Ummm monster trucks and nascar are definitely bland. Nascar has to be the most bland thing on the planet, it is even more boring than watching baseball. Hell, I'd venture nascar has got to even boring for the drivers.
It's just yet another variation of the same overdone story. Yes it is a good tale, there are thousands of those. I read superior fantasy novels all the time. Being foreign and old adds precisely zero points. I wouldn't rate that higher than "The Last Castle", "The Shawshank Redemption", or books like "The Wheel of Time", "The Sword of Truth", or the works of Tolkien. The list really could go on forever across multiple genres.
There are great stories from many cultures. What I tend to find is that where most countries have 4-6 great old classics they overplay again and again the US has hundreds of films and books to rival them including superior productions of those same foreign tales. We've just produced a lot more media overall. The US isn't the BBC making things with Druids, Merlin, Sherlock, Doctor Who, and Robinhood over and over again. The US produces at least as many new stories which rival those with each passing year.
It isn't that the plot of Avengers is the pinnacle of US culture in terms of story (though it is underrated) it is the current pinnacle globally in terms of overall production. It doesn't matter what the actual story is, the US production (which will exploit locations and talent globally) is capable of blowing away any foreign production.
That's why all this non-anime subtitled garbage being funded by Netflix is so annoying. US produced and funded "subtitled foreign films" so that the tech immigrants can have content locally and intellectuals can feel enlightened, superior, and cultured. We are actually downgrading content so people who watch trash telenovelas, real housewives, goldengirls, and the Kardashians can pretend they are cultured and not consuming crap of the lower grade than Nascar.
Actually the comics are pretty large scale and entertaining writing. People who use words like "culture" too often generally spend far too much of their time enjoying the smell of their enlightened gaseous emanations. Films and books dedicated to these things tend to be filled with deep, meaningful, artistic, and downright boring.
it's like Shakespeare, you can enjoy parsing it out, you can seem very impressive to those who haven't if you've done so and even more so if you memorize a few quotes, but ultimately it is all highly overrated with many sitcoms actually having better plots and many things without much of a plot at all actually being more entertaining.
Just build walls around the cities, the full metropolitan areas so you get all those suburbs that are separately incorporated but actually part of the same damn population. You get a pass on the outside that lets you in/out and to board planes that aren't destined for other large cities but your pass and biometrics have to match to prove you aren't a resident to use them.
As opposed to everywhere else which just embraces blatant racism as normal culture and pretends there are lynchings, hangings, shooting, and beatings happening everywhere in the US so you can view your bullshit as different.
Of course they hurt parks. The parks cost money to maintain, more people means more cost to maintain which is fine if those people pay toward that cost but illegal immigrants don't.
Which can be alleviated by opening more paths to legal immigrant status. There are some things which get in the way, piggy backing attempts to further open the floodgates of tech immigration onto any bill, a desire to make all these immigrants voters because it would favor one party even though it isn't a sound policy, and either party giving an inch meaning their (real or imagined) testicles falling off.
I don't see a literal big wall working well when tunnels are such a common thing. I can see a giant electrified fence with razor wire and a mesh network of sensors doing something useful. There are some great open frameworks built for monitoring oil pipelines that would work well here. Hell, use it to distribute free high speed Wifi and 5G cellular while at it and let anyone monitor it. Seems like a great way to boost immigration to the border as an added bonus and the police and civilians in those places become bonus eyes and enforcement.
But as far a giant literal wall. Seems like a meaningless gesture and an expensive one at that. But really, compared to some of the other crap we blow money on it is a drop in the bucket so I don't see why people are so outraged by it either. If they want a stupid wall, build a stupid wall, and still integrate sensors, wifi, and 5g so it has a purpose. You'll cover the last mile all the way down the border.;)
That wifi and 5g has an added purpose. Suddenly the Telcos have a vested financial interest in keeping the thing maintained and protected.
First of all, props for making this argument without being rabid and foaming at the mouth like most who advocate for the interests of businesses.
"People's Price Adjustment Council - East Coast Bureau"
In some of the places they are doing the manufacturing, there is something like that. But consumer sentiment still has power in the market. If the small number of people like me who are aware of what is happening are vocal and spread the sentiment a growing unrest on the subject spreads along with awareness. Eventually either the entrenched companies will have to react or someone who actually has the resources to enter the market will realize there is an opportunity for someone with deep enough pockets to upend the cart and upset the market.
"I suspect very few need SSDs because they NEED them. It's an elective. If they stopped buying them and made it clear to vendors prices were still too high vs. HDDs prices would come down."
Consumers aren't given a realistic option. Consumers would definitely be doing this if manufacturers were giving them 10TB SSDs for $100 more than the magnetic disks which is perfectly viable. It isn't a question of what consumers NEED. If we went by that model we'd all still 256k of ram.
"Operations that REQUIRE the benefits of SSDs will just pay it, like they payed for SCSI over IDE back whenever."
