I salute your resolve. Tell this to the unwashed masses how have been craving for the most recent cool software / gadget / widget / design / feature for the last 20 years. And offer 'security' as alternative, and close to 99 out of 100 will gladly take the earlier candy.
You can't. But that's not the point at all. But in one case one could, if only one wanted, to check the code quality and apply a patch; in the other case this door is totally shut. The first alternative is light-years ahead of the second, irrespective of the field. Because it leaves you the freedom of choice. Be it contributing to retirement benefits or invest your money at your own discretion, the decision to smoke certain substances or not, choice always has a connotation of freedom. The same choice that one has to buy this operating system or that one. Once you decide for closed source, you are 1. totally dependent on the manufacturer 2. without a chance to check yourself 3. unable to analyze if the manufacturer has inserted some malicious code like a trapdoor, eventually on purpose Now, where would be any advantage in using a system of closed source?
Right. But the GP's formulation is less abstract and leaves less room for interpretation. No, did not mod you down nor do I have modpoints currently. Never forget, we are at/.
One day later I still think this is great business idea, that some company ought to pick up. Or, some individual. In another thread, someone pointed out, that some organization does a 12.5 khour test. But that's unconvincing to me, since buying a lamp and let it run for close to 2 years, and then measure the light output is totally unrealistic, because it doesn't take ageing of the elements into account. I don't want a bulb that emits some 70% or 80% of the light after 2 years of continuous burning; I want a bulb that emits some 70% or 80% of the original light after I have been switching it on for 3 hours a day; after the accumulated 12.5 or 25 khour. You can't test that, you can at best artificially age the lamp.
In a nutshell, yes, I'd be prepared to pay considerable money for a LED bulb that is 1. date stamped, AND 2. has its output measured after manufactured, and documented, AND 3. where the manufacturer guarantees that this bulb will produce at least, e.g. 75% of the light after 5 years in service.
Remember those bulb testing equipment in shops, at least in Europe, where you could test your new bulb before going to the cashier? My suggestion in this respect is, to set up similar testing locations in future, where one can walk in and test the remaining light power of one's bulb(s). With a unique serial number, like stamped on the side, and the original value stored with the serial number, just bringing one's bulbs, one can easily test one bulb(s). With a reading of the serial number and the display of the remaining efficiency, everyone could check his/her bulbs. With an (almost) automatic exchange, if the performance of the bulb remains below a guaranteed efficiency. As I said, that's what I'd call fair; and be prepared to pay extra for.
Now you start talking! We used to have a close to 40-year-old dish washer ('Constructa'), that still worked perfectly okay. Maybe some don't know the social pressure that Germans can exert? Almost no visitor failed to point out our 'serious shortcoming', our mistake, to 'waste water and energy' like there was no tomorrow. Call it group-think. I measured the consumption, and found that it consumed around 30 liters of water, and 1,7 kWh. Yep, that 's close to 50 cent here. A new, branded, modern, A+++ that we bought cost us a good € 500. With a consumption of close to 25 cent, this gives us a ROI after some 2000+ rounds of dish-washing. And we use it once per week, so it will balance out the investment in another 40 or 50 years.;-) Plus, I take bets of considerable amounts that the new one is not going to last that long. Additionally, the cleaning results of the new one are very good, and yet below those of the 40-year-old machine.
No, we haven't given in to the silly social pressure. We have totally voluntarily passed the old one on to our son, who's starting a household.
Of course, but the latter implies an arbitrary effect introduced by the manufacturer to bring down the lifespan. The 1000 h, however, as GP pointed out so insightful, is already - aside from being a cartel - some technical optimum of efficiency versus lifetime. Because reducing the temperature quickly increases the lifespan; while increasing the optical efficiency quickly brings down lifespan. And the temperature is required to produce visible light. Don't forget that red is at the very edge of light being visible to humans. And the 2000K+ is needed to produce that light.
