06-02-2022, 01:27 PM | #21 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
That's my stance as well. I've been using Mac Minis pretty much since they first came on the market. I have an iPad and an iPhone, but I don't allow either of them to receive or send e-mail; if people have an urgent message they can text me (though even for texting, I find it much easier to send a text from my desktop using a proper keyboard).
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
06-02-2022, 08:16 PM | #22 |
Join Date: Dec 2012
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
It's been a while since I read anything by Gibson, I think. By 'hot,' did he mean stolen, or is it a slang term in-story? (Given time-of-writing, I can see why he'd have thought that 3 Mb was a lot.) Another example, of course, is Bill Gates allegedly claiming in 1981 that '640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anybody.'
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Warning, I have the Distractible and Imaginative quirks in real life. "The more corrupt a government, the more it legislates." -- Tacitus Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted. |
06-02-2022, 09:29 PM | #23 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
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And didn't an IBM engineer claim in the 1950s that six (or some other comically small number) of their latest computer would have all the computing power the world would ever need?
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. |
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06-02-2022, 10:51 PM | #24 | ||
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
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But that's also the usual story, one expression of a given tech rarely entirely replaces another, and mainframes, desktops, smartphones, etc. are all expressions of the same basic technology. We've been hearing for years, for ex, that mainframe computers are a thing of the past...yet they remain an economic/business viable product to manufacture and are the best solution for certain applications. Also, some 'replacements' of mainframes turn out to be networked assemblages of blade servers or the like which more or less approximate a mainframe. Sometimes it comes down to terminology.
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06-02-2022, 10:59 PM | #25 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
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The reason is that as battery power increased, instead of letting them run the machine longer, designers added more and more features and power-consuming bells and whistles that used up that extra energy that much faster, so your laptop still conks out after similar time. Same deal with processor power and software. A good percentage of the vast increase in processor power has been eaten up by various forms of software bloat. Faster Internet connections sometimes get used up by adware and the like that eats up the capacity like a hungry badger. (To say nothing of malware...though sometimes the distinction between malware and some supposedly legit stuff looks fuzzy in practice.) (I've believed for years that website designers and the like ought to be required by their employers to use slower-than-available I-net connections to do their work, as a check on that tendency. Don't give them high-end fiber optic connections, make them do their design work on an average speed connection.) So in GURPS terms, your TL 9 battery might not behave any differently than a TL8 battery, if the TL9 systems use up energy faster too.
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HMS Overflow-For conversations off topic here. Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 06-02-2022 at 11:04 PM. |
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06-02-2022, 11:06 PM | #26 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
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Giving actual numbers for a gadget, other than basic weights and dimensions, makes it very likely that your predictions will be comically incorrect in just a few decades (but with an infinitesimal chance that you're right and make way more off of patents or stocks than you're ever going to earn from your writing). |
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06-03-2022, 12:53 AM | #27 | |
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Luxembourg
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
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And it wasn't that they tough their latest computer would have all the computing power the world would ever need, but that for the use they were thinking of, there wasn't need of more at that point. They did not foresee in how many way computer could be used, or especially personal computer... |
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06-03-2022, 01:47 AM | #28 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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06-03-2022, 01:59 AM | #29 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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06-03-2022, 06:41 AM | #30 | ||
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: TL 9 microchips?
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Last edited by Anaraxes; 06-03-2022 at 08:28 AM. |
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computers, ultra-tech |
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