Stupid me, should have kept up with the conversation and realized the AC and the guy with the doppler stuff were just asshats.
I really wasn't considering anything quite so complex- if your purpose is routing ONLY then you don't even need IP2- you just need to know that the encoder on the other end of the fiber said that this packet is in the range that goes to such and such router down the line. Even if you only have two frequencies available, this is enough to switch millions of packets for millions of individual PCs between two cities.
So Wave Division Multiplexing DOES work- but the number of frequencies is limited? So what was all that about temporal multiplexing being the current technology?
Still, I'd expect a given backbone to only have data on it that relates to hosts reachable from that backbone, and that would be far more limited than just IP. I don't see a need particularily to have one single fiber backbone going to every computer in the world- it'd be physically impossible, because you can only have two encoder/decoder sets on a physical fiber from what I understand. Basically what I'm saying is that the serviceable IP ranges at each end of the fiber are a known quantity- thus to acomplish nearly the same thing as this switch is add another envelope to the network protocol stack- which defines the subnet the IP address is in, encode THAT as the color, and use Wave Division Multiplexing on each end.
Beyond that, the router at the fiber/copper junction is STILL going to have to look at the IP address for proper routing, so while being able to look at the IP address without converting to electricity is indeed very impressive, there are other ways to accomplish the same goal with existing technology.
The more interesting thing is the secondary goal- that this optical transistor is the first stage to a fully optical computer- one cabable of being a direct node with no conversion to electricity at all.
Which would be the point, wouldn't it? Putting a serial digital signal down each frequency at one end- and then use the prisim to separate them into those frequencies at the other end to get distinct channels of data (as in, this channel coming from LED 5x26 which we can discern from the frequency color spread is going to LA, where color 5x27 is going to San Francisco)? Except for the frequency shift problem put forth in another post, it should work- but those frequency shift problems mean that the colors are *different* coming out than going in.
Didn't matter anyway- a later post (or was it an earlier one) revealed this to be a badly written synopsis to begin with- they ain't launching people, they're launching satelites, and they're not in competition for the Ansari X-Prize.
I can imagine machines, which don't need life support, to be WAY easier to launch than people, and thus cost less.
Ok- then that makes more sense. Always wondered why it's almost always just a single color instead of white coming out of the end of a fiber optic cable.
This is what has always disappointed me about fighting robots- if I'm ever rich enough I'll build my own damn arena and put out the call for AI-only fighting robots. Might make it more interesting- what does an AI bot do after the killer buzz saw on his oponent gets it in the motion detector array?
I had to think about your reply before realizing *why*. I'm used to thinking about red shift and blue shift only in terms of pure doppler effect- and it's not like the fiber optic cable itself is shrinking or growing. I think you mean the speed of the earth turning affecting how fast the wave travels down the cable- but wouldn't this only affect east-west cables as opposed to north-south?
I also thought we were *already* using color to differentiate voice streams- which is why a single fiber could handle so many more voice calls than copper could (limited to one circuit as a twisted pair is). Are you saying that all fiber is really packet switched at a high rate of speed instead?
Could simulate a tunable single-wavelength color source with an array of fixed-single-wavelength color sources- but I get your point, that could be prohibitively expensive.
Windows, for its first three incarnations, was an absolute piece of garbage.
And worse yet- that was NOT the first three incarnations. The first three incarnations were 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. There was also a 3.1 and a 3.11 before 95- all in the same code base.
The current code base is actually an entirely different set of code, starting with NT (for New Technology). So we're talking 8 incarnations of garbage- all of which belonged to a code base that is now utterly abandoned by Microsoft.
Certainly- the 2nd world countries have a lot to gain from this technology. But I think there's a third issue with outsourcing that nobody seems to ever mention- there's no good way to gain requirements up front, you MUST have face to face communications with the end users for a successfull software project. To that end, India/Pakistan will NEVER be adequate software producers for American needs- but that won't matter in the long run, because they won't be producing software for America, they'll be producing software for their HOME MARKETS! That's the real key to economic success from having a software industry- think locally, not globally.
If he's hitting the ~$5000/year set, they've got electricity in their homes. Not *dependable* electricity, maybe only an hour or two a day, maybe only what they can afford fuel for the generator for, maybe only as much as little Apu can pedal his bicyle to charge the leden jars, but I'm sure they have electricity. Without electricity, the only light at night is fire (gas or candle) and it's REALLY hard to work enough to earn that $5000/year without artificial light, or with only 1 candlepower of light (even at it's worst, the Ford Company doing studies in the 1940s showed that for peak work productivity, you need at least 3 candlepower in the workplace).
Ah, ok- he's targeting people who live on an average of $5000/year, as opposed to less than $2000/year (there's a TON of people out there living on less than $2000/year, and the grand majority of those in pre-developing countries do indeed live on $365 a year). As usual the person posting the article is incorrect, and I failed to RTFA. Thanks for the correction.
