Bull. As many others have pointed out, the telcos and cable companies have MONOPOLIES in most cases. You make it sound like the customers should be thankful for parting with their dollars to line corporate pockets. Get real. A more sensible idea would be for cities to provide hollow pipe for cheaply laying cable/fiber/whatever and let the competing local or regional or national providers bid for the contracts to stick their wires/fibers into the hollow pipe and provide bandwidth. THEN we'll see how much water your strawman argument of $1450 loss (for the telco)per pipe-hogger customer holds. You seem to treat bandwidth as an extremely scarce commodity and every customer as a bandwidth hog. Get a fucking clue. People have better things to do than clog up data pipes, and if the telco monopolies weren't sitting on their rich asses doing NOTHING, there wouldn't be any clogging.
There's terabits worth of fiber lying unlit, for God's sake. Shit or get off the pot!
I saw an one of the Japanese "ultralight" notebook PCs (NEC I believe) at the Microcenter in Cambridge (Boston). Had a 10" screen, ~ 3 lbs and looked cute. The CPU listed was the Transmeta Crusoe. Nifty look & feel, and seemed snappy enough for lightweight work (i.e. standard websurfing, wordprocessing, email etc).
The only thing I'm really worried about right now is losing my e-mail account and having friends get their messages bounced before I can tell them my new address (whatever that may be).
Get yourself a yahoo address and forward it to whervever your latest email account is. Simple.
[I]t is not going to take long before we start seeing hacked versions of the Xbox and hardware that can be connected to it that is not released by Microsoft.
That is precisely the idea, general. That is precisely the idea.
Bull. I just got done installing XP and in 20 minutes I am fully upto speed with it. The install was absolutely smooth on circa 1998 hardware (ABIT BH6 mobo, PII-400). The entire install involved pressing less than 15 keys and 20 mouseclicks for a *custom* install. The OS seems to run, look and FEEL very stable. I know 20 minutes experience is not that much, but the OS is running super smooth. Take it for what it is worth. I love the user interface of XP.
Unless there's a HUGE amount of liquid nitrogen discovered in a reserve (imagine a sea of LN), this geezer's idea won't fly.
As it is, his solution requires that we first SPEND a lot of energy liquifying the nitrogen, then carry it around in well-insulated tanks, and then make sure there's a way to keep the LN engine heated (analogous to the need for cooling the gasoline/diesel engine) so that the LN can continue to be evaporated and thus be exploited for moving the wagon forward.
This is one of the stupidest ideas I have seen in a while.
Well, my family doesn't really have the money to buy any UPS's and we sure can't afford to pay the state electricity board the one thousand rupees it takes to get our electrical connection back on every six months.
But gimme a 386 with a mono monitor and my brother and I will take turns on our bicycle-mounted dynamo, while we surf the net.
No, speed is the main advantage photonic switches can give. The structures will have to be atleast the same size as the wavelength of light, not shorter, to do useful, controllable processing of information represented in photon states or streams. Given that microlithography is already heading into 130 nanometer range, and is likely to go further into 90 nm pretty soon, the size of the switches (MOSFETs in case of silicon electronics) is going to be much smaller in silicon, whereas in photonic switches case, the size of the switch will have to be _atleast _several wavelengths of light, which would likely mean several hundred to several thousand nanometers for near-UV to far IR light (which seem to be the only parts of the lower-wavegelnth EM spectrum that we have technological control over as far as modulating and manipulating its flow.
Compare the size of the original prototype of the various transistor structures with the size of a typical photonic switch setup today.
Another comparison that should help is that between the crystal structure of silicon and the structure of a photonic bandgap crystal. The latter is several orders of magnitude bigger in terms of the unit cell size and is very much composed of a material with an ordinary crystalline structure, making use of gazillions of the crystal unit cells to create one photonic-crystal unit cell.
Hence, size of photonic bandgap devices is not going to be much smaller UNLESS the researchers figure out a way to make them fully 3-D (silicon electronics is 2-D or "planar").