That is based on the faulty assumption that only for profit ventures and those with deep pockets require the benefits of SSDs. Selling magnetic drives when SSD has technologically supplanted them, has dramatically lower failure rates, and is cheap to produce is on part with installing fuses that are designed to fail. Hell, even the disk management firmware included in these drives is an example of that, they take a failure condition which is very real and can be pointed to and use it to justify firmware that aggressively marks off blocks to reduce capacity and hasten reported failure. Otherwise these drives would last a ridiculously long time. Why, your hard drive would go from the second most failing component in the system to a rank somewhere far behind ram.
Not having SSD performance by default carries a potential opportunity cost and increased operating costs that may be soft and difficult to quantify but are very real. The increased failures and cost of replacements also leeches vital capital from businesses and consumers.
"This is as much a case of consumers going to vendors on bended knee as it is vendors "milking" consumers. "
It is a question of bargaining power. Milking consumers in the interest of the vendors but it is contrary to the interests of everyone else. Stealing this market out from under the entrenched players with a giant value increase at a lower margin could still be an insane profit. Taking a giant leap in mass market extremely fast storage alongside pushing frameworks that accelerate computing with large size pre-calculated lookup tables could be a massive win.
With a large enough primary business that has a heavy need for storage it could even be worth it to run at break even or as a loss leader. This is exactly what Tesla has done with battery manufacturing. And while this might seem like a pointless forum post pissing into the wind, there are people in positions to take advantage of insight like this and run with it who buzz around here from time to time. I've posited ideas and seen them run with before, who knows, maybe one day someone will cut me in.
You might have got me there if I'd said it was the cost of sand.
"Creating silicon wafers isn't free"
That is certainly true and while the heavy energy input is part of it, most if it just that the equipment is made in small quantities with ridiculously high per unit cost.
"The price on SSDs reflect a global game of chicken, as each vendor is trying to maximize the price while still undercutting their competition."
Yet they publish roadmaps far in advance. You'd never do that unless you and the competition are keeping pace with each other within a reasonable margin rather every release being your best shots. AMD has made Intel shave a year off its planned releases by jumping ahead but the thing is, Intel only had to scramble because it wasn't targeting making its next release the best it could manage, it was targeting making it keep pace. The new CEO broke the unspoken agreement. The same keeping pace gentlemans agreement is in place here. The pricing tiers are more or less fixed within a certain margin and capacity is grown as slowly as they can make plausible. All the manufacturers have this common interest, if capacity grows too much too fast people don't need as many drives, reliability increases (fewer drives in your array means lower probability of failure), margins shrink, etc.
It's no different than cell phones. You ever wonder why all the providers have the same backwards concept of giving steep discounts to new customers but not on upgrades? They actually make more money if people keep switching, dropping grandfathered older plans, and buying new phones. They could build their model around retention but then they'd be in serious competition with the other providers, this way if you are sprint and 80% of new contracts are going to verizon it is no big deal because next week 80% will be coming to you. You just keep cycling around the contracts and the size of the pie is grown so much all the providers win. Creating churn and competing in inches can far more profitable than lapping the competition not mention carries far lower risk of running afoul of anti-trust concerns.
There are already better answers for these things. This is what your smart home hub is for. You are always going to have a poor experience on these things if you are connecting your voice assistant to things like hue, lifx, nest, harmony hub, etc directly. The answer is to integrate all those devices into a flexible and open smart controller like Home assist, Vera, etc and then integrate that and only that with your voice assistant(s).
That way you get a clean and modular system. You'll still have to learn the commands to some extent but because everything is presented to the voice assistant via one plugin/skill/service/whatever the syntax across devices will be uniform and consistent. Have an Alexa and GA or Sirii? Np, those things just talk to the same smart controller, state remains consistent and uniform, Everything and it's dog is including smart features but if you set up multiple things to control the same devices directly you are just asking for trouble.
Besides, if you are ever going to be serious about a smart home you can't use wifi for all your devices, wifi doesn't scale well to high client counts.
"You WERE given a choice in the free market economy, which makes alternatives available."
Yeah, a dumb phone or an Apple product which is even worse. How is that a choice? The choices we need aren't the ones which provide the best margins and profitability to companies. Once upon a time people running businesses actually cared about providing a good product at a fair price, now sociopaths stock pumping machines redefine fair price to mean whatever they can get someone to pay via any method they can get ruled as legal in a court. Hell, even illegal is fine as long as nobody says it is illegal out loud and after the court battle they make a profit.
Luddites don't but you don't magically turn into a luddite just because there is some new thing you don't agree is advancement. New is not automatically better and believe it or not some people consider privacy concerns a showstopper.
These are fair points. If you have Alexa you almost certainly intentionally paid for it. Is google counting phones?
That said, Google seems to be winning this war and I've starting replacing Alexa around the house with Google devices.
There are some issues though. First the app is horrible, the installed services is per user so it becomes highly fragmented. For instance I can't go in and remove phillips hue (which are more universally and seemlessly controlled via my home automation hub which GA can also talk to) because my wife initially installed it.
