Yes, sample prep can be a huge pain - ranging from about 1 hour on prep to one on the microscope to litterally dozens of hours prep per hour on microscope. It really depends a lot on what you're looking at.
Beam damage is the other big problem. And that is where you might fall short on something like high-Tc superconductors. IIRC (and my knowledge is well out of date) these were fairly sensitive to beam damage.
EELS is great for low-Z elements. I did most of my work on carbon. But beam damage, etc, I think it would be incredibly challenging to get anything useful at a near-atomic level on YBACUO family. Nevertheless, it could be worth your time to ask someone with more current knowledge than me!
Often the first one of anything is rather expensive to build, then costs come down as we gain more experience and improve production facilities.
True, but the 'often' in this sentence refers to a select sample, which is the sample of economically viable enterprises. If tokomak fusion is economically viable, it is likely to become more cost-efficient over time. However, if the concept is borderline, it could easily get more expensive over time, as has happened for fission reactors. The physics and engineering of fission are well-understood but costs are not coming down for a wide range of reasons. Plasma fusion on the other hand, requires some difficult physics problems to be solved before we even can build a pilot plant to begin to mature the engineering.
A massive problem for fission reactors is decommissioning costs - what to do with a million tonnes of radioactive reactor? The point that fusion protagonists often overlook is that fusion reactors will face a similar problem decommissioning. In both cases fast neutrons create all sorts of difficult and radioactive materials in and around the core that will be hugely difficult to dispose of. If it were my money, I'd invest in solving the problems with decommissioning and disposal of by-products from fission. But that would not be nearly as cool and sexy as trying to find a brand new way to make the same mistakes.
The scientists quoted are top notch. I used to work with David Muller, and you can trust this to be both scientifically sound and bleeding-edge technically.
I was *almost* doing this in the 1990s. I could have showed you a coloured image at atomic resolution with colours based on EELS spectra, but IIRC the contrast was mainly from electron-channeling and therefore bullshit. I'm confident that these guys have eliminated such effects.
The uses of this technology in materials science will be enormous.
Nice idea, but unfortunately patent owners are not required to allow use of their patented ideas. Nor is there any rule that says the only way to take a royalty is a percentage of sales. They could demand a flat amount per user, per cpu (sound familiar?) or whatever. If you don't agree they don't license you to use the 'technology' and you're not allowed to. I can't see that as a win for anyone but competing os's which are licensed or which avoid patent infringement.
If I release my source that removes a massive barrier to entry for new competitors who would otherwise have to spend a lot of time and money developing the equivalent of our in-house systems. Why would I want to encourage new competitors? If we can say we're the only one in our space offering a particular service or feature why would I throw that competitive advantage away? I do understand there's usually a lot more to each offering than just the software - but it can be a major factor.
I believe our code base is way ahead of all our competitors - that is a competitive advantage and there's no way I'm going to give it away.
This logic clearly doesn't apply in many of the situations already discussed in this thread. But I haven't seen any mention of this particular dynamic which applies quite commonly.
Stats for a non-technical site with enough visitors to pick up meaningful statistics on less popular OS:
All Mac variations 3.5% Linux 0.1% Symbian 0.01% Solaris 0.003% HP UX 0.001% BSD 0.0005% RISC OS 0.0002% CPM 0.0001% (still more than 100 hits per month)
I thought this might be interesting as (a) a contrast to stats on OS usage derived from technically-oriented sites, and (b) just interesting to see some of the OS's still out there - I bet there's plenty of/.ers too young to remember CP/M.
Yes, I also used to think hydrogen was the way to go. But battery technology is going to win. One of the main reasons I think this is that there is a viable transition from 'oil economy' to 'electricity economy'. We already have mass-produced petrol-electric hybrids, soon these will be 'plug in'. As the batteries get better over time reliance on the petrol engine will gradually diminish and eventually vanish. The important point is that there is no such gradual transition possible for any of the competing approaches.
Most hard disks have for some years had a thin layer of similar material as the top layer above the magnetically active layer(s). In this application the diamond-like carbon's usefulness comes from a combination of several properties, primarily that it is very hard but at the same time presents a very low-friction surface. Diamond-like carbon comes in many different forms, but can inherit properties from both diamond (hardest material, high refractive index, high electrical resistance, massive thermal conductivity, etc) and graphite (very soft, good lubricant, metallic, non-transparent).
