Your solution would require all-optical (what they call, "transparent") switch to re-configure itself on each of the packets that you are sending down. It's OK if one packet length is a complete ISO image, but is you are just sending 256 bytes to update your position in the game on other player's computer -- well, tough luck!;-) Did you know that like a third of the packets on the Internet at any given time are under a couple hundred bytes long -- mostly TCP/IP ACKs.
... as my former advisor Prof K. Likharev used to say. When you send a sharp electrical pulse down a matched transmission line/waveguide it propagates with, you guessed it, speed of light in the medium. If your insulator is the same SiO2 they use for optical fiber you will get the same speed as in the fiber!
The problem with traditional voltage-based electronics at 40G speeds is that when you drive a SiGi/InP/GaAs transistor that fast it dissipates LOTS of power (measured in Watts per handful of transistors). Moreover, CV^2f/2 power dissipation when you constantly charge/discharge line capacitance to ~1V operating voltage is significant. And of course the maximum operating speed of any substantial logic is determined not by transistor speed but by RC constants of the wiring.
Now, if one departs from traditional transistor logic design, say, to superconductor electronics (which I've spent all my life designing up until the beginning of this year, when my current employer decided to "discontinue that effort"), you can start from a clear sheet of paper. In superconductor case, first of all you lose R in RC, not bad! Second is that when temperatures are that cold, thermal noise (~kBT) is small and operating voltages (pulse amplitudes in our case) could be ~1 mV, not ~1V, and Josephson junctions are pretty happy generating ~1ps wide pulses.
The downside is having to deal with refrigiration, one would not see this technology on the end user's desktop any time soon, but for the telco switching center it is almost doable.
My personal estimates (well, down to the complete circuit diagrams;-) ) showed that we could make a 128x128 non-blocking self-routing packet switching matrix at 60Gbps/line that could fit on the palm of one's hand, and after packaging with refrigerator fit on half a rack.
The "packet" feature is important, often when "optical computing" people talk about their switches they conveniently omit the fact that while switch might be fast enough for some 120GHz of bandwidth the re-configuration of that takes milliseconds (think long-haul traditional SONET lines), we were talking about routing/re-configuration at ~256 bits packet length (think TCP/IP).
Oh, well, it's a pity that I can not work on this stuff now, it was -> |- THIS close to actually coming up with a viable demo/product. Maybe some day...
Yeah, that might be important... But do you honestly think that if Warren Buffet (or whoever) has 1,000,000 more than you AT THIS POINT IN TIME means that his kids are getting the same *1e6* X better education right now?
At some point we need to stop looking at ourselves as just individuals, and begin looking at ourselves as a society which rises and falls in unison.
As someone who actually grew up in the SOVIET RUSSIA, I would rather opt-out of this plan, really. The thinking that "society" has "rights", while "individual" only has "responsibilities" is a very dangerous (and *logically* totally unsupported!) proposition.
An old argumnent that 80% of the wealth is controlled by 10% of the people is wrong because those are not THE SAME people every year/month/day!
Do you really believe that the people who controlled substantial chunks of $$ in 1997 are the same as in 2004?
When you start talking about "classes" the distinction is less noticeable, after all you can define a "wealthy class" as ones who control more than X% of the economy, and then your statement will become true BY DEFINITION, but it says absolutely nothing about the actual people involved.
Paul B.
P.S. There was that thread on/. some time ago, along the lines of "If you are making more than 80K/year you are actually wealthy by Kerrie's campaign definition", I would not be surprized.
Re:A must read for everyone interested in spectrum
on
Spectrum as Property
·
· Score: 1
That's a fascinating article. What does it have to do with radio spectrum?
Huh? I've got one 'Funny' moderation (which I tried to ignore;-) ) and now your comment... Strange, I guess the link was pretty much about Open Spectrum, was it the wrong one???......
