This is late twentieth- century post-modern Japan.
[rant]
post-modern?
what is that? 99.5% of the time when people uses the phrase "post-modern", they have no clue what they are talking about, which is really annoying because it will ruin a perfectly good review like this. let us analyze this a bit in detail:
linguistically speaking, post-modern is oxymoron. modern: Of or relating to recent times or the present. post modern would refer to the future, hence making absolutely no sense if you are talking about a "current-era".
in the arts, we have "post-modernism", which would make a *little* more sense. misnomer aside, it refers to the succession of "modernism," however -- we are sure as heck not talking about avant-garde arts. and as far as i know Japan's art culture has never really had a significant "post-modernism" era.
so... geez people. stop using that phrase!
[/rant]
and oh yeah, japan is nothing like you see on animes; "japan has no homeless people" is a flat lie. and the place looks, in general, much more run-down than you would imagine. Still better than Miami, though.
not really -- Voodoo 2 had "dual" setups and pretty much everyone ran without a hitch;
i think it's not the "dual GPU" that's hard to write drivers for -- it's the way that they implemented the hardware that make it dual -- V2 had SLI - simple, effective, real -- you interleave the lines; but ATI with their rage fury decided that it wasn't "good enough" and just *had* to come up with something else (i think they split the screen top-bottom with some details given to load sharing in case the top-bottom had different number of polygons (read: all the games); THAT will screw up any driver-writing process.
if they stick with SLI this time maybe it will get better
i saw that when i was proof-reading the preview text but decided to leave it alone so some poor unsuspecting individual will cleverly take advantage of the opening so i can say "ha! knew you were gonna do that" like i am doing now.;-)
is not that there is a book and what not, but as the story has pointed out:
This is a case which we are aware of and, as with all piracy matters throughout the world, take this issue extremely seriously.
i am sorry, HUH? piracy matters? wtf does that have to do with this? This is more like infringement of copyright of the Harry Potter name, but there are other people writing fan fictions -- the only thing this author is guilty of is probabbly the fact that he pretended to be Rowling, but throughout the story it appears that he did not try to do that anyway, nor does people really think that he is Rowling because of the difference in writing style etc; so it just boils down to that a fan-fiction got published and we are taking it *way* too seriously because Rowlings believes it's taking away some of her money. good grief people.
going to mars this early is such an "mommy look what i can do" deal -- completely a waste of money...
we all know we can make it to mars and with enough cash infusion, and a dose of luck that the equip does not crap out half way there (and there are no f*ed up danger lurking out there like little green men etc) -- from what i've been seeing -- all the satellites comming back to life and what not - i'd say that the darn things built for space are pretty bullet proof... so, again, we can make it there if we wanted to.
but WHY?
(same point with why put a person on the moon back in the days -- but back then we had a space race, we had a president's promise, we had a "nation's pride", and we sure as hell did not have a clue how it was gonna be done)
but this time it's different, we can do it; we *know* we can.
the problem is that with this knowledge - there goes half the fun (or, purpose) -- so the other half have to make up for it: are there sufficient scientific and economical benefits to this? i don't think so. economically certainly not. as for scientifically -- other than collecting some data on how bad solar radiation really is on the human body when away from the magnetosphere, not much. besides the craft will probabbly generate a magnetosphere of its own anyhow - to make sure the astronauts stay alive. and again -- we already know how to get there, it just costs money; so what we will get out of it as for learning the "unknown" is scarce at best.
the one last possible benefit is "experience" in manned deep-space flight, for preparation of the future; but see -- we don't need to goto mars for that. for that much trouble -- it would be much wiser to get a moon-base / moon-colony going, sufficiently advanced to do some manufacturing, so that when we do go to mars, 1) the exploratory trip will be a helluvalot cheaper, 2) if the first trip runs into ANY kind of trouble it's much easier to send a rescue team, and 3) the second or third trip to mars is a colony ship; and all those trips to the moon? well, how's that for "spacetravel experience"?
any money (this 20 bil included) toward a moon base will pay for itself within 3-4 trips to mars; probabbly less if the moon becomes self-sustained and actually exports stuff to earth or becomes a serious tourist attraction.
