4MB of SRAM would have cost an absolute fortune back in the day. One of the more overlooked reasons behind the explosion of personal computing power back in the 80s and 90s was the invention and proliferation of DRAM which made it finally affordable for people to have enough memory on the system to use it for more than toy scale projects.
4 MB of SRAM in the '80s would have been the main RAM of a supercomputer.
We still use SRAM today. It's what level-1 cache and registers are implemented with - actual flip-flops, can be toggled with one cycle delay. Supercomputers used to make their entire main memory out of SRAM, effectively the whole thing was L1 cache.
The 486 has an on-chip cache - 8 or 16 KB of SRAM. Very large for the time.
Off-chip access to the DRAM involves wait states. The read or write is stalled until the DRAM enters the appropriate state. The 486 would also do block reads of 16 bytes at a time to fill an entire cache line. This is around the time main memory and the CPU became increasingly decoupled.
Avoiding all the complexity of managing DRAM is why hobbyists use SRAM these days. Basically: to avoid cost. Ironic!
Our politicians are already thinking about them, which is why they are cracking down on immigration and generating relentless propaganda demonizing refugees and asylum seekers.
Many companies aren't selling anything special or are just selling an "idea".
Like liquid death sells water for a strangely high amount of money - entirely sales / marketing.
International Star Registry gives you a piece of paper and a row in a database that says you own a star.
Many luxury things are just because it's sold by that luxury brand. They are "worth" that amount of money for the status of other people knowing you paid that much for it.
It works. But for most it is not sustainable. It in most cases collapses eventually. But ideas and words and now pictures and videos do sell as in get pre-orders or pre-payments.
I get the sentiment about "why would I let people who aren't going to stay long term decide how the city is run?" but in the end it creates a city that is indifferent or even hostile to people in that situation. It ends up disenfranchising a population that will always be there, even if the people who make up that population is constantly changing.
Thank you. I know people who have lived in Amsterdam for over five years but can't vote for local politics because of their legal status or because they are illegally subletting due to the shitty housing market in The Netherlands.
Don't complain about people not being engaged with local politics if you don't allow them to vote.
The ones who will “always be there” can get their papers for permanent residence done and vote. If they don’t want to (or can’t since they don’t have the legal grounds to even stay there for longer), then they shouldn’t have a say on decisions that can permanently change things about the place.
There will always be the population of people who will be in short term housing or similar situations, but due to their circumstances the individual people will come and go. 5 years from now the makeup of the itinerant population may be almost entirely different, but the people in that population are in the same circumstances, especially if they don't have any political representation.
Who is going to speak for the people who aren't allowed to vote?
In my country, citizens without a permanent address (which is very few people, those who have no place of theirs mostly register at someone elses for easier administration) can still sign up and vote, so that leaves us with just the people who don’t have the permits to even stay here permanently.
I’m also not expecting to fly to country X, book an airbnb for 6 months or get a summer job, and then just somehow be entitled to vote there.
That is only possible with stable and legal housing. Not everyone is privileged to be in that situation, especially not with the housing market in many countries.
With your thinking you are creating a class of subhumans where you enjoy the benefits of their labour but you are not allowing them to vote. Like African Americans in the US not that long ago.
I think the only restriction that seems problematic is not being able to clone someone’s voice without permission. I think there’s probably a valid case for using it for satire.
You might use it for something illegal in one country, and then leave for another country with no extradition… but you’ve lost the license to sue the software and can be sued for copyright infringement.
It works both ways, a lot of people also take the "nothing ever happens" position and it is true that most of the time "nothing ever happens", so by taking that position, they're right 99% of the time and sound smart
Yes, but the majority opinion is "nothing ever happens" by default for everything, not just tech outages. It's not about sounding smart, but getting ahead of grifters and clout chasers.
Your post reflects another online observation. With the rise of online sports books, this sort of predictive doomerism has flooded almost every team's online comment section. It no longer feel like fandom or community in the same way. Just lots of voices that will be glad to say, "I told you so," in the loss and crickets with the W. Wish there was some accountability mechanism for all the negative noise broadcasted into the channel.
I have a conspiracy theory take on traditional manufacturers being so anti-EV.
Basically the primary differentiator between car companies and the primary barrier to entry in the combustion vehicle business is the engine, especially in the US. Look at the marketing, horsepower and torque are always the topline numbers. Zero to sixty and quarter mile drag races are the favored metrics. Each company spent decades perfecting the engines and the majority of the engineering effort goes into them. Even the transmissions get second fiddle status.
But now EVs come along and the electric motors are commodity parts that are already well optimized. There's little one company can do to make the motor significantly better. Battery tech is cutthroat and also largely outside of the car company's scope, although Tesla does more than other car companies with their megafactories and experiments with oversized cells. If EVs become popular there's little to stop competition from sprouting up everywhere and killing profitability for the legacy auto manufacturers.
That's one way of seeing it, but the fact is that automobile parts are already nearly commodity parts. The wall that stops automaker upstarts in their tracks is the need for safety testing and approval from the US DOT.
Even if you had the chutzpah to get all of the materials together for a fleet of vehicles, you have to spend big cash and grease a lot of palms to get a vehicle you make certified. It takes years and millions of dollars to get to the 1st sellable vehicle.
This is a portion of why BYD, for instance, isn't selling in America.
There are other reasons of course, but one of them is the millions and millions of dollars you're putting at risk just to potentially be told "No" by the government.
Do you think the DOT should have a X program similar to the FAA that allows manufacturers that sell less than some number of cars a year (maybe 100?) to bypass most of the testing but require buyers to sign a disclaimer that they know the vehicle has not been fully tested for safety?
Also, I don't think it is the cost of DOT testing that is the primary barrier to entry for a company with three quarters of a trillion dollars in revenue. The domestic car manufacturers are never going to stand for a repeat of the Japanese invasion of the 70s that nearly bankrupted all of them simply because they were not listening to the customers and trying to sell vehicles that were too big and too expensive. Everyone knows what would happen if some bare bones $15,000 EV with a 250 mile range and ample supply appeared in the market.
Well, that is why I say One of the reasons, lol. US Automobile companies are actively lobbying the government to protect them from chinese emergence in America.
They're actively scamming americans by artificially limiting their choices, raising prices, and calling it freedom.
And yes, I think there should be some loopholes or programs to get small numbers of vehicles made by small companies, but I also know that insuring a car with such small numbers would likely be a nightmare for the owners.
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