Well, yeas, it was!;-( (He did a trick or two, after all, what whould you expect of the guy!;-) )
Still stuck with Mentor or something like that?;-) If you would be using Cadence DFII you would be using their variant of Lisp (SKILL)... Yes, that was one of the best design decisions that Cadence guys made.
... was the video stream available in one of open video formats or only as WMA/RM proprietary junk? I guess it's an important (for/. people) question to ask!;-)
Also, Dia (should've come with your Linux distribution as part of GNOME) but I personally find xfig more "intuitive".;-)
And modern XFig even has libraries of simbols for standard network/computer/rack/whatever equipment.
Paul B.
P.S. The best part is that the storage format is all plain-text ASCII, I've done a number of "Increase all font sizes to 14 pt" with sed and/or awk.;-)
Zend, the Israeli company backing the development of PHP...
As far as I understand from your review, PHP development was directed not by a non-profit (think Apache Foundation), but by a business (think MySQL and Zope) for a while now, and this was OK from your POV until some bigger businesses offered investment in Zend. Can you reasonably justify (at least to yourself) why Zend was OK and "Sun, MySQL, Borland and Macromedia" are bad-bad-bad corporations? Especially since MySQL could not be MUCH bigger, right?
If there were a Microsoft connection, I might don on my tinfoil hat (not just because they are BIG, but because of their monopolistic practices).
No, really! That was one of the (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/020 1043580/qid=1091570616/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-97293 58-6063327?v=glance&s=books) books that actually started the whole field, and they had to explain what the whole semi technology was to the "non-initiated" physicists.
I know how you feel, I've been trying to make a similar transition from superconductor electronics back into the mainstream, and whereever I come I can start from discussing if the place uses classic Mead-Conway colors for their layouts, of if not why not?;-) And yes, people do relate to that!;-)
Another good book which an older friend of mine swears by is the Andy Grove's book on semiconductor processes (more oriented towards fab than design), can not get the link now (maybe it is out of print), but the guy who had started Intel can not be TOO wrong, right?
Gray and Meyer wrote (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/047 1321680/qid=1091571023/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-97293 58-6063327?v=glance&s=books) this book, my new boss suggested it for me to read (took it off his bookshelf and it takes its well-deserved position on my desk now, I move it around once in a while to indicate the fact that I am checking it out;-) ), more of analog design with transistors stuff, like how would one build a really good amp and what it takes to design that without computers, SPICE and everything.
Judging from the photos on the site, those look like nice big bolts of the size one would use to attach an engine head to the block. Would the actuator mechanism really give enough of the torque for such an application???
If this can get space-qualified though, I can see those fasteners used on satellites or space stations (attach something outside without a need for a human spacewalk).
... and it is BIGGER than any company around!;-) And the Gov't agencies get to choose in which formats they send out their BAAs and in which formats do they accept proposals. I know, I work for a similar company...;-)
The good thing is that PDF becomes more and more of a standard, but to really change the whole MS vs. open standards balance one would have to start on the federal level.
IBM (the big Cadence user) just went to Cadence a couple years ago and insisted that cds5.00 should be released for Solaris and Linux *simultaneously*.
They did.
Paul B.
P.S. Cadence is a huge Electronic Design Automation (EDA) CAD system.
The WORST case in the latency-limited problem are very *small* messages: "The value @0x67564987 has changed to 0xDEADMEAT, which value to look at next?" (note the implied waiting for the answer).
You do not gain anything when you pump up bandwidth while exchanging small messages (it helps for large, sure!), you are still limited by the latency.
... you can almost introduce the desired "one little change" by exhaustive search (err, "genetic algorithm")!
Actually I've done almost (or maybe exactly!) the same, at least I used to visualize "stuff" inside old dusty-deck FORTRAN programs by making them write PostScript code and the input was definitely coming from PERL.
Just think how many more lines of code will you need to visualize something on your screen (and be able to print it in publication quality afterwards, if needed!) if you would have to re-implement half of GhostScript (and your printer's firmware as well) in your FORTRAN program.;-) Not a pretty thought, huh?
