If there is only one other player at the end, then they can set the spread between the price at which you can sell vs. the price at which you can buy to whatever they like.
No they can't. I can buy and sell from non-spread players. The reason the HF spreads are tighter is because being fast means nothing if you arent offering the highest bid and the lowest ask.
Surrounding the HF spreads are bids and asks from players that arent playing both sides of the coin. The large players there are holding companies for IRA's and so forth that aren't looking to buy X but instead only sell X, and vise-versa.
These are the facts:
(A) There are fewer arbitrage players today than there were a decade ago.
(B) The spread is tighter than ever.
These facts go against your warped thinking on the matter. It is the HF trading that has reduced both the spread and competition in arbitrage, contrary to your theory.
Investors like Warren Buffett look at the value of a company and their activities.
..only to guess at what future people will pay for the stock.
Your reasoning is backwards. You have swapped cause and effect. It is because people act as if X is important to price that X actually becomes important. There are numerous examples where the market does not value a stock based on the companies assets or activities, but instead on other factors such as another companies activities and in some cases, simple pipe-dream thinking (see the dot-com bubble)
....it comes from the arbitrage players that used to do it slower.
The arbitrage was always there.
Here is the deal. Lets call the arbitrage pie X. With HF arbitrage, the pie is now 0.1X due to the smaller spread. Less money is going to arbitragers now per transaction, but it is going to a lot fewer arbitragers.
Both the investor (who likes a small spread) and the remaining arbitragers (who's increased volume makes up for the smaller percentage) win.
Yes, this is true; however, HF trading violates one fundamental precept of the stock market that makes it work: that market forces determines the actual value of stock, based on an assessment of the value a company provides. There is no such valuation in HF algorithms (the concept of "value" is meaningless to a computer), only arbitrage. HF trading can and often does distort true market values.
These traders cant set the price of stock to lower than it is worth to others because they dont have an infinite number of shares to do it with (others will buy all their shares and then sell them for more), nor do they want to set the price of stock to higher than it is worth to others because they dont want to pay more than the shares are worth.
Also, your conceptualization of 'actual value of stock' is borked. The actual value of stock is what a buyer and seller were happy enough with in order for the trade to happen. Thats it. Thats the actual value. The price on the board is the price the last trade went off at.
Price manipulations are possible, but its not exclusive to high frequency traders. Their manipulations can only be minimal, and in fact they counteract the real manipulations such as we had seen before and during the great depression (a manipulator has to blow through the arbitrage buffer first.)
The patient investor can still do that. The arbitrage players dont own the majority of the other shares and therefore cannot control the price. The price still moves up and down based on demand and the arbitrage player would be a fool to mess with that. The patient investor eventually sells his stock to the arbitrager who gladly takes the asking price of the patient investor.
In short, the patient investor was never in a position to do better than his asking price. It was always the arbitrager that snaped up the patient investors shares as the price swings over the asking price so that he can then sell even more shares for more than that amount. This rapid trading hasnt changed a thing in that regard.
the problem with your line of reasoning is that if you can change your prices only once per minute, then there will be no volatility during that minute, and hence there is no need to change the prices. So your argument regarding spreads is invalid.
You are making an invalid assumption... Either that only one player is making postings, or that there being no volatility over some specific time interval means anything.
If I cant post my shares in that 1 minute interval because I too must wait 1 minute, then it doesnt mean anything that there was no volatility in that minute. I can't get the price on the board, but must guess at the next price. If I can post my shares in that 1 minute interval, then there really isnt a 1 minute interval after all because there are multiple players.
The upshot of this is that if there are outstanding trades still in progress when I decide to make my own trade, then there is volatility. This rapid arbitrage causes the majority of all outstanding trades near the margin to be filled nearly instantly, so the price on the ticker more closely resembles the price that I can pay or get. That is reduced volatility. The only effect this rapid arbitrage has is that instead of a hundred thousand people arbitraging, its only a few big traders located next door to the exchange... and I don't care if its 1 player or 100000 on the other end.. what I care about is that the price I see resembles the price I can get.
What middle ground to you want? People were complaining when it was milliseconds too. There will always be someone trying to do it faster. Even if you put a 60 minute hold between a posting and a fulfillment, it would then be 60 minutes + 1 picosecond.. the "advantage" would still be there.
Arbitrage is a good thing, because it DOES provide liquidity. Is 1 picosecond trading mind-boggling? well sure.
