I haven't seen this particular episode, so I can't make a judgement on how realistic the news ticker looked. But in order to be legal parody, the mock version has to be significantly different enough so that an average person would know that it was a parody and not confuse it with the original.
This illustrates the level to which our legal system has sunk. A TV Show considers suing another TV Show.
From my knowledge of the founding fathers and our legal system as it was meant to be: private citizens are given rights. They can bring suits in court or have suits brought against them to preserve public order. Television shows, and more generally, companies are not, I repeat, NOT citizens!
Yeah, but those documents will be so boring to read that the letter from any 'large community' will have no effect on the recipient.
I imagine this would be used for documents on a much larger timescale than what we're used to. For instance, slashdot is an instant medium. But there are certainly comments that are out of place, wrong, or that the author wishes could be taken back. I see this at the far other end of the scale. No one will use this for quick communication on a large scale. But important, long standing but fluid documents would be a perfect match.
On a smaller scale, it would be useful for a 10 member board to create a fax rather quickly without too much molasses slowing them down like a multi-thousand member group.
This ought to be much more useful than wiki and similar systems.
There is neverending abuse of new technology, mainly spammers who innovate to ruin the next up and coming trend (usenet,google,blogs). The one thing these spoilers can't outsmart is people. As long as there is a dedicated community behind these projects, this strategy should not only provide documents everyone can agree on, but trim down the abuse as well.
What you're describing sounds very similar to the idea I proposed. And yes, I think it would work just as well. And the size shouldn't be an issue. Unless there is some theoretic limit to the size, companies will put a lot of money into research to make smaller and smaller ones. Just think of our transition from tubes to big transistors to tiny transistors to millions on a pin-prick sized transistors. If the application is there, the product will become better and smaller through the natural course of things.
I think, based on your comments, we have no disagreements, only previous misunderstandings.
I would be interested in reading the PDF. But I don't want to post my email permenantly to slashdot. Is it available via ftp or the web? Also, I think my address is temporarily written in my journal.
A thought has crossed my mind. But I'm not sure if it's a good idea, or something other people have thought of and dismissed because its a bad idea. Perhaps you might be one of the best people to bounce this question off of.
Regarding amplifying a light signal so as to use passive OR and XOR gates: Think back to plain old gas lasers. What if a tube full of He were held at an excited state, so that there was a population inversion - but no induced emission of photons. In such a tube an incoming laser signal would trigger a huge induced light beam, amplifying the signal. The power supply would indeed be electric. But the response time would be amazingly fast. Is this similar to how lithium-niobate works? Is lithium-niobate the solid state version of what I just described? I admit I don't know much about this medium, only having read about it briefly. Back to my point, with the aid of such an amplifier, a gate could be made completely passive with respect to the path of the light signal. It would require only a voltage to maintain the population inversion. Thus, a light signal could pass through a slit and be XORed or ORed with another signal and amplified in the process with virtually no delay or deviation. The signal could then continue to the next gate. Perhaps this is compromising good design for speed. On top of that, I'm sure I have overlooked some very important details. But it struck me as an idea at least worth examining.
The last I checked in to optical memory it was implimented with tiny drops of ink. The ink could be made to block or pass light based on a light pulse from one direction, while the signal was read from another direction.
So to store 8 bits of data, you would shine individual lights on each of those eight bits that are not to be set from the proper angle, and the ink dot would become opaque from the read angle.
Then, during the read phase, a light is shined through each ink dot. All the darkened ink dots will block bits that are off, and on bits will be allowed to shine through.
The speed on this memory wouldn't be as fast as the cpu. Probably a lot like today's memory bottleneck. But it should outperform electronic vs optical conversions when it is a mature technology.
Warning. I read about this several years ago, and it was a very young technology. It may have changed significantly, or been replaced something better. Optical memory in itself is a new concept that hasn't had a lot real world success. But it appears to have potential. As with all things: it first has to happen under lab conditions. Then a poor product will be available for 1 bajillion dollars. And eventually everyone will have one for the price of 10 cups of coffee.
HAH!!! I found the post I lost in my browser cache!!! Now you can read and enjoy it.
Sorry if I came off snide. I didn't mean too. I took your comment to be snide and responded a little harshly. I will be much more civil.
Here's a better and longer explanation of what I said before.
With the present theory of computing (electronic and optical) you have a clock that drives the processor. Actions that take place such as moves, adds, rotates, and multiplies all take place because of an enabling clock pulse. There are bits that will be set on or off that are read and written at the clock pulse. For any digital computer, there must be on and off thresholds - above a certain threshold is on, and below a certain threshold is off - in between is not used and possibly an error.
