Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment How will they join Carbon Nanotube WIRES? (Score 1) 206

(I am an EE.) Copper wire is useful because a) it conducts electricity well, and b) it is easily joined to other circuits. It can be joined to other circuits because of its properties: soldering because it copper alloys well, crimping/wrapping/twisting because copper is malleable and ductile.

Are carbon nanotubes solderable? I doubt it.

Are carbon nanotubes crimpable or twistable? Again, I doubt it.

So, how are they going to join two nanotube wires?

Comment Re:This is not the same thing as Palin's situation (Score 0, Flamebait) 407

Palin staff: already had government e-mail accounts, but used Yahoo accounts to conduct business that they did not want to reveal to the public.

This really is becoming "SlashKos". Anyone who could be bothered to actually READ the screenshots at Gawker of Palin's Yahoo! account could have seen that it WAS NOT GOVERNMENT BUSINESS.

Sheesh. Come on. You may hate Palin, but this is a technology website. Let's deal in the truth.

Comment Overclocking? That's all you can say? (Score 1) 1

OK, I AM an electronics engineer, which I guess is the reason I'm bugged by the "overclock" comment, even though I know it's mostly a joke.

The reason people want to cool computer hardware that is "overclocked" is because of a basic, heretofore unavoidable fact of nature: Joule's Law. Stated simply, Joule's Law says that electrical power dissipated as heat is proportional to the resistance that the current is passing through. In a computer, signals turn on and off (that's the "clock" part), so the heat is proportional to the frequency, too. (It's also proportional to the square of the voltage, all other factors being equal, which explains the push to lower voltages.) So, crank the clock frequency, the voltage, and given some resistance, and yeah, you better be ready to remove heat from the device.

BUT THIS IS A SUPERCONDUCTOR.

Superconductors don't have any electrical resistance; that's the whole point of superconductors. Therefore, given the right conditions (magnetic fields not spoiling your superconduction, etc.), you can run a superconducting computer with a clock frequency WAY faster than you could ever run anything made of normal silicon field-effect transistors (FETs). Even when they are fully on, FETs have a resistance of some hundredths of an ohm, up to tens of ohms. Superconducting FETs (if they work the way I think they're working, but I didn't RTFA) don't have ANY resistance. Zip. Zero. Nada.

So, no need to lower the temperature any more, and you just "clock", not "overclock". Sorry, modders :-(

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, lower your standards.

Working...