The Trans-Pacific Express Submarine Cable Consortium (TPE) announced yesterday that their new fibre-optic cable is in production. The cable is 18 000 kilometre long! With the addition of NTT Communications earlier this year, the TPE cable system will add a submarine cable link to Japan giving the TPE cable system six landing sites – one in Japan, two in mainland China, and one each in Taiwan, South Korea and the United States.

Current capacity is around 3.2 TB/s or 60 times the current capacity between USA and China (equals approximately 77,5 million concurrent phone calls).

When Fase II completes (date not set) the capacity will reach 6TB/s and will include another landing site in Japan.

Pretty amazing, but as a lot of SPAM and other things originate from some of these countries I’m somewhat concerned about what’s going to happen next… I guess we will find out soon?!

Source: Scientificblogging.com

What to do if something goes wrong…

…hope Todd doesn’t get to many calls.

I’ve never figured out how they do this, and probably won’t. But one thing is for sure – it’s very entertaining

Have a great weekend!

While working in 3d last year David O’Reilley discovered this optical illusion.

A large grid seen rotating at a certain speed will appear to group itself into smaller grids, spinning independently.

Source: David O’Reilley

Sounds a bit strange I know, but if you really want to you can! Since the launch back in 2001 more than 10 million articles (in 253 languages) have been published. 25% of these are written in English.

The content is free and available to anyone under the GNU Free Documentation License. However, this doesn’t mean you can start running your own Wikipedia but you may download and use the information for your own personal/private use.

From time to time the complete database is dumped as static HTML files, the last available release was “dumped” in June earlier this year. You will need something like 7-zip to unpack the files which is available from this location. The English version, a massive 14GB download is found here (at the bottom).

You might ask yourself WHY on earth you would want to download it?! Well, to be honest I really don’t know. But in case you are going somewhere without an Internet connection or similar it could possibly prove useful…