That's not how optics work. You need to image what you want to see onto your detector.
To test this: remove the lens from your DSLR and take a photo. You'll get nothing but blur.
Yeah I was wondering about that. Some of the other replies cleared that up earlier.
I still imagine that investing in those sensors would have a great payoff.
Even with the most sensitive detector possible, you still need a lens to focus the image. Otherwise you've just got a very fancy flatbed scanner, and everything further away than a couple of inches will be a useless blur.
The lens can be virtual, like in synthetic aperture systems, but building something like that for optical wavelengths with literally *no* physical lenses involved (whether those lenses are glass, mirrors, or whatever) on a football-field-sized scale would be challenging at best. Each photosite on each of your supercooled sensors would need to capture phase information as well as amplitude. The system would also have to store timestamps for each pixel with atomic clock-level accuracy in order to use the phase information. I think some day, the human race will build something like that, but it's probably going to be awhile.
Ah. Yeah, I was wondering about optics.
Well, it would still allow much smaller mirrors to be used, right? So something like a (relatively cheap) 30" mirror with an S-CAM sensor would be able to outperform a much larger telescope with a CCD?
Even if there are optics involved, making the sensor 18000 times more sensitive seems like it would be immensely more helpful than just making bigger optics.
The real future of telescopes will have no mirrors.
I'm not sure why no one has made a big deal out of this, but superconducting cameras have the potential to completely replace mirrors in telescopes, making them more robust and essentially eliminating complex alignment.
Why do I say this? Well, I reasoned this out myself, so maybe I'm wrong, but basically superconducting cameras are able to register every photon that sees them, sending off ~18000 electrons per photon hit. CCDs, on the other hand, send off 1 electron for every photon hit (I read that a while ago but I think those are the numbers).
Since CCD sensors are so much less sensitive, we use massive mirrors to magnify the amount of light hitting the sensor.
Well, it seems to me that if we had high resolution functional S-CAM sensors, we wouldn't need mirrors. We could just point them straight to the sky, and even if 18000 times fewer photons hit them, they'd have roughly the same or better output as a CCD.
Or, you could just lay out a giant array of S-CAM pixels, say, 10 meters in diameter. Then you'd basically have a ten meter telescope without the mirrors, *and* it would be vastly more sensitive.
I understand that using superconductors is currently an enormous pain in the ass, and I'm not expecting us to find a room-temp one any time soon, but even with the complexities of keeping the sensor cool, wouldn't that have enough advantages over a traditional system that it might be worth it? Maybe not yet, as the sensors currently have to be 0.3K, which seems to me to make it extremely challenging. But if we could make them with something warmer - say, liquid nitrogen cooled - then they might be viable.
Is there any flaw in my basic reasoning? I mean, maybe it would be more expensive than I imagine, but I feel like we should be looking into it. Imagine a football-field sized array of S-CAM sensors. I feel like we could pretty much see license plates on alien worlds at that point. And it wouldn't be nearly as fragile as something with a mirror.
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=36685
That is the third generation superconducting camera sensor that the ESA is working on. It only has 120 pixels, but I really believe we should be putting way more money into researching these...
-Taylor
Did anyone notice that the pic of Emil Protalinski (the guy whose ZDNet article was linked in the OP) looks like it could be the mug shot of the criminal in question? Not a good pic...
Yeah, I noticed this. Not a good coincidence for the guy, heh. He really should get a picture that doesn't look like it was taken in a basement.
which is why the Android model of open source is fundamentally broken, imho. But then it was never about the customer.
This is such a stupid fucking argument.
"Oh my god they released in December and it takes months for manufacturers to port to their devices! Android is broken!"
You don't realize it, but this is the right way to do it. How would you expect it to work?
Like iOS?
Apple says "oh hey new version of iOS is out and you can instantly get it for any iOS phone that's been out the past 2 or 3 years with a simple update"
Takes months for manufacturers, maybe, if they actually were trying. They could have been experimenting with the beta version of Gingerbread and have it working by the time it was officially released. Hell what about all those Android phones still on 2.1, or worse, 1.6?
Wow, you really don't get it. Apple tests iOS with every device they release it for, because, uh, there's only like 10 of them, and they created them all.
And actually, I checked and what you said isn't even fucking true. iOS 4 came out last summer for phones and ipod touches, but not until fall for iPads. And it wasn't compatible with anything made before the iPhone 3GS - so, half of the iPhone models got left behind. So you're full of shit.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/iphone-os-4-0-unveiled-shipping-this-summer/
And yes, the nice thing about apple controlling every piece of hardware is that they can release for many devices at once, but that's not how Android works and I hardly consider that broken. If you want to work with multiple manufacturers using open source code, you have to accept that not everyone will jump on a release immediately. I'd much rather have many manufacturers than one, so like I said, I hardly consider it broken.
-Taylor
which is why the Android model of open source is fundamentally broken, imho. But then it was never about the customer.
This is such a stupid fucking argument.
"Oh my god they released in December and it takes months for manufacturers to port to their devices! Android is broken!"
You don't realize it, but this is the right way to do it. How would you expect it to work? Embedded development takes time, there's no way to avoid that. Even on full PCs there is a delay. Take Windows - they come out with new releases only once in many years, so they can easily delay the release 6 months to allow manufacturers to port their drivers - and thats what they do. Microsoft has a Release Candidate of windows ready many months before they "release", but no one complains about that. If google told us "Yup, the next version is done, so we're releasing to manufacturers and you'll see it in 6 months." people would get just as upset. And it wouldn't make sense to do - some people port faster and can use the new features sooner - so just release all the source and let the OEMs sort it out.
You could look at Ubuntu - it releases all at once to everything - but then, thats where computers differ from phones. Computers have enough extra space and resources that PC operating systems like Windows and Ubuntu just include drivers for every piece of hardware they can - windows has many hundreds of megabytes of *extra* stuff on the disk just to make sure whatever network card you happen to have will work. Phones don't have all that extra space. Computers are also all built with certain things being constant. Phones have to be highly optimized though, so everything about them varies. The notification lights are hooked up to different pins on the microcontroller, different features on a bluetooth chip are enabled depending on space requirements, etc. All the code for every component has to be ported to exactly how that device is laid out. So far NO ONE has come up with a good solution for building a mobile phone OS that can be universally upgraded without issue. Thats something google is trying to do with Android, but thats one hell of an undertaking. They say Gingerbread includes some features that will help, but dude, this stuff is all new, it takes time.
So chill out and think about what you say.
-Taylor
But it's only on the Nexus S. They were going to release it for the Nexus One and others, but those plans seem to be on hold. I'm using 2.3 on my N1 via the nightly Cyanogen builds but it's definitely got a bunch of quirks in it still. I'm betting Google is going to just release 2.4 as their next "standard" release that's widely distributed.
While I also am using CM7 on my N1 and wish Google would release a damn stable version already, I imagine they're pretty busy. I'd *much* rather they spend all of their energy on making Honeycomb kick ass than releasing Gingerbread for more phones. Gingerbread is a nice update, but Honeycomb tablets will be shipping soon (supposedly) and they really want to ship them with the best possible software they can. Not only am I much more interested in a honeycomb tablet than stable Gingerbread on my phone, I also want regular people to choose honeycomb over the ipad.
Also, the Nexus one (and maybe the older dev phones) and the only ones google has any ability to "release" updates for. For the rest of the phones out there, its up to the manufacturer. Clearly cyanogen/koush et al have been working their asses off and they aren't done, I don't see any reason why the manufacturers would be any farther.
-Taylor
Just scroll down to the bottom. The answer is always there.
Jesus, I didn't know that!
I still wish they would die, I hate what they do. They're not trying to be helpful first and make money second, its the other way around with them. Or being helpful might be 3rd or 4th on their list.
This order sounds right.
For those of us who know what we're doing, sure this is offensive.
For those who decide that spending 99cents on Justin Bieber wall papers that also snoop on their private conversations, that's a different story.
See, no vision, this is the problem in america. If you really want to snoop people's private conversation, you make the wallpaper free!
I don't get it: everyone bashed Apple when its iPhone lacked certain features (multitasking, cut and paste, enterprise security) but not one peep when Android or Windows Mobile lacks these very same features.
What? Android *does* have excellent multitasking, as well as decent cut and paste. I'm not sure about enterprise security, but I think people have blasted Android for not having it, if it doesn't.
What the fuck are you talking about?
A majority of academics are in the pursuit of knowledge and furthering their respective fields. When you are working for a company a majority of the time you are doing something that does not further the field of science and knowledge.
Agreed. Even if you *were* doing useful research, you likely would not be allowed to share it, ever. You have patents and copyright terms and by the end of them its not like companies just open up their records. They'd stay hidden forever. Patents give some insight but not all.
-Taylor
Perhaps some of the knowledge broadcast has a negative value, so the absolute value of the knowledge broadcast is high, but the net information distributed is much smaller?
Carl Sagan addressed this in Cosmos. He said there was more data broadcast in TV programs every day than the combined written works of all of history.
But, as he said, "not all bits have equal value."
A quote I had laser engraved on the back of my Nexus One.
-Taylor
The US accounts for 46% of all world military spending. China, for comparison, accounts for 6% (assuming the numbers are accurate).
Check out this graph:
http://cdn1.globalissues.org/i/military/10/country-distribution-2009.png
From
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
Our military spending is INSANE.
Another chart (I found these all via google. I cannot vouch for their accuracy. But they seem legit) shows the proportion of spending for various things.
http://www.federalbudget.com/
All this stuff shows me is that we could cut every other program in *half* excluding the last 4, and we'd barely make a dent.
People want to cut science and research and all the things that will make our future better, but we keep throwing away all our money on all this other crap!
People want to cut "pork" in these little programs that amount to 0.1% of our budget, but no one is willing to tackle the big ones. I'm so fucking sick of it.
-Taylor
You forget about this: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/01/19/2322215/Motorola-Sticks-To-Guns-On-Locking-Down-Android
Think again - Motorola said that post was basically BS, and they are working to possibly make installing custom roms easier.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/21/motorola-ready-to-make-sweet-love-to-rom-devs-and-rooters/
-Taylor
What about all the people that "just need a computer" so they can go on Facebook or whatever?
I suspect that this is where the tablet market will find its biggest demographic...
Well, I agree with that. But we're not there yet (soon!). I would still appreciate it if PC makers didn't put crapware on machines in the meantime. For my mom's sake. Though I'll probably get her an iPad once the next one comes out. After I get myself a Xoom.
-Taylor
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.
