Sadly, every interaction I have recently had with those on BCTS and elsewhere shows that most or all of those who use any sort of computer technology are simply unaware of the shake out we have recently experienced. It has been a huge education for me. Some of those I have talked to have been quite blunt and tactless, treating me like I am an idiot.
Since 1968, I have seen Hard Drives shrink from the size of a Ford Van to the size of a postage stamp with 1 terabyte. I just got a tower computer that is roughly 1 foot on two sides and 4 inches thick that is an almost empty box. The mother board is less than 6 inches square, and the largest parts are the three cooling fans. It goes on and on. Most of the components I have grown used to seeing are simply gone.
Battery powered cars will likely go from barely 200 miles range to nearly 1200 miles range very soon.
Only a few of the Authors that I have read have written any of the fiction, including the very wishful TG stories that will likely be reality. It is sad that the antagonists of Transgender folk have their heads so far up their back sides. I can't even guess how soon complete gender change a red pill/blue pill thing will be. The so called righteous in Florida, and Texas are about to experience a reality that will have them sitting in the corner wringing their hands.
When members of my own family come round, will I tell them to bugger off? I want to. I've brief thoughts of suicide that have thankfully departed.
I feel like a Dinosaur watching a meteor burning up in the sky over my head.
Ahabidah
Comments
From another "Dinosaurian" ...
Hoping I was not among those who distressed you.
I 'fell in love' with computers in 1969 (age circa 15) when my parents 'tossed me into' a computer class for high school students. They said, "Try it. If you don't like it, you don't have finish out the course. We'll even get you the textbook,"
The text was about 40 pages, and I understood nothing past page one point five ...
Since then, my computer life has been pretty much nothing but learning about the beasts. Idiot? ... Kind hope I'm not. Ignorant? Just about permanently ...
Wherever you are at ... I've probably been there. My high-school had a punched-card sorter, When we wanted to change the sorting - we opened up the back panel and rearranged wires on a plug-board...
Punch cards? Check. Punched paper tape? - Yep. First job, we sent coding forms to the data entry people, who typed them in ...
Was at a lecture by Doctor Admiral Grace Murry Hopper. She was, among many other things, "God Mother of Cobol." When an insect got into, and stopped, the workings of one of her built-with-relays(!) computers ... the deceased was removed and taped into the logbook. Not the first usage, but: https://www.si.edu/object/log-book-computer-bug%3Anmah_334663. The teasing was obvious, and now historic.
Assembly language (4)? C? PL/1? Unix (many)? IBM 360? Micro-code? Yep, yep, ...
Back-ups? One work assignment was to enlarge my department's data area. Our source code. Documents. Works in progress. History files, Memos - all of it. Myself and a co-worker independently backed it up. Before I deliberately destroyed it. Then I enlarged the area, and put everything back in. It was the only time I had guaranteed employment. If anything went wrong, I knew I had a job until they had sucked my brain dry of all that went wrong ...
Hard drives? Circa 1994 my company was proudly spinning a one-Terabyte database at a trade show. Twelve full-sized 'refrigerator'-sized boxes full of hard drives, another four such 'refrigerators' full of CPUs to run it.
At the moment, I have a two T-byte hard drive (backups) sitting on top of my 95+% empty desktop tower. And another two T-byte USB hard drive stuck in the front, with stuff I 'need' - and it's not even 2/3rds full.
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So. if there is something I happen know, but you don't ... there was a time when => I did not know it either <= ... and I try to remember back to "when I was just an egg."
At the moment, I have a 700 page Java book within fore-arms reach - and that's my hobby reading.
== ===
Stick around. If/When you chew up your "family" - we want all the "gory" details, and to hoist a (virtual) brew or few with you.
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Now that I've mentioned it ... I'm gonna move my 'every-day' hard drive from the slow front USB port to fast port on the back. Thanks!
Urrk!
I forgot the important part:
And I'd be happy to try and teach.
Gently.
Or try and point you towards the decent how-to spots.
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PS: And the move of my 'main drive' (not the C: with system stuff) of 'goodies' from from the slow port to the fast - worked perfectly.