...in the wrong hands (or the wrong office) the Nokia 7650 imaging phone will become the ultimate weapon of shame and mortification, on hand to record and send moments that were probably best forgotten to your boss/ friends/lover/spouse...
can you imagine; a walking army armed with cameras *and* the ability to deliver the picture instantaneously to the place where you don't want it most. this is scary people -- forget Big Brother Survallence (sp?) -- this is the scariest of all, you never know where ppl are looking / taking pictures;
picking your nose in the car on the highway? ha! forget it. forgot to zip up after going to the bathroom b/c you are hung-over? watch it haunt you smiled at the bank teller when depositing a check? wait for the divorce...
this is going to be a scary world. before you know it, *you* will be in one of thoes mock-up internet chain letter "caught on camera cheating? priceless" emails
see -- still -- with all those cooling and "high quality cables" -- you are only increasing the margin of safety (which is fairly pointless, btw -- because chips are tested to -40 / 125 anyhow), but not make them work better;
re-boring an engine would be the equivalent of redoing the litho in a chip to optimize the interger pipe line. i will bow to the first person that "mods" his PC that way.
no wonder there are SO MANY japanese porn sites...
and speaking of which... it's like 6AM over there, on a saturday... i know that 8Mb DSL is nice and all -- but browsing at 6AM on a saturday just seem a litte... i dunno... overkill
I am moving to Japan -- Saitama prefecture as well (Kumagaya most likely -- wait, is kumagaya in Gunma pref?) -- any advice on getting connected over there? which company to call, what kind to hoop to jump through, etc.
thanks in advance.
if i(we) get modded off-topic, you can write to qiling *at* charlie _dot_ cns +dot+ iit ^dot^ edu
some quotes: ...Gemini V astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad were able to spot, among other things, a special checkerboard pattern that had been laid out in Texas, a rocket-sled test in New Mexico, and the aircraft carrier that would later pick them up in the Atlantic, along with a destroyer trailing in its wake...
...It was a just maturing technology that had not reached it's performance peak - much like computers are now...
give me *one* explanation how neon lights and acrylic windows and whatever make your computer perform better;
on the contrary -- do you know why computers uses metal cases? because in the times of solar flares, radiation will pass through you tiny tiny capacitors in your DRAM, usually leaving a stream of drained capacitors; -- metal cases help in that respect. (and i am not making this up)
so i would think that with a window on your PC, it would be *more* flimsy rather than less.
USB(2), firewire, 3GIO, SATA, and Serian SCSI. They are all serial interfaces.
yes... look at a firewire cable; shielded twisted pair; the thing is, when you cram more and more signals through a cable, the cable itself gets quite pricy, so you are offloading design costs of the motherboard onto the quality control of cabelling, which i see no point in. high quality cables (shielded) cannot be bent too much because that will cause variations locally in the dielectric, screwing up your signal. and frankly, cables are much more likely to get bent / messed up than a trace in the PCB, so i rather see technology that's not very dependent on the cable quality / condition.
parallel ATA is pretty much maxed out at 133 right now
i am not denying this fact -- but at the mean time; i believe my argument still stands; what i do not like is the fact that suddenly, when moving to a new architecture, we decide that "we can do this with a narrow bus". i don't believe it. it is great and fine that you can reach the next step in your road map with only an 8-bit bus, but that does not mean you should do it. because i believe eventually the bus size will double and again. i hate to see that level of bs people will have to put up with. say i have a old MB when mainstream serial ATAs now have twice the bus width as when my MB was designed. how much are you willing to bet that it won't work then? USB and firewire will reach their maximum capacity (cable-wise) in the future, and when that happens, i bet you a dollar to a donut that the spec will start calling for wider busses on those too. but unlike specs that maintain their bus width, interoperability will be severly limited.
