A different point of amusement: The processor's capabilities and speed are roughly equivalent to the processor in the Intellivision. Most instructions are 1, 2 or 3 machine cycles long, but the processor apparently only runs at 100kHz. The Intellivision's CPU is 895kHz, but instructions take 6 to 14 cycles. The Intellivision is slightly faster, but lacks hardware divide/multiply and has less flexible addressing modes.
So, on the whole, it looks like "Intellivisions.... In..... SPACE!!!!!!!"
Yes, that is fairly interesting. I had noticed it also, and wondered how it might work.
It implies there will be some mechanism for the "computers" to exchange data and programs. (Since it looks like a bog standard von Neumann architecture, there's very little distinction.) For viruses to really take off, though, they need to exploit some vulnerability that's common to many programs. So, either these computers will have some baseline of common software that they come with, or there will be some widely popular 3rd party programs written by a handful of gamers, or some combination of the two. I imagine that third case is the most likely.
This has shades of Core Wars to it, actually. I wonder if that was an inspiration?
Well, the simulated processor is 16 bit, but that just runs the code you write to control your ship and such, as I understand it. Read carefully: "The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish."
That means as part of the game, the game provides you a computer to work with, and that computer is 16 bit. There's a whole game going on outside that computer.
I think we're left, then, arguing the semantics of the word "idiocy" then. According to my dictionary, idiocy is "utterly senseless or foolish behavior; a stupid or foolish act, statement, etc."
ZT policies make the teacher's and administrator's lives easier at the (sometimes extreme) expense of students. It doesn't really solve any problems. Actually, it appears to amplify them, but it mostly deflects them away from the administration. To think this is at all a good thing is foolish. The administrators who put these policies in place think they're good ideas, but I see them as foolish, and therefore idiots.
Speaking of which... that wasn't the only course I took that didn't rely much on a text book. My control theory classes had no text book -- rather, the professor gave a handout every period that gave the skeleton and some (but not all) of the meat for the "notes" for that days' lecture. You were encouraged to fill in the missing bits if you liked. I rarely did. Got an A in the first one (classical control), but only a B+ in the second one (state space control), mainly because I suck at matrices.
DSP and VLSI classes both had textbooks. I never even took the shrinkwrap off of my DSP text, and I never even bought the VLSI textbook.
Did I mention Bradley U. has some amazing professors?
This particular class (found the syllabus here) did have some textbooks, but I don't really remember them playing a large role. Granted, my memory is hazy, 17 years later. The stuff the professor was most interested in us learning was delivered in lecture. If you didn't take good notes, you didn't stand a chance on the exams or writing your essays. Attendance was mandatory, and for very good reason.
Being a 300-level class (ie. 3rd year, aka. Junior Year), the class really didn't focus on rote memorization. Rather, the professor wanted to us to think about the material at a higher level than that, understanding the social contexts, and drawing deeper conclusions about the relationships between the different religions. For me, it was quite the wild ride. Yeah, we needed to remember the facts, but he also wanted us to move beyond basic comprehension and toward analysis and synthesis.
It helped that Dr. Fuller was (and I imagine still is) an entertaining, knowledgeable and energetic professor that genuinely wanted to be there teaching. (If you watch the vid at that page, understand that he gets even more animated when he's giving lecture, and crams those 55 minutes absolutely full.) I'm not religious or really into religions at all, but I enjoyed the class and actually learned something. Maybe I don't remember the books because they were dull and uninteresting, comparatively.:-)
I only pulled a B+ in that course. It was the only course I ever took at the same time as my (then future) wife. She got an A with far less apparent effort than I put into it. (Of course, I suspect her larger background and personal interest in mythologies from around the world was an asset here.) Ah well... I have my engineering and she has her geology. It's all good.
Maybe it's an engineering thing. My degree is in electrical engineering.
That said, it may not work for a class that doesn't lend itself to the nice conceptual processes of engineering. LIke I said above, the only class I felt compelled to take copious notes in was that religions class. There was no way I was going to keep straight the Jains and Sikhs and ascetic ("skinny Buddha") Buddhists and. the later ("fat Buddha") Buddhists, the relationship or lack thereof of all those to Hinduism. Nor would I remember all the various religious/foundational texts of Hinduism (such as the epics Mahabharata (esp. the Bhagavad Gita) and the Ramayana), all the Chinese and Japanese religions such as Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, and so on.