Who does this move to picosecond trading effect? The people already doing microsecond trading, which isnt you or me, and before that it was millisecond, and before that it was seconds, and before that it was people with full-time employees on the floor....
Once you've decide that arbitrage of any length is necessary, the move to picoseconds doesnt mean shit.
Seriously, if Firefox had stagnated like IE6 did for so many years
FF1 and FF2 most certainly did stagnate for years. They are still stagnant and will forever onwards be stagnant.
The last IE6 version was released in 2004, the first IE7 version was released in 2006. The correct argument to make is that IE6 was popular for so many years...
Damn IE6 for not having any successful competition for so many years (this is coming from a long-time Opera user.. so dont even try to claim that I am an IE fan-boy, like the guy in my signature was)
And the founders of the US were all traitors to the crown of England. What are you saying?
They took responsibility for the consequences of their actions by funding and leading a revolution.
This idea that Manning should do the time is all about responsibility. He could have done it and then fled to another country, or done it and then attempted to organize a revolution, or gone underground, or any of a number of things. He chose to sit and wait to be identified, putting himself entirely at the mercy of our laws, and that too is taking responsibility. His choice was in the type of consequences that lay before him.
What you are doing is second guessing Manning. Are you of the opinion than Manning is not competent to make these choices himself? Thats the crux of it, really. If you think Manning to be a complete dimwit, below the threshold of competence, then sure.. he should not have to take responsibility for his actions. If you believe that he is not a dimwit, that he is above the threshold of competence, then you surely must agree that he knew what could become of him given the choices that he made.
History is littered with people who willfully broke laws and willfully accepted the responsibility for the consequences of their actions. It is because they then took responsibility that they are considered great men and women.. heroes.
Maybe Manning was stupid enough to think they he wouldnt get caught, yet still considered competent by any reasonable measure. If thats the case, then he is not a hero.. just someone that couldnt fathom the enormity of his position, and those people must also face the consequences of their actions for if they didn't, everybody would play the fool.
Actually, it does. Once lots of people use a term generically it's difficult to make it into a trade mark.
..which has nothing to do with what people do not do.
If people do not refer to Walmart as "Discount Store" that does not mean that someone can come along and trademark "Discount Store" for their store that offers big discounts.
What people do not do has no bearing.
As for the rest of it.. I guess "Gas Station" is OK to trademark because "Gas" is just an abbreviation.
X Windows isnt an operating system and it also doesnt matter what 'the majority of people definitely didnt [do]'
Windows is a valid trademark because it is not a generic term for an operating system. App Store is not a valid trademark because it IS a generic term for stores that sell applications.
'Gesture OS' is OK to trademark for an operating system because it is not a generic term for operating systems. Apple is trying to trademark a generic term in the field of business that it is generic.
I have a laptop for surfing/typing, a router for networking, a few Arduinos for hacking, a rack of servers for Real Work (TM), and if I wanted to play games with awesome graphics I would probably break down and use a console.
You can pay for and maintain all of that, or you can buy a decent desktop.
If the TRIM command is used, from the firmware's perspective, wouldn't the original statement be completely accurate?
No, the original statement says that the SSD understands the file-system, not that its been explicitly told by the OS what pages arent in use by a special command needed because SSD's shouldn't and don't normally understand file systems. Specifically he made it sound like SSD's were constantly wiping themselves based on the data that they contain, rather than the commands that they have been issued.
It has now been revealed (wasn't in the summary) that the submitter found an SSD firmware that does understand at least one file-system. This is not the norm, nor is it the future. Its a tragedy waiting to happen.
On the other hand, in this situation, the thing doing the purging is the drive's firmware itself, not the OS, and the firmware knows for sure where the data is in the cells, and furthermore it's on a mission - to purge cells that it knows the filesystem is no longer using for data.
Inaccurate.
These drives are oblivious to the file-system, which is why there needs to be a TRIM command which allows the OS to say "hey, I don't care about that page (4 KB) any longer." If the SSD is pretending to be a 40 GB drive, then over time its working set grows to 40 GB of data even if the file-system is only using 10 GB of it.. and it needs to treat all 40 GB as precious unless its received some TRIM's to inform it that only 10 GB is precious.
You are right that if its powered up and idle, the SSD will be looking for re-mapping work to do on its own behalf. But you are wrong that the SSD is doing the purging outside of OS intervention.. the OS must specifically mark pages for purging.
