Comment Huzzah! (Score 5, Insightful) 78
Here's to Opportunity and, hopefully, another ten years!
Here's to Opportunity and, hopefully, another ten years!
S.B. is the acronym for a Bachelor of Science, or, rather, Science Bachelor, at institutions like MIT and Harvard.
But I do agree most of the graduating "computer engineers" I've interviewed barely knew how to code and had a few canned routines like bubble-sorting memorized. The ones claiming to be Microsoft certified were even more embarrassing.
I'm not sure you're aware, but, depending upon the school, an S.B. in computer engineering can be much more akin to an S.B. in electrical engineering than one in computer science. To elaborate, some computer engineering programs are part a joint department that focus almost entirely on circuit analysis and design, solid-state theory, (non-)linear/stochastic control, architecture design, electromagnetics, and much more, with very little, if any, emphasis on programming.
Like how in the 70s scientists all over the world proved and knew nuclear energy was causing an ice age but of course we all know how good their factual evidence turned out to be.
Or like how you're wrong about that, since there was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that Earth was headed into an ice age:
T. C. Peterson, W. M. Connolley, and J. Feck, "The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 89: 1325-1337, 2008.
Stuff looks promising indeed, it's just sad that so many people refuse to even consider the possibilities.
I will admit that there are plenty of possibilities, as there are with every embedded platform/microcontroller that I have either designed or utilized in my research over the years. However, the Raspberry Pi, while nice for some, is nothing about which people should be constantly harping week after week, especially on Slashdot.
Including a processor on the backside of the PaperTab wouldn't likely be a huge problem, as there are multiple research groups investigating ultralow-power, flexible, organic electronics, e.g.,
G. H. Gelinck, et al., "Flexible active matrix displays and shift registers based on solution-processed organic transistors", Nature Mater., 3: 106, 2004
K. Nomura, et al., "Room-temperature fabrication of transparent flexible thin-film transistors using amorphous oxide semiconductors", Nature, 432: 488-492, 2004
B. Yoo, et al., "High-performance solution-deposited n-channel organic transistors and their complementary circuits", Adv. Mater., 19: 4028, 2007
H. Klauk, et al., "Ultralow-power organic complementary circuits", Nature, 445: 745, 2007
W. Xiong, et al., "A 3-V, 6-bit C-2C digital-to-analog converter using complementary organic thin-film transistors on glass", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 45: 1380-1388, 2010
H. Marien, et al., "A fully integrated delta sigma ADC in organic thin-film transistor technology on flexible plastic foil", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 46: 276-284, 2011
K. Myny, et al., "Unipolar organic transistor circuits made robust by dual-gate technology", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 46: 1223-1230, 2011
K. Myny, et al., "An 8-bit, 40-instructions-per-second organic microprocessor on plastic foil", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 47: 284-291, 2012
Beyond that, there are already flexible batteries on the market.
I would have loved this when I was growing up, considering that programmable robots at that time were limited to industry and research labs at universities.
In any event, the asking price seems a bit too high for what LEGO are offering and with what's now available today; touching on just one facet, after a cursory glance on Mouser/DigiKey, PCB manufacturing companies, and 3D printing shops, the so-called intelligent brick, along with its circuitry innards, could easily be fabricated on a one-off basis for under $75-100 USD. For $350 USD, they should have at least thrown in a decent CMOS camera and more servos.
Oh it's not just you: although, I can agree with some of what holophrastic is imparting, his behavior makes him out to be an incredibly picayune individual.
Fucking apologist. Don't you get it? I wouldn't touch an iPad with a fucking barge pole. I don't want to be part of your fucking ecosystem.
By the same token, you are also an apologist. However, unlike the poster you berate, who came off as pragmatic, you sound like a petulant child.
I think my professional millionaire job will be safe for the foreseeable future, except in those countries with high inflation rate or with a currency with an exchange rate that is not on near-equal footing with either the US dollar, British pound sterling, or the Euro.
Speaking as an academic at one of the schools you listed, it's not worth my time to edit Wikipedia entries, as I get no credit for my contributions that go toward advancing my career, let alone the state of the art, unless I spend an inordinate amount of time to make a noticeable impact. Instead, I'm better off sharing my knowledge in a less volatile yet still easily-accessible medium, such as a freely available e-book that also offers a printed version through a publisher, e.g., one akin to Jon Dattorro's excellent treatise on convex optimization and Euclidean distance geometry (https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dattorro/mybook.html); in this instance, I not only have something tangible that I can list when it comes time for a tenure review, but can also be assured that key concepts won't be wiped away by some ignorant, but perhaps well-meaning, editor.
[...] This is a full scan of the original pages, including illustrations. It's looking pretty good.