I hope you weren't serious about that.
i was about half serious -- and yes -- i know that SATA will be intergrated into the chipset directly, with it's own channels out. but wait a sec here... how does that simplify MB design again? you are saying i need a few more high freq traces going into the chipset, which is already crammed full of traces to the memory, AGP, southbridge, processor, etc? I would much more rather see a wider adoption of an evolutiona to the outdated PCI bus, and have things hang off those -- than have these new and fancy crap that gets crammed into the chipset. PCI, btw, *is* a bottleneck because any SATA adapter cards will hang off the PCI bus (say i want 8 drives for my system)... i wish the industry puts forth half as much momentum behind say, PCI64's adoption than SATA, etc.
i'd be much more worried about learning to drive on the opposite side of the road.
i hear that when ppl learns to drive on one side -- in an emergency they automatically swerve to what they consider to be the "side of the road" -- in your case you will probabbly swerve left, which would be toward the oncomming traffic here in the US.
and oh yeah -- if you ever do move here -- stay away from silicon valley, or california in general. this place is like the nymph in the legends -- lure you here with beautiful weather, and torment you for eternity with rediculous real-estate prices (houses are roughly 800k-1.4 million US dollars here, apt / townhouse (flat?) will cost you 350-600k US dollars) *coughs blood*
ETHERNET is a protocol; i think what you are really saying is that unshielded twisted pair was able to bump up in speed progressively.
i am not concered with the ATA protocol, in this case -- rather the amount of signals moved through the cables connecting the drive to your board;
even the venerable UTP can only get to 1Gbit and no more; ethernet lives on, 10Gbit ethernet standard is here, but guess what, fibre only.
same with ATA; you can only move so much signal (electrically) through wires. or, signals of so high a frequency; in this case, for a specific type of cable, there in a maximum amount of information that can travel through it. (unless you go out of your way to shield them, etc etc -- but a nicely shielded cable will cost you ~1500 dollars -- most high freq oscilloscope probes uses them, btw.) anyhow; serial ATA tries to bump up speed with a serial interface -- mainly to simplify MB design considerations -- less traces, narrower bus, etc; but since each strand in your cable will only go so far -- i am betting that eventually (without resorting to optical connections) even serial ATA, under the demand of higher throughput either by the market or by their (un)realistic roadmap -- start to double / quadruple the bus width. to me this is just silly -- because the benefit this offered is going away! MB designers will again have to fudge with wide busses and connections.
we might as well just keep on using parallel ATA but boost the signal freq incrementally, since it will get us to the same place in a few years anyway, without all these incremental MBs using different sized busses that's not compatible with different generation drives.
by the way -- PCI bus can only push 133MB anyhow -- anything beyond that is silly
sorry for the mis-use of language -- what i am refering to is "dual-channel" RDRAM.
it was implemented on intel's i850 (? -- don't remember so well anymore) -- and required two modules to be installed simultaneously.
now that DDR / DDR II is catching up to RDRAM in terms of bandwidth, RAMBUS decided that all the "high performance" RDRAM modules will be "dual channel on a single chip" (which, btw, is 32 bit); now you will say -- this is still small -- but remember that originally RAMBUS can be used with only 8-bit bus width (somebody correct me if i got this wrong); and on the horizon quad-channel (64-bit) RAMBUS is looking at ya. guess how wide is the DDR / SDRAM bus? 64 bits too? ditto.
RDRAM is double-pumped (i do not believe it is a technical term, btw) -- data comes on both pos and neg edge of clock. there is no *real* quad-pumped memory; QDR-RAM is still only double-pumped except both I and O can operate simultaneously. only used in SRAMs anyway. (FYI)
step 1) obtain wireless access point step 2) amplify broadcast power of access point step 3) take computer to bathroom stall - buy some "caution / do not enter" tape" step 4) check connection (if no connection, redo step 2) step 5) work wonders to save humanity! (we all know that most of the truly inspiring thoughts come to man when he is in sitting on the throne -- just think about the flux capacitor)
p.s. on a serious note: i am sorry for your current condition; maybe move to the states / even japan? (in japan, even the senior managers don't get office(s), so while it's the same lousy work env, you will at least feel better about it, maybe.)
remember back when RAMBUS said: we will provide an architecture with very narrow bus but extremely high speed to make up for it? (the *original* RAMBUS specs) -- beside the royalties and whatnot -- it actually (technology discussion only) had merits in that the PCB design was greatly simplified because of less crosstalk, easier routing, etc etc.
and then, people demanded more bandwidth... so now we have double / quad pumped RAMBUS channels -- in the end (today) it's back to 64-bit data-bus *anyhow*... except with an architecture that's not designed for parallel operation.
do anybody see some parallel (ha!) here?
i am guessing (or, predicting) that serial ATA / SCSI will go the same route. i really hope that it won't -- because if it did, our lives will all be kinda rough -- but it probabbly will.
that's what i figured; -- not the UK part, but the office layout you are probabbly at.
