Certainly a number of drive waveforms and the basic concepts are presented. There are likely implementation subtleties or specific configurations that are not explicitly disclosed.
You can probably figure out a lot about both the implementation, and motivation by digging through the patents.
The patents disclose general categories of waveforms, but they leave out key details of exactly how the final results are achieved. Thus, the final waveform Performance is a combination of patent and trade secret.
Additionally, as others have posted, the waveforms vary for different panels, due to manufacturing variation, so reversing a single example won’t tell you much about how to drive a different panel.
A trade secret that can be reverse engineered by a tinkerer with an oscilloscope in an afternoon.
This is more or less the type of situation patents were invented for: a simple invention anyone can copy once it's invented, but difficult (I assume) to invent in the first place.
It's why I don't like most software patents, but why I think codecs, especially the modern ones, should be patentable. They're complicated engineering challenges requiring you to make numerous tradeoffs and I feel that just because the result is an algorithm doesn't mean that it shouldn't be patentable.
Other software patents I'm more dubious of, but I feel comfortable saying H.264 should be patentable.
Totally agree. However in many cases, the main technology is invented at universities with public funding. Also, codecs are a means of communication, and I don't think it should be patentable because it can cause problems once everybody settles on a single standard. See the MPEG nightmare, where professional cameras have a license attached to any movie shot with them.
Secrecy and patents are mutually exclusive. The deal you get with the patent is you disclose you invention so secrecy doesn't hinder progress too much and in exchange you get exclusivity.
Not hydrogen storage for seed dispersal, but Larry Niven's Known Space series featured Stage Trees. These were plants genetically engineered to be solid fuel rockets. They grew to be quite large, multistage launchers. When they ignited, they dispersed their seeds to other planets.
to add to this, I just listened to a podcast called StarTalk [0] where Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed James Cameron [1]. James Cameron stated the idea for some of the plants actually come from personally scuba diving and seeing some plants react the way they did in the movie (specifically when you touch them move or close up)
James Cameron stated he has been a passionate scuba diver and it was a slight nod to others who may have had similar experiences.
I think self-driving cars are short term doomed, and we've doomed them.
The problem is we view them as a purely technical problem where-as the real issues are sociological. It's not possible to create a self-driving car that acts perfectly on roads designed for humans (arguably, it's not possible to have humans acts perfectly either).
There are two solutions to this problem. Either shift human expectations such that they accept the failures of self-driving cars, or change the roads to make it easier for automated cars to drive on them.
I believe we should overwhelmingly be doing the second. We should be augmenting and instrumenting our road infrastructure to make self-driving easier. And in particular, we should be concentrating our efforts where this is easier, and has the most value (probably transit).
Infrastructure spending is problematic. Heck, many states cannot even keep their bridges in good repair. I get the feeling that to enhance the roads, big tech needs to come up with a standard and finance it’s inclusion when major road work is done. Otherwise, I don’t see a way forward with augmented roads.
Possibly true, but some of the biggest hurdles to self driving are unexpected road conditions. Debris on the road, people stepping out into traffic, temporary roadworks etc.
I believe the biggest hurdle is that the bar has been set too low for what constitutes an acceptable standard of driving/casualty rate. There's so much that can be done to improve the situation but few answers are politically palatable (except for Netherlands, Sweden, and a few other countries around there, I believe). Car owners also seem to like driving, despite being stuck in traffic Mon-Sat.
I also think people will soon realise the limitations of trying to implement too much of this kind of tech as an answer to solving political and social problems. I'm not saying that the tech will never be good enough, but right now it's hard to see when that future will arrive in time before other pressing matters take hold.
However, what I do like about the self-driving car "movement" is that it's forcing more people to ask questions about what is acceptable when it comes to trauma rates. But for the time being, I see a lot of risk compensation ahead and fiddling around the edges.
More can be done a lot faster for less money if we instead were to focus all our efforts on reducing the population's overall dependency on private vehicle use and ownership. But in many parts, there's just too much money tied up in motordom with powerful parties are at play - the same parties who decide where to place big infrastructure spends and tax concessions. After all, always making new cars is one way to drive the economy - but at what externalised costs?
