Well, the fact that there is demand in developing countries implies that there is a market in those countries. If computer manufacturers and (re)sellers wish to continue their growth, then they are going to supply that demand. Of course, profits will be slim, but if local investments are made to produce components in those developing countries, production costs will be lower too. It would also help if manufacturers used their previous generation fabbing technologies to produce chips more cheaply in those markets. Heck, why not just ship your old tech to a plant in a developing country to get more useful production capacity out of it??
Whenever an important resource gets cheaper it gets more useful. Remember, alumium was pretty useless when it was more expensive than gold, but once Hall (and independently Haroult) came up with the electrolytic reduction process, aluminum became orders of magnitude more useful. Economics plays a vital role in the usefulness of a material.
And you sir, seem not to understand that the oxygen (oxide, actually) from rutile goes into the calcium chloride to form calcium oxide, which has a much higher melting point than the chloride salt (the chloride would presumably get oxidized at the anode since chlorine is less electronegative than oxygen). This would alter the properties of the electrolyte, though I don't have the phase diagram handy to describe exactly how. It is an important engineering problem for this to be an economically viable alternative to the current titanium production process.
listen, this sounds to me like a typical media ploy. HP is simply trying to develop interest in such a product. if you go to the HP website, there's a form that asks for information to be sent to you. Methinks that HP will actually only release such a product if they can generate enough enthusiam for it (considering that the cost will be pretty huge for a calculator). Count me out on this one folks.
Russia now leases the Baikonur Cosmodrome from Kazakhstan. Why spend a fortune building a new facility when they can spend a pittance on a lease to a poor country like Kazakhstan?? Especially these days, when Russia can barely afford to keep any government project adequately funded.
Knievel never tried to jump the Grand Canyon, he tried to jump the Snake River Canyon near Twin Falls, Idaho (back in 1974, IIRC). but alas, he didn't make it across as you say and had to parachute back down.
While I may admire the aim the book, the real issue in reconciling capitalism with limited natural resources is how to take the long term perspective? Wall Street "looks forward" only to the next few months or maybe a year or so on the outside. Also, the rapid growth of the internet has, IMHO, only aggravated the tendency of us all to look at the short term (e.g. last weeks news is old news...). I think that what is going to force us to break out of this short term view is the simple fact the people (at least in developed countries) are living longer and longer. Someone born today can expect to live well into their nineties or more. I think that is something most of us can't simply comprehend. Think about it, you're thirty or so now; perhaps medical advances soon forthcoming (genome project, etc.) will let you expect to live until you are 85.You're not even half-way there yet! You're kids will grow up and live in good health and have fifty or sixty year careers!! Meanwhile, you'll be *retiring* when they are about 40 or so. Now tell me that last months news is "old news." Now tell me that Compaq's stock taking a tumble recently upsets you. The only you'll care about is if the company is around long even that you can quintuple your money and have something to say for your investment. When we start taking the long term perspective, lots of things change quite a bit. Global warming becomes a concern to all. Running out of fossil fuels becomes an issue ("Well, I remember kids when cars used to run on distilled dinosaurs, way back in the 20th century!" "OOOh, aaah" they say). You also start to give a damn about how the federal governement operates.
Just my rant, but people here need to realize that they are going to live three or four times their current age.
IIRC, every element heavier than iron is made in the fury of a supernova. The carbon catalysis cycle in main-sequence fusion can produce only up to iron (element # 27). Personally, I find it fascinating that two-thirds of the periodic table is made in the instantaneous death rage of a large star.