Assuming perfect weak levelling, that's 6.4 rewrite cycles per year for a 256GB SSD. A drive that can 'only' handle 3,000 rewrites will therefore wear out after about 450 years. If it does a tenth as well as that, then it will last for almost as long as hard drives have existed.
There is another factor that you arent considering, and that is write amplification. In an ideal world, the write amplification factor will be 1x (no amplification), but could be (for OCZ's current lineup) as bad as 128x (each 4 KB write causes a 512 KB erase.) I havent seen an actual write amplification study for various workloads, but the anecdotal reports are less than 2x.
I think what most people dont understand is that once we are talking about 40+GB drives, the erase limits really do become trivialized by the sheer enormity of the amount of erases (measured in KB) that these devices can sustain. Even 100000 erase cycles isnt very impressive on a 1 MB drive (100 GB of erases), but on a 40 GB drive even 1000 erase cycles is extremely impressive (40 TB of erases.) This, combined with the fact that most people way over-estimate how much data they are writing...
This is why I believe in hybrid setups. The other replies to this are talking about mere millions of writes.
There are no replies talking about mere millions of writes. The one reply that did mention 1 million was talking about per cell and is also very wrong. Furthermore, we do not speak of write limits with SSD's. We speak of erase limits. We should learn the difference before being critical. SSD's write in 4K Pages but erase in Blocks. OCZ is currently using 128 Pages per Block, so Blocks are 512K on their devices.
Do you know how many writes the swap file gets every hour you use your computer?
You are attempting to invoke a nebulous unknown to support your argument for hybrids. When you know how much you are writing per hour on average, and how that compares to the limits of these drives, then you might have support for your belief in hybrids. Right now all you have given is voodoo hand-waving. Swapping has been considered bad for a lot longer than SSD's have been around, because disk reads and writes were slow, so you are essentially only hitch-hiking on that traditional negativity here. On modern SSD's, reads and writes are much faster, so that traditional reason for hating swap doesnt just naturally cross over.
My guess is that you are severely over-estimating how much writing you are doing per day while also severely under-estimating how much writing can be done on these drives. The erase-limits of these drives will last years even if you routinely erase and refill them entirely each day.
The bug was well known pretty much right from the start, yet you still got bit twice by it. My suggestion to you is to find someone knowledgeable to make hardware purchases for you.
If you are averaging a sustained 20MB/sec, then your drive, controller, partition alignment, or drivers suck.. and by suck I mean really really really suck.
It is hard to imagine the great lengths of time you would have to invest in finding a collection of SATA 2.0 hardware that bad, so its almost certainly your partition alignment or drivers.
You do know that modern drives require 4096 byte partition alignment, while most older OS's presume that 512 byte is good enough?
We saw prices of the previous generation drop from $4/GB to under $2/GB while waiting for SATA 3.0 adoption. Now those same SATA 2.0 SSD's will drop much further... by years end it will be a great time to pick up older SATA 2.0 SSD's
It's not contractual language between corporations, it's a demand from the DOJ that those corporations have to meet in order to conduct a merger.
But once the merger has been conducted... what then? The idea that Comcast can be held to any of these conditions in perpetuity is laughable.. at the simplest level, Comcast can then spin off (a demerger) a wholly-owned subsidiary that conducts half of the business the DOJ would otherwise find objectionable... in fact, I think that its fairly certain that Comcast would be spinning off several subsidiaries even if the DOJ wasnt in the picture.
Mergers followed by demergers are actually quite common.
The size of on-chip cache determines its latency. Larger caches are slower because they HAVE to be, not because they are made of different stuff.
The first-order reasons is distance. The L1 is closest to where the data is needed, the L2 farther away, and the L3 still farther. Its not possible to simply make the L1 larger without also increasing the largest distance and thus its latency.
So the L1 is kept small on purpose, to reduce its latency (to 2 or 3 clock cycles these days)
Trust me. The CPU manufacturers arent stupid. Their cache size choices are pretty close to optimal given the workloads they expect of their processors.
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If there is only one other player at the end, then they can set the spread between the price at which you can sell vs. the price at which you can buy to whatever they like.
No they can't. I can buy and sell from non-spread players. The reason the HF spreads are tighter is because being fast means nothing if you arent offering the highest bid and the lowest ask.