Hey, you got your 5 Insightful; now deserve it and share you list of 'good' and 'bad', because I tend to suffer from the same crap LEDs that become dim after less than 1000 hours; and we all want to know!
We took over an old house, large house, with likewise well above 50 traditional lightbulbs. I have invested close to €1000 for almost strict replacement of all bulbs. The electricity bill is down to little less than half (good!), the failure rate is very low, but, and this is a huge but, the promised 25000+ hours are fiction. Some have clearly reduced the amount of lumen / lux to between 1/8 and 1/5 of the original brightness. I have recently returned a batch of 8 (I tried a number of brands) to GP, where I fortunately had 2 in the original wrapping, that I took out only to replace 2 bulbs that had gone down to no more than a bright candle; but since it was over time, I hadn't really noticed. Only then did I. And then I collected all 8 from the house, and they all had lost measurably, quite linear with the hours of use. Now comes the serious disappointment: with hours of use between 50 and 800. After 800: about 1/8, measured in the same socket. And, as mentioned, the others had gone down proportionally.
Therefore my suggestion: If you come from CFLs, I agree from own experience, the 'long-lasting' isn't always as lasting as long as promised. Once you enter LED-country, I agree with mother that LEDs tend to not fail. But they tend to be lose brightness much faster than the manufacturers promise. Most LEDs here are much less bad than the GPs mentioned further up, though observed closely, the person eventually living in our house once we are dead, will take over a fscking dark place, lit by some 70 'candles'.
DC doesn't work well over distances, which is why AC was adopted as the grid in the first place.
... and you have, alas, already disqualified your remarks, irrespective how good the rest might have been. Because DC is the preferred transport over large distances. Its only downside is that conventional transformers constitute an insurmountable obstacle.
The next phase was replacing Office, and it came with a huge backlash. The chief complaints where not so much about OpenOffice funcionality (along with some "it's *UGLY*!"), but about compatibility with MS generated documents. As of yet, it has been impossible to take MSOffice away from the "higher-ups", as any single minor UI or functionality change is bitched about as if it was a sign of the Apocalypse.
Though definitely not an easy change, it can be done in small steps and with minimal disruption. YMMV, mostly on how dependent you are on MsOffice...
The first, compatibility, is still correct; and will never go away for technical reasons not to be discussed here. The second, 'higher-ups' are the usual bore. They tend to feel threatened when a. they'd have to confess to a lack of ability, publicly, b. consider themselves to be too important to relearn a little bit. (My boss already yells when the attachment to a mail opened with Outlook fails to pop up on the correct one of his two monitors.) Third, you missed this one, the last straw is always the fact, that these people can't install their own software any longer. They bring their IrfanView.exe from home, and it doesn't do at all what they think it should do.
I guess, this is has made the sound of 'whoosh' over the mods' heads! Because, if it was serious, you'd be a fool. Or someone who made some make, make install, etc. many years ago.
Update is much easier, and including all applications, contrary to MS Windows. You don't have to restart and wait for 1,2,3,...% before you can actually use your system again. You get all the updates in a single go (especially fresh Windows installs sometime take hours, and 3-4 reboots and reissues of the commands, until no further updates are popping up.
"we Linux folks"? Who? My experiences are different. usually I'm told 'how nice!', but what's missing is MS Office. 'Missing', of course. sorry. And when one was told by her publisher, that it 'would have to be' TeamViewer (because that's what the publisher knows), it was the - I agree - usual problem. But I hate to see you calling it 'Desktop experience'!
Reminds me of the old and flogged into a dead state, horse; the old 'Tin Lizzy'. Imagine someone had offered to spraypaint her into a livid green! Everyone would be complaining until today, that 'A Tin Lizzy has to come in any colour, as long as it is black'.
MS Office must be sooo much better than OO/LO (my last 15 years prove it is not), and Teamviewer must be soo much better than, e.g. ssh/sftp (my last 15 years prove it is not). But, I concede, both are what Dick, Tom and Harry have as idea in their simpleton minds, when the topics 'Office Suite' or 'remote access' pop up.