A minority of Japanese workers are Kaishain (Salarypeople), and there's nothing you really really /need/ from a corporation. Corporate socialising is a thing, as is finding a partner at work. But given the low marriage rates in Japan, not really that big a deal. I guess there are people who are about the reputation of working at a well known company.
I read the article, but I can't see how the title is supported.
What is for example, the second largest tech hub and how narrow is silicon valley's lead over it.
I would guess that the bay area if way way ahead of anywhere else (I don't like it, but it seems to be self apparent) and the lead is not narrow at all.
I'd bet either NYC or Seattle is number two. I think Seattle comes closest in salaries thanks to the number of FAANG and similar companies with either HQ's or large branches (same time zone as California helps). NYC is probably number two as far as startup scenes.
Your article is titled "high tech" venture capital, but the Pitchbook data they use span all sectors. If you include biotech, then yes, Boston will be way up there. And New York is just a huge city and an economic hub, so there will be a bunch of entrepreneurial activity going on there. But if you take the more narrow view of "tech" as in computer-related things, I'd be surprised if New York or Boston were much ahead. And yes, as you mentioned, it's one measure of the tech scene. Seattle is Facebook's largest engineering presence outside of the Bay area. I think Google may have more engineers in New York right now, but that will not last - they're tripling their footprint in Seattle right now. It's one of the largest (non-Bay area) engineering offices for Uber and the largest for Lyft and Salesforce. And then there's MS and Amazon. I've looked for SWE and data science jobs in New York and Seattle and if you're not interested in FinTech, Seattle is the winner by a mile.
VC funding is an extremely narrow measure of a city's economy. Seattle (metro area) has Amazon and Microsoft's HQs. That alone is enough to give it a pretty large tech scene.
It's probably not very bad, but stupid experiments can have a negative influence on the community as a whole.
Let's say e-ink keyboards are a good idea, but it's too soon. An early implementation will quite possibly delay (more make completely unviable) trying the experiment again.
If it's just a bad idea, resources will have been diverted into the development of a failed product (which is years of someones life spent on something useless). Not only that, but the cost of trying other ideas is increased. You have to hire and train more developers to work on other projects, to make up for the time wasted. The cost of developers increases for other companies, perhaps trying out better ideas.
This particular instance probably isn't very significant. But people apply the same logic to "what's the harm in VCs funding blockchains for pets", or any other buzzword without really understanding it. Well the harm is that they shift the entire ecosystem toward something that is possibly not very useful. They increase the costs for other companies (perhaps bootstrapping) their own ideas. And they push us toward a market that is driven by buzzwords, not logic, which is where most of us end up working.
This presumes we can choose the right path without mistakes. It's a silly presumption.
And I think it's fine to be frustrated with stupid VC spending, but to the extent it is actually a problem, it shouldn't be sustainable (it would be replaced by less stupid spending if it were truly enjoining advancement).
I agree, we can't proceed without mistakes. But it's incorrect to say that there is no cost, and that we shouldn't minimise mistakes (which is what the comment I was replying to was implying).
The VC stuff... I'm not sure that it's not sustainable. The way VCs are selected is not totally efficient (I would say, not even very efficient). More than that, successful exits for VCs don't always mean that a product or service provided value to the world at large (or was a good use for limited engineering talent), there are lots of ways for a VC to get a successful exit without that happening (including a follow on investing giving them liquidity, before there is even a product on the market for example, or the company being acquired without having developed anything useful).
If the money is there to waste, you have some evidence that no one has a better idea about how to deploy the resources.
There's the problem of what "better" should mean, but private investors aren't going to fund government for fun (or similar), so many of the alternative meanings of better can't really be expected to inform a discussion about private investment. Like maybe stupid VC spending is evidence that tech companies aren't getting taxed enough, but that is solved by raising taxes, not by hand-wringing over questionable products.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/20/firefox-g...