Surrounding the HF spreads are bids and asks from players that arent playing both sides of the coin. The large players there are holding companies for IRA's and so forth that aren't looking to buy X but instead only sell X, and vise-versa.
These are the facts:
(A) There are fewer arbitrage players today than there were a decade ago.
(B) The spread is tighter than ever.
These facts go against your warped thinking on the matter. It is the HF trading that has reduced both the spread and competition in arbitrage, contrary to your theory.
Investors like Warren Buffett look at the value of a company and their activities.
Your reasoning is backwards. You have swapped cause and effect. It is because people act as if X is important to price that X actually becomes important. There are numerous examples where the market does not value a stock based on the companies assets or activities, but instead on other factors such as another companies activities and in some cases, simple pipe-dream thinking (see the dot-com bubble)
You are an idiot because you have taken a quote from Jobs out of context so you could use it as a troll.
How is it out of context? You realize that its my signature, right?Didn't I even say that it was my signature?
Don't these facts make YOU an idiot?
....it comes from the arbitrage players that used to do it slower.
The arbitrage was always there.
Here is the deal. Lets call the arbitrage pie X. With HF arbitrage, the pie is now 0.1X due to the smaller spread. Less money is going to arbitragers now per transaction, but it is going to a lot fewer arbitragers.
Both the investor (who likes a small spread) and the remaining arbitragers (who's increased volume makes up for the smaller percentage) win.
Yes, this is true; however, HF trading violates one fundamental precept of the stock market that makes it work: that market forces determines the actual value of stock, based on an assessment of the value a company provides. There is no such valuation in HF algorithms (the concept of "value" is meaningless to a computer), only arbitrage. HF trading can and often does distort true market values.
These traders cant set the price of stock to lower than it is worth to others because they dont have an infinite number of shares to do it with (others will buy all their shares and then sell them for more), nor do they want to set the price of stock to higher than it is worth to others because they dont want to pay more than the shares are worth.
Also, your conceptualization of 'actual value of stock' is borked. The actual value of stock is what a buyer and seller were happy enough with in order for the trade to happen. Thats it. Thats the actual value. The price on the board is the price the last trade went off at.
Price manipulations are possible, but its not exclusive to high frequency traders. Their manipulations can only be minimal, and in fact they counteract the real manipulations such as we had seen before and during the great depression (a manipulator has to blow through the arbitrage buffer first.)
The patient investor can still do that. The arbitrage players dont own the majority of the other shares and therefore cannot control the price. The price still moves up and down based on demand and the arbitrage player would be a fool to mess with that. The patient investor eventually sells his stock to the arbitrager who gladly takes the asking price of the patient investor.
In short, the patient investor was never in a position to do better than his asking price. It was always the arbitrager that snaped up the patient investors shares as the price swings over the asking price so that he can then sell even more shares for more than that amount. This rapid trading hasnt changed a thing in that regard.
the problem with your line of reasoning is that if you can change your prices only once per minute, then there will be no volatility during that minute, and hence there is no need to change the prices. So your argument regarding spreads is invalid.
You are making an invalid assumption... Either that only one player is making postings, or that there being no volatility over some specific time interval means anything.
If I cant post my shares in that 1 minute interval because I too must wait 1 minute, then it doesnt mean anything that there was no volatility in that minute. I can't get the price on the board, but must guess at the next price. If I can post my shares in that 1 minute interval, then there really isnt a 1 minute interval after all because there are multiple players.
The upshot of this is that if there are outstanding trades still in progress when I decide to make my own trade, then there is volatility. This rapid arbitrage causes the majority of all outstanding trades near the margin to be filled nearly instantly, so the price on the ticker more closely resembles the price that I can pay or get. That is reduced volatility. The only effect this rapid arbitrage has is that instead of a hundred thousand people arbitraging, its only a few big traders located next door to the exchange... and I don't care if its 1 player or 100000 on the other end.. what I care about is that the price I see resembles the price I can get.
What middle ground to you want? People were complaining when it was milliseconds too. There will always be someone trying to do it faster. Even if you put a 60 minute hold between a posting and a fulfillment, it would then be 60 minutes + 1 picosecond.. the "advantage" would still be there.
Arbitrage is a good thing, because it DOES provide liquidity. Is 1 picosecond trading mind-boggling? well sure.