Second this! - When I started in academia, 1980, there were exactly 2 journals in our/my field worth reading. And, yes, they were worth reading; because the articles contained would often summarize the work of complete teams, mostly achieved over years of work. And nobody would be admonished for 'insufficient' publications. On the other hand, had someone at the age of 35 in those days told us, that she'd been 'doing some 135 peer-reviewed journal articles', we would have her failed the job interview. We would have said "that's the least we're interested in". Few years ago, someone popping up in the interview and saying exactly that was set on a tenure-track professorship. And today, there are around 70 journals in our/my field. And most articles are lousy enough to wipe one's dirty shoes. But i don't blame the authors. I blame the science community overall not to rebuke the bean counters, the MBAs, the admin people, when those became jealous, and insecure, having to somehow evaluate the 'return' of our work. We ought to have offered them a cold shower instead by pointing out that our work usually does not come in tangible returns. But in intellectual returns; something in the realms that those people were lacking in.
Alas, how to distinguish? Wasn't - and isn't still? - Quantum Theory esoteric? I guess, for the general public, for the layperson, it is usually considered as such. Is it for science? I'm sure you'll agree that it is not. Archaeology? Sumerian clay pots? No, I'm no archaeologist. Though I would always raise my hand for the usefulness of continuing unearthing the relics of former, ancient, civilizations. Einstein, anyone? Or, maybe closer to/., von Neumann. What has he contributed? Years of teaching quantum science in the golden days of Berlin, before the Nazis came in, doing some math, doing some work in cryptography, in computer science. He wouldn't have made it, probably, in the pale copy that science has become in our days. Wittgenstein, he's even worse. In so-called modern terms, at least. One basic book, few articles. He'd be on the dole!
When you take money, you owe something in return.
Though we might agree here, I am afraid, we might not on its interpretation. What is 'return'? Something with an equivalent value in US$? Regular publications? Books? In a post-materialist society one tends to overlook non-tangible returns. In my current position, I have no teaching allocation, any yet I volunteer and enjoy it some hours per week, since it is possible within my duties for the relatively generous salary that the tax payer affords for me. Which is, by the way, surely more valuable in my case than forcing me to publish yet another article of no scientific relevance based on currently meager results. Meaning, that I'm doing the best that I can, returning the most that I can, without necessarily tangible returns. And when I have material to publish, I'll do so. Which brings us back to trust. The public is entitled to 'something in return', but in order to get results that are beyond staple diet, the public must trust us, that we don't pilfer away their money in jewelry, furniture, nor in efforts to prove creationism. I am afraid, there is more money available for the latter than for the analysis of dying spoken languages, by the way.
This may sound strange, but it is a lack of trust. In the old days, which were not always good, a brilliant scientist/academician/professor would be granted tax payers' monies to pursue her dreams in science, at least as far as basic funding was concerned; that is not including expensive apparatuses. But then we, in the academic world, allowed the bean counters to take over. And they started to ask for ROI, at least in the number of patents, marketability, etc. Additionally, short funding terms made it into our world. 2 years, 3 years. Where I work, the latter is already the exemption. Therefore, as written by Lefkowitz, yes, we have to have results before we can ask for funding. Not only because the sponsors want to be on the safe side (of getting a return), but also not to embarrass ourselves by not being able to come up with what was envisaged. In the place were I used to be, the latter would give you a blacklisting.
Or, the other way round, if the public is not willing to trust us, but wants us to produce off-the-shelf academic results (numbers of publications included; publications that might take away from our genuine research time), that's what the public gets.
I only wished that the public was cognizant of this interdependence.
