Journal ahfoo's Journal: Wow, Cogent sounds cool. Good news when the chips are down. 2
The other day I posted whining about the lack of competitive straight ethernet backbone connectivity and somebody pointed me to Cogent. Wow! I now have great faith in the future of my homeland, the USA. This is quite important to me because I'm planning on moving back permanently for the first time in many years and I was very concerned about the lack of decently priced broadband in rural areas. Here in Taiwan I get great DSL service (256K down 64K up) for about thirty bucks a month although for an extra ten bucks I can have twice as much although so far I dont' really need it. That seems like a pretty good deal to me. I have friends in the States in major urban areas still using modems, so I was quite concerned as I'd like to move to a rural area and I had heard a lot of horror stories.
Anyhow, thanks to Slashdot, I'm feeling a lot more optomistic about the future of broadband in the States.
Chips, however, I am a major pessimist on. That's why I'm leaving Taiwan although I love Taipei and have spent many years getting my Chinese in good shape. I wish the future looked bright for chips, but the mask costs are reportedly already going way high. Apparently they're already gearing up for the 65nm process in no more than a few months. That's too scarry. The end is not near, it is imminent.
According to IBM, that's the end of the line. What I find interesting is that Taiwan claims to be heading there as quickly as possible in that EE Times link above they say 24 months they will have a fab doing 65nm. The reports I have read from IBM seem to have assumed the industry would slow down as it got closer to the final limits of CMOS. IBM seems to make it a habit of pretending to control soon-to-be important technologies and then letting them slip away just as they become truly important. If Intel is to be believed, this SOI technology is SOL. Besides, nobody I've read at either Intel or IBM was ever promising CPUs beyond 400Ghz and most of the conservative estimates say 40Ghz is our current practical limit and we're staring it down pretty hard.
As a Taiwan resident by marriage, it's truly ominous to see the industry that this country depends on so heavily heading for a brick wall at a warp speed. I mean for Christ's sake, these researchers at Intel and IBM are talking about liquid nitrogen cooling as a feasible alternative to advances in lithography. I'm afraid that does not boost my morale. Aside from the energy consumption issues, having a PC dependent on a compressor, even a reliable scroll compressor, does not sound like a reasonable idea for the consumer market.
But that's just tech stuff which for me has become, once again, more or less a hobby. There's something about Taiwan that has not much directly to do with tech, though perhaps very much indirectly, that has changed and suggests to me that it is time to leave.
That is, college students who used to go to the States in vast lucrative droves have turned into a trickle. I have very inside track access to this knowledge as it's my bread and butter. It's not that student's have stopped studying overseas. No, the difference is that students from Taiwan are now going to Mainland China for graduate studies instead of the US.
This is not something you read about in the news, but in my business it's painfully obvious and the rate at which the shift took place was astonishing. It was like a school of fish suddenly dated in a new direction in unison. Locals who are generally independence minded tend to explain it away by saying that is was because of the 9/11 attacks and the fear of hostility towards foreigners in the States, but I don't buy that. That's a cover story as far as I know because in general people in Taipei will tell you that their biggest fear of the US is that it is boring to live there. I don't think people in Taiwan act out of fear, but I'm damn sure they're nationalistic as all hell and the culture is more Chinese than China will ever be. Essentially, now that the technology of the West has apparently been drained to the last dregs reunification has begun.
My personal perspective on all this is twisted to the degree that I find it amusing and part of a much larger drama that has taken place over many thousands of years. I think the Chinese people are still failing to overcome an essential element of racism that will continue to stunt their society for centuries to come. The end of CMOS is hardly the time to turn away from the heterogenous cultural wealth of the US where innovation springs eternal despite the worst practices of the monopolistic thieves that have become so abundant there of late, but this is apparently what is happening.
It seems that we are entering the dark phase of a great cycle. During this troubled period, I put my faith in the greatness of the American way. I'm well aware that there will be an abundance of conditions to test such faith. I hope that I can add to its strengths and I'm sure I will be required to strike against its weaknesses. It's a long road ahead.
After the third world war, perhaps we should enforce a giant bussing scheme on Africa, Europe and Asia not unlike that which was used to enforce school integration in the States. Those who resented such programs the most were obviously most in need of its effects.
re:Who told you things are looking good? (Score:2)
With respect to broadband, assuming you have more than Web pr0nsurF1ng in mind, look for a city / utility district that did this:& a=22338,00.asp [theneteconomy.com]
February 4, 2002
CLECs, ILECs, and now.the 'CitiLEC'
TNE Web Exclusive
http://www.theneteconomy.com/article/0,3658,s=902
By Jonathan Blum
If you're thinking about the SF Bay Area, Alameda is rolling out their municipal fiber-to-the-curb network either now or REAL SOON NOW. The Los Angeles Water & Power District was planning the same thing, I don't know how far they got.
