Slashdot Mirror
Transparent Transistors Are Coming
Roland Piquepaille writes "Transparent electronics is an emerging technology which aims to produce invisible electronic circuits. Now, researchers from Oregon report they made a major advance in transparent electronics. Their zinc-tin-oxide 'thin-film' materials are amorphous, physically robust, chemically stable and cheap to produce at just above room temperature. These new materials and transistors offer many new possibilities for consumer electronics, transportation, business and the military."
#2: This Roland Piquepaille stuff is getting on my nerves. There is obviously some kind of either backdoor deal, or favoritism for this guy getting stories.
Where is your journalistic integrity?
Hey Slashdot! I feel like having the option to block this guy out on my Edit Home Page Page. I mean, he has more submissions than "samzenpus," whoever the hell that is.
Don't force me to write a RSS filter that blocks phrasewords out. I'm feeling too lazy atm.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com . It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com) to see it for yourself.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money.
Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index) . Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistors
Wearable computers, please.
"Yes sir, I know it doesn't look like there's an Athlon in there, but there is, trust me. It's the new transparent model."
"Really?"
"Sure."
The coolest voice ever.
Zinc Tin Oxide sounds alot like indium tin oxide (ITO) which is pretty commonly used, but has commonly known downsides. I don't think this is all that impressive.
we'll finally get to see all those electrons and holes?
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
This is just what I need for that transparent Lucite(tm) computer case. A transparent MOBO!!!
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So being "transparent" really doesn't mean much for sales point? It sounds like the key points are (1) the element can be made small (thin) and (2) cheap. I could be way off the mark, as I just skimmed the article out of curiousity on application.
Perfect for a throw-away phone and such?
Transparent aluminum?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I hope the tech gets better than this. Still I'm Impressed.
I don't think we'll see much of this implemented.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I could imagine that all other implications of this technology are clear too, transparent in fact.
... I haven't checked to see if the parent post is plagerized or anything but it's a valid point. Kudos.
My post above states similar facts, though more ambiguous than hard data.
Good work, son.
It appears that every single article submitted to Slashdot by Roland Piquepaille is accepted, and he submits multiple articles each month. As of today, it is clear that ten articles were accepted in October, six in November, and four in December (so far). See http://slashdot.org/~rpiquepa for yourself. Some generate lots of discussion; others very little. What is clear is that, on a whole, this generates a lot of traffic for Roland Piquepaille.
You must be new here. Since when do Slashdotters read the articles???
Transparent transistor + Blue LED = Rice-pc modder wet dream.
Just imagine:
Modder - "Pffft. Activity lights on the case are so lame, when my computer is thinking my whole processor lights up!"
Can I quote that (verbatim, of course, and without acknowledgement) as a defence if I ever get accused of plagiarism?
At the bottom of the
... no one will be able to see I'm a nerd?
Great, so now the world will be overrun by an invisible self-replicating goo instead of that old grey stuff.
Currently, the quality and definition of LCD screens and LCD chips used in projectors is due to the fact that the driver circuitry for each cell is in the area around the cell. And the yeild for both is limited by not having redundant driver circuitry for each cell. If these transistors truely are transparent, does this mean that the driver circuitry could be in the middle of each cell, and the area between each cell could be reduced to a bare minimum? And does this mean that they could have additional circuirty so the cells could be self-healing and could eliminate both "burned on" and "burned off" pixels?
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Just in time for the latest Wonder Woman movie. With Star Trek's transparent aluminum and these new-fangled transparent circuits, she can finally go solid state.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
It appears that every single article submitted to Slashdot by Roland Piquepaille is accepte
It does, doesn't it. Yet for the sums in question I don't really think that Slashdot media inc. (OSDN or whatever they're called this week) would be taking a backhander from him in order to get them published. Or, if they are, can they please open the channel up? I know a whole shitload of people that'd pay $100 a pop to put stories on Slashdot. Oh yes.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I too, am concerned about invisible trannies sprogging their goo everywhere.
Correct me if I'm wrong but there are already transparent transistors in the most of your LCD displays. They are the ones that control the each sub-pixels on your screen. ;)
If this is new then I discovered that bananas were shaped like California...
