On an episode of "Explorations" about a year ago Michio Kaku had an interview with David Goodstein of Caltech. Unfortunately the archive was deleted but it was on May 27, 2008. Prof. Goodstein claimed that if we were to switch to all Nuclear power for our electricity needs, we would run out of Uranium in 20 years.
Is this a surprise? None of the nation's biggest airports are on there because they're all locked into various Wi-Fi carriers like Boingo that charge $7-10 for a day pass.
If we're going to have graphene consumer electronics though, it's going to be based on the wafer-scale CVD manufacturing process developed in Korea and MIT.
Trust me, CVD synthesis of graphene is in the earliest of early stages. The problem is that neither group (Korea nor MIT) have figured out how to get the graphene off the nickel layer that catalyzes the reaction. There are other ways of making graphene that are much further along, such as epitaxial growth on silicon carbide.
This is unfortunate. The two universities that I am very familiar with both have very large computer labs where people can print out things. I am wholly reliant upon the university currently to print things out. I HATE toting around my laptop and so I prefer to use campus resources.
That said, my department made the switch from physical computers to remote desktops. It's worked out well, but I have to say I don't like not being able to pop in and check my e-mail between classes without having to lug my laptop around like a ball and chain.
Many of the professors I know of host copies of their publications on their lab websites for all to view. Perhaps this decision by MIT is the first of its type officially, but it's hardly new.
That's actually pretty cool. By concentrating the light, they need less photovoltaic material per square foot of land used for solar. I'm curious how the efficiency of photovoltaic cells varies with the concentration of light
For a constant temperature, efficiency goes up logarithmically with light concentration. A solar cell with 1 sun on it is going to be less efficient than one with 500 suns on it assuming you have a way to cool the cells. Past a certain point the efficiency drops like a rock due to lack of cooling the cells and this reduces the voltage you can produce by about 2.3mV/C past room temp.
I regret ever putting any information about myself on that website. Even though I deleted some of my old stuff (like e-mail), Facebook still holds the data hostage.
Anyway, I found this funny:
and a new Facebook group called 'People Against the new Terms of Service' that has added more than 10,000 members today."
God that is the laziest form of protest ever. Yeah let's join a group on the service we are protesting to show how much we disagree with this new policy! If you take such exception, stop using the damned service.
If Intel is able to shrink its die size every 12 months AMD is in trouble.
For what it's worth "tick-tock" is actually alternating between a new architecture and a process shrink every 12 months. "Q4" in the summary means Q4 2009.
Am I the only one feeling we might have reached the point of diminishing returns, at least for desktops, in the last 2-3 years. All the shrinkage past 90 nanometers just feels underwhelming. Stuff beyond Pentium 3 has not been revolutionary, performance wise, for a desktop.
I hate to be snarky but you sound like one of those people who bought the crap about the "Megahertz Myth". Processor clock rate has little to do with performance. I'll agree that pentium 4 was underwhelming, but Core was a huge hit and saw huge performance, especially toward the ones that were released in early this year that used the high k dielectric.
has involved reinventing the wheel? I know too many engineers that like to start from scratch and simply ignore tried and true existing ideas/code/technology/what have you.
I couldn't help but notice that 7 of the 10 teams were from California with the other 3 teams being from Texas, Idaho and Colorado. I have a hard time believing nobody on the east coast is capable of competing in this competition, so the question is then why is there so much apathy outside California? Perhaps it is exorbitant transportation costs and most of these teams appear to be amateurish, but I just can't help but think the competition isn't as fierce as it could have been.
Sensitivity may refer to the ratio between light and dark current. Obviously one can't knock out 500 times more electrons with the same amount of photons in this material because typical silicon photodetectors aren't THAT bad. The increase in efficiency may only be a few percent for reasons I won't go into.
This is not a new technology but it is helpful to have refined, although the first use when the technology matures will be short range devices (1-2ft) not long range devices (10-20ft).