The same becomes true of shopping lists. Normally we use a voice assistant device in the kitchen, when something is running low, we think of something we want to make, or are simply doing a check before going shopping we'd quickly tell the voice assistant to add those things to the shopping list. In this way the person going shopping will always know we are low on bread and pick it up. With GA by default everything goes in individual shopping lists instead of a shared list. We can change this but currently my little brother is staying with us and has an iphone and no google services, GA says it can't identify him and refuses to let him modify a list. Major usability problem.
The GA devices don't seem to be aware of each other in the way you expect. With Alexa I can overlap the devices in such a way that the one which hears me best picks up what is being said and acts. Multiple devices sometimes activate with Google and the response is sometimes randomly shown on a different device than the one which actually picked it up. For instance, sometimes the GA built into the nvidia shield will display a response on the tv to something spoken to the device in the kitchen. Which is also an annoying function, it is actually a PIA to get rid of that pop-up which will disrupt content playing on the TV.
Music doesn't resume automatically when you give the assistant a command. And the various third party services seem to have poor reliability. When I turn off a zwave light in the livingroom the GA recognizes the command properly 95% of the time which is good enough for me but it actually turns on/off that light maybe 30% of the time with no indication GA knows it failed. Given that the controller is on the LAN and nothing special happening at the times it refuses I have no explanation. Pressing a switch that sends a command to the controller consistently works when GA fails.
That said, I can build GA integrated devices quite trivially and that is a huge win. So this is still the technology I'm going to support. Also, Amazon tends to be a heavily religion driven organization injecting its moral values into content and trying to exercise a closed and controlled platform rather than an open ecosystem which is just a bad long-term bet. Even if you don't care, developers do.
"Maybe not, but they are still MORE expensive to make"
More expensive to make than previous generation chips not necessarily more expensive than magnetic storage. At least not after initial costs for expanding manufacturing capacity are accounted for. Realistically we are talking about 100TB SSDs for a couple hundred dollars to replace 10TB magnetic disks selling for $180 now.
"my only option is to pay the consumer price, which is radically more than spinning storage"
Yes, I'm not proposing everyone go out and buy SSD to replace all their magnetic storage at existing available capacities and pricing.
Sure, the performance would hit bottlenecks (does now, it isn't like there aren't SANs populated with SSD now)... but how is that not a better problem to have than having slow and low capacity magnetic storage? Solid state scales to well over 200TB per disk with existing technology if they package it that way and the silicon isn't any more expensive than in the past when the chips were lower capacity, it is just more efficiently utilized.
I'm speaking to a technical crowd, so technically yes, some of the newer fab technologies require longer exposures and the like but nothing that can even begin to explain the small capacities and massive premium they are charging for these drives. They used to largely use the premium prices to pay for the R&D and new equipment and then drop prices. Now they ride the higher prices as long as they can and use articles like this to misdirect people... the next high capacity low cost storage technology already exists, they just don't want to race to the bottom.
"The main reasons for magnetic hard drives are cost, reliability, and scale. Yes you and anyone can build a huge raid of SSDs--if money was no object. However price per GB is $0.025 for a HDD and $0.25 for a SSD so sometimes 10x as much."
Yes, but that isn't because SSDs cost 10x as much to make. They price is where it is so they can maximize margin on SSD by selling it as premium technology.
Price is a value being set by the manufacturer. SSD's are superior technology to spinning magnetic storage. That is my point, the actual silicone used in that SSD doesn't justify the price being charged. Instead the price is based on the "premium" capabilities SSD brings to the table. If you simply eliminate the magnetic tier and price SSD options accordingly you dramatically cut the margins on those chips since it won't be premium but rather standard performance at that point.
I'm sure the argument that many would toss out would be manufacturing capacity. While chipmakers claim that production is too high now, they are saying as much with an argument that ignores they could simply sell more densely packed drives at lower prices because that does nothing for them. They'll quickly switch to "there aren't enough" in response to a proposal they give consumers more for less like that. However, that scarcity is again artificial, just like the telcos they don't want to upgrade lines and want to continue to leverage old infrastructure for higher margin returns.
Have you bought an SSD lately? They are mostly air as it is. There is absolutely no reason these couldn't be packed with newer chips to the same degrees as the solid bricks these drives were a few years back to make 200+TB SSDs. There is no particular reason that we need magnetic drives or similar capacity SSDs should cost significantly more. The drive manufacturers just have a common interest in maximizing return on every bit of infrastructure they own and have formed a consensus around it.
This isn't much different than the Telcos continuing to sell "T1" lines with nonsense about SLAs and guaranteed bandwidth. It had very little to do with offering the best product they could and almost everything to do with maximizing margins at consumer expense.
I'm not saying it isn't good for their businesses but when it comes to technology, artificial scarcity like this impacts R&D and availability of products and services for everyone else in a very pronounced negative way.
Tech companies (and others) are forming virtual international monopolies because they actually understand the work of John Nash and that there is more profit to be had by collaborating. This simply does too much damage for the rest of us to allow in certain key areas like Food production, healthcare, energy, defense, communications and especially technology.
Most free market economists do not account for the work of Nash. The entire concept of an unrestricted market which naturally organizes due to competition and market pressures breaks in a very serious way when you can prove that it can be more profitable to cycle non-loyal consumers between a small number of competitors than to actually compete with them in areas in which would reduce margins for all competitors.
