What was happening was this: in its pure state of repeating units of one titanium and two oxygen atoms, titanium dioxide is a semiconductor. Heat the material, though, and some of the oxygen is driven out of the structure, leaving electrically charged bubbles that make the material behave like a metal.
The memristor they've created depends on the movement of oxygen atoms to produce the memristor-like electrical behavior. Purely electrical components such as resistors, capacitors, inductors, and transistors only rely on the movement of electrons and holes to produce their electrical behavior. Why is this important? The chemical memristor is an order of magnitude slower than the theoretical electrical equivalent, which no one has been able to invent yet.
I think the memristor they've created is a great piece of technology and will certainly prove useful. However, it is like calling a rechargeable chemical battery a capacitor. While both are useful things, only one is fast enough for high speed electronics design for applications like the RAM they mentioned. On the other hand, a chemical memristor could be a flash memory killer if they can get the cost down (which I doubt to happen any time soon).
Although I'm doubtful that this invention would actually save 34.7mW, I was curious to see how much extra battery life this would actually give me.
My Nokia 2630 has a 700mAh 3.7V battery and is rated for 6 hours of talk time. Based on these numbers, the phone consumes 431.7mW. With the power reduction described, this would result in 397mW of power consumption, yielding 6.52 hours of talk time. Thus, an 8.7% increase in battery life.
As I said, I am pretty skeptical of a 34.7mW power savings; research papers often leave out the negative details.
"Even to consider an alternative to the transistor is anathema to many device engineers, and the memristor concept will have a steep slope to climb towards acceptance," wrote Drs James Tour and Tao Heare of Rice University, Houston in an accompanying article in Nature.
Walmart is offering the Toshiba HD-A2 DVD Player today for $98.87 as an in-store special. The cheapest Blu-Ray player they offer is the PS3 which costs $399.00.
You will find that there is an interesting correlation every year between the Research Science Institute participants and the Intel STS winners. RSI is a program that is run in cooperation with MIT where high school students spend their summer before senior year doing research with MIT professors. Intel has even noticed the connection and they have a page on it. Out of the list of top ten Intel STS winners, the following were at RSI in 2006:
Mary Masterman (1)
Dmitry Vaintrob (3)
Megan Blewett (7)
Pretty good for a program that only accepts 50 American students (IIRC). The usual suspects used to show up as Lucent Global Science Scholars as well, but that program was unfortunately ended in 2005.
In my experience, the key to high school and undergraduate research is a teacher/professor that pushes the student far beyond what he or she knows. A high school student just doesn't have enough experience to come up with truly groundbreaking research. However, amazing things can happen when the teacher/professor exposes the student to advanced concepts which their minds need to struggle to understand. The student will often approach the problem in a different way then the researchers in the field, which will sometimes lead to a new and unexpected result.
The main difficulty is that it can be really frustrating and demoralizing for a student to be in a place where they have to struggle to understand a concept. I think a lot of high schoolers and undergrads get discouraged when they have difficulty understanding a concept. Educators just need to keep that in mind and reassure students that the learning process is an important component of doing good research.
My fraternity house at MIT was assigned a Class B IP range. While it was pretty cool to have a Class B IP range, I agree that 65536 IP addresses for 40 people was quite excessive...
...especially because we were using NAT inside the house!
Last year saw a 131 percent jump in digital sales, but overall the industry still saw about a 4 percent decline in revenue.
The article states that industry revenues fell by 4% but doesn't mention the change in profits. With such a jump in digital sales, I would imagine that expenses also dropped significantly. Every CD that is replaced with a digital sale saves the material cost of the CD/packaging, manufacturing equipment, shipping costs, shelf space, and more. This is good for the environment and much less wasteful. It is good for the consumer (assuming no DRM) because we get our product instantly and conveniently, we can preview it, and we can play it on a variety of devices. How do we know that the music industry's profits didn't increase over the last year? Perhaps it is good (profitable) for the music industry as well. Certainly the speed, cost and penetration of distribution becomes a much easier problem with online sales.
Maybe instead of lamenting their decrease in revenue, the music execs could look at the big picture and think about how to increase their profits without screwing their customers. For some reason, they seem insistent on pushing these pieces of plastic, but why not consider a distribution method that's better for everyone involved?