Actually it IS a new technology. Anyone who is spouting off bombast about how Tesla came up with this a hundred years ago, or that we've been using this in transformers for years is WRONG. Transformers are not resonant devices and rather rely on the closeness of the windings/core to guide the majority of the field lines to the other winding. As for Tesla's work, he used strictly far field EM radiation, which differs fundamentally from this effect, which uses near-field interactions that tend to "stick" for lack of a better term to the power source unless transferred to another device capable of resonating with it. This is what makes this 2006 discovery so great because it is extremely efficient and doesn't rely on line of sight or broadcasting a huge amount of power so that a device a reasonable distance away can receive the power it needs to operate. According to the 2006 article ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5834/83 ) the electric fields involved are small too: around 200V/m which is about double Earth's field at ground.
And finally, The human body has little to no magnetic response which is why MRI's don't kill you with their multi-Tesla magnetic fields (the Earth's magnetic field is 0.5 Gauss = 1/20000 T, for reference)
Here is a link to the actual study (toward the bottom are the pertinent charts). Looking at the third pair of bar graphs, they readily admit
Note that the data for Cox is more noisy than Comcast, due to the smaller number of measured hosts. In fact, the "100%" number for Cox comes from a whopping sample size of TWO.
Now I shouldn't be defending them because I have Cox, but I'd just like to say I get anywhere from 30-300kBps when downloading torrents which is not terrible but ultimately lags far behind what I could get back in the urban area where my parents live that uses Bright House.
...but these settlements seem to come down to stupidity rather than a legitimate claim. This claim only extends back to 2001; I'm fairly sure I knew about this discrepancy the first time I booted up my first 386 computer in '95 when I noticed that 500 base 10 megs was actually 466 base 2 megs, and that was FAR before 2001.
Mark me redundant, but I just don't feel like these lawsuits represent a good use of the legal system.
I took computer science AB when I was in highschool and it was a great class if you looked past the god forsaken code project you had to modify that had something to do with fish. I learned all about algorithms, data structures and other important topics that I would not have gotten formal exposure to until, well, never because I didn't major in CS. One huge drawback is that it's taught in Java now, which is absolutely terrible for learning the fundamentals (I took it when it was C++)
What is the biggest shame is this course was hugely popular in my tech-oriented highschool: Like 50 people took the AB exam every year out of my class of 120 or so. While I understand TCB is trying to cut the cost of making unpopular exams, keeping computer science A is a joke because AB wasn't all that fast and A doesn't even count for credit at my university; It's basically just a waste of time.
Without access to the full volume of information freely available to the rest of the world, China will fall behind in crucial ways.
OTOH, their ignorance of Youtube comments might serve them for the better!
A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded.
Graphene wasn't even [b]fabricated[/b] for the first time until 2004 by the so-called "Manchester group". Carbon nanotubes were formally identified in 1991 and intentionally created shortly thereafter and we've done what exactly with them? As far as I know, companies like Nantero, which uses carbon nanotubes as a basis for nonvolatile memory, are few and far between. I'm active in the field, and I can just say it's going to be a year or two until we even see transistor demos much less arrays of memory or logic circuits.
Graphene has some of the same problems as carbon nanotubes, so while doing basic electrical characterizations of this material are major news right now (that shows you how new this material is), ultimately using this material and convincing the 4 or 5 companies with the capital to have state-of-the-art fab facilities to switch over from silicon-based CMOS technology is looking way, way, WAY into the future.
I hear a lot of the same crap that gets spewed at me by professors, that engineers are better than anyone else and that we have to work the hardest for our degrees. This is simply untrue: Engineering is extremely loose with the facts and unrigorous. I have a minor in math and took some physics courses and they were infinitely more challenging than any of my EE classes because they stressed the underlying theory MUCH more rather than using the approach of engineering classes in which you learn specific cases of a much broader topic but don't understand how they are related. Time and time again, especially in math, I was very impressed at the creativity and logic of math students and the ease in which they understood new topics.
