a very cool computer and web bloat

[miriam_e]

I was just reading about a cool computer, the new OpenRISC System-on-Chip FPGA development board that uses an Altera FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array).

An FPGA is a chip that contains vast numbers of logic switches (gates) that can be configured by special instructions so that it can be internally "wired up" to become almost anything you want, within the limits of the chip. Many people have begun doing amazing things like getting FPGAs to become special high-speed processors (as in the board above), or emulating whole computers (Jeri Ellsworth built an entire Commodore64 inside an FPGA).

Anyway, this OpenRISC computer, about the size of a playing card, looked very interesting to me, but being made in Sweden the price is given in Euros as €149, and I had no idea how that converted to Australian dollars, so I went to the currency converter site I usually check price conversions at: http://www.oanda.com/currency/converter/

After about half an hour the page finally loaded. The damn page contains about 2 megabytes of data. To put this in perspective, that is equivalent to all the combined text in the first 3 Harry Potter books plus half of the 4th book! That's insane! It is a case of incredibly sloppy programming. It never used to be this bad. Looks like I'll have to find a more accessible currency conversion site.

The speed of my net connection is terrible at the moment. Since my satellite modem was killed a while back by a sudden lightning storm, I've been using dial-up, and of course Telstra refuse to fix the land-lines out here, so the fastest speeds I can get are about 2kbytes per second, but usually much less, around 1kbytes per second. If you'd been wondering why I hardly update my blog these days, that's one of the reasons.

It is a good thing that I have so much data on my computers that I hardly need to venture out onto the net these days.

Comments

[miriam_e]

Thank you. I'm very grateful. I didn't know Google does currency conversions until you and my nephew informed me. I'm delighted to find that out.

Yep, 14.4kbits per second works out to be 1.4kbytes per second. There are 8 bits in a byte, but in serial communications there is extra overhead so it is a useful rough shorthand to simply move the decimal point in converting between bits and bytes. The fastest dial-up speed is 56kbits per second (about 5.6kbytes). The next highest speed is 33.6kbits (about 3.3kbytes). The next highest is 28.8kbits (about 2.8kbytes). Lastly is 14.4kbits (about 1.4kbytes). On very rare occasions my dialup gets up to 3kbytes, but never stays there for long. Mostly it stays between 1 and 2kbytes per second. In the "old" days this was a wonderful speed, but when having to deal with today's pernicious bloat it is terrible.