Obviously, some of it stuck, given that I was able to rattle that off off the top of my head almost 20 years later. (I apologize for any oversimplifications, omissions or errors.) And who knows whether any of that would have stuck if I hadn't taken (and studied!!) those copious notes. It wasn't something you could derive from first principles, unlike, say, derivatives and integrals, or hell, deriving Ohm's Law from Maxwell's Equations! It certainly wasn't something you could apply, except by adopting it as a way of life. I can apply Ohm's Law to a circuit. How do I apply the eight-fold path, and to what? Only thing I can think of is to apply it to myself through contemplation, self-reflection, and adoption of the Buddha's teachings in my own life. While that may be a worthwhile thing to do, it rises above the level of most class studies.;-)
I honestly think it depends on the person. I find if I take copious notes, it doesn't help me, and instead I am more concentrated on being a secretary taking dictation than really *listening* (as opposed to just hearing) what has been said.
That said, jotting down a few choice notes at the right point in the presentation material can be invaluable. For me, it reminds me of the questions and confusion I had encountering the material the first time. These are likely the most interesting places to revisit anyway.
That said, I make the assumption that the presentations are in your domain of experience, so there is a fair bit of "real time" understanding of what you're learning. There was one class in college I took copious, detailed notes for: RLS331 Religions of the Eastern World. Fascinating, but information heavy and entirely out of my element. I earned a B+, and to this day I think the notes helped more than hurt. In any other class, I never considered notes an advantage beyond serving as a flag to say "look here again".
I went to public school myself. Graduated 20 years ago, actually. Back then, we didn't have ZT policies, we didn't have all this teaching-to-the-state-test crap, and teachers and administrators had at least a little bit of flexibility in how they applied the rules. Sure, the system as a whole tended toward churning out "mindless automatons," but not to this degree. It wasn't previously this adversarial.
And I agree, free thinkers can run circles around the "educated." I had only a B+ GPA, and worked just hard enough to get that B+. Otherwise, I just tried to get my degree as quickly as possible. (Turned 16 during my senior year.) Everything else I put into my computer hobby, learning electronics, logic design, programming and so forth. Sure, there was a bunch of "book learnin'" there, but also a lot of out-of-the-box thinking. I was always trying to figure out different ways of doing things, after seeing multiple examples of the "accepted way". For the last 16 years I've been a very successful electrical engineer. I don't really directly use 90% of what I learned in class, though. Most of my success has come from looking at problems in new ways and coming up with wildly different ways of doing things.
All the paper shuffling and endless, pointless homework assignments from school didn't really help me, and likely held me back. And, I sat in suspension a couple times for stupid things like being tardy to 1st period too many times (I walked 1.5 miles every day, and I've never been good keeping to a schedule), or running in the halls (gotta be first in the lunch line!). I used to have Tylenol in my locker. It may have been against the rules, but it would probably have amounted at most to a warning or another night of detention, if anyone cared at all. In today's environment, would I have even graduated?
It achieves the goal of removing certain legal liabilities, and so is attractive to people who care only about their legal exposure. If schools existed only to serve the administrators, then that might be reasonable. They don't. They exist to serve the needs of the children by teaching them. On this measure, ZT fails horribly, and schools no longer serve their mission.
If you think schools are just about teaching the "the three Rs", then maybe you don't see it. Schools also teach children (whether they intend to or not) about how to behave in societ, and how to apply reasoning to human problems. ZT sends the message that "inflexibility is the key!" to the kids. Is that what we want? Mindless automatons churned out by the gross? I suppose there are many that think that's just fine. I'm not in that camp.
ZT is idiotic, in my opinion. Sure, when you allow human judgment into the picture, you also allow for biases and selective enforcement. Those are both problems, and I would be wrong to argue otherwise. ZT, though, leads to suspensions and arrests ibuprofen to school, or suspending first graders for bringing Cub Scouts gear to school.
The policies themselves were not designed with ZT in mind. The policies are human-designed, and intended to be applied by humans, with human reasoning, to human situations. ZT effectively turns them into hard computer programs without actually requiring the policies to be fully elaborated to account for all the extenuating circumstances under which they might be applied. I argue that in most cases, that simply isn't possible. At the very least, it is very far from likely unless you spend considerable effort. If it were easy, we wouldn't have a court system (complete with appellate courts).