Fact: Engineering's difficulty doesn't make every other subject cake despite whatever you have been indoctrinated with. Engineering suffers from something that most other majors do not: People that are there strictly for the money. If you aren't interested in a subject, you're more likely to fail, which is partially why I believe that the GPA disparity exists. I saw so many people in my classes that wouldn't shut up about their 80k salaries they expected to score right out of undergrad, and those same people were always the ones that just barely got their prelabs done each week or surfed the web on their laptops in class (engineering building was the only one with wi-fi).
I went to a top 25 engineering school and I can honestly say I know nowhere near what I had hoped to, and my peers know even less. I had a few friends in the same major, and I remember one semester we were all taking the same electromagnetic fields class with this old school guy who was really well-respected in his field. He was a pretty lousy teacher, but if you read the textbook and really made an effort to understand what was being taught, the class was cake. He threw the class a huge curveball on the final exam and instead of giving all problems regurgitated from homework, he asked us to define concepts such as "resistance" and "capacitance" in our own words. I was the only person I talked to that actually produced an answer to this question, and others bitched so much how the professor could possibly have "expected" them to know how to respond. How does one hope to be an electrical engineer but cannot understand something so fundamental?
I'm going to graduate school at a more prestigious university but I have no misconceptions that I will somehow learn more from classes; I'll just have access to better resources with which to learn on my own. Engineering is best learnt by doing, and most people incorrectly assume they will become good engineers by going through the engineering curriculum and that somehow magically after 4 years they will be prepared to jump into projects, which is of course bullocks. These are the reasons why so many people find engineering difficult.
I hear a lot of the same crap that gets spewed at me by professors, that engineers are better than anyone else and that we have to work the hardest for our degrees. This is simply untrue: Engineering is extremely loose with the facts and unrigorous. I have a minor in math and took some physics courses and they were infinitely more challenging than any of my EE classes because they stressed the underlying theory MUCH more rather than using the approach of engineering classes in which you learn specific cases of a much broader topic but don't understand how they are related. Time and time again, especially in math, I was very impressed at the creativity and logic of math students and the ease in which they understood new topics. Fact: Engineering's difficulty doesn't make every other subject cake despite whatever you have been indoctrinated with.
Engineering suffers from something that most other majors do not: People that are there strictly for the money. If you aren't interested in a subject, you're more likely to fail, which is partially why I believe that the GPA disparity exists. I saw so many people in my classes that wouldn't shut up about their 80k salaries they expected to score right out of undergrad, and those same people were always the ones that just barely got their prelabs done each week or surfed the web on their laptops in class (engineering building was the only one with wi-fi).
I went to a top 25 engineering school and I can honestly say I know nowhere near what I had hoped to, and my peers know even less. I had a few friends in the same major, and I remember one semester we were all taking the same electromagnetic fields class with this old school guy who was really well-respected in his field. He was a pretty lousy teacher, but if you read the textbook and really made an effort to understand what was being taught, the class was cake. He threw the class a huge curveball on the final exam and instead of giving all problems regurgitated from homework, he asked us to define concepts such as "resistance" and "capacitance" in our own words. I was the only person I talked to that actually produced an answer to this question, and others bitched so much how the professor could possibly have "expected" them to know how to respond. How does one hope to be an electrical engineer but cannot understand something so fundamental?
I'm going to graduate school at a more prestigious university but I have no misconceptions that I will somehow learn more from classes; I'll just have access to better resources with which to learn on my own. Engineering is best learnt by doing, and most people incorrectly assume they will become good engineers by going through the engineering curriculum and that somehow magically after 4 years they will be prepared to jump into projects, which is of course bullocks. These are the reasons why so many people find engineering difficult.
The proof was submitted in september. Granted it's still old even when you take into account it was published in December, 3 months is a pretty short amount of time in academia. As an engineer, I am happy to see that not only has this mathematician proved his solution but he also provided us with an algorithm by which his solution can always be had - some might just stop at proving the existence, which makes it worthless in practice.