I wish that I thought of that. As long as he doesn't submit BS it's fine with me. News goes through plenty enough rehashings before before it ever gets printed anyway.
From the abstract :
:-) which is not the purpose of the research anyway.
Transparent thin-film transistors (TTFTs) with an amorphous zinc tin oxide channel layer formed via rf magnetron sputter deposition are demonstrated. Field-effect mobilities of 5-15 and 20-50 cm^2 V^-1 s^-1 are obtained for devices post-deposition annealed at 300 and 600 C, respectively. TTFTs processed at 300 and 600 C yield devices with turn-on voltage of 0-15 and -5-5 V, respectively. Under both processing conditions, a drain current on-to-off ratio greater than 10^7 is obtained. Zinc tin oxide is one example of a new class of high performance TTFT channel materials involving amorphous oxides composed of heavy-metal cations with (n-1)^d10 ns^0 (n>=4) electronic configurations. ©2005 American Institute of Physics
For comparison pusposes positive carrier mobility in silicon is about 500 cm^2 V^-1 s^-1 and for negative charges (aka electrons) it is about 800. This means that this transparent dvice technology is on the order of 10 - 50 times slower than silicon. Not good for new CPU's
What's of much more interest and is not mentioned in the abstract is what the gain of these devices are and what kind of current density they can handle.
The "drain current on-to-off ratio" is sort of an odd thing to put in the paper. I mean if the off current is 1pA then the on current is 10uA (woo-hoo). If they made an actual transistor they should be able to present very standard benchmark values like gain, cut-off frequency and breakdown voltages.
So I'm not actually convinced they created a bonafide device, but maybe just characterized the films for use as a potential semiconductor, in which case they have a long way to go. They need to dope the material, attach a gate, etc... all things which could cause all sorts of complications.
Absolute statements are never true
Could this tech beused to make a monitor out of a simple pair of contacts? That's the big tech I'm waiting for.
And why, if he is listed as an foe do I even SEE his posts?
Easy enough to blacklist 212.43.241.105 at the router for now I guess.
Pictures please...
Said the guy posting in an offensive story, thus providing more eyeballs to the related ads.
I don't think that makes sense. Reading and posting to a slashdot article doesn't mean driving traffic to the linked articles. The slashdot articles are the only thing that links to the articles, postings in those threads doesn't necessarily mean more traffic for the linked sites.
Transparent electronics is an emerging technology which aims to produce invisible electronic circuits
As far as i know, air is invisible, oxigen is invisible, radiation is invisible..Electronic circuits are just tranparent.
Except that Slashdot doesn't go around to other sites talking about the stories it has and linking back to itself, as Roland does.
You are an AC supporting RP, so you perhaps you are he?
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
It means more comments in the thread, which means more ad hits for Slashdot, which means more demand for the dude's work. Frankly, I resent my flamebait moderation on my previous post. It's a good point. The best way to keep this guy around is to keep the topic controversial. How do you think Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh stay on the air?
You guys want Slashdot to take him down? Don't comment in his threads. The editors will get the point when they can no longer guarantee that certain topics will get x many pages served with client y's ads..
"Derp de derp."
It's irritating when that happens especially when you want to submit a story you KNOW hasn't been on slashdot before, but get rejected only to have one of these "frequent" headliners post "dupes" or an ask slashdot that could have easily been looked up on google. /. editors do buisness on the main page is what lead to the popularity of 'journals.' afterall your journal can contain every single rejected article, if you think you've got a good one you can reference it with urls, etc etal. Frankly if /. didn't have journals I wouldn't be using /. anymore... few articles on the main page are worth more than reading the headline*. but with the 'my/amigos' page you can custom build a 'main' page with content from everyone you think has good je's.
you must be new here... Articles are accepted, rejected and posted as fully autonomously as humanly possible... remember Taco get's paid to play video games all day long, not to actually accept or reject pending articles...
when they find someone who's submitting a lot of good articles he get's flagged and sorted to the top, so editors can say 'hrm 2 stories to que for submission acception allright reject the rest..'
Once they find the x# of submissions to accept they can just bulk reject submisions. The way
*= when you've been here a while you pick up the formula... most articles links read the same.. vanilla press release on new technology X etc etc.. there are occasionally really good RTFA's but usually just the headline is enough.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
. . . .
