AmigaOS could do that with floppies because back then the computer was 100% in charge of the drive and knew exactly what had gone through and what not.
A modern disk runs an entire OS of its own, and very possibly lies to the OS about its internal state, because lies look better on benchmarks. Just because the drive says "this has been saved", doesn't necessarily it has been.
That means the OS can't really do what you want reliably. It might work with some drives, and fail miserably with others.
If every hard disk was truthful about what's on the platter, and every SSD had the capacitors needed to finish work, this would work nicely. But we unfortunately don't have that.
At this point, hardware specs have well outpaced what is necessary to do most work. Even something like a phone or tablet is far superior to what would have been an impressive machine not so long ago. We're no longer counting every byte, processing, memory and storage are all plentiful even at low prices.
You need some sort of computer to access these services all the same, and it's pretty much a given that any such hardware can do the required work locally just fine, without the need to connect anywhere or pay anybody for a subscription.
You'd really have to to try really hard to buy something that would be only powerful enough to connect to a remote service and work as a display. In fact, the web has grown to require some quite impressive specs, and at this point it would be very hard to sell something you can't browse the web on comfortably, which means there's a lower bound to what can be sold reasonably.
It might make some sense for videogames, but the same problem exists there -- a cheap computer currently has a surprisingly decent integrated video card, which while it won't run Witcher 3 at 4K at 60 FPS, will do a quite passable job at low settings.
And of course such services always have issues with latency and bad connections.
Netflix pays their ISP for their connection, I pay mine for mine. That's all there has to be. There's no reason for my ISP to care about Netflix, because whatever are the costs of my usage of Netflix should be covered by the money I pay.
8K is actually 2x2 4K displays, so 4X the amount of pixels again.
So correspondingly, 16K is 4X 8K, and 32K is 4X 16K. You're asking for a display with a resolution of 530 million pixels. At 8 bit color, you need 1500 MB of memory just to buffer one single frame. And then to transfer 133 GB/s just to display at the Oculus' 90 FPS.
Sure, nVidia is just a week from announcing that they've completely revolutionized several fields in one go.
I've got a laptop with 1 thunderbolt port (and two USB C), and damn, it's nice. I can charge from either side of the laptop, which is great for safety and comfort. I can plug two 4K monitors into one port with a pretty cheap dongle. It even works in Linux. And I can plug an external video card, but I've not tried yet.
It's extremely cool that I can expand a small, light, long battery life laptop into a configuration that's got all the comforts of a high end desktop.
The thing is that 16 bit audio already has all the dynamic range it needs, more in fact. Pretty much nobody listens to stuff that goes from "barely audible falling leaves" to "gas powered chainsaw" in one composition. That's really all that 24 bit audio could give you. It's good in the studio for headroom, but for actual listening, I don't think anybody is missing the ability of reproducing the experience of sticking their head into a jet engine.
The same goes for >44.1 KHz audio. 10 year olds might actually derive some benefit from that, but most of those don't buy high end audio equipment. By the time you have the disposable cash to shell out for expensive amps and speakers, it's likely already too late, as high frequency hearing decreases with age.
Things like Facebook have a lot of inertia. If you use it a lot, then certainly over a year letting go of it would lead to many small inconveniences adding up.
Even if I had an account and logged in once in a blue moon I would say no to say $100/year, because over a year, it's basically a rounding error. $8/month is well below what I spend on coffee and random nonsense and not worth the exchange for anything that even might come handy.
$1000/year would seem to be the starting point where it starts feeling like money -- if you're living paycheck to paycheck, then $83/month is probably a pretty big deal.
I think that's mostly unrelated to Facebook, though. My logic would go the same if you asked me to say, commit to not using a dremel tool (which I very rarely use). It's less about the value of Facebook, and more about the amount that starts feeling like enough money to justify any sort of year-long commitment.
Of course the price would go up a lot for something I actually valued. I would put a $1000/year threshold as the absolute minimum to consider something of this kind.
Why yes, Curiosity has a bunch of fancy stuff onboard.
And it still drives at an amazing 0.08 mph. I think even turtles go faster than that. A human walking is 3.1 mph. So we've got an almost 40X improvement before we even add a rover.
Communications to Mars have stupid high latency. 4 to 24 minutes depending on where Mars happens to be.
As a result, the robots have to be incredibly paranoid and drive at a snail's pace. Put some people there and with good equipment they could get stuff done 20 times faster, not to mention doing things the robots aren't equipped for.