As to your last remark- I'm not overly impressed with the code coming out of that area of the world. Perhaps in 30 years or so they'll be up to our standards, but for now, far too many projects sent there fail to coding errors that we in the west learned to avoid in the 1980s. But given that many of these people are still in the same place we were in the 1980s (with less than a decade's experience even as a HOBBY!) and don't know or care to understand the history, this isn't surprising at all.
Let the weenies that hate their work slack away. When the annual review comes up the people that take pride or work hard will move ahead. Then the weenies will bitch about not being liked, etc. ANYTHING but looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for their place on the ladder.
Not entirely true- I worked my tail off at every job I've ever done up until 3 years ago, and NONE of them were secure, or even close to the "permanent employee" promised. True, several times I made it until the "end of the company"- but no matter how many times I put in 24 hour or 48 hour shifts developing software, the company eventually went bankrupt anyway. And no job ever lasted more than 2 years.
Government is MUCH more reliable than private industry- though I've yet to build up my loyalty barrel again after being out of work for 26 months.
Good plan- I did live to work, then the 2001 recession hit my job- and I spent the next 26 months going slowly insane. I'm now fully insane, which is why I'm working in government. So don't be like me- work to live, don't live to work.
In my department of transportation that I contract with, I'm utterly convinced that actually working a full day gets you transfered to Information Systems. Regardless of previous training. The sad thing about this is that the people most stuck up about working a full day get transfered to the Computer Security Unit, where they have control over the firewall. Amazing what web sites get blocked at the proxy, and which ones don't (like/. isn't blocked but everything2 is).
Worse yet- he doesn't realize that the grand majority of those 4 billion people not only live on less than $2000 a year- they live on less than $365 a year (since the going wage at the bottom of the third world is $1/day). Does he really expect people to give up 2/3rds of their yearly salary just to get a TV set/Telephone/Videophone? And don't you have to be at least symbol-literate to use a remote control or keyboard?
You apparently failed to read the article, which showed that yes indeed, the tc0 of OSX is cheaper than Windows- but as a "toy OS" the people using it don't have anything usefull to 0wn on their machines, so why would you bother to hack them?
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They bought Peoplesoft because they were going to be the major competitor for this new offering. Simple case of elimination of competition.
Considering that Microsoft broke their own CRM add-on to Outlook with Service Pack 2.
And I got entirely taken in by the doppler argument which was false- yes, this is the idea for routable light based on frequency.
Stupid me, should have kept up with the conversation and realized the AC and the guy with the doppler stuff were just asshats.
I really wasn't considering anything quite so complex- if your purpose is routing ONLY then you don't even need IP2- you just need to know that the encoder on the other end of the fiber said that this packet is in the range that goes to such and such router down the line. Even if you only have two frequencies available, this is enough to switch millions of packets for millions of individual PCs between two cities.
Umm... How would you make a "nand" gate out of that?
No need to if your purpose is merely Routing Information, as all you need is a single piece of information- where to send the packet of info on to.
So Wave Division Multiplexing DOES work- but the number of frequencies is limited? So what was all that about temporal multiplexing being the current technology?
Still, I'd expect a given backbone to only have data on it that relates to hosts reachable from that backbone, and that would be far more limited than just IP. I don't see a need particularily to have one single fiber backbone going to every computer in the world- it'd be physically impossible, because you can only have two encoder/decoder sets on a physical fiber from what I understand. Basically what I'm saying is that the serviceable IP ranges at each end of the fiber are a known quantity- thus to acomplish nearly the same thing as this switch is add another envelope to the network protocol stack- which defines the subnet the IP address is in, encode THAT as the color, and use Wave Division Multiplexing on each end.
Beyond that, the router at the fiber/copper junction is STILL going to have to look at the IP address for proper routing, so while being able to look at the IP address without converting to electricity is indeed very impressive, there are other ways to accomplish the same goal with existing technology.
The more interesting thing is the secondary goal- that this optical transistor is the first stage to a fully optical computer- one cabable of being a direct node with no conversion to electricity at all.
Which would be the point, wouldn't it? Putting a serial digital signal down each frequency at one end- and then use the prisim to separate them into those frequencies at the other end to get distinct channels of data (as in, this channel coming from LED 5x26 which we can discern from the frequency color spread is going to LA, where color 5x27 is going to San Francisco)? Except for the frequency shift problem put forth in another post, it should work- but those frequency shift problems mean that the colors are *different* coming out than going in.
Didn't matter anyway- a later post (or was it an earlier one) revealed this to be a badly written synopsis to begin with- they ain't launching people, they're launching satelites, and they're not in competition for the Ansari X-Prize.
I can imagine machines, which don't need life support, to be WAY easier to launch than people, and thus cost less.
Ok- then that makes more sense. Always wondered why it's almost always just a single color instead of white coming out of the end of a fiber optic cable.
This is what has always disappointed me about fighting robots- if I'm ever rich enough I'll build my own damn arena and put out the call for AI-only fighting robots. Might make it more interesting- what does an AI bot do after the killer buzz saw on his oponent gets it in the motion detector array?