/. ??? Now I can't even find out what he's been posting recently.
.
/. editors, this person adds nothing but first grade english comprehension and some googled links, which otherwise could fit on the /. front page, with a credit to him of course. credit where's due, but on balance none is due.
.
And how many users get to have their nick / handle linking to their homepage istead of their uid history on
Forget the money issues, i just love the way how the "story" builds up to "many new possibilities " (bold is the link to Roland's site - is he a real person? so that you are tempted to ignore the origin of the story and link straight to the punchline . .
I am sorry, but connexion or no connexion between Rolan and
at time of posting the majority of "discussion" attached to this story is annoyed one way or the other about this roland, pro or con the conspiracies. that gotta be bad .
Wow! $647 a month? So that's he can afford his Porsch.
I for one welcome our new invisible transexual goo sproogging concern causing overlords.
It was so obvious. All they had to do was manufacture the transistors out of transparent aluminum!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Would you like me to email you some?
Most of the stories summitted by Piquepaille don't interest me, so the fact that he has so many stories accepted doesn't really concern me. I do see some people on here who don't seem to understand why some people do have problems with him though.
His "sins" or breaches of etiquette are many:
1. he is profiting off of getting stories posted, or is at least seeming to. I would imagine that the cost of bandwidth might be close to what he is alleged to make in ads.
2. he is merely reposting stuff from others. Which is what Slashdot does, but the main problem is that slashdot doesn't then go to others sites and post a story linking back to slashdot. which leads to the next "sin"
3. he is breaking from the accepted norms of what happens when you post a link on slashdot. Most people, myself included, think that when you click on a link on slashdot, it will take you to the original story, not another story about a story.
4. he is self linking. This is probably the biggest sin. Nearly everyone here has their own website but it is seen as showy or bragging to just go around linking to yourself. If what he has to say is so interesting, then why aren't other people submitting his blog columns?
5. it isn't obvious that is what he is doing from the text. If you aren't paying attention that the story was submitted by Piquepaille, then you will click the link looking for more information and be disappointed.
6. he gets a lot of stories accepted. I think I can explain this one, however. I bet the guy simply submits every single time he posts on his blog. If you submit an article every single day, I'm willing to bet you will get accepted a couple times a month.
Personally? I think he's an attention whore. He acts like a junior high kid "look at me! look at me!" I think it is lame and I wish it would stop, but as I said from the beginning, I hardly ever care about his stories anyway, so it doesn't matter much to me.
I say we pillory him just because neither his first nor last name is properly pronounced by Americans.
I always thought that silicon transistors are transparent - OK, more translucent than transparent, but make them thin enough and they should be transparent. Silicon trannies have been around for decades, so what is new about this idea?
Oh well, what the hell...
maybe they should call Roland and pay him 100 bucks...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think that Roland Piquepaille's biz is entirely legitimate.
His job is to research the web for people who do not have the time to do it, and he is getting $600 for his job.
What's wrong with that?
Ok, he didn't give credits before, but now he do.
So, don't bother him.
It's a differente story the issue about slashdot posting.
--
Imagine.. a processor you cannot see, a motherboard you cannot see, inside a transparent case you cannot see. The next step in virtual tecknology.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I know the wrath of Sims, he doesn't like my .sig so he put my entire subnet in the "timeout corner". Big man Michael is. Lover of free speech as long as he agrees with it. I am sure I will get placed in the timeout corner again for this post or just have my account deleted. We will soon see...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The post in question was somehow rated a 5-informative when all it really says is "Roland Piquepaille is an asshole". There are at least 10 posts further down that say the same thing but get rated as 1-Troll.
The only difference seems to be that one person took 500 words to say it and the other took 5.
Pseudointellectualism at its best.
I invented these years ago, but the patent office didn't see the prototype in the envelope and rejected my claim.
That's standard procedure if you submit a story.
Anyway, this will satisfy your curiosity.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Shit. Not a bad idea. Nice one.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You realize this is just a canned response that's in a lot (1 2 3) of his threads, right? If you look at the post, you'll notice that the AC didn't even bother to change As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate to the current date.
Sharks with friggin invisible lasers on their heads?
Why? What's the use of this?
A good read and an eye opener. Sadly I would say nothing will come of it and more then likely we will see more people do this.