"I am Executive Director of Environmental Defense Fund, where I direct our strategic plan and mission to address to global climate change and natural resource challenges. I am passionate about increasing shared prosperity and stewardship both domestically and internationally, while also developing scientifically and economically sound solutions. I spent five years at EDF managing the Oceans Program advocating for reforms and programs that help fisherman while also rebounding fisheries in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. I’ve also worked closely on our climate and energy projects, identifying new ways to open markets to clean energy financing. Before joining EDF, I spent 20 years developing and supporting scientifically sound bipartisan solutions to environmental challenges at the Environmental Protection Agency."
In other words, despite the last sentence there this undeniably a partisan political drive.
Really, common sense should tell you that nothing of much significance happens in the span of a couple weeks, especially when park rangers and security are still there. Most of this staff didn't even exist pre-Clinton and many state and private parks are serviced by fewer staff and less frequently on an ongoing basis while remaining great resources.
Yeah and being a little more responsible during that time almost certainly brought you rewards and advantages but not everyone has the same life and the same experiences. Some people grow up at 8, 18, 38, etc in fact, all of them do, in different ways. Not having enjoyed that time also has consequences of a different sort and relatively speaking your social intelligence was almost certainly impaired.
"But I guess in a modern culture where students demand that loans they willfully and knowingly took out must be forgiven because "too expensive", I shouldn't be surprised that people demand the ability to edit history in their personal favor."
Children with no actual experience of their own and no basis for comparison take out loans in a culture where everyone tells them it is the most important thing to do and the loans they take out are for dramatically overpriced education. Yes, maybe we can cut them a break. I suppose you have a serious issue with the criminal records of minors being expunged as well and reduced penalties.
I didn't go to kegger parties or take out loans I couldn't pay back. But I've made other mistakes. Forget what you think is the appropriate action, do you lack the empathy? Do you claim you've made no mistakes or simply have a total inability to have empathy for any of the ones you personally didn't make?
"That is easy. Just don't Instagram/Post about every little drunken binge or cutesy thing you ever see."
People are humans with all the human quirks and flaws. We could all live in huts on mountain tops and avoid these issues but even if YOU don't post every little thing on FB and instagram, everyone else at the party did. That time an old college buddy who never really grew up came to town and you reverted into a stupid younger version of yourself for an evening... well you might not see it since you aren't on social media, but the highly reserved, stable, and conservative person you've grown into isn't going to be judged by that anymore the next time you apply for your next position at a conservative law firm now your employer will be judging you based on the posts other people who were there that night made... FOREVER.
"The words we said were really said. The things we did really happened."
Some action you engaged in isn't your real self, it's just something you did. Everyone says something poorly, has a wrong idea, lets emotion cloud their judgement or get caught up in a moment. Those fuck-ups belong to them and those involved forever but they don't belong to anyone else. In a perfect world even you don't dwell on your past and build mountains of emotional baggage. People grow, evolve, and change and the vast majority of people are base judgmental pricks who actually think they elevated because of how judgmental they are. It is critical to be able to clean the slate and start over. Everyone deserves second chances in life and in the modern age there are no second chances. Also, that history you are protecting may not actually be real. You are also talking about the inability to remove false rumors and fake evidence, unjust conviction, etc.
Also just because what happened, happened, doesn't mean YOU have a right to know about it. All people are bad people filled with human weakness, faults, and carelessness, and as a society our tolerance and empathy on those matters is virtually non-existent.
"On some level I kind of agree, but there is also no particular reason they should be prohibited from it either."
There is a very simple reason, the interests of actual people outweigh the interests of companies. Companies are sociopath robots and we invented them. The minute companies inconvenience humans to a large degree or in a systematic way there is no reason NOT to prohibit their actions in fact since they have no ability to apply any sort of rational restraint and ethics on their own actions we have an obligation and a requirement to actively restrain them. Also, the data doesn't belong to the companies, it belongs to the people. Your life, your story, your history, is yours. In some cases that ownership is shared with others who were also involved. Nobody else has a right to it.
"The fact that it's easier to get more data now or cheaper to store more data doesn't in itself represent any fundamental difference."
That's like saying there is no fundamental difference between a sling shot and a nuclear weapon. In this case we are talking about something that was never okay but practical reality and social norms limited the scope of utility and damage.
You seem to be looking at things in black and white terms and missing that there is nothing in the world which is actually absolute and binary like that, everything is grey. The false everything is perfect image you talk about on social media is bad because it is a systematic extreme and people put too much faith in what they are seeing but everyone presents some level of mask. There are different layers and flavors of mask we all present and earning the trust and consideration to get to know the "real" you is something people have to earn, facebook and google don't have the right to steal exchanges between you and your closest friends simply because they run the modern form of the postal service.
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment it is mostly Florida and California on the way out and nobody is particularly upset about that.
How is that bad? It's probably already paid for the stupid wall.
