Exactly. Of course these costs are passed on to the customer. All you've accomplished is setting a near-impossible barrier to entry in the market, ensuring that you'll have a oligopoly. If you want to get tax money off cell phone customers, tax cell phones. If you want to get tax money period, then increase general tax levels.
'Immaculate conception' has nothing to do with virgin birth. It refers to one of the dogmas of the catholic church, that the virgin Mary was conceived (by her parents) without original sin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_conception
Each of these switches is probably smaller than any particle shedded by normal wear-and-tear, and also smaller than the surface features that the whole concept of friction is based on.
Actually, friction increases with decreasing size. For nano-sized particles friction is one of the dominant effects and often cause microelectromechanical devices to fail due to "stiction"; one piece of the machinery semi-permanently sticking to another due to van-der-Waals forces.
Europe has much higher fuel prices. We evolved our society in one direction ([sub]urban sprawl/commuting) and they in another (it helps that they are so small and dense though).
Hey! Some of us Europeans are actually tall and smart!
Actually, most proposed designs use Lithium-6 (which melts at about 450 K) to capture the neutrons, turning it into Lithium-7. This Lithium-7 is then pumped through a heat-exchanger to extract the energy. Lithium-7 later decays into Helium-4 and tritium. The latter you feed back into the reactor.
The advantages of this approach are that you don't get as much neutron irradiation of the walls and other stuff in the reactor, and you don't need to generate the tritium used for fuel in the reactor.
Which is nice because lunar aluminum, silicone, etc will be what we build virtually any big orbital structure out of. Why import steel from Earth? Foamed aluminum (simple to make on the moon) is almost as strong, and much cheaper to get than terran steel. If we can find some iron (possible, even if its just remnents of meteors) that's easy to mine, Lunar Steel stands to make a killing as well.
Actually, one of the most common minerals in the "seas" on the moon is ilmenite, basically a titanium / iron oxide. There is all the iron and titanium you'll ever need!
Air actually has a very low dielectric constant. Vacuum, which isn't far off electrically speaking, has a dielectric constant of 1 by definition.
Apart from that, you're right. Materials with low dielectric constants are ideal for surrounding traces and leads on integrated circuits; a low dielectric constant ensures a low capacitance which translates to higher operating frequencies. So, aerogel could probably be used there, provided it could be manufactured in place.
1 kilo-watt per square meter is the correct figure (of course depending on season, location, weather and time of day). This is the total received power over all bands (visible, IR, UV et.c.)
A 10x10m roof is 100 square meters, meaning 0.1 megawatts.
This transistor technology (Single Electron Transistors) cannot be used to make large circuits, because it is extremely sensitive to spurious charges in its surroundings. It does have its special uses, though, e.g. ultra-precise current measurements, standards calibration, and that sort of thing.
What is more interesting is that this type of controlled manufacturing of quantum dots opens up the possibility of making quantum computers.
Having a specialized Linux distribution for games kinda defeats the purpose of having the games running on Linux in the first place : not having to dual boot.
Of course, you wouldn't have to pay for it, but still...
It is not the size of the logo that's impressive here, it's the resolution. The polymer they used is the key factor behind this - if the grains of the material that they expose to e-beam lithography are small enough then the resolution will be high.
The polymer they talk about seems to have long chains standing out from the surface, each forming a very small dot that can be exposed. Pretty neat.
The wafer stepper is not a yield killer in IC manufacturing, not even close. That would be contaminants and poorly calibrated equipment.
Nor is it the limiting factor when you want to go from e.g..18 microns to.13 microns. There you have all sorts of problems, most of them related to transistor design (whats to say that a.13 micron transistor will work even if you manufactured it perfectly?)
To clarify, the Crusoe is a 128-bit VLIW processor that can run 32-bit x86 code. It cannot at the moment run IA64-code but that should be easy to add support for given the software-based design of the Crusoe.
Agreed. I have an extremely powerhungry system, a Dual 300MHz PII (Klamath core) with several 7200 rpm drives and a 5" cooling fan connected to the 5 volt line. The processors alone use almost 80 watts. My powersupply isn't quite up to it, so when I load the computer (move some windows around in X, for example), I can hear the fan speed dropping (since the PIIs manage to lower the voltage on the 5 volt line). It has caused no problems so far but it makes me a bit uneasy. This is a standard Enlight miditower case and power supply.