And, it doesn't even save you from capriciousness. Instead it leads you to amplify the whims of children. For example, in one of the links above, the student was "caught" because some other kid claimed she had a knife. The likelihood someone gets ratted out (and thus subjected to the worst effects of ZT) varies based on the attitudes and decisions of the fellow classmates, not the now supposedly immune administrators. That just sets the system up for worse outcomes, because a big lever of the system (detection/reporting) is left to the kids, and enforcement is automatic and uncontrolled.
Furthermore, if an administrator does notice something punishable, but lets it slide silently because nobody else notices, who would know? ZT only applies once its obvious to everyone that there's an infraction. The system isn't even airtight at that level, since the decision to let something slide undetected is an individual decision on the part of that administrator, and they can later claim (usually) to not have noticed the infraction.
Explain to me again how the sliver of legal protection offered by ZT isn't idiocy compared to these awful, stupid outcomes?
Well, this is a public school. They seem to make an artform out of administrative idiocy, whether it's installing spy software on laptops so they can confuse Mike & Ikes with drugs or applying zero tolerance nonsense to activities that take place off school grounds and outside school hours. They make it a point to stick their nose in where it doesn't belong.
Sure, students are largely the victims of this crap, but teachers and administrators occasionally get this crap splattered on them too.
On any given interaction, you might have a problem. But, what if you averaged over a large period of time? Sure, the resulting image may be blurry, but a blurry photo is better than no photo. It's not as if you're trying to read text written in radioactive cesium ink. You just want to know "That corner's hot, this corner's not."
The real story is much more involved. Reader's Digest summary:
Original Commodore floppy drives used the IEEE-488 bus (also known as GPIB). Those used a funky cable, and there ended up being a cable shortage, I believe due to an uptick in defense contracting work. So, Tramiel orders the engineers to come up with a simpler connection with an easier to acquire cable.
They develop the 1540 for the VIC-20 with a serial link that should perform at about the same speed as the old IEEE-488 drives. It uses the serial port in the VIA. So far, so good, until they discover a bug in the VIA's shift register. Too late to fix, they change the protocol to a simple bit-banging protocol. It takes a speed hit, but not huge.
Commodore 64 comes along, and replaces the VIC chip with the VIC II chip. The VIC II is much more complex than the VIC chip, and inserts more wait states to fetch object and character data. Some of these fetches are longer than one bit period for the speed the VIC-20 / 1540 ran at. So, hasty hack two: They slowed the bit rate down further! That's why they released the 1541 -- to match the slower bit rate they were banging on the C64 as compared to the VIC-20.
The various fast-load cartridges worked around this through many clever techniques. And you're right, a 10x or greater increase in serial transfer rate was possible. (The actual overall throughput is less, because at some point the floppy itself becomes the bottleneck.) But yeah, it was an embarrassment.
At least the 1541 allowed you to download programs to the floppy drive.
If you count mumbling under my breath while the patented Slow As Cassette (TM) drive loads, then yes.
Fun fact: If you run your fingers lightly over the air vent grating on the top, you can make the most awful screeching sound--worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. But, it's still more pleasant than a stock C64's disk loading times.
There's only 56 bytes that the computer has to read from somewhere to have a runnable program. In the case of Javascript, since there's no compiled bytecode, you have to download and run from the source. For assembly language, I think it's fair to measure the binary that results from assembling, since it's pretty much a 1:1 translation at that level.
Under DOS, I believe you could actually key the whole program's machine code in with Alt-Keypad sequences using "copy con: foo.com" as long as your program didn't have a ^Z in it. Would you count the source code length then as the number of keystrokes on the keyboard then, or the number of bytes produced? (And if so, are we going to count all the shift keypresses for typing curly braces and parentheses in the Javascript program? Ha.)
Take a look at that 672 byte chess program someone mentioned earlier. You don't hear anyone talking about the size of the source code or even the fact that to create the program image requires a machine with 3K. The resulting program image that the machine has to load (mixture of BASIC and machine code) takes 672 bytes of RAM.
And while you're at it, how many Libraries of Congress can it hold, and what fraction of the width of a human hair do the wires in the processors in each correspond to? We need meaningful units here, folks!
A superconducting transmission line will eliminate resistive losses, but not radiative losses. Plus, "room temperature" for a superconductor is defined as 0 Celsius. You'd still need to refrigerate most of those lines to guarantee that they can remain well enough below their critical transition temperature. In order to have sufficient current carrying capacity, you need to be somewhat below its superconducting transition temperature.