Put a small fabrication shop on Mars, and they'll be able to craft whatever tool's needed for the job on the spot if anything unexpected comes up.
I read Battlefield Earth out of morbid curiosity. It was horrible.
The first third of so corresponds to the movie, and is the part that reads the best. Not good by any means, but the least awful. From there, it's all downhill. First, there's the defeated Terl and some random handicapped jerk from Johnny's village vs Johnny, then it's Johnny vs Intergalactic Banking, which is about as exciting as that sound.
Hubbard apparently made some noise about writing good scifi with paying attention to the science, but the science is laughable. The plot relies on stupidity. The core idea is that an alien species that has zero concern for the wellbeing of anybody on Earth, planet killing bombs, teleportation, and autonomous surveillance and bombing aircraft for some reason needs to mine by hand, rather than say, using robots or just blowing up mountains and sorting out the rubble. There's also that the "devious" villain for some reason puts up with a rebellious slave and teaches him everything needed to fight a revolution.
Well, then Apple shouldn't be giving them an easy payday by being accurate about what they claim. It's really simple.
Nobody but the liars benefits when companies are allowed to fudge their numbers "because it's just a little bit", or "because we look at things differently".
Hold everyone to the same, strict standard.
And for that matter yes, I would be very much in favor of some sort of regulation about how storage size is advertise, because a 16 GB phone sure as hell can't hold 16 GB of music, like one could expect. Just add a "(8 GB used by the OS, 8 GB available to the user)" right afterwards, and now it's much clearer.
I'd be a prime target for such a test since I make very heavy use of my smartphone.
But the thing is, a smartphone is simply a tiny, limited computer. It can be trivially substituted by any other computer in any circumstance where size is not a complete deal breaker.
For instance I have my lunch in a bar, where I watch videos on youtube. Doing the same with a laptop might be a bit quirky, but there's no reason why I couldn't do that.
Reading in the underground without a tablet would be inconvenient, as one needs to be seated to use a laptop. But it wouldn't be a particularly big deal. I could always print stuff, or perhaps use a Kindle if that's allowed.
I guess the main inconvenience would be music, as I use bluetooth headphones, and carrying a laptop everywhere to work as a source would be a pain. But I'm sure I could still get a dedicated player for that.
Overall, I could do this quite easily without really changing any of my usual patterns which currently heavily involve a smartphone.
Cryptocurrencies are specifically designed to deal with that.
For instance for Bitcoin, the network works in such a way that if processing power doubles, so does difficulty, keeping the mining rate the same it was.
Additionally, the amount you get for mining periodically halves and there's a fixed maximum supply of 21 million bitcoins total.
So unless you manage to find a defect in the design, it doesn't matter what processing power you have: the rate mining will remain constant, punctuated with a halving of production at predictable intervals, and the last bitcoin will be mined roughly in 2140.
And here we come to the word "eventually", which is also in my first post.
They're not doing it because things aren't there yet. I'm saying nuclear will eventually go away in favor of the mass application of simpler ideas. It's far easier to throw more solar panels at the problem than to comply with nuclear regulations.
You know, servers also have transmission and access requirements. You can't plop a server down in a field and walk away either. It's called "networking", and it happens I did mention it in the previous post.
And given that the electrical network reaches pretty much everywhere this entire subject would matter, it doesn't seem like that much of a problem.
Also, it's an analogy. Analogies by their nature are always not 100% exact anyway, though this one is holding up fairly well I think.
A huge excess of generation, and/or battery/pumped storage.
Basically what I'm saying that eventually just putting solar panels everywhere, plus storage for the night will do the trick. If you end up exceeding the daylight requirements by 50%, who cares if it's still cheaper and easier than nuclear?
In IT terms, rather than solving a problem by a huge, room sized mainframe that requires a very specific environment and people with very special skills, solve it by racks and racks of cheap commodity hardware. Not enough capacity? Buy more of that stuff. Ran out of room? Put it somewhere else and hook it up to the network. Eventually using common, consumer level equipment became superior to buying some monster of a machine of which there's only a few dozen in existence. That's what I think will end up happening to nuclear.
I know safety is taken very seriously these days, that reactor designs are good and not like the RBMK, that reactors don't explode when malfunctioning, that accidents kill very few people if any, and so on, and so forth.