This page lists a bat's hearing range as 2KHz to 110KHz. The human is listed as 64Hz to 23KHz. The 256KHz and 512KHz sampled recordings can fully represent frequencies up to 128KHz and 256KHz respectively, making them indistinguishable to all but the porpoise.
Anyhow, I suspect the GP and GGP are either porpoises or accidentally referring to bitrate instead of sampling frequency.
You're referring to the BrainPort, which is manufactured by Wicab. IEEE Spectrum picked it as one of the "tech losers" of 2007 because it is too expensive ($5000-$6000) for what it is. Basically, a camera connected to a computer connected to a little motor that buzzes your tongue.
The sensing resolution on the tongue is way too low for processing visual data. A dog or cane would be just as useful for a blind person and they wouldn't end up attracting stares. Even with more research, Wicab is not going to be able to develop a tongue-based system that will let a user confidently cross the street. The invention mentioned in the article, however, taps directly into the ganglion cells, which are already optimized to pick up high resolution visual information. With further research, scientists could theoretically approach or even surpass the capabilities of normal human vision. Why not let a user see infrared and UV or have an extremely wide range of vision?
The possibilities here are very intriguing. The study that the article mentioned used a pair of glasses with a camera. But there's no reason why those glasses/cameras would need to be on your face. You could literally set up eyes in the back of your head, a security camera monitored by yourself, or expand your field of vision to be much larger. Also, you could set up a virtual reality sim just by playing back a recorded stream of visual data into your implant.
Of course, the possibilities for mischief with such an implant are also endless. These things would be in high demand for poker games and high school locker rooms and about a billion other things that criminals and perverts will think up.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Apple TV hardware is based on the iPhone
I don't think the author thought this one through. Pretty much the only things they have in common are that they both run operating systems and can play back media.
Apart from that, the iPhone is designed for a portable form factor, low power consumption, relatively low screen resolution, touch sensing, relatively low bandwidth use, and cell phone capabilities. The Apple TV can take up a lot of physical space, use up a lot of power, but it has to produce a high resolution picture and be able to sustain streaming video.
These devices are designed for very different purposes so I would expect them to share very little hardware in common.
I'm not quite sure what you mean. I realize that Apple has issued specifications on which H.264 formats are supported by the Apple TV. Whichever chip is in the Apple TV will be one that supports all of those modes. It'll probably be one of these.
So my question is why does the author "want to know the identity of the Apple TV's H.264 decoder chip". It seems like it doesn't matter to the end user. The author also states "There's a lot to be learned from the identity of THAT chip." That sentence doesn't make sense to me because the specifications are already issued; what more could you want to know about the H.264 decoding capabilities of the device?
The only thing I can think of is that he is anticipating a firmware upgrade to unlock more video modes. I guess it would be mildly interesting if Apple put in a powerful chip that could output 1080p but was crippled to only supporting 480p for the initial release. It would be kind of like those Apple computers that shipped with the Draft-N part but were only advertised as supporting 802.11b. I really don't know if this is what the author means because he doesn't explain it.
My wish list for those hackers, by the way, isn't to know the clock speed or the type of processor or the amount of memory installed. I want to know the identity of the Apple TV's H.264 decoder chip. There's a lot to be learned from the identity of THAT chip.
Why does he care who makes the video decoder chip? I don't see how it fits in with the rest of the article.
There happens to be a 1972 album by Klaus Schulze that is also called Irrlicht which was originally released in 1972 and then re-released in 2006. Perhaps Viacom owns the rights to this album and their search bot mistakenly flagged the video as a copyrighted work.
Verizon has made it their policy to lock down the filesystem of every device they get their greedy mitts on. I agree with your general sentiment, but I'd like to point out that not every Verizon phone is completely locked down. In the past few months, I have purchased both a LG-VX5300 and a Motorola Razr V3m from Verizon. The LG is not locked down at all and I was able to sync phone book, add ringtones, transfer pictures, etc. using Bluetooth and BitPim. The Razr V3m, on the other hand, is completely locked down and can't connect to the PC at all without buying some software from Verizon.
This is pretty ridiculous, since the phone itself allows for a lot of syncing options with a PC but all these features have been disabled in firmware by Verizon. Anyhow, if you want to hack your phone and void your warranty, you can perform something called a SEEM edit which will let you change the file system either by cable or by Bluetooth. Lots of websites will tell you how to do this, since the consumer demand to sync phones with PCs is overwhelming.
