Ad Terras Per Aspera

ESA looks at the Face On Mars that really isn’t

Steve Jobs Keynote Blooper Video

FCC to Axe Closed Caption

This one really came up out of nowhere: Wireless USB, a standard for ultra-wideband wireless comminications over short ranges, replicating the use of USB. It can reach speeds of up to 480 mbit/sec with distances up to 3 meters, and up to 110 mbit/sec over ten meters, and they include USB->WUSB bridges to connect pre-existing USB devices wirelessly.

USB tends to serve the same tasks that Bluetooth does (such as data communication with small devices, and collecting input from devices such as keyboards and mice), and with a little tweaking (such as provideing additional standardized task profiles to cover what Bluetooth has and USB doesn’t), WUSB can completely replace Bluetooth… except for the fact that Bluetooth is already widely available, and few devices plan on supporting Wireless USB.

I can’t help see this as another Firewire vs USB war: one is better than the other, yet the worse performing one proliferates because it is cheaper to manufacture, and I see Bluetooth as already having won this one.

That said, I’m actually interested in WUSB as a cheaper replacement of Canon’s WiFi module for their DSLR camera line… all the module does is allow you to upload files to a FTP server on your network, and it doesn’t allow you to interact^* with the camera like you can with Canon’s special software, which communicates over USB.

_{* Yes, this does include dumping photos directly to your computer, just like the WiFi module can. It can also allow you to set things that you can access through the interface (such as ISO, shutter time, white balance, autofocus settings) and it can also take a picture.}

I’ve noticed one thing on the Internet, that stands out above almost all others: most people on the Internet have no clue what they are talking about. Case in point, a lot of ricers and gamerz like to say that DDR is lower latency than DDR2 because DDR2 takes more cycles to do things; except they forget one important thing: cycles are not a measurement of time, they are a measurement of iterations.

That said, there is only one case where DDR actually manages to be lower latency than DDR2 (and this doesn’t mean it has higher performance, or effects benchmarks in any measurable way in favor of DDR), and that is with DDR400 memory vs. DDR2-400 memory: latency is theoretically lower, but you pay a penalty for giving up DDR2’s larger prefetch buffer and better power efficiency. Also, no one actually uses DDR2-400 memory, only 667 and 800. DD2-800 compared to DDR400, latency ends up being similar in impact, and the actual performance is at least twice as much as DDR400, probably even more.

Another thing people say is that DDR2 is slower because it takes more cycles to do things. Yet another thought that hasn’t been fully thought out, and in a similar manner to the whole latency problem (infact, they are directly related; faster timings usually decrease latency across the same memory archetecture). As I said earlier, cycles do not measure time; however, cycles combined with cycles per unit of time measure time. DDR2 in most, if not all, situtations simply performs better.

So, to anyone out there that says that DDR2 is a step backwards: You’re an idiot.