Ummm monster trucks and nascar are definitely bland. Nascar has to be the most bland thing on the planet, it is even more boring than watching baseball. Hell, I'd venture nascar has got to even boring for the drivers.
It's just yet another variation of the same overdone story. Yes it is a good tale, there are thousands of those. I read superior fantasy novels all the time. Being foreign and old adds precisely zero points. I wouldn't rate that higher than "The Last Castle", "The Shawshank Redemption", or books like "The Wheel of Time", "The Sword of Truth", or the works of Tolkien. The list really could go on forever across multiple genres.
There are great stories from many cultures. What I tend to find is that where most countries have 4-6 great old classics they overplay again and again the US has hundreds of films and books to rival them including superior productions of those same foreign tales. We've just produced a lot more media overall. The US isn't the BBC making things with Druids, Merlin, Sherlock, Doctor Who, and Robinhood over and over again. The US produces at least as many new stories which rival those with each passing year.
It isn't that the plot of Avengers is the pinnacle of US culture in terms of story (though it is underrated) it is the current pinnacle globally in terms of overall production. It doesn't matter what the actual story is, the US production (which will exploit locations and talent globally) is capable of blowing away any foreign production.
That's why all this non-anime subtitled garbage being funded by Netflix is so annoying. US produced and funded "subtitled foreign films" so that the tech immigrants can have content locally and intellectuals can feel enlightened, superior, and cultured. We are actually downgrading content so people who watch trash telenovelas, real housewives, goldengirls, and the Kardashians can pretend they are cultured and not consuming crap of the lower grade than Nascar.
Actually the comics are pretty large scale and entertaining writing. People who use words like "culture" too often generally spend far too much of their time enjoying the smell of their enlightened gaseous emanations. Films and books dedicated to these things tend to be filled with deep, meaningful, artistic, and downright boring.
it's like Shakespeare, you can enjoy parsing it out, you can seem very impressive to those who haven't if you've done so and even more so if you memorize a few quotes, but ultimately it is all highly overrated with many sitcoms actually having better plots and many things without much of a plot at all actually being more entertaining.
Mahabharata? Pfft, it is no wheel of time.
The UK is a US territory.
Just build walls around the cities, the full metropolitan areas so you get all those suburbs that are separately incorporated but actually part of the same damn population. You get a pass on the outside that lets you in/out and to board planes that aren't destined for other large cities but your pass and biometrics have to match to prove you aren't a resident to use them.
"ignorant American race politics"
As opposed to everywhere else which just embraces blatant racism as normal culture and pretends there are lynchings, hangings, shooting, and beatings happening everywhere in the US so you can view your bullshit as different.
Of course they hurt parks. The parks cost money to maintain, more people means more cost to maintain which is fine if those people pay toward that cost but illegal immigrants don't.
Which can be alleviated by opening more paths to legal immigrant status. There are some things which get in the way, piggy backing attempts to further open the floodgates of tech immigration onto any bill, a desire to make all these immigrants voters because it would favor one party even though it isn't a sound policy, and either party giving an inch meaning their (real or imagined) testicles falling off.
I don't see a literal big wall working well when tunnels are such a common thing. I can see a giant electrified fence with razor wire and a mesh network of sensors doing something useful. There are some great open frameworks built for monitoring oil pipelines that would work well here. Hell, use it to distribute free high speed Wifi and 5G cellular while at it and let anyone monitor it. Seems like a great way to boost immigration to the border as an added bonus and the police and civilians in those places become bonus eyes and enforcement.
But as far a giant literal wall. Seems like a meaningless gesture and an expensive one at that. But really, compared to some of the other crap we blow money on it is a drop in the bucket so I don't see why people are so outraged by it either. If they want a stupid wall, build a stupid wall, and still integrate sensors, wifi, and 5g so it has a purpose. You'll cover the last mile all the way down the border. ;)
That wifi and 5g has an added purpose. Suddenly the Telcos have a vested financial interest in keeping the thing maintained and protected.
First of all, props for making this argument without being rabid and foaming at the mouth like most who advocate for the interests of businesses.
"People's Price Adjustment Council - East Coast Bureau"
In some of the places they are doing the manufacturing, there is something like that. But consumer sentiment still has power in the market. If the small number of people like me who are aware of what is happening are vocal and spread the sentiment a growing unrest on the subject spreads along with awareness. Eventually either the entrenched companies will have to react or someone who actually has the resources to enter the market will realize there is an opportunity for someone with deep enough pockets to upend the cart and upset the market.
"I suspect very few need SSDs because they NEED them. It's an elective. If they stopped buying them and made it clear to vendors prices were still too high vs. HDDs prices would come down."
Consumers aren't given a realistic option. Consumers would definitely be doing this if manufacturers were giving them 10TB SSDs for $100 more than the magnetic disks which is perfectly viable. It isn't a question of what consumers NEED. If we went by that model we'd all still 256k of ram.
"Operations that REQUIRE the benefits of SSDs will just pay it, like they payed for SCSI over IDE back whenever."