FYI, japan is almost exactly the same way... so you might feel at home working there.
i personally don't think that it's a good idea -- i mean, cube farms in the US is lame and all, but i would still prefer fake walls than half-height, see-your-neighbor-pick-his-nose situations.
maybe there is a "thinking room" you can goto with a laptop for the "thinking times"...
you might want to ask your facilities personells to invest in better cubicals. i am not joking -- cubes (good ones (ha!)) are supposed to block sounds of typing, and not-too-noisy conversations etc. full-height helps; metal-backed helps; etc.
you can also use this excuse and ask for an office.
while i liked them... my golly ther were LOUD... don't ever think about typing on one of those if somebody is sleeping...
we had a computer lab full of these before (this is the days of Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS) -- when finals came around and people need to write papers you can hear this deafening roar of metali-plastic spring clicking....
so -- durable, fine; but for all practical purposes -- i will stick with the original Microsoft Natural (sorry, but it is the most "ergonomic" i found)... might upgrade to one of those fancy type-sideways ones in the future.
i do think "chord" typing is a good idea (ex: press E,T,S will get you F)... but it just takes so long to learn. one hand operation would be hard, but you can fit a keyboard onto almost everything (i think they should try this for the PDAs and cellphones. have anyone tried the keypads on the SONY NR-70 or the SHARP zauras (sp?) those are tiny and hard (i have stubby fingers). chord-key, though, would work much easier IMHO. sigh... so it probabbly means it wont ever catch on.
last note: as for regular keyboards, DVORAK is really nice. give it a try -- just a couple monthes... you will wonder why other ppl don't use it either.
last last note: (heh i lied) -- the dollar bill he used in the pict must be as old as that keyboard controller... heh... i thought it was kinda amusing.
I am not authoratative on this -- but if i still remember the EE theories -- usually inverters are not that efficient -- so you are dropping some efficiency right there that you may not have accounted for. also to transmit power, they need to bump up the voltage to ~100-150K volts -- so the transformers will drain some more juice (granted transformers usually do near-ideal coupling). but i suspect it will be hard to haul around a transformer -- more importantly it's hard to tap into the high voltage lines -- so it will probabbly transmit at lower voltages -- lower voltage transmission loses much more power in the lines, so again not efficient. hence, while an interesting plan, i see it as a *very* temporary solution... not something you would want to keep around for too long.
i mean... i know it's expensive -- but build a f** nuke plant... nevada dump site is a couple hours away now ANYHOW... sigh...
diesel engines have terrible power bands -- whilst a average automobile engine can produce useable torque between 500-6000 RPM; big diesel engines only do so between ~100 - 600? (the numbers escape me -- but the spirit is the same) -- hence to be able to produce reasonable torque between rest and cruising speed, you need something like around 80 different gear ratios. for everyone who does not drive stick and have NO idea what gear ratios are... erm... cars usually have ~3-6 different ratios. the transmission would be HUGE! and the loss phemomenal
furthermore -- when the train is at rest -- remember that the engine only produce torque around 100 rpm -- this means you need some serious clutch plate to be able to handle that much torque. in the end motors are much better because they have a flat (pretty much) torque band (until drop off at high RPMs -- but that's above cruising speed anyhow).
the other great they they can do easily with a motor is braking -- when you applies the brakes the electricity flows from the motor(s) and through a large resistor mesh (generally a couple ohms), this mesh will heat up and there is a fan on top of the train spcifically used to cool this mesh. realld neat stuff.
for a lot more info check out here: sorry it's late and i don't want to deal with tags -- so copy and paste: http://www.howstuffworks.com/diesel-locomotive.htm
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[rant]
post-modern?
