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Mass Storage Leaves Microchips in the Dust
Roland Piquepaille writes "This article from Wired Magazine looks at storage with a new angle. 'Right now I am sitting in front of a whirring 60-gigabyte hard disk that cost less than $100. Do the math: If back then 10 megabytes cost $1,000, then 60 gigabytes would have cost x, where x = $6,000,000 and "back then" = 18 years ago. I'm sitting in front of $6,000,000 worth of mass storage, measured at mid-1980s prices. We have Moore's law for microprocessors. But who's coined a law for hard disks? In mass storage we have seen a 60,000-fold fall in price -- more than a dozen times the force of Moore's law.' DeLong also looks at a non-distant future when a $100 mass storage device will hold a full terabyte. He also thinks that with disk space becoming cheaper and cheaper, we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos. This is in fact the goal of the Gordon's Bell project, MyLifeBits. You can learn more about the MyLifeBits project by reading this NewsFactor Network article. Check this column for more details."
Magnetic storage has gotten cheaper?
You don't say.
But recordable CD drives are still tens of thousands of dollars, right?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
No only the price, the size of the drives. 18 years ago a 40 Mb HD has the size of a toaster...
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
" 'Right now I am sitting in front of a whirring 60-gigabyte hard disk that cost less than $100. Do the math: If back then 10 megabytes cost $1,000, then 60 gigabytes would have cost x, where x = $6,000,000 and "back then" = 18 years ago. I'm sitting in front of $6,000,000 worth of mass storage, measured at mid-1980s prices. We have Moore's law for microprocessors. But who's coined a law for hard disks? In mass storage we have seen a 60,000-fold fall in price --"
You mean that all this time we could have had much faster computers just by using magnetic media?
"Derp de derp."
microprocessors have gotten faster and faster. hard disks have not.
we have jon's law.
as in the toilet.
note to harddrive manufacturers: i'm not impressed. i'm still waiting on my data to "move around".
That's nothing! You can get 120 gigs for $95!
This is just common knoledge. And if he paid 100$ for a 60gig drive, he got screwed! Thats why there cheap, cause dumbasses pay too much for drive, and the manufacs pass the savings on to ME.
Too bad the speed of the disk hasn't increased as quickly...
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
In general the problem is that while capacities have lept up, the rate at which we can read/write to those drives has not kept pace. It's not so bad for the iPod in particular, but at some point it's going to be a real problem for desktops and laptops, assuming our appetite for capacity grows as the capacity does.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
I don't want to see Gordon Bell's "lifebits"
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
Moore's law says nothing about price though. If you are going to compare hard disks to processors in the same general terms using Moore's law, shouldn't you compare increase in storage size to increase in processing power?
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
Bloat will kill the increase in storage available - one way or the other. It'll be a 3gig version of word, or windows movie maker that will only save in raw, non-compressed video. Anything to drive the market. We've seen it with processor speeds, if HD prices keep dropping I'm sure well see it with storage as well.
Come on, is XP is SO far ahead of NT 4 that it requires 4x the ram? Of course not. But what MS reccomends, PC manufacturers will have to yield to.
This really helps to put into perspective the ass-whipping I got when I installed Wing Commander 2 on my Dad's new hard drive.
"THAT 800 MB HARD DRIVE COST ME 500 DOLLARS, AND THAT GAME TAKES 72 MB?!!!"
"But dad, in 15 years that will only be 25 cents of space!"
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
A lot of the developments that have made disks so high capacity came from spintronics research. Here is a link to an article on Scientific American about how it works: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007A73 5-759A-1CDD-B4A8809EC588EEDF
So DeLong wants a computer term/law named after him. Whee. Next story?
-2, offtopic/in a pissy mood.
moox. for a new generation.
He's predicting only a tearbyte for a $100 in 2012. Right now desktop drives are about a dollar a GB. So, he's predicting about a 10 fold increase in the next 9 YEARS!!! What have we seen in the last 9 years, about 100 fold increase?
He also thinks that with disk space becoming cheaper and cheaper, we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos.
But who would want to? I recently formatted my drive, but first backed up some data. My origional source code, email contacts, and a fistful of pic easily fit on a CD. (mp3s & porn live on another hard drive obviously) Right now, we can arcive quite a bit with still photos, and video is pretty easy as well. Sure it's not quite as accessible as something on the old hard drive, but if it was, I wouldn't look at those things much more. In short, I don't think I'm unique in saying sure there's a way, there's just not the will.
but wait until the RIAA starts charging in advance for piracy. They can do $15 for an album, or charge $15000 per song ammounting to $1,485,000 for a single recordable disc (99 possible tracks).
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
18 years ago? When was this written?
2003 - 18 = 1985.
I bought a 20 MB MFM hard disk in 1985 for $400.
If that rate continues, some day hard drives will become so large that processesors will not have the power to process it all....
I will know that day has arrived when the length of my winamp playlist rolls over into negative integers. :)
Muerte
I have to admit that the notion that it is now techincally possible to mpeg-1 every moment of one's existence is a staggering one.
If you accept that Blogs satisfy some previously underestimated human desire for self-expression, think of what might happen if one could clip a web cam to one's collar, wear a storage device on one's waist and synch that with an online VidLog every night like a Palm Pilot?
I am going out back to sit among the dandelions.
The best way to do is to be.
An interesting feature of OpenNap is that it tells you exactly how many MB of files are out there for your downloading pleasure. I used to be blasted away at the large number. Sometimes I could get it up to 1 or 2 pedabytes.
A terabyte is 1000 gigs. You can get a terabyte of storage today for $1000 dollars. One dollar per gig. It's insane. Soon it will be a dollar a terabyte. We wont need things like divx anymore. We'll be looking for ways to increase the quality of our recording devices so that the video, image and audio files will take up more space. Nothing else really requires a large amount of storage.
The one limited is network speed. Sure, if I've got enough room for a collection of 2 gigabyte raw avi movies, that's great. But if I can't get enough speed to download them quickly it will suck.
Storage aint worth crap if you dont' got enough stuff to fill it.
Remember the days when DOS games would ask questions like this
minimum install (if you're low on space)- 50MB
standard install (reccommended)- 100MB
big install (runs faster)- 250MB
CRAZY INSTALL (no cd required!) - 500MB!!!
those were the days...
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
At least until you start getting sonic booms from the imperfections in the media.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Yeah exactly. There is no moore's law... just a regular increase which has maintained at a steadyly increasing rate.
There is no 'law'...
looked at another way, hard drive capacities have just been doubling faster than processor speeds.
If 10MB back then cost $1k then 1MB cost $100, so we just do the 60G/1M and get a 60,000 time increase in storage capacity for the same price. Doubling times would then be log(2)60k = 15.9 or so, or about once every 1.1 years over 18 years. Contrast this with moore's law which states that processor speeds double every 1.5 years.
The downside is that access times have tracked closer to a linear function.
...something something... what I wouldn't give for an archive of a Cowboy Neal webcam ...seomthing something...
Yeah! Technology really is making our lives better!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Actually, I started a project to do just this for myself about 7 years ago. I'm 28 now and it's taken me until NOW to catch up (and I'm only about 80-85% caught up.... still have plenty of baby pictures to scan). I just spent last weekend sifting through old documents about yours truly that my parents has stored away. I now have a ton of interesting data about myself on tap, including every report card I had until college. :)
The original motivation for this project for me was the realization that my generation may never have to face death and I was terrified at the prospect of being 1000 years old and having no recollection of my life as of today. So I decided to digitally augment my memory. And it's VERY effective. Seeing scans of ticket stubs of concerts I had completely forgotten brought back all those memories in a flash. I'd hate to image what would happen if I just forgot permamently and never had a 'key' to unlock it.
Since starting the project the original motivation has been eclipsed by an even more compelling one: Going through all these documents made me realize that I've lived an amazingly full and rich life and I'm only 28. I was overwhelemed with awe and gratitude at how huge and wonderous my relatively normal life really is and how tragic it is that I've forgotten that. In other words, it was a great way to refresh the brightness of all the colors in my memory, which left me feeling uplifted and more optimistic about the future than ever.
(Still, every once in a while I imagine myself a few centuries from now, bored out of my mind on an multi-year interstellar trip to somewhere and enjoying a good browse through 'The Story Of Me')
From the given numbers, it looks like storage capacity doubles every 14 months instead of the 18 it takes for chips.
5 .872
from $6000000 to $100 requires about 16 doubling periods:
100*2^x=6000000
2^x=60000
xln2=ln(60000)
x=1
~16 doubling periods in 18 years is about 14 months per period. Of course, a small change with exponential growth causes major changes as time goes by, but a four month shorter doubling period doesn't seem very significant.
It would be much better if we could combine this growth in the industry, into producing CF cards that can hold 2+ GB, and give us mass storage on small microchips.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
In a few years time, when storage is cheap enough, I'm going to have a camera permanently strapped to my head (think better minaturisation + wireless tech) recording my life full-time. At moments of boredom I'll be able to relive any part of my life.
How much storage? Say, 500Mb/1hour (better compression as well, hopefully) * 24 * 365 ~= 4.4Tb/year. Doesn't seem that far away...
The common rule of thumb is that storage capacity (density) increases at approximately 60% a year. There was an exeception around a few years ago when it was increasing by around 100% a year but experts feel that we are settling back at 60% again.
