular* lithography to get 300nm features... no wonder it's such a pain, we need a NANOlithography machine!
it does sounds awesome though, I'd give them money were I an MBA'd suit with no engineering experience!
the researchers that make 200-400GHz transistors today DO in fact worry very much about tunneling. (I'm thinking of InP/InGaAsP transistors)
Quantum wells are around 5-10nm wide, so anything approaching ~20nm would at least have to account for that sort of quantum effect. So density may have a difficult limit to breach, but smaller lithography certainly makes high speed transistors easier to implement on CMOS.
(EE, not physics)
I agree, Target Disk mode is absolutely bad-ass.
When you need it, you are SO happy that it exists.
PS. did you know you can use another comp's Wireless antenna (& sometimes BlueTooth) via TD-mode? It shows up in your system profiler!
USB is so crappy comparatively. USB *may* be good for transfers, but only as long as you only have one drive being accessed on the entire hub. The moment you attach a digital camera/iPod to the same hub, USB demosntrates it's utter crappiness.
Firewire is infinitely more stable than USB 2, and it appears to have always been like that in my experience. Three FW drives being simultaneously R/W'd have never shown any hiccups, for years now.
I recently made the mistake of putting one of my (3) external drives into a USB case; it drops out any time I sync my Canon PowerShot, iPod, iRiver or ANY other device that needs an actual datarate on the USB. This is the 2nd USB encolsure I've tried, I'm going back to all-FW.
(This happens on my Toshiba (Windoze) Laptop and also on my MacMini (OS X).)
Conclusion:
USB2 is still for slow devices, like cameras, mp3 players, printer.
USB2 sucks for high-data rate devices, like drives.
... except, of course, for a rock hard copy
Aren't all cellphone's RF/Antenna chips usually GaAs as well?
i honestly thought this /. story was a joke.
I'm glad some slashdotter has been waiting in in front of the apple store just in case something happens... inevitably attracting passersby who stop to witness the happening you're apparently waiting for.
dude, i wish i had a company that did nothing and people were still drooling all over themselves to buy you unannounced product!
brilliant!
(whatever it is, I'd love to have it , but it's likely way out of my price range)
pressure's pretty darn low.
Low pressure, low density, low temp. PV = nRT? (i don't remember how to use n and R)
(actually, they mention that regular matter is not detected via gravitational effects, they simply observed the absorption spectrum. However, when the gasses are highgly ionized, there are no electrons spinning around waiting to absorb the light, and thus the ionized Hydrogen does not yield an easily detectable absorption. (see 2nd article) "dark matter", non-regular matter, is detected via the gravitational lensing effects. )
"Astronomers caution that the missing baryonic matter is not to be confused with "dark matter," a mysterious and exotic form of matter that is only detected via its gravitational pull."
"The presence of highly ionized oxygen (and other elements) between the galaxies is believed to trace large quantities of invisible, hot, ionized hydrogen in the universe.
These vast reservoirs of hydrogen have largely escaped detection because they are too hot to be seen in visible light, yet too cool to be seen in X-rays."
The second article is certainly great for explaining most of the technical aspects, such as how you know what light passed through before it got to your eye/lens, by observing the spectrum. The missing piece is that they must have very detailed knowledge of what the un-modified spectrum of a Quasar is, and i wonder how those became so accurate.
Can't wait for hydrogen-powered gigantic ram-jet space engines.
Great post.
it's actually a pretty useful article. I'm gonna make sure my work computer doesn't auto-install SP3, 'cuz I know it's kinda buggy and not acting perfectly correctly, which would likey lead to these BSoD/non-booting systems people are experiencing.
however i do agree that I had no idea there was a new SP until I read the article about some people's updates breaking...
I Agree, I can't believe that Windoze user have, for years now, become completely accustomed to erasing their entire hard drive to fix a problem! In fact, that's a typical way to speed up your computer! I'm not in IT or CS, and I've watched CS majors/engineers do this as their standard solution for their windoze PC, it's totally retarded. Even a person with an in-depth knowledge of computers can't fix a buggy Windoze PC.
Even to fix a program that's acting wierdly, you have to uninstall the entire program and re-install it, losing everything in the process.
I know that Linux folk and Mac folk (like myself) can actually fix problems. I think the last time I wiped a startup drive was 6 years ago, within 4 days of buying the new computer (I figured I'd partition before I did more to it). And having use-accessible preference files usually lets one fix an unhappy application, as any mac person knows.
actually, the roughness would cause electrons (or holes) to recombine or otherwise get lost at the surface defects, and (as you said) increase the heat while decreasing the current, in general requiring more power and generating more heat, all bad I think.
So it's still good for wires. You can see their wires are only 100nm apart, without touching.
But also, the nice part of their process is that you can direct the lasers to certain areas of the chip.
I agree they should show the ends, but you could possibly use the directed laser pulse to stay away from the terminals.
the problem is the "green ones" are Silicon crystal, meaning they are part of the same crystal as the substrate and thus semiconductor (which you can make diodes/transistors out of).
The blue ones are glass (quartz), a highly resistive dielectric, which you can only make resistors out of.
The end result must be that the semiconductor (or metal i suppose) is smoother.
I haven't found the original paper, but i'd guess they wafer bonded the Si substrate and quartz plate.
To Stoofa's point, i do wonder why the quartz is so smooth on it's surface, maybe it's just very well polished?
Also to Stoofa's point, how did they define the quartz with smoother sidewalls than the Silicon?
maybe they'll extend this First Proof-of-concept to the 45nm scale, but their demo. is already at 70nm (lines) and 50nm (dots).
the lines demonstration is a big deal to Intel's optical waveguiding, as it'll reduce the sidewall scattering loss of the waveguides considerably. I'd imagine the dots would be great for transistor gates.
quote from article:
Simple melting by direct heating has previously been shown to smooth out the defects in plastic structures.
This process can't be applied to a microchip for two reasons. First, the key structures on a chip are not made of plastic, which melts at temperatures close to the boiling point of water, but from semiconductors and metals, which have much higher melting points.
Heating the chip to such temperatures would melt not just the structures, but nearly everything else on the chip. Second, the melting process would widen the structures and round off their top and side surfaces, all of which would be detrimental to the chip.
Chou's team overcame the first obstacle by using a [...] laser [...] because it heats only a very thin surface layer of a material and causes no damage to the structures underneath. The researchers carefully designed the pulse so that it would melt only semiconductor and metal structures, and not damage other parts of the chip. The structures need to be melted for only a fraction of a millionth of a second, because molten metal and semiconductors can flow as easily as water and have high surface tension, which allows them to change shapes very quickly.
That's pretty amazing, that the semiconductor and metal self-correct via surface tension, and by using a directed laser pulse so you only affect specific areas of the chip.