Sometimes great hackers make the worst employees. They are hard to get along with, arrogant, and throw tantrums.
TFA explicitly suggests segregating the great hackers in their own departments where they can work *with others* of the same abilities. You get dime-a-dozen post-1999 Java programmers to do the "boring stuff".
As for: If you see a great hacker don't hire them as an employee. Hire them as a consultant... -- again, the explicit advice is not to hire him but to bring him as into your company as a co-founder (or at least give enough of teh stake in the Co. to keep him attached and interested).
... because Paul Graham and ESR seem not only to share the political ideas but also be quite good friends in real life too, from what I've read. ESR, by the way, wrote a foreword to "Hackers & Painters". So I would not actually try to contrast their opinions too much...
... and it deserves to be 'Insightful', not 'Funny', really!
What is really funny is all the replies from people who do not get your sarcasm here and try to "correct" your reasoning (and one guy even agreed to it! I guess he did not read to the end;-) )
It's the same mindset that got us 'It depends on what the definition of is is'.
I assume that you mean "the definition of *it* is", and yes, this mindset can called "analytical", "scientific", "logical", etc., as opposed to the "emotional", "gut feeling" one. And I do not oppose an idea of asking what a definition or "murder" is and how it differs from "manslaughter".
Take it from a Russian who drank (maybe a bit too much of) it with people who actually lived in similar parts!;-) (they have some coal reserves nearby)
Slashdot Mirror
Your solution would require all-optical (what they call, "transparent") switch to re-configure itself on each of the packets that you are sending down. It's OK if one packet length is a complete ISO image, but is you are just sending 256 bytes to update your position in the game on other player's computer -- well, tough luck! ;-) Did you know that like a third of the packets on the Internet at any given time are under a couple hundred bytes long -- mostly TCP/IP ACKs.
Paul B.
... as my former advisor Prof K. Likharev used to say. When you send a sharp electrical pulse down a matched transmission line/waveguide it propagates with, you guessed it, speed of light in the medium. If your insulator is the same SiO2 they use for optical fiber you will get the same speed as in the fiber!
;-) ) showed that we could make a 128x128 non-blocking self-routing packet switching matrix at 60Gbps/line that could fit on the palm of one's hand, and after packaging with refrigerator fit on half a rack.
The problem with traditional voltage-based electronics at 40G speeds is that when you drive a SiGi/InP/GaAs transistor that fast it dissipates LOTS of power (measured in Watts per handful of transistors). Moreover, CV^2f/2 power dissipation when you constantly charge/discharge line capacitance to ~1V operating voltage is significant. And of course the maximum operating speed of any substantial logic is determined not by transistor speed but by RC constants of the wiring.
Now, if one departs from traditional transistor logic design, say, to superconductor electronics (which I've spent all my life designing up until the beginning of this year, when my current employer decided to "discontinue that effort"), you can start from a clear sheet of paper. In superconductor case, first of all you lose R in RC, not bad! Second is that when temperatures are that cold, thermal noise (~kBT) is small and operating voltages (pulse amplitudes in our case) could be ~1 mV, not ~1V, and Josephson junctions are pretty happy generating ~1ps wide pulses.
The downside is having to deal with refrigiration, one would not see this technology on the end user's desktop any time soon, but for the telco switching center it is almost doable.
My personal estimates (well, down to the complete circuit diagrams
The "packet" feature is important, often when "optical computing" people talk about their switches they conveniently omit the fact that while switch might be fast enough for some 120GHz of bandwidth the re-configuration of that takes milliseconds (think long-haul traditional SONET lines), we were talking about routing/re-configuration at ~256 bits packet length (think TCP/IP).
Oh, well, it's a pity that I can not work on this stuff now, it was -> |- THIS close to actually coming up with a viable demo/product. Maybe some day...
Paul B.
pbunyk (at) lycos (dot) com
P.S. Google for SFQ/RSFQ for more info
From the official site:
The mission goal - to fly the first controlled solar sail flight - remains the same.