So what, they're getting bigger. What I would like to see, actually, is a stagnation on the size of the drives, if only for 5-10 years.
I think this would force software makers to write tighter code, or at least less bulky code, and it would force innovation in storage formats and such.
That would be interesting to me at least.
What's that, Donkey Breath?! Hee HAW
you should be modded up as a god
"Have you noticed, hard drives are just so huge now! Oh my gosh, pretty soon we are all going to archive our entire lives! Whoa, I am a visionary!"
sic transit gloria mundi
hard drives don't get much faster. currently, it is the hard drive that is the bottleneck in most systems. ram is cheap and fast, same for processors, but it's that archaeic mechanical monstrosity that is causing most of the noise in my computer (other than the fan) and is by far the slower than anything else in my computer. even scsi or this new serial stuff is just a faster interface to the same contraption.
"The absurd is clear reasoning recognizing its limits"
-Albert Camus
Where is he getting this $100/MB number from? In
the mid '80s the cost was more like $10/MB.
This brings his math right into accord with Moore.
Don't tell me let me guess, Neo brings her back to life. Am I right? Am I?
Record everything. Once your life is half over you need to cue up the recording and start watching what happened in the first half of your life. Then when that is over you drop dead.
I hate you! so much for going in without knowing whats coming... :/
Who, wha....prices? Moores Law? Moores Law and Prices? I'm confused.
He also thinks that with disk space becoming cheaper and cheaper, we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos.
Yeah, but how do you back yourself up? Tho, this might make a good argument for the "what if you get hit by a truck" thing. But backup mediums are falling so far behind in speed and volume, they're becoming only marginally useful.
Now digital me has to worry about stupid questions like "what if you get hit by a magnet".
No, XP doesnt require 4x the ram. MS recommends it, but it surely doesnt require it if you ONLY want it to run as well as NT4 did. You'll need it if you want to use some of the newer features and eye candy.
Keep NT 4, or your linux install on a 3 gig hard drive with your pentium 166 and 16 megs of ram. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Me, I like having big DVD sized games that run from the hard disc, or being able to stream a few hours of TV-quality video. I like having two 120 gig drives in RAID 0 and never having to worry about running out of space.
It's not just about technology driving the market. It's about the market driving the technology.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The challenge is no longer whether you can store everything, it is whether you'll be able to find it later when you need it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Nah, not really. There is only so big an app can get in terms of code, and it's way, way less than a small HD can do. For consumers, who are using more than 25% or so for their drive, it's likely digital media that's doing it. MP3 files, and especially video. Textures and videos in games. Tutorial files for media apps. That kind of stuff.
.app, and you'll likely find less than 25% of the total file is being used for application code. The rest is multilingual help, graphics, sounds, etcetera.
Crack open your average 20 MB MacOS X
My video compression blog
Until you have to defrag the bugger...
Whirring is the key word. Hard disks have gotten bigger. But they haven't gotten faster. They haven't gotten quieter.
... if you think carefully (or even casually) about the claim.
The guy is confused (or intentionally spinning) about storage capacity and price. I believe Moore's Law says only about the processing speed. In that case, we replace processing speed with disk capacity, and we extrapolate from the data he gave (which is prolly questionable):
10MB * 2^(18yr / 1.5yr) = 40960MB ~ 40GB
So the disk capacity is not far from Moore's Law (which is not really a law, just an educated guess with observation) prediction.
You can derive all kinds of conclusion when you compare an apple to a chair. It doesn't mean that you cannot compare an apple to a chair, it is how do you validate that conclusion. E.g., if we want to see the relative size of apple v chair, sure, the comparision is valid. But if we want to compare the taste, or the color, well, we need a little more qualification, don't you think?
Sensationalization--works on enough people to be very effective tool in mind control.
Cheers,
e.
20 Year Price List for the Cost of 1 TeraByte of Magnetic Disk Storage
In Dec. 1995 I got a 1 gig drive for $500. Someone else posted that they can get a 120 gig drive for 80 cents a gigabyte. That's 625 times better in 7.5 years. That means roughly at the end of the year 2010, $100 will buy you about 7.8 million gigabytes.
That doesn't seem quite right, and I suspect that the recent market forces driving prices down might be skewing the results.
Maybe we should be looking at the size of the largest hard drive available instead of the price.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
1 hour of divx = 500MB.
500*24=12Gb a day;
7*12=72Gb a week;
500*365=1.825 Tb a year
1.825*75 = 136.85 Tb in a lifetime.
136.85 = 800 Zetabytes.
So, we could record the lifetimes of everyone on earth in DivX format and it STILL wouldn't take up a yottabyte! Not to mention not everybody lives for the same duration so it would be even less!
If prices fell by 60000 times over 18 years, then we're looking for the solution of the equation: x^18 = 60000, which implies x = 1.84 years = about 22 months. So prices fall in half every 22 months (assuming it's exponential). Moore's law says transistor density doubles every 18 months. It's not that much different, although it does make a huge difference over time.
That we as a socity seem to have lost our ability to tell if something is good or worth saving. Right now we should be asking ourselves the question, should we save people's life to a hard drive? Who would use this information, how would this information be used. Answers to this question can be fun theroetical problems, but what world will we live in where we can go back and replay a conversation we had when we were 14 years old when we are 50. It's things like this which make me ask, when is this insane rat race going to end? Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
the disk storage has reduced cost faster than moore's law in recent times. however, the overall rate is not significantly higher than microchips. in mid 80's, 8 kbytes ram used to cost $50. today, you can get 512 MB for the same price. that is 64K tims price reduction which is same as for hard drive. also, the ram price reduced faster than harddrive from 1956 (hard drive introduction year) till mid-80s. in 1956, 5 Meg hard drives were available. in mid-80s, this figure barely jumped to couple of gigs. that is about several hundred times. on the other hand, in 1956, a single byte RAM required a whole circuit board and in 1985, Toshiba had announced Mega bit ram chips. so overall, microchips have made faster progress than harddrives.
No, XP doesnt require 4x the ram. MS recommends it, but it surely doesnt require it if you ONLY want it to run as well as NT4 did. You'll need it if you want to use some of the newer features and eye candy.
Keep NT 4, or your linux install on a 3 gig hard drive with your pentium 166 and 16 megs of ram. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Me, I like having big DVD sized games that run from the hard disc, or being able to stream a few hours of TV-quality video. I like having two 120 gig drives in RAID 0 and never having to worry about running out of space.
It's not just about technology driving the market. It's about the market driving the technology.
"Whirring is the key word. Hard disks have gotten bigger. But they haven't gotten faster. They haven't gotten quieter. "
Techhnically they have. 10,000 RPM hard drives haven't been around forever. They first showed up in 1996.
"Derp de derp."
Haven't we already?
Say the old Gold Box D&D games (1 floppy, maybe 2) compared to Baldur's gate (4+ years old, 4 cds) for example...
It will be a 3gig version of IIS, .Net, or whatever. The extra 2.9gigs are bundled data so you can buffer overrun yourself.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Ok, I must be tired. We're trying to solve: 0.5^x=1/60000 implies x = 15.87 doubling periods. Spread this over 18 years, 18/15.87 = 1.13 years per doubling (actually, halving). So prices drop in half every 13 months, not every 22 months. Urgh..
Am I live, or am I Memorex?
They have 15k RPM drives as well, and probably faster. The point was that they haven't gotten faster in proportion to the increase in size.
You hear people refer to the assumption that electronics will keep getting cheaper and and cheaper as "Moore's Law". Nit-pickers hate this, insisting that "Moore's Law" only refers to the number of transistors on a chip. But even casting Moore's predictions as a "Law" goes beyond what Moore actually said. So it makes just as much sense (or just as little) to speak of the whole economic trend as "Moore's Law". After all, the fact that transitor logic keeps getting cheaper and cheaper isn't obvious to most people. The resulting collapse in the cost of computing and electronics is.
Creating bigger hard disks does nothing to solve the problem of reading data from existing storage devices. As time goes on our society stores more and more information without any real plan on how to ensure that the information we're collecting will be accessible in the future. Every year we lose more and more precious data to the deterioration of media as well as the loss of the equipment to read the remaining media.
While hard disk sizes have grown much faster than CPU speeds, I don't think hard disk access times/bandwidth have grown as fast. Perhaps it's a property of the universe, that it's easier to shrink technology in space (making things smaller) than in time (making things quicker)? Maybe, maybe not (femtosecond lasers, etc.)...
Whirring is the key word. Hard disks have gotten bigger .... They haven't gotten quieter.
You haven't used a Seagate Barracuda IV have you?
Trust me, they have got a lot quieter than the 80s.
No, XP doesnt require 4x the ram. MS recommends it, but it surely doesnt require it if you ONLY want it to run as well as NT4 did. You'll need it if you want to use some of the newer features and eye candy.
Keep NT 4, or your linux install on a 3 gig hard drive with your pentium 166 and 16 megs of ram. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Me, I like having big DVD sized games that run from the hard disc, or being able to stream a few hours of TV-quality video. I like having two 120 gig drives in RAID 0 and never having to worry about running out of space.
It's not just about technology driving the market. It's about the market driving the technology.
I hacked up a IBM 10MB hard drive that was made in the 1970s I think. It was about 3ft x 2ft x 2ft if my memories from age 8 are correct.