With your degree, I'm sure you know all this.
Once a bit is set, that is a voltage applied or a light turned on, there is a certain amount of wait time until that signal propogates and can be read. The slope of the voltage vs time plot is rather shallow compared to a light intensity vs time plot. So in order to be reasonably sure that all bits your enabled have reached the threshold will take longer for an electronic signal than for an optical signal. This is why overclockers often increase the voltage on their cpu's, to decrease the time it takes for the signal to reach the threshold value. However, since the intensity of light increases much faster (the packet is tigher) the clock can be set at a MUCH faster rate and still maintain good assurance that all signals have reached their threshold value.
Hopefully this better explains what I said before. You can only imagine if I had tried to type that all into my original post!
OH MAN!!! I just wrote a huge long post and isn't showing up!
I don't have time or the patience to retype it.
So I'll summarize.
Sorry for sounding rude. I thought you were being rude so I responded in kind.
I think we're talking about different things: My point has to do with the rise and fall times of electronic and photonic signal packets. Since most of the time wasted by a cpu is waiting for signals to reach threshold levels, optical computers can have a much faster clock and not sacrifice stability or energy requirements.
Alright, I've got a question. What limits the speed of these optical processors? Is it something like the bandwidth of the input signal, where the two sidebands of some input signal move at slightly different speeds through the same medium in the processor, or is it something like energy requirements, or even simply the speed of light and physical processor size?
In practice, it is the much slower electronic components that limit the speed of an optical processor. Optical memory and bus would fix much of that though.
At a theoretic level, pretty much everything else you said is a limiting factor. While optical signals rise very quickly, they aren't instantaneous. The signal has to reach the output (speed of light through medium). And the gates aren't as small as silicon gates yet. Also, the photonic signals currently have to be amplified by electronic devices.
All of these things affect the speed. And none of them are a huge bottleneck save the interface between optical and electronic computer.
You mentioned interaction of light and changing energy levels of electrons. I beleive you are refering to, for instance, the time it takes for the electrons to change energy state in lithium niobate when it receives incident photons. First of all, this is not a point of contention between our viewpoints, as my argument concerns the latent time between signal set and acheiving threshold level. I originally mistook what you meant. But there is another option besides gates that use a photo-electrically sensitive substance such as lithium niobate. There are optical gates under development which use the diffraction of light to create OR and XOR gates. The gates are similar to the Young's single and double slit experiments. Oh how I wish slashdot had a way to draw! Anyway, two light signals, separated by a small angle, are both sent to a slit in a screen. Holes in a screen on the other side of the first screen are then optical outputs that return OR or XOR depending on their distance from the center of the screen. These gates can then be combined to create all other logical gates.
The only problem with these gates is amplification. Since the gates are passive, they will eventually lose strength. In which case an active medium will again be required to pump up th e signal.
But there is at least a start on purely optical gates that don't depend on electron energies.
They used to use regular electronic circuits to solve differential equations and similar problems too. They didn't get an exact solution, but they got a usable value. I think that's what you're talking about here.
That's partially true, but the (more) important aspect is that velocity of light in materials (3e8 [m/s] / refr index) is orders of magnitude larger than the eletrical carrier velocity (less than 1 m/s)
That is a common misconception, but not true. Both electrical and optical signals travel at the same speed, and both are slowed significantly by their medium. But that has minimal impact on the speed of a cpu. Most of the time wasted by an electronic cpu is wasted waiting for bits to rise and fall.
Electricity, as you're talking about it, is an EM Wave and travels at the speed of light in a vaccuum. Both light and electricity are slower traveling throug mediums, and their speed is still comperable. But the point of my post was that the speed of either is not the factor that increases the speed of the processor. The rise and fall times have nothing to do with the speed either. It is the tightness of the signal packet that creates a fast rise and fall time.
I doubt you'll ever see or buy one. But the you'll see the speed increase when your ISP's start using them. And from what I understand, these processors are signal processors. The application I just described is what they natively do. They are designed to take an input signal and process it into an ouput signal.
I studied this subject in depth and happen to know 6 six physics professors who agree with me on the subject. And I don't agree with a thing you've said.
To do anything at all with light, you need a material in with light beams can interact.
Light will interact in almost any medium. Many kinds of optical gates have already been created.
In this material, the speed at which electrons can change energy levels determine the speed.
