As the summary points out, this is just a new recipe for making quantum dot tetrapods, for use in, for example, thin film solar cells where the cadmium selenide dots are encased in a polymer layer.
As with all stories about incremental progress in solar cell there are still a few hurdles yet to overcome:
Power conversion efficiencies from these cells are typically below 4% (eg. 1.8% original report, Sun et. al Nano Lett 3, 961). A good crystalline silicon cell will give you 12-15%.
Stability. Nanocrystals tend to go off pretty quickly and you don't want to be replacing your solar cell every week or so.
Cadmium is hella-toxic and _may be_ more so in nanocrystal form. A little vial of the stuff is enough to kill you, apparently. Makes you wonder about all those Ni-Cd batteries.
However, I welcome the (eventual) coming of our new tetrapod overlords.
The Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) part of WinFX promises dot-pitch independent GUIs, so everything will scale nicely for high-res displays. It takes the form of an improved Windows Forms API for.net.
Personally this is my no. 1 desired feature of Vista. I couldn't give a damn about sidebard gadgets (lame) or the fact that everything is now black coloured. The decent bits of Vista always seem to be overlooked.
A fairly major selling point of these screens is that they are considerably harder to break than normal glass based screens. Glass is to some degree brittle. These screens are made of 4 layers of tough plastic and should be resistant to dropping, ripping and even to some degree scratching.
The display component is from e-ink and is basically made up of little balls, each half black and half white. When the screen is powered up it flips the relevant balls to make a picture (and then powers down and the image stays). In the lab they claim to have VGA res, colour and refresh speeds suitable for video (early versions of this system had refresh speeds of about 0.5s which was painful)
I'm interested in your assertion that China would not respond. If it looked like American or American-supported forces were invading North Korea, I'm convinced the Chinese government would absolutely fight against the invading troops. The Chinese do not want to share a border with the Yanks.
I believe the equipment on-board was necessary to record the wind speeds etc., it was just that the main transmission eq to send the signal back was not turned on.
`Mother nature knows best':) Unfortunately the word `organic' here just means based on carbon chemistry. The organic materials used in OLED and PLEDs (polymer LEDs) do not occur in nature and have to be synthesised by chemists (eg. Alq3, PPVs etc.)
Good to see their money is going to good use
on
Mozilla.org Relaunched
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Were they stuck for something to do when they realised they no longer had to keep renaming Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?
1) is not correct. When receiving a torrent you receive random packages of data from all over the file. Hence you can often watch movies when they are ~80% downloaded and you happen to have got the indexing block.
If you think about it, if torrents were purely sequential they would be very slow since if say 10 people started torrenting from 1 seed they would all be fighting over the same blocks and couldn't help each other.
Eventually we may get to that stage. For screen technology you require 3 main components - a substrate/electrode (glass + indium tin oxide), a TFT layer for active switching ([amorphous] silicon currently) and then the active part of the screen itself (and maybe a metal electrode which is no big deal).
Polymer TFT planes and polymer substrates are coming on but, even when we get the active layer polymer right, we'll still need the other two to get real disposible displays.
There seems to be a lot of confusion over exactly which type of OLEDs are currently out there in the market.
There are two OLED `generations':
1) Small molecule - these use small organic molecules (think anthracene). They require pretty much conventional vacuum-systems for preparation and hence are expensive. However, they are emissive (unlike LCDs). These are the OLEDs we start to see in cameras etc. Lifetimes are pretty good.
2) Polymer - this is the 2nd gen - here the manufacturing is all roll-to-roll or inkjet printing. These are going to be the el-cheapo reasonably-nice displays of the future. However, the lifetimes here are a concern - we're talking 15,000 hrs for the best blue polymers which isn't good enough yet.
Certainly a big advantage of electronic voting is seen as being able to vote remotely, over the internet or whatever (it's certainly been used in the UK for local council elections). The Indian system just seems like small non-networked computers at the polling stations as a replacement for boxes of paper. It's got big advantages for counting etc. but it doesn't do what a lot of people would want (secure internet voting).
Although I'm willing to be proved wrong, I suspect these may be vacuum-deposited organics (small molecule), rather than the soft-lithographic or printed semiconductors I'm envisioning.
As I understand it, current RFID solutions are based on small silicon chips - which are probably going to remain rather expensive, even in bulk (at least compared to a bar code). The real explosion of RFID will probably come with the commercialisation of any of the large-scale non-vacuum deposition semiconductor techniques - printable metals, organic polymer transistors etc.
Why are all these mock-ups so small? When I'm saving a file my full attention is devoted to the file selection dialogue, so it might as well fill up a reasonable part of the screen. MS realised this with Office 2000.
