Ypsiliform

This beautiful word means shaped like an upsilon. I kid you not. I do love the English language.

Now that I've finished that painfully long review of a video game, I figured that I'd try and take a step towards the technical side of technology once more. I haven't gotten that sense of writing something worthwhile for the past two blog posts that I got from any posts before them, which somewhat negates the blog since I'm writing it for personal enjoyment.

Recently, what with my focus being almost non-existant and so forth, I've found myself procrastinating an awful lot. And because most of my work is online, it's mostly websites that form my procrastination, and I really want to stop my procrastination during hours that I dedicate to work. In order to do this, I am in the process of trying to write a piece of code to help with this. I'm only in the process of formulating what I want it to do right now, but I'm thinking of making its purpose to put some sort of delays in place, as opposed to just completely restricting my access. Pitting my want to procrastinate against my impatience as it were. For example, when I get bored I flip over to Facebook and refresh my News Feed (the main page that shows me all of my friends' updates). If, for example, when I wanted to load up Facebook, I had to load up a completely different browser and I set it so that to view updates, I'd have to close the browser and load it back up and log in again, I'd get impatient and stop doing it as often. This would then lead to higher productivity. I'll upload some flow-diagrams of what I want this code to do sometime tomorrow. Maybe.

On a different yet similar topic, Intel recently launched a new, high-speed method through which computers can connect to storage peripherals, or even any kind of peripheral for that matter. Similar to the way that USB 2.0 took over from FireWire and USB 1.1, and very recently, USB 3.0 took over from USB 2.0, the new project, codenamed Thunderbolt is looking promising for a takeover from USB 3.0.

I'm going to dip into a little history here for those of you who didn't already know this stuff. In 1986, Apple developed a system (called FireWire) via which data could be transferred between a computer and peripheral at either 12MB/s, 25MB/s or 49MB/s. At the time, this was fantastic. Computers barely had this much storage, so this was more than sufficient.
In 1998, USB 1.1 was released with a 12MBit/s transfer rate for data devices but a lower 1.5MBit/s transfer rate for peripherals such as joysticks, keyboards and mice. The main advantage to USB was that it utilised existing interfaces (USB slots already existed at this point) and simplified software configurations for devices.
These ran happily and sufficiently until music players and suchlike came along, and larger quantities of data were being transferred. A new data transfer protocol was required to handle such large amounts of data and reduce transfer times.
And so, along came USB 2.0. Not only did this new protocol increase data transfer by almost 40 times (USB 2.0 had transfer speeds of up to 480MBits/s) it also provided a 4-volt power supply for devices. Apple almost instantly began utilising this new feature fantastically. With their music players (the iPod), they no longer needed to provide both a mains charger and a USB data cable, as they could integrate the charger inside the data cable so that the iPod charged from the computer. And the new data transfer speeds meant that an awful lot of music (and miscellaneous files in the case of flash disks which were, at this point, becoming increasingly popular) could be copied to music players in a relatively short amount of time.

And so came the year 2010, moving ever closer to the heart of the Digital Age. With external hard drives reaching sizes of several terabytes, the need for an even higher transfer rate arose very quickly. Computer developers were ready for this incredible, exponential increase in digital storage, and had been developing USB 3.0. When the need began to seriously affect consumers, they began releasing the new USB 3.0 protocol. This new protocol pushed speeds to almost unheard-of highs. 5Gbit/s at the top end. This meant that a 4GB DVD-movie could be copied over to a local media server in less than a minute. USB 3.0 also decreased ppower consumption while simultaneously increasing power output.

And now, Intel have released "Thunderbolt". This new project has transfer speeds of up to 10GBit/s, double that of USB 3.0, but is limited by the materials used. Thunderbolt Copper uses, obviously, copper wiring inside it. Copper is a fantastic conductor for electrical signals which aids the high transfer speeds, but lately a better contender for data transfer has stood on tiptoes above the rest. Ever heard of Fibre Optic Broadband? This broadband allows for phenomenal speeds, because it uses fibre optics to transfer data in the form of light. If Thunderbolt Copper goes down well, they will be releasing Thunderbolt Optic. This form of Thunderbolt has speeds, theoretically, up to 100GBit/s.

Now, it might seem a bit silly investing so much money, just to save a few extra seconds transferring files, but with increased transfer speeds comes an incredible bonus. Memory.
For those of you running Vista or Windows 7, do you remember when USB Flash Memory Drives used to come with little stickers saying "ReadyBoost compatible"? (I know I'm going on a bit here, but I can't stop now)

Back in the day, when you had a lot of programs open and were running low on RAM (Random Access Memory, for those of you not in-the-know), your computer would allocate user-definable amount of physical hard-disk space as "Virtual RAM". This vRAM acted as normal RAM, but different in one way: its transfer speed was abysmal compared to standard RAM. With old-style hard disks (those with the magnetic disks that spun, with the clicky noise when it was accessing data), the data transfer rate was awful, but with the vRAM it allowed a little extra storage space to stop your computer from completely locking up and not doing anything at all due to having no free space to move data around.

Computers still do this, but with the invention of solid-state drives (similar to flash drives in that there are no moving parts) the transfer rate was higher, so the computer was (marginally) quicker when using the vRAM data cache.
ReadyBoost utilised the new, incredible transfer speeds by allowing a vRAM data cache to be created on USB flash drives with high enough access times. By utilising the new Thunderbolt Optic transfer speeds to develop external solid-state drives with high access times, massive vRAM caches could be created that run as quickly, if not quicker than normal RAM, resulting in cheap and easy methods of speeding up your computer massively. I should patent this idea; I'm not sure if developers have come up with it yet.

Anyways, I've written for far too long as it is, so I leave you with a somewhat related quote:


"There are three types of computer users: Novice users who are afraid that just pressing a button will break their computer; Intermediate users who don't know how to fix their computer after pressing the key that broke it; and Expert users who break other peoples' computers."