Slashdot Mirror
Engineers Report Breakthrough in Laser Beam Tech
petralynn writes to tell us the New York Times is reporting that Stanford engineers have discovered a method to modulate a beam of laser light up to 100 billion times a second. The new technology apparently uses materials that are already in wide use throughout the semiconductor industry. From the article: "The vision here is that, with the much stronger physics, we can imagine large numbers - hundreds or even thousands - of optical connections off of chips," said David A.B. Miller, director of the Solid State and Photonics Laboratory at Stanford University. "Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years."
While I applaud Standford (sic) for their efforts at increasing the bandwidth on a technical side, one has to ask if they have the sociologist-equivalent of bearded terminal hackers working on the impact of such discoveries. We have seen that as the Internet has grown since 1996 from modems and isbn lines on up to cable modems and DSL, netizens aren't exactly using their bandwidth for the most altruistic purposes. This has created social problems such as the rampant piracy on the internet. Also companies that invested large sums of money in compression schemes and other workarounds for low bandwidth situations have and will continue to suffer in the face of increasing bandwidth (ask anyone at Citrix). Hopefully businesses and individuals can learn to adapt and use new technology responsibly.
Here's to more colloboration between technologists and sociologists.
I love you
Sincerely,
a hardware enthousiast (and laser lover)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Ok, I usually don't gribe about spelling mistakes, but STANDFORD?!!! First we get Taco's rant about his online gaming debacles and now we get this...Slashdot has stooped to new lows today.
A week or so ago, I mentioned decommissioning analog & digital TV broadcast spectrum to use for ore wireless data. I mentioned how fiber was just on serendipidous discovery away from massive data rates. I was shunned as "everyone knows" there are limits to light.
While this may not be THE discovery I was alluding to, it proves that the door surely isn't closed.
While science can find use in this discovery, I'm more interested in profitable consumer uses. What are the possibilities there?
lol. very good. Its not often you side makes me laugh...
"There are more birth defects among Born Again Christians than any other religious group."
That's not a very nice way to talk about their children.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"