That is based on the faulty assumption that only for profit ventures and those with deep pockets require the benefits of SSDs. Selling magnetic drives when SSD has technologically supplanted them, has dramatically lower failure rates, and is cheap to produce is on part with installing fuses that are designed to fail. Hell, even the disk management firmware included in these drives is an example of that, they take a failure condition which is very real and can be pointed to and use it to justify firmware that aggressively marks off blocks to reduce capacity and hasten reported failure. Otherwise these drives would last a ridiculously long time. Why, your hard drive would go from the second most failing component in the system to a rank somewhere far behind ram.
Not having SSD performance by default carries a potential opportunity cost and increased operating costs that may be soft and difficult to quantify but are very real. The increased failures and cost of replacements also leeches vital capital from businesses and consumers.
"This is as much a case of consumers going to vendors on bended knee as it is vendors "milking" consumers. "
It is a question of bargaining power. Milking consumers in the interest of the vendors but it is contrary to the interests of everyone else. Stealing this market out from under the entrenched players with a giant value increase at a lower margin could still be an insane profit. Taking a giant leap in mass market extremely fast storage alongside pushing frameworks that accelerate computing with large size pre-calculated lookup tables could be a massive win.
With a large enough primary business that has a heavy need for storage it could even be worth it to run at break even or as a loss leader. This is exactly what Tesla has done with battery manufacturing. And while this might seem like a pointless forum post pissing into the wind, there are people in positions to take advantage of insight like this and run with it who buzz around here from time to time. I've posited ideas and seen them run with before, who knows, maybe one day someone will cut me in.
"And no, it's not the cost of sand, idiot."
You might have got me there if I'd said it was the cost of sand.
"Creating silicon wafers isn't free"
That is certainly true and while the heavy energy input is part of it, most if it just that the equipment is made in small quantities with ridiculously high per unit cost.
"The price on SSDs reflect a global game of chicken, as each vendor is trying to maximize the price while still undercutting their competition."
Yet they publish roadmaps far in advance. You'd never do that unless you and the competition are keeping pace with each other within a reasonable margin rather every release being your best shots. AMD has made Intel shave a year off its planned releases by jumping ahead but the thing is, Intel only had to scramble because it wasn't targeting making its next release the best it could manage, it was targeting making it keep pace. The new CEO broke the unspoken agreement. The same keeping pace gentlemans agreement is in place here. The pricing tiers are more or less fixed within a certain margin and capacity is grown as slowly as they can make plausible. All the manufacturers have this common interest, if capacity grows too much too fast people don't need as many drives, reliability increases (fewer drives in your array means lower probability of failure), margins shrink, etc.
It's no different than cell phones. You ever wonder why all the providers have the same backwards concept of giving steep discounts to new customers but not on upgrades? They actually make more money if people keep switching, dropping grandfathered older plans, and buying new phones. They could build their model around retention but then they'd be in serious competition with the other providers, this way if you are sprint and 80% of new contracts are going to verizon it is no big deal because next week 80% will be coming to you. You just keep cycling around the contracts and the size of the pie is grown so much all the providers win. Creating churn and competing in inches can far more profitable than lapping the competition not mention carries far lower risk of running afoul of anti-trust concerns.
There are already better answers for these things. This is what your smart home hub is for. You are always going to have a poor experience on these things if you are connecting your voice assistant to things like hue, lifx, nest, harmony hub, etc directly. The answer is to integrate all those devices into a flexible and open smart controller like Home assist, Vera, etc and then integrate that and only that with your voice assistant(s).
That way you get a clean and modular system. You'll still have to learn the commands to some extent but because everything is presented to the voice assistant via one plugin/skill/service/whatever the syntax across devices will be uniform and consistent. Have an Alexa and GA or Sirii? Np, those things just talk to the same smart controller, state remains consistent and uniform, Everything and it's dog is including smart features but if you set up multiple things to control the same devices directly you are just asking for trouble.
Besides, if you are ever going to be serious about a smart home you can't use wifi for all your devices, wifi doesn't scale well to high client counts.
"You WERE given a choice in the free market economy, which makes alternatives available."
Yeah, a dumb phone or an Apple product which is even worse. How is that a choice? The choices we need aren't the ones which provide the best margins and profitability to companies. Once upon a time people running businesses actually cared about providing a good product at a fair price, now sociopaths stock pumping machines redefine fair price to mean whatever they can get someone to pay via any method they can get ruled as legal in a court. Hell, even illegal is fine as long as nobody says it is illegal out loud and after the court battle they make a profit.
Luddites don't but you don't magically turn into a luddite just because there is some new thing you don't agree is advancement. New is not automatically better and believe it or not some people consider privacy concerns a showstopper.
These are fair points. If you have Alexa you almost certainly intentionally paid for it. Is google counting phones?
That said, Google seems to be winning this war and I've starting replacing Alexa around the house with Google devices.
There are some issues though. First the app is horrible, the installed services is per user so it becomes highly fragmented. For instance I can't go in and remove phillips hue (which are more universally and seemlessly controlled via my home automation hub which GA can also talk to) because my wife initially installed it.
