Posts by Chipwidget

Trump stomps feet, pulls out 't-word' again over China rare earths ban

Processing equipment

The only reason China holds any advantage in RE is because for many years the us was happy to buy cheap from China instead of building their own capacity. Now Taco’s trade war has caused China to pull one of the biggest levers they have and the mango Mussolini is in a mess entirely of his own making. OTOH Mountain Pass is big, new and efficient and none of the process technologies came from China. The only reason the us can’t be self sufficient in RE is cost and time to build new capacity

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Throw in a change of corporate domain name, entanglement with Teams, things that work only on the desktop and some that work only on mobile devices (thanks to corporate security tweaks) at the same time as the new outlook arrives and this semi-tech literate user is struggling.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Once when working on a car window mechanism I reassembled the door only to find, on counting tools, I had left a spanner inside. My sympathy is with the mechanic

Ambitious overclocker cools Raspberry Pi 5 with liquid nitrogen

Re: He voided his warranty

Irrelevant as it hasn’t actually broken. Yet.

Next-gen Meta AI chip serves up ads while sipping power

If the ads it sends me are any indication this chip lacks any intelligence, artificial or otherwise

Toyota, Samsung accelerate toward better EV batteries

Re: Seeing is believing

I expect we will use the solid state battery to store the power generated by fusion reactors

NASA and miners face off over lithium deposits at satellite calibration site

NASA is safe

In analysing mining opportunities for investment there are a few danger signs. These include 1) using new technology (that may never eventuate) and 2) Extracting the entire periodic table (or at least 10 of). My guess is these guys are planning to extract their profits from the shareholders and government grants. They've clearly got the latter sorted

Boffins think they've decoded mysterious 819-day Mayan calendar

Re: "and have yet to return to a sense of normalcy"

"...the books" - which were otherwise so-so compared to the radio play

Uncle Sam greenlights first commercial nuclear small modular reactor design

Timing is everything

"that SMR will be ready next month" but you already told us the first will be ready in 2029 and I'm guessing that depends on finance etc. Renewable projects that are "years away" will probably be ready sooner and no 35 x radioactive waste.

Direct lithium extraction technique for greener batteries gains traction

Re: Water is Recyclable

The problem is it takes years of evaporation so it's a long 'pipeline' before you get some product. In the meanwhile an unseasonable rain event (ie any rain at all in that part of the world) can knock you back a year. Ask anyone from Eastern Australia about increasing rain events...

Oxidation-proof copper could replace gold, meaning cheaper chips, says prof

Re: Will this be any use in practice

I just read that there is about 0.1g of gold in a CPU chip and I expect they have more than most. So at $62 million per tonne, that works out to about $6.20. If the copper was absolutely zero cost, your stick would come down to about 377 pounds. Might make more difference on cheaper things but they probably have less gold in them too