I had to think about your reply before realizing *why*. I'm used to thinking about red shift and blue shift only in terms of pure doppler effect- and it's not like the fiber optic cable itself is shrinking or growing. I think you mean the speed of the earth turning affecting how fast the wave travels down the cable- but wouldn't this only affect east-west cables as opposed to north-south?
I also thought we were *already* using color to differentiate voice streams- which is why a single fiber could handle so many more voice calls than copper could (limited to one circuit as a twisted pair is). Are you saying that all fiber is really packet switched at a high rate of speed instead?
Could simulate a tunable single-wavelength color source with an array of fixed-single-wavelength color sources- but I get your point, that could be prohibitively expensive.
What I don't get- couldn't you accomplish the same thing by encoding the addressing into the color layer and just using a prisim for a switch?
Windows, for its first three incarnations, was an absolute piece of garbage.
And worse yet- that was NOT the first three incarnations. The first three incarnations were 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. There was also a 3.1 and a 3.11 before 95- all in the same code base.
The current code base is actually an entirely different set of code, starting with NT (for New Technology). So we're talking 8 incarnations of garbage- all of which belonged to a code base that is now utterly abandoned by Microsoft.
for this to be cheap. A mere millionaire (somebody making a million a year) will need 6-21 years to pay for this.
Certainly- the 2nd world countries have a lot to gain from this technology. But I think there's a third issue with outsourcing that nobody seems to ever mention- there's no good way to gain requirements up front, you MUST have face to face communications with the end users for a successfull software project. To that end, India/Pakistan will NEVER be adequate software producers for American needs- but that won't matter in the long run, because they won't be producing software for America, they'll be producing software for their HOME MARKETS! That's the real key to economic success from having a software industry- think locally, not globally.
Minus the warhead, but yeah- it's amazing what you can find these days on ebay. Just enter "Russia" and "Surplus".
Someone modded this insightfull when I made the same mathematical error as the article summary? Try again- see the thread Rubbish.
If he's hitting the ~$5000/year set, they've got electricity in their homes. Not *dependable* electricity, maybe only an hour or two a day, maybe only what they can afford fuel for the generator for, maybe only as much as little Apu can pedal his bicyle to charge the leden jars, but I'm sure they have electricity. Without electricity, the only light at night is fire (gas or candle) and it's REALLY hard to work enough to earn that $5000/year without artificial light, or with only 1 candlepower of light (even at it's worst, the Ford Company doing studies in the 1940s showed that for peak work productivity, you need at least 3 candlepower in the workplace).
Ah, ok- he's targeting people who live on an average of $5000/year, as opposed to less than $2000/year (there's a TON of people out there living on less than $2000/year, and the grand majority of those in pre-developing countries do indeed live on $365 a year). As usual the person posting the article is incorrect, and I failed to RTFA. Thanks for the correction.
As to your last remark- I'm not overly impressed with the code coming out of that area of the world. Perhaps in 30 years or so they'll be up to our standards, but for now, far too many projects sent there fail to coding errors that we in the west learned to avoid in the 1980s. But given that many of these people are still in the same place we were in the 1980s (with less than a decade's experience even as a HOBBY!) and don't know or care to understand the history, this isn't surprising at all.
Let the weenies that hate their work slack away. When the annual review comes up the people that take pride or work hard will move ahead. Then the weenies will bitch about not being liked, etc. ANYTHING but looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for their place on the ladder.
Not entirely true- I worked my tail off at every job I've ever done up until 3 years ago, and NONE of them were secure, or even close to the "permanent employee" promised. True, several times I made it until the "end of the company"- but no matter how many times I put in 24 hour or 48 hour shifts developing software, the company eventually went bankrupt anyway. And no job ever lasted more than 2 years.
Government is MUCH more reliable than private industry- though I've yet to build up my loyalty barrel again after being out of work for 26 months.
Good plan- I did live to work, then the 2001 recession hit my job- and I spent the next 26 months going slowly insane. I'm now fully insane, which is why I'm working in government. So don't be like me- work to live, don't live to work.
In my department of transportation that I contract with, I'm utterly convinced that actually working a full day gets you transfered to Information Systems. Regardless of previous training. The sad thing about this is that the people most stuck up about working a full day get transfered to the Computer Security Unit, where they have control over the firewall. Amazing what web sites get blocked at the proxy, and which ones don't (like /. isn't blocked but everything2 is).
Worse yet- he doesn't realize that the grand majority of those 4 billion people not only live on less than $2000 a year- they live on less than $365 a year (since the going wage at the bottom of the third world is $1/day). Does he really expect people to give up 2/3rds of their yearly salary just to get a TV set/Telephone/Videophone? And don't you have to be at least symbol-literate to use a remote control or keyboard?
You apparently failed to read the article, which showed that yes indeed, the tc0 of OSX is cheaper than Windows- but as a "toy OS" the people using it don't have anything usefull to 0wn on their machines, so why would you bother to hack them?