But ensuring all of this takes a lot of people, time, money and effort. You can't just put a nuclear powerplant anywhere you like. It takes years of planning, years of careful construction, then there's constant oversight, lots of security and guards, issues with insurance... while nuclear is a perfectly good technology when viewed in the abstract, it's an enormous pain in the ass in practice.
And that's why eventually it will go away. When faced with the choice of dealing all the stuff above, or just putting a bunch of solar panels/mirrors/wind turbines pretty much anywhere you please with a cheap metal fence around it, it's clear what is the most convenient option.
Eventually it will get to the point where power generation can be solved by just building a lot of small renewable energy powerplants all over the place plus storage, and once that starts happening, nuclear is dead.
The need for error checking has been around for a very long time. Yes, cosmic particles are indeed a thing, and result in increased memory errors at high altitude, in airplanes, or especially in space.
I remember parity RAM being around in the 90s, and I'm pretty sure it's older than that. Pretty much any server these days uses ECC for this reason.
I run ECC and record the occassional bit flip in my logs once in a while. These can be found at/sys/devices/system/edac/mc/mc0/.
What's odd is that ECC is not routinely used in all hardware. Depending on the conditions it can be of great help, as the rare bit flip can cause strange problems that can take ages to track down. And it works well for figuring out when you have a bad memory module -- the computer will figure it out on its own.
The version of Konsole in Fedora 29 supports split windows fine.
It's inferior to Terminator, though. Konsole can only split a window either horizontally or vertically, while Terminator can mix and match those. So for instance you can't make a 2x2 split layout in Konsole.
Also, if you're a fan of fancy terminals, Kitty is also worth looking into.
So what this tells me is that this piece of news might as well not exist. The only reasonable reaction is "Oh, okay".
Because whether this is a good or a bad decision on Musk's part depends on whether those managers were doing a good job or not, and not having insight into those managers' work and reasoning we can't tell if they were doing a good job or not, and therefore whether Musk's decision to fire them was a good one or not.
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It's not really practical today.
AmigaOS could do that with floppies because back then the computer was 100% in charge of the drive and knew exactly what had gone through and what not.
A modern disk runs an entire OS of its own, and very possibly lies to the OS about its internal state, because lies look better on benchmarks. Just because the drive says "this has been saved", doesn't necessarily it has been.
That means the OS can't really do what you want reliably. It might work with some drives, and fail miserably with others.
If every hard disk was truthful about what's on the platter, and every SSD had the capacitors needed to finish work, this would work nicely. But we unfortunately don't have that.
At this point, hardware specs have well outpaced what is necessary to do most work. Even something like a phone or tablet is far superior to what would have been an impressive machine not so long ago. We're no longer counting every byte, processing, memory and storage are all plentiful even at low prices.
You need some sort of computer to access these services all the same, and it's pretty much a given that any such hardware can do the required work locally just fine, without the need to connect anywhere or pay anybody for a subscription.
You'd really have to to try really hard to buy something that would be only powerful enough to connect to a remote service and work as a display. In fact, the web has grown to require some quite impressive specs, and at this point it would be very hard to sell something you can't browse the web on comfortably, which means there's a lower bound to what can be sold reasonably.
It might make some sense for videogames, but the same problem exists there -- a cheap computer currently has a surprisingly decent integrated video card, which while it won't run Witcher 3 at 4K at 60 FPS, will do a quite passable job at low settings.
And of course such services always have issues with latency and bad connections.
NN is about removing extortion.
Netflix pays their ISP for their connection, I pay mine for mine. That's all there has to be. There's no reason for my ISP to care about Netflix, because whatever are the costs of my usage of Netflix should be covered by the money I pay.
32K display!?
A 4K display is 4X of 1080p pixels.
8K is actually 2x2 4K displays, so 4X the amount of pixels again.
So correspondingly, 16K is 4X 8K, and 32K is 4X 16K. You're asking for a display with a resolution of 530 million pixels. At 8 bit color, you need 1500 MB of memory just to buffer one single frame. And then to transfer 133 GB/s just to display at the Oculus' 90 FPS.
Sure, nVidia is just a week from announcing that they've completely revolutionized several fields in one go.
So buy a laptop with more ports.
I've got a laptop with 1 thunderbolt port (and two USB C), and damn, it's nice. I can charge from either side of the laptop, which is great for safety and comfort. I can plug two 4K monitors into one port with a pretty cheap dongle. It even works in Linux. And I can plug an external video card, but I've not tried yet.
It's extremely cool that I can expand a small, light, long battery life laptop into a configuration that's got all the comforts of a high end desktop.
