Because all or most of the fabs are geared towards Si CMOS circuitry, and without a clear path for these multi-billion production facilities to migrate to, the big players in the semiconductor electronics industry are not going to budge one inch from their "roadmap" (google for it - don't have time). Hint: GaAs or other more exotic direct bandgap semiconductors are not on their "favoured" list.
OK, if your email is the one mentioned in the Boycott journal entry, I'll dump the pdf (or the URL, if I find a live one) there. Your idea about the population inversion is indeed valid. I'll go into greater length responding to it in the email. The response time is indeed fast (only limited by the amount of available empty electron states at the bottom of the band and Fermi's Golden Rule), but the recovery time often sucks (you need to pump the inversion up after a pulse). Cheers, M. (expect mail from my vub.ac.be account - just so you can notify your spam filter)
OK - Read your 3 last comments (while on the train going home, unfortunately the wireless access is not ubiquitous - it is rather in the neighbourhood of inexistent) when I got home. That accounts for the latency;-)
1) The lithium-niobate Mach-Zehnder interferometers indeed work in a way similar to Young's double slit experiment, with the added functionality of a phase shift in one of the arms (aaah, drawing on Slashdot - indeed an utopic (?) concept) to switch the gate using a photo-electric material. The photo-electric effect, unfortunately, is due to a nonlinear index of refraction caused by a change of the electron band levels in the presence of a DC electric field. So again, these gates operate at "electronic" speeds
2) "electronic" speeds are not necessarily nanoseconds. They can be in the order of picoseconds as well. My initial "utter dung" was related to my interpretation of the switch on/off speed. And yes, rereading it, it sounded snide as well. Unintentionally as well. Sorry as well.
3) If we now look at "electronic" speeds in the order of nanoseconds, one effect comes into play which related to your remarks about the voltage swing and overclockers: the ridiculously low RC-timeconstant for light in vacuum/air/optical fiber. This of course is the direct reason for the steep flanks on the clocking pulses your are referring to. A really good article (which, if you haven't, you should read) about this subject (the advantages of optical computing) was written by D. Miller. If you want, I can send you the PDF.
- Light will interact in almost any medium. Many kinds of optical gates have already been created.
Yes, light will interact; badly. Many kinds of _fully_ optical gates have been prototyped and proposed. Few are available commercially
- There are no signal carrying electrons in an optical fiber.
Duh, no - but weren't we talking about optical gates; two beams interacting? How do they interact then, if not through changing the electron populations in the material ?
- Already, there are many physical processes that do not need any optical-electronic conversion
Read my previous remark again: what is then the physical origin of the switching on/off in your proposed gates in the fully optical processor ?
And to bounce back your initial snide remark: I too have studied this subject in depth (a M.Sc on the subject of optical computing and a PhD on the subject of VCSELs) and happen to know at least six physics professors who agree with me on the subject. And I don't agree with your tone, but am always interested in a stimulating discussing about points of view.
To do anything at all with light, you need a material in with light beams can interact. In this material, the speed at which electrons can change energy levels determine the speed. Just a in "normal" processors.
Rise and fall times have nothing to do with this. In fact: the rise and fall time are determined by how fast you can (electronically) switch the light source on or off.
Uh huh - without touching the platters - right. And no dust as well.
I would strongly suggest trying this on - oh say - 15 trow-away HD's before realizing that without a lot of experience you can forget about this course of action.
Send them to Ontrack or whatever : if it's worth your time to fiddle with the hardware, you can afford to send it away (or you are underpaid).
It seems to me all the results for candle truck and other weird ones also have exactly one (and the same) hit in the google directory. Strangely, the google images does give more results.
If I remember correctly, try any plasma, near the plasma resonance you'll find the index smaller than one. But it only tells you something about the phase velocity, not the group velocity. The group velocity tells you how fast information can travel, so no dice there.
M.
Re:You keep all your money in cash?
on
Cashless Society
·
· Score: 1
We acutally got it for free as a promotional stunt of the banks (to encourage use of the Proton card).
Re:You keep all your money in cash?
on
Cashless Society
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Don't know about France, but here in Belgium we have a little keychain gizmo in which to insert the card and it tells you the amount you just purchased, as well as the last couple of transactions (just the amount).
It is _very_ quiet. I have a 17" model and it only makes noise when the convective cooling does not work. Even then, the fan makes almost no noise. Really.
From the story: "Mundie's slides also showed the surprising results of automated crash reports from Windows users. A mere 1 percent of Windows bugs account for half of the crashes reported from the field."
Automated crash reports? What's the skinny on this? If it can work well enough to send in a report, how about automated crash recovery ?