what is that? 99.5% of the time when people uses the phrase "post-modern", they have no clue what they are talking about, which is really annoying because it will ruin a perfectly good review like this. let us analyze this a bit in detail:
linguistically speaking, post-modern is oxymoron. modern: Of or relating to recent times or the present. post modern would refer to the future, hence making absolutely no sense if you are talking about a "current-era".
in the arts, we have "post-modernism", which would make a *little* more sense. misnomer aside, it refers to the succession of "modernism," however -- we are sure as heck not talking about avant-garde arts. and as far as i know Japan's art culture has never really had a significant "post-modernism" era.
so... geez people. stop using that phrase!
[/rant]
and oh yeah, japan is nothing like you see on animes; "japan has no homeless people" is a flat lie. and the place looks, in general, much more run-down than you would imagine. Still better than Miami, though.
not really -- Voodoo 2 had "dual" setups and pretty much everyone ran without a hitch;
i think it's not the "dual GPU" that's hard to write drivers for -- it's the way that they implemented the hardware that make it dual -- V2 had SLI - simple, effective, real -- you interleave the lines; but ATI with their rage fury decided that it wasn't "good enough" and just *had* to come up with something else (i think they split the screen top-bottom with some details given to load sharing in case the top-bottom had different number of polygons (read: all the games); THAT will screw up any driver-writing process.
if they stick with SLI this time maybe it will get better
look at it here.
i saw that when i was proof-reading the preview text but decided to leave it alone so some poor unsuspecting individual will cleverly take advantage of the opening so i can say "ha! knew you were gonna do that" like i am doing now. ;-)
This is a case which we are aware of and, as with all piracy matters throughout the world, take this issue extremely seriously.
i am sorry, HUH? piracy matters? wtf does that have to do with this? This is more like infringement of copyright of the Harry Potter name, but there are other people writing fan fictions -- the only thing this author is guilty of is probabbly the fact that he pretended to be Rowling, but throughout the story it appears that he did not try to do that anyway, nor does people really think that he is Rowling because of the difference in writing style etc; so it just boils down to that a fan-fiction got published and we are taking it *way* too seriously because Rowlings believes it's taking away some of her money. good grief people.
going to mars this early is such an "mommy look what i can do" deal -- completely a waste of money...
we all know we can make it to mars and with enough cash infusion, and a dose of luck that the equip does not crap out half way there (and there are no f*ed up danger lurking out there like little green men etc) -- from what i've been seeing -- all the satellites comming back to life and what not - i'd say that the darn things built for space are pretty bullet proof... so, again, we can make it there if we wanted to.
but WHY?
(same point with why put a person on the moon back in the days -- but back then we had a space race, we had a president's promise, we had a "nation's pride", and we sure as hell did not have a clue how it was gonna be done)
but this time it's different, we can do it; we *know* we can.
the problem is that with this knowledge - there goes half the fun (or, purpose) -- so the other half have to make up for it: are there sufficient scientific and economical benefits to this? i don't think so. economically certainly not. as for scientifically -- other than collecting some data on how bad solar radiation really is on the human body when away from the magnetosphere, not much. besides the craft will probabbly generate a magnetosphere of its own anyhow - to make sure the astronauts stay alive. and again -- we already know how to get there, it just costs money; so what we will get out of it as for learning the "unknown" is scarce at best.
the one last possible benefit is "experience" in manned deep-space flight, for preparation of the future; but see -- we don't need to goto mars for that. for that much trouble -- it would be much wiser to get a moon-base / moon-colony going, sufficiently advanced to do some manufacturing, so that when we do go to mars, 1) the exploratory trip will be a helluvalot cheaper, 2) if the first trip runs into ANY kind of trouble it's much easier to send a rescue team, and 3) the second or third trip to mars is a colony ship; and all those trips to the moon? well, how's that for "spacetravel experience"?
any money (this 20 bil included) toward a moon base will pay for itself within 3-4 trips to mars; probabbly less if the moon becomes self-sustained and actually exports stuff to earth or becomes a serious tourist attraction.