Dimanond like carbon covers a wide range of materials. Most have a disordered or "amorphous" structure in which the carbon atoms do not form - even locally - regular arrays (analogies are usually made to 'frozen liquid' or glass, neither of which are quite right but you get the flavour). These materials become more 'diamond like' as the proportion of carbon atoms which bond tetrahedrally to 4 other carbons (as in diamond) increases compared to the number of carbons that bond to 3 carbons (as in graphite). This is further complicated by the presence of hydrogen which encourages tetrahedral bonding but in other ways can make the material less diamond like (eg softer).
Re:What were they thinking?
on
Inside MySpace.com
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That should have been the very first thing that they tried, as any experienced developer would have known.
I guess the problem is not much overlap between the 'internet startups' developers and the 'corporate megasite' developers. If the developer's whole career has been building and supporting sites where they think a few million page views a month is big, they are going to really struggle when that turns into millions per day or per hour.
Would a caching layer have solved myspace server problems without also implementing SANs for storage and clustering db servers? I've no idea, not having any experience with such large sites, but I sort of doubt it. Would love to see some comments from people who have... anyone?... anyone?
Sorry mate, out of mod points. Only 2 posts on architecture which is what the article was about. Disappointing. Seems everyone on/. would rather argue about whether myspace is 'good' etc than the much more interesting - to me - issues about how to scale up sites, deal with massive growth in a very short space of time, etc.
From TFA: "To test this idea, a [Brazilian] team... took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometers thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then... they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon". Translation: using standard arc welding equipment with the current turned to max, the team zapped the crap out of some bits of silicon which were lying around and took a *very* amateur video, not even bothering to put on sensible footwear...
Having said that, the NewScientist article says the results will appear in the high-prestige journal Physical Review Letters, which gives this work credibility - if true.
From TFA: "Given the cold dry conditions of Mars, life could have evolved on Mars with the key internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, said Schulze-Makuch."
The important point is that a new possibility for the nature of life on Mars has been suggested. If there is any life in this form it would not have been detected by previous experiements. This is interesting because it keeps open the possibility of what would be the greatest discovery ever - life on another planet. The minor point that the testing process could have killed the specific bacteria it sampled is - apart from the obligatory jokes - totally irellevant.
I think the situation you describe is a sales team calling customers you have existing relationships with. That is quite different to telemarketing. If you're respecting the customer's right to opt out of further calls AND you never pretend the call is about anything other than selling something that isn't too bad. We get a lot of calls where they say stuff like 'no I'm not selling anything' or 'I need to speak to the business owner about an important and confidential matter'. I tell you I hate these lying asshats more than I hate spammers.
The other key element of this is the sensor properties. When you only have to have one sensor rather than a large array of pixels you can achieve very different performance. For example a photon-counting photodiode can achieve in some conditions much better performance than a million CCD elements, even though each CCD element gets a million times longer exposure. I suspect this is most likely to be important outside the visible and near-visible where CCD and other silicon array technologies perform so amazingly well. Think of the far infrared for example.
I have a great deal of sympathy with Spamhaus aims and many of their methods, but blacklisting IP ranges as opposed to the actual IPs of known or suspected spammers is actually evil. To me this is equivalent to them sending around some thugs with crowbars to say 'they're real nice servers you got there... it would be a real pity if something happened to those servers... say a little crowbar accident...' Its intimidation pure and simple.
OK I acknowledge that the spammers - quite probably the one running the server mentioned above - are in many ways behaving in even *worse* ways than this. But I really don't like the vigilante approach. I think it brings the anti-spam movement down to the same moral level as the spammers and that in the long run this will be counter-productive.
Have spamhaus pick a day and time to report empty lists from 9am to 11:59am on a Monday. Then lets see what Congress and the FTC says.
I'd be very interested to see what happened. I have gut feeling the answer would be 'nothing'. Some people would get more spam, but the vast majority, I recon, would get about the same amount as usual. My feeling is that anti-spam is nearly as diverse as spam and therefore no single entity has a dramatic effect. Same as closing down a big spammer will not make much difference (actually, perhaps similar to a big drug bust not having much impact on the streets...)