The same becomes true of shopping lists. Normally we use a voice assistant device in the kitchen, when something is running low, we think of something we want to make, or are simply doing a check before going shopping we'd quickly tell the voice assistant to add those things to the shopping list. In this way the person going shopping will always know we are low on bread and pick it up. With GA by default everything goes in individual shopping lists instead of a shared list. We can change this but currently my little brother is staying with us and has an iphone and no google services, GA says it can't identify him and refuses to let him modify a list. Major usability problem.
The GA devices don't seem to be aware of each other in the way you expect. With Alexa I can overlap the devices in such a way that the one which hears me best picks up what is being said and acts. Multiple devices sometimes activate with Google and the response is sometimes randomly shown on a different device than the one which actually picked it up. For instance, sometimes the GA built into the nvidia shield will display a response on the tv to something spoken to the device in the kitchen. Which is also an annoying function, it is actually a PIA to get rid of that pop-up which will disrupt content playing on the TV.
Music doesn't resume automatically when you give the assistant a command. And the various third party services seem to have poor reliability. When I turn off a zwave light in the livingroom the GA recognizes the command properly 95% of the time which is good enough for me but it actually turns on/off that light maybe 30% of the time with no indication GA knows it failed. Given that the controller is on the LAN and nothing special happening at the times it refuses I have no explanation. Pressing a switch that sends a command to the controller consistently works when GA fails.
That said, I can build GA integrated devices quite trivially and that is a huge win. So this is still the technology I'm going to support. Also, Amazon tends to be a heavily religion driven organization injecting its moral values into content and trying to exercise a closed and controlled platform rather than an open ecosystem which is just a bad long-term bet. Even if you don't care, developers do.
"Maybe not, but they are still MORE expensive to make"
More expensive to make than previous generation chips not necessarily more expensive than magnetic storage. At least not after initial costs for expanding manufacturing capacity are accounted for. Realistically we are talking about 100TB SSDs for a couple hundred dollars to replace 10TB magnetic disks selling for $180 now.
"my only option is to pay the consumer price, which is radically more than spinning storage"
Yes, I'm not proposing everyone go out and buy SSD to replace all their magnetic storage at existing available capacities and pricing.
Sure, the performance would hit bottlenecks (does now, it isn't like there aren't SANs populated with SSD now)... but how is that not a better problem to have than having slow and low capacity magnetic storage? Solid state scales to well over 200TB per disk with existing technology if they package it that way and the silicon isn't any more expensive than in the past when the chips were lower capacity, it is just more efficiently utilized.
I'm speaking to a technical crowd, so technically yes, some of the newer fab technologies require longer exposures and the like but nothing that can even begin to explain the small capacities and massive premium they are charging for these drives. They used to largely use the premium prices to pay for the R&D and new equipment and then drop prices. Now they ride the higher prices as long as they can and use articles like this to misdirect people... the next high capacity low cost storage technology already exists, they just don't want to race to the bottom.
"The main reasons for magnetic hard drives are cost, reliability, and scale. Yes you and anyone can build a huge raid of SSDs--if money was no object. However price per GB is $0.025 for a HDD and $0.25 for a SSD so sometimes 10x as much."
Yes, but that isn't because SSDs cost 10x as much to make. They price is where it is so they can maximize margin on SSD by selling it as premium technology.
Price is a value being set by the manufacturer. SSD's are superior technology to spinning magnetic storage. That is my point, the actual silicone used in that SSD doesn't justify the price being charged. Instead the price is based on the "premium" capabilities SSD brings to the table. If you simply eliminate the magnetic tier and price SSD options accordingly you dramatically cut the margins on those chips since it won't be premium but rather standard performance at that point.
I'm sure the argument that many would toss out would be manufacturing capacity. While chipmakers claim that production is too high now, they are saying as much with an argument that ignores they could simply sell more densely packed drives at lower prices because that does nothing for them. They'll quickly switch to "there aren't enough" in response to a proposal they give consumers more for less like that. However, that scarcity is again artificial, just like the telcos they don't want to upgrade lines and want to continue to leverage old infrastructure for higher margin returns.
Have you bought an SSD lately? They are mostly air as it is. There is absolutely no reason these couldn't be packed with newer chips to the same degrees as the solid bricks these drives were a few years back to make 200+TB SSDs. There is no particular reason that we need magnetic drives or similar capacity SSDs should cost significantly more. The drive manufacturers just have a common interest in maximizing return on every bit of infrastructure they own and have formed a consensus around it.
This isn't much different than the Telcos continuing to sell "T1" lines with nonsense about SLAs and guaranteed bandwidth. It had very little to do with offering the best product they could and almost everything to do with maximizing margins at consumer expense.
I'm not saying it isn't good for their businesses but when it comes to technology, artificial scarcity like this impacts R&D and availability of products and services for everyone else in a very pronounced negative way.
Tech companies (and others) are forming virtual international monopolies because they actually understand the work of John Nash and that there is more profit to be had by collaborating. This simply does too much damage for the rest of us to allow in certain key areas like Food production, healthcare, energy, defense, communications and especially technology.
