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IBM Scientists Find New Way To Shrink Transistors
MarcAuslander writes that IBM scientists have discovered a way to replace silicon semiconductors with carbon nanotube transistors, an innovation the company hopes will dramatically improve chip performance and get the industry past the limits of Moore's law. According to the Times: In the semiconductor business, it is called the 'red brick wall' — the limit of the industry's ability to shrink transistors beyond a certain size. On Thursday, however, IBM scientists reported that they now believe they see a path around the wall. Writing in the journal Science, a team at the company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center said it has found a new way to make transistors from parallel rows of carbon nanotubes.
Transistors, and their own US-based workforce.
I've seen tons of articles like this over the last decade, touting carbon nanotubes as being the enabling technology for all sorts of improved applications.
Can anyone actually point me to something that has made it to production utilizing carbon nanotubes? I'm not being snarky here - I'm really curious to know if any of this is actually getting off the workbench into mainstream use anywhere.
Carbon nanotubes hit me as being a wonder invention like nuclear fusion; if we can build it it will be awesome, but we probably won't be able to build it for at least $DATE + 20 years.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
It's a badly and lazily written summary. Moore's "law" doesn't specify any limits, but for a while Moore's law hasn't held true because of some unforeseen physical limits of the current silicon technology we use.
This new technology may or may not deliver what it promises, but if it does, it will be a resumption of Moore's law, not breaking it. If anything, Moore's "law" was broken several years ago by the existing technology not living up to it.
I put "law" in quotes because it's not actually a law, just a prediction, and a rather wishful one at that.
Believe me, as a libertarian I love questioning the wisdom of all laws, but every time I do some social justice activist calls the PC Principal on me, and he's not nice.
You guys are so boring, find a new routine or something.
Moore's law is more a marketing law. They knew they could improve the performance a lot by skipping several steps of miniaturization. But that would mean they couldn't milk their customers. Potential competitors were crippled by IP laws, making it impossible for other to just start creating 6nm processors in the 70's for example.
How fast do we improve performance to stay ahead of the competition and to force our customers to upgrade because their old pc becames way too slow. Especially in combination with Microsoft that 'promised' to keep on adding bloat to their OS and requiring security updates that added even more bloat, that a perfectly fine PC became a unproductive slow mess to work with.
Since the development of double performance/half size/double transistors whatever has come to a hold, people can hold on their desktop for more than a decade without suffering any productivity loss. Just insert a SSD to have a big upgrade in performance. That latest processor is only like 5% faster in some conditions and the OS/applications are not optimized for the multiple cores/processors. What difference does 4 cores make to 8 cores and 8 to 16 cores? Nothing for most users or gamers.
The biggest improvement will have to come from the software world who should be able to create faster algorithms in their already existing code. Streamlining their code base without adding new features. But why spending so much R&D to gain nothing but speed and security while people are already happy with the current performance.
Microsoft has been promising faster Windows, but ironically they also push Cloud services. What does it matter that the underlying OS is faster, when your performance is limited to the state of the servers you connect to, the quality of your internet connection and the speed of your browser that still runs single core slow javascripts to offer less functionality than we had 15 years ago...
That's why some financial analyst have declared the death of the desktop. It is no longer interesting to invest in these kind of companies. They can't promise their 10% annual growth anymore. It will only go downhill with less profits. They will not disappear of course, but they will be only for the 'real workers', not the office workers who can just do things on their phones or tablets that will be docked in the near future like laptops today.
Believe me, as a libertarian I love questioning the wisdom of all laws, but every time I do some social justice activist calls the PC Principal on me, and he's not nice.
My own experience is that the Political Correctness types know how off-topic they are with regard to anything I tend to discuss (I mean, my stance that consenting adults should be able to do what they want whether or not I personally agree naturally includes lots of under-represented non-mainstream cultures). What I get instead is the morons who, despite knowing little or nothing about libertarian thought, feel an irresistable urge to form an opinion on it. Thus simple and easy-to-understand concepts like "minimal government" are conflated with anarcho-capitalism, even after I kindly explain to them that a government which cannot maintain rule of law and cannot enforce necessary regulations is less than minimal (that is, insufficient, too far in the opposite direction) and therefore not at all what I am talking about.
In such discussions said morons tend to respond to what they imagine I must have meant, as though they know this better than I, rather than responding to what I actually said (see the arrogance?). I think a lot of people confuse terms accidentally. When they realize they have done this, they realize it after some discussion has already occurred. Then they continue to do it intentionally, because for them, this is somehow easier than admitting they made a mistake. After all, they already made up their mind what "libertarian" means and aren't interested in honestly examining how accurate their mental representation (stereotype) actually is.
The world is filled with people who don't care about truth but do care very much about their own image and whether they can appear to be "right" in the eyes of others. Admitting fault is not compatible with this worldview, however noble and constructive it may be. Libertarian thought is especially problematic because if it caught on and became popular and well-represented in media, it would cause some drastic societal changes that would amount to a lot of powerful people losing their power. Thus, no one with any funding, power, or representation has any incentive to do anything other than demonize it. The method of demonization is simple: portray only its most extreme, least rational formations and ignore any reasonable method of applying its principles. Thus we are all anarcho-capitalists who don't want rule of law, publically funded police protection and firefighters, reasonable regulations, etc. No, it is "every man for himself", and if you aren't rich enough to hire private guards then you just get fucked.
That's the way you discredit a credible idea: misrepresent it like hell, being careful never to portray its merits. Make no mistake, poltiics is a great big PR game and PR is so effective because most people are lemmings who will not conduct their own research before deciding what they think of a given position. If the average person took a skeptical attitude towards every political stance, never believing anything other than what they can validate with facts and non-fallacious reasoning, then we would not have the situation we experience now, in which the politician with the most funding who buys the most advertising tends to win the election.
Absolutely but that's very fluid and I'll be the very first to admit that any pure political ideology will not work - no form, not even democracy, will ever work. A reasonable and blended choice is ideal. Most (from what I've witnessed over the many years) Libertarians don't actually have much in common with the people who purport to speak for the party and, frankly, this is a bad thing and is our fault entirely for not having maintained control and been welcoming of anyone and everyone. It's sort of how the Republicans let the Fundamentalists into the tent.
Seriously, read the first few paragraphs on Wikipedia. it's actually written better than I expected. I just discovered it the other day - I'd never bothered looking before as I'd assumed it was going to be trash. I'm pretty far left, as an example, and generally believe the rights of the individual come before all else except where the commons need protections. Businesses, for example, have rights but they are really far down on the list of importance. I want a strong, functional, government without waste and over-reaching antics. I want everyone to have the same chances I have had and I want people to be able to move upward. I want a strong social safety net. I am a Libertarian. I guess, to be frank, it's probably time to start calling myself a Classic Libertarian.
Ayn Rand was a moron and Rand Paul needs to be cracked in the jaw.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
An you sound fairly similar to my philisophy. I'm far in the direction of letting people do whatever the hell they want if they're not harming anyone else. I also support a rather stronger right to self defence and related things than many people do: while there's a line somewhere between self defense and manslaughter, I don't thing that one should have to rationally exercise measured restraint against someone who's just thrown you into a potentially life or death situation against your will.
I support socialistic things like a decent welfare state, and therefore the taxes required to run it. I also support the government stepping in when the free market is doing a poor job. Anything that's too big to fail should be run by the government because the government has to take the risk of propping it up anyway. That includes things like infrastructure.
SJW n. One who posts facts.