You're assuming R is independent of applied voltage, which is not true for any transistor. Resistance is a derived quantity that can be (for example) formulated in terms of the ratio of resulting current from an applied voltage. Ultimately, electronic devices require a certain current to operate, so it's not as simple as minimizing power by arbitrarily scaling down current. If you cannot supply enough current to a system, transistors may not have enough juice to produce those 1's and 0's quickly enough, causing unreliable operation. A more accurate way to look at the problem is that if you wish for a device to operate and it requires a given current, if you can find a way to deliver this current at a lower voltage then you will require less power to run the device.
I am very interested to see how they managed to reliably demonstrate on/off states of individual transistors at the 0.3V level given that standard logic families use between 1-5V for individual transistors. Of course the article wouldn't have these details considering the article was entitled "Ten times more energy-efficient microchip recharges itself". I suppose whoever wrote the article drew that conclusion from the CONJECTURE posed in MIT's press release.
Slashdot Mirror
On an episode of "Explorations" about a year ago Michio Kaku had an interview with David Goodstein of Caltech. Unfortunately the archive was deleted but it was on May 27, 2008. Prof. Goodstein claimed that if we were to switch to all Nuclear power for our electricity needs, we would run out of Uranium in 20 years.
Is this a surprise? None of the nation's biggest airports are on there because they're all locked into various Wi-Fi carriers like Boingo that charge $7-10 for a day pass.
If we're going to have graphene consumer electronics though, it's going to be based on the wafer-scale CVD manufacturing process developed in Korea and MIT.
Trust me, CVD synthesis of graphene is in the earliest of early stages. The problem is that neither group (Korea nor MIT) have figured out how to get the graphene off the nickel layer that catalyzes the reaction. There are other ways of making graphene that are much further along, such as epitaxial growth on silicon carbide.
This is unfortunate. The two universities that I am very familiar with both have very large computer labs where people can print out things. I am wholly reliant upon the university currently to print things out. I HATE toting around my laptop and so I prefer to use campus resources. That said, my department made the switch from physical computers to remote desktops. It's worked out well, but I have to say I don't like not being able to pop in and check my e-mail between classes without having to lug my laptop around like a ball and chain.
Many of the professors I know of host copies of their publications on their lab websites for all to view. Perhaps this decision by MIT is the first of its type officially, but it's hardly new.
That's actually pretty cool. By concentrating the light, they need less photovoltaic material per square foot of land used for solar. I'm curious how the efficiency of photovoltaic cells varies with the concentration of light
For a constant temperature, efficiency goes up logarithmically with light concentration. A solar cell with 1 sun on it is going to be less efficient than one with 500 suns on it assuming you have a way to cool the cells. Past a certain point the efficiency drops like a rock due to lack of cooling the cells and this reduces the voltage you can produce by about 2.3mV/C past room temp.
and a new Facebook group called 'People Against the new Terms of Service' that has added more than 10,000 members today."
God that is the laziest form of protest ever. Yeah let's join a group on the service we are protesting to show how much we disagree with this new policy! If you take such exception, stop using the damned service.
If Intel is able to shrink its die size every 12 months AMD is in trouble.
For what it's worth "tick-tock" is actually alternating between a new architecture and a process shrink every 12 months. "Q4" in the summary means Q4 2009.
Am I the only one feeling we might have reached the point of diminishing returns, at least for desktops, in the last 2-3 years. All the shrinkage past 90 nanometers just feels underwhelming. Stuff beyond Pentium 3 has not been revolutionary, performance wise, for a desktop.
I hate to be snarky but you sound like one of those people who bought the crap about the "Megahertz Myth". Processor clock rate has little to do with performance. I'll agree that pentium 4 was underwhelming, but Core was a huge hit and saw huge performance, especially toward the ones that were released in early this year that used the high k dielectric.
has involved reinventing the wheel? I know too many engineers that like to start from scratch and simply ignore tried and true existing ideas/code/technology/what have you.
I'm pretty sure it was a South Park reference before it was a /. reference.
I couldn't help but notice that 7 of the 10 teams were from California with the other 3 teams being from Texas, Idaho and Colorado. I have a hard time believing nobody on the east coast is capable of competing in this competition, so the question is then why is there so much apathy outside California? Perhaps it is exorbitant transportation costs and most of these teams appear to be amateurish, but I just can't help but think the competition isn't as fierce as it could have been.
