3 ms·

It might not be the same. You see, context and surrounding technolgy changes rapidlly and so ideas that were not feasible 50 years ago (or had some other type o

It might not be the same. You see, context and surrounding technolgy changes rapidlly and so ideas that were not feasible 50 years ago (or had some other type of problem) might be feasible today. History can't repeat because underlying technology always moves forward and that change is so important that it invalidates almost anything to be clasified as total repete.

tharkun__ 4y ago
I don't claim that it's a total repeat. I say I don't like the fact that the opposite is often claimed, i.e. that something is "totally new". Emphasis on "totally". Can you give specifics? You are right in that technology changes and different things that were not possible become possible or become mainstream accessible. What I don't like is the complete ignorance of what came before because of marketing. Don't get me wrong, I get it in that sense. It only sells well when you make everyone believe it's the best thing since sliced bread and that you just invented it out of thin air. I don't have to like that though. We start out with sequential reads being faster for example. Think tape drives and how file formats and search algorithms got optimized for sequential reads being faster. Then hard drives come along where you can suddenly do much faster 'random reads' simply because searching is so much faster in comparison and people take advantage of it. But then you build enough functionality on top of that sudden ability to do random reads relatively fast that it does become the bottleneck and you instead organize things on your HDD such that they result in sequential reads instead. Along come SSDs, which are so much faster overall that you don't have to any longer. Until it repeats and your workloads bottleneck on even an SSDs abilities. But the idea of organizing your files in a certain way or taking advantage of the read characteristics of your storage aren't completely novel at all. Or take databases. We start out with accessing data by key only, because it's faster. You need to know your access pattern beforehand if you want things to be fast. Someone comes along and invents relational databases and it becomes possible to actually do that in a 'fast enough' way as well because of hardware advances. Suddenly someone else comes along way later and re-invents accessing data by key only if you need 'real speed' (aka NoSQL databases). Or like in another thread where someone claimed 'the cloud' invented node independent re-attachable networked storage. No they didn't. I'm not sure if that's the earliest but it's the earliest I know of, which are EMC^2 Symmetrix and that was way pre-cloud i.e. in the 1990s. SANs are/were a thing for a long time. Mainstream access to such technologies by simply renting an EC2 instance w/ EBS volumes is something the cloud did give us though.

tharkun__ 4y ago

I don't claim that it's a total repeat. I say I don't like the fact that the opposite is often claimed, i.e. that something is "totally new". Emphasis on "totally". Can you give specifics? You are right in that technology changes and different things that were not possible become possible or become mainstream accessible. What I don't like is the complete ignorance of what came before because of marketing. Don't get me wrong, I get it in that sense. It only sells well when you make everyone believe it's the best thing since sliced bread and that you just invented it out of thin air. I don't have to like that though. We start out with sequential reads being faster for example. Think tape drives and how file formats and search algorithms got optimized for sequential reads being faster. Then hard drives come along where you can suddenly do much faster 'random reads' simply because searching is so much faster in comparison and people take advantage of it. But then you build enough functionality on top of that sudden ability to do random reads relatively fast that it does become the bottleneck and you instead organize things on your HDD such that they result in sequential reads instead. Along come SSDs, which are so much faster overall that you don't have to any longer. Until it repeats and your workloads bottleneck on even an SSDs abilities. But the idea of organizing your files in a certain way or taking advantage of the read characteristics of your storage aren't completely novel at all. Or take databases. We start out with accessing data by key only, because it's faster. You need to know your access pattern beforehand if you want things to be fast. Someone comes along and invents relational databases and it becomes possible to actually do that in a 'fast enough' way as well because of hardware advances. Suddenly someone else comes along way later and re-invents accessing data by key only if you need 'real speed' (aka NoSQL databases). Or like in another thread where someone claimed 'the cloud' invented node independent re-attachable networked storage. No they didn't. I'm not sure if that's the earliest but it's the earliest I know of, which are EMC^2 Symmetrix and that was way pre-cloud i.e. in the 1990s. SANs are/were a thing for a long time. Mainstream access to such technologies by simply renting an EC2 instance w/ EBS volumes is something the cloud did give us though.