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54 comments on Jumping on the technology bandwagon

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Bob Munck on December 4, 2005 - 6:21pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Computer-type techies are made optimistic by the long-term and continuing success of Moore's Law; what they tend not to realize is that that law takes advantage of a second-power relationship.  That is, the thing chipmakers improve over the years is the resolution of their machinery -- the number of lines per linear unit on the substrate.  When you do that, the number of elements on the chip -- essentially the thing Moore's Law measures -- goes up as the square of the improvement. Double your resolution, and the number of elements on the chip goes up by four. No such relationship exists for improvements in things like the efficiency of extracting energy from wind or processing tar sands.
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odograph on December 4, 2005 - 7:11pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I've made and seen the Moore's law contrast in other forums.  Someone made the observation that shrinking electronics means that LESS mass (electrons) is moved in each generation, increasing efficiency.  On the other hand, US automobiles have been trending toward slightly more mass.

The SUV trend aside, there is no way we are going to make a four passenger car 1000x lighter.

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TJ on December 4, 2005 - 7:40pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
  It might be nice if just for once someone used the space program instead of computers as their technology referent.  After a half century of development, it's just gotten more expensive and more complicated.  Or look at medical science, for pete's sake.  You don't get the result you like just because you want it a lot.
  This artticle is just more King Canute. It struck me as another example of someone trying to spin reality away.  Without magic markets and magic technology the Wired way of life would be doomed; no one is going to be interested in wrist computers, Google Universe and AI when you can't heat a house.  Therefore if you say it can't happen often enough then it won't.
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wkwillis on December 5, 2005 - 5:28am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I have to agree. We spend lots and lots of money on rocket engineering and we still can't beat three solids and a pressure fed for getting off the planet. Hydrogen, liquid fuel bipropellant, liquid oxygen, etc, are simply not cost drivers. Three solid fuel rockets in a stack and a pressure fed for regularizing the orbit is still the way to go. All the fancy accounting they use to persuade us that Ariane and the Shuttle are cost effective is not going to change the fact that their budgets are still way too high for the prices they qoute.
In fifty years we have made no progress. That's when the Scout program started up.
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tom deplume on December 5, 2005 - 5:31pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The power of a wind turbine is proportional to the SQUARE of its diameter. Its sort of like Moore's Law.
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