Well, first off, the earth's gravity hasn't changed much (as discussed above) over the last few billion years. One quite likely possiblility on how such a large dino could live is that it spent much of its time wading in water using its long neck to go after underwater vegetation and tree leaves on the shore. The water would help provide some buoyancy to the dino and some safety (really, such a beast could not move very fast). Heck the river or lake mud could be six feet thick and something that big could still walk through it too! But as suggested, the atmosphere probably was more dense back then due both to the increased surface temperature and increased vegetation. This would have made it easier for large critters like dinos to grow up so big as there would have been more oxygen available (although the atmosphere probably also had a few per cent higher O2 content, helping even more). As to what happened to the density of the atmosphere? Lower surface temperatures resulted in lower humitidy and more CO2 uptake by the oceans, less vegetation resulted in less O2. Possibly other factors too. But I'm not sure if all of it can be attributed to the KT impact event. Perhaps.
This is exactly why the non-volatile RAM based upon phase-change media (in a story from the other day) is a much better idea. My guess is that you will see (relatively) cheap NVRAM within eighteen months or so. Probably around a couple of gigs for a grand or so, but with access time in the nanosecond range (way better than the millisecond range of today's disks). Probably more expensive than DRAM will be then, but with the advantage of permanent storage, reduced power requirements, and reduced engineering complexity.
For a little background (I'm a chemistry grad student working in this area), the maturing of this technology is good to see, after many years of battle vs. magnetic storage for both CD-RW and non-volatile memory. I think the potential here is very great because of the relative prodcution simplicity and cost benefit compared to competing technologies. This stuff is not vaporware! The technology of phase change media (based upon optically/electrically induced reversible amorphous to crystalline transitions) has been researched extensively over the last two decades by big names like Philips, Micron, 3M, IBM, etc. But magnetic storage had more research money for quite awhile for alot of reasons; however, it's phase change media that eventually got used for your CD-RW (not CD-R though...) discs. Making non-volatile RAM was the next obvious target, but latency was a problem until recently (and the inertia problem of changing manufacturing methods). For some more info, goto the website of the parent company Energy Conversion Devices. It's based out of Troy, Michigan and was founded by Stan Ovshinsky, who's somewhat of a rogue in the physics community. But it's a cool company that also uses a similar technology to make surge protectors against the EMP from a nuclear blast!:)
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Well, the fact that there is demand in developing countries implies that there is a market in those countries. If computer manufacturers and (re)sellers wish to continue their growth, then they are going to supply that demand. Of course, profits will be slim, but if local investments are made to produce components in those developing countries, production costs will be lower too. It would also help if manufacturers used their previous generation fabbing technologies to produce chips more cheaply in those markets. Heck, why not just ship your old tech to a plant in a developing country to get more useful production capacity out of it??
Whenever an important resource gets cheaper it gets more useful. Remember, alumium was pretty useless when it was more expensive than gold, but once Hall (and independently Haroult) came up with the electrolytic reduction process, aluminum became orders of magnitude more useful. Economics plays a vital role in the usefulness of a material.
And you sir, seem not to understand that the oxygen (oxide, actually) from rutile goes into the calcium chloride to form calcium oxide, which has a much higher melting point than the chloride salt (the chloride would presumably get oxidized at the anode since chlorine is less electronegative than oxygen). This would alter the properties of the electrolyte, though I don't have the phase diagram handy to describe exactly how. It is an important engineering problem for this to be an economically viable alternative to the current titanium production process.
listen, this sounds to me like a typical media ploy. HP is simply trying to develop interest in such a product. if you go to the HP website, there's a form that asks for information to be sent to you. Methinks that HP will actually only release such a product if they can generate enough enthusiam for it (considering that the cost will be pretty huge for a calculator). Count me out on this one folks.
Russia now leases the Baikonur Cosmodrome from Kazakhstan. Why spend a fortune building a new facility when they can spend a pittance on a lease to a poor country like Kazakhstan?? Especially these days, when Russia can barely afford to keep any government project adequately funded.
Knievel never tried to jump the Grand Canyon, he tried to jump the Snake River Canyon near Twin Falls, Idaho (back in 1974, IIRC). but alas, he didn't make it across as you say and had to parachute back down.
