> 99% of the computing needs of 99% of the people can be met by the existing

You know, this phrase has been uttered so many times it became completely meaningless. Please define "Computing needs"?

If you had asked someone in the 50ies, they would have told you that the average person needs some help with adding the numbers for checkbook balancing. So a simple calculator should be enough, right? Nobody would have considered that people of 2000ies would deem it a worthwhile endeavour to use processing power that exceeds the computing power of the entire civilization in the 50ies by orders of magnitudes, simply for gaming.

Today people use a different frame of reference based on the applications they know today. The mistake is still the same.

Why do we need more of moores law?
- Right now everything is about the internet of things. Moores law is not only about transistor density, it is also about power. We need extremely low power computing. The trillion sensor revolution is not a joke. It is happening right now.
- We are still orders of magnitude away in computing power from anything required to make truely intelligent system. There are huge research projects right now, pushing the understanding of the human brain (the EU human brain project for example). If you want your fridge to be as intelligent as a dog, you may want it to have more computing power than your current pc or smartphone.

Please recommend good applications. I bought a Nexus 5, because I recently dropped my previous smartphone. But what do I do with it?

>Every one of the inventions is being pulled forward. It is clear you have no idea what's available out there. Thin film is beginning to dominate commercial installation, >in fact it's so much better that it's very difficult to even purchase thin films any more because all the production is allocated to commercial installations. Other

Bullshit. Most thin film technologies are DOA. There are two technologies that seem to suceed in the market: CdTe and CIGS. However, due to their low conversion efficiency they are only used in big projects. You are not going to see thin film in residential anytime soon. In fact First Solar, thin film market leader, recently acquired a crystalline silicon company to introduce a product in that sector.

>techniques are out there and being used, the better the cell the more likely it'll be relegated to commercial installation. Most of what's available for retail purchase >is the output of older cell lines that are no longer competitive on the commercial side.

It would be nice if market consolidation were drive by technological differentiation, but sadly that is not the case. Older cell lines are only uncompetitive due to bad scaling effects (low throughput, low degree of automation etc.), not due to their cell technology.

>They do, all the time.

In fact, they never do at all! If you look at the market statistics, you will notice that >80% of the market is crystalline silicon. And while there are different ways to manufacture crystalline silicon solar cells, companies have been extremely reluctant to introduce new technologies. In fact, almost all solar cells today are still made with the same manufacturing process steps as 10 years ago. Conversion efficiencies have improved simply by tweaking these process steps.

>Why do you think the cost of solar has decreased by 90% over the last 30 years?

I know why the cost has decreased
- Manufacturing cost reduction by scaling effects
- Very significant cost reduction in raw materials
- Reduction of material consumption by process optimization
- And to a smaller part, improvement of conversion efficiencies by process optimization.

News about surface plasmonic effects, black silicon and the like are surface every other weak. However they have not inched any closer to production than they were 5 years ago.

Photovoltaic modules are a commodity. The technology and science behind it is of limited depth and not comparable to the semiconductor industry. Look elsewhere if you want to innovate in technology.

What is needed is innovation on the system level, products and marketing.
 

Right, I was so appalled that I even overlooked this basic fact:

Why are the no booth babes in the video?

WTF is this shit? I don't even know where to start...

1) Bad audio quality
2) Bad video quality
3) Cat background?
4) Some guy who never in his life got close to a woman who would qualify as a "booth babe" talking about "booth babes"?

This is just pathetic.

Know your limits. Know your audience. Even if Slashdot is dieing, please do it with dignity!

Man I really wish for Slashdot going down with a story about how 2017 is finally the year of Linux on the Desktop.

Some people do not seem to understand the term "quantum efficiency" (QE).

The quantum efficiciency measures the fraction of photons that are actually detected by the camera.
An external quantum efficiency of 50% means that 50% of all incident photons are converted into electron-hole pairs and can be detected.
There are, however, loss mechanisms that prevent all e-h pairs to be collected. But this is not off by a factor of 1000x from the theoretical limit.

As already stated by the original poster. This figure is probebably for some other wavelengths, like far infrared, where silicon is "blind" due to its band gap.
Since humans are very blind to this wavelengths as well, the relevance in the cameras is questionable.

The semiconductor industry is a bit different. No fab is ever build without massive government subsidies. Just google about globalfoundries in new york.

They are still there. As well as several Infineon Fabs in Germany (Dresden, Regensburg, Warstein) and Austria (Villach), a massive fab by Globalfoundries in Dresden and a large fab by Intel in Ireland.

I am pretty sure IBM did not leave due to any reason directly related to the location. Semiconductor fabs can have a relatively short lifetime, depending on the technology. The IBM fab had been in operation for decades, if I am not mistaken.

If you want a leading edge fab, it is quite possible that some technology changes (e.g. wafer size conversion) make it uneconomical to upgrade an existing fab. In that case you need to build a new shell. Locations for new fabs are often significantly influenced by incentive payments from the local government. For example the new globalfoundries fab in new york state got billions of incentive payments. IBM most likely decided to discontinue the site after moving the products to a more modern fab that was build somewhere where they got more money...

Oh man, I always hated April fools day on slashdot, because all frontpage articles would be "jokes". It became even worse when slashdot started lagging all the other aggregators in speed. So, today they found a way to even top that with this stupid rot13 shit.

Is today the day slashdot jumped the shark? Probably not, because i see that this article only got around 160 comments. That used to be different five or ten years ago.

Slashdot is dead. The founders knew when to leave, but it is a pity the current owners let it rot as the zombie it is.

>3 times replying to himself
>obvious nerd rage

geeks will be geeks...

Hey, I know Slashdot is somewhat retro, but this submission really seems like a thing of the past. You know, when we all were still 14 in 1998, when Slashdot was still the most awesome website on the interwebs? In 1998 I could still guzzle down a couple of cans of soda a day without worrying about my weight. But it is not 1998 any more and I am not 14 any more. I bet the average visitor of slashdot is in his thirties by now.

So, who in their right mind is interesting in learning about drinking sugar-water in the morning, even if it is infused by fruit juice? How is it news that some obesity-spreading conglomerate is launching another attack on the nations health?

Come on Slashdot. I have not complained for years, but WTF!

I once decapsulated one of the first versions of these gate array. To my surprise a large fraction of the die area was completely unused - it seemed that the chip was extremely I/O limited. No wonder it was possible to fit further devices into that gate array.

Unfortunately the article is dumbed down a lot, so it is not easy to understand what technology is actually supposed to be used. But this sound a lot like a Rapid Thermal Anneal (RTA/RTP), which has been used for decades in semiconductor manufacturing. It has also been used a lot in lab environment to manufacture solar cells. It is possible that the energy consumption can be reduced, but the tool throughput and maintenance costs are quite a bit higher than that of a conventional furnace. I suppose that is why it did not catch on so far.