Re: Government/society in post-scarcity interstellar environments

On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 01:44:40 GMT, throopw@xxxxxxxxx (Wayne Throop) wrote:

:: Roman pots and tiles did, and still do, exist in numbers comparable
:: to transistors today.

: John Schilling <schillin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
: Uh, just how many pots and tiles did the Romans make?
:
: Because, see, I've got something like a billion solid-state
: transistors in my office right now, and I think I'm only mildly above
: average in that regard...

Huh? DRAM still has one transistor per bit, right? I'd imagine the
usual in a new entry-level system is a quarter gigabyte nowdays, though
older equipment might be half that. But that's a billion transistors
*minimum*; average may be as many as four billion in a typical single
system.

You're right, of course. I was thinking of flash memory, with its
strange sort of quasi-transistor-thingy and not wanting to argue the
point. But DRAM has an honest transistor for each bit. And SRAM
has half a dozen, or perhaps two transistors and two SCRs if you
look at it from a different angle, but I don't think I have any SRAM
outside of caches and the like. Chump change, not worth counting.

So, yeah, on the order of twenty-five billion transistors here. And
if we're counting flash-memory transistoroids, my camera will bring
that up to forty billion.


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*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
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