While I may admire the aim the book, the real issue in reconciling capitalism with limited natural resources is how to take the long term perspective? Wall Street "looks forward" only to the next few months or maybe a year or so on the outside. Also, the rapid growth of the internet has, IMHO, only aggravated the tendency of us all to look at the short term (e.g. last weeks news is old news...).
I think that what is going to force us to break out of this short term view is the simple fact the people (at least in developed countries) are living longer and longer. Someone born today can expect to live well into their nineties or more. I think that is something most of us can't simply comprehend. Think about it, you're thirty or so now; perhaps medical advances soon forthcoming (genome project, etc.) will let you expect to live until you are 85.You're not even half-way there yet! You're kids will grow up and live in good health and have fifty or sixty year careers!! Meanwhile, you'll be *retiring* when they are about 40 or so.
Now tell me that last months news is "old news." Now tell me that Compaq's stock taking a tumble recently upsets you. The only you'll care about is if the company is around long even that you can quintuple your money and have something to say for your investment.
When we start taking the long term perspective, lots of things change quite a bit. Global warming becomes a concern to all. Running out of fossil fuels becomes an issue ("Well, I remember kids when cars used to run on distilled dinosaurs, way back in the 20th century!" "OOOh, aaah" they say). You also start to give a damn about how the federal governement operates.
Just my rant, but people here need to realize that they are going to live three or four times their current age.
IIRC, every element heavier than iron is made in the fury of a supernova. The carbon catalysis cycle in main-sequence fusion can produce only up to iron (element # 27). Personally, I find it fascinating that two-thirds of the periodic table is made in the instantaneous death rage of a large star.
Well, first off, the earth's gravity hasn't changed much (as discussed above) over the last few billion years. One quite likely possiblility on how such a large dino could live is that it spent much of its time wading in water using its long neck to go after underwater vegetation and tree leaves on the shore. The water would help provide some buoyancy to the dino and some safety (really, such a beast could not move very fast). Heck the river or lake mud could be six feet thick and something that big could still walk through it too! But as suggested, the atmosphere probably was more dense back then due both to the increased surface temperature and increased vegetation. This would have made it easier for large critters like dinos to grow up so big as there would have been more oxygen available (although the atmosphere probably also had a few per cent higher O2 content, helping even more). As to what happened to the density of the atmosphere? Lower surface temperatures resulted in lower humitidy and more CO2 uptake by the oceans, less vegetation resulted in less O2. Possibly other factors too. But I'm not sure if all of it can be attributed to the KT impact event. Perhaps.
This is exactly why the non-volatile RAM based upon phase-change media (in a story from the other day) is a much better idea. My guess is that you will see (relatively) cheap NVRAM within eighteen months or so. Probably around a couple of gigs for a grand or so, but with access time in the nanosecond range (way better than the millisecond range of today's disks). Probably more expensive than DRAM will be then, but with the advantage of permanent storage, reduced power requirements, and reduced engineering complexity.
For a little background (I'm a chemistry grad student working in this area), the maturing of this technology is good to see, after many years of battle vs. magnetic storage for both CD-RW and non-volatile memory. I think the potential here is very great because of the relative prodcution simplicity and cost benefit compared to competing technologies. This stuff is not vaporware! The technology of phase change media (based upon optically/electrically induced reversible amorphous to crystalline transitions) has been researched extensively over the last two decades by big names like Philips, Micron, 3M, IBM, etc. But magnetic storage had more research money for quite awhile for alot of reasons; however, it's phase change media that eventually got used for your CD-RW (not CD-R though...) discs. Making non-volatile RAM was the next obvious target, but latency was a problem until recently (and the inertia problem of changing manufacturing methods). For some more info, goto the website of the parent company Energy Conversion Devices. It's based out of Troy, Michigan and was founded by Stan Ovshinsky, who's somewhat of a rogue in the physics community. But it's a cool company that also uses a similar technology to make surge protectors against the EMP from a nuclear blast! :)