I'd like to be proved wrong because that would mean the anti-spam people are actually having a noticeable impact, but unfortunately even their collective impact is low and so I would not expect to see that much impact from a single service shutting down.
wish I had mod points. Yes, the parent is witty, but more importantly it is spot on. I've seen this before, but it really can't be repeated too many times in my view.
The point of high dynamic range is to get an image where there is much finer information (contrast). If I take a photo with a normal digital camera I have 0-255 greyscales and my monitor has pretty much the same. If I take the same image and collect information on a range 0-4096 then I can get my 0-255 monitor to show sub-sets (an area of the photo with brightness in the range 256-512 for example) or I can just see the whole range with the information averaged out (which will usually give lower noise). A HDR display will show much more of that fine detail and so - in theory, I've never seen one - look more realistic.
To put it in the terms you used, HDR gives you the potential to expand 'dark grey to light grey' out to black to white.
From my point of view the cool thing about high dynamic range is what you can do once you've got HDR images (which is very achievable by combining multiple exposures with a good quality CCD).
If I take a normal photo on a very sunny day I might have some white areas over-exposed (so the contrast is washed out) and shadowed areas under-exposed (no contrast just black). No matter how I zoom in or fiddle with the image range, I can only get a bit more contrast in these areas. If the photo was HDR I could zoom in on the shadowed area, adjust the brightness range and see all the detail, same for the bright areas.
So from a HDR photo of my house during the day I could crop down to the bit showing my window. Then I have the potential to subtract out the reflections on the window and due to the magic of HDR enough contrast left to potentially show what can be seen through the window (just like you could see through it by going up close and blocking reflected light with your hands).
Another thing HDR does for your image is enable you to zoom in a lot more. The amount you can magnify a digital image is not just limited by the pixel resolution. In most cases you can't get anywhere near the actual pixel resolution because noise blurs out low-contrast variations between nearby pixels. To do that thing where you zoom right in on an image like they do on the movies you need heaps of resolution but you also need much larger dynamic range than in a typical digital camera image.
Some applications like multiple cores. CPU intensive tasks on my database servers seem to scale very well across multiple cores. But I think it would all become disk-limited well before 80 cores, though...
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.google.com/dclk/messages
Not that it says much, but from the horse's mouth so to speak.
Sorry doom, just noticed your reply.
Yes, sample prep can be a huge pain - ranging from about 1 hour on prep to one on the microscope to litterally dozens of hours prep per hour on microscope. It really depends a lot on what you're looking at.
Beam damage is the other big problem. And that is where you might fall short on something like high-Tc superconductors. IIRC (and my knowledge is well out of date) these were fairly sensitive to beam damage.
EELS is great for low-Z elements. I did most of my work on carbon. But beam damage, etc, I think it would be incredibly challenging to get anything useful at a near-atomic level on YBACUO family. Nevertheless, it could be worth your time to ask someone with more current knowledge than me!
True, but the 'often' in this sentence refers to a select sample, which is the sample of economically viable enterprises. If tokomak fusion is economically viable, it is likely to become more cost-efficient over time. However, if the concept is borderline, it could easily get more expensive over time, as has happened for fission reactors. The physics and engineering of fission are well-understood but costs are not coming down for a wide range of reasons. Plasma fusion on the other hand, requires some difficult physics problems to be solved before we even can build a pilot plant to begin to mature the engineering.
A massive problem for fission reactors is decommissioning costs - what to do with a million tonnes of radioactive reactor? The point that fusion protagonists often overlook is that fusion reactors will face a similar problem decommissioning. In both cases fast neutrons create all sorts of difficult and radioactive materials in and around the core that will be hugely difficult to dispose of. If it were my money, I'd invest in solving the problems with decommissioning and disposal of by-products from fission. But that would not be nearly as cool and sexy as trying to find a brand new way to make the same mistakes.
Sorry, no. The colours are atom types as inferred from the energy loss spectra - for example in one image lanthanum is coloured green.
The scientists quoted are top notch. I used to work with David Muller, and you can trust this to be both scientifically sound and bleeding-edge technically.
I was *almost* doing this in the 1990s. I could have showed you a coloured image at atomic resolution with colours based on EELS spectra, but IIRC the contrast was mainly from electron-channeling and therefore bullshit. I'm confident that these guys have eliminated such effects.
The uses of this technology in materials science will be enormous.
If you like the article above, you'll get a *lot* more nerdy info from a mate of mine who runs IT for a big project at the south pole:
http://antarctica.kulgun.net/blog/
For example this post on communications at the pole - very readable.
