7 ms·
On the one hand, the list isn't wrong. On the other hand, more fortunes have been made by assuming that physics will catch up (closely enough, anyway) to compu
by zephen 4mo ago
On the one hand, the list isn't wrong.
On the other hand, more fortunes have been made by assuming that physics will catch up (closely enough, anyway) to computational needs, than by assuming that every byte and every cycle and every nanosecond matters.
- shermantanktop 4mo agoMaking money and being highly available are different goals.
- rusk 4mo agoStock markets and commercial Telecomms beg to differ
- inigyou 4mo agoIs every business a stock market and commercial Telecomm?
- rusk 4mo ago> Making money and being highly available are different goals. These are large, highly profitable vertical markets. The above remark is demonstrably foolish and ignorant.
- shermantanktop 4mo agoCan you make money without being highly available? Can you be highly available without making money? And btw I've worked in both the industries you cite. It's hard to think of telecomms having amazing uptime when you have to write a restart script for a core security daemon because the sysadmin doesn't know how.
- rusk 4mo ago[flagged]
- IAmBroom 4mo agoOK, fine: Making money and being highly available often different goals.
- rusk 4mo agoNot if being highly available is central to your business model which is about half the industry
- saltcured 4mo agoAsymptotically, every billing system is a stock market and telecom. ;-) My biggest career horror was realizing how much the medical informatics concepts have been structured around billing and insurance rather than scientific, biomedical requirements.
- inigyou 4mo agoIn 2026 Moore's law has mostly stopped. My computer from 10 years ago still has acceptable performance today. My computer from 15 years ago would struggle a bit but still get the job done. This is nothing like the 90s where you actually could wait two years for all of that year's conceivable performance problems to be solved.
- neonstatic 4mo ago[dead]
- gf000 4mo agoDennard scaling has stopped (performance/clock speed increasing), Moore's law means mostly transistor count or density. The former is still going strong, the latter is slowing down.
- RetroTechie 4mo agoThat's like saying money is only spent on sw/hw systems which rely on ever-growing compute capacity. Reality: embedded systems are a thing. And there's (lots of!) money in that business too. There's maaaany applications where some (fixed) amount of compute does the job, and the simplest/cheapest device that does it wins out.
- zephen 4mo ago> Reality: embedded systems are a thing. I've worked in embedded, and chips, and embedded chips for most of my career. > There's maaaany applications where some (fixed) amount of compute does the job, and the simplest/cheapest device that does it wins out. There's usually quite a bit factored in for slop in these days, because time-to-market is a thing. There's also sometimes a cost-reduction stage (yeah, I've been involved in cost reductions where a penny a unit was awesome), but you don't bother doing the cost-reduction phase unless you have the volume to support it. Warren Buffet famously said that "Concentration builds wealth, diversification preserves it." In much of computing, even embedded, demos and prototypes build a product, and the right-sizing of everything to make it even more profitable happens later, if it is worth it.