That's great that your bank doesn't transmit any sensitive information over the SSL encrypted connection. However, I know that when I had Bank of America, the default login was your ATM card number and PIN. So I think it's safe to say that at least some of their customers regularly login with their ATM card number and PIN. While you might think that it is the fault of these users for not changing their login/pass from the default, I think BofA also should share a lot of the blame for not FORCING their users to use a different login/pass.
Most banks offer a SSL encrypted login page but don't explicitly encourage people to use it. For example, if you go Washington Mutual's homepage, you can login, although the login page is not encrypted. With a little bit of digging, however, you can find the SSL encrypted login page. I assume they make you work for the encrypted page to avoid the overhead of creating an SSL connection with every person that happens to visit the WaMu homepage. I am not a web developer, but I think that if a form posts to an HTTPS site, then the form data is encrypted before being sent. However, there is no way to know whether a form intends to post to an HTTPS site except by digging through the page source. Perhaps this is why a lot of banking sites are now using the two page login sequence.
Gmail has a secure login page as well but you have to explicitly type in https in order to get to it.
These open WiFi networks are really scary. A criminal could park his car next to Starbucks with a laptop and an AP in the trunk. The AP would broadcast an SSID with the name "Starbucks" and forward almost all packets transparently. However, for banking websites, the laptop would form an SSL connection to the bank and forward an unencrypted page to the user. A lot of people wouldn't notice that the connection wasn't secure, especially if all other websites seemed to be working fine. I don't know if a hacker would really want to read your Gmail, but he would be thrilled to get the login info for your bank!
It is too easy to get screwed (and not even realize it) using an open WiFi network. At least if you physically lose your credit card or know that a hacker has gotten your information, you can cancel or freeze your accounts. But if you don't know your account has been compromised, it could be totally drained by the time you realize it. My advice is don't do anything requiring a login on an open WiFi network unless you use a secure VPN tunnel to a machine that you trust. Also, don't keep very much money in your checking/ATM account; invest it or put it in a savings account where it is not as easy to clean you out in one shot.
I switched away from Bank of America partially because they required me to enter my card number and PIN as part of the login process. They claimed it was secure because you entered the two pieces of data on two consecutive web pages. But I might not notice if that second page was not SSL encrypted but was otherwise identical to the real page. WaMu requires an Internet-only login and password. If a hacker somehow got my online banking login info, he/she would not be able to clean me out through an ATM. But if my BofA info had been stolen online, they would have been able to make a fake ATM card and withdraw everything in the account.
Another scary thing that I just realized is that phishers could use the same trick that I mentioned above. They could set up a similar sounding banking website except forming an HTTP connection rather than an HTTPS connection. However, they would forward the data so that it would seem to the end user that everything is fine. They could even create an unsigned certificate and use SSL between the phishing server and the user. Of course, the user would have to accept the certificate, but most people just blindly click "Accept", don't they? I don't know if phishers are using this technique yet, but I would definitely watch out for it in the future.
I've used a TI-89 for 9 years now and it has worked great through high school, college, and grad school. Over the years, I have been using less and less of its functionality, but here's a breakdown of how it's been useful:
High School: Graphing, Trig functions, Matrices, Units conversion, Derivatives/Integrals, Standardized tests, Equation Solver, Arithmetic
College: Trig functions, Derivatives/Integrals, Arithmetic
Grad School: Arithmetic
Job: Arithmetic
The TI-89 will give you a big advantage in high school because it can automatically calculate integrals and derivatives. It is almost unfair to allow such a powerful calculator on standardized tests like the SAT. Having it will really train you to solve problems in a different way, because it can often be faster to use the equation solver or to graph equations rather than the way you are "supposed to" solve the problem.
In high school, all of my engineering and math classes forbade the use of ANY calculator on exams. Homework made sparing use of the calculator. Annoyingly enough, I had to buy a crappy calculator for my chemistry class since they didn't want students storing information in the calculator memory. Anyhow, the TI-89 has survived 9 years of rain, snow, and being dropped about 50 times. Oh yeah, you can also get a cool translucent case for it!
