Engineers Report Breakthrough in Laser Beam Tech 208
petralynn writes to tell us the New York Times is reporting that Stanford engineers have discovered a method to modulate a beam of laser light up to 100 billion times a second. The new technology apparently uses materials that are already in wide use throughout the semiconductor industry. From the article: "The vision here is that, with the much stronger physics, we can imagine large numbers - hundreds or even thousands - of optical connections off of chips," said David A.B. Miller, director of the Solid State and Photonics Laboratory at Stanford University. "Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years."
Re:With great bandwidth comes great responsibility (Score:1, Insightful)
With great bandwith comes great amounts of porn.
Re:An Open Letter to Solid State and Photonics Lab (Score:4, Insightful)
Your tinfoil hat slipped loose.
Re:Speed of light vs. speed of electrons in wire? (Score:2, Insightful)
So, you still have the same "speed" but you have way higher modulation than what is possible through a traditional chip.
So, if you have two highways, both going the same speed, but one is filled with dinky cars and one is filled with transport trucks....in which highway can you have more total cars get through?
So the data gets there in the same length of time, but you have data sending/arriving much more frequently, so total throughput is up.
Re:With great bandwidth comes great responsibility (Score:2, Insightful)
Climbing the corporate ladder != Innovation
Innovation?! C'mon! This is a culture in which people really do use words like "synergy" and "value-added" with straight faces! I know; I've worked with them!
Each time I've worked in a corporate environment, I've been thoroughly appauled. People don't pursue good ideas! Rather, they make sure that they have all the right "check marks" on their "report cards." At the last place I worked, there were so many half-assed useless projects lying around -- wastes of time and money -- which could have been made useful if the resources had been put into them to do them right. But they weren't, because that's not how the incentive structure works.
When the end of the quarter comes around, you're faced with a choice: Have I "met my goals" (your immediate supervisor will be inclined to say that you did, because it'll make him look good), and pick up a fat bonus -- or do you finish the job right?. Of course you choose option 1; you play the "incentive structure" for all it's worth.
You make the right moves. You cozy up to the right people. You do everything you can to look good. You do not investigate great new ideas.
Political scientists speak of "collective action problems." The corporation is a legal construct, and the laws that govern it seem tailor-made to create collective action problems. The individual incentives that corporatism puts in place spur individual actions which do not sum to positive collective action. That is, each worker puts the right checkmarks on his report card, but the company does not pursue goals - like investing in new technology - on which its future ultimately depends.
It's because of the "incentive horizon." People pursue goals "within their horizons." Investment culture, and legal obligations to shareholders, dictate that the incentive horizon is approximately three months long. Why don't we have decent broadband in the US? Because infrastructure takes time and has delayed returns. Successful cultures emphasize the importance of 'delayed returns,' but corporatism as it is currently practiced does not. There's a famous explanation in political science for why hereditary monarchy is rationally preferable for a people than is a series of dictatorships by unrelated people: The monarch has a larger "incentive horizon," and so will seek to build a country that will serve him and his decendants. He will tax at the maximum level which does not significantly harm economic growth, because, integrated over time, this represents his largest possible profit. The despot, in contrast, has a shorter incentive horizon, and so it is not rational for him to pursue delayed returns: He taxes everything immediately, seizing farms and industrial equipment. His actions mean that soon the public will not be able to generate new tax income to tax, but, in the short time-span in which he is operating, that is entirely rational. The problem is that modern corporatism creates this second incentive structure. Other countries, like South Korea and Japan, have succeeded in developing good broadband because they have succeeded in using government regulation to effectively change the incentive structure for corporations. The incentive horizon is longer for them. Probably still not optimally large, but longer.
So what is an innovator to do? Certainly don't get caught up in the mess that is corporate culture. Me, I'm seriously thinking about a PhD and research. I've been nothing but impressed with academic scientists.