😁
Mostly air in the case
You know Gwen, even four decades back the cases containing computer hardware were mostly filled with air and “empty space”. I still vividly remember the first hard disk drive I ever saw back in January 1986. It was a cabinet about 80cm wide by 80cm deep and 100cm high. It was surrounded by about one meter of ventilation space on all four sides. Opening the back panel revealed a single metal disk spinning on a chassis at the bottom of the cabinet, with the top 80% being just empty space. That beast had the massive storage capacity of five megabytes!
And yes I remember having to open personal computers on a regular basis (every three to six months) and press down on all those many individual memory chips to insure a good seat, since they tended to creep out of their sockets due to thermal expansion. My first IBM compatible PC had 16 individual memory chips for the huge amount of 1MB (one megabyte) of Random Access Memory. My current PC has one module with two or three surface-mounted chips for 32GB (thirty two gigabytes) of memory. The former was in 1990 and the latter in 2021.
Back then every peripheral required its own expansion card and slot: video card, serial and parallel ports, floppy controller, hard disk controller, sound card, CD-ROM controller, modem, network card, etc. Not to mention running those wide ribbon cables from those expansion cards to the respective devices. Now-a-days all those interfaces are integrated into two or three integrated circuit chips and parallel connections have disappeared in favor of serial connections. That saves a lot of space!
Even if very small cases are available (such as notebook computers), the bigger cases are still better and more efficient at heat dissipation. Hence all that empty space and the multitude of fans installed on and around the motherboard.
I still remember being able to touch a 80286 CPU in operation with no problems, but blistering my fingertip after barely touching a running 80486 CPU. And the newest CPUs need to dissipate even more heat, and will shut down when they reach 80-85℃.
As if the technology gets
As if the technology gets better with time....
(I work in IT, and some things are just not being told openly...).
So - new postage stamp sized 1tb drives... yay for size. But they have ~400-600 guaranteed rewrites per block (QLC ones). Flash storage got cheaper and... less reliable (if you do not believe my words - google "SLC MLC TLC QLC SSD" - the denser they go, the less reliability they have. I had at least one modern SSD drive fail on me, with data loss, due to overheating. I had one 'spinning rust' drive fail destructively on me. it was at this point - more than 10 year old, and running almost 24/7. I got data recovered from it.
At this point any flash-based drives can be considered consumables. And this is not even counting that they shouldn't be used for long-term data storage. Leave them unpowered for long time and they risk starting losing data.
Same goes for computers - yes, they got more advanced, but progress have slowed down considerably lately. Around 2006-2007 strategy of "just increase cpu clock" stopped working. Then it was "just add more cpu cores" - that one still sort of works, but we hit physics limits here too (in both miniaturization and die size). Desktop computer I built in 2014 was perfectly serviceable for most purposes in 2022. And still would have been, if I didn't leave it when I moved out of the country. The only change I did was add SSD for operating system booting (speed), add more RAM, and that was it.
> Battery powered cars will likely go from barely 200 miles range to nearly 1200 miles range very soon.
And that is highly unlikely. So - let's take Tesla Model S - it has 95 kilowatthour battery. That is sufficient for ~300 miles of range (as they claim).
Energy requirement to move the car is sort of fixed, it is defined by aerodynamics, speed and weight.
So - to increase range we need bigger battery - about 3 times bigger. That will be 1.5 tons of battery alone. But even that is not a big problem - the problem is - how do you charge it in reasonable time - 300kWh battery, at 10kW slow charger - that would be 30 hours.
And I am not even touching infrastructure here, required to support that load. :-(
On another point - battery fires. They already happen. If you get 300kWh of energy on your hands in a fire - it is impossible to extinguish. You try to cool it down and pray that it would not spread. If battery is full - that energy is enough to heat from 25°C, boil and vaporize half a ton of water.
And as energy density will get better - it will get more dangerous. Gasoline at least requires oxygen to burn. Batteries do not need that.
> I can't even guess how soon complete gender change a red pill/blue pill thing will be.
Not soon. That is basically complete body rebuild.
Organs built from "scaffold" and recipient cells - now that may be reality relatively soon.