4 ms·

What we singularly call a computer is actually a collection of computers. Each HDD and/or SSD is its own computer, with its own CPU (controller) and RAM (cache

What we singularly call a computer is actually a collection of computers. Each HDD and/or SSD is its own computer, with its own CPU (controller) and RAM (cache). Each video card is its own computer with its own CPU (GPU) and RAM (video RAM). Every USB controller is its own computer with its own CPU and RAM. Each NIC is its own computer with its own CPU and RAM. And so on and so forth. Do disks lie? Fuck yeah, and so does everything else. Much like the human world, everyone (everything) lies so the system as a whole can (hopefully) keep running smoothly.

thfuran 3y ago
>everyone (everything) lies so the system as a whole can (hopefully) keep running smoothly. That's not how you make a smoothly running system, it's how you make one that insists everything is fine while it's all going to shit.
- jurgenaut23 3y ago
  Great analogy of the wider world, by the way.
- rollcat 3y ago
  Not necessarily. Sometimes you are forced to lie, because another component couldn't bear the truth. Disks were an example of that basically from day 1. I can't recall the exact details, but it was something about the disk geometry (heads/cylinders/sectors) that didn't fit in an 8bit integer, which was what BIOS expected. So the disks had to make something up, and translate requests on the go, otherwise a chunk of the total capacity would be inaccessible, which would be inexcusable in a race to be the biggest. You could call it "adversarial compatibility", and we owe a lot of tech progress to it.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    I love the term "adversarial compatibility". If I had to describe technological progress in computing for the past 40 years, that's what I'd use.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    Yeah originally cylinder-head-sector sizing was used, but we soon realized that you could fit more sectors on the outer cylinders that fly by the read head faster than the inner ones (closer to constant linear velocity) and suddenly you didn't have a fixed "sectors per cylinder" and the system broke down, so the drives had to lie to the system. ATA/IDE was introduced in 1986 and a replacement for CHS wasn't introduced until 2002 when the 8 GB limit of the multiple of the fake CHS sizes became a problem.
nurple 3y ago
So my Kubernetes cluster is actually a collection of a collection of someone else's computers?
- groestl 3y ago
  Pretty much yes
jen20 3y ago
Turns out the C64 design hasn’t changed that much, eh?
b3lvedere 3y ago
It's not that they always lie, but that the expectation of the end user of a certain piece of hardware vastly differs from what the manufacturer states how you should treat it and guarantuees. Most end users expect a disk to work flawlessly at any given moment no matter what they throw at it. Same with all other hardware indeed, like printers for instance.

thfuran 3y ago

>everyone (everything) lies so the system as a whole can (hopefully) keep running smoothly. That's not how you make a smoothly running system, it's how you make one that insists everything is fine while it's all going to shit.

jurgenaut23 3y ago
Great analogy of the wider world, by the way.
rollcat 3y ago
Not necessarily. Sometimes you are forced to lie, because another component couldn't bear the truth. Disks were an example of that basically from day 1. I can't recall the exact details, but it was something about the disk geometry (heads/cylinders/sectors) that didn't fit in an 8bit integer, which was what BIOS expected. So the disks had to make something up, and translate requests on the go, otherwise a chunk of the total capacity would be inaccessible, which would be inexcusable in a race to be the biggest. You could call it "adversarial compatibility", and we owe a lot of tech progress to it.
- Sakos 3y ago
  I love the term "adversarial compatibility". If I had to describe technological progress in computing for the past 40 years, that's what I'd use.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Yeah originally cylinder-head-sector sizing was used, but we soon realized that you could fit more sectors on the outer cylinders that fly by the read head faster than the inner ones (closer to constant linear velocity) and suddenly you didn't have a fixed "sectors per cylinder" and the system broke down, so the drives had to lie to the system. ATA/IDE was introduced in 1986 and a replacement for CHS wasn't introduced until 2002 when the 8 GB limit of the multiple of the fake CHS sizes became a problem.

nurple 3y ago

So my Kubernetes cluster is actually a collection of a collection of someone else's computers?

groestl 3y ago
Pretty much yes

jen20 3y ago

Turns out the C64 design hasn’t changed that much, eh?

b3lvedere 3y ago

It's not that they always lie, but that the expectation of the end user of a certain piece of hardware vastly differs from what the manufacturer states how you should treat it and guarantuees. Most end users expect a disk to work flawlessly at any given moment no matter what they throw at it. Same with all other hardware indeed, like printers for instance.