Yep, 'they' do. Where 'they' includes me. I was afraid that's what you'd thought; and that's fundamentally wrong. Propagation delay and processing time doesn't render a circuit asynchronous. Following your logic, any circuit would be asynchronous, if only on the propagation delay induced by any non-infinitely short wire. Then we'd say that the whole world is asynchronous; and that'd be it. When we use these terms, however, it is common understanding that a synchronous circuit is 'guided', clocked, by a central clocking device. And all sub-circuits are controlled by that same device. Likewise, an asynchronous circuit is controlled by the actual occurrence of the signal, without a predefined time frame. Respectively by a pre-cursor (header) in the signal path. One could as well focus on the number of signals: a synchronous circuit has a clock signal and payload signal(s), while the asynchronous circuit has only one signal: the payload. Eventually with a header.
Sure, throughput is what matters most for operations you can parallelize. However, as Amdahl's Law cruelly reminds us, there's always parts of the problem that remain serial, and they'll put an upper bound on performance. You can't parallelize the traversal of a linked list, no matter how hard you try. You have to invent new algorithms and programming techniques. (In the specific case of linked lists, there are other options that trade space for efficiency, such as skiplists.).
Not for forget, Amdahl's law is purely calculation; not speculation; like what Moore's law is. And you are right, certain items simply remain serial.
The best you AC know about is proverbs. An electrical engineer you are not, and neither a physicist. Your ideas on crosstalk and interference are basically vague.
How's that then? Would you care to explain, please, what you mean? My D-FFs here are totally synchronous: The D-input pops up at the output exactly with the rising clock edge + processing delay. And the latter is unavoidably indefinably. .
Power use is proportional to the chip's operating voltage, and transistors simply cannot operate below a 200 milli-Volt level
Wow. To me it is like P~U^2. So proportional, but not linear. And where would that 200 mV level come from? In my understanding it depends very much on the semiconductor used.
Slashdot Mirror
I salute your resolve. Tell this to the unwashed masses how have been craving for the most recent cool software / gadget / widget / design / feature for the last 20 years. And offer 'security' as alternative, and close to 99 out of 100 will gladly take the earlier candy.
You can't. But that's not the point at all.
But in one case one could, if only one wanted, to check the code quality and apply a patch; in the other case this door is totally shut. The first alternative is light-years ahead of the second, irrespective of the field. Because it leaves you the freedom of choice. Be it contributing to retirement benefits or invest your money at your own discretion, the decision to smoke certain substances or not, choice always has a connotation of freedom. The same choice that one has to buy this operating system or that one.
Once you decide for closed source, you are
1. totally dependent on the manufacturer
2. without a chance to check yourself
3. unable to analyze if the manufacturer has inserted some malicious code like a trapdoor, eventually on purpose
Now, where would be any advantage in using a system of closed source?
Right. But the GP's formulation is less abstract and leaves less room for interpretation. No, did not mod you down nor do I have modpoints currently. /.
Never forget, we are at
One day later I still think this is great business idea, that some company ought to pick up. Or, some individual.
In another thread, someone pointed out, that some organization does a 12.5 khour test. But that's unconvincing to me, since buying a lamp and let it run for close to 2 years, and then measure the light output is totally unrealistic, because it doesn't take ageing of the elements into account. I don't want a bulb that emits some 70% or 80% of the light after 2 years of continuous burning; I want a bulb that emits some 70% or 80% of the original light after I have been switching it on for 3 hours a day; after the accumulated 12.5 or 25 khour. You can't test that, you can at best artificially age the lamp.
In a nutshell, yes, I'd be prepared to pay considerable money for a LED bulb that is
1. date stamped, AND
2. has its output measured after manufactured, and documented, AND
3. where the manufacturer guarantees that this bulb will produce at least, e.g. 75% of the light after 5 years in service.
Remember those bulb testing equipment in shops, at least in Europe, where you could test your new bulb before going to the cashier? My suggestion in this respect is, to set up similar testing locations in future, where one can walk in and test the remaining light power of one's bulb(s). With a unique serial number, like stamped on the side, and the original value stored with the serial number, just bringing one's bulbs, one can easily test one bulb(s). With a reading of the serial number and the display of the remaining efficiency, everyone could check his/her bulbs. With an (almost) automatic exchange, if the performance of the bulb remains below a guaranteed efficiency.