Sensitivity may refer to the ratio between light and dark current. Obviously one can't knock out 500 times more electrons with the same amount of photons in this material because typical silicon photodetectors aren't THAT bad. The increase in efficiency may only be a few percent for reasons I won't go into.
This is not a new technology but it is helpful to have refined, although the first use when the technology matures will be short range devices (1-2ft) not long range devices (10-20ft).
Actually it IS a new technology. Anyone who is spouting off bombast about how Tesla came up with this a hundred years ago, or that we've been using this in transformers for years is WRONG. Transformers are not resonant devices and rather rely on the closeness of the windings/core to guide the majority of the field lines to the other winding. As for Tesla's work, he used strictly far field EM radiation, which differs fundamentally from this effect, which uses near-field interactions that tend to "stick" for lack of a better term to the power source unless transferred to another device capable of resonating with it. This is what makes this 2006 discovery so great because it is extremely efficient and doesn't rely on line of sight or broadcasting a huge amount of power so that a device a reasonable distance away can receive the power it needs to operate. According to the 2006 article ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5834/83 ) the electric fields involved are small too: around 200V/m which is about double Earth's field at ground.
And finally, The human body has little to no magnetic response which is why MRI's don't kill you with their multi-Tesla magnetic fields (the Earth's magnetic field is 0.5 Gauss = 1/20000 T, for reference)
Now I shouldn't be defending them because I have Cox, but I'd just like to say I get anywhere from 30-300kBps when downloading torrents which is not terrible but ultimately lags far behind what I could get back in the urban area where my parents live that uses Bright House.
...but these settlements seem to come down to stupidity rather than a legitimate claim. This claim only extends back to 2001; I'm fairly sure I knew about this discrepancy the first time I booted up my first 386 computer in '95 when I noticed that 500 base 10 megs was actually 466 base 2 megs, and that was FAR before 2001.
Mark me redundant, but I just don't feel like these lawsuits represent a good use of the legal system.
I took computer science AB when I was in highschool and it was a great class if you looked past the god forsaken code project you had to modify that had something to do with fish. I learned all about algorithms, data structures and other important topics that I would not have gotten formal exposure to until, well, never because I didn't major in CS. One huge drawback is that it's taught in Java now, which is absolutely terrible for learning the fundamentals (I took it when it was C++)
What is the biggest shame is this course was hugely popular in my tech-oriented highschool: Like 50 people took the AB exam every year out of my class of 120 or so. While I understand TCB is trying to cut the cost of making unpopular exams, keeping computer science A is a joke because AB wasn't all that fast and A doesn't even count for credit at my university; It's basically just a waste of time.
A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded.
Graphene has some of the same problems as carbon nanotubes, so while doing basic electrical characterizations of this material are major news right now (that shows you how new this material is), ultimately using this material and convincing the 4 or 5 companies with the capital to have state-of-the-art fab facilities to switch over from silicon-based CMOS technology is looking way, way, WAY into the future.
Fact: Engineering's difficulty doesn't make every other subject cake despite whatever you have been indoctrinated with. Engineering suffers from something that most other majors do not: People that are there strictly for the money. If you aren't interested in a subject, you're more likely to fail, which is partially why I believe that the GPA disparity exists. I saw so many people in my classes that wouldn't shut up about their 80k salaries they expected to score right out of undergrad, and those same people were always the ones that just barely got their prelabs done each week or surfed the web on their laptops in class (engineering building was the only one with wi-fi).
I went to a top 25 engineering school and I can honestly say I know nowhere near what I had hoped to, and my peers know even less. I had a few friends in the same major, and I remember one semester we were all taking the same electromagnetic fields class with this old school guy who was really well-respected in his field. He was a pretty lousy teacher, but if you read the textbook and really made an effort to understand what was being taught, the class was cake. He threw the class a huge curveball on the final exam and instead of giving all problems regurgitated from homework, he asked us to define concepts such as "resistance" and "capacitance" in our own words. I was the only person I talked to that actually produced an answer to this question, and others bitched so much how the professor could possibly have "expected" them to know how to respond. How does one hope to be an electrical engineer but cannot understand something so fundamental?