Furthermore, from what I recall, superconductivity breaks down when you reach a certain current limit due to the magnetic forces. So even though you have zero resistance, you have an upper bound on current carrying capacity, again limiting how far you can practically sling electricity.
You really, really don't have any idea of superconductors are capable of, do you? It's lot more than just making electricity transmission more efficient.
Superconductivity has a lot of other neat effects, but I imagine in the short run room-temp superconductors won't make huge differences right away. Perhaps some of their more exotic physical properties will lead to novel new inventions. But will it change the world inside of a generation like the transistor or the microcomputer both did? Without some plausible theories, it's hard to see how.
No, it isn't. It's not the kind of change that would bring a "sea change" in how society behaves and expands. It looks more like the level of a good, solid engineering improvement.
Sure, it'd be a welcome improvement, but it wouldn't be such an earth shattering change so as to question society's ability to handle it. "What are the cultural pros and cons of such a shift?" "Uh... My electricity got $0.0001/kWh cheaper."
In other words, with respect to the power grid, there isn't much low hanging fruit there and switching to room temperature superconductors might bring down prices in the long run, but it'd bring them down by the amounts you'd expect from average engineering improvements.
I'd expect a bigger impact on the grid from SMES, since if you can build enough energy storage capacity in those, then you can filter away the distinction between peak and base load, which is huge! For sporadic-generation renewable energy technologies (wind, for example, depends on the weather), you can collect energy more opportunistically, and have it ready when you need it, and those can be separated in time.
Well, we currently only lose about 6-7% of the electric energy we generate to transmission losses. So, superconducting transmission lines are unlikely to be earth shattering. Someone else posted a link to SMES -- these are superconducting energy storage devices. If those become cheap and plentiful, then we might blunt the distinction between "peak" and "offpeak" electricity use, allowing us to size powerplants more moderately.
If the material could work in place of aluminum or copper in a semiconductor, it might help cut down the amount of power your PC sucks out of the wall.
But, in general, I wouldn't expect anything dramatic. A lot of things would just get "a little more efficient."
Slashdot Mirror
A different point of amusement: The processor's capabilities and speed are roughly equivalent to the processor in the Intellivision. Most instructions are 1, 2 or 3 machine cycles long, but the processor apparently only runs at 100kHz. The Intellivision's CPU is 895kHz, but instructions take 6 to 14 cycles. The Intellivision is slightly faster, but lacks hardware divide/multiply and has less flexible addressing modes.
So, on the whole, it looks like "Intellivisions.... In..... SPACE!!!!!!!"
Yes, that is fairly interesting. I had noticed it also, and wondered how it might work.
It implies there will be some mechanism for the "computers" to exchange data and programs. (Since it looks like a bog standard von Neumann architecture, there's very little distinction.) For viruses to really take off, though, they need to exploit some vulnerability that's common to many programs. So, either these computers will have some baseline of common software that they come with, or there will be some widely popular 3rd party programs written by a handful of gamers, or some combination of the two. I imagine that third case is the most likely.
This has shades of Core Wars to it, actually. I wonder if that was an inspiration?
Well, the simulated processor is 16 bit, but that just runs the code you write to control your ship and such, as I understand it. Read carefully: "The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish."
That means as part of the game, the game provides you a computer to work with, and that computer is 16 bit. There's a whole game going on outside that computer.
How many games run the scripts on the server, even when you're not logged in?
I think we're left, then, arguing the semantics of the word "idiocy" then. According to my dictionary, idiocy is "utterly senseless or foolish behavior; a stupid or foolish act, statement, etc."
ZT policies make the teacher's and administrator's lives easier at the (sometimes extreme) expense of students. It doesn't really solve any problems. Actually, it appears to amplify them, but it mostly deflects them away from the administration. To think this is at all a good thing is foolish. The administrators who put these policies in place think they're good ideas, but I see them as foolish, and therefore idiots.
Speaking of which... that wasn't the only course I took that didn't rely much on a text book. My control theory classes had no text book -- rather, the professor gave a handout every period that gave the skeleton and some (but not all) of the meat for the "notes" for that days' lecture. You were encouraged to fill in the missing bits if you liked. I rarely did. Got an A in the first one (classical control), but only a B+ in the second one (state space control), mainly because I suck at matrices.