Moore's law is largely due to manufacturing improvements in which the feature size of transistors keeps becoming smaller, such that you can get (approximately) twice as many transistors in the same amount of space. (yes, yes, I know, die sizes keep growing, but not nearly at the pace at which transistors shrink.) The tricky part here is that this shrinking has generally been coupled with ramping up frequency. Increasing the capacity of a disk has no such benefit due to the fact that mechanical parts (disk heads, spinning platters) are the overwhelming determining factors for performance. Hence, the gap between processor performance and disk performance is being exacerbated - we can only make a disk spin & heads move so fast.
It's an interesting comparitive trend to notice (between processor performance growth & disk capacity to see the effect on the overall system), but you can't really compare the way disks have improved with the way microprocessors have.
the good, the bad, and the ugly.
This includes this post right here right now.
snap!
What's the point of documenting every single little piece of your life? Most peoples lives are boring.
Just look at all the bloggers. Do they think anybody actually read what they write? Or that anybody even care at all? Do anybody really care what I have to say in this post?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
I have started archiving much of my life. I write a long (1000+ words) journal for every day of my life, and I keep all my pictures from the camera I take around with me on my website. It also has rants, poems, and quotes from people in my life. Archiving my life is a lot of fun, I dedicate much time to it. You can see it at www.theanticrust.com
No, XP doesnt require 4x the ram. MS recommends it, but it surely doesnt require it if you ONLY want it to run as well as NT4 did. You'll need it if you want to use some of the newer features and eye candy.
Keep NT 4, or your linux install on a 3 gig hard drive with your pentium 166 and 16 megs of ram. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Me, I like having big DVD sized games that run from the hard disc, or being able to stream a few hours of TV-quality video. I like having two 120 gig drives in RAID 0 and never having to worry about running out of space.
It's not just about technology driving the market. It's about the market driving the technology.
A dozen times what processors have increased!!!! WOW!!!! Holy crap are hard drives ever fast!!!
Oh wait, Moore's Law (which has nothing to do with hard drives, but I'll bite) says that things DOUBLE in a certain period of time. Hmm, a dozen times is less than 2^4. Even using the old standard of 18 months (for a while there it was 12), that's less than 4 doublings. 4x18 months = 6 years.
So, let's see. These numbers go back about 20 years, and the difference is less than 6. 6/20 = 30%. Wow, hard drives have increased in capacity 30% faster than CPUs have in speed. Whoopdee friggin do.
But I guess that sounds a lot less sensationalist than A DOZEN TIMES!!!
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
he's just trying to make people pissed off
When I had my first "chance" (1978 or 1979) to buy a hard disk, it was for a TRS-80 level 2. It was 1MB, and cost $10,000 ($10000/mb)
Today, I can buy (yes, I know you can get it cheaper, whoever you are, this was the sweet spot per www.pricewatch.com as of this writing) a 120GB for $95 ($0.7916/GB or 0.0773197916 cents/MB).
That's 129347.36842105263157894736842105 times cheaper (according to MS Calc, and if I didn't slip a digit) in 25 years.......
30 years ago Century Data/Diablo 5Mb "pizza oven" drives cost about $5000 each. This equates to approximately $1K per megabyte.
40 years ago IBM top-loader 10Mb drives were in the $30000 range (IFIRC). This equates to approximately $3K per megabyte.
As an exercise, the student can compute doubling rate and/and or the cost of current hard drives at those price points.
Reallly?! Geeeeeeeeeee that's a clever observation, you PHALLUS. you stupid idiot! i hate you! GO die you l0z3r
That's the trend I see taking off. It's already here with mp3s. Having already digitized my entire cd library, I can hardly wait until storage space catches up with the size of DVDs ... when I can have an entire video library on the computer. Take a loot at MAME ... you can have everything that used to be in an arcade on your computer. An entire freaking arcade! I can hardly wait for the day when I can have several thousand DVD quality movies on a hard drive streaming to a TV .... yeah...
Except that processors don't just give up the ship randomly(well, except in VERY rare circumstanecs)- drives do it all the time; it's almost expected. I don't give a crap about another 20GB or $20 off, I want a hard drive that won't turn itself into a paperweight after a year or two. If I'm going to own the drive for 5 years, what's another $20?
SMART was an improvement, but most OS's(linux included) don't even recognize SMART info out of the box. Even if you've got the SMART utilities installed and the kernel modules etc, /var/log/messages is so noisy, I mostly ignore it- same for Win2k boxes, Event Manager is full of TONS of crap(thank god it has filtering, but still...) If SMART were to be useful, the HD would beep at you, or blink its LED, or the OS would annoy you with popup messages so you knew, "oh shit, I gotta back up my stuff to somewhere else, NOW!"
I had an ancient 4GB Digital drive I got second-hand, in the early 90's; it was already several years old when I got my hands on it, so it was probably pre-90's. It weighed a ton, took up the full space of a 3.5" drive bay, and even had its own little suspension system. I abused that thing to hell and back, carrying it in bookbags, cooking it when the fan on the external case died...the whole nine yards. I think I low-level formatted it a dozen times(something you're not supposed to do often on SCSI drives, supposedly). It only finally gave up the ship around '99, when it spent a couple months cooking itself to death hooked up "temporarily" to a machine I forgot about.
Meanwhile, I've lost two quantum drives(one laptop, one Ultra2 3.5") and my athlon's Maxtor drive is making funny noises every once in a while. None of them were more than 2, 3 years old TOPS. WTF? The excuse seems to be that consumers don't need the reliability corporate users 'demand'.
Home users users have, at the very least, equal needs as business users, because while businesses need to keep going 24x7, they often have backups, clusters, RAID units, etc. Most home users don't have any of their data backed up, RAID is practically unheard of among the jane-and-bob computer users, and of course no clustering.
Please help metamoderate.
Too bad Communication Speeds for Networking and more importantly, Internetworking, haven't moved along any where near that speed. In my years of computing I've only seen the progression from 2400bps modems to 56k modems, and more recently to DSL and Cable.
Those speeds pale in comparison to the headway made in disk storage and CPU's.
"The point was that they haven't gotten faster in proportion to the increase in size. "
Ah I see, that's true.
Not that surprising, though. The mechanical arm inside of the drive has its limitations. I wonder what it'd take to replace it with a magnetic field sorta like what TV's use to fire energy at the phosphors on the tube. I wonder if a disc (maybe optical disc?) could be read that way. Seems like you could dramatically increase it's read speed that way.
Blah I'm sure there's a serious issue that I'm not thinking about. Oh well.
"Derp de derp."
In general the problem is that while capacities have lept up, the rate at which we can read/write to those drives has not kept pace. It's not so bad for the iPod in particular, but at some point it's going to be a real problem for desktops and laptops, assuming our appetite for capacity grows as the capacity does.
I've not seen any indication that we are using anywhere near the hard disk speed. Movies and music have typically gotten less bandwidth-intensive with better compression, not more. It is more likely that we will exceed our output devices (screen, speakers) capacity and not need more. Unless we can manage to make VR simulation gear commonplace, I don't see how we'll need more than 1920x1080x24fps w/7.1 sound, which we can do just fine already from todays hard drives.
The truth is that apart from servers trying to serve lots of requests that in total push their transfer capacity (using stuff like RAID to increase it etc.), hard drives haven't really pushed for speed at all. It's mostly a side effect from the data being packed more densely, that the read head covers more data at the same speed.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
is that necessary? really?
I always thought Moores law was something to do with the value of his stock options doubling every 18 months?
There are physical limits sure, and yes as I'm sure someone is going to point out, they have gotten faster, but nowhere near the same rates.
While processors and storage space have all grown at significant rates, storage transfer has increased incredibly slow. I also remember reading an article not so long ago that the limits on spinning a hard drive any faster than it currently is (in research not in your desktop) is that spinning faster will cause itty bitty sonic booms which of course won't treat the hardware so nicely.
And you raise the issue of optical drives... there is some nice research (an old prof of mine is working on) where they store databases in crystals, 1 cm^3, such that a pulse of light is sent through it and all the information (terabytes) are read instantly. However, the optical->electronic transfer still takes significant time.
Course he also mentioned if someone bumps the desk holding the crystal it takes days to realign the laser.
After all, we all pay for those Windows licenses that may or may NOT be used on every desktop PC sold, regardless of whether it's running Linux or not, right?
Ever try and run NT4 on a 300 mhz system with ~only~ 64M ram? Runs pretty damn well.
Then add all the SP's and IE6, IT...SLOWS...TO...A...CRAWL...
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
I don't think that's what he's talking about at all. First of all XP doesn't run as well as NT 4 did, xp starts faster, runs much much slower. This is what programmers fondly refer to as the bloat effect, it's where you see excel hold a hidden flight simulator. It's where you look at code and see redudent loops and time delays in what should be a time critical application. It's where you see developers who use as many prewritten libraries as possible because they are too lazy to spend 5 minutes writing the few functions they need.
A library that saves you 3hrs on a project that takes a year is not good. A library that saves you 3 days on the same project... not good. a week, still not good. A month... now we are starting to consider using the existing library.
Libraries chosen for significant increases in portability and compatibility get higher priority but follow a similar scale.