Nice idea, but unfortunately patent owners are not required to allow use of their patented ideas. Nor is there any rule that says the only way to take a royalty is a percentage of sales. They could demand a flat amount per user, per cpu (sound familiar?) or whatever. If you don't agree they don't license you to use the 'technology' and you're not allowed to. I can't see that as a win for anyone but competing os's which are licensed or which avoid patent infringement.
If I release my source that removes a massive barrier to entry for new competitors who would otherwise have to spend a lot of time and money developing the equivalent of our in-house systems. Why would I want to encourage new competitors? If we can say we're the only one in our space offering a particular service or feature why would I throw that competitive advantage away? I do understand there's usually a lot more to each offering than just the software - but it can be a major factor.
I believe our code base is way ahead of all our competitors - that is a competitive advantage and there's no way I'm going to give it away.
This logic clearly doesn't apply in many of the situations already discussed in this thread. But I haven't seen any mention of this particular dynamic which applies quite commonly.
This is why I read /.
Stats for a non-technical site with enough visitors to pick up meaningful statistics on less popular OS:
/.ers too young to remember CP/M.
All Mac variations 3.5%
Linux 0.1%
Symbian 0.01%
Solaris 0.003%
HP UX 0.001%
BSD 0.0005%
RISC OS 0.0002%
CPM 0.0001% (still more than 100 hits per month)
I thought this might be interesting as (a) a contrast to stats on OS usage derived from technically-oriented sites, and (b) just interesting to see some of the OS's still out there - I bet there's plenty of
Yes, I also used to think hydrogen was the way to go. But battery technology is going to win. One of the main reasons I think this is that there is a viable transition from 'oil economy' to 'electricity economy'. We already have mass-produced petrol-electric hybrids, soon these will be 'plug in'. As the batteries get better over time reliance on the petrol engine will gradually diminish and eventually vanish. The important point is that there is no such gradual transition possible for any of the competing approaches.
Trust me, its crap.
Most hard disks have for some years had a thin layer of similar material as the top layer above the magnetically active layer(s). In this application the diamond-like carbon's usefulness comes from a combination of several properties, primarily that it is very hard but at the same time presents a very low-friction surface. Diamond-like carbon comes in many different forms, but can inherit properties from both diamond (hardest material, high refractive index, high electrical resistance, massive thermal conductivity, etc) and graphite (very soft, good lubricant, metallic, non-transparent).
r bon.html
Dimanond like carbon covers a wide range of materials. Most have a disordered or "amorphous" structure in which the carbon atoms do not form - even locally - regular arrays (analogies are usually made to 'frozen liquid' or glass, neither of which are quite right but you get the flavour). These materials become more 'diamond like' as the proportion of carbon atoms which bond tetrahedrally to 4 other carbons (as in diamond) increases compared to the number of carbons that bond to 3 carbons (as in graphite). This is further complicated by the presence of hydrogen which encourages tetrahedral bonding but in other ways can make the material less diamond like (eg softer).
http://www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk/edm/research/carbon/ca
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond-like_carbon
I guess the problem is not much overlap between the 'internet startups' developers and the 'corporate megasite' developers. If the developer's whole career has been building and supporting sites where they think a few million page views a month is big, they are going to really struggle when that turns into millions per day or per hour.
Would a caching layer have solved myspace server problems without also implementing SANs for storage and clustering db servers? I've no idea, not having any experience with such large sites, but I sort of doubt it. Would love to see some comments from people who have... anyone?
Sorry mate, out of mod points. Only 2 posts on architecture which is what the article was about. Disappointing. Seems everyone on /. would rather argue about whether myspace is 'good' etc than the much more interesting - to me - issues about how to scale up sites, deal with massive growth in a very short space of time, etc.
From TFA: "To test this idea, a [Brazilian] team... took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometers thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then... they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon". Translation: using standard arc welding equipment with the current turned to max, the team zapped the crap out of some bits of silicon which were lying around and took a *very* amateur video, not even bothering to put on sensible footwear...
Having said that, the NewScientist article says the results will appear in the high-prestige journal Physical Review Letters, which gives this work credibility - if true.
From TFA: "Given the cold dry conditions of Mars, life could have evolved on Mars with the key internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, said Schulze-Makuch."