I'm going to graduate school at a more prestigious university but I have no misconceptions that I will somehow learn more from classes; I'll just have access to better resources with which to learn on my own. Engineering is best learnt by doing, and most people incorrectly assume they will become good engineers by going through the engineering curriculum and that somehow magically after 4 years they will be prepared to jump into projects, which is of course bullocks. These are the reasons why so many people find engineering difficult.
I hear a lot of the same crap that gets spewed at me by professors, that engineers are better than anyone else and that we have to work the hardest for our degrees. This is simply untrue: Engineering is extremely loose with the facts and unrigorous. I have a minor in math and took some physics courses and they were infinitely more challenging than any of my EE classes because they stressed the underlying theory MUCH more rather than using the approach of engineering classes in which you learn specific cases of a much broader topic but don't understand how they are related. Time and time again, especially in math, I was very impressed at the creativity and logic of math students and the ease in which they understood new topics. Fact: Engineering's difficulty doesn't make every other subject cake despite whatever you have been indoctrinated with. Engineering suffers from something that most other majors do not: People that are there strictly for the money. If you aren't interested in a subject, you're more likely to fail, which is partially why I believe that the GPA disparity exists. I saw so many people in my classes that wouldn't shut up about their 80k salaries they expected to score right out of undergrad, and those same people were always the ones that just barely got their prelabs done each week or surfed the web on their laptops in class (engineering building was the only one with wi-fi). I went to a top 25 engineering school and I can honestly say I know nowhere near what I had hoped to, and my peers know even less. I had a few friends in the same major, and I remember one semester we were all taking the same electromagnetic fields class with this old school guy who was really well-respected in his field. He was a pretty lousy teacher, but if you read the textbook and really made an effort to understand what was being taught, the class was cake. He threw the class a huge curveball on the final exam and instead of giving all problems regurgitated from homework, he asked us to define concepts such as "resistance" and "capacitance" in our own words. I was the only person I talked to that actually produced an answer to this question, and others bitched so much how the professor could possibly have "expected" them to know how to respond. How does one hope to be an electrical engineer but cannot understand something so fundamental? I'm going to graduate school at a more prestigious university but I have no misconceptions that I will somehow learn more from classes; I'll just have access to better resources with which to learn on my own. Engineering is best learnt by doing, and most people incorrectly assume they will become good engineers by going through the engineering curriculum and that somehow magically after 4 years they will be prepared to jump into projects, which is of course bullocks. These are the reasons why so many people find engineering difficult.
The proof was submitted in september. Granted it's still old even when you take into account it was published in December, 3 months is a pretty short amount of time in academia. As an engineer, I am happy to see that not only has this mathematician proved his solution but he also provided us with an algorithm by which his solution can always be had - some might just stop at proving the existence, which makes it worthless in practice.
For me, when I start to see the blue light is when I normally GO to sleep.
You're assuming R is independent of applied voltage, which is not true for any transistor. Resistance is a derived quantity that can be (for example) formulated in terms of the ratio of resulting current from an applied voltage. Ultimately, electronic devices require a certain current to operate, so it's not as simple as minimizing power by arbitrarily scaling down current. If you cannot supply enough current to a system, transistors may not have enough juice to produce those 1's and 0's quickly enough, causing unreliable operation. A more accurate way to look at the problem is that if you wish for a device to operate and it requires a given current, if you can find a way to deliver this current at a lower voltage then you will require less power to run the device.
I am very interested to see how they managed to reliably demonstrate on/off states of individual transistors at the 0.3V level given that standard logic families use between 1-5V for individual transistors. Of course the article wouldn't have these details considering the article was entitled "Ten times more energy-efficient microchip recharges itself". I suppose whoever wrote the article drew that conclusion from the CONJECTURE posed in MIT's press release.