Now I'm aware that all these file selectors are resizable with GTK layouts etc. but the default, and the size for which the GUI is optimised, ought to be a little larger I think.
I don't do windows, but wouldn't it be preferable to put the resources towards native solutions?
What resources? This is one guy's pet project by the looks of things. If you want some big Linux company to dedicate $100,000s to developing native NTFS dream on...
So these guys are almost a factor of 10 up. The story's a bit short on details - I'm guessing that they are using some form of inorganic nanocrystals (CdSe or CdTe seem popular) embedded in the plastics. The plastics give cheapness of manufacturing (spin coating etc.), the inorganics do the real charge separation work. There was a paper a while back that reported 50% EQE (external quantum efficiency) with such devices, but this is not the same as power conversion, and that was at the system's maximum absorption wavelength; real solar cells have to take what they're given from the sun - they can't rely on a laser at the right wavelength!
To be frank, the old real way they can know that the source code they have is actually running on their machine in unadulterated form, is to compile the source and then use this version on all of their machines.
Whilst I guess a government could insist on this, reinstalling all machines after they'd be bought, presumably with Windows pre-installed, from the supplier, it would still be an undertaking.
I really can't imagine Valve launching HL2 in England with such a system. Many people here (such as myself) have to pay-per-minute for internet access. Probably less than 50% of people who would buy HL2 have broadband or unmetered dialup (and that has 2 hourly cutoffs typically).
Certainly the big Linux companies are in competition. They appreciate the need for a standard desktop, not only from a useability point of view, but from a branding point of view.
The best example is RedHat's bluecurve, which I'm sure they'd like to be seen as `the' Linux desktop for the enterprise.
The nice thing about binary systems are that they are either on or off. As gates and tracks get smaller, interference effects etc. become the limiting factor.
As we add more states, intermediate voltages, to the system, the difference between states becomes smaller, ie. the difference between states 2 and 3 in a ternary system is less than states 1 and 2 in a binary system.
Hence a binary system can be made smaller and denser than a ternary system and still work.
We may gain in logic density but lose out in physical density.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck with your new endeavours. For whatever reason, I still find myself coming back to this site year after year :)
-flend
As the summary points out, this is just a new recipe for making quantum dot tetrapods, for use in, for example, thin film solar cells where the cadmium selenide dots are encased in a polymer layer.
As with all stories about incremental progress in solar cell there are still a few hurdles yet to overcome:
Power conversion efficiencies from these cells are typically below 4% (eg. 1.8% original report, Sun et. al Nano Lett 3, 961). A good crystalline silicon cell will give you 12-15%.
Stability. Nanocrystals tend to go off pretty quickly and you don't want to be replacing your solar cell every week or so.
Cadmium is hella-toxic and _may be_ more so in nanocrystal form. A little vial of the stuff is enough to kill you, apparently. Makes you wonder about all those Ni-Cd batteries.
However, I welcome the (eventual) coming of our new tetrapod overlords.
The Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) part of WinFX promises dot-pitch independent GUIs, so everything will scale nicely for high-res displays. It takes the form of an improved Windows Forms API for .net.
Personally this is my no. 1 desired feature of Vista. I couldn't give a damn about sidebard gadgets (lame) or the fact that everything is now black coloured. The decent bits of Vista always seem to be overlooked.
330 A4 pages with small print maybe. Letter-sized for you American types.
A fairly major selling point of these screens is that they are considerably harder to break than normal glass based screens. Glass is to some degree brittle. These screens are made of 4 layers of tough plastic and should be resistant to dropping, ripping and even to some degree scratching.
The display component is from e-ink and is basically made up of little balls, each half black and half white. When the screen is powered up it flips the relevant balls to make a picture (and then powers down and the image stays). In the lab they claim to have VGA res, colour and refresh speeds suitable for video (early versions of this system had refresh speeds of about 0.5s which was painful)
To quickly create a filter, right click on the From text in blue on the message header and go for Create Filter From Message...
I'm interested in your assertion that China would not respond. If it looked like American or American-supported forces were invading North Korea, I'm convinced the Chinese government would absolutely fight against the invading troops. The Chinese do not want to share a border with the Yanks.
I believe the equipment on-board was necessary to record the wind speeds etc., it was just that the main transmission eq to send the signal back was not turned on.
`Mother nature knows best' :) Unfortunately the word `organic' here just means based on carbon chemistry. The organic materials used in OLED and PLEDs (polymer LEDs) do not occur in nature and have to be synthesised by chemists (eg. Alq3, PPVs etc.)