Most free market economists do not account for the work of Nash. The entire concept of an unrestricted market which naturally organizes due to competition and market pressures breaks in a very serious way when you can prove that it can be more profitable to cycle non-loyal consumers between a small number of competitors than to actually compete with them in areas in which would reduce margins for all competitors.
Diane Regas according to Forbes:
"I am Executive Director of Environmental Defense Fund, where I direct our strategic plan and mission to address to global climate change and natural resource challenges. I am passionate about increasing shared prosperity and stewardship both domestically and internationally, while also developing scientifically and economically sound solutions. I spent five years at EDF managing the Oceans Program advocating for reforms and programs that help fisherman while also rebounding fisheries in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. I’ve also worked closely on our climate and energy projects, identifying new ways to open markets to clean energy financing. Before joining EDF, I spent 20 years developing and supporting scientifically sound bipartisan solutions to environmental challenges at the Environmental Protection Agency."
In other words, despite the last sentence there this undeniably a partisan political drive.
Really, common sense should tell you that nothing of much significance happens in the span of a couple weeks, especially when park rangers and security are still there. Most of this staff didn't even exist pre-Clinton and many state and private parks are serviced by fewer staff and less frequently on an ongoing basis while remaining great resources.
Yeah and being a little more responsible during that time almost certainly brought you rewards and advantages but not everyone has the same life and the same experiences. Some people grow up at 8, 18, 38, etc in fact, all of them do, in different ways. Not having enjoyed that time also has consequences of a different sort and relatively speaking your social intelligence was almost certainly impaired.
"But I guess in a modern culture where students demand that loans they willfully and knowingly took out must be forgiven because "too expensive", I shouldn't be surprised that people demand the ability to edit history in their personal favor."
Children with no actual experience of their own and no basis for comparison take out loans in a culture where everyone tells them it is the most important thing to do and the loans they take out are for dramatically overpriced education. Yes, maybe we can cut them a break. I suppose you have a serious issue with the criminal records of minors being expunged as well and reduced penalties.
I didn't go to kegger parties or take out loans I couldn't pay back. But I've made other mistakes. Forget what you think is the appropriate action, do you lack the empathy? Do you claim you've made no mistakes or simply have a total inability to have empathy for any of the ones you personally didn't make?
"That is easy. Just don't Instagram/Post about every little drunken binge or cutesy thing you ever see."
People are humans with all the human quirks and flaws. We could all live in huts on mountain tops and avoid these issues but even if YOU don't post every little thing on FB and instagram, everyone else at the party did. That time an old college buddy who never really grew up came to town and you reverted into a stupid younger version of yourself for an evening... well you might not see it since you aren't on social media, but the highly reserved, stable, and conservative person you've grown into isn't going to be judged by that anymore the next time you apply for your next position at a conservative law firm now your employer will be judging you based on the posts other people who were there that night made... FOREVER.
"The words we said were really said. The things we did really happened."
Some action you engaged in isn't your real self, it's just something you did. Everyone says something poorly, has a wrong idea, lets emotion cloud their judgement or get caught up in a moment. Those fuck-ups belong to them and those involved forever but they don't belong to anyone else. In a perfect world even you don't dwell on your past and build mountains of emotional baggage. People grow, evolve, and change and the vast majority of people are base judgmental pricks who actually think they elevated because of how judgmental they are. It is critical to be able to clean the slate and start over. Everyone deserves second chances in life and in the modern age there are no second chances. Also, that history you are protecting may not actually be real. You are also talking about the inability to remove false rumors and fake evidence, unjust conviction, etc.
Also just because what happened, happened, doesn't mean YOU have a right to know about it. All people are bad people filled with human weakness, faults, and carelessness, and as a society our tolerance and empathy on those matters is virtually non-existent.
"On some level I kind of agree, but there is also no particular reason they should be prohibited from it either."
There is a very simple reason, the interests of actual people outweigh the interests of companies. Companies are sociopath robots and we invented them. The minute companies inconvenience humans to a large degree or in a systematic way there is no reason NOT to prohibit their actions in fact since they have no ability to apply any sort of rational restraint and ethics on their own actions we have an obligation and a requirement to actively restrain them. Also, the data doesn't belong to the companies, it belongs to the people. Your life, your story, your history, is yours. In some cases that ownership is shared with others who were also involved. Nobody else has a right to it.
"The fact that it's easier to get more data now or cheaper to store more data doesn't in itself represent any fundamental difference."
That's like saying there is no fundamental difference between a sling shot and a nuclear weapon. In this case we are talking about something that was never okay but practical reality and social norms limited the scope of utility and damage.
You seem to be looking at things in black and white terms and missing that there is nothing in the world which is actually absolute and binary like that, everything is grey. The false everything is perfect image you talk about on social media is bad because it is a systematic extreme and people put too much faith in what they are seeing but everyone presents some level of mask. There are different layers and flavors of mask we all present and earning the trust and consideration to get to know the "real" you is something people have to earn, facebook and google don't have the right to steal exchanges between you and your closest friends simply because they run the modern form of the postal service.
It'll be a ridiculous joke we are laughed at for and that offers no benefits just like the encryption export restrictions.