Well, here in Europe the price is about 40 Euros (or should that be Eurodollars) a month which come sto the same amount. This is the typical price, and is not considered all that expensive. For this, you get 10Mb/s (Cable or ADSL) downstream, 128 kb/s upstream. No caps so far (although they urge you to stay below 20 GB a month).
Actually, it does exist.
Alcatel in Belgium has a fully optical switch, as do several US companies (I recall reading a story on slashdot about it) - Lucent probably. However, the technology is tricky due to less than ideal nonlinear materials and problems with drift of several of the parameter. Also, you mustn't forget that the interaction among light beams inside a material is still mediated by electrons, so the speed can never be more than that of the electronic processes used. In current electronics, they are much better at pushing the edge here. The real power in optical switching lies in the parallellism and the bandwidth thus possible.
Random network burp
From the page:
"It might lead to a computer processor thousands of times faster than today's Pentiums, or memory chips with millions of times more capacity than all the PCs Compaq Computer Corp. builds in a year. Tour said these components will use just a fraction of the electricity today's machines use, and will cost next to nothing to build - on a surface smaller than a dime. "
And it will make a hot drink which is almost totally but not quite unlike tea...
Oh please,
Do these people even know what they are talking about? Hype hype hype, but not a sensible sentence to read.
It reminds me of the optical processor debacle: computing at the speed of light! while they conveniently forgot that both electrical signals in todays chips and photon in the "computer of the future" go at exactly the same speed in semiconductor materials (about 1/3 of the speed of light in vacuum) and metals (about 2/3 of the speed of light in vacuum), as they are both form of electromagnetic radiation.
Who would need such a hypothetical device, and what data would fill this black hole of a memory - and how would you index it - or transmit it, for that matter.
Actually, A very similar idea (IMHO) was developted and is being developed here in Belgium bij Waveresearch I believe. It is a product called FilePool which does a kind of hashing on selected files saving the as e-CLIP (or soemthing) which are 34 byte keys. When you want to send a file of files to a friend, you just mail them the key, and THE NEAREST SERVER gives them the correct files. Meanwhile, in the background, the servers are continually synchronizing. Hmmm -a link: Wave Research
I wonder what they think - smells to me M$ is going to push this.
Slashdot Mirror
If you do not start Dashboard, it is not running and does not consume anything. Right ? Just wondering.
Because all or most of the fabs are geared towards Si CMOS circuitry, and without a clear path for these multi-billion production facilities to migrate to, the big players in the semiconductor electronics industry are not going to budge one inch from their "roadmap" (google for it - don't have time). Hint: GaAs or other more exotic direct bandgap semiconductors are not on their "favoured" list.
Great, not a single Mac OS X app can correctly address my 6310i, but Joe Random Hacker can? Urgh. I need to get my priorities straight.
OK, if your email is the one mentioned in the Boycott journal entry, I'll dump the pdf (or the URL, if I find a live one) there. Your idea about the population inversion is indeed valid. I'll go into greater length responding to it in the email.
The response time is indeed fast (only limited by the amount of available empty electron states at the bottom of the band and Fermi's Golden Rule), but the recovery time often sucks (you need to pump the inversion up after a pulse). Cheers, M. (expect mail from my vub.ac.be account - just so you can notify your spam filter)
OK - Read your 3 last comments (while on the train going home, unfortunately the wireless access is not ubiquitous - it is rather in the neighbourhood of inexistent) when I got home. That accounts for the latency ;-)
1) The lithium-niobate Mach-Zehnder interferometers indeed work in a way similar to Young's double slit experiment, with the added functionality of a phase shift in one of the arms (aaah, drawing on Slashdot - indeed an utopic (?) concept) to switch the gate using a photo-electric material. The photo-electric effect, unfortunately, is due to a nonlinear index of refraction caused by a change of the electron band levels in the presence of a DC electric field. So again, these gates operate at "electronic" speeds
2) "electronic" speeds are not necessarily nanoseconds. They can be in the order of picoseconds as well. My initial "utter dung" was related to my interpretation of the switch on/off speed. And yes, rereading it, it sounded snide as well. Unintentionally as well. Sorry as well.
3) If we now look at "electronic" speeds in the order of nanoseconds, one effect comes into play which related to your remarks about the voltage swing and overclockers: the ridiculously low RC-timeconstant for light in vacuum/air/optical fiber. This of course is the direct reason for the steep flanks on the clocking pulses your are referring to. A really good article (which, if you haven't, you should read) about this subject (the advantages of optical computing) was written by D. Miller. If you want, I can send you the PDF.
Yours,
M.