I'm not even sure what you are talking about here. There are no signal carrying electrons in an optical fiber - that's the point. And if you meant photons instead of electrons, then the photons aren't changing energy levels. If you look back through your physics book, that would corrospond to changing color, and has nothing to do with optical computing. It is the absence or presence of light that determines the on or off state. Not the voltage, as in a regular processor.
In fact: the rise and fall time are determined by how fast you can (electronically) switch the light source on or off.
If you are using an isolated optical gate with electronic converters surrounding it yes. But that would be senseless and no one does it. Everyhing inside an opticl processor is connected by light signals. Each optical gate interacts with other optical gates optically. And as time goes on, the memory and bus of these systems will also become optical. Already, there are many physical processes that do not need any optical-electronic conversion : especially cpu bound operations that fit into the cache.
I don't beleive you have accurately grasped the concept of optical computing. If you have questions, please ask them. But don't assert your opinion as fact.
The most important and far reaching impact of this by far will be its affect on the internet and other fiberoptic networks.
Currently the slowest and most expensive part of a fiberoptic network is an OEO (optical-electric-optical) converter, used in routers and switches. These should replace those converters and have a SIGNIFICANT speed enhancement. Faster connections for all!
But if you want to get the full speed out of your processor and memory, as I recall, all the buses must be optical as well.
Yes, as soon as you convert from optical to electronic or vise versa, you sacrifice some of the speed you gained. I don't know about the current state of long term optical storage (Optical Hard Drives) but nearly everything else can be made to be optical including the processor, ram, bus, peripheral interface...
would you be able to link this in a Beowulf-type manner?
Yes. You can apply the black box theory to optical vs electronic processors. The internals are different, using different logic to form the gates. But the function and operation would be no different.
The only exception would be how you communicate with the processor. If you interact with it optically, you have to alter the rest of the computer. Or you have to have an optical to electronic converter- which will cost you a little speed, but make it behave exactly like a regular cpu.
Interstingly, optical processors aren't faster because light is faster than electricity. They are faster because they have much faster rise and fall times between digital on and digital off.
I've done a lot of research on this. Optical processors have incredible potential. And if you think that's good, just wait. The combo of an optical processor with optical memory is a one-two punch. This is definitely the future of computing.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen this particular episode, so I can't make a judgement on how realistic the news ticker looked. But in order to be legal parody, the mock version has to be significantly different enough so that an average person would know that it was a parody and not confuse it with the original.
This illustrates the level to which our legal system has sunk. A TV Show considers suing another TV Show.
From my knowledge of the founding fathers and our legal system as it was meant to be: private citizens are given rights. They can bring suits in court or have suits brought against them to preserve public order. Television shows, and more generally, companies are not, I repeat, NOT citizens!
Has SCO made an offer to indemnify all the users or redistributors of their illegal license?
why not through in Walmart and McDonalds?
Yeah, but those documents will be so boring to read that the letter from any 'large community' will have no effect on the recipient.
I imagine this would be used for documents on a much larger timescale than what we're used to. For instance, slashdot is an instant medium. But there are certainly comments that are out of place, wrong, or that the author wishes could be taken back. I see this at the far other end of the scale. No one will use this for quick communication on a large scale. But important, long standing but fluid documents would be a perfect match.
On a smaller scale, it would be useful for a 10 member board to create a fax rather quickly without too much molasses slowing them down like a multi-thousand member group.
I think it has a lot of good applications.
This ought to be much more useful than wiki and similar systems.
There is neverending abuse of new technology, mainly spammers who innovate to ruin the next up and coming trend (usenet,google,blogs). The one thing these spoilers can't outsmart is people. As long as there is a dedicated community behind these projects, this strategy should not only provide documents everyone can agree on, but trim down the abuse as well.
Most of us have free (emphasis mine) copies of Windows which have been tossed in with our systems
Free for just one low payment of $199 with the purchase of your computer.
Heh heh.
The Vietnamese have installed Open Source software on 4 computers already, leaving only 2 to go.
What you're describing sounds very similar to the idea I proposed. And yes, I think it would work just as well. And the size shouldn't be an issue. Unless there is some theoretic limit to the size, companies will put a lot of money into research to make smaller and smaller ones. Just think of our transition from tubes to big transistors to tiny transistors to millions on a pin-prick sized transistors. If the application is there, the product will become better and smaller through the natural course of things.
I think, based on your comments, we have no disagreements, only previous misunderstandings.
I would be interested in reading the PDF. But I don't want to post my email permenantly to slashdot. Is it available via ftp or the web? Also, I think my address is temporarily written in my journal.
A thought has crossed my mind. But I'm not sure if it's a good idea, or something other people have thought of and dismissed because its a bad idea. Perhaps you might be one of the best people to bounce this question off of.