Your explanation sounds like it could be reasonable for an asynchronous circuit but not for standard CMOS. Assuming that the processor is using a balanced clock tree, the clock signal should arrive at the two flops at the same instant, no matter what the propagation delay through the clock tree is. As the chip gets colder, the propagation delay through the datapath decreases until finally a hold time violation occurs. Throughout this entire process, the clocks can be assumed to hit both of those flops simultaneously which is valid for a balanced clock tree.
I did make a mistake in saying that hold time is dependent on clock frequency. This is not true for the reason that I explained above. However, the hold time will eventually be violated as the propagation delay between registers shrinks with decreasing temperature no matter what the clock frequency is.
Slashdot Mirror
What was happening was this: in its pure state of repeating units of one titanium and two oxygen atoms, titanium dioxide is a semiconductor. Heat the material, though, and some of the oxygen is driven out of the structure, leaving electrically charged bubbles that make the material behave like a metal.
The memristor they've created depends on the movement of oxygen atoms to produce the memristor-like electrical behavior. Purely electrical components such as resistors, capacitors, inductors, and transistors only rely on the movement of electrons and holes to produce their electrical behavior. Why is this important? The chemical memristor is an order of magnitude slower than the theoretical electrical equivalent, which no one has been able to invent yet.
I think the memristor they've created is a great piece of technology and will certainly prove useful. However, it is like calling a rechargeable chemical battery a capacitor. While both are useful things, only one is fast enough for high speed electronics design for applications like the RAM they mentioned. On the other hand, a chemical memristor could be a flash memory killer if they can get the cost down (which I doubt to happen any time soon).
Netflix serves the US only. Our equivalent in the UK is lovefilm.com.
The researcher probably put fish into the Vegemite jars.
Although I'm doubtful that this invention would actually save 34.7mW, I was curious to see how much extra battery life this would actually give me.
My Nokia 2630 has a 700mAh 3.7V battery and is rated for 6 hours of talk time. Based on these numbers, the phone consumes 431.7mW. With the power reduction described, this would result in 397mW of power consumption, yielding 6.52 hours of talk time. Thus, an 8.7% increase in battery life.
As I said, I am pretty skeptical of a 34.7mW power savings; research papers often leave out the negative details.
Let me guess...you're a lawyer!
"Even to consider an alternative to the transistor is anathema to many device engineers, and the memristor concept will have a steep slope to climb towards acceptance," wrote Drs James Tour and Tao Heare of Rice University, Houston in an accompanying article in Nature.
Walmart is offering the Toshiba HD-A2 DVD Player today for $98.87 as an in-store special. The cheapest Blu-Ray player they offer is the PS3 which costs $399.00.
You will find that there is an interesting correlation every year between the Research Science Institute participants and the Intel STS winners. RSI is a program that is run in cooperation with MIT where high school students spend their summer before senior year doing research with MIT professors. Intel has even noticed the connection and they have a page on it. Out of the list of top ten Intel STS winners, the following were at RSI in 2006:
Mary Masterman (1)
Dmitry Vaintrob (3)
Megan Blewett (7)
Pretty good for a program that only accepts 50 American students (IIRC). The usual suspects used to show up as Lucent Global Science Scholars as well, but that program was unfortunately ended in 2005.
In my experience, the key to high school and undergraduate research is a teacher/professor that pushes the student far beyond what he or she knows. A high school student just doesn't have enough experience to come up with truly groundbreaking research. However, amazing things can happen when the teacher/professor exposes the student to advanced concepts which their minds need to struggle to understand. The student will often approach the problem in a different way then the researchers in the field, which will sometimes lead to a new and unexpected result.
The main difficulty is that it can be really frustrating and demoralizing for a student to be in a place where they have to struggle to understand a concept. I think a lot of high schoolers and undergrads get discouraged when they have difficulty understanding a concept. Educators just need to keep that in mind and reassure students that the learning process is an important component of doing good research.
My fraternity house at MIT was assigned a Class B IP range. While it was pretty cool to have a Class B IP range, I agree that 65536 IP addresses for 40 people was quite excessive...
...especially because we were using NAT inside the house!
Try opening it up and reseating the hard drive connector. It's only held by a piece of tape and the connection can get flaky. Solved my problem...
Maybe instead of lamenting their decrease in revenue, the music execs could look at the big picture and think about how to increase their profits without screwing their customers. For some reason, they seem insistent on pushing these pieces of plastic, but why not consider a distribution method that's better for everyone involved?