Some of the pages are garbled, or, at the very least, a tad difficult to parse, due to the ensuing or previous page(s) bleeding through to the others during the scanning process. (Granted, this phenomena gave me an excellent idea for an IEEE CVPR/TPAMI paper about a variational, non-local image inpainting scheme for fixing such things in scanned, double-sided documents.)
I find it incredibly humorous that you have the gall to refer to us as "drones" yet can't even manage to establish the veracity of the very list you mindlessly parrot.
For starters, First Solar has neither filed for bankruptcy nor is failing; granted, they did have a rather nasty Q1 2012, as they lost $449.4M (USD), which they made up for in Q2 2012, by posting a profit of $111M (USD), and likely will do the same in Q3, given their current stock price. To find out more about their history, you can peruse their official quarterly financial results that are made available to investors:
(Q2 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=587754&filekey=43642762-a08b-47d3-bc57-62ee73d6b300&filename=Q2_2012_Web_Schedule_final.pdf
(Q1 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=566130&filekey=eb2e729f-983d-466b-bf42-d09461c40ddd&filename=Q1_2012_Web_Schedule_Final_IR.pdf
(Q4 2011) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=546601&filekey=6975fcbc-0591-43f3-8d96-89e3e3ed2a14&filename=Q4_2011_Web_Schedule_Final.pdf
(Q3 2011) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=514964&filekey=d9532d11-f0d6-43b8-8aec-2af1d4f57991&filename=Q3_2011_Web_Schedule_Template_FINAL.pdf
(Q2 2011) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=489149&filekey=7d51e913-c933-40b8-8cf1-57cf28583eba&filename=Key_Quarterly_Financial_Data.pdf
and the 2012 reports that they sent to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC):
(August 1, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-33&cik=1274494
(Jun 29, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-38&cik=1274494
(May 24, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-27&cik=1274494
(April 17, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1193125-12-165498&cik=1274494
(March 19, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-19&cik=1274494
(February 28, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-11&cik=1274494
As well, SunPower is has neither filed for bankruptcy nor is failing, as evidenced by their official annual financial reports:
(2011) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=555007&filekey=2DC44492-5900-4B57-BACA-84AC364FEE34&filename=SunPower_2011_Annual_Report_FINAL.pdf
(2010) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=453648&filekey=9577388E-424A-41E2-BE32-B7BF46C2BBA1&filename=2010AR.pdf
(2009) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=361273&filekey=005B0CA2-05C3-48E9-8BE0-268B84CEB2BD&filename=SunPower_BMK.pdf
(2007) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=182669&filekey=D290981E-816A-4179-AAFF-FDE71CC3A8AD&filename=2007AnnualReport.pdf
(2006) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=90636&filekey=7E859B79-FC73-4823-8071-C114A759E1F4&filename=14790-001.pdf
(2005) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=35108&filekey=0CD02714-FF13-406A-BFC6-1E9700F0DA05&filename=2005AnnualReport.pdf
and their US SEC reports for 2012:
(October 16, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=867773-12-51&cik=867773
(August 31, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=867773-12-46&cik=867773
(August 8, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=1193125-12-344048&cik=867773
(May 3, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=1193125-12-208521&cik=867773
(February 16, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=1193125-12-65347&cik=867773
Similar claims can be made about some of the other companies, e.g., Johnson Controls, according to their financial information on the SEC's website (http://www.sec.gov/).
Also, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is a US Government research lab, not a private or public company, that is funded by the US Department of Energy.
Some individuals may not understand the intermediate steps if they aren't intimately familiar with the field, e.g., someone new to probabilistic models may not know why you can rewrite Sethuraman's sum-based, stick-breaking construction of the two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet/Pitman-Yor process or the one-parameter Dirichlet processes in a multinomial-based, stick-breaking form. Nevertheless, that does not necessarily mean that the context or contributions of your work won't be unknown to others.
To elaborate, I recently wrote a paper wherein I used copious amounts of differential geometry to recast a high-level machine-vision methodology in a more general, conducive fashion, then proceeded to extend and use the tools of the field to massage that scheme so that its algorithmic implementation would have a much lower computational complexity. Although the paper was sent to the top-tier computer vision/pattern analysis journal, which has been host to a few articles that make use of differential geometry, I doubt that most of the readers will care about the pages of theorems and derivations, as most are not mathematicians, and, instead, just home in on the two important, end-product equations I list, either code them up or download my code, and find that they produce the same outputs but with the new version requiring fewer calculations; further, In this case, while they may not fully grasp how I moved from one representation to the other, they can at least see that the end result is bonafide and incorporate my scheme in their work.
You're correct that it would be quite expensive, considering that just a 28nm mask alone runs around $2.8M to $3M (USD) these days. However, with around $6M (USD) in hand, I'd be able to get some investors on board to match or even triple that amount, which would give me a better amount of wiggle room.
Don't panic.