As I said, that's what I'd call fair; and be prepared to pay extra for.
And I've worked in power generation stations. Almost 100% of America's power grid is AC.
I bow before this argument in shame and promise to never repeat my earlier assertion.
Now you start talking! ;-)
We used to have a close to 40-year-old dish washer ('Constructa'), that still worked perfectly okay. Maybe some don't know the social pressure that Germans can exert? Almost no visitor failed to point out our 'serious shortcoming', our mistake, to 'waste water and energy' like there was no tomorrow. Call it group-think. I measured the consumption, and found that it consumed around 30 liters of water, and 1,7 kWh. Yep, that 's close to 50 cent here. A new, branded, modern, A+++ that we bought cost us a good € 500. With a consumption of close to 25 cent, this gives us a ROI after some 2000+ rounds of dish-washing. And we use it once per week, so it will balance out the investment in another 40 or 50 years.
Plus, I take bets of considerable amounts that the new one is not going to last that long. Additionally, the cleaning results of the new one are very good, and yet below those of the 40-year-old machine.
No, we haven't given in to the silly social pressure. We have totally voluntarily passed the old one on to our son, who's starting a household.
Of course, but the latter implies an arbitrary effect introduced by the manufacturer to bring down the lifespan. The 1000 h, however, as GP pointed out so insightful, is already - aside from being a cartel - some technical optimum of efficiency versus lifetime. Because reducing the temperature quickly increases the lifespan; while increasing the optical efficiency quickly brings down lifespan. And the temperature is required to produce visible light. Don't forget that red is at the very edge of light being visible to humans. And the 2000K+ is needed to produce that light.
Agree totally, This would be great; plus an instrument to measure its lumen/W at any moment, to prove that the brightness is still above 70%.
Hey, you got your 5 Insightful; now deserve it and share you list of 'good' and 'bad', because I tend to suffer from the same crap LEDs that become dim after less than 1000 hours; and we all want to know!
Lucky you!!
We took over an old house, large house, with likewise well above 50 traditional lightbulbs. I have invested close to €1000 for almost strict replacement of all bulbs. The electricity bill is down to little less than half (good!), the failure rate is very low, but, and this is a huge but, the promised 25000+ hours are fiction. Some have clearly reduced the amount of lumen / lux to between 1/8 and 1/5 of the original brightness. I have recently returned a batch of 8 (I tried a number of brands) to GP, where I fortunately had 2 in the original wrapping, that I took out only to replace 2 bulbs that had gone down to no more than a bright candle; but since it was over time, I hadn't really noticed. Only then did I. And then I collected all 8 from the house, and they all had lost measurably, quite linear with the hours of use. Now comes the serious disappointment: with hours of use between 50 and 800. After 800: about 1/8, measured in the same socket. And, as mentioned, the others had gone down proportionally.
Therefore my suggestion: If you come from CFLs, I agree from own experience, the 'long-lasting' isn't always as lasting as long as promised. Once you enter LED-country, I agree with mother that LEDs tend to not fail. But they tend to be lose brightness much faster than the manufacturers promise. Most LEDs here are much less bad than the GPs mentioned further up, though observed closely, the person eventually living in our house once we are dead, will take over a fscking dark place, lit by some 70 'candles'.
DC doesn't work well over distances, which is why AC was adopted as the grid in the first place.
... and you have, alas, already disqualified your remarks, irrespective how good the rest might have been. Because DC is the preferred transport over large distances. Its only downside is that conventional transformers constitute an insurmountable obstacle.
The next phase was replacing Office, and it came with a huge backlash. The chief complaints where not so much about OpenOffice funcionality (along with some "it's *UGLY*!"), but about compatibility with MS generated documents. As of yet, it has been impossible to take MSOffice away from the "higher-ups", as any single minor UI or functionality change is bitched about as if it was a sign of the Apocalypse.
