Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Advances in the investigation of the physical universe we live in.
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Enki
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by Enki »

Sounds like a good way to shackle innovation.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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Enki wrote:Sounds like a good way to shackle innovation.
NYT | The Patent, Used as a Sword
Google and Apple Spent More On Patents Than R&D Last Year
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by HAL9000 »

Typhoon wrote:Former US Register of Copyright: New Technology Should Be Presumed Illegal Until US Congress Says Otherwise
Whenever possible, when the law is ambiguous or silent on the issue at bar, the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established. That is especially so if that technology poses grave dangers to the exclusive rights that Congress has given copyright owners. Commercial exploiters of new technologies should be required to convince Congress to sanction a new delivery system and/or exempt it from copyright liability. That is what Congress intended.

What I am going to say is a digression, it is not the same topic, but still relevant: Consider the Food and Drug Administration. It turns out that any new drug must undergo very rigorous testing until it is marketed, to prove that its toxicity is within acceptable limits. These specific toxicity limits are determined by the government.

Similarly, as science becomes more advanced, much more exotic materials will be invented, and already many of the electronic components are very toxic if they are broken down and mixed with drinking water. Some of the solar panels contain arsenic, but the company says that these toxic materials are properly sealed and won't leak even if there is rain on the roof...

So far there is only very little brain cancer caused by cell phones, but in the future much more exotic electromagnetic devices will be invented, and more scrutiny will be needed. For instance, there are already plans to develop new technologies for transmitting electricity to electric cars on highways, without using wires, but nobody knows how this will affect people.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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HAL9000 wrote: . . .

So far there is only very little brain cancer caused by cell phones, but in the future much more exotic electromagnetic devices will be invented, and more scrutiny will be needed. For instance, there are already plans to develop new technologies for transmitting electricity to electric cars on highways, without using wires, but nobody knows how this will affect people.
Please continue this topic here
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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Azrael wrote:Has there been much progress with improving software lockout mitigation in recent years?

(Edit: Perhaps this?)

That would seem to be a major issue with increasing performance by adding more CPU cores.
You're dead right. There are some new tools out there to help, however, such as this:
Multithreading with ØMQ

ØMQ is perhaps the nicest way ever to write multithreaded (MT) applications. Whereas as ØMQ sockets require some readjustment if you are used to traditional sockets, ØMQ multithreading will take everything you know about writing MT applications, throw it into a heap in the garden, pour gasoline over it, and set it alight. It's a rare book that deserves burning, but most books on concurrent programming do.

To make utterly perfect MT programs (and I mean that literally) we don't need mutexes, locks, or any other form of inter-thread communication except messages sent across ØMQ sockets.

By "perfect" MT programs I mean code that's easy to write and understand, that works with one design language in any programming language, and on any operating system, and that scales across any number of CPUs with zero wait states and no point of diminishing returns.

If you've spent years learning tricks to make your MT code work at all, let alone rapidly, with locks and semaphores and critical sections, you will be disgusted when you realize it was all for nothing. If there's one lesson we've learned from 30+ years of concurrent programming it is: just don't share state. It's like two drunkards trying to share a beer. It doesn't matter if they're good buddies. Sooner or later they're going to get into a fight. And the more drunkards you add to the table, the more they fight each other over the beer. The tragic majority of MT applications look like drunken bar fights.

The list of weird problems that you need to fight as you write classic shared-state MT code would be hilarious if it didn't translate directly into stress and risk, as code that seems to work suddenly fails under pressure. Here is a list of "11 Likely Problems In Your Multithreaded Code" from a large firm with world-beating experience in buggy code: forgotten synchronization, incorrect granularity, read and write tearing, lock-free reordering, lock convoys, two-step dance, and priority inversion.

Yeah, we also counted seven, not eleven. That's not the point though. The point is, do you really want that code running the power grid or stock market to start getting two-step lock convoys at 3pm on a busy Thursday? Who cares what the terms actually mean. This is not what turned us on to programming, fighting ever more complex side-effects with ever more complex hacks.