Silicon technology is still a bulk technology. The most likely candidates for a further circuit miniaturization are what is called "molecular electronics." These involve using organic molecules with dimensions of several dozen angstroms for swithces and interconnects. People are already working very hard on metal contacts to organic molcular componet. There was a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE on Quantum and Nanoscale Devices and an article titled "Molecular Electronics" by Prof. Reed of Yale EE dept surveyed the field.
The Most striking figures in that article were (i) a very tiny organic molecular diode which operated at room temperature with voltages around +/- 0.5 volt, and (ii) a resonant tunneling device at room temp. with similar voltages. These are highly practical voltages and temperatures! The biggest obstacle is to integrate these devices.
The variety of possibilities offered by organic molecules in conjunction with metals and other solid materials is simply staggering. What is going to open the floodgates is development of techniques to integrate these tiny devices with tiny interconnects in an inert matrix.
.. in quantum mechanics have been directed at questioning the now-well-established orthodox QM picture of the world. Look up some technical articles on "Quantum Teleportation" for more details. For a very good introduction on the traditional QM theory, read Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 3.
Pratmik gave an on-the-mark description of English and programming talent in India. Most Indian Universities, colleges and schools, especially the engineering schools (which are probably the biggest nurseries of programmers) teach almost exclusively in English. English is taught in almost all states from grade 6 onwards and most "public schools" (which in India means privately run schools teach English from kindergarten on).
Linux should be a great boost for computer use and education in India. I think the good schools will incorporate a lot of it in their OS and other computer science courses. As Pratmik mentioned, getting hardware is a real problem, because it is expensive (one big reason there are few Apple machines in India), but things should get better with time as students, hobbyists and smalltime tech businessmen & businesswomen grab the 386s, 486s and early pentium systems and get them rolling with Linux.
Having grown up in rural India, I do feel that there will be significant obstacles in the path of pervasiveness of computers beyond the big cities. In the state of Punjab, there are about 25 million people, and 75% of them live in the 12,000 villages. I doubt you can find even 120 RUNNING standalone (much less hooked-up) computers in these 12,000 villages. And Punjab is one of the economically well-off states. (I say RUNNING because bureaucrats do dump some stuff on the bigger state-run schools, but no one can use them -- and they are BBC computers that can only do BASIC and emit beeps.) And the same goes with English language education: the countryside mostly gets incompetent teachers who totally suck at English themselves.
Therefore, computer usage in India is likely to stay confined to big and medium sized cities for the next few years. For 80% of Indians who live in the countryside, computers and English proficiency are not likely to show up on their radar screens anytime soon.
--rs Hah! Death is the last thing to happen to me!
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Bull. As many others have pointed out, the telcos and cable companies have MONOPOLIES in most cases. You make it sound like the customers should be thankful for parting with their dollars to line corporate pockets. Get real. A more sensible idea would be for cities to provide hollow pipe for cheaply laying cable/fiber/whatever and let the competing local or regional or national providers bid for the contracts to stick their wires/fibers into the hollow pipe and provide bandwidth. THEN we'll see how much water your strawman argument of $1450 loss (for the telco)per pipe-hogger customer holds. You seem to treat bandwidth as an extremely scarce commodity and every customer as a bandwidth hog. Get a fucking clue. People have better things to do than clog up data pipes, and if the telco monopolies weren't sitting on their rich asses doing NOTHING, there wouldn't be any clogging.
There's terabits worth of fiber lying unlit, for God's sake. Shit or get off the pot!
I saw an one of the Japanese "ultralight" notebook PCs (NEC I believe) at the Microcenter in Cambridge (Boston). Had a 10" screen, ~ 3 lbs and looked cute. The CPU listed was the Transmeta Crusoe. Nifty look & feel, and seemed snappy enough for lightweight work (i.e. standard websurfing, wordprocessing, email etc).
As a side note to the main topic, Netscape 4.7x is shit. Use 4.08 standalone. It's much better.
The only thing I'm really worried about right now is losing my e-mail account and having friends get their messages bounced before I can tell them my new address (whatever that may be).
Get yourself a yahoo address and forward it to whervever your latest email account is. Simple.
You can have multiple desktops in Windows XP. To access it, right click on taskbar, Toolbars -> Desktop manager.
That is precisely the idea, general. That is precisely the idea.
