Chip Gear's Applied Materials Taking Shine To Solar Industry

batteries, waves, wind, etc. Silicon valley companies see this as the next long boom.

I lived through the personal computer boom as a small actor and it has enabled my career and enriched my life. I started by working in a service bureau in the mid-80s--we used a $2M refrigerated mainframe to process images and create printing film. Within two years one could do the same thing with a $10k personal computer and peripherals. The same function now is available for under $2k and one can go the whole hog and publish on the internet instead of using paper, ink and all the embedded energy and capital needed to move all that stuff around.

I'm very excited about the possibilities of clean, renewable, decentralized, networked, affordable, (and dare we say it--nontoxic) energy sources with concurrent improvement in the efficiency of the things we are powering and the functionality of batteries and other energy storage technologies.

But the semiconductor industry as a whole is anything but "nontoxic" Some of the chemestries that they use are downright dangerous. Many sites of former chip plants are superfund sites like the old Gould site in south San Jose.

of things that are even more toxic (eg. lets conference over the net instead of all flying to meet in a particular place by plane or auto, or I will spam you by email instead of whacking down a bunch of trees, we haven't seen the end of this kind of thing yet.) The industry has also moved to using citrus solvents instead of more toxic solvents and they will now be forced to move to recyclable components and a number of other greener manufacturing processes.

Due to the power of acrobat I never have to send paper manuscripts out any more. I used to go through 10 reams of paper every year, now I only buy a 10 ream box every few years.