If it makes your program more efficient and no less portable or compatible, you absolutely should be re-inventing the wheel no matter what a thousand programmer who are churning out programs that have executables that measure in mb without counting graphics and sound (data, not code, code always counts).
Basically if programmers still gave a damn like they did when writting code for C64's we wouldn't have alot of these issues. Nowdays they would rather churn out crap so long as it's better than some of the other crap they've seen.
Do the world a favor, spend more time writting less code, spend the time to make it fast and efficient, help build a solid foundation for the future... you never know what your code will be used in. This is what I do... I have my own custom libaries that I've already tuned and in many cases reinvented the wheel for... guess what, I generally don't have to reinvent the wheel twice.
Whirring is the key word. Hard disks have gotten bigger. But they haven't gotten faster. They haven't gotten quieter.
But they have gotten warmer. My computer is starting to take over the job of my heater in the winter.
Jason
ProfQuotes
You can find one of the more definitive papers here.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'm going completely from memory at the moment, but some of my figures may be out...
... full install was around 70MB (about 7% of HDD space)
...
/me prepares to be proven wrong, but it was an interesting flow of thought to me anyway :)
back in 1995, I bought a 1GB HDD for about AU$600
which is around the same price of a 250GB HDD now...
now, take windows 95
Duke Nukem 3D full install was about 50MB (about 5% of HDD space)
the modern day equivalents would be an O/S filling 17.5GB & modern games filling 12.5GB
it seems to me that hard drives have been far outstripping bloat for quite a few years now, surely it has to slow down soon?
This is surely the case, but is it really "precious" if nobody cared enough to make sure it was archieved properly?
.doc etc. ;-P
You can look at this from the other side - data gets filtered. The good and really important stuff (e.g. Shakespeare) will be saved because everyone knows about it and cares, the mediocre and bad stuff gets sorted out if nobody cares about it. That is a kind of democratic process, compareable to modding slashdot post up or down based on content.
Of course there will always be some stuff that was worth saving that gets lost, but processes of these magnitude tend to be "messy". It is kind of self-regulatory, whatever is important enough will be saved because it is, and nearly everything important lost will be thought of by somebody else if you give it enough time.
There is only so much information that can effectively be used by humankind, so there needs to be a process that sorts out the stuff that should be save. And as humankinds capability to manage and use information increase, so will its capability of storing it long term.
But of course it is still true that you need to put work and resources into the process so that it works efficient enough for science and art and literature to "improve" at a reasonable rate.
And here is on for the microsoft zealots to think about: the data that will be hardest to keep for a long time is the one stored in undocumented, proprietary closed-source formats like
Then again, who cares about _your_ documents
thanks for reading this,
Nils
-- Having problems sending big files over the net? Try out Efisto (http://efisto.org)
First computer I ever worked on that had a HDD was a Data General Nova 800. Drives then cost @$2000, and held 2.5 MEGA bytes on a thing the diameter of a super-duper extra-large pizza in a drive that required 4U space in a 19" rack. Given my life expectancy and the present rate of growth, I expect I'll see multi-exabyte drives. Amazing, but I nevertheless hope to be bitching about lack of capacity on my deathbed.
I agree with your main point. I am a bit suspicious of your alleged 4GB drive from the "early 90's" though. I don't believe 4GB drives were even avaliable until the mid-90's. An interesting chart (that only applies to IBM drives) may be found here.
Do not read this sig.
I love the idea of taking my $1500.00 computer investment back to the future and sell it for millions. Face it, the hard drive would be useless without today's controllers. How much would the entire computer go for: P4 2.0 GHz, 1GB RAM, 75GB ATA100 Hard Drive, 128MB Video, 52x24x52 CD-RW back then? But who would buy it for millions? Cray! DOD? Sorry, but spare parts are going to cost you extra pal!
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
"we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos."
Isn't that called your brain?
I don't know about you, but I can remember my fondest life experiences.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
I pointed that out a while back. Furthermore, the industry has shown signs that they can push it to 9 when they want to.
I've also pointed out that the capacity will be easily used. First you'll want to record a full time video stream. Then multiples so that you can record the lives of your family and everything that occurs in multiple locations you own. The real hit comes when you start recording it in 3D and in enough resolution that you can later zoom on anything that was around you at any point in time during the day, whether or not you were looking in that direction. The high amplification 3D sound recording made using the directional sensors woven into your clothes will suck up quite a bit too.
Of course, to usefully index it, you would need to be able to recognize objects and people within that spherical 3D video stream in real time. Otherwise, the command to isolate (both visually and auditorally) and play back the conversation between the two people in red shirts talking behind your back about 10 minutes ago won't be understood.
Or at least, putting and retrieving data from hard drives has gotten faster....
Let's say you take that 12x of power over Moore's law, and instead buy 12 hard drives instead of one.
Now Raid-0 them.
Boom. Fast.
paintball
we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos.
which nobody will ever read for fear of dying out of sheer boredom.........
Trying to figure out why this is being presented as such new information; after all, it is because magnetic disk prices have so deeply, quickly and consistently plummeted that magnetic tapes on PCs are a thing of the past (as their prices have dropped less dramatically and of course there's that sequential access thing).
The Encyclopedia Britannica on 4% of one's HDD -- whatawaste!
As I understand Moore's law is about data density; it didn't directly speak to necessary cost implications of a consistently increasing # of transistors per IC. (This is to say I don't love this analogy)
Definitely disagree with this prediction:
Finally, and most important, your memory will improve.
My memory is getting steadily and by design worse for anything that I can look up; why absorb space & expend cycles on retaining data that is easily retrievable when one could more usefully be loading larger executables into that memory space so as to grasp concepts (which themselves require understanding of underlying components, at least temporarily, of course).
Those who give up their power willingly deserve none.
Apreche said, "Storage aint worth crap if you dont' got enough stuff to fill it."
And DeLong said, "...we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos."
Which leads me to ask, will we want to lead more exciting lives (parachuting, rock climbing, panty-cams...whatever flips your lid) and record these events for posterity? Future viewing will be easy because you can organize files how ever you want for easy retrieval - no searching through stacks of CD/DVDs or video tapes. Will we start buying video cameras to record the day and upload it to our 80 pedabyte RAID when we get home - of course, all the house would be wired, recording multiple cameras views back to the computer... for posterity...
because we all know that the cost of the OS isn't included with the hardware...
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Drives today have 10.000 rpm or 15.000 rpm. Eight years ago the high end was 7200 rpm, 5400 before that...
;)
That's approximately a 2X performance increase per EIGHT YEARS. This is very very far from being impressive.
Disk seek time is dominated (today) by rotational latency. The fastest disks have seek times around 4ms, and that is pretty much the rotational latency on a 15000 rpm disk.
In order to improve disk performance (the seek time, not the throughput), disks need to spin faster. This does pose some interesting problems though...
A normal 3.5" drive has a platter with approximately 48mm radius, giving roughly 0.3 meter circumference. At 15000rpm the speed of the circumference is 75.4m/s.
Doing the math, this gives us a centripetal acceleration of v^2/r = 118435 m/s^2, or roughly 12085G. Sure as hell beats most drag racers out there (by more than a factor of 12000
The fun part is, that a simple doubling of the rotational speed, will do really interesting things to the acceleration (note the v^2 thing above).
A 30000rpm disk will have a centripetal acceleration of the circumference of approximately 48000G.
A mass-element at the circumference weighing one gram, will have a "pull" corresponding to (F=m*a) 118kg - which again will be approximately half a tonne on the 30000rpm disk.
You need to find a material that will weigh little, not deform under the given stress, and still have the necessary properties for use as a hard drive platter...
but wait until the RIAA starts charging in advance for piracy.
Ever so often, they want to place a tax on everything that could possibly be used to store music. Which has basicly two Pandora's Box effects:
1. Then everybody else's work that could possibly be represented digitally get their cut (ie. everybody)
2. Why only RIA of America? Why not of Canada? or Uzbekistan? After all, does RIAA claim to have a monopoly on being pirated?
By some mysterious happening (no, I don't believe they saw the light. Even a blind chicken finds a kernel of corn now and then...) they haven't made such a levy here, not even on blank CDs. Anyway, judging by the problems I have reading old CDs I might look at using hard disks anyway...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'll be able to couple some hard drives to my flux capacitor and record the entire history of the universe.
Why is it no time traveller goes and says 'hi' to Jesus? Thats what I'd do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
First off, the project which microsoft is conducting has the purpose of storing all of the memories of a person, a virual brain of sorts. Even with the readilly increasing size of hard drives if it takes five years to get to a terabyte, then it will be a very long time before they get hard drives that will be big enough to hold all of the memories of a person. Thus delaying their production and testing of this thing they're making for at least 20 years; which, in my opinion, is a good thing. Think of the consequences that this virtual brain could have: it could kill or paralize you, do damage to your nervous system, and most frighteningly, if there is a security flaw in the software (99.9999% certain there will be: Microsoft need I say more?) someone could take control of your brain thus controlling you.
Consider the IBM XT 4.77MHz with a factory default formatted 17 sector per track MFM hard drive with a 6:1 interleave. The peak throughput of this machine was roughly 87 kilobytes per second.
... 3.06GHz, maybe a touch faster?
Now consider the new SATA machines with measured (not calculated) throughputs of 87 megabytes per second.