Regarding amplifying a light signal so as to use passive OR and XOR gates: Think back to plain old gas lasers. What if a tube full of He were held at an excited state, so that there was a population inversion - but no induced emission of photons. In such a tube an incoming laser signal would trigger a huge induced light beam, amplifying the signal. The power supply would indeed be electric. But the response time would be amazingly fast. Is this similar to how lithium-niobate works? Is lithium-niobate the solid state version of what I just described? I admit I don't know much about this medium, only having read about it briefly. Back to my point, with the aid of such an amplifier, a gate could be made completely passive with respect to the path of the light signal. It would require only a voltage to maintain the population inversion. Thus, a light signal could pass through a slit and be XORed or ORed with another signal and amplified in the process with virtually no delay or deviation. The signal could then continue to the next gate. Perhaps this is compromising good design for speed. On top of that, I'm sure I have overlooked some very important details. But it struck me as an idea at least worth examining.
The last I checked in to optical memory it was implimented with tiny drops of ink. The ink could be made to block or pass light based on a light pulse from one direction, while the signal was read from another direction.
So to store 8 bits of data, you would shine individual lights on each of those eight bits that are not to be set from the proper angle, and the ink dot would become opaque from the read angle.
Then, during the read phase, a light is shined through each ink dot. All the darkened ink dots will block bits that are off, and on bits will be allowed to shine through.
The speed on this memory wouldn't be as fast as the cpu. Probably a lot like today's memory bottleneck. But it should outperform electronic vs optical conversions when it is a mature technology.
Warning. I read about this several years ago, and it was a very young technology. It may have changed significantly, or been replaced something better. Optical memory in itself is a new concept that hasn't had a lot real world success. But it appears to have potential. As with all things: it first has to happen under lab conditions. Then a poor product will be available for 1 bajillion dollars. And eventually everyone will have one for the price of 10 cups of coffee.
HAH!!! I found the post I lost in my browser cache!!! Now you can read and enjoy it.
Sorry if I came off snide. I didn't mean too. I took your comment to be snide and responded a little harshly. I will be much more civil.
Here's a better and longer explanation of what I said before.
With the present theory of computing (electronic and optical) you have a clock that drives the processor. Actions that take place such as moves, adds, rotates, and multiplies all take place because of an enabling clock pulse. There are bits that will be set on or off that are read and written at the clock pulse. For any digital computer, there must be on and off thresholds - above a certain threshold is on, and below a certain threshold is off - in between is not used and possibly an error.
With your degree, I'm sure you know all this.
Once a bit is set, that is a voltage applied or a light turned on, there is a certain amount of wait time until that signal propogates and can be read. The slope of the voltage vs time plot is rather shallow compared to a light intensity vs time plot. So in order to be reasonably sure that all bits your enabled have reached the threshold will take longer for an electronic signal than for an optical signal. This is why overclockers often increase the voltage on their cpu's, to decrease the time it takes for the signal to reach the threshold value. However, since the intensity of light increases much faster (the packet is tigher) the clock can be set at a MUCH faster rate and still maintain good assurance that all signals have reached their threshold value.
Hopefully this better explains what I said before. You can only imagine if I had tried to type that all into my original post!
OH MAN!!! I just wrote a huge long post and isn't showing up!
I don't have time or the patience to retype it.
So I'll summarize.
Sorry for sounding rude. I thought you were being rude so I responded in kind.
I think we're talking about different things: My point has to do with the rise and fall times of electronic and photonic signal packets. Since most of the time wasted by a cpu is waiting for signals to reach threshold levels, optical computers can have a much faster clock and not sacrifice stability or energy requirements.
Alright, I've got a question. What limits the speed of these optical processors? Is it something like the bandwidth of the input signal, where the two sidebands of some input signal move at slightly different speeds through the same medium in the processor, or is it something like energy requirements, or even simply the speed of light and physical processor size?
In practice, it is the much slower electronic components that limit the speed of an optical processor. Optical memory and bus would fix much of that though.
At a theoretic level, pretty much everything else you said is a limiting factor. While optical signals rise very quickly, they aren't instantaneous. The signal has to reach the output (speed of light through medium). And the gates aren't as small as silicon gates yet. Also, the photonic signals currently have to be amplified by electronic devices.
All of these things affect the speed. And none of them are a huge bottleneck save the interface between optical and electronic computer.