can you imagine; a walking army armed with cameras *and* the ability to deliver the picture instantaneously to the place where you don't want it most. this is scary people -- forget Big Brother Survallence (sp?) -- this is the scariest of all, you never know where ppl are looking / taking pictures;
picking your nose in the car on the highway? ha! forget it.
forgot to zip up after going to the bathroom b/c you are hung-over? watch it haunt you
smiled at the bank teller when depositing a check? wait for the divorce...
this is going to be a scary world. before you know it, *you* will be in one of thoes mock-up internet chain letter "caught on camera cheating? priceless" emails
see -- still -- with all those cooling and "high quality cables" -- you are only increasing the margin of safety (which is fairly pointless, btw -- because chips are tested to -40 / 125 anyhow), but not make them work better;
re-boring an engine would be the equivalent of redoing the litho in a chip to optimize the interger pipe line. i will bow to the first person that "mods" his PC that way.
no wonder there are SO MANY japanese porn sites...
and speaking of which... it's like 6AM over there, on a saturday... i know that 8Mb DSL is nice and all -- but browsing at 6AM on a saturday just seem a litte... i dunno... overkill
I am moving to Japan -- Saitama prefecture as well (Kumagaya most likely -- wait, is kumagaya in Gunma pref?) -- any advice on getting connected over there? which company to call, what kind to hoop to jump through, etc.
thanks in advance.
if i(we) get modded off-topic, you can write to
qiling *at* charlie _dot_ cns +dot+ iit ^dot^ edu
some quotes:
...Gemini V astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad were able to spot, among other things, a special checkerboard pattern that had been laid out in Texas, a rocket-sled test in New Mexico, and the aircraft carrier that would later pick them up in the Atlantic, along with a destroyer trailing in its wake...
give me *one* explanation how neon lights and acrylic windows and whatever make your computer perform better;
on the contrary -- do you know why computers uses metal cases? because in the times of solar flares, radiation will pass through you tiny tiny capacitors in your DRAM, usually leaving a stream of drained capacitors; -- metal cases help in that respect. (and i am not making this up)
so i would think that with a window on your PC, it would be *more* flimsy rather than less.
as for mouse mods... sigh... get a life yo.
a *really* slow news day.
yes... look at a firewire cable; shielded twisted pair; the thing is, when you cram more and more signals through a cable, the cable itself gets quite pricy, so you are offloading design costs of the motherboard onto the quality control of cabelling, which i see no point in. high quality cables (shielded) cannot be bent too much because that will cause variations locally in the dielectric, screwing up your signal. and frankly, cables are much more likely to get bent / messed up than a trace in the PCB, so i rather see technology that's not very dependent on the cable quality / condition.
parallel ATA is pretty much maxed out at 133 right now
i am not denying this fact -- but at the mean time; i believe my argument still stands; what i do not like is the fact that suddenly, when moving to a new architecture, we decide that "we can do this with a narrow bus". i don't believe it. it is great and fine that you can reach the next step in your road map with only an 8-bit bus, but that does not mean you should do it. because i believe eventually the bus size will double and again. i hate to see that level of bs people will have to put up with. say i have a old MB when mainstream serial ATAs now have twice the bus width as when my MB was designed. how much are you willing to bet that it won't work then? USB and firewire will reach their maximum capacity (cable-wise) in the future, and when that happens, i bet you a dollar to a donut that the spec will start calling for wider busses on those too. but unlike specs that maintain their bus width, interoperability will be severly limited.
I hope you weren't serious about that.
i was about half serious -- and yes -- i know that SATA will be intergrated into the chipset directly, with it's own channels out. but wait a sec here... how does that simplify MB design again? you are saying i need a few more high freq traces going into the chipset, which is already crammed full of traces to the memory, AGP, southbridge, processor, etc? I would much more rather see a wider adoption of an evolutiona to the outdated PCI bus, and have things hang off those -- than have these new and fancy crap that gets crammed into the chipset. PCI, btw, *is* a bottleneck because any SATA adapter cards will hang off the PCI bus (say i want 8 drives for my system)... i wish the industry puts forth half as much momentum behind say, PCI64's adoption than SATA, etc.