Some widely used models, despite being the basis for entire industries, are fundamentally broken, and shared state concurrency is one of them. Code that wants to scale without limit does it like the Internet does, by sending messages and sharing nothing except a common contempt for broken programming models.
http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#Multi ... ng-with-MQ

which take the terror and pain down a notch or two. Really though, it's more than just a mindset shift by programmers that's required to take advantage of parallel processing. Selling the idea of a massive MT / MP rewrite of creaking software to management with all the risk, complexity and expense that that entails when the company could just throw another dozen servers at the problem for a fraction of the cost and get by is tricky at best.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by Typhoon »

Sounds interesting.

Have you used ØMQ?
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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It is! I'm evaluating it for a project at work - a unified logging framework to allow my employer to collect data from the wacky races suite of applications that forms their product (written in C, C++, VB (ffs), VB.net, C#, Python and Java) into some sort of coherent central database. It's ideally suited for it, given that the software runs on different machines, so many languages and processes are involved and the log entries are in so many formats.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by Azrael »

Wright's Law edges out Moore's Law in predicting technology development.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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Sparky wrote:It is! I'm evaluating it for a project at work - a unified logging framework to allow my employer to collect data from the wacky races suite of applications that forms their product (written in C, C++, VB (ffs), VB.net, C#, Python and Java) into some sort of coherent central database. It's ideally suited for it, given that the software runs on different machines, so many languages and processes are involved and the log entries are in so many formats.
Any update on your evaluation?
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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RW | Let's All Shed Tears For The Crappy Startups That Can't Raise Any More Money
The great lie of these last few years is that anyone can be a tech entrepreneur. You don't need to know electrical engineering or computer science. You don't need to know anything about business. You just need a positive outlook and an ability to speak confidently while saying things that make little or no sense.

What really offends is that smart young people have been conned into thinking that starting a company is akin to buying a lottery ticket or rolling dice at Las Vegas -- the odds are long but you never know, you might get lucky and strike it rich. So make something up, throw it out there, and see what happens. "Spray and pray," it's called.

Meanwhile our country is facing a crisis because we have a shortage of students in STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math. Every big company in Silicon Valley is starved for talent. And there is an entire generation of young people who, instead of studying those hard subjects, would rather slap together the fourteenth version of a peer-to-peer car sharing service or alternative taxi service. Because it's easy and you might get rich quick.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by noddy »

Typhoon wrote:RW | Let's All Shed Tears For The Crappy Startups That Can't Raise Any More Money
The great lie of these last few years is that anyone can be a tech entrepreneur. You don't need to know electrical engineering or computer science. You don't need to know anything about business. You just need a positive outlook and an ability to speak confidently while saying things that make little or no sense.

What really offends is that smart young people have been conned into thinking that starting a company is akin to buying a lottery ticket or rolling dice at Las Vegas -- the odds are long but you never know, you might get lucky and strike it rich. So make something up, throw it out there, and see what happens. "Spray and pray," it's called.

Meanwhile our country is facing a crisis because we have a shortage of students in STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math. Every big company in Silicon Valley is starved for talent. And there is an entire generation of young people who, instead of studying those hard subjects, would rather slap together the fourteenth version of a peer-to-peer car sharing service or alternative taxi service. Because it's easy and you might get rich quick.
very true but twitter sits as a great big headf*ck temptation to those who try and make new and exciting things :)

who would have thought in this multimedia mega machine day and age that a brain dead messaging system limited to less text than an old sms would have been the killer idea!
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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noddy wrote:
Typhoon wrote:RW | Let's All Shed Tears For The Crappy Startups That Can't Raise Any More Money
The great lie of these last few years is that anyone can be a tech entrepreneur. You don't need to know electrical engineering or computer science. You don't need to know anything about business. You just need a positive outlook and an ability to speak confidently while saying things that make little or no sense.

What really offends is that smart young people have been conned into thinking that starting a company is akin to buying a lottery ticket or rolling dice at Las Vegas -- the odds are long but you never know, you might get lucky and strike it rich. So make something up, throw it out there, and see what happens. "Spray and pray," it's called.