This is a 1,000x fold increase. For CPU processer throughput (speed) to keep up with this performance at the same rate, you would be able to buy a machine with a 4.77GHz CPU in it. Right now the fastest stock boxes are running what
CPUs have gotten faster. Hard drives have gotten faster faster.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
There is an interesting difference to do with measuring processing speed vs. measuring data storage. Unlike for processing speed, and like for physical temperature, you can set an "absolute zero" for data storage, based on the current physical theorem for atoms and molecules. -273Celcius == -460Fahrenheit == 0 Kelvin, because 0 K is the temperature at which atoms are motionless. Likewise, the tiniest physical alteration performable AND measurable to an atom would represent the smallest possible unit of data storage. Hence, the unit that forms the basis for the highest possible density of data storage. On a rather philosophical note, measuring data storage on an absolute scale I think is possible because unlike processing speed, data storage always has a 1:1 mapping with whatever matter is representing it.
In fact Moore's law sais it's 2^(N/18) (doubles roughly every 18 months) - so 2^(27/18) = ~ 6 times .... which means that IPod disk size (for one sample) is following Moore quite nicely ....
It's quite similar with RAM too. I bought a 0.5MB RAM upgrade for my Amiga 500 in 1989 for $100 - it was going really cheap. I thought that was such a good bargain.
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
While it's nice that you took the time to rant about how much better of a programmer that you are then everyone else (the whole "If I didn't code it, it's crap" attitude really shines through), I think your scale is a bit off.
Lets say a library saves you a week. Now, lets say that like more people you use at least 4 libraries. Now, you've saved a month. A *month*, at which point you say you'll start to "consider" using external libraries. Well, I'm underpaid, but lets say you hired me to do this. By shaving a month off, you've saved over $3500 in my salary alone. And that's assuming that I (or anyone) could fully implement, *debug*, and "finish", a given complicated lib in 1 week. Great! Now, I quit, because I'm underpaid, and my replacement comes in. Now, I write good, well documented stuff, but it's not industry standard. So my replacement can't just sit down and pick up where I left off, but has to learn how *I* decided to implement libfoo. But it turns out that he's a lot like you, and thus 'he didn't write it, so it's crap'. And then *he* spends a month throwing away my stuff, and redoing it all. And on, and on, and on. There's a *reason* that things like Boost and Roguewave and Qt and Gtk and glib exist. And until you figure that out, you're doomed to be 1/10th as productive as you could be. Or, assuming that (as you claim) you've polished your libs to perfection and the productivity is there, I pity whomever has to take over your code. No, actually, I just pity you.
Such bull. .33%!
W2K server takes up minimal space compared to W2K or NT4 given the years difference. On Modern drives the OS is taking less than 1% of the entire drive, in many cases
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
Kurzweil would argue differently.
Technology always increases at an increasing rate. While the "double every 18 months" is arbitary, stuff does get faster, well, faster. This is the law of accelerating returns.
Just think how awful it will be for future generations.
Today, when someone dies, their heirs have to go through their belongings and (potentially) writings/documents/photos to see what's worth keeping.
When my gandparents went, it took nearly a year to go through the book collections, notes, etc.
If I were splattered by a bus on my way home this evening, my relatives would have to go through a collection of the same size (books, notebooks, photos), plus approximately 40 GB of data -- much of it redundant, much of it useless, some of it encrypted, etc, but some of it probably worth something to someone. What a nightmarish task!
And it's only going to get worse!
I anticipate a lot will simply fall through the cracks and vanish.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
>> we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos.
We, too.
It's cool that you can archive your life like that. Now how would you put it in an easily accessible, time-relevant format. (Was that picture taken when I was 7 or 8?)
As I read your post I realized that if I tried to do the same thing the huge gaps would probably lead me to give up pretty quickly out of pure depression.
There does not, with the exception of high school yearbooks, exist any pictures of me between grades 9 and 13. I was that much of a loner. No parties, no weekends with friends, nothing.
Being a geek or nerd is a common topic on Slashdot. Probably one way of definitively identifying yourself as one is an archive of your life being almost empty.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Moores is the # of transistors/processing power every 18 mos... you're looking at price per byte.
lets see what $100 gets you
$100/meg = 1985 10 meg
$50/meg = 1986.5 20 meg
$25/meg = 1988 40 meg
$12.5/meg = 1989.5 80 meg
$6.25/meg = 1991 160 meg
$3.13/meg = 1992.5 320 meg
$1.56/meg = 1994 640 meg
$0.78/meg = 1995.5 1.2 g
$0.39/meg = 1997 2.4 g
$0.19/meg = 1998.5 4.8 g
$0.09/meg = 2000 9.6 g
$0.04/meg = 2001.5 18.6g
$0.02/meg = 2003 37.2g
$0.01/meg = 2003.5 74.4g
Looks like the curve is a bit faster than every 18 mo... I think 12 months might be a better approximation of storage/cost.
meh
I want holographic storage...mmmmm.... Holgraphic pr0n!! Allrighhhttt!!!
"Basically if programmers still gave a damn like they did when writting code for C64's we wouldn't have alot of these issues. Nowdays they would rather churn out crap so long as it's better than some of the other crap they've seen."
If you're trying to tell me we should go back to the days of non-portable assembly, I think I'm going to cry. Yes, people should write tighter code, but trying to make believe that we should write code just like in the "good old days" is ignoring years upon years of advancement in the field of computer science.
And, also, look at what they were doing back in the days of the C64, and look at what they're doing now. You really do need more code to do more. Trying to tell me that they had 6kb executables with the C64 and then telling me our 6mb ones are bloated is ludicrous.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
And you didn't cry at the end of Philadelphia when they're showing the home movies of when Tom Hank's character was a boy.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I have no idea for sure(but like speculating) they leave you hanging at the end, but after the credits roll, there is a 3 min trailer for revolutions, and I would guess that Trinity features in the trailer. I've heard several people complain about the trailer at the end.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
18 years ago a 40 Mb HD has the size of a toaster...
Yep. Generated the same amount of heat, too.
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
... Is not as much as it may first seem. Inflation must be taken into account - there is certainly a great decrease in the price of hard disks and an increase in their capacity, but the price reduction can't be overestimated.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
LifeBits? That's nothing! :-)
/. generation who've never heard of the guy, he's one of the 20th century's great thinkers--probably most famous for the Geodesic dome. Read Operating Manual for SpaceShip Earth once in a while for a wake up call on priorities. :-)
Buckminster Fuller archived everything from 1920-1983. His mass storage was a warehouse
His Dymaxion Chronofile was one of his many human guinea pig experiments. For those of the
No, the growth rate of Hard Drives in terms of capacity and speed is a normal hyperbolic graph (an exponential on top of an expontential) which is the same curve all technology is following.
The simple fact of the matter is that over time, the "abberations" that make advances seem more or less than hyperbolic will balance out, to produce a normal hyperbolic curve.
Look at the rate of CPU clock cycle increases: this year - it's just incredibly lame - and Chipzilla/AMD won't even add a single gigahertz to the final total from 2002. That's a LONG way behind what Moore's Law predicts.
We conveniently gloss over the massive increases in speed afforded by architecture changes, faster FSBs and faster RAM...
Check http://www.kurzweilai.net for the real oil on the rate of technological progress, and the coming Singularity.
While we can continue to rely upon a over-all Hyperbolic growth rate in speed/price/performance, there will always be hiccups along the way where existing technology provides for a smaller or faster growth rate.
When the paradigm changes (transitioning from moving parts to solid state storage - moving parts suck donkey nuts!) the rate of increase may surge massively, and then calm down to a more modest annual increase.
What we see in HDD performance is merely a blip in the graph, and while it seems significant now, the truth is that in 20 years, the curve will look pretty smooth, even given what appears to be massive variations away from the curve at the moment.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
In addition to the reviews of the project, Gordon Bell's own page on MyLifeBits is available atn ce/M yLifeBits.aspx
http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPrese
it doesn't work for me in the winter, but in the fall and spring if I feel a little bit chilly I can close up my room and it will become a few degrees warming than other closed off rooms in my house. Also, in the winter I have to close the heat vent in my room a few notches because otherwise it will be too hot when the rest of the house is just right
I think we have to look at waht really dirves a HDs cost and size to put this in a little better perspective. First, lets look at the phsical components and their evolutions:(please reply for any glaring ommisions or innacuracies)
Heads(faster, able to read higher densities on platters) Platters(thinner, higher density)
Motors(faster bigger better more)
Drive Electronics (Less chips, new interfaces)
Ok, now, lets look at the current dive costs:
80gb drive is say 100 bucks
120gb drive is like 110 bucks...
wait a tick, wtf is going on here? Ahh, the REAL cost of the hard drive starts to come to light: everything BUT what the data is actually stored on. This means that mostly you are paying for the dirve electronics etc., and that for the more common platter of densitys between x and y only raise the price a small amount.
This leads us to the current problem in drive size and performance. Size is going up exponentially to performance. (mostly on the IDE side). In this respect, i think the comparison to moores law falls on its ass.
