Hi all, I’m very sorry for the interruption on the continuous flow of posts I was managing up until September, but as everyone, when the workload increases, non-essential stuff start to get set aside. Regardless, this projects hasn’t ended, and the flow of new visitors has now got to a stable level. As such, registration for new users and comments are now open to all. Feel free to comment on anything you don’t agree or any other stuff you find relevant.
This is a simple update on the last post regarding POF and Light Peak. In an interview to Tech-On, Jason Ziller, director of Optical I/O Planning/Marketing at Intel states: Q: How long is the wavelength of optical signals used for Light Peak? Ziller: It is 850nm. Optical signals are transmitted via optical fibers made of glass. The wavelength was decided in consideration of cost, durability, transmission range and so forth. However, it is possible that plastic optical fibers (POF) will be used in the future because its properties are drastically improving. Now, I’m yet to understand how can multimode glass …
For those who haven’t seen any keynote from Intel’s IDF for the last couple of years, Light Peak is the code name for a revolutionary technology that will allow cheap interconnects at 10Gbps, for domestic usage, based on optical technology. Here’s a quick into on Light Peak: Now, there’s a number of obvious limitations on using glass optical fiber. To start with, it’s brittle. No one is considering a consumer cable that cannot be bent! Nor can it have a maximum number of usages, nor having to be polished at each end. There’s simply no way glass optical fiber will make …
Sony’s Playstation 3 is one of the best media players around: it can play Blu-ray Discs, pictures, music, videos and finally, games. One of the best uses for the PS3 is the ability to stream content from a media server through DLNA. Nothing of what is written above is any news, nor does it brings any big issues to anyone. Now, let’s assume I have a number of media players at home, and I need to find a container that is supported by them all (PS3 included) but also must support all the functionalities I need (HD and subtitles). There …
Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, my HTC died just before I finished posting this, so not all steps were thoroughly tested although I did test the end results on both Snow Leopard and Linpus. For all those still waiting for HTC to update it’s Magic smart phone to Android 2.2, where not a lot of options for tethering you device with Linux or OSX machines: root it, pay for PDAnet (and it only works on OSX), or follow the following steps 🙂 How it works Android 1.6 doesn’t offer any capability to use a cell phone as a simple UMTS Modem, as …
Probably, one of the most important technologies ever invented for the home is plastic fiber, POF (plastic optical fiber). Unfortunately, it’s mostly unknown to most people, unless you work on the industrial grade networks. POF is basically the same technology as the old S/PDIF optical cable, but with a XXI century technology, from 2Mbps to 100Mbps (1Gbps already in the works, or maybe available) full duplex. What’s the advantage? Size. POF cables are between 1.5 and 2mm wide and extremely flexible. Those compare with Ethernet cables which are around five times thicker and far less flexible. This is not really …
Sorry for the delay, as the latest article on Plastic Fiber is not yet out of the oven. It should be ready by Saturday. On the other hand, where’s other article already on the making.
For all purposes, I’m a proud owner of an HTC Magic, obviously running Android. Out of the box, the Hero offers little: browser, email client (although Exchange support is included, thanks to HTC), and little more. Compared from my old Nokia E61e, it was a world appart: the browser really works! The internet is finally on the subway (private joke, sorry) and not exclusively limited to very basic less than ok mobile sites. This was already OK by me, but a brand new world appeared as soon as I got into Android Market, where there’s always an App that fits …
Why on earth would someone want to generate files of random content (not files with random name) ? Well, there is one big reason to do it: generate incompressible files. This seems a small reason, but there are a number os usage scenarios (apart from proving that random content is incompressible), most focus on transmitting files. Although is transparent to most people, but some tools do background compression namely, https, IPSEC and SSL VPNs, etc, and as such, trying to measure real world performance on those require incompressible content. First, how to generate it (assuming you can talk *NIX) ? …