Meanwhile our country is facing a crisis because we have a shortage of students in STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math. Every big company in Silicon Valley is starved for talent. And there is an entire generation of young people who, instead of studying those hard subjects, would rather slap together the fourteenth version of a peer-to-peer car sharing service or alternative taxi service. Because it's easy and you might get rich quick.
very true but twitter sits as a great big headf*ck temptation to those who try and make new and exciting things :)

who would have thought in this multimedia mega machine day and age that a brain dead messaging system limited to less text than an old sms would have been the killer idea!
Indeed. Although as a photographer I would have thought that you would have picked the example of Instagram . . .
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by noddy »

aah yes, the twitter of photography... i seem to forget about it everytime someone reminds me of it.

its only feature seems to be collecting all the things i dont like in one easy to avoid place.

what was it again ? :P
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by noddy »

actually - instagram and camera phones are having an amazing, if not short term, effect on photography and its never been a better time to be a photophile.

the death of the point n shoot market has required the real cameras to be much better than the camera phones to remain viable - the bang for the buck on a $1000 camera is mind blowing now and the innovations and improvements are coming thick and fast, sony in particular is doing great things.

longer term many are going to go broke and they will possibly end up expensive enthusiast items again - but right here right now, the battle is consumer heaven, both my canon slr and my sony nex cost nothing in relation to the image quality they produce when you compare it to a few years ago and the lenses just keep getting better and better as the optical designs get refined and the factories that produce them also.

glad i got all this before my new found money problems - if im going to be out of work atleast ill have the hobby time and gear to enjoy it!
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by Enki »

Typhoon wrote:RW | Let's All Shed Tears For The Crappy Startups That Can't Raise Any More Money
The great lie of these last few years is that anyone can be a tech entrepreneur. You don't need to know electrical engineering or computer science. You don't need to know anything about business. You just need a positive outlook and an ability to speak confidently while saying things that make little or no sense.

What really offends is that smart young people have been conned into thinking that starting a company is akin to buying a lottery ticket or rolling dice at Las Vegas -- the odds are long but you never know, you might get lucky and strike it rich. So make something up, throw it out there, and see what happens. "Spray and pray," it's called.

Meanwhile our country is facing a crisis because we have a shortage of students in STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math. Every big company in Silicon Valley is starved for talent. And there is an entire generation of young people who, instead of studying those hard subjects, would rather slap together the fourteenth version of a peer-to-peer car sharing service or alternative taxi service. Because it's easy and you might get rich quick.

:roll:

Because people who grow up to be salesmen were natural engineers, they just didn't know it.

:roll:
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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noddy wrote: who would have thought in this multimedia mega machine day and age that a brain dead messaging system limited to less text than an old sms would have been the killer idea!
Twitter is actually a very smart messaging system. The hashtag thing is simple but brilliant. It allows for pretty complex forms of communication.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by noddy »

Enki wrote:
noddy wrote: who would have thought in this multimedia mega machine day and age that a brain dead messaging system limited to less text than an old sms would have been the killer idea!
Twitter is actually a very smart messaging system. The hashtag thing is simple but brilliant. It allows for pretty complex forms of communication.
aye - cross conversations.

the article was on engineering style technological innovation being ignored in favour of simple little tools that might hit paydirt.

their are books to be written on the interplay between new features and making those features accessable to the masses .. its a never ending game.

we have had tagging and messaging with metadata for ages.. yet it was twitter that struck gold.

or more simply put - linux console guys dont tend to get why apple is so popular, they dont grok the simple because they dont need it simple.. not a knock of either group, just a fact of life.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by noddy »

same argument for instagram aswell.. plenty of anti anti instagram rants about bringing photography to the masses.

dont have to learn to balance the exposure interplay between aperture/shutter and how the depth of field and rendering changes with different apertures and distances, nor how shutter speeds affect movement capture and the various different looks all that gives and tweeking all those to perfect the picture to your own tastes.

dont have to learn photoshop and other postprocessing tools and create your own vision of the colour models etc.

point n click n choose a prebuilt filter, anyone can do it.. painting by numbers.

all good for those that like it and/or cant tell the difference, usually hideously ugly and boring to me :)
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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noddy wrote:actually - instagram and camera phones are having an amazing, if not short term, effect on photography and its never been a better time to be a photophile.

the death of the point n shoot market has required the real cameras to be much better than the camera phones to remain viable - the bang for the buck on a $1000 camera is mind blowing now and the innovations and improvements are coming thick and fast, sony in particular is doing great things.

longer term many are going to go broke and they will possibly end up expensive enthusiast items again - but right here right now, the battle is consumer heaven, both my canon slr and my sony nex cost nothing in relation to the image quality they produce when you compare it to a few years ago and the lenses just keep getting better and better as the optical designs get refined and the factories that produce them also.

glad i got all this before my new found money problems - if im going to be out of work atleast ill have the hobby time and gear to enjoy it!
Very cool.