Size: has come from 5mb to 200+GB
Performance: (ide side, and to some extent SCSI)) has gone from who knows how ungodly slow to real world numbers form 40-100mb/s(single drive) about. -- these numbers have not changed dramaticaly in the last 5-8 years.. really. They do not corrispond at all with the raise in size. This has also become one of the biggest bottlenecs on the PC(notice the P for personal, im not getting in to raids and stuff here)
Cost: This really need to be split up in to 2 categories to get the real picture: platter cost and dirve electronics cost. Id wager the electronics cost is a fairly flat line compared to platter cost (having a LOT to do with where R&D money seems to being spent). So while Drives may SEEM to be going ahead of the curve, they are really far behind, held back mostly by legacy tech, no real mass market demand in greatly improved per drive performance, and good ol laws of physics*.
End of off the top of my head rant, sorry for the intrusion.
*(C)(TM)(R) The Microsoft Corperation, all rights reserved.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
Hell, since the requirements were a 386/33 and 16MB Ram (and this was for NT4 Server!), I'm not surprised that it runs well on that box.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
is that the capacity of the disk is inversly proportional to the 12th power of the distance of the head to the disk.
That means that everytime you halve the gap, your capacity goes up 2 to the 12th or 4096 times.
Your old 20 MB disk would hold a little over 80 GB if that happened. And it DID, don't you see....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Wow. Here I am, sorting out my holiday snapshots, where 30 photos (on paper) are more than enough to document a month in Mexico... and some people want to keep *everything*. Every last little bit of dull, uninteresting crap that ever happened to them, every meaningless little event that passed before their dull, glazed eyes. God.
I blame television. Like that guy who wanted to preserve 20 hours of VHS tapes. (Of what... old episodes of Dr Who?)
A word of advice: your life happens tomorrow, not last year. You don't need to record every moment of it.
Heh... just try backing it all up, anyway. I can't find a decent backup device for my 2 twenty gig disks. So when the disks go, your whole life goes up in smoke. Poof! You're gone.
There's a very modern, very existential lesson in there somewhere.
Are people really replacing their computers at the rate they were two years ago? I know much better computers are being sold, but isn't there a consumer backlash that started when computers got "good enough" combined with an economy slow down?
I can see a niche market for software coded for older standards of performance. Call it "Classic Coded" "Optimized for the Family Computer". Some marketing buzz phrase like that. I know people who have serious folding green, buying a brand new turbo 3 ghz whizzbang is definetly in the budget-but they already got a pentium 800 or something that is totally functional for everything they do now. Maybe they'll add a bigger drive, but not seeing the same amount of "new" purchases I used to see, and the amount of whitebox shops are dropping and those remaining have slimmer margins. It's like they don't care, they don't see "upgrading" with the same "must do" fanaticism once some sort of "good enough" threshold got reached 2-3 years ago. Getting different gadgets-yes, seeing that, new cell phones and pdas and digicams and whatnot, but not seeing people bragging about their "new computer they just got" like you used to see.
Not counting hard core geeks, I mean joe regular old consumer. Not sure on businesses either, don't get exposed to it to see if it's happening.
In 1981, a state-of-the-art DRAM chip was 64 Kbit (2^16.00 bits), and a state-of-the-art 5.25-inch winchester hard drive was 5 Mbytes (2^25.25 bits). In 2003, a state of the art DRAM chip is 1 Gbit (2^30.00 bits), and a state-of-the -art 3.5-inch winchester hard drive is 250 Gbytes (2^40.86 bits). That's growth by a factor of 1.55 per year for DRAM, and a factor of 1.64 per year for disk. Given only 22 years of historical data for comparison, I don't think one can really claim that the difference in growth rates is significant. It would be fair to simply say that both have grown by a factor of 1.6 per year.
As Kurzweil points out in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, even though Moore's Law was originally stated in terms of transistors, it actually extrapolates backward accurately for computing devices in general all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century (mechanical calculators), and there's no reason to believe that it won't similarly extend forward even when transistors eventually are replaced by a fundamentally different technology (for instance, nanoscale mechanical computing, or quantum electronics). Part of the rationale for making such a claim is that the same sort of power law has applied to many other technology areas. So it's not too surprising that disk storage density has grown exponentially.
"Back then" your OS wouldn't have been able to address that much memory space.
Conner did it. Probably could google for it.
Considering that microprocessor operating frequency has improved roughly 500 fold in the time that disk latency has only improved by 20 or so (rough numbers, I know), the microprocessor is leaving the storage in the dust. This latency gap is at all levels of the storage hierarchy - wire delay in memories (and inside microprocessors) is getting so bad that access times (measured in cycles *and* in raw time - thinner wires have greater delay) are getting out of control with respect to the microprocessor. This is a real problem.
I agree that disks have improved... but compared to microprocessors, they're dragging ass. By the way, your argument about increased density helping speed is fallacious - seek time dwarfs (by several orders of magnitude) any benefit of denser storage elements in quasi-random access patterns. And as previously noted, if you want throughput, you can get obscene amounts of it from better (granted, more expensive) architectures. Did you just start examining computer architecture last week, or have you been guessing all this time? ;) Man, those gnomes inside your disk really need to get to work!
My 2.26ghz p4 keeps my room nice and toasty in the winter. I had the windows opened all winter and I live in montreal! My room isn't that big though...
I believe what has made code so bloated these days, is people believing it's more important to produce more faster and fix it later than do it right the first time.
And in your example nobody has saved $3500 on your salary alone. Every 3rd party lib you add for the sole purpose of saving time at the moment costs you about 10% when it comes time debug... you run into weird problems and can't trace them down.. why? because someone else wrote the code and now your learning THEIR code.
Your app is guaranteed to be slower as well, a library that is designed to be more universal has to make sacrifices to that end.
You have to consider also that drive space depends on density measured in storage/in^2, So a 60k increase in storage size is only a 245x increase in linear storage. That's worse than moore's law. 18 years = 12 1.5-year periods, which should have precipitated a 4096x storage increase.
:)
Storage is behind.
Of course, moore's law doesn't exactly measure the linear density of microchips, but still, trying to compare the two is silly.
Businesses need standards.
Software can start being developed for a 6 Ghz 64 bit AMD machine x86 now knowing that in 2 years it will be here.
The processor companies are probably milking the technology for all its worth...but at least we know what to expect and develop for.
I'd like to see Bill reduce his prices by a factor of 60,000
.. than I am in increasing mass storage performance! The size of the drive may have increased astoundingly, but the data transfer speed has barely increased at all. The Disk I/O has become THE bottleneck on the PC.
True, with cheap RAM these days it seems like there is little reason to have to put up with applications swapping out to disk, but it does still happen.
I just wish that there was an affordable RAID setup that actually increased performance to some significant degree. I don't remember where, but I saw a study that showed that the cheap RAID adapters, when configured to RAID0 (striping), saw only negligible increase in performance. If motherboards came with a RAID setup that allowed you to install two identical disks as a single virtual drive and get close to double the performance, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
"We see a 60,000 fold fall in price." How much stronger than Moore's Law is that?
(2x)^10 = 60,000 where 10 is (18 years)/(18 months) and x is 'how much stronger.'
Solving for x gives us roughly 1.5, not 18...
Thats why slashdot just ran a story on IBM's research into nano scale transistors.
Some of them being issues for me...such as 18 years / 18 months being 12, not 10...
So...(2x)^12 = 60,000 gives us... about 1.25 for x.
And if x = 1.25, then 2x = 2.5, then 2.5^6 * 60gb gives us about 14.6tb, not 1...
that's why we have to advance compression schemes, which directly reduce such (storage) bloat
Well, the obvious meaning would be that the CPU would not be able to run through all the data on the hard drive in any reasonable amount of time. Like, if you filled it up with video, you wouldn't be able to play it all before you died (or something). Another possibility would be overflow.
:P)
If you have a signed 2's compliment integer, and it is incremented past the max value, the number will 'loop' around and become negative. An example of this, actually, is a little uptime program I write back when I had a win98 box. It get's the number of milliseconds since the computer's been booted as a 32 bit integer. Right now, the output of that program is (on my windows 200 box)
D:\WINNT>uptime
-20days, -15hours, -16minutes and -32seconds (-1782992778 milliseconds total)
The computer was booted on 4/9/2003 8:27:48 PM
(yet, weirdly it calculates the date correctly
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
you should be godded up as a mod
Keep NT 4, or your linux install on a 3 gig hard drive with your pentium 166 and 16 megs of ram
well, linux will run just fine on that, but you obviously have never tried running nt4 on such a machine. it will boot, but only just; forget about running anything on it.
When I was a kid we had to haul each bit up and down a mountain in the snow! 1's were represented by cinderblocks and 0s were represented by catching tuberculosis!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
- CPU: from 200Mhz to 2Ghz - 10 times;
- RAM: from 128MB to 1GB - about 10 times;
- ISP: from 33K to 3Mbs - 100 times;
- System Bus: from 66 Mhz to 133 MHz - 2 times;
So, seems like motherboards is the worst parts, at least for typical home PCs and desktops. Too bad.Or is it just a problem of x86 architecture?
Less is more !
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I can see it now, telling the kids about computers "in my day"...
