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Terabit Ethernet Inches Closer To Reality
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Australia, Denmark, and China have combined efforts to show the feasibility of terabit-per-second Ethernet over fiber-optic cables. The solution involves a photonic chip that uses laser light for switching signals, and a form of the exotic material type, chalcogenide, or arsenic trisulfide."
"...a form of the exotic material type, chalcogenide, or arsenic trisulfide.
Whew, for a minute there I was worried we were going to use some hazardous materials.
If you have, say, a bundle of fiber running across the Pacific that would cost you 9,334 bazillion dollars and a battle with the giant enemy crab just to upgrade; being able to increase its capacity just by upgrading the hardware on each end is a very attractive proposition. This applies, to a lesser degree, in all but short run situations.
This isn't exactly destined for workstations in the near future(heck, neither is 10GigE, and that is more or less commodity-off-the-shelf stuff by now); but there are applications where higher speed per fiber could well be desirable.
On a large enough sample set, correlation implies a relation other than chance, and thus should be investigated. Otherwise you can keep screaming "Correlation is not causation" at every piece of data every produced and try to claim that we can never claim results.
After all, if I state that "Each time a plant is deprived of water and sunlight it dies.", stating "Correlation is not causation" is complete nonsense. We've observed over a large enough sample set that yes, in this case correlation damn well IS causation. Effectively, your only argument here should be whether or not the sample size is large enough.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain