No. No. No. Dates are to Integers as Date+Time is to Floating Point. You (we) -want- to compare them, but you need something akin to a language level specification for these. Otherwise, it is all what you are trying to do/what problem you are solving. Excel (where I suspect 60% or more of this nonsense lives) at least has a clear definition (both are floats, so you can do the comparison). Otherwise, "Down the Wat-hole" for what to expect.
Ah recruiters. Several years ago I recall the story of one of the creators of a programming language who was asked how many years of experience they had with the language and the response "all of them" was perfect. I can't recall if this was Gosling/Java or Van Rossum/Python (or someone else entirely).
A similar and absurd story[1] I remember from last year:
"I saw a job post the other day. It required 4+ years of experience in FastAPI. I couldn't apply as I only have 1.5+ years of experience since I created that thing."
Everyone in the industry is looking at this. There is a great graph out there by one drive manufacturer that overlays $/GB for different HDDs and SSD technologies. For example, 15K and 10K RPM drives no longer are cost effective to produce. You are better going with SSDs. 7.2K will be next and some of the "lower end SSDs" are encroaching on that. 5.4K will likely live a longer time and if you keep "HDD as archive" you might project these drives to be alive in the foreseeable future (then factor in SMR, HAMR, then SMR plus HAMR.... and $/GB gets pretty cheap). After all, if you aren't keeping 100% of your data "in flight" keeping it at rest on a cheaper medium seems a sane thing. (Tape backup systems are _still_ for sale and in use...)
Another interesting back of the envelope to do is look at Fab capacity for SSDs and compare it against HDD capacity sold. How much Fab capacity has to be available to serve the total storage demand? If there is a shortage of Fab plants, then a price premium for SSDs is easier to maintain (and may benefit some flash manufacturers in the short term to keep the price premium in place). Looking at the economics of building enough Fab capacity gets interesting quick.
> (Tape backup systems are _still_ for sale and in use...)
LTO seems to tick a lot of boxes in the archive business. I remember people trying to sell a MAID (massive array of idle disks) some years ago -- something like 100 disks in 4U of space. They came of blades that each held about 8 disks, and there were about 15 of them in a 4U row. With a controller in the middle it meant you could get somewhere in the region of 1000 disks in a rack.
The power consumption would be obscene, but that was fine, as the disks were kept idle, in fact the system could only power about 25% of the disks at once. The idea was you don't need access to the majority of files, and a 10 second latency when you do isn't going to hurt (far faster than tape)
At the same time tape manufacturers were pushing LTO-5 and LTFS, arguing that was the better solution for archive, and after a misstep with LTO6 (launching at 2.5T rather than 3T), LTO7 recovered.
I've actually been wondering why is not possible to make lower-end desktop SSD drives of capacity 1TB (or more) that are "better" then spinning drives.
I have a samsung 950 pro NVMe drive in my development workstation and I can't statute it without a synthetic workload. There are times I need that for work, most times it's over kill.
For example 1TB SSD drive that can do like 300MB/s sustained transfer with 3000 to 5000 iops. So a speed that's magnitude or magnitude and a half less then current consumer SSD drives. But still a magnitude faster then spinning disk. I'm confident that would be more then enough to make most desktop environment work feel just as snappy as a SSD or within an acceptable factional difference.
If you could make this at $100 to $120 price point drives. That's like 1/2 the cost of a low end desktop 1TB SSD drive (like the Toshiba/OCZ) You'd have a hot seller in peoples gaming rigs, mid-range laptops etc.
Obviously I'm missing something here. Why is not happening? Does producing lower end flash (slower) not saving you any money?
Because 128GB piece of second/third grade flash is ~$20, and those go into cheaper SD cards/usb drives. $160 in cheap memory alone.
There are manufacturers playing aggressive race to the bottom, they make drives with neither ram nor even SLC buffer. Mostly JMicron and Silicon Motion controllers, but more and more companies jump on this opportunity like Marvell. Im not even talking about garbage bin chinese "vendors" like kingspec/kingdian/kingrich/ki..you get the picture, I mean SanDisk Z400 or OCZ TL100, proper manufacturers.
At the end of the day those are pretty much USB pendrives with switched PHY, you can expect same prices and performance. That also means drastically lower write endurance, ~20-40TB Total lifespan. ~20GB/day in an age of Windows 10 writing ~1-2GB of logs(you know, so they can upload them to ze cloud, harmless telemetry ..) alone every single day.
Such drives technically existed in the early days of consumer SSDs (2009-2010), but even then, the limitations in speed were due to poor controllers and firmware (certain Jmicron controllers, if anyone remembers).
The slow flash chips that you're talking about probably don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant making a separate product from them. Let's say their lithography produces 5% of slow flash chips. It is probably more cost efficient to sprinkle those chips in existing product lines as spare capacity (all SSDs are overprovisioned, afaik), rather than making a whole separate product line out of them - a product line that will, by definition, be low end and thus have tiny margins.
But high volume, it could be in every laptop under $800 price point. A lot of these guys already make low margin high volume products (like Samsung and TVs) and that's okay.
Sigh. There's no reason to be be a condescending prick (ad hominem).
Simply asking somebody who works in the industry why it's impractical to segment the market by making slower chips. Maybe it's not possible or they cost the same, but I'm just speculating. Hence wanting to find out and understand.
> I'm not sure if you understand the economics, but no sane for-profit company will trade margins for high volume.
Business don't always get a choice, or do make that choice (based on game theory). In the case of SSD vendors it's a decently competitive market with many vendors (Samsung, Intel, Toshiba, Sandisk, ...). In fact it looks like Samsung is going this route: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/236260-samsung-plants-... . Which they might as well do because they one of the largest producers so it makes sense to put pressure on your competitors if (if you can sustain it).
Looks great... just needs 10GbE instead of 1Gb. Add an SFP port and a RJ45 if all you got is a 1Gb or want to try your hand at getting 10GBASE-T working.
It might be interesting to see how many blunders this identifies compared with traditional analysis. (Looking at the "surprising bad move" vs "surprising good move")
In any case, very interesting work. Others have some good ideas for additional checks/considerations, and it would be interesting to see how this evolves!
Tal played the move 19. Rf6!!, which instantly wins the game. However, (at least when I tested this a few months ago), Stockfish takes a fairly long time to recognize this-- it prefers the more conservative 19. c4 instead.
I just went through the game and man 19. Rf6!! Took me by surprise! What an amazing move!
I also would love to see some chess engine that plays ridiculous moves in the beginning to throw people off guard (i.e. increase greatly increase the variance in possible evaluations) and then crushes the opponent by playing all the computer moves while the human players have to walk on their toes in a minefield of possible blunders because the position is so wacky.
I think part of this is due to selecting "50 areas" to divide the country into. They mention that in the article and even say "it has a math basis" but don't explain why. If they chose 60 (for example) some of these areas might naturally divide. It might be a very interesting thing to look at deciding how many boundaries come about by applying limits to either economy or population to try to balance each.
The market forces around laptops would seem to be a ripe area for serious academic study. I honestly can't find a laptop I _want_ to buy only ones I weigh silly trade-offs. (to be fair: my biggest complaint is around the lack of keyboard choices). It seems that the market desires either can't drive laptop options, or the market is vastly different than I perceive. For example: Why did it take so long for 720 screens to die as an option? For $50 more you get a 1080. I watched this for 6 years (2009 to 2014) and really can't fathom it.
Now... this is for Windows based machines, and I'm sure the forces are different for Apple, but it would be lovely to read a serious study on this. I suspect there is something along the lines of cost and supply chain factors dominating the "refresh cycle" but this used to be handled by different product lines with wildly different configurations. (it still kinda is... Alienware vs Inspiron vs Yoga vs T vs P series but Apple seems to buck this trend completely) Anyway... I just need the cathartic release of posting (venting) with these laptop articles.
My theory behind this is that the most efficient functioning market needs intelligent buyers and sellers. The buyers have to be able to discern what the specs mean, what the quality of the parts are, what the expected lifetime is, and with computers not only that, but they have to be able to evaluate the software options (Windows vs OS X, malware subsidized laptops versus not)? Even explaining malware to a layman is difficult.
So you had the two markets, business and professional consumers who knew what they were buying, and then regular consumers who mostly cared about price but are also swayed by large numbers (more GB, more HZ, bigger screen, more software a.k.a. malware).
Then I think the tide sort of turned in the past decade where even the common populace had realized Windows consumer laptops were full of crap that caused it to run slow and unexpectedly and people noticed Apple's laptops were more consistent with user experience (which they were), so now Apple has a reputation of being the no nonsense brand (which they deserve). Of course, now Apple can also charge a premium for this so you see people with disposable income sticking to Apple's ecosystem, and then the rest of the OEMs fight for price conscious consumers and getting barely any profit out of it.
Obviously for Apple, keeping things simple keeps their operating costs down, so they don't need to cater to every purchaser, and they probably decided that now they're the default brand to purchase if you have the money, they don't need to waste resources chasing after a small segment of the market looking for extremely high specifications.
Companies use projections for how well the line up will perform when they refresh it. They might be optimizing for different factors so the underlying logic is not always obvious but you can get a fair idea about where they are coming from if you visit a big box retailer during a weekend and just watch the sales interactions that are taking place. The 'average' consumer's needs are vastly different from the HN crowd, and even among such 'average' consumers preferences can vary widely by geography (primarily because of the difference in income) - something that companies other than Apple try to cover with product lines.
I was going to say something along these lines (tho more of a "cautionary tale" than absolute "no company can") Having worked for Nokia when they absolutely dominated the supply chain for their phones, this indeed gets you to the position of "top 10 brand in the world" but it isn't enough to keep you there.
That said, I think Apple it much better positioned than Nokia and much more focused on continual disrupting their own position (ipad to phone to tablet to watch is an interesting morph away from single product). So long as they can keep innovating and dominate the supply chain, I believe they will have some long legs.
I may not understand the impact of this, but this sounds like "there is a limit to Google-scale solutions and we have hit it"? I know this is a gross over-simplification, but I'd appreciate if someone might offer more depth to this? FWIW: I have liked the duckduckgo approach of separating the "space" of the search, but I always figured this was a stop-gap until Google could grok the context from your situation (e.g. 4 searches in a row related to motorcycles and the 5th for AMA shouldn't give me anything on the American Medical Society, but instead prefer American Motorcycle Association)
Now I'm wondering if there may be some limit to Google's ability to hit this in a timely manner with the amount of content available. Insights very much appreciated.