Were they stuck for something to do when they realised they no longer had to keep renaming Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?
1) is not correct. When receiving a torrent you receive random packages of data from all over the file. Hence you can often watch movies when they are ~80% downloaded and you happen to have got the indexing block.
If you think about it, if torrents were purely sequential they would be very slow since if say 10 people started torrenting from 1 seed they would all be fighting over the same blocks and couldn't help each other.
Eventually we may get to that stage. For screen technology you require 3 main components - a substrate/electrode (glass + indium tin oxide), a TFT layer for active switching ([amorphous] silicon currently) and then the active part of the screen itself (and maybe a metal electrode which is no big deal).
Polymer TFT planes and polymer substrates are coming on but, even when we get the active layer polymer right, we'll still need the other two to get real disposible displays.
There seems to be a lot of confusion over exactly which type of OLEDs are currently out there in the market.
There are two OLED `generations':
1) Small molecule - these use small organic molecules (think anthracene). They require pretty much conventional vacuum-systems for preparation and hence are expensive. However, they are emissive (unlike LCDs). These are the OLEDs we start to see in cameras etc. Lifetimes are pretty good.
2) Polymer - this is the 2nd gen - here the manufacturing is all roll-to-roll or inkjet printing. These are going to be the el-cheapo reasonably-nice displays of the future. However, the lifetimes here are a concern - we're talking 15,000 hrs for the best blue polymers which isn't good enough yet.
Certainly a big advantage of electronic voting is seen as being able to vote remotely, over the internet or whatever (it's certainly been used in the UK for local council elections). The Indian system just seems like small non-networked computers at the polling stations as a replacement for boxes of paper. It's got big advantages for counting etc. but it doesn't do what a lot of people would want (secure internet voting).
Although I'm willing to be proved wrong, I suspect these may be vacuum-deposited organics (small molecule), rather than the soft-lithographic or printed semiconductors I'm envisioning.
As I understand it, current RFID solutions are based on small silicon chips - which are probably going to remain rather expensive, even in bulk (at least compared to a bar code). The real explosion of RFID will probably come with the commercialisation of any of the large-scale non-vacuum deposition semiconductor techniques - printable metals, organic polymer transistors etc.
Why are all these mock-ups so small? When I'm saving a file my full attention is devoted to the file selection dialogue, so it might as well fill up a reasonable part of the screen. MS realised this with Office 2000.
Now I'm aware that all these file selectors are resizable with GTK layouts etc. but the default, and the size for which the GUI is optimised, ought to be a little larger I think.
I don't do windows, but wouldn't it be preferable to put the resources towards native solutions?
What resources? This is one guy's pet project by the looks of things. If you want some big Linux company to dedicate $100,000s to developing native NTFS dream on...
I believe there is a James Bond razor available with a polymer display, try, er, this link.
I guess that HOWTO you mention might come in handy in future :)
So these guys are almost a factor of 10 up. The story's a bit short on details - I'm guessing that they are using some form of inorganic nanocrystals (CdSe or CdTe seem popular) embedded in the plastics. The plastics give cheapness of manufacturing (spin coating etc.), the inorganics do the real charge separation work. There was a paper a while back that reported 50% EQE (external quantum efficiency) with such devices, but this is not the same as power conversion, and that was at the system's maximum absorption wavelength; real solar cells have to take what they're given from the sun - they can't rely on a laser at the right wavelength!
To be frank, the old real way they can know that the source code they have is actually running on their machine in unadulterated form, is to compile the source and then use this version on all of their machines.
Whilst I guess a government could insist on this, reinstalling all machines after they'd be bought, presumably with Windows pre-installed, from the supplier, it would still be an undertaking.
I really can't imagine Valve launching HL2 in England with such a system. Many people here (such as myself) have to pay-per-minute for internet access. Probably less than 50% of people who would buy HL2 have broadband or unmetered dialup (and that has 2 hourly cutoffs typically).
Certainly the big Linux companies are in competition. They appreciate the need for a standard desktop, not only from a useability point of view, but from a branding point of view.
The best example is RedHat's bluecurve, which I'm sure they'd like to be seen as `the' Linux desktop for the enterprise.
The nice thing about binary systems are that they are either on or off. As gates and tracks get smaller, interference effects etc. become the limiting factor.
As we add more states, intermediate voltages, to the system, the difference between states becomes smaller, ie. the difference between states 2 and 3 in a ternary system is less than states 1 and 2 in a binary system.
Hence a binary system can be made smaller and denser than a ternary system and still work.
We may gain in logic density but lose out in physical density.