seattlepi.nwsource.com — IBM Corp. will unveil a pair of tiny chips today that can transmit huge volumes of data by beaming light pulses through plastic fibers, an approach that uses far less energy than pushing a stream of electrons through copper wires.
Mar 26, 2007 View in Crawl 4
merrebornMar 27, 2007
"bottom line: The amount of data we transfer goes up almost parallel with the increase in transferring speed, thus, the sad reality is that we will always be staring at those damn transfer boxes."Yes and no. The size of uncompressed CD audio hasn't changed in years, and there don't appear to be any higher-quality standards that are likely to see mass adoption. So that's something of a ceiling.Hell, we watch videos on youtube nearly instantaneously now would have taken hours to download via modems.So there *is* a level of good-enoughness, at least in some contexts. Once you can download an entire CD's worth of audio in under a minute, then for the purposes of music, etc., that's "enough" bandwidth. Gonna be a while till we get there, and even longer til we get there for video, but there is a finite limit to useful bandwidth, per capita.
bean6886Mar 27, 2007
tiny chips huh?.....cool, if you're into that nerd s**t
diggduggduggedMar 27, 2007
@Tenog:I would guess it's probably something more like a better switch to tie into those fiber optic lines. Per Wikipedia: <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_switch">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_switch</a>If I remember correctly there are few good solutions for telcos to do optical switching on their networks. As of a couple of years ago I know that the technology called for switching the optical signals to electrical signals and then BACK to optical whenever the network entered or exited the CO. It sounds like progress has been made recently but this design from IBM seems to be a higher performing, more cost effective way of switching to an all optical network.
roberto_deneeroMar 27, 2007
So, lemme guess, the RIAA & MPAA are suing IBM now for creating technology that could be used to copy media illegally? Why doesn't the NAACP sue Ford for making cars that could be used to kill African Americans? Thank goodness for lawyers with too much time on their hands.
phaedMar 27, 2007
Its like those other visualizations "You can store the entire library of congress 5 times". Who finds that useful? Just tell me it can store 50GB. Comeon who are they targeting? Retards? Give us numbers!
cbrackMar 27, 2007
IBM Vice President and technology guru Bernard Meyerson said that within a few years, these light-based transceiver chips could be completely freaking obsolete.
agretMar 27, 2007
Fast enough to explode, or maybe not spin at all and just get scanned by some new system.....
aquasharkMar 27, 2007
f**k DVDs.. just imagine multiplayer games with no lag$$$