Back in the peak-paper days - when the Sunday newspaper was for the man "smart enough to read it and strong enough to carry it", and the Computer Shopper magazine vied with phone directories for thickness - you could go into a gas station and pick up a paperback copy of the CIA World Factbook, usually from a shelf also sporting the Rand McNally road maps.
> Its a demonstration of wealth. This is called Veblen good
Just the other day I was reminded of the poor little "I am rich" iOS app (a thousand dollar ruby icon that performed diddly squat by design), which Apple deep-sixed from the app store PDQ.
Some people are just oblivious to six orders of magnitude mistakes, and then go off about "folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity" ...
Assuming this is about Harju, it seems the author read "245 million sq m" and assumed the m was miles, not metres.
So the already large 24,500 hectare farm became a ludicrous 245 million square mile multi-planetary behemoth.
Reading sq m as square miles is a surprisingly common error in the US, but usually gets caught before production or publication because the result is orders of magnitude out.
Quoted straight from the piece, as written by dude who just made one of the smallest countries around have abandoned farms larger than the whole world ...
But many people are really like this, no notion whatsoever of order of magnitude plausibility. Has to be beaten out of engineering students, but I suppose the majority of the population is untreated.
> The naive extrapolation of this exponential trend predicts that the 21st century will see cheap computers with a thousand times the raw computational power of all human brains combined
i.e. putting an upper bound on the exponential with solar system mass
Yup, and I played it back when it was new. at an arcade, not in my car.
To me it is like someone saying, "Honey, I'll be on the garage watching Football in my Tesla all afternoon." Yeah, you can do it, but is a car really where you want to do that? The second aspect is it is a game glorifying Elon's "genius". What is next, a FPS for your Tesla where you have a chainsaw and you run through federal buildings trying to get the highest body count?
Those worked in 4-bit slices, and you could use them as LEGO blocks to build your own design (e.g. 8, 12 ou 16 bits) with much fewer parts than using standard TTL gates (or ECL NANDs, if you were Seymour Cray).
The 1980 Mick & Brick book Bit-slice Microprocessor Design later gathered together some "application notes" - the cookbooks/crib sheets that semiconductor companies wrote and provided to get buyers/engineers started after the spec sheets.
Intel has launched in 1974 both the NMOS Intel 8080 and a bipolar bit-slice processor family (Intel 3000).
AMD has introduced in 1975 both its NMOS 8080 clone and the bipolar bit-slice 2900 family.
I do not know which of these 2 AMD products was launched earlier, but in any case there was only a few months difference between them at most, so it cannot be said that AMD "was already in the CPU market". The launch of both products has been prepared at a time when AMD was not yet in the CPU market and Intel had been earlier than AMD both in the NMOS CPU market and in the market for sets of bipolar bit-slice components.
While Intel 8080 was copied by AMD, the AMD 2900 family was much better than the Intel 3000 family, so it has been used in a lot of PDP-11 clones or competitors.
For example, the registers+ALU component of Intel 3000 implemented only a 2-bit slice and few ALU operations, while the registers+ALU component of AMD 2900 implemented a 4-bit slice and also many more ALU operations.
Tears in rain, sic transit, etc.
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