Just to make myself clear:
- Light will interact in almost any medium. Many kinds of optical gates have already been created.
Yes, light will interact; badly. Many kinds of _fully_ optical gates have been prototyped and proposed. Few are available commercially
- There are no signal carrying electrons in an optical fiber.
Duh, no - but weren't we talking about optical gates; two beams interacting? How do they interact then, if not through changing the electron populations in the material ?
- Already, there are many physical processes that do not need any optical-electronic conversion
Read my previous remark again: what is then the physical origin of the switching on/off in your proposed gates in the fully optical processor ?
And to bounce back your initial snide remark: I too have studied this subject in depth (a M.Sc on the subject of optical computing and a PhD on the subject of VCSELs) and happen to know at least six physics professors who agree with me on the subject. And I don't agree with your tone, but am always interested in a stimulating discussing about points of view.
Hem Hem. M.
What utter dung.
To do anything at all with light, you need a material in with light beams can interact. In this material, the speed at which electrons can change energy levels determine the speed. Just a in "normal" processors.
Rise and fall times have nothing to do with this. In fact: the rise and fall time are determined by how fast you can (electronically) switch the light source on or off.
Uh huh - without touching the platters - right.
And no dust as well.
I would strongly suggest trying this on - oh say - 15 trow-away HD's before realizing that without a lot of experience you can forget about this course of action.
Send them to Ontrack or whatever : if it's worth your time to fiddle with the hardware, you can afford to send it away (or you are underpaid).
It seems to me all the results for candle truck and other weird ones also have exactly one (and the same) hit in the google directory. Strangely, the google images does give more results.
Isn't this like the idea proposed by J. Brunner in The Shockwave Rider - some kind of oracle by the people ?
M.
P.S. Read the book - it is great.
If I remember correctly, try any plasma, near the plasma resonance you'll find the index smaller than one. But it only tells you something about the phase velocity, not the group velocity. The group velocity tells you how fast information can travel, so no dice there.
M.
We acutally got it for free as a promotional stunt of the banks (to encourage use of the Proton card).
Don't know about France, but here in Belgium we have a little keychain gizmo in which to insert the card and it tells you the amount you just purchased, as well as the last couple of transactions (just the amount).
It is _very_ quiet.
I have a 17" model and it only makes noise when the convective cooling does not work. Even then, the fan makes almost no noise. Really.
No dB levels, though.
Just remember folks, when such a smaal change is considered important, it usually means $$$ is a stake. As in:
The use of free software is supported : you can get $$$ if you use the stuff.
The use of free software is encouraged : you can get kudos if you use it.
That being said, I think the author of the original article smoked a bit too much of all the shit he could get on that beach.
POKE 65495,0
Urgh - I'd though I'd never see that again.
My C64 is still in the cellar.
I AM NOT PATHETIC.
From the story:
"Mundie's slides also showed the surprising results of automated crash reports from Windows users. A mere 1 percent of Windows bugs account for half of the crashes reported from the field."
Automated crash reports? What's the skinny on this?
If it can work well enough to send in a report, how about automated crash recovery ?
Well, here in Europe the price is about 40 Euros (or should that be Eurodollars) a month which come sto the same amount. This is the typical price, and is not considered all that expensive. For this, you get 10Mb/s (Cable or ADSL) downstream, 128 kb/s upstream. No caps so far (although they urge you to stay below 20 GB a month).
M.
Actually, it does exist. Alcatel in Belgium has a fully optical switch, as do several US companies (I recall reading a story on slashdot about it) - Lucent probably. However, the technology is tricky due to less than ideal nonlinear materials and problems with drift of several of the parameter. Also, you mustn't forget that the interaction among light beams inside a material is still mediated by electrons, so the speed can never be more than that of the electronic processes used. In current electronics, they are much better at pushing the edge here. The real power in optical switching lies in the parallellism and the bandwidth thus possible. Random network burp
And it will make a hot drink which is almost totally but not quite unlike tea...
Oh please,
Do these people even know what they are talking about? Hype hype hype, but not a sensible sentence to read. It reminds me of the optical processor debacle: computing at the speed of light! while they conveniently forgot that both electrical signals in todays chips and photon in the "computer of the future" go at exactly the same speed in semiconductor materials (about 1/3 of the speed of light in vacuum) and metals (about 2/3 of the speed of light in vacuum), as they are both form of electromagnetic radiation.
Who would need such a hypothetical device, and what data would fill this black hole of a memory - and how would you index it - or transmit it, for that matter.
It would take a lifetime to fill.
Maxwell rules !
Michael
I wonder what they think - smells to me M$ is going to push this.
Le M.
P.S. What's a first post ? This is mine...