I guess the "controlled" part is important. The sail itself is actually a set of blades which can be tilted to steer the craft.
Paul B.
and education
Yeah, that might be important... But do you honestly think that if Warren Buffet (or whoever) has 1,000,000 more than you AT THIS POINT IN TIME means that his kids are getting the same *1e6* X better education right now?
Paul B.
At some point we need to stop looking at ourselves as just individuals, and begin looking at ourselves as a society which rises and falls in unison.
As someone who actually grew up in the SOVIET RUSSIA, I would rather opt-out of this plan, really. The thinking that "society" has "rights", while "individual" only has "responsibilities" is a very dangerous (and *logically* totally unsupported!) proposition.
Paul B.
An old argumnent that 80% of the wealth is controlled by 10% of the people is wrong because those are not THE SAME people every year/month/day!
/. some time ago, along the lines of "If you are making more than 80K/year you are actually wealthy by Kerrie's campaign definition", I would not be surprized.
Do you really believe that the people who controlled substantial chunks of $$ in 1997 are the same as in 2004?
When you start talking about "classes" the distinction is less noticeable, after all you can define a "wealthy class" as ones who control more than X% of the economy, and then your statement will become true BY DEFINITION, but it says absolutely nothing about the actual people involved.
Paul B.
P.S. There was that thread on
That's a fascinating article. What does it have to do with radio spectrum?
;-) ) and now your comment... Strange, I guess the link was pretty much about Open Spectrum, was it the wrong one??? ... ...
;-( (He did a trick or two, after all, what whould you expect of the guy! ;-) )
Huh? I've got one 'Funny' moderation (which I tried to ignore
Well, yeas, it was!
The correct one is here
Paul B.
OK, OK, I surely know how it feels, doing similar stuff myself... ;-) And add gnuplot to the mix too! ;-)
Paul B.
Thoughts of Dave Reed (the guy who gave us TCP/IP)
on the subject
Paul B.
Still stuck with Mentor or something like that? ;-) If you would be using Cadence DFII you would be using their variant of Lisp (SKILL)... Yes, that was one of the best design decisions that Cadence guys made.
Paul B.
... was the video stream available in one of open video formats or only as WMA/RM proprietary junk? I guess it's an important (for /. people) question to ask! ;-)
;-)
Also, where are the LINKS to archived streams?
Paul B.
Also, Dia (should've come with your Linux distribution as part of GNOME) but I personally find xfig more "intuitive". ;-)
;-)
And modern XFig even has libraries of simbols for standard network/computer/rack/whatever equipment.
Paul B.
P.S. The best part is that the storage format is all plain-text ASCII, I've done a number of "Increase all font sizes to 14 pt" with sed and/or awk.
Zend, the Israeli company backing the development of PHP...
As far as I understand from your review, PHP development was directed not by a non-profit (think Apache Foundation), but by a business (think MySQL and Zope) for a while now, and this was OK from your POV until some bigger businesses offered investment in Zend. Can you reasonably justify (at least to yourself) why Zend was OK and "Sun, MySQL, Borland and Macromedia" are bad-bad-bad corporations? Especially since MySQL could not be MUCH bigger, right?
If there were a Microsoft connection, I might don on my tinfoil hat (not just because they are BIG, but because of their monopolistic practices).
Paul B.
No, really! That was one of the (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/020 1043580/qid=1091570616/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-97293 58-6063327?v=glance&s=books)
;-) And yes, people do relate to that! ;-)
7 1321680/qid=1091571023/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-97293 58-6063327?v=glance&s=books) ;-) ), more of analog design with transistors stuff, like how would one build a really good amp and what it takes to design that without computers, SPICE and everything.
;-)
books that actually started the whole field, and they had to explain what the whole semi technology was to the "non-initiated" physicists.