One more follow up about mediums:
You mentioned interaction of light and changing energy levels of electrons. I beleive you are refering to, for instance, the time it takes for the electrons to change energy state in lithium niobate when it receives incident photons. First of all, this is not a point of contention between our viewpoints, as my argument concerns the latent time between signal set and acheiving threshold level. I originally mistook what you meant. But there is another option besides gates that use a photo-electrically sensitive substance such as lithium niobate. There are optical gates under development which use the diffraction of light to create OR and XOR gates. The gates are similar to the Young's single and double slit experiments. Oh how I wish slashdot had a way to draw! Anyway, two light signals, separated by a small angle, are both sent to a slit in a screen. Holes in a screen on the other side of the first screen are then optical outputs that return OR or XOR depending on their distance from the center of the screen. These gates can then be combined to create all other logical gates.
The only problem with these gates is amplification. Since the gates are passive, they will eventually lose strength. In which case an active medium will again be required to pump up th e signal.
But there is at least a start on purely optical gates that don't depend on electron energies.
They used to use regular electronic circuits to solve differential equations and similar problems too. They didn't get an exact solution, but they got a usable value. I think that's what you're talking about here.
That's partially true, but the (more) important aspect is that velocity of light in materials (3e8 [m/s] / refr index) is orders of magnitude larger than the eletrical carrier velocity (less than 1 m/s)
That is a common misconception, but not true. Both electrical and optical signals travel at the same speed, and both are slowed significantly by their medium. But that has minimal impact on the speed of a cpu. Most of the time wasted by an electronic cpu is wasted waiting for bits to rise and fall.
Electricity, as you're talking about it, is an EM Wave and travels at the speed of light in a vaccuum. Both light and electricity are slower traveling throug mediums, and their speed is still comperable. But the point of my post was that the speed of either is not the factor that increases the speed of the processor. The rise and fall times have nothing to do with the speed either. It is the tightness of the signal packet that creates a fast rise and fall time.
I doubt you'll ever see or buy one. But the you'll see the speed increase when your ISP's start using them. And from what I understand, these processors are signal processors. The application I just described is what they natively do. They are designed to take an input signal and process it into an ouput signal.
I studied this subject in depth and happen to know 6 six physics professors who agree with me on the subject. And I don't agree with a thing you've said.
To do anything at all with light, you need a material in with light beams can interact.
Light will interact in almost any medium. Many kinds of optical gates have already been created.
In this material, the speed at which electrons can change energy levels determine the speed.
I'm not even sure what you are talking about here. There are no signal carrying electrons in an optical fiber - that's the point. And if you meant photons instead of electrons, then the photons aren't changing energy levels. If you look back through your physics book, that would corrospond to changing color, and has nothing to do with optical computing. It is the absence or presence of light that determines the on or off state. Not the voltage, as in a regular processor.
In fact: the rise and fall time are determined by how fast you can (electronically) switch the light source on or off.
If you are using an isolated optical gate with electronic converters surrounding it yes. But that would be senseless and no one does it. Everyhing inside an opticl processor is connected by light signals. Each optical gate interacts with other optical gates optically. And as time goes on, the memory and bus of these systems will also become optical. Already, there are many physical processes that do not need any optical-electronic conversion : especially cpu bound operations that fit into the cache.
I don't beleive you have accurately grasped the concept of optical computing. If you have questions, please ask them. But don't assert your opinion as fact.
The most important and far reaching impact of this by far will be its affect on the internet and other fiberoptic networks.
Currently the slowest and most expensive part of a fiberoptic network is an OEO (optical-electric-optical) converter, used in routers and switches. These should replace those converters and have a SIGNIFICANT speed enhancement. Faster connections for all!
But if you want to get the full speed out of your processor and memory, as I recall, all the buses must be optical as well.
...
Yes, as soon as you convert from optical to electronic or vise versa, you sacrifice some of the speed you gained. I don't know about the current state of long term optical storage (Optical Hard Drives) but nearly everything else can be made to be optical including the processor, ram, bus, peripheral interface
would you be able to link this in a Beowulf-type manner?
Yes. You can apply the black box theory to optical vs electronic processors. The internals are different, using different logic to form the gates. But the function and operation would be no different.
The only exception would be how you communicate with the processor. If you interact with it optically, you have to alter the rest of the computer. Or you have to have an optical to electronic converter- which will cost you a little speed, but make it behave exactly like a regular cpu.
Interstingly, optical processors aren't faster because light is faster than electricity. They are faster because they have much faster rise and fall times between digital on and digital off.
I've done a lot of research on this. Optical processors have incredible potential. And if you think that's good, just wait. The combo of an optical processor with optical memory is a one-two punch. This is definitely the future of computing.