DSP and VLSI classes both had textbooks. I never even took the shrinkwrap off of my DSP text, and I never even bought the VLSI textbook.
Did I mention Bradley U. has some amazing professors?
This particular class (found the syllabus here) did have some textbooks, but I don't really remember them playing a large role. Granted, my memory is hazy, 17 years later. The stuff the professor was most interested in us learning was delivered in lecture. If you didn't take good notes, you didn't stand a chance on the exams or writing your essays. Attendance was mandatory, and for very good reason.
Being a 300-level class (ie. 3rd year, aka. Junior Year), the class really didn't focus on rote memorization. Rather, the professor wanted to us to think about the material at a higher level than that, understanding the social contexts, and drawing deeper conclusions about the relationships between the different religions. For me, it was quite the wild ride. Yeah, we needed to remember the facts, but he also wanted us to move beyond basic comprehension and toward analysis and synthesis.
It helped that Dr. Fuller was (and I imagine still is) an entertaining, knowledgeable and energetic professor that genuinely wanted to be there teaching. (If you watch the vid at that page, understand that he gets even more animated when he's giving lecture, and crams those 55 minutes absolutely full.) I'm not religious or really into religions at all, but I enjoyed the class and actually learned something. Maybe I don't remember the books because they were dull and uninteresting, comparatively. :-)
I only pulled a B+ in that course. It was the only course I ever took at the same time as my (then future) wife. She got an A with far less apparent effort than I put into it. (Of course, I suspect her larger background and personal interest in mythologies from around the world was an asset here.) Ah well... I have my engineering and she has her geology. It's all good.
Maybe it's an engineering thing. My degree is in electrical engineering.
That said, it may not work for a class that doesn't lend itself to the nice conceptual processes of engineering. LIke I said above, the only class I felt compelled to take copious notes in was that religions class. There was no way I was going to keep straight the Jains and Sikhs and ascetic ("skinny Buddha") Buddhists and. the later ("fat Buddha") Buddhists, the relationship or lack thereof of all those to Hinduism. Nor would I remember all the various religious/foundational texts of Hinduism (such as the epics Mahabharata (esp. the Bhagavad Gita) and the Ramayana), all the Chinese and Japanese religions such as Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, and so on.
Obviously, some of it stuck, given that I was able to rattle that off off the top of my head almost 20 years later. (I apologize for any oversimplifications, omissions or errors.) And who knows whether any of that would have stuck if I hadn't taken (and studied!!) those copious notes. It wasn't something you could derive from first principles, unlike, say, derivatives and integrals, or hell, deriving Ohm's Law from Maxwell's Equations! It certainly wasn't something you could apply, except by adopting it as a way of life. I can apply Ohm's Law to a circuit. How do I apply the eight-fold path, and to what? Only thing I can think of is to apply it to myself through contemplation, self-reflection, and adoption of the Buddha's teachings in my own life. While that may be a worthwhile thing to do, it rises above the level of most class studies. ;-)
I honestly think it depends on the person. I find if I take copious notes, it doesn't help me, and instead I am more concentrated on being a secretary taking dictation than really *listening* (as opposed to just hearing) what has been said.
That said, jotting down a few choice notes at the right point in the presentation material can be invaluable. For me, it reminds me of the questions and confusion I had encountering the material the first time. These are likely the most interesting places to revisit anyway.
That said, I make the assumption that the presentations are in your domain of experience, so there is a fair bit of "real time" understanding of what you're learning. There was one class in college I took copious, detailed notes for: RLS331 Religions of the Eastern World. Fascinating, but information heavy and entirely out of my element. I earned a B+, and to this day I think the notes helped more than hurt. In any other class, I never considered notes an advantage beyond serving as a flag to say "look here again".
I went to public school myself. Graduated 20 years ago, actually. Back then, we didn't have ZT policies, we didn't have all this teaching-to-the-state-test crap, and teachers and administrators had at least a little bit of flexibility in how they applied the rules. Sure, the system as a whole tended toward churning out "mindless automatons," but not to this degree. It wasn't previously this adversarial.