Bottom line, pick a power supply that you know can handle the load.
Since these planets are gas giants, they are not expected to be able to harbor life (due to the extreme gravity). Their moons might, however. If these moons resemble the gas giant moons found in our solar system then they have not-so-dense atmospheres and geological activity ranging from none to quite a lot.
My point is that the equilibrium temperature (I think the definition you propose is the likely one) can be a good estimate for orbiting moons while not a very good one for the gas giant itself.
Yes it is. As others have mentioned scaling the transistor to smaller dimensions involves decreasing the thickness of the insulating layer (otherwise capacitance and therefore channel control would go down). At some point, the leakage current due to quantum-mechanical tunneling will become untolerable. What thickness this is is subject to debate but a typical suggested figure is slightly below 2 nm.
What one can do to remedy the situation is to switch the insulating layer material to something with a higher dielectric constant. Then one doesn't need to decrease the layer thickness. Today silicon dioxide is dominant partly due to its ability to withstand the high processing temperatures in subsequent steps after applying the insulating material. The article mentions this as one of the main advantages of this method: being able to apply the gate insulator and the gate material last.
The article says that this is after the high-temperature steps have been completed, but that is not entirely true. Applying the gate material (today highly doped polycrystalline silicon) is in itself a high temperature step, and this has to be applied after the gate insulator, obviously.
A solution would be to switch the gate insulator and the gate material at the same time. There is a lot of research on this (for example, aluminium oxide and aluminium, tantalum oxide + metal, titanium oxide + metal) and hopefully a solution will be available when the SIA roadmap says it is needed for production.
The huge brownish slug (commonly known as the Spanish murder slug here in Sweden) is very successful in eating other types of slugs, keeping those populations at bay. It is really gross to see a run-over or stepped-on slug being eaten by a group of his formed pals.
Unfortunately almost every type of animal finds the brown slugs inedible due to their (supposedly) foul taste. Result: the slug population is rampant in urban backyards. People are resorting to methods such as the aforementioned beer, or pouring salt / cutting in half individual slugs. This is really considered a large problem, with sometimes up to a thousand slugs in just a single backyard!
There is one animal that will eat the slugs : an obscure type of duck. Enterprising farmers are renting these ducks to people on a daily basis. It will be interesting to see what the introduction of slugbots will do to this market.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Of course these costs are passed on to the customer. All you've accomplished is setting a near-impossible barrier to entry in the market, ensuring that you'll have a oligopoly. If you want to get tax money off cell phone customers, tax cell phones. If you want to get tax money period, then increase general tax levels.
'Immaculate conception' has nothing to do with virgin birth. It refers to one of the dogmas of the catholic church, that the virgin Mary was conceived (by her parents) without original sin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_conception
Each of these switches is probably smaller than any particle shedded by normal wear-and-tear, and also smaller than the surface features that the whole concept of friction is based on.
Actually, friction increases with decreasing size. For nano-sized particles friction is one of the dominant effects and often cause microelectromechanical devices to fail due to "stiction"; one piece of the machinery semi-permanently sticking to another due to van-der-Waals forces.
Europe has much higher fuel prices. We evolved our society in one direction ([sub]urban sprawl/commuting) and they in another (it helps that they are so small and dense though).
Hey!
Some of us Europeans are actually tall and smart!
The advantages of this approach are that you don't get as much neutron irradiation of the walls and other stuff in the reactor, and you don't need to generate the tritium used for fuel in the reactor.
Which is nice because lunar aluminum, silicone, etc will be what we build virtually any big orbital structure out of. Why import steel from Earth? Foamed aluminum (simple to make on the moon) is almost as strong, and much cheaper to get than terran steel. If we can find some iron (possible, even if its just remnents of meteors) that's easy to mine, Lunar Steel stands to make a killing as well.
Actually, one of the most common minerals in the "seas" on the moon is ilmenite, basically a titanium / iron oxide. There is all the iron and titanium you'll ever need!
Air actually has a very low dielectric constant. Vacuum, which isn't far off electrically speaking, has a dielectric constant of 1 by definition.
Apart from that, you're right. Materials with low dielectric constants are ideal for surrounding traces and leads on integrated circuits; a low dielectric constant ensures a low capacitance which translates to higher operating frequencies. So, aerogel could probably be used there, provided it could be manufactured in place.
