Well I have a problem: I need to specify the minimum bandwidth that an organisation is supposed to have. Since I don’t know much about networking, I came up with this simple (and apparently logical) calculation. The problem is that it’s so simple that I’m not sure if I’ve missed something.
There is is:
- An organiastion has: 100 computers
- Out of these 100 PCs, 50 are continuously accessing different pages from the Internet
- I’ve assumed that a web page is 100 KB (I know, many are much more than that but … round figures are good
)
- It’s reasonable (given that we are in Mauritius; far away from everything) that someone waits 5 seconds for such a page to download completely
- So the number of KB/s required is: 100KB / 5 seconds = 20 KB/s
- Given that 50 computers are accessing different pages off the Internet, the bandwidth required for these 50 is: 50 PCs * 20 KB/s = 1000 KB/s ~ 8.9Mbps (Megabits per second)
I’ve also made the following assumptions:
- There’s no proxy in use
- a PC is not going to access the same content twice (which means that it can’t retrieve the contents from the cache)
- No downloads
So do you think that this calculation is ok, at least as a rough calculation? Please let me know what you think
After 26 years, we have Daylight saving time back again. Why was it abolished after a one year trial back then? It will be hard for me to say exactly (I was one year old back then) but from what I gathered it was because of political reasons.
Why is it being reintroduced?
The reason put forward is: we want to save money on electricity. This seems to make sense since we will light up our houses later but unfortunately many studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time) have seen no real benefit in terms of energy savings! Anyway I suppose that we will have to wait for at least 6 months to know the real effect on the Mauritian economy.
What do I think of it?
Well, from what I gathered from Wikipedia, very few tropical countries use it! The map below (from Wikipedia) shows that:
The colour code is as follows:
- blue – country using it
- orange – countries that have abandoned it
- red – countries that have never used it
This might simply be because the changes in lighting, between summer and winter, is simply not that extreme in tropical regions. This lead me to another point: is it wise to end summer time in March? We are starting it in October after the equinox (same length day and night) but ending it after the March equinox where it might be quite dark in the morning – if the sun rises at 6 a.m. in March, it’ll mean that the sun will rise at 7 a.m. and anyone going to work or school will find it pretty dark!
Having said all this, I must admit that I however do like it simply coz I like it when it’s still bright when I get home after work!
When someone pops up with a way of challenging petrol as our primary source of energy I can’t help but have serious doubts. I don’t challenge the idea from a scientific point of view but rather from an economic one. I’ve not read much about economics but from the little I understand, a cheap source of endless energy would be impossible. Let me explain myself.
The most important thing on earth (and arguably in the whole universe) is energy! With enough energy you can do anything; you don’t have water, pump it from the ocean and desalinate it, no bananas in the North Pole, we’ll build a green house powered by a heater running night and day! The only important thing for these two is energy and once you have that you can do anything.
The term economics come from an Ancient greek word meaning “management of a household”. Management is required when resources are scarce but if energy becomes cheap and readily available, we don’t need to manage anymore; we just need to use! Imagine what this would mean; food and all sort of resources in abundance; no more poor coz anything can be manufactured at practically no cost. Can this be true? Come on, that’ll be heaven on earth, no more hardships,…. or rather a dream
Yes yes I really mean it, I do love a few things about Windows vista (it would have been too easy to do some more Vista bashing). Take a look at the specs for Vista below taken from the microsoft site:
Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate
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1-gigahertz (GHz) 32-bit (x86) processor or 1-GHz 64-bit (x64) processor |
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1 GB of system memory |
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Windows Aero-capable graphics card
Note This includes a DirectX 9-class graphics card that supports the following:
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A WDDM driver |
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Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware |
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32 bits per pixel |
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| • |
128 MB of graphics memory (minimum) |
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40-GB hard disk that has 15 GB of free hard disk space (the 15GB of free space provides room for temporary file storage during the install or upgrade.) |
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Internal or external DVD drive |
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Internet access capability |
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Audio output capability |
If you’ve paid attention to the above, you will notice that compared to previous versions of Windows, this time a decent graphics card is required (arguably it angered many users who thought that they could easily move to Vista without investing a cent) since the numerous fading effects need resources; moreover, 1 GB of RAM is required as well. Intentionally or not, Microsoft has given a big boost to the graphics industry which used to be powered only by greedy games – now we also have a greedy OS .
Given that I’m passionate about good graphics, no wonder I’ll love this. However, with Vista eating 1GB of RAM, we’ll now need a huge amount or memory to quench the thirst of Vista + the ever more realistic 3D games.