Though definitely not an easy change, it can be done in small steps and with minimal disruption. YMMV, mostly on how dependent you are on MsOffice...
The first, compatibility, is still correct; and will never go away for technical reasons not to be discussed here.
The second, 'higher-ups' are the usual bore. They tend to feel threatened when a. they'd have to confess to a lack of ability, publicly, b. consider themselves to be too important to relearn a little bit. (My boss already yells when the attachment to a mail opened with Outlook fails to pop up on the correct one of his two monitors.)
Third, you missed this one, the last straw is always the fact, that these people can't install their own software any longer. They bring their IrfanView.exe from home, and it doesn't do at all what they think it should do.
I guess, this is has made the sound of 'whoosh' over the mods' heads!
Because, if it was serious, you'd be a fool. Or someone who made some make, make install, etc. many years ago.
Update is much easier, and including all applications, contrary to MS Windows.
You don't have to restart and wait for 1,2,3,...% before you can actually use your system again.
You get all the updates in a single go (especially fresh Windows installs sometime take hours, and 3-4 reboots and reissues of the commands, until no further updates are popping up.
"we Linux folks"? Who?
My experiences are different. usually I'm told 'how nice!', but what's missing is MS Office. 'Missing', of course. sorry. And when one was told by her publisher, that it 'would have to be' TeamViewer (because that's what the publisher knows), it was the - I agree - usual problem.
But I hate to see you calling it 'Desktop experience'!
Reminds me of the old and flogged into a dead state, horse; the old 'Tin Lizzy'. Imagine someone had offered to spraypaint her into a livid green! Everyone would be complaining until today, that 'A Tin Lizzy has to come in any colour, as long as it is black'.
MS Office must be sooo much better than OO/LO (my last 15 years prove it is not), and Teamviewer must be soo much better than, e.g. ssh/sftp (my last 15 years prove it is not). But, I concede, both are what Dick, Tom and Harry have as idea in their simpleton minds, when the topics 'Office Suite' or 'remote access' pop up.
Second this! - When I started in academia, 1980, there were exactly 2 journals in our/my field worth reading. And, yes, they were worth reading; because the articles contained would often summarize the work of complete teams, mostly achieved over years of work. And nobody would be admonished for 'insufficient' publications. On the other hand, had someone at the age of 35 in those days told us, that she'd been 'doing some 135 peer-reviewed journal articles', we would have her failed the job interview. We would have said "that's the least we're interested in".
Few years ago, someone popping up in the interview and saying exactly that was set on a tenure-track professorship.
And today, there are around 70 journals in our/my field. And most articles are lousy enough to wipe one's dirty shoes. But i don't blame the authors. I blame the science community overall not to rebuke the bean counters, the MBAs, the admin people, when those became jealous, and insecure, having to somehow evaluate the 'return' of our work. We ought to have offered them a cold shower instead by pointing out that our work usually does not come in tangible returns. But in intellectual returns; something in the realms that those people were lacking in.
I agree mostly, by the way, to what you say.
Alas, how to distinguish? Wasn't - and isn't still? - Quantum Theory esoteric? I guess, for the general public, for the layperson, it is usually considered as such. Is it for science? I'm sure you'll agree that it is not. Archaeology? Sumerian clay pots? No, I'm no archaeologist. Though I would always raise my hand for the usefulness of continuing unearthing the relics of former, ancient, civilizations. Einstein, anyone? /., von Neumann. What has he contributed? Years of teaching quantum science in the golden days of Berlin, before the Nazis came in, doing some math, doing some work in cryptography, in computer science. He wouldn't have made it, probably, in the pale copy that science has become in our days. Wittgenstein, he's even worse. In so-called modern terms, at least. One basic book, few articles. He'd be on the dole!
Or, maybe closer to
When you take money, you owe something in return.
