Actually, Moore's "Law" does not refer to gate size. If anyone reads the actual history, Moore was referring to the number of components per die, since there has always been a trade-off between the complexity of the die and yield. While this may indeed lead to higher densities, density is, stricltly speaking, not what Moore was talking about.
That said, Moore's Law is neither a law, nor very important.
In principle, yes. That's how solar cells and photodiodes work. Now, just because something is efficient at converting electricity into light, however, doesn't mean that it will be similarly efficient at converting light to electricity. Generally, devices are usually specialized toward one function or the other. I suspect that nanotubes wouldn't be that great as photocells. For one, you can already make high efficiency semiconductor photocells with large surface areas (important for light collection!), whereas, nanotubes wouldn't give you much of an active area to work with unless you manage to pack them densely on a surface.
I have much more faith in magnetic confinement. ICF relies on the idea that you'll vaporize little fuel pellets several times a second with multiple high energy lasers and be able to do it reliably and accurately. Science has come a long way, but ICF seems like a technique prone to failure. Also, there have been some recent suggestions that the thermonuclear explosions caused by pellet vaporization may create significant turbulence, making it difficult to vaporize another pellet in rapid succession. Of course, magnetic confinement has its problems, too. ITER will probably result in "ignition", but even so, it'll produce a machine so large and unwieldy (requiring an army of PhDs to operate) that no power company would ever invest in it. Also, I believe actual experiments in the generation of electrical power are intended for the successor to the ITER machine. Tell your congressman to increase funding for alternative fusion concepts!
I called the Apple Developer program before buying mine with the hardware purchase program (3 weeks ago) and they said that they dropped the whole "devloper related course" req. If you're an engineering or CS major, you're fine. Dunno about science or other majors...
They seem pretty lax. By the time I had my student ID, etc. together to fax to them, they'd already shipped the machine. After all, as part of the signup process, they already had my school and student ID no.
Remember the "Real California Cheese" campaign or the "Got Milk" campaign. An ad campaign telling consumers to "look for the CD Audio label" (i.e., Red book compliance) would properly hurt DRM title sales significantly. Of course,, who knows where the money for a national campaign would come from. However, regular ads in Rolling Stone, Wired, and some other carefully targetted publications could probably accomplish quite a bit.
This isn't news. However, I'll bet confusion is stemming from the fact that the Quicktime *file format* was selected for the MPEG-4 standard. Take JPEG for example... JPEG speciifies encoding and decoding procedures, not what to do with the data. The standard (though I believe alternatives are emerging) file format for a JPEG encoded image is called JFIF. So, in the above instance, Apple created the file format (like JFIF), but not the codec standard (like JPEG).
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Actually, Moore's "Law" does not refer to gate size. If anyone reads the actual history, Moore was referring to the number of components per die, since there has always been a trade-off between the complexity of the die and yield. While this may indeed lead to higher densities, density is, stricltly speaking, not what Moore was talking about. That said, Moore's Law is neither a law, nor very important.
In principle, yes. That's how solar cells and photodiodes work. Now, just because something is efficient at converting electricity into light, however, doesn't mean that it will be similarly efficient at converting light to electricity. Generally, devices are usually specialized toward one function or the other. I suspect that nanotubes wouldn't be that great as photocells. For one, you can already make high efficiency semiconductor photocells with large surface areas (important for light collection!), whereas, nanotubes wouldn't give you much of an active area to work with unless you manage to pack them densely on a surface.
I have much more faith in magnetic confinement. ICF relies on the idea that you'll vaporize little fuel pellets several times a second with multiple high energy lasers and be able to do it reliably and accurately. Science has come a long way, but ICF seems like a technique prone to failure. Also, there have been some recent suggestions that the thermonuclear explosions caused by pellet vaporization may create significant turbulence, making it difficult to vaporize another pellet in rapid succession. Of course, magnetic confinement has its problems, too. ITER will probably result in "ignition", but even so, it'll produce a machine so large and unwieldy (requiring an army of PhDs to operate) that no power company would ever invest in it. Also, I believe actual experiments in the generation of electrical power are intended for the successor to the ITER machine. Tell your congressman to increase funding for alternative fusion concepts!
I called the Apple Developer program before buying mine with the hardware purchase program (3 weeks ago) and they said that they dropped the whole "devloper related course" req. If you're an engineering or CS major, you're fine. Dunno about science or other majors...
They seem pretty lax. By the time I had my student ID, etc. together to fax to them, they'd already shipped the machine. After all, as part of the signup process, they already had my school and student ID no.
Remember the "Real California Cheese" campaign or the "Got Milk" campaign. An ad campaign telling consumers to "look for the CD Audio label" (i.e., Red book compliance) would properly hurt DRM title sales significantly. Of course,, who knows where the money for a national campaign would come from. However, regular ads in Rolling Stone, Wired, and some other carefully targetted publications could probably accomplish quite a bit.
This isn't news. However, I'll bet confusion is stemming from the fact that the Quicktime *file format* was selected for the MPEG-4 standard. Take JPEG for example... JPEG speciifies encoding and decoding procedures, not what to do with the data. The standard (though I believe alternatives are emerging) file format for a JPEG encoded image is called JFIF. So, in the above instance, Apple created the file format (like JFIF), but not the codec standard (like JPEG).