This page lists a bat's hearing range as 2KHz to 110KHz. The human is listed as 64Hz to 23KHz. The 256KHz and 512KHz sampled recordings can fully represent frequencies up to 128KHz and 256KHz respectively, making them indistinguishable to all but the porpoise.
Anyhow, I suspect the GP and GGP are either porpoises or accidentally referring to bitrate instead of sampling frequency.
You're referring to the BrainPort, which is manufactured by Wicab. IEEE Spectrum picked it as one of the "tech losers" of 2007 because it is too expensive ($5000-$6000) for what it is. Basically, a camera connected to a computer connected to a little motor that buzzes your tongue.
The sensing resolution on the tongue is way too low for processing visual data. A dog or cane would be just as useful for a blind person and they wouldn't end up attracting stares. Even with more research, Wicab is not going to be able to develop a tongue-based system that will let a user confidently cross the street. The invention mentioned in the article, however, taps directly into the ganglion cells, which are already optimized to pick up high resolution visual information. With further research, scientists could theoretically approach or even surpass the capabilities of normal human vision. Why not let a user see infrared and UV or have an extremely wide range of vision?
The possibilities here are very intriguing. The study that the article mentioned used a pair of glasses with a camera. But there's no reason why those glasses/cameras would need to be on your face. You could literally set up eyes in the back of your head, a security camera monitored by yourself, or expand your field of vision to be much larger. Also, you could set up a virtual reality sim just by playing back a recorded stream of visual data into your implant.
Of course, the possibilities for mischief with such an implant are also endless. These things would be in high demand for poker games and high school locker rooms and about a billion other things that criminals and perverts will think up.
I don't think the author thought this one through. Pretty much the only things they have in common are that they both run operating systems and can play back media.
Apart from that, the iPhone is designed for a portable form factor, low power consumption, relatively low screen resolution, touch sensing, relatively low bandwidth use, and cell phone capabilities. The Apple TV can take up a lot of physical space, use up a lot of power, but it has to produce a high resolution picture and be able to sustain streaming video.
These devices are designed for very different purposes so I would expect them to share very little hardware in common.
I'm not quite sure what you mean. I realize that Apple has issued specifications on which H.264 formats are supported by the Apple TV. Whichever chip is in the Apple TV will be one that supports all of those modes. It'll probably be one of these.
So my question is why does the author "want to know the identity of the Apple TV's H.264 decoder chip". It seems like it doesn't matter to the end user. The author also states "There's a lot to be learned from the identity of THAT chip." That sentence doesn't make sense to me because the specifications are already issued; what more could you want to know about the H.264 decoding capabilities of the device?
The only thing I can think of is that he is anticipating a firmware upgrade to unlock more video modes. I guess it would be mildly interesting if Apple put in a powerful chip that could output 1080p but was crippled to only supporting 480p for the initial release. It would be kind of like those Apple computers that shipped with the Draft-N part but were only advertised as supporting 802.11b. I really don't know if this is what the author means because he doesn't explain it.
There happens to be a 1972 album by Klaus Schulze that is also called Irrlicht which was originally released in 1972 and then re-released in 2006. Perhaps Viacom owns the rights to this album and their search bot mistakenly flagged the video as a copyrighted work.
Verizon phones are perfect for /.ers! You have to hack them, void your warranty, and risk bricking them in order to get them to work the way you want!
This is pretty ridiculous, since the phone itself allows for a lot of syncing options with a PC but all these features have been disabled in firmware by Verizon. Anyhow, if you want to hack your phone and void your warranty, you can perform something called a SEEM edit which will let you change the file system either by cable or by Bluetooth. Lots of websites will tell you how to do this, since the consumer demand to sync phones with PCs is overwhelming.
That's great that your bank doesn't transmit any sensitive information over the SSL encrypted connection. However, I know that when I had Bank of America, the default login was your ATM card number and PIN. So I think it's safe to say that at least some of their customers regularly login with their ATM card number and PIN. While you might think that it is the fault of these users for not changing their login/pass from the default, I think BofA also should share a lot of the blame for not FORCING their users to use a different login/pass.