Who does this move to picosecond trading effect? The people already doing microsecond trading, which isnt you or me, and before that it was millisecond, and before that it was seconds, and before that it was people with full-time employees on the floor....
Once you've decide that arbitrage of any length is necessary, the move to picoseconds doesnt mean shit.
Seriously, if Firefox had stagnated like IE6 did for so many years
FF1 and FF2 most certainly did stagnate for years. They are still stagnant and will forever onwards be stagnant.
The last IE6 version was released in 2004, the first IE7 version was released in 2006. The correct argument to make is that IE6 was popular for so many years...
Damn IE6 for not having any successful competition for so many years (this is coming from a long-time Opera user.. so dont even try to claim that I am an IE fan-boy, like the guy in my signature was)
And the founders of the US were all traitors to the crown of England. What are you saying?
They took responsibility for the consequences of their actions by funding and leading a revolution.
This idea that Manning should do the time is all about responsibility. He could have done it and then fled to another country, or done it and then attempted to organize a revolution, or gone underground, or any of a number of things. He chose to sit and wait to be identified, putting himself entirely at the mercy of our laws, and that too is taking responsibility. His choice was in the type of consequences that lay before him.
What you are doing is second guessing Manning. Are you of the opinion than Manning is not competent to make these choices himself? Thats the crux of it, really. If you think Manning to be a complete dimwit, below the threshold of competence, then sure.. he should not have to take responsibility for his actions. If you believe that he is not a dimwit, that he is above the threshold of competence, then you surely must agree that he knew what could become of him given the choices that he made.
History is littered with people who willfully broke laws and willfully accepted the responsibility for the consequences of their actions. It is because they then took responsibility that they are considered great men and women.. heroes.
Maybe Manning was stupid enough to think they he wouldnt get caught, yet still considered competent by any reasonable measure. If thats the case, then he is not a hero.. just someone that couldnt fathom the enormity of his position, and those people must also face the consequences of their actions for if they didn't, everybody would play the fool.
Was App Store use by the general public before July 17, 2008?
"App" was. End of story.
Actually, it does. Once lots of people use a term generically it's difficult to make it into a trade mark.
If people do not refer to Walmart as "Discount Store" that does not mean that someone can come along and trademark "Discount Store" for their store that offers big discounts.
What people do not do has no bearing.
As for the rest of it.. I guess "Gas Station" is OK to trademark because "Gas" is just an abbreviation.
X Windows isnt an operating system and it also doesnt matter what 'the majority of people definitely didnt [do]'
Windows is a valid trademark because it is not a generic term for an operating system. App Store is not a valid trademark because it IS a generic term for stores that sell applications.
'Gesture OS' is OK to trademark for an operating system because it is not a generic term for operating systems. Apple is trying to trademark a generic term in the field of business that it is generic.
I have a laptop for surfing/typing, a router for networking, a few Arduinos for hacking, a rack of servers for Real Work (TM), and if I wanted to play games with awesome graphics I would probably break down and use a console.
You can pay for and maintain all of that, or you can buy a decent desktop.
If the TRIM command is used, from the firmware's perspective, wouldn't the original statement be completely accurate?
No, the original statement says that the SSD understands the file-system, not that its been explicitly told by the OS what pages arent in use by a special command needed because SSD's shouldn't and don't normally understand file systems. Specifically he made it sound like SSD's were constantly wiping themselves based on the data that they contain, rather than the commands that they have been issued.
It has now been revealed (wasn't in the summary) that the submitter found an SSD firmware that does understand at least one file-system. This is not the norm, nor is it the future. Its a tragedy waiting to happen.
You have your terminology backwards. The industry standard is to refer to the erase units as Blocks and the read/write units as Pages.
On the other hand, in this situation, the thing doing the purging is the drive's firmware itself, not the OS, and the firmware knows for sure where the data is in the cells, and furthermore it's on a mission - to purge cells that it knows the filesystem is no longer using for data.
Inaccurate.
These drives are oblivious to the file-system, which is why there needs to be a TRIM command which allows the OS to say "hey, I don't care about that page (4 KB) any longer." If the SSD is pretending to be a 40 GB drive, then over time its working set grows to 40 GB of data even if the file-system is only using 10 GB of it.. and it needs to treat all 40 GB as precious unless its received some TRIM's to inform it that only 10 GB is precious.
