From my experience: Pageplus Talk n Text 1200 is a very cheap effective plan for moderate users.
$30/mo. including all taxes, uses Verizon's 3G network. (You can get further discounts ~10+% if you buy these pins online at http://www.pageplusdirect.com/ or wherever).
1,200 Minutes, 3,000 Text/Picture Messages, 500 MB Data.
https://www.pagepluscellular.com/plans/talk-n-text-1200/
Buy a used HTC Incredible from ebay, activate it, save your money.
Hate to be replying to my own post... however, the link to the NYtimes article regarding science funding in the US can be read without registration/TimesSelect only via the following link
Funding for the physical sciences (among others) in the United States has been facing a lot of difficulties lately as well. Failure of the congress to pass the new budget has caused a crisis in science funding from agencies such as the NSF and NIH that supply much of the money for taxpayer funded research in the states. This threatens to close major facilities*, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work.
It seems hardly a coincidence that the US and UK are allies in the misguided Iraqi Invasion, as well as the fight against adequate science and research funding. With all the money diverted into these misguided efforts, no wonder science funding is suffering all over (There's only so much of it to go around!)
* Example from the nytimes.com article:
"Among the projects at risk is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, on Long Island. The $600 million machine -- 2.4 miles in circumference -- slams together subatomic particles to recreate conditions at the beginning of time, some 14 billion years ago, so scientists can study the Big Bang theory. It was already operating partly on charitable contributions, officials say, and now could shut down entirely, throwing its 1,069 specialists into limbo."
HfO2/Hf Silicates is mature technology (Obviously, else they wouldn't be in production this year) - however, I disagree with it having been mature for more than 10 years. There were all sorts of compatibility problems with respect to the new layer of "foreign materials" killing the mobility of the electrons responsible for the transistor action in the absence of the kind of relatively perfect interface that Si/SiO2 had. Finding new metals for the right band alignment (different for both the PMOS vs NMOS) was an added absolutely non-trivial challenge. The amount of research activity that this problem has generated is insane. For example, a prominent research review article that was published back in 2001 "High-kappa gate dielectrics: Current status and materials properties considerations" by Wilk et. al, (J. App. Phys. 89, 5243-5275 2001) has been cited 1429 times since then when I checked today and it's still growing...
Ten years ago, scaling down of SiO2 had not really hit the wall, it was coming; so they began this work back then; It's only the last couple of years that frequency scaling has not been going upwards... The real fear was if high-k technology would miss the "45 nm technology node" - in which case it might have had to wait till the 38 nm or whatever node that came next. It was thus a question of timing, and frankly it is impressive that Intel/IBM has managed to converge upon a set of solutions which have overcome all the new problems** that the new manufacturing technology (they use ALD, atomic layer deposition) and new materials and their interfaces bring about. Hopefully these chips won't start exhibiting flaky behavior when the overclockers get their hands on these chips....
** Some of the tough problems they had to solve include (sorry for the karma whoring, check the wikipedia high-k article for the links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-k_Dielectric)
* Permittivity
* Band gap
* Band alignment to silicon - sufficiently large band offsets are needed to keep the leakage current low and protect the film from hot carrier injection.
* Thermodynamic stability
* Minimization of electric fields due to phonons in the dielectric to reduce scattering in the Si substrate so as to achieve high mobility of charge carriers in the MOSFET channel
* Minimization of the concentration of electrically charged and/or electrically active defects in the film
* Film morphology - Amorphous or epitaxial films seem to be the promising candidates - polycrystalline materials are generally ruled out.
* Interface quality
* Compatibility with the current or expected materials to be used in processing for CMOS devices
* Process compatibility - for one, the film must survive sufficiently high temperatures such as a Rapid thermal anneal to 1000 C for say, 10 s (as dictated by the CMOS technological process)
* Reliability
* Stability against degradation by the electric field and injected carriers.
* Precursor availability
* Precursor and process costs
As a graduate student researching this field, this is an amazing bit of news! - The intel high-k announcement is a *major* breakthrough, and a new, disruptive technology for chip technology especially as far as the the introduction of new materials in the Fab are concerned (and trust me, Fab engineers are paranoid about such kinds of shifts). It essentially involves replacing the SiO2 dielectric gate insulator with a new class of materials, very likely Nitrided Hafnium Silicates (though they have not publicly acknowledged the silicate part, they just mention it as a compound of Hafnium - it is the leading contender in the field).