In my day, we only had 3 ghz machines with only 4 GB of memory, and that's only if you were rich! Why I remember using a 4.77 mhz 8086 with a black and yeller display! The hard drives in our day were 3.5..... zzzzzzzzzz.....
it's 1024k in ONE MB, that is 170.6 times the final grinded code. 6MB is actually 1024 times the size your example 6k app. About the only thing you'll find that's 6mb nowdays is a text editor (in the windows world, we are talking about bloat remember),
ok, I admit that's not entirely fair. But it's not the asm hacks and such that I mean should be kept. But the attitude that had to be used to program for these platforms. Alot of those apps were written in C after all. Programmers now are more concerned with "productivity" than functionality and efficiency. It's this mind shift that has lead to the bloat of today. And the bloat of today isn't a 6mb app (unless it's a text editor) the bloat of today is 150mb APPS not games, but APPS!!!! I've never seen an application that has any excuse being 150mb! I have yet to see an application that provides functionality to justify this kind of size... instead they get it by adding pretty light up and animation effects on start buttons and such.
Actually what we generally do with computers today isn't much different than 5yrs ago when the largest apps were 30mb. Most new versions of the apps out then add little or no functionality at all but have tripled in size. Lets take a random example, getright downloader, the only improvement in this program's function that has been added was more broken mirror finding options, the program itself has literally tripled in size. icq is another that essentially has added no functionality since 1998 (the new features that are actually features existed as plugin's then that you could get if you wanted) and it has massively bloated in size and slowed. MS windows itself, the difference between NT and XP... since when does secure code require significantly more memory (not that I'd call xp secure), the small checks involved with writing stable and secure code generally do not involve very much overhead. win95b to win98 was much the same, there were a couple minor enchancements between b and 98 1st edition but not much... the program gained more functionality going to the SE version of 98 but almost no additional bloat (in comparison)... odd how that works.
You know everytime the subject of hdd capacity/performance comes up I wonder why no one has produced a hdd with dual servo arms with the capacity to read/write to different sections of the disk simultaneously. More or less single disk raid 0. This would result in an incredible performance increase at a small price increase. Furthermore while raid 0 decreases storage system reliability a single disk with dual arms would actually be slightly more reliable than a standard disk; i.e. one arm fails you've got another one to keep going, (and I realize an arm failing isn't the primary cause of hdd failure). Maybe it would even be possible to optimize one arm for reading and one for writing.
Programmers now are more concerned with "productivity" than functionality and efficiency. It's this mind shift that has lead to the bloat of today.
Do you actually do any development on modern computers? I believe we're most concerned with functionality, productivity coming in a very close second. If I can spend ten or twenty minutes writing an app to solve a particular problem, but it uses 256MB or so of RAM and a couple gigs of disk space, I've solved my problem and I can worry about other things.
I've written enough code where libc has too much overhead for my app to work efficiently, I've moved on (well, for the most part).
[...]
Actually what we generally do with computers today isn't much different than 5yrs ago when the largest apps were 30mb. Most new versions of the apps out then add little or no functionality at all but have tripled in size.
I think the things we do are quite a bit different, and larger applications allow us to do this. For my job, I develop a java app that is about 200MB installed and uses a minimum of a half gig of memory. I could constrain it to use a lot less memory without an excessive amount of effort, but it'd be more difficult to develop in, and it'd run more slowly...so I tell ops to buy bigger machines. What does a gig of core cost these days?
An app I do a lot of work in at home is Final Cut Express. There wasn't anything like this I could run five years ago (at least, not that I knew about). NLE is a fairly new thing, and is here because mass storage brings it home. However, I'd like to point this out:
dustinti:/Applications 502% du -sk Final\ Cut\ Express.app
11960 Final Cut Express.app
That's all of it. The app binary itself is under 3.5MB, the rest is plugins (most of which are text files).
Some things need to be big, some things need to be small. Either way, this powerbook has a 60GB disk, and no app has seemed to make much of a dent into it. (Now, my DV files on the other hand...)
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
Price decreases at a rate 1.5 faster than the increase in performance and power of Moore. Moore is Less!
Storage doubles in 66% the time as circuits is because a few years back one manufacturer decided on a shorter cycle. The price drops because the high fixed cost can only be recouped via steep discounting.
Moore's law is a self-fullfiling prophecy. If you are designing a circuit for 3 years from now you set your target based on the expected competitive landscape.
I believe what has made code so bloated these days, is people believing it's more important to produce more faster and fix it later than do it right the first time.
I don't believe that I said anything about shipping broken code. Maybe I did. Maybe you could point out where. Or is your point (again!), that if you didn't write it, it can't possibly be Right(tm)?
And in your example nobody has saved $3500 on your salary alone. Every 3rd party lib you add for the sole purpose of saving time at the moment costs you about 10% when it comes time debug... you run into weird problems and can't trace them down.. why? because someone else wrote the code and now your learning THEIR code.
That 10% figure still stinks from where you pulled it out of. And if you don't think that taking a month off of a twelve month project is a *serious* gain, then I don't believe you have ever had to ship a working product.
Your app is guaranteed to be slower as well, a library that is designed to be more universal has to make sacrifices to that end.
Let's take your logic to its conclusion (without exagerating anything you've said). Your first premise is that general purpose libs are bloated and prone to error. The solution is to write your own versions, and then (as you said in the last paragraph of your first comment), you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel as you go on to other projects. Can I take that to mean that you reuse that code that you have polished? Code reuse is a good thing, I think we both agree. So, you have a lib that does something. You wrote it for app A, and then reuse it in app B. Of course, when reusing it in app B, you discover something that worked well at first, but needs to be more flexible now. So you change it a bit, and now it works equally fine in apps A and B (because you need to maintain A, that's a given). Now along comes app C, you make more changes AND WHAT THE HELL IS DIFFERENT BETWEEN YOUR LIBRARY AND ONE THAT OTHER PEOPLE WROTE??!??!!?!? You just managed to (as you so aptly put it) reinvent the wheel, making a generalized lib that can be reused but has only been 1)tested by you 2)understood by you 3)given a design review by you. How, *exactly*, is this magically faster/better/strong than something that's had people spending time optimizing it, had people looking at it from completely different angles to expose design flaws, and testing it in one thousand and one different situations, exposing bugs?
I'll give you a hint: it isn't. And the *only* reason for someone to continually and habitually refuse to use other people's libs like you've described, is pure and utter arrogance.
I'm going to bed...
It's called Giant Magneto-Resistance, and it's why hard-drives all the suddenly got so huge. Besides, it's past the limit of need at this point; who needs more than 20GB for personal use? Hence, no market, and lower prices! It's a different story with CPUs. Kind of a lame article, isn't it? Get with it, /.!
One problem with having all this storage is backing it all up. Even taking a moderatly sized drive today of 120GB, chuck in some compression and be generous by saying 2:1 (1.5 is much more likely). That means you need 60GB of data.
To thats 15 DVD-R's at 4 GB of piece or 100 CD-Roms. Of course we could start looking at tape but whichever way you look at it there is no cheapish way of being able to make a backup you could keep offsite.
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
That 10% figure still stinks from where you pulled it out of.
Your rear end apparently because you've obviously got something that's crawled up in there.
Take a moment to relax, hmmmm?
Your 2.2ghz cpu is WAY more than 88 times as fast. In additon to getting higher mhz, CPUs these days are also tons more efficient in terms of what they can do per cycle. On something simple like a straight, integer arithmitic behchmark, which is what 386/486s were the best at, they'd be luck to get 1 instruction per clock so 25 MIPS for 25mhz. These days a P4 can easily pull over double the MIPS/mhz for simple arithmitic ops. It gets even worse if you take something like repetitive FP calculations. Modren processors have SIMD units, and fast memory, that helps them do that stuff real quick, even quicker than simple integer ops usually. Old processors didn't and did much worse on those kinds of test than integer tests. I'm willing to bet on something hard, like video encoding, your current processor would be at least 500 times as fast as your old one.
I find it wholesome to purge the old cruft from my 120ish GB of hard disk every 2 weeks to make room for the latest huge.file
Seems like I've been doing that since the old days with a 5MB hard drive on my Apple ][e. The cleansing just takes longer now. I suppose there is no reason to hope that a terabyte will be any easier to keep tidy.
or are there any facts facts that show that the technology is capabable of maintaining the same rate of increase?
It will get copied. I have data from 10 years ago. The orignal media is long ago destroyed, it just gets copied and recopied to whatever my current mass storage devices happen to be. The really important stuff, I backup in more than one place.
I'm not sure why people cry about data loss as though it is some new, horrable thing only cause because of the digitsing of things. No, actually, the digital world has created orders of maginitude more data and given a better system for holding on to it. Yes, a whole lot gets lost, so what? In the past even more, percentage wise, got lost. Paper may last longer than a harddrive, but it is certianly a more fragile medium of storage if for no other reason than that copying it is a pain (and was a real bitch before the printing press). I can duplicate any digital data perfectly quickly and time I want to. With the Internet, I can even do it to many physically diverse locations.
Because of the nature of digital data, the important thing is NOT having everlasting media, it is having a good system to keep the data copied to current media. The problem seems to be that some people expect that everything ever commited to a computer should be backed up for ever and any loss is tragic. Not so, information has always been lost, it is just the way it goes. With large scale digitization of data, it will actually become feasable to not only save much more information, but have it accessable to the world.
I'm pulling down the average!
- 1995 : 14.4kbit
- 1997 : 33.6kbit
- 1999 : ~45kbit (=56kbit, supposedly)
- 2001 : 512kbit
- 2002 : ~45kbit again
Maybe in 2008 I'll be down to a 1200 baud acoustic coupler. God bless British Telecom.