1 kilo-watt per square meter is the correct figure (of course depending on season, location, weather and time of day). This is the total received power over all bands (visible, IR, UV et.c.)
A 10x10m roof is 100 square meters, meaning 0.1 megawatts.
/Erik
This transistor technology (Single Electron Transistors) cannot be used to make large circuits, because it is extremely sensitive to spurious charges in its surroundings. It does have its special uses, though, e.g. ultra-precise current measurements, standards calibration, and that sort of thing.
What is more interesting is that this type of controlled manufacturing of quantum dots opens up the possibility of making quantum computers.
I wonder |fnord| how long it will |fnord| take before subliminal messages |fnord| are encoded into these barcode |fnord| smudges...
Having a specialized Linux distribution for games kinda defeats the purpose of having the games running on Linux in the first place : not having to dual boot.
Of course, you wouldn't have to pay for it, but still...
It is not the size of the logo that's impressive here, it's the resolution. The polymer they used is the key factor behind this - if the grains of the material that they expose to e-beam lithography are small enough then the resolution will be high.
The polymer they talk about seems to have long chains standing out from the surface, each forming a very small dot that can be exposed. Pretty neat.
-Erik Aderstedt
The wafer stepper is not a yield killer in IC manufacturing, not even close. That would be contaminants and poorly calibrated equipment.
Nor is it the limiting factor when you want to go from e.g. .18 microns to .13 microns. There you have all sorts of problems, most of them related to transistor design (whats to say that a .13 micron transistor will work even if you manufactured it perfectly?)
To clarify, the Crusoe is a 128-bit VLIW processor that can run 32-bit x86 code. It cannot at the moment run IA64-code but that should be easy to add support for given the software-based design of the Crusoe.
Agreed. I have an extremely powerhungry system, a Dual 300MHz PII (Klamath core) with several 7200 rpm drives and a 5" cooling fan connected to the 5 volt line. The processors alone use almost 80 watts. My powersupply isn't quite up to it, so when I load the computer (move some windows around in X, for example), I can hear the fan speed dropping (since the PIIs manage to lower the voltage on the 5 volt line). It has caused no problems so far but it makes me a bit uneasy. This is a standard Enlight miditower case and power supply.
Bottom line, pick a power supply that you know can handle the load.
/Erik
Since these planets are gas giants, they are not expected to be able to harbor life (due to the extreme gravity). Their moons might, however. If these moons resemble the gas giant moons found in our solar system then they have not-so-dense atmospheres and geological activity ranging from none to quite a lot.
My point is that the equilibrium temperature (I think the definition you propose is the likely one) can be a good estimate for orbiting moons while not a very good one for the gas giant itself.
Isn't the real problem quantum tunneling, though?
Yes it is. As others have mentioned scaling the transistor to smaller dimensions involves decreasing the thickness of the insulating layer (otherwise capacitance and therefore channel control would go down). At some point, the leakage current due to quantum-mechanical tunneling will become untolerable. What thickness this is is subject to debate but a typical suggested figure is slightly below 2 nm.
What one can do to remedy the situation is to switch the insulating layer material to something with a higher dielectric constant. Then one doesn't need to decrease the layer thickness. Today silicon dioxide is dominant partly due to its ability to withstand the high processing temperatures in subsequent steps after applying the insulating material. The article mentions this as one of the main advantages of this method: being able to apply the gate insulator and the gate material last.
The article says that this is after the high-temperature steps have been completed, but that is not entirely true. Applying the gate material (today highly doped polycrystalline silicon) is in itself a high temperature step, and this has to be applied after the gate insulator, obviously.
A solution would be to switch the gate insulator and the gate material at the same time. There is a lot of research on this (for example, aluminium oxide and aluminium, tantalum oxide + metal, titanium oxide + metal) and hopefully a solution will be available when the SIA roadmap says it is needed for production.
Unfortunately almost every type of animal finds the brown slugs inedible due to their (supposedly) foul taste. Result: the slug population is rampant in urban backyards. People are resorting to methods such as the aforementioned beer, or pouring salt / cutting in half individual slugs. This is really considered a large problem, with sometimes up to a thousand slugs in just a single backyard!
There is one animal that will eat the slugs : an obscure type of duck. Enterprising farmers are renting these ducks to people on a daily basis. It will be interesting to see what the introduction of slugbots will do to this market.