Though we might agree here, I am afraid, we might not on its interpretation. What is 'return'? Something with an equivalent value in US$? Regular publications? Books? In a post-materialist society one tends to overlook non-tangible returns. In my current position, I have no teaching allocation, any yet I volunteer and enjoy it some hours per week, since it is possible within my duties for the relatively generous salary that the tax payer affords for me. Which is, by the way, surely more valuable in my case than forcing me to publish yet another article of no scientific relevance based on currently meager results.
Meaning, that I'm doing the best that I can, returning the most that I can, without necessarily tangible returns. And when I have material to publish, I'll do so. Which brings us back to trust. The public is entitled to 'something in return', but in order to get results that are beyond staple diet, the public must trust us, that we don't pilfer away their money in jewelry, furniture, nor in efforts to prove creationism.
I am afraid, there is more money available for the latter than for the analysis of dying spoken languages, by the way.
Dear-o-dear-o-dear ...
Billions. Billions.
Not millions, no, not millions. And 4000-6000 years are right out of question.
This may sound strange, but it is a lack of trust.
In the old days, which were not always good, a brilliant scientist/academician/professor would be granted tax payers' monies to pursue her dreams in science, at least as far as basic funding was concerned; that is not including expensive apparatuses.
But then we, in the academic world, allowed the bean counters to take over. And they started to ask for ROI, at least in the number of patents, marketability, etc. Additionally, short funding terms made it into our world. 2 years, 3 years. Where I work, the latter is already the exemption. Therefore, as written by Lefkowitz, yes, we have to have results before we can ask for funding. Not only because the sponsors want to be on the safe side (of getting a return), but also not to embarrass ourselves by not being able to come up with what was envisaged. In the place were I used to be, the latter would give you a blacklisting.
Or, the other way round, if the public is not willing to trust us, but wants us to produce off-the-shelf academic results (numbers of publications included; publications that might take away from our genuine research time), that's what the public gets.
I only wished that the public was cognizant of this interdependence.
No astroturfing, please! ;-)
For me the free wine is doing just fine. sudo apt-get install wine; that is. For MS Office 2007, at least. And who needs newer?
Yep, 'they' do. Where 'they' includes me. I was afraid that's what you'd thought; and that's fundamentally wrong. Propagation delay and processing time doesn't render a circuit asynchronous.
Following your logic, any circuit would be asynchronous, if only on the propagation delay induced by any non-infinitely short wire. Then we'd say that the whole world is asynchronous; and that'd be it. When we use these terms, however, it is common understanding that a synchronous circuit is 'guided', clocked, by a central clocking device. And all sub-circuits are controlled by that same device. Likewise, an asynchronous circuit is controlled by the actual occurrence of the signal, without a predefined time frame. Respectively by a pre-cursor (header) in the signal path.
One could as well focus on the number of signals: a synchronous circuit has a clock signal and payload signal(s), while the asynchronous circuit has only one signal: the payload. Eventually with a header.
Sure, throughput is what matters most for operations you can parallelize. However, as Amdahl's Law cruelly reminds us, there's always parts of the problem that remain serial, and they'll put an upper bound on performance. You can't parallelize the traversal of a linked list, no matter how hard you try. You have to invent new algorithms and programming techniques. (In the specific case of linked lists, there are other options that trade space for efficiency, such as skiplists.).
Not for forget, Amdahl's law is purely calculation; not speculation; like what Moore's law is. And you are right, certain items simply remain serial.
The best you AC know about is proverbs. An electrical engineer you are not, and neither a physicist. Your ideas on crosstalk and interference are basically vague.
Having no mod points, I can only nod points.
Every D-flip flop is an async circuit. W.
How's that then? Would you care to explain, please, what you mean?
My D-FFs here are totally synchronous: The D-input pops up at the output exactly with the rising clock edge + processing delay. And the latter is unavoidably indefinably.
.
Power use is proportional to the chip's operating voltage, and transistors simply cannot operate below a 200 milli-Volt level
Wow. To me it is like P~U^2. So proportional, but not linear.
And where would that 200 mV level come from? In my understanding it depends very much on the semiconductor used.