i'd be much more worried about learning to drive on the opposite side of the road.
i hear that when ppl learns to drive on one side -- in an emergency they automatically swerve to what they consider to be the "side of the road" -- in your case you will probabbly swerve left, which would be toward the oncomming traffic here in the US.
and oh yeah -- if you ever do move here -- stay away from silicon valley, or california in general. this place is like the nymph in the legends -- lure you here with beautiful weather, and torment you for eternity with rediculous real-estate prices (houses are roughly 800k-1.4 million US dollars here, apt / townhouse (flat?) will cost you 350-600k US dollars) *coughs blood*
ETHERNET is a protocol; i think what you are really saying is that unshielded twisted pair was able to bump up in speed progressively.
i am not concered with the ATA protocol, in this case -- rather the amount of signals moved through the cables connecting the drive to your board;
even the venerable UTP can only get to 1Gbit and no more; ethernet lives on, 10Gbit ethernet standard is here, but guess what, fibre only.
same with ATA; you can only move so much signal (electrically) through wires. or, signals of so high a frequency; in this case, for a specific type of cable, there in a maximum amount of information that can travel through it. (unless you go out of your way to shield them, etc etc -- but a nicely shielded cable will cost you ~1500 dollars -- most high freq oscilloscope probes uses them, btw.) anyhow; serial ATA tries to bump up speed with a serial interface -- mainly to simplify MB design considerations -- less traces, narrower bus, etc; but since each strand in your cable will only go so far -- i am betting that eventually (without resorting to optical connections) even serial ATA, under the demand of higher throughput either by the market or by their (un)realistic roadmap -- start to double / quadruple the bus width. to me this is just silly -- because the benefit this offered is going away! MB designers will again have to fudge with wide busses and connections.
we might as well just keep on using parallel ATA but boost the signal freq incrementally, since it will get us to the same place in a few years anyway, without all these incremental MBs using different sized busses that's not compatible with different generation drives.
by the way -- PCI bus can only push 133MB anyhow -- anything beyond that is silly
sorry for the mis-use of language -- what i am refering to is "dual-channel" RDRAM.
it was implemented on intel's i850 (? -- don't remember so well anymore) -- and required two modules to be installed simultaneously.
now that DDR / DDR II is catching up to RDRAM in terms of bandwidth, RAMBUS decided that all the "high performance" RDRAM modules will be "dual channel on a single chip" (which, btw, is 32 bit); now you will say -- this is still small -- but remember that originally RAMBUS can be used with only 8-bit bus width (somebody correct me if i got this wrong); and on the horizon quad-channel (64-bit) RAMBUS is looking at ya. guess how wide is the DDR / SDRAM bus? 64 bits too? ditto.
RDRAM is double-pumped (i do not believe it is a technical term, btw) -- data comes on both pos and neg edge of clock. there is no *real* quad-pumped memory; QDR-RAM is still only double-pumped except both I and O can operate simultaneously. only used in SRAMs anyway. (FYI)
in real-life terms, it would be the equivalent of:
"look for this and this information in THIS book" would be legal.
"look for this and this informaiton in THIS book, PAGE # xx-yy" would not be legal.
rediculous. -- heh, but it does make writing bibliographies easier -- "information obtained from www.nytimes.com"
there is only one solution to your problem:
step 1) obtain wireless access point
step 2) amplify broadcast power of access point
step 3) take computer to bathroom stall - buy some "caution / do not enter" tape"
step 4) check connection (if no connection, redo step 2)
step 5) work wonders to save humanity!
(we all know that most of the truly inspiring thoughts come to man when he is in sitting on the throne -- just think about the flux capacitor)
p.s. on a serious note: i am sorry for your current condition; maybe move to the states / even japan? (in japan, even the senior managers don't get office(s), so while it's the same lousy work env, you will at least feel better about it, maybe.)
remember back when RAMBUS said: we will provide an architecture with very narrow bus but extremely high speed to make up for it? (the *original* RAMBUS specs) -- beside the royalties and whatnot -- it actually (technology discussion only) had merits in that the PCB design was greatly simplified because of less crosstalk, easier routing, etc etc.
and then, people demanded more bandwidth... so now we have double / quad pumped RAMBUS channels -- in the end (today) it's back to 64-bit data-bus *anyhow*... except with an architecture that's not designed for parallel operation.
do anybody see some parallel (ha!) here?
i am guessing (or, predicting) that serial ATA / SCSI will go the same route. i really hope that it won't -- because if it did, our lives will all be kinda rough -- but it probabbly will.
sigh...
that's what i figured; -- not the UK part, but the office layout you are probabbly at.