Line shamelessly copied from "Dr. Strangelove")
Bull. I just got done installing XP and in 20 minutes I am fully upto speed with it. The install was absolutely smooth on circa 1998 hardware (ABIT BH6 mobo, PII-400). The entire install involved pressing less than 15 keys and 20 mouseclicks for a *custom* install. The OS seems to run, look and FEEL very stable. I know 20 minutes experience is not that much, but the OS is running super smooth. Take it for what it is worth. I love the user interface of XP.
As it is, his solution requires that we first SPEND a lot of energy liquifying the nitrogen, then carry it around in well-insulated tanks, and then make sure there's a way to keep the LN engine heated (analogous to the need for cooling the gasoline/diesel engine) so that the LN can continue to be evaporated and thus be exploited for moving the wagon forward.
This is one of the stupidest ideas I have seen in a while.
Offtopic, but Philo Farnsworth invented the TV as we know it.
But gimme a 386 with a mono monitor and my brother and I will take turns on our bicycle-mounted dynamo, while we surf the net.
Compare the size of the original prototype of the various transistor structures with the size of a typical photonic switch setup today.
Another comparison that should help is that between the crystal structure of silicon and the structure of a photonic bandgap crystal. The latter is several orders of magnitude bigger in terms of the unit cell size and is very much composed of a material with an ordinary crystalline structure, making use of gazillions of the crystal unit cells to create one photonic-crystal unit cell.
Hence, size of photonic bandgap devices is not going to be much smaller UNLESS the researchers figure out a way to make them fully 3-D (silicon electronics is 2-D or "planar").
rs
Silicon technology is still a bulk technology. The most likely candidates for a further circuit miniaturization are what is called "molecular electronics." These involve using organic molecules with dimensions of several dozen angstroms for swithces and interconnects. People are already working very hard on metal contacts to organic molcular componet. There was a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE on Quantum and Nanoscale Devices and an article titled "Molecular Electronics" by Prof. Reed of Yale EE dept surveyed the field.
The Most striking figures in that article were (i) a very tiny organic molecular diode which operated at room temperature with voltages around +/- 0.5 volt, and (ii) a resonant tunneling device at room temp. with similar voltages. These are highly practical voltages and temperatures! The biggest obstacle is to integrate these devices.
The variety of possibilities offered by organic molecules in conjunction with metals and other solid materials is simply staggering. What is going to open the floodgates is development of techniques to integrate these tiny devices with tiny interconnects in an inert matrix.
Zyvex and the Foresight Institute website are the best resources for information on this subject. Particularly, the writings of Eric Drexler and Ralph Merkle.
.. in quantum mechanics have been directed at questioning the now-well-established orthodox QM picture of the world. Look up some technical articles on "Quantum Teleportation" for more details. For a very good introduction on the traditional QM theory, read Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 3.
... if you access the site via partners.nytimes.com instead of www.nytimes.com cheerio, rs
Linux should be a great boost for computer use and education in India. I think the good schools will incorporate a lot of it in their OS and other computer science courses. As Pratmik mentioned, getting hardware is a real problem, because it is expensive (one big reason there are few Apple machines in India), but things should get better with time as students, hobbyists and smalltime tech businessmen & businesswomen grab the 386s, 486s and early pentium systems and get them rolling with Linux.
Having grown up in rural India, I do feel that there will be significant obstacles in the path of pervasiveness of computers beyond the big cities. In the state of Punjab, there are about 25 million people, and 75% of them live in the 12,000 villages. I doubt you can find even 120 RUNNING standalone (much less hooked-up) computers in these 12,000 villages. And Punjab is one of the economically well-off states. (I say RUNNING because bureaucrats do dump some stuff on the bigger state-run schools, but no one can use them -- and they are BBC computers that can only do BASIC and emit beeps.) And the same goes with English language education: the countryside mostly gets incompetent teachers who totally suck at English themselves.
Therefore, computer usage in India is likely to stay confined to big and medium sized cities for the next few years. For 80% of Indians who live in the countryside, computers and English proficiency are not likely to show up on their radar screens anytime soon.
--rs
Hah! Death is the last thing to happen to me!