4 ms·
Analogy: "In the past, a well-meaning body of public servants decided there was a need to slow down microprocessors to protect jobs threatened by automation, re
by bharam 7y ago
Analogy: "In the past, a well-meaning body of public servants decided there was a need to slow down microprocessors to protect jobs threatened by automation, reduce resource consumption and benefit the climate. CPU frequency was capped at 25MHz and instruction length was limited to 8 bits. The move was hailed as a great victory for humans, nature and the climate"
As a nation, where would we be today (compared to where we are) if a policy like that had actually been adopted?
- thefounder 7y agoSo you compare automation with pollution? Really?
- bharam 7y agoNope. Automation is technology and so is transportation. Both can cause pollution but that's besides the point.
- danw1979 7y agoWe'd be dying on the roads in droves because faster is always better ?
- ajdlinux 7y agoThis analogy is completely broken, obviously. But off-topic: I wonder what computers would look like if there _were_ arbitrary restrictions like that. What directions would we have pursued in microarchitecture, distributed systems, etc etc if there was a regulation capping clock speed or number of transistors, or a rule that made it illegal to have asymmetric network connections?
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoWe would have adapted to the situation we found ourselves in. Some of the most creative solutions can come from constrained environments.
- pjc50 7y agoThere's no Moore's law for ship speeds. If there were, then in the century since tea clippers we'd have ships somehow zipping across the sea at a decent fraction of the speed of light, somehow using less power than the baseline. In fact that probably would have already made the case for speed restrictions, as every multi-thousand-knot container ship created its own tsunami. There have long been speed restrictions on canals at a few miles an hour to avoid erosion.