The thing is that 16 bit audio already has all the dynamic range it needs, more in fact. Pretty much nobody listens to stuff that goes from "barely audible falling leaves" to "gas powered chainsaw" in one composition. That's really all that 24 bit audio could give you. It's good in the studio for headroom, but for actual listening, I don't think anybody is missing the ability of reproducing the experience of sticking their head into a jet engine.
The same goes for >44.1 KHz audio. 10 year olds might actually derive some benefit from that, but most of those don't buy high end audio equipment. By the time you have the disposable cash to shell out for expensive amps and speakers, it's likely already too late, as high frequency hearing decreases with age.
Things like Facebook have a lot of inertia. If you use it a lot, then certainly over a year letting go of it would lead to many small inconveniences adding up.
Even if I had an account and logged in once in a blue moon I would say no to say $100/year, because over a year, it's basically a rounding error. $8/month is well below what I spend on coffee and random nonsense and not worth the exchange for anything that even might come handy.
$1000/year would seem to be the starting point where it starts feeling like money -- if you're living paycheck to paycheck, then $83/month is probably a pretty big deal.
I think that's mostly unrelated to Facebook, though. My logic would go the same if you asked me to say, commit to not using a dremel tool (which I very rarely use). It's less about the value of Facebook, and more about the amount that starts feeling like enough money to justify any sort of year-long commitment.
Of course the price would go up a lot for something I actually valued. I would put a $1000/year threshold as the absolute minimum to consider something of this kind.
Also children. It's perfectly reasonable for a child to go to a store or a hairdresser on their own.
Why yes, Curiosity has a bunch of fancy stuff onboard.
And it still drives at an amazing 0.08 mph. I think even turtles go faster than that. A human walking is 3.1 mph. So we've got an almost 40X improvement before we even add a rover.
Communications to Mars have stupid high latency. 4 to 24 minutes depending on where Mars happens to be.
As a result, the robots have to be incredibly paranoid and drive at a snail's pace. Put some people there and with good equipment they could get stuff done 20 times faster, not to mention doing things the robots aren't equipped for.
Put a small fabrication shop on Mars, and they'll be able to craft whatever tool's needed for the job on the spot if anything unexpected comes up.
I read Battlefield Earth out of morbid curiosity. It was horrible.
The first third of so corresponds to the movie, and is the part that reads the best. Not good by any means, but the least awful. From there, it's all downhill. First, there's the defeated Terl and some random handicapped jerk from Johnny's village vs Johnny, then it's Johnny vs Intergalactic Banking, which is about as exciting as that sound.
Hubbard apparently made some noise about writing good scifi with paying attention to the science, but the science is laughable. The plot relies on stupidity. The core idea is that an alien species that has zero concern for the wellbeing of anybody on Earth, planet killing bombs, teleportation, and autonomous surveillance and bombing aircraft for some reason needs to mine by hand, rather than say, using robots or just blowing up mountains and sorting out the rubble. There's also that the "devious" villain for some reason puts up with a rebellious slave and teaches him everything needed to fight a revolution.
Oh, and there's a guy named "Arsebogger" in it.
I don't recommend it at all, it sucks.
Well, then Apple shouldn't be giving them an easy payday by being accurate about what they claim. It's really simple.
Nobody but the liars benefits when companies are allowed to fudge their numbers "because it's just a little bit", or "because we look at things differently".
Hold everyone to the same, strict standard.
And for that matter yes, I would be very much in favor of some sort of regulation about how storage size is advertise, because a 16 GB phone sure as hell can't hold 16 GB of music, like one could expect. Just add a "(8 GB used by the OS, 8 GB available to the user)" right afterwards, and now it's much clearer.
Certainly. Competition is compromised when companies are allowed whatever they please, rather what reflects reality.
Any company that lies about their product characteristics should get a big fat fine.
I'd be a prime target for such a test since I make very heavy use of my smartphone.
But the thing is, a smartphone is simply a tiny, limited computer. It can be trivially substituted by any other computer in any circumstance where size is not a complete deal breaker.
For instance I have my lunch in a bar, where I watch videos on youtube. Doing the same with a laptop might be a bit quirky, but there's no reason why I couldn't do that.
Reading in the underground without a tablet would be inconvenient, as one needs to be seated to use a laptop. But it wouldn't be a particularly big deal. I could always print stuff, or perhaps use a Kindle if that's allowed.
