Recent Comments:
Crystals hold promise of affordable solar energy, may have been purchased on eBay {Engadget}
May 28th 2008 8:46PM There's nothing crazy or "new age" about using crystals in solar panels. In fact, most of our solar technologies rely on them. Silicon, Gallium Arsenide, CIGS, Cadmium Telluride... are all crystalline. The only technologies that I can think of that aren't crystalline are Amorphous Silicon and the newer organic/dye/polymer types. Crystals and semiconductors go hand-in-hand, meaning that not only can crystals convert light into energy, they can convert energy into light, do trillions of calculations per second, communicate with people all over the globe...
The innovation here is being able to grow large single crystals of Titanium Oxide. That's it. The applications are only mentioned to appease the reporter conducting the interview. So instead of just making fun of this guy and writing this off, try reading a little. I understand this might conflict with your copy/paste school of journalism, but in the end you won't sound like a huge ass.
Redesign giveaway: HTC's new Shift UMPC {Engadget}
Apr 11th 2008 8:46AM in-car computer
AT&T offers SIM-only service, attempts to maintain "most open" status {Engadget}
Jan 20th 2008 7:42PM Uh, satellites? Nice try. This is AT&T, not Inmarsat.
Video: Sony's 27-inch OLED leave jaws open {Engadget}
Jan 7th 2008 5:53PM Crap, i'm one of those double-posters.
Yeah, that's the weird thing about light emitting diodes; throughout my entire education I never heard another engineer pronounce LED as "led" (rhymes with dead) only ever "el-ee-dee." Then again, I don't really care what you call it as long as I can understand what you are talking about.
Video: Sony's 27-inch OLED leave jaws open {Engadget}
Jan 7th 2008 5:36PM Really? I used to work at Eastman Kodak (where this technology originated) and we pronounced it Oh-Led just as much as O.L.E.D. It's not as correct, but very easy to pronounce in mid-sentence, unlike the staccato pronunciation of discrete initials. Just like LASER/layzer, SCSI/scuzzy, RFID/arphid, WYSIWYG/wizzywig, QWERTY/kwertie, LAN/lahn, etc, etc. I don't believe for a second that you pronounce each character in any of the final three.
Compulab's EM-X270 brings DIY to smartphones {Engadget Mobile}
Oct 19th 2007 2:28PM I even looked past their word choice, I was thinking "Oh really, it will feature 'spinning electrons' [sic], you mean like ever piece of matter in the universe?"
I get your point though about their goal of just pushing ads, but I still have a problem with the fact that the person with the megaphone has an implicit authority and they are using it to legitimize misinformation. An occasional error is nothing to talk about, but this is a chronic problem and blogs as a whole seem to be undermining the idea of journalism (and together with Wikipedia, they will put the final nail in the coffin of objective truth). Based on the comments, it doesn't seem to matter much, as most of the people who post here seem to be junkies looking for their next fix of acronyms. This however, is a whole other can of worms, and I don't think this is the forum to discuss my problems with techno-optimism.
IBM's next gen flash storage to feature spinning electrons {Engadget}
Oct 19th 2007 3:22AM Ok, so this is pretty late, but I pulled this article up to have a laugh again and I saw that someone had a legitimate question which was answered with lame jokes.
First of all, Samsung has been on 45nm for a while, and Intel 45nm Penryn chips are at fab now.
But this is what happened when people tried to go below 65nm:
Dielectric breakdown -> Ionization of the Silicon -> Ruined Device
That probably didn't make any sense, so I'll do my best to explain.
Start by looking at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lateral_mosfet.svg
That is a MOSFET transistor, which is what most flash would be made from. The easiest way to describe this is to look at it as a faucet handle for electrons. Let's say you the left N+ area is the municipal water supply and the right hand N+ area is the spout. Electrons can't travel across a P region, so you turn the faucet handle by applying a voltage to the "Gate". This basically creates a path for the electrons to cross over, and they start coming out the other side (it would take a little while longer than this to actually explain what is happening, so I apologize if that explanation wasn't sufficient).
When you move past 65nm, one of the biggest problems is with the "oxide" between the gate and the P region. As you decrease the channel length (L in the diagram, this is what you're measuring when you say "65nm") you have to make the oxide thinner (and lower the gate voltage) to make the device operate. At 65nm, the oxide thickness was ~10s of atoms, so there wasn't really any where else to go to make it thinner. That was the problem.
What people ended up doing was changing the "oxide" material (see: high-k dielectrics) But since the old dielectric (SiO2) was one the reasons why we started using Silicon in the first place (it "grows" naturally on bare Si, so it's free and easy), it took people a long time to develop this and to retool the manufacturing to accommodate this new material.
Compulab's EM-X270 brings DIY to smartphones {Engadget Mobile}
Oct 19th 2007 2:38AM No, no, no, not even remotely. "Starting at $122 (in units of 1000)" is how that should read. You can't buy this, and you probably never will be able to. You can purchase an eval board for a few grand, but that's not congruent with your original message. If you really want this "tech" you're better off getting an iPaq off of eBay and breaking open the case.
Also, as a reply to the previous poster who suggested the new Broadcomm SoC, good luck getting your hands on that if you're name isn't Nokia. Finally, cell phones have been DIY from the beginning, just not DIYWE (without education).
Which brings me to the real point; Engadget either needs to hire an engineer or stop merely reposting material from other blogs indiscriminately, because any time you try to post on something like this* it ends up being more funny than informative. If you reach beyond your domain and make an error, you'll end up degrading whatever journalistic integrity you may have had. Then again, this is the company that killed Apple stock by reporting rumors as truth, so maybe fact checking is too much to ask.
*Like new physics research, which genuinely makes me laugh out loud.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/20/ibms-next-gen-flash-storage-to-feature-spinning-electrons/
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/16/german-scientists-claim-to-have-broken-speed-of-light/
IBM's next gen flash storage to feature spinning electrons {Engadget}
Aug 21st 2007 10:01PM Am I the only one who finds the title for this post hilarious? It'll feature spinning electrons? Really?
Here, I saved you the trouble of writing your next headline:
"Apple's newest iPod has mass, occupies finite space"
Atree's UM10 e-dictionary with trick sliding keyboard {Engadget}
Aug 14th 2007 1:49PM Do you even need an Italian dictionary? Just add a vowel to the end of an English word. Done.