The important point is that a new possibility for the nature of life on Mars has been suggested. If there is any life in this form it would not have been detected by previous experiements. This is interesting because it keeps open the possibility of what would be the greatest discovery ever - life on another planet. The minor point that the testing process could have killed the specific bacteria it sampled is - apart from the obligatory jokes - totally irellevant.
Damn, I nearly shouted BINGO first!
I think the situation you describe is a sales team calling customers you have existing relationships with. That is quite different to telemarketing. If you're respecting the customer's right to opt out of further calls AND you never pretend the call is about anything other than selling something that isn't too bad. We get a lot of calls where they say stuff like 'no I'm not selling anything' or 'I need to speak to the business owner about an important and confidential matter'. I tell you I hate these lying asshats more than I hate spammers.
The other key element of this is the sensor properties. When you only have to have one sensor rather than a large array of pixels you can achieve very different performance. For example a photon-counting photodiode can achieve in some conditions much better performance than a million CCD elements, even though each CCD element gets a million times longer exposure. I suspect this is most likely to be important outside the visible and near-visible where CCD and other silicon array technologies perform so amazingly well. Think of the far infrared for example.
I have a great deal of sympathy with Spamhaus aims and many of their methods, but blacklisting IP ranges as opposed to the actual IPs of known or suspected spammers is actually evil. To me this is equivalent to them sending around some thugs with crowbars to say 'they're real nice servers you got there... it would be a real pity if something happened to those servers... say a little crowbar accident...' Its intimidation pure and simple.
OK I acknowledge that the spammers - quite probably the one running the server mentioned above - are in many ways behaving in even *worse* ways than this. But I really don't like the vigilante approach. I think it brings the anti-spam movement down to the same moral level as the spammers and that in the long run this will be counter-productive.
I'd be very interested to see what happened. I have gut feeling the answer would be 'nothing'. Some people would get more spam, but the vast majority, I recon, would get about the same amount as usual. My feeling is that anti-spam is nearly as diverse as spam and therefore no single entity has a dramatic effect. Same as closing down a big spammer will not make much difference (actually, perhaps similar to a big drug bust not having much impact on the streets...)
I'd like to be proved wrong because that would mean the anti-spam people are actually having a noticeable impact, but unfortunately even their collective impact is low and so I would not expect to see that much impact from a single service shutting down.
wish I had mod points. Yes, the parent is witty, but more importantly it is spot on. I've seen this before, but it really can't be repeated too many times in my view.
The point of high dynamic range is to get an image where there is much finer information (contrast). If I take a photo with a normal digital camera I have 0-255 greyscales and my monitor has pretty much the same. If I take the same image and collect information on a range 0-4096 then I can get my 0-255 monitor to show sub-sets (an area of the photo with brightness in the range 256-512 for example) or I can just see the whole range with the information averaged out (which will usually give lower noise). A HDR display will show much more of that fine detail and so - in theory, I've never seen one - look more realistic.
To put it in the terms you used, HDR gives you the potential to expand 'dark grey to light grey' out to black to white.
From my point of view the cool thing about high dynamic range is what you can do once you've got HDR images (which is very achievable by combining multiple exposures with a good quality CCD).
If I take a normal photo on a very sunny day I might have some white areas over-exposed (so the contrast is washed out) and shadowed areas under-exposed (no contrast just black). No matter how I zoom in or fiddle with the image range, I can only get a bit more contrast in these areas. If the photo was HDR I could zoom in on the shadowed area, adjust the brightness range and see all the detail, same for the bright areas.
So from a HDR photo of my house during the day I could crop down to the bit showing my window. Then I have the potential to subtract out the reflections on the window and due to the magic of HDR enough contrast left to potentially show what can be seen through the window (just like you could see through it by going up close and blocking reflected light with your hands).
Another thing HDR does for your image is enable you to zoom in a lot more. The amount you can magnify a digital image is not just limited by the pixel resolution. In most cases you can't get anywhere near the actual pixel resolution because noise blurs out low-contrast variations between nearby pixels. To do that thing where you zoom right in on an image like they do on the movies you need heaps of resolution but you also need much larger dynamic range than in a typical digital camera image.
Some applications like multiple cores. CPU intensive tasks on my database servers seem to scale very well across multiple cores. But I think it would all become disk-limited well before 80 cores, though...