The high-k film can be made physically thicker than the very thin SiO2 layer (which is only around 12 Angstroms thin at the moment, making it leak like a sieve) without messing up the capacitance requirements for the transistor. The introduction of new metal gate instead of the classic poly-crystalline silicon (called poly) is also abig deal, and there is greater secrecy on what those materials are. The wikipedia article on high-k has the details. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-k_Dielectric
I installed FC6T1 on a P4/Intel 865/1GB RAM system today, and already there were 125(!) updates, so it's something under very active development. The default kernel (2.6.16.xx) works, but the updated kernel 2.6.17.xx results in kernel panic (apparently, trouble with the LVM). There was also some dependency issues with a library required for updating nfs-utils, so I had to uninstall that. Other than that, it seems to be working all right. Appearences wise, it seems very similar to FC5, and seems to be more of an incremental update. This problem with kernel updates was something I encountered with FC3 as well, at which point I had to switch to CentOS 4.3 which has been very solid so far. Fedora Core may have the latest and greatest, but practically it is still a toy as far as stability/maintenance requirements goes. It will be interesting to see it mature.
For example, looking at atomic level resolution of material surfaces using an Scanning Tunneling Microsope which is fairly routine for a nanoscience experiment requires very low vibration so that the ultra fine tip does not drift with time. Usually this is accomplished by installing these multi-million dollar machines in the basements of research buildings. Lower vibrational thresholds would be always be welcome.
Parent is right, it is complex interaction of particles in a complex/coupled condensed matter system that adds complexity to the system (Usuallly solved with the time varying schrodinger equation, some pseudopotentials etc). Interactions with the nuclei are often ignored (Born approximation). Simple calculations for small clusters with good symmetry can now be relatively easily done on your PC or simple Beowulf clusters nowadays using popular programs such as Gaussian. Scaling it up to 100 atoms requores some serious horsepower like this. A good open source/GPL program for condensed matter physics related calculations can be found at www.abinit.org (ABINIT short for ab-inito caluclations)
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From my experience: Pageplus Talk n Text 1200 is a very cheap effective plan for moderate users. $30/mo. including all taxes, uses Verizon's 3G network. (You can get further discounts ~10+% if you buy these pins online at http://www.pageplusdirect.com/ or wherever). 1,200 Minutes, 3,000 Text/Picture Messages, 500 MB Data. https://www.pagepluscellular.com/plans/talk-n-text-1200/ Buy a used HTC Incredible from ebay, activate it, save your money.
Hate to be replying to my own post... however, the link to the NYtimes article regarding science funding in the US can be read without registration/TimesSelect only via the following link
Funding for the physical sciences (among others) in the United States has been facing a lot of difficulties lately as well. Failure of the congress to pass the new budget has caused a crisis in science funding from agencies such as the NSF and NIH that supply much of the money for taxpayer funded research in the states. This threatens to close major facilities*, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work.
Concerned citizens are encouraged to write to their congressmen to not forget the cause of advancement in the US. Instead of bemoaning the loss of the US edge in the sciences , speak up!
It seems hardly a coincidence that the US and UK are allies in the misguided Iraqi Invasion, as well as the fight against adequate science and research funding. With all the money diverted into these misguided efforts, no wonder science funding is suffering all over (There's only so much of it to go around!)
* Example from the nytimes.com article:
"Among the projects at risk is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, on Long Island. The $600 million machine -- 2.4 miles in circumference -- slams together subatomic particles to recreate conditions at the beginning of time, some 14 billion years ago, so scientists can study the Big Bang theory. It was already operating partly on charitable contributions, officials say, and now could shut down entirely, throwing its 1,069 specialists into limbo."
The Make magazine featured the leafproject recently which uses a custom board [2] for their "open source robot using artificial intelligence and vision"
> What do you think about2 8&cid=17787848
> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2191
HfO2/Hf Silicates is mature technology (Obviously, else they wouldn't be in production this year) - however, I disagree with it having been mature for more than 10 years. There were all sorts of compatibility problems with respect to the new layer of "foreign materials" killing the mobility of the electrons responsible for the transistor action in the absence of the kind of relatively perfect interface that Si/SiO2 had. Finding new metals for the right band alignment (different for both the PMOS vs NMOS) was an added absolutely non-trivial challenge. The amount of research activity that this problem has generated is insane. For example, a prominent research review article that was published back in 2001 "High-kappa gate dielectrics: Current status and materials properties considerations" by Wilk et. al, (J. App. Phys. 89, 5243-5275 2001) has been cited 1429 times since then when I checked today and it's still growing...