Most banks offer a SSL encrypted login page but don't explicitly encourage people to use it. For example, if you go Washington Mutual's homepage, you can login, although the login page is not encrypted. With a little bit of digging, however, you can find the SSL encrypted login page. I assume they make you work for the encrypted page to avoid the overhead of creating an SSL connection with every person that happens to visit the WaMu homepage. I am not a web developer, but I think that if a form posts to an HTTPS site, then the form data is encrypted before being sent. However, there is no way to know whether a form intends to post to an HTTPS site except by digging through the page source. Perhaps this is why a lot of banking sites are now using the two page login sequence.
Gmail has a secure login page as well but you have to explicitly type in https in order to get to it.
These open WiFi networks are really scary. A criminal could park his car next to Starbucks with a laptop and an AP in the trunk. The AP would broadcast an SSID with the name "Starbucks" and forward almost all packets transparently. However, for banking websites, the laptop would form an SSL connection to the bank and forward an unencrypted page to the user. A lot of people wouldn't notice that the connection wasn't secure, especially if all other websites seemed to be working fine. I don't know if a hacker would really want to read your Gmail, but he would be thrilled to get the login info for your bank!
It is too easy to get screwed (and not even realize it) using an open WiFi network. At least if you physically lose your credit card or know that a hacker has gotten your information, you can cancel or freeze your accounts. But if you don't know your account has been compromised, it could be totally drained by the time you realize it. My advice is don't do anything requiring a login on an open WiFi network unless you use a secure VPN tunnel to a machine that you trust. Also, don't keep very much money in your checking/ATM account; invest it or put it in a savings account where it is not as easy to clean you out in one shot.
I switched away from Bank of America partially because they required me to enter my card number and PIN as part of the login process. They claimed it was secure because you entered the two pieces of data on two consecutive web pages. But I might not notice if that second page was not SSL encrypted but was otherwise identical to the real page. WaMu requires an Internet-only login and password. If a hacker somehow got my online banking login info, he/she would not be able to clean me out through an ATM. But if my BofA info had been stolen online, they would have been able to make a fake ATM card and withdraw everything in the account.
Another scary thing that I just realized is that phishers could use the same trick that I mentioned above. They could set up a similar sounding banking website except forming an HTTP connection rather than an HTTPS connection. However, they would forward the data so that it would seem to the end user that everything is fine. They could even create an unsigned certificate and use SSL between the phishing server and the user. Of course, the user would have to accept the certificate, but most people just blindly click "Accept", don't they? I don't know if phishers are using this technique yet, but I would definitely watch out for it in the future.
I've used a TI-89 for 9 years now and it has worked great through high school, college, and grad school. Over the years, I have been using less and less of its functionality, but here's a breakdown of how it's been useful:
High School: Graphing, Trig functions, Matrices, Units conversion, Derivatives/Integrals, Standardized tests, Equation Solver, Arithmetic
College: Trig functions, Derivatives/Integrals, Arithmetic
Grad School: Arithmetic
Job: Arithmetic
The TI-89 will give you a big advantage in high school because it can automatically calculate integrals and derivatives. It is almost unfair to allow such a powerful calculator on standardized tests like the SAT. Having it will really train you to solve problems in a different way, because it can often be faster to use the equation solver or to graph equations rather than the way you are "supposed to" solve the problem.
In high school, all of my engineering and math classes forbade the use of ANY calculator on exams. Homework made sparing use of the calculator. Annoyingly enough, I had to buy a crappy calculator for my chemistry class since they didn't want students storing information in the calculator memory. Anyhow, the TI-89 has survived 9 years of rain, snow, and being dropped about 50 times. Oh yeah, you can also get a cool translucent case for it!
Your explanation sounds like it could be reasonable for an asynchronous circuit but not for standard CMOS. Assuming that the processor is using a balanced clock tree, the clock signal should arrive at the two flops at the same instant, no matter what the propagation delay through the clock tree is. As the chip gets colder, the propagation delay through the datapath decreases until finally a hold time violation occurs. Throughout this entire process, the clocks can be assumed to hit both of those flops simultaneously which is valid for a balanced clock tree.
I did make a mistake in saying that hold time is dependent on clock frequency. This is not true for the reason that I explained above. However, the hold time will eventually be violated as the propagation delay between registers shrinks with decreasing temperature no matter what the clock frequency is.