Drawing on a plasma display with a laser pointer
youtube.com
youtube.com
Perhaps it is because this is such a rarified area to be poking around, but in many other videos the content creator seems to often "know it all". It's refreshing when someone says, "I think this is why this behaves like this," and then lays out their claim.
Truly, this guy should leave Google so he has more time to make YouTube videos and tinker/research in his garage/lab. Something tells me he likes his day job too though.
unless he's so independently rich that he doesn't require the income from google, this is not a good idea for most people (and i'm sure not for him neither).
Google pays a lot, and this high pay would allow him to spend more free time (e.g., it may be possible to work only 4 days on google pay) doing tinkering. It would also allow funds to buy goods _for_ doing the tinkering. Youtube money is unlikely to be enough, and he doesn't put out enough videos for it to be a job. Paradoxically, making youtube your job will likely diminish the tinkering aspect of the video - youtube encourages you to create clickbait and upload often and consistently.
To be sure though, to be able to comfortably afford up even a used electron microscope for your hobby ... it would be nice to have a decent income.
they're often given out free or sold very cheap during lab auctions.
problem is that setup is a pain, the old ones are very large, and they're usually one of the heaviest pieces of equipment in the lab -- all that stuff adds up to the real cost.
If he is still working for Google X, it's because he wants to, not because he has no choice.
Much of the high dollar equipment he gets is donated by test equipment companies. I dont think it's reasonable to call niche test equipment donations income.
Rest assured Shahriar is making good money at his day job, considering he has a pretty good title at one of the biggest/best RF research companies.
What is clear is that most of Shahriar's equipment is not donated, by the manufacturers or by anyone else. He will (obviously) say so when it is, and he rarely does. He buys it himself -- primarily on eBay, but still, that doesn't mean it's cheap.
At first I like it this way - it's all my jobs and roles which makes me really me. And focusing in one high income role only would have benefit in short term only. In long term I'd burn myself out and my family will suffer even in short term. This would be even more true if my income would depend on Youtube algorithm etc.
I’ve never seen one in operation, and I don’t think there’s even pictures of one online showing an image.
The thing that is novel to me in a Skiatron is that the electron beam manipulates something physical (i.e. the crystal structure of the KI used on the screen) in order to create the image on the tube.
Taking physical object manipulation via electron gun to the extreme (ie a spinning disc of oil in a vacuum), you get the eidophor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor
They excelled at vector. IIRC, the 4014 could address 4096x4096 coordinates but even between two points, the “resolution” was that of the phosphor grain.
This is something we should resurrect.
The problem with storage tube CRTs is erasure--more specifically that you can't erase arbitrary parts of the screen.
With bi-stable tubes (like the kind found in the 4014), you can erase the entire screen. Some bi-stable tubes (as found on certain Tek oscilloscopes) also allow erasing predefined regions, like the top half or bottom half. Those are in, some sense, two storage tube mechanisms in one glass envelope.
But there's no way to erase just one line, and the entire screen flashes brightly when you do erase the image. It makes viewing any kind of animation or moving image very annoying.
They were fine back when computers didn't have enough memory to hold a 4k by 4k framebuffer because the computer didn't have enough CPU to draw enough FPS for smooth animations anyway--so users couldn't expect continuous movement of the rendered image.
Notice how the image builds up gradually over time, as the host sends drawing commands to the terminal, but the image never moves once drawn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IztxeoHhoyM
I thought it might be cool to try it out myself, perhaps make a cool toy for the kids, but a quick search on ebay for 'plasma display panel' shows it's not for the casual hacker. One item is listed at $2400+, sold "as is"!.
Maybe set a reminder to check again in 6 or 12 months after people have time to discover some more dusty crap in their garages or wherever this stuff comes from.
my guess(without reading the patent). it's not the device that has a patent but the technique of using external emissions to affect a plasma display type element.
my guess is that if contested the prior art claim would be that the invention was obvious to any one in the field(debatable) as the device that exhibits these properties was built far before the patented idea was dreamed up.
This reminds me of why I dislike software patents, there are things done on computers that are genuinely patentable, but most software patents are in the form of "machine that already exists, but on a computer" which is bullshit.