And I agree, free thinkers can run circles around the "educated." I had only a B+ GPA, and worked just hard enough to get that B+. Otherwise, I just tried to get my degree as quickly as possible. (Turned 16 during my senior year.) Everything else I put into my computer hobby, learning electronics, logic design, programming and so forth. Sure, there was a bunch of "book learnin'" there, but also a lot of out-of-the-box thinking. I was always trying to figure out different ways of doing things, after seeing multiple examples of the "accepted way". For the last 16 years I've been a very successful electrical engineer. I don't really directly use 90% of what I learned in class, though. Most of my success has come from looking at problems in new ways and coming up with wildly different ways of doing things.
All the paper shuffling and endless, pointless homework assignments from school didn't really help me, and likely held me back. And, I sat in suspension a couple times for stupid things like being tardy to 1st period too many times (I walked 1.5 miles every day, and I've never been good keeping to a schedule), or running in the halls (gotta be first in the lunch line!). I used to have Tylenol in my locker. It may have been against the rules, but it would probably have amounted at most to a warning or another night of detention, if anyone cared at all. In today's environment, would I have even graduated?
It achieves the goal of removing certain legal liabilities, and so is attractive to people who care only about their legal exposure. If schools existed only to serve the administrators, then that might be reasonable. They don't. They exist to serve the needs of the children by teaching them. On this measure, ZT fails horribly, and schools no longer serve their mission.
If you think schools are just about teaching the "the three Rs", then maybe you don't see it. Schools also teach children (whether they intend to or not) about how to behave in societ, and how to apply reasoning to human problems. ZT sends the message that "inflexibility is the key!" to the kids. Is that what we want? Mindless automatons churned out by the gross? I suppose there are many that think that's just fine. I'm not in that camp.
Hmmm... I apparently pasted the wrong link at "arrests" also. Here is the corrected link. Geeze, I fail at editing this morning. MOAR COFFEE!
Edit fail: "arrest ibuprofen to school" => "arrests for bringing ibuprofen to school".
ZT is idiotic, in my opinion. Sure, when you allow human judgment into the picture, you also allow for biases and selective enforcement. Those are both problems, and I would be wrong to argue otherwise. ZT, though, leads to suspensions and arrests ibuprofen to school, or suspending first graders for bringing Cub Scouts gear to school.
The policies themselves were not designed with ZT in mind. The policies are human-designed, and intended to be applied by humans, with human reasoning, to human situations. ZT effectively turns them into hard computer programs without actually requiring the policies to be fully elaborated to account for all the extenuating circumstances under which they might be applied. I argue that in most cases, that simply isn't possible. At the very least, it is very far from likely unless you spend considerable effort. If it were easy, we wouldn't have a court system (complete with appellate courts).
And, it doesn't even save you from capriciousness. Instead it leads you to amplify the whims of children. For example, in one of the links above, the student was "caught" because some other kid claimed she had a knife. The likelihood someone gets ratted out (and thus subjected to the worst effects of ZT) varies based on the attitudes and decisions of the fellow classmates, not the now supposedly immune administrators. That just sets the system up for worse outcomes, because a big lever of the system (detection/reporting) is left to the kids, and enforcement is automatic and uncontrolled.
Furthermore, if an administrator does notice something punishable, but lets it slide silently because nobody else notices, who would know? ZT only applies once its obvious to everyone that there's an infraction. The system isn't even airtight at that level, since the decision to let something slide undetected is an individual decision on the part of that administrator, and they can later claim (usually) to not have noticed the infraction.
Explain to me again how the sliver of legal protection offered by ZT isn't idiocy compared to these awful, stupid outcomes?
Well, this is a public school. They seem to make an artform out of administrative idiocy, whether it's installing spy software on laptops so they can confuse Mike & Ikes with drugs or applying zero tolerance nonsense to activities that take place off school grounds and outside school hours. They make it a point to stick their nose in where it doesn't belong.
Sure, students are largely the victims of this crap, but teachers and administrators occasionally get this crap splattered on them too.
On any given interaction, you might have a problem. But, what if you averaged over a large period of time? Sure, the resulting image may be blurry, but a blurry photo is better than no photo. It's not as if you're trying to read text written in radioactive cesium ink. You just want to know "That corner's hot, this corner's not."
The real story is much more involved. Reader's Digest summary:
Original Commodore floppy drives used the IEEE-488 bus (also known as GPIB). Those used a funky cable, and there ended up being a cable shortage, I believe due to an uptick in defense contracting work. So, Tramiel orders the engineers to come up with a simpler connection with an easier to acquire cable.