May consider taking up photography as a hobby.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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HBR | How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation
If there's been one topic that has entirely dominated the post-election landscape, it's the fiscal cliff. Will taxes be raised? Which programs will be cut? Who will blink first in negotiations? For all the talk of the fiscal cliff, however, I believe the US is facing a much more serious problem, one that has simply not been talked about at all: corruption. But this isn't the overt, "bartering of government favors in return for private kickbacks" corruption. Instead, this type of corruption has actually been legalized. And it is strangling both US competitiveness, and the ability for US firms to innovate.

The corruption to which I am referring is the phenomenon of money in politics.

Lawrence Lessig's Republic, Lost, details many of the distortions that occur as a result of all the money sloshing around in the political system: how elected representatives are being forced to spend an ever-increasing amount of their time chasing donors for funds, for example, as opposed to chasing citizens for votes. Former congressman and CIA director Leon Panetta described it as "legalized bribery"; something which has just "become part of the culture of how this place operates."

But of all the negative impacts this phenomenon has had, it's the devastating impact it has on US competitiveness that should be most concerning.

One of the prime drivers of economic growth inside America over the past century has been disruptive innovation; yet the phenomenon that Lessig describes is increasingly being used by large incumbent firms as a mechanism to stave off the process. Given how hard it can be to survive a disruptive challenge, and how effective lobbying has proven in stopping it, it's no wonder that incumbent firms take this route so often.

The process by which firms do this is rarely overt, and usually couched in the language of regulation. When it involves nascent disruptors running headlong in to regulation that protects the incumbents, then the innovators are painted as "cutting corners." Conversely, when new regulation makes sense in order to foster innovation and disruption, but it doesn't suit the interests of the incumbents, then that regulation will often be characterized by incumbents as "stifling red tape." It seems to be happening more and more frequently, across sectors:
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by Enki »

noddy wrote:
Enki wrote:
noddy wrote: who would have thought in this multimedia mega machine day and age that a brain dead messaging system limited to less text than an old sms would have been the killer idea!
Twitter is actually a very smart messaging system. The hashtag thing is simple but brilliant. It allows for pretty complex forms of communication.
aye - cross conversations.

the article was on engineering style technological innovation being ignored in favour of simple little tools that might hit paydirt.

their are books to be written on the interplay between new features and making those features accessable to the masses .. its a never ending game.

we have had tagging and messaging with metadata for ages.. yet it was twitter that struck gold.

or more simply put - linux console guys dont tend to get why apple is so popular, they dont grok the simple because they dont need it simple.. not a knock of either group, just a fact of life.
Yeah twitter is just dimensional modeling of chat. That the chat is public is pretty neat. There was never really anything quite like twitter before it came about. I find the best use of twitter is when I am at a conference and want to have a convo with the broader conference.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

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CSPAN - Burt Rutan | Innovation and the Space Race

[I'm still waiting for a rocket that does not rely on chemical combustion for propulsion.]
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by Doc »

Typhoon wrote:CSPAN - Burt Rutan | Innovation and the Space Race

[I'm still waiting for a rocket that does not rely on chemical combustion for propulsion.]
If you ever get to DC you can see both Space Ship One and the Voyager in the Smithsonian Air and space museum on the mall. I would also highly recommend Udvar-Hazy companion facility beside Dulles Airport in Chantilly. That is the one that was in the Transformers movie.

As to non chemical based propulsion:


http://www.transpowerusa.com/wordpress/ ... ace-plane/
The commercial space plane to which we refer is a Hybrid Nuclear Space Plane that uses a revolutionary new nuclear propulsion technology to deliver people and payloads into space with less than 1/100th of the amount of fuel required by conventional chemical rockets. The hybrid nuclear technology driving this amazing propulsion system uses an innovative combination of nuclear fusion and nuclear fission to generate power more efficiently, cleanly, and safely than today’s nuclear power plants, or any other man-made energy source.
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Re: Research and Development; Invention and Innovation

Post by Enki »

Typhoon wrote:CSPAN - Burt Rutan | Innovation and the Space Race

[I'm still waiting for a rocket that does not rely on chemical combustion for propulsion.]
What about electormagnetic mass drivers?
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