Tin oxide has been used for over a century to make cheap power resistors and heated windshields. Nothing new to see here.
Are not those already using transparent transistors on the glass? Or did i miss something in that class...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
nonono, its News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
There's ads on slashdot? I've been reading this site for a number of years, and I actually had to scroll up to see if there was an ad on the top of the page. And there was. I was genuinly surprised. I swear I don't even notice ads on websites anymore, it's like my brain filters them out without even telling me.
Now, that's useful ad blocking software.
Nice conspiracy theory. I don't buy it, but it's very cute.
Some specific problems with your theory:
First, Slashdot itself runs basically the same type of service Roland does; they link to other articles. Hell, Slashdot doesn't even have to go looking for the articles, they expect readers to submit them. Slashdot is sure as hell making more money each month than Roland. Should we hate Slashdot as well?
Second, is Roland (and Slashdot) providing a service? Well, you're here, aren't you? Roland serves the same purpose many blogs do, he collects information. Maybe that's not worth anything to you, but it's hardly an evil scheme. Is he pimping his own site via Slashdot? Perhaps. So what? Apparently the Slashdot editors find his submissions to be worthy of posting. On that note...
Fourth, you're seriously suggesting that Slashdot is involved some sort of evil plan to scam $647 a month? That's chump change t to Slashdot.
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, you suggest that the $647 is something that we should give the slightest crap about. If you were paying him that money you might have a right to complain that he wasn't justifying that money, but you're not. You're getting a free service, the only cost to you is potentially being exposed to some ads. If you don't like it, don't take advantage of that free service.
The worst non-crazy charges you can levy are that Roland pimps himself on Slashdot for hits and that Slashdot editors are lazy and let Roland pimp himself. Wow, life's tough.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
.. the (transparent) glasses ARE the battlefield computer..
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
you got some points to you article, but you leave out a few things. i'm not sticking up for roland, dont know him, or give a shit about him. it may very well be true that he does steal other's work. if so it will catch up with him. im replyin to your post for your benifit... you have some good arguments, and im gonna play a little devil's advocate. if you look at things a in a slightly different light, roland is what one would call a low level research assistant. the fact that you say he makes 600 some odd dollars a month would be a typical stipend for an RA of the post graduate level. While that may seem like a large amount of money, i hope he has a day job (welfare has for a long time been more profitable that being a (Teachers Assisstant --teachin undergrad classes of 500ish, and RA's) why does slashdot post his stuff? well you have the answer in your post. He generates discussion. true only some of his stuff may, but that is worth the post that dont. discussion is one way of looking at a topic's popularity. next is laziness of /. eds. instead of findin out the current stories, they can rely on the rolands of the web to do it for them. when u ask what service roland provides, this would be the most valuable thing he does. the cut an paste, could be done by a well trained chimp. but roland, depending on his research skills and the availability of the data he comes up with, may actually spend a lot of time looking for and sorting out stuff for his posts.
the only benefit he can be to web writers is to give them exposure too. for a writer, the only worse thing than being talked about, is not being talked about. in fact, you talking about this raymoond character let me know he exists. dont worry, though, i will soon forget he exists.
however, if he steals the work of others, esp for profit, cannot be excused. here is whhere you can make a difference. if you feel strongly enough about him, then you should contact the author of each article he uses. you could say 1 ronald is using your article did you know? did he ask permission (not requierd for academia, but is known as a courtesy in learned circles). 2 we think he is an asshole because he a) steals others work b) derives an income from it. c) we recommend you a) ask not to be associated with him b) demand to see how mcuh he made from your article, and seek renumeration c) file the appropriate copyrigt / dcma &c notices
writing such a letter can be easy (you can draft the main body of each and paste it into emails (riddick is not the only one who can cut and paste). more than anything this will help speed up the process of him gettin busted if he is stealing work. you might also want to send a copy of his doings to his revenue provider, blogads, and his advertisers. hope this helps, and good luck on shutting him down, if he is indeed a plagiarist.
Hah. I love the notion that of X many pages to CLient Y ads. It's too bad that that doesn't exist.
The reason Roland's stories get posted is that because he writes good submissions. Nothing more, nothing less.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
They have freeways too!