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To: Sherman Logan

Battery tech has been stagnant for years. Flash is getting cheaper and more dense but what we need is more RAM and it sucks juice and thus at this point is limited by battery tech. CPUs are getting more efficient but ultimately, they are limited by battery tech also.

As far as fuel cells, Toshiba (IIRC) was spending a lot of money on methanol fuel cells a number of years back but is not longer aggressively persuing the technology now.

Things could always change tomorrow but right now they are just tweaking anodes and cathodes to get a few percent more out of batteries, what we need is orders of magnitude improvement. But if they can make a battery powerful enough to run a PC replacement, that battery technology will be powerful enough to power a real electric car alternative and buffer the grid, more power to them.


57 posted on 03/05/2012 6:48:13 AM PST by dangerdoc (see post #6)
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To: dangerdoc

Moore’s Law has been chugging along for several decades now. The energy needed for a given computational power has gone down proportionately, as computers today don’t use much if any more power than 20 years ago, despite being many orders of magnitude more powerful.

I’m skeptical of claims that we are rapidly approaching the limits of what can be done to reduce size, cost and energy consumption of electronics. All such claims have failed for decades now.

Doesn’t mean THIS week’s claim might not be right, but I wouldn’t bet any large sums on it.


58 posted on 03/05/2012 8:40:04 AM PST by Sherman Logan
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