Full circle

Ever notice how much of what's good comes around full circle? One great example is vinyl. When I was visiting my friends at Music Direct I got a tour of their warehouse. The area dedicated to vinyl was perhaps 100 times larger than the small and, apparently, dwindling area of CDs they have for sale. Another was sent to me by my friend Tim. It now looks like Moore's law may be adhered to with, of all things, vacuum tubes. Yup. Talk about coming full circle. Moore's Law states that in computing hardware, the number of transistors will double every two years. When Intel founder Gordon Moore wrote that "law" he knew that someday that number would get so big it will bump up against the laws of physics. And we're getting to that point now. But a group of scientists have discovered that we may be able to go beyond current limitations in transistor sizes by bringing back the vacuum tube, in the form of a vacuum transistor. Here's a picture of a vacuum transistor, compared to a MOSFET. You can read the article by clicking here. Love how this works!