Ten years ago, scaling down of SiO2 had not really hit the wall, it was coming; so they began this work back then; It's only the last couple of years that frequency scaling has not been going upwards... The real fear was if high-k technology would miss the "45 nm technology node" - in which case it might have had to wait till the 38 nm or whatever node that came next. It was thus a question of timing, and frankly it is impressive that Intel/IBM has managed to converge upon a set of solutions which have overcome all the new problems** that the new manufacturing technology (they use ALD, atomic layer deposition) and new materials and their interfaces bring about. Hopefully these chips won't start exhibiting flaky behavior when the overclockers get their hands on these chips....
** Some of the tough problems they had to solve include (sorry for the karma whoring, check the wikipedia high-k article for the links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-k_Dielectric)
* Permittivity
* Band gap
* Band alignment to silicon - sufficiently large band offsets are needed to keep the leakage current low and protect the film from hot carrier injection.
* Thermodynamic stability
* Minimization of electric fields due to phonons in the dielectric to reduce scattering in the Si substrate so as to achieve high mobility of charge carriers in the MOSFET channel
* Minimization of the concentration of electrically charged and/or electrically active defects in the film
* Film morphology - Amorphous or epitaxial films seem to be the promising candidates - polycrystalline materials are generally ruled out.
* Interface quality
* Compatibility with the current or expected materials to be used in processing for CMOS devices
* Process compatibility - for one, the film must survive sufficiently high temperatures such as a Rapid thermal anneal to 1000 C for say, 10 s (as dictated by the CMOS technological process)
* Reliability
* Stability against degradation by the electric field and injected carriers.
* Precursor availability
* Precursor and process costs
As a graduate student researching this field, this is an amazing bit of news! - The intel high-k announcement is a *major* breakthrough, and a new, disruptive technology for chip technology especially as far as the the introduction of new materials in the Fab are concerned (and trust me, Fab engineers are paranoid about such kinds of shifts). It essentially involves replacing the SiO2 dielectric gate insulator with a new class of materials, very likely Nitrided Hafnium Silicates (though they have not publicly acknowledged the silicate part, they just mention it as a compound of Hafnium - it is the leading contender in the field).
The high-k film can be made physically thicker than the very thin SiO2 layer (which is only around 12 Angstroms thin at the moment, making it leak like a sieve) without messing up the capacitance requirements for the transistor. The introduction of new metal gate instead of the classic poly-crystalline silicon (called poly) is also abig deal, and there is greater secrecy on what those materials are. The wikipedia article on high-k has the details. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-k_Dielectric
I installed FC6T1 on a P4/Intel 865/1GB RAM system today, and already there were 125(!) updates, so it's something under very active development. The default kernel (2.6.16.xx) works, but the updated kernel 2.6.17.xx results in kernel panic (apparently, trouble with the LVM). There was also some dependency issues with a library required for updating nfs-utils, so I had to uninstall that. Other than that, it seems to be working all right. Appearences wise, it seems very similar to FC5, and seems to be more of an incremental update. This problem with kernel updates was something I encountered with FC3 as well, at which point I had to switch to CentOS 4.3 which has been very solid so far. Fedora Core may have the latest and greatest, but practically it is still a toy as far as stability/maintenance requirements goes. It will be interesting to see it mature.
You are right. thanks-
Not for me... Quake? Not a clue, never played it
For example, looking at atomic level resolution of material surfaces using an Scanning Tunneling Microsope which is fairly routine for a nanoscience experiment requires very low vibration so that the ultra fine tip does not drift with time. Usually this is accomplished by installing these multi-million dollar machines in the basements of research buildings. Lower vibrational thresholds would be always be welcome.
Parent is right, it is complex interaction of particles in a complex/coupled condensed matter system that adds complexity to the system (Usuallly solved with the time varying schrodinger equation, some pseudopotentials etc). Interactions with the nuclei are often ignored (Born approximation). Simple calculations for small clusters with good symmetry can now be relatively easily done on your PC or simple Beowulf clusters nowadays using popular programs such as Gaussian. Scaling it up to 100 atoms requores some serious horsepower like this. A good open source/GPL program for condensed matter physics related calculations can be found at www.abinit.org (ABINIT short for ab-inito caluclations)
SCO = So Cluelessly Outtathegame
All they need now is a "Developers! Developers! Developers!" gig...