The door is closed to new development of this in California... our state legislature is 0wN3d, and I think this door will be closed as quickly as RBOCs and Comcast can buy up state politicians.
If you aren't thinking of the SF Bay Area, pull some keywords (CitiLEC seems good) out of the article and start looking. There's a chance you'll find this somewhere around wherever you plan to go if you're very, very lucky and persistet.
I figure that the next wave of broadband service innovation is likely to physically come from the areas with cheap, flexible broadband NOT provided by RBOCs or national cablemodem service providers and that locating for this reason is as reasonable as it was for the ancient economy company to locate next to cheap coal or energy.
If I weren't planning to go to Holland for a personal reason, I'd be thinking about Alameda, (I'm in the SF Bay Area) though my own ISP has wireless broadband a few miles from here.
Re:Who told you things are looking good? (Score:2)
As for links to the Economist, no. I don't have specific links as I got the data from second-hand print copies, but I think in May there was a Review of Global Capitalism that actually made the statement that western style capitalism was never appropriate for most of Africa or the Middle East. I agree with that notion, I was just a bit surprised to see it in the Economist. While I'm not surprised the Economist takes a pro legalization stance on drugs because that's only appropriate for a dyed-in-the-wool free market cheerleader, but seeing a reporter start dismissing capitalism as an unsuitable economic system is a bit harder to fathom from such a staunch capitalist advocacy rag.
Earlier though, I think around April there was an issue where the had the title The Sadness of Japan. Inside it went on at great length about how the only really amazing thing about Japan right now is that there aren't riots in the streets because the collapse of the banking system appears to be a matter of when and not if.
I didn't realize it was such a problem. I knew it had been bad for a long time and I was really pissed about the handling of DVD-R technology, but I had no idea that the overall economy was as bad as it apparently is.
I want to revise something I said in my earlier journal though. Locally nothing has changed, but I was sort of getting carried away with my focus on the Taiwanese situation. Everything I said was 100% correct and hasn't changed. I don't take it back, but it deserves to be put in a slightly broader context which is this:
Subsequent to my rant I learned that ETS is closing half of its computer testing centers globally. In terms of actual student volume, it's only a 15% cut but the idea that ETS would cut back at all is shocking to people like me and the people I work with. We always thought ETS could only grow and apparently there is a big shrinkage going on. This news doesn't change what I said about Taiwanese students going to mainland. That's really happening and it's amazing how suddenly the change took place. However, this ETS news means what I'm seeing here in Taiwan is not a strictly local phenomena --the whole planet is undergoing major changes in relationship to the US. Or at least to ETS. But it's true that for the here and now ETS is the gateway for foreign students into the US.
Now, I'm not trying to be overly alarmist. It's just that for me personally this is seriously bad news on top of years of backed up bad news that I was hoping was going to get better some day. I have no idea what it means for geopolitics, but for my own little world it couldn't be worse. Luckily it was already so bad this is almost laughable.
Besides, I'm pretty resiliant about failure. Sometimes I even think success is harder for me to cope with than failure which makes life pretty smooth in the big picture because no matter how high you get, you've always got to come back down sometime. Real skill is knowing how to stumble gracefully, right?
But to get back to the point, I'm not sure what this latest news from ETS means on a global scale. It could be nothing more than a minor adjustment to trim costs which is how they frame it [toefl.org] and I'm hoping that's all it is. But it could also be a sign that the world is closing up a bit. I suppose it's reasonable to assume it's a bit of both.
Having been in this business for many years I know more than a few owners of prep school franchises and the people that I've spoken with since this news hit are more or less stunned and very worried about their bottom line. Most test prep schools lease their classrooms and need volume to stay in business. Everybody thought the bottom had already dropped out and the competition had been thinned as far as it could possibly go. It seems that was not the case. The people that are left, like myself and my partner, have no reason to leave and nowhere to go. We're just left wondering what happened.
For so many years there was nothing but growth in overseas education and it seemed that it couldn't stop. It hasn't stopped, but we always assumed it was going to flow to the US. That apparently, was a mistake. It's still flowing, but our little stream is seriously drying up and we've got to deal with it.
I'm thinking I'll head back to the States and try and weather the storm in school to get another degree although I already have an MA. My wife wants me to go to law school but I think she's a much better candidate. I can come back to Taiwan anytime since I'm married I have an open visa to come and go as I please. For the next few years it doesn't look happening at all. Nanotech might prove me wrong, but I'm not going to hold my breath. I'd rather go hit the books for awhile and do something totally not financially dependent on software or chips although like so many others on Slashdot that's really where my heart's at. I'll still be at it for fun, but chasing paid programming looks ugly in the future. Unfortunately, I tend to concentrate a lot better when there's money involved.