FYI, japan is almost exactly the same way... so you might feel at home working there.
i personally don't think that it's a good idea -- i mean, cube farms in the US is lame and all, but i would still prefer fake walls than half-height, see-your-neighbor-pick-his-nose situations.
maybe there is a "thinking room" you can goto with a laptop for the "thinking times"...
you might want to ask your facilities personells to invest in better cubicals. i am not joking -- cubes (good ones (ha!)) are supposed to block sounds of typing, and not-too-noisy conversations etc. full-height helps; metal-backed helps; etc.
you can also use this excuse and ask for an office.
while i liked them... my golly ther were LOUD... don't ever think about typing on one of those if somebody is sleeping...
we had a computer lab full of these before (this is the days of Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS) -- when finals came around and people need to write papers you can hear this deafening roar of metali-plastic spring clicking....
so -- durable, fine; but for all practical purposes -- i will stick with the original Microsoft Natural (sorry, but it is the most "ergonomic" i found)... might upgrade to one of those fancy type-sideways ones in the future.
i do think "chord" typing is a good idea (ex: press E,T,S will get you F)... but it just takes so long to learn. one hand operation would be hard, but you can fit a keyboard onto almost everything (i think they should try this for the PDAs and cellphones. have anyone tried the keypads on the SONY NR-70 or the SHARP zauras (sp?) those are tiny and hard (i have stubby fingers). chord-key, though, would work much easier IMHO. sigh... so it probabbly means it wont ever catch on.
last note: as for regular keyboards, DVORAK is really nice. give it a try -- just a couple monthes... you will wonder why other ppl don't use it either.
last last note: (heh i lied) -- the dollar bill he used in the pict must be as old as that keyboard controller... heh... i thought it was kinda amusing.
I am not authoratative on this -- but if i still remember the EE theories -- usually inverters are not that efficient -- so you are dropping some efficiency right there that you may not have accounted for. also to transmit power, they need to bump up the voltage to ~100-150K volts -- so the transformers will drain some more juice (granted transformers usually do near-ideal coupling). but i suspect it will be hard to haul around a transformer -- more importantly it's hard to tap into the high voltage lines -- so it will probabbly transmit at lower voltages -- lower voltage transmission loses much more power in the lines, so again not efficient. hence, while an interesting plan, i see it as a *very* temporary solution... not something you would want to keep around for too long.
i mean... i know it's expensive -- but build a f** nuke plant... nevada dump site is a couple hours away now ANYHOW... sigh...
diesel engines have terrible power bands -- whilst a average automobile engine can produce useable torque between 500-6000 RPM; big diesel engines only do so between ~100 - 600? (the numbers escape me -- but the spirit is the same) -- hence to be able to produce reasonable torque between rest and cruising speed, you need something like around 80 different gear ratios. for everyone who does not drive stick and have NO idea what gear ratios are... erm... cars usually have ~3-6 different ratios. the transmission would be HUGE! and the loss phemomenal
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furthermore -- when the train is at rest -- remember that the engine only produce torque around 100 rpm -- this means you need some serious clutch plate to be able to handle that much torque. in the end motors are much better because they have a flat (pretty much) torque band (until drop off at high RPMs -- but that's above cruising speed anyhow).
the other great they they can do easily with a motor is braking -- when you applies the brakes the electricity flows from the motor(s) and through a large resistor mesh (generally a couple ohms), this mesh will heat up and there is a fan on top of the train spcifically used to cool this mesh. realld neat stuff.
for a lot more info check out here: sorry it's late and i don't want to deal with tags -- so copy and paste: http://www.howstuffworks.com/diesel-locomotive.ht