I know how you feel, I've been trying to make a similar transition from superconductor electronics back into the mainstream, and whereever I come I can start from discussing if the place uses classic Mead-Conway colors for their layouts, of if not why not?
Another good book which an older friend of mine swears by is the Andy Grove's book on semiconductor processes (more oriented towards fab than design), can not get the link now (maybe it is out of print), but the guy who had started Intel can not be TOO wrong, right?
Gray and Meyer wrote (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/04
this book, my new boss suggested it for me to read (took it off his bookshelf and it takes its well-deserved position on my desk now, I move it around once in a while to indicate the fact that I am checking it out
Make your pick!
Paul B.
Judging from the photos on the site, those look like nice big bolts of the size one would use to attach an engine head to the block. Would the actuator mechanism really give enough of the torque for such an application???
If this can get space-qualified though, I can see those fasteners used on satellites or space stations (attach something outside without a need for a human spacewalk).
Paul B.
... and it is BIGGER than any company around! ;-) And the Gov't agencies get to choose in which formats they send out their BAAs and in which formats do they accept proposals. I know, I work for a similar company... ;-)
The good thing is that PDF becomes more and more of a standard, but to really change the whole MS vs. open standards balance one would have to start on the federal level.
Paul B.
IBM (the big Cadence user) just went to Cadence a couple years ago and insisted that cds5.00 should be released for Solaris and Linux *simultaneously*.
They did.
Paul B.
P.S. Cadence is a huge Electronic Design Automation (EDA) CAD system.
In the worst case (very large messages) ...
The WORST case in the latency-limited problem are very *small* messages: "The value @0x67564987 has changed to 0xDEADMEAT, which value to look at next?" (note the implied waiting for the answer).
You do not gain anything when you pump up bandwidth while exchanging small messages (it helps for large, sure!), you are still limited by the latency.
Paul B.
... you can almost introduce the desired "one little change" by exhaustive search (err, "genetic algorithm")!
;-) Not a pretty thought, huh?
Actually I've done almost (or maybe exactly!) the same, at least I used to visualize "stuff" inside old dusty-deck FORTRAN programs by making them write PostScript code and the input was definitely coming from PERL.
Just think how many more lines of code will you need to visualize something on your screen (and be able to print it in publication quality afterwards, if needed!) if you would have to re-implement half of GhostScript (and your printer's firmware as well) in your FORTRAN program.
Paul B.
Sometimes great hackers make the worst employees. They are hard to get along with, arrogant, and throw tantrums.
TFA explicitly suggests segregating the great hackers in their own departments where they can work *with others* of the same abilities. You get dime-a-dozen post-1999 Java programmers to do the "boring stuff".
As for: If you see a great hacker don't hire them as an employee. Hire them as a consultant... -- again, the explicit advice is not to hire him but to bring him as into your company as a co-founder (or at least give enough of teh stake in the Co. to keep him attached and interested).
No, seriously... RTFA
Paul B.
... because Paul Graham and ESR seem not only to share the political ideas but also be quite good friends in real life too, from what I've read. ESR, by the way, wrote a foreword to "Hackers & Painters". So I would not actually try to contrast their opinions too much...
Paul B.
... and it deserves to be 'Insightful', not 'Funny', really!
;-) )
What is really funny is all the replies from people who do not get your sarcasm here and try to "correct" your reasoning (and one guy even agreed to it! I guess he did not read to the end
Paul B.
It's the same mindset that got us 'It depends on what the definition of is is'.
I assume that you mean "the definition of *it* is", and yes, this mindset can called "analytical", "scientific", "logical", etc., as opposed to the "emotional", "gut feeling" one. And I do not oppose an idea of asking what a definition or "murder" is and how it differs from "manslaughter".
Paul B.
... or, not to start a flamewar, even vim, I bet by now it has special modes for everything under the Sun!
Paul B.
Take it from a Russian who drank (maybe a bit too much of) it with people who actually lived in similar parts! ;-) (they have some coal reserves nearby)
Paul B.