Mmmh... I the size of hard drives keep increasing, won't that drive the adoption of 64bit archetectures just to keep the adressing simple?
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
Moore's law causes a problem to manufacturers - how to keep up the profit margins. I suspect this is the major driving force behind many new technologies.
For example, once disk drives are cheap enough to give everyone 100+GB local storage, we get much more expensive SANs, NAS servers and network caches.
Once complete PCs began to cost under $200, we get blade servers and micro cases to keep the price (and total profit) up.
Before the flames start, I'm perfectly aware that some people's requirements will dictate the more expensive solution. But in many cases you can go for multiply redundent cheaper devices, with higher total reliability, and still get change from the price of the "enterprise" products.
Andrew Yeomans
However, the vagaries of fashion seem to indicate that old styles come back again regularly. And who gets to decide in the end?
Consider some of the classical composers who did not become popular until 50 years or more after they died. Today they are counted amongst the masters.
Or consider old cars. Vehicles which were generally regarded as low-quality bangers in the 1960s, then rubbish in the 1970s and 1980s are now being restored and sold for higher prices (numerically, but still...) than they cost new back then.
My point is, even if some literary achievement or some other work of art or utility is viewed as rubbish or irrelevant by whoever gets to decide at the time, years later, opinion may change. By analogy of slashdot moderation, this would correspond to something being rated (Score: 0, Troll) at some point and then being considered worthy of (Score: 4, Insightful) three years later.
The question remains unanswered: how are we to know what people will like and how well they will like it hundreds of years later. Certain things like Shakespeare's plays will probably be regarded as masterpieces forever, but how are we to know without the benefit of hindsight what is worth keeping and what can be discarded?
One way we try to get around this problem of loss is to try and record as much as we can, in the hope that someone will be interested in all of it sometime in the near future. Provided they are able to read it that is. Your point on proprietary file formats is an important one.
Some countries' national archives actually do this, they keep copies of all documents, magazines, newspapers, and books being published. Paper copies are readily readable, but no single storage medium seems to last forever. Keeping everything implies an ever-increasing job of copying all of it to new media ere the old ones rot...
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Yeah, well.. like the Apollo Project. All the data and specs are in formats no longer practically readable. That means you'd have to start from scratch when sending some more men to the moon.
"I think the things we do are quite a bit different, and larger applications allow us to do this. For my job, I develop a java app that is about 200MB installed and uses a minimum of a half gig of memory. I could constrain it to use a lot less memory without an excessive amount of effort, but it'd be more difficult to develop in, and it'd run more slowly...so I tell ops to buy bigger machines. What does a gig of core cost these days?" That has to be the saddest most pathetic statement I've ever heard. If people like you are writing most of the software today its no wonder
its a load of bug ridden bloated shit. And the cost of a gig of core isn't much if you're only going to run ONE application. But what if
the machine has to run literally hundreds of processes at once? Let them have a gig each?? I don't think so. I think all you've shown is that
you only work in the toy programming arena of the desktop. If you ever got a job programming for servers you'd be FORCED to make your bloatware more
efficient or you'd be getting your pink slip PDQ!
Brian Hayes recently published an article tackling this issue. He include a graph showing the cost of disk space over time and discusses the impact of increasing storage space on media companies. I strongly recommend taking a look.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
If we start keeping every worthless bit of data that we've ever recorded don't we risk becoming terminally bogged down in worthless data?
How will we find the good stuff if it's buried along with mounds of garbage data?
I think that some data are meant to expire.
Great... huge personal storage capabilities for every little tidbit of family history.
Now, what if the OS you're doing all this work on is built on a database structure that requires or could require some type of licensing fee or royality.
Yes, they are your memories but they've been encoded by someone elses "licensed" technologies.
Future Shivers
.... then you just configure a 10 way, geographically spread, mirror.
Wait a minute. I have got a bussiness plan here.....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You're right, I should apologize for the tone of both my emails (though I can't really for the gist of them). The fact that I'm dealing with an idiot at work with a remarkably similar attitude is not his problem. But that doesn't change the fact that he's still an idiot :-)
Consumers generally saturate at accumulations of 1000 hours of audio or video. Thats 11 hours a day if you only listen or watch each thing twice a year. Media usage follows power laws: there are some things you want to hear a couple times a day. Most stuff you may only listen to or watch once. We all know music geeks with 10,000 hour collections. But I doubt if much it have been viewed once, much less twice.
A thousand hours of music is about 70 GB, a thousand hours of video about 2000 GB. In a year people can carry around all the audio they can effectively use. Video saturation will occur in about five years.
All is in the context.
That boring video of your birthday 10 years ago may contain the only known picture of somebody else that later on becomes notorious for whatever reason.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Even though the RPM rate of drives may not have changed that much. (50% on average), the fact is that even at a given spin rate, doubling the density doubles the transfer rate.
A 7200 RPM 120GB drive will transfer data much faster than a 7200 RPM 4.5 GB drive.
Unless you have multiple drives (More than 2 per bus), you're also not going to saturate modern bus technology. One ATA100 channel has the bandwidth for two of the latest 7200 RPM drives. (ATA133 is better, though, once you take into account overhead issues. Ultra160 SCSI even better, since SCSI handles multiple drives on a bus more gracefully.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What I would love to see in the future are drives with multiple independent heads.
At the very least, independent read and write heads. (This would be the simplest method, as you wouldn't have to deal with contentions between the heads.)
That way you can do copies of data from one part of the drive to another much more quickly - No more bouncing back and forth between destination and origin, just have one head at each place. This would be GREAT for defragging, and also for video processing.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What our harddrives need is more read/write heads per drive and slower RPMs, that will make the drives more reliable AND faster, since most speed is lost fore seeking (moving head from sector to sector,) so if more heads were present, they could be positioned strategically to the necessary sectors in advance.
You can't handle the truth.
This is true, of course. I wonder if they could maintain a vacuum around the spinning discs to reduce/eliminate (if the vacuum is REALLY good) the sonic booms. The problem with this is that if the vacuum every suddenly broke, the hard drive would probably catastrophically fail. Another problem is that as the density of air decreases, so does the speed of sound. This in turn causes the micro sonic booms to occure sooner, just with a weaker effect. Once the gas becomes rarified (I believe) the booms essentially become nonexistant.
"I don't believe that I said anything about shipping broken code. Maybe I did. Maybe you could point out where. Or is your point (again!), that if you didn't write it, it can't possibly be Right(tm)?"
I don't believe a program needs to have bugs to be broken, I believe a program that uses one byte of ram where it doesn't actually serve a purpose but to save you a 2 minute rewrite is broken. If you disagree with this then we will never agree so lets drop it.
umm no, you modify a copy of the lib for the new app, and statically compile of course, you do not keep hacking at a big convoluted monster to string it to fit the new situation... if the needs are different enough you rewrite.
"Let's take your logic to its conclusion (without exagerating anything you've said). Your first premise is that general purpose libs are bloated and prone to error"
Absolutely, if you had read this and thought a moment you would have realized it's not too difficult to reuse code and still keep libs specialized.
If a procedure or function is needed it's put into an application on per need basis, you organize this into libraries but never actually use an existing library as an include! You make a custom library for that app, within that library you make what changes you need and comment as well as document them, you keep the interface as close to the original as doesn't hurt anything. If a function needs modified in a significant way that would make sense elsewhere, you take the new tuned function and add it the other libraries and merge it's documentation when the main docs for your libs.
I mean damn... you sound like a corporate drone programmer where the companies bottom line and meeting the release dates set by marketing is what matters. That is the type of environment that has created the very attitude change I'm bitching about... that's why the most efficient code tends to be written by people at home and not corporate. And for the record, I don't think only my code is pure, but I do think only code produced by those who believe it's better to write one line that screams and is solid a day than a 1000 lines with one minor glitch you never trace down before the app has lived it's life.
And then crush them with your teeth!
And lets say I, as a user, lose one single HOURS worth of work because your damn application crashed while saving a file.
I am going to want to come and strangle you no matter WHOSE library you use.
Lesson: THE USER DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL PROGRAMMING PHILOSOPHY, JUST STOP RELEASING BUGWARE PLEASE
As for bloat, the Microsoft volume control with windows 2000 takes up around 3 megs. Ouch.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I don't get it -- the numbers the author gave are perfectly in order to the thing which is often referred to as "Moore's law":
t m
16 years of doubling hard disk size gives indeed 2^16 = 65,000, which is indeed the factor of 60,000 he gave. So: well his numbers are correct. So what's new here?
In fact, let's just restate what many probably have said thousants of times before:
* Moore did not say anything about money or hard disks. All he observed was an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit. http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.h
* In day to day talk, the term "Moore's law" has been (ab)used for three things:
1) The speed of CPU seems to double every 18 months (assuming it is a CPU of the same price, it is unclear if this is just the number of Gigaflops, or the clockspeed)
2) The speed of hard disk storage doubles every 12 months
3) The speed of network capacity doubles every 9 months
Regrettably, the writer just made a pretty common observation. Too bad. It would have been a much more interesting story if drew an interesting conclussions, like: despite the exponential growth, the CPU proceessing speed really is getting behind compared to network capacity, so in a matter of a decade we can expect a lot more distributed computing, just because it will be cheaper to buy more bandwidth than to buy more CPU's