You are right that if its powered up and idle, the SSD will be looking for re-mapping work to do on its own behalf. But you are wrong that the SSD is doing the purging outside of OS intervention.. the OS must specifically mark pages for purging.
According to the Intel blah Drive Information tool, my SSD ate 400 GB writes since about 5 months.
~1 TB per year, and that thing (if its the 40 GB model) should withstand ~200 TB of erases.
Assuming perfect weak levelling, that's 6.4 rewrite cycles per year for a 256GB SSD. A drive that can 'only' handle 3,000 rewrites will therefore wear out after about 450 years. If it does a tenth as well as that, then it will last for almost as long as hard drives have existed.
There is another factor that you arent considering, and that is write amplification. In an ideal world, the write amplification factor will be 1x (no amplification), but could be (for OCZ's current lineup) as bad as 128x (each 4 KB write causes a 512 KB erase.) I havent seen an actual write amplification study for various workloads, but the anecdotal reports are less than 2x.
I think what most people dont understand is that once we are talking about 40+GB drives, the erase limits really do become trivialized by the sheer enormity of the amount of erases (measured in KB) that these devices can sustain. Even 100000 erase cycles isnt very impressive on a 1 MB drive (100 GB of erases), but on a 40 GB drive even 1000 erase cycles is extremely impressive (40 TB of erases.) This, combined with the fact that most people way over-estimate how much data they are writing...
This is why I believe in hybrid setups. The other replies to this are talking about mere millions of writes.
There are no replies talking about mere millions of writes. The one reply that did mention 1 million was talking about per cell and is also very wrong. Furthermore, we do not speak of write limits with SSD's. We speak of erase limits. We should learn the difference before being critical. SSD's write in 4K Pages but erase in Blocks. OCZ is currently using 128 Pages per Block, so Blocks are 512K on their devices.
Do you know how many writes the swap file gets every hour you use your computer?
You are attempting to invoke a nebulous unknown to support your argument for hybrids. When you know how much you are writing per hour on average, and how that compares to the limits of these drives, then you might have support for your belief in hybrids. Right now all you have given is voodoo hand-waving. Swapping has been considered bad for a lot longer than SSD's have been around, because disk reads and writes were slow, so you are essentially only hitch-hiking on that traditional negativity here. On modern SSD's, reads and writes are much faster, so that traditional reason for hating swap doesnt just naturally cross over.
My guess is that you are severely over-estimating how much writing you are doing per day while also severely under-estimating how much writing can be done on these drives. The erase-limits of these drives will last years even if you routinely erase and refill them entirely each day.
I got bitten a couple of time by the JMicron bug
The bug was well known pretty much right from the start, yet you still got bit twice by it. My suggestion to you is to find someone knowledgeable to make hardware purchases for you.
If you are averaging a sustained 20MB/sec, then your drive, controller, partition alignment, or drivers suck.. and by suck I mean really really really suck.
It is hard to imagine the great lengths of time you would have to invest in finding a collection of SATA 2.0 hardware that bad, so its almost certainly your partition alignment or drivers.
You do know that modern drives require 4096 byte partition alignment, while most older OS's presume that 512 byte is good enough?
We saw prices of the previous generation drop from $4/GB to under $2/GB while waiting for SATA 3.0 adoption. Now those same SATA 2.0 SSD's will drop much further... by years end it will be a great time to pick up older SATA 2.0 SSD's
It's not contractual language between corporations, it's a demand from the DOJ that those corporations have to meet in order to conduct a merger.
But once the merger has been conducted... what then? The idea that Comcast can be held to any of these conditions in perpetuity is laughable.. at the simplest level, Comcast can then spin off (a demerger) a wholly-owned subsidiary that conducts half of the business the DOJ would otherwise find objectionable... in fact, I think that its fairly certain that Comcast would be spinning off several subsidiaries even if the DOJ wasnt in the picture.
Mergers followed by demergers are actually quite common.
The size of on-chip cache determines its latency. Larger caches are slower because they HAVE to be, not because they are made of different stuff.
The first-order reasons is distance. The L1 is closest to where the data is needed, the L2 farther away, and the L3 still farther. Its not possible to simply make the L1 larger without also increasing the largest distance and thus its latency.
So the L1 is kept small on purpose, to reduce its latency (to 2 or 3 clock cycles these days)
Trust me. The CPU manufacturers arent stupid. Their cache size choices are pretty close to optimal given the workloads they expect of their processors.