They develop the 1540 for the VIC-20 with a serial link that should perform at about the same speed as the old IEEE-488 drives. It uses the serial port in the VIA. So far, so good, until they discover a bug in the VIA's shift register. Too late to fix, they change the protocol to a simple bit-banging protocol. It takes a speed hit, but not huge.
Commodore 64 comes along, and replaces the VIC chip with the VIC II chip. The VIC II is much more complex than the VIC chip, and inserts more wait states to fetch object and character data. Some of these fetches are longer than one bit period for the speed the VIC-20 / 1540 ran at. So, hasty hack two: They slowed the bit rate down further! That's why they released the 1541 -- to match the slower bit rate they were banging on the C64 as compared to the VIC-20.
The various fast-load cartridges worked around this through many clever techniques. And you're right, a 10x or greater increase in serial transfer rate was possible. (The actual overall throughput is less, because at some point the floppy itself becomes the bottleneck.) But yeah, it was an embarrassment.
At least the 1541 allowed you to download programs to the floppy drive.
If you count mumbling under my breath while the patented Slow As Cassette (TM) drive loads, then yes.
Fun fact: If you run your fingers lightly over the air vent grating on the top, you can make the most awful screeching sound--worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. But, it's still more pleasant than a stock C64's disk loading times.
My VCR will pull the cassette back in after only a minute or two, if you eject a tape but don't take it out.
There's only 56 bytes that the computer has to read from somewhere to have a runnable program. In the case of Javascript, since there's no compiled bytecode, you have to download and run from the source. For assembly language, I think it's fair to measure the binary that results from assembling, since it's pretty much a 1:1 translation at that level.
Under DOS, I believe you could actually key the whole program's machine code in with Alt-Keypad sequences using "copy con: foo.com" as long as your program didn't have a ^Z in it. Would you count the source code length then as the number of keystrokes on the keyboard then, or the number of bytes produced? (And if so, are we going to count all the shift keypresses for typing curly braces and parentheses in the Javascript program? Ha.)
Take a look at that 672 byte chess program someone mentioned earlier. You don't hear anyone talking about the size of the source code or even the fact that to create the program image requires a machine with 3K. The resulting program image that the machine has to load (mixture of BASIC and machine code) takes 672 bytes of RAM.
And while you're at it, how many Libraries of Congress can it hold, and what fraction of the width of a human hair do the wires in the processors in each correspond to? We need meaningful units here, folks!
Furthermore, from what I recall, superconductivity breaks down when you reach a certain current limit due to the magnetic forces. So even though you have zero resistance, you have an upper bound on current carrying capacity, again limiting how far you can practically sling electricity.
Superconductivity has a lot of other neat effects, but I imagine in the short run room-temp superconductors won't make huge differences right away. Perhaps some of their more exotic physical properties will lead to novel new inventions. But will it change the world inside of a generation like the transistor or the microcomputer both did? Without some plausible theories, it's hard to see how.
No, it isn't. It's not the kind of change that would bring a "sea change" in how society behaves and expands. It looks more like the level of a good, solid engineering improvement.
Sure, it'd be a welcome improvement, but it wouldn't be such an earth shattering change so as to question society's ability to handle it. "What are the cultural pros and cons of such a shift?" "Uh... My electricity got $0.0001 /kWh cheaper."
In other words, with respect to the power grid, there isn't much low hanging fruit there and switching to room temperature superconductors might bring down prices in the long run, but it'd bring them down by the amounts you'd expect from average engineering improvements.
I'd expect a bigger impact on the grid from SMES, since if you can build enough energy storage capacity in those, then you can filter away the distinction between peak and base load, which is huge! For sporadic-generation renewable energy technologies (wind, for example, depends on the weather), you can collect energy more opportunistically, and have it ready when you need it, and those can be separated in time.
Well, we currently only lose about 6-7% of the electric energy we generate to transmission losses. So, superconducting transmission lines are unlikely to be earth shattering. Someone else posted a link to SMES -- these are superconducting energy storage devices. If those become cheap and plentiful, then we might blunt the distinction between "peak" and "offpeak" electricity use, allowing us to size powerplants more moderately.
If the material could work in place of aluminum or copper in a semiconductor, it might help cut down the amount of power your PC sucks out of the wall.
But, in general, I wouldn't expect anything dramatic. A lot of things would just get "a little more efficient."
Ok, it's not just me then. I was wondering if I had accidentally landed on a foreign version of the site that was in another language.