I guess the main inconvenience would be music, as I use bluetooth headphones, and carrying a laptop everywhere to work as a source would be a pain. But I'm sure I could still get a dedicated player for that.
Overall, I could do this quite easily without really changing any of my usual patterns which currently heavily involve a smartphone.
Cryptocurrencies are specifically designed to deal with that.
For instance for Bitcoin, the network works in such a way that if processing power doubles, so does difficulty, keeping the mining rate the same it was.
Additionally, the amount you get for mining periodically halves and there's a fixed maximum supply of 21 million bitcoins total.
So unless you manage to find a defect in the design, it doesn't matter what processing power you have: the rate mining will remain constant, punctuated with a halving of production at predictable intervals, and the last bitcoin will be mined roughly in 2140.
And here we come to the word "eventually", which is also in my first post.
They're not doing it because things aren't there yet. I'm saying nuclear will eventually go away in favor of the mass application of simpler ideas. It's far easier to throw more solar panels at the problem than to comply with nuclear regulations.
You know, servers also have transmission and access requirements. You can't plop a server down in a field and walk away either. It's called "networking", and it happens I did mention it in the previous post.
And given that the electrical network reaches pretty much everywhere this entire subject would matter, it doesn't seem like that much of a problem.
Also, it's an analogy. Analogies by their nature are always not 100% exact anyway, though this one is holding up fairly well I think.
"energy powerplants all over the place plus storage," -- it's in my first post.
A huge excess of generation, and/or battery/pumped storage.
Basically what I'm saying that eventually just putting solar panels everywhere, plus storage for the night will do the trick. If you end up exceeding the daylight requirements by 50%, who cares if it's still cheaper and easier than nuclear?
In IT terms, rather than solving a problem by a huge, room sized mainframe that requires a very specific environment and people with very special skills, solve it by racks and racks of cheap commodity hardware. Not enough capacity? Buy more of that stuff. Ran out of room? Put it somewhere else and hook it up to the network. Eventually using common, consumer level equipment became superior to buying some monster of a machine of which there's only a few dozen in existence. That's what I think will end up happening to nuclear.
I know safety is taken very seriously these days, that reactor designs are good and not like the RBMK, that reactors don't explode when malfunctioning, that accidents kill very few people if any, and so on, and so forth.
But ensuring all of this takes a lot of people, time, money and effort. You can't just put a nuclear powerplant anywhere you like. It takes years of planning, years of careful construction, then there's constant oversight, lots of security and guards, issues with insurance... while nuclear is a perfectly good technology when viewed in the abstract, it's an enormous pain in the ass in practice.
And that's why eventually it will go away. When faced with the choice of dealing all the stuff above, or just putting a bunch of solar panels/mirrors/wind turbines pretty much anywhere you please with a cheap metal fence around it, it's clear what is the most convenient option.
Eventually it will get to the point where power generation can be solved by just building a lot of small renewable energy powerplants all over the place plus storage, and once that starts happening, nuclear is dead.
Or you could buy AMD, which seems to have excellent support for it.
The need for error checking has been around for a very long time. Yes, cosmic particles are indeed a thing, and result in increased memory errors at high altitude, in airplanes, or especially in space.
I remember parity RAM being around in the 90s, and I'm pretty sure it's older than that. Pretty much any server these days uses ECC for this reason.
I run ECC and record the occassional bit flip in my logs once in a while. These can be found at /sys/devices/system/edac/mc/mc0/.
What's odd is that ECC is not routinely used in all hardware. Depending on the conditions it can be of great help, as the rare bit flip can cause strange problems that can take ages to track down. And it works well for figuring out when you have a bad memory module -- the computer will figure it out on its own.
That wastes a lot of screen space, and is more fiddling than just adjusting the borders in something like Terminator.
Plus, I use both multiple tabs and splits inside some of the tabs.
The version of Konsole in Fedora 29 supports split windows fine.
It's inferior to Terminator, though. Konsole can only split a window either horizontally or vertically, while Terminator can mix and match those. So for instance you can't make a 2x2 split layout in Konsole.
Also, if you're a fan of fancy terminals, Kitty is also worth looking into.
So what this tells me is that this piece of news might as well not exist. The only reasonable reaction is "Oh, okay".
Because whether this is a good or a bad decision on Musk's part depends on whether those managers were doing a good job or not, and not having insight into those managers' work and reasoning we can't tell if they were doing a good job or not, and therefore whether Musk's decision to fire them was a good one or not.