asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: but forget about ice cream men. ask your intelligence men if, say, LukOil produces own terahertz silicon. is there any question what the answer is?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: but ice cream monger wants to live too.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if it does, i can't see why you wouldn't have your own, terrahertz bus << because ice cream truck does not bring in the income to convert it to galactic ice cream empire.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: and memory access is the bottleneck.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: anyway, bad analogy. i'm speaking of actual problems where higher clock on system bus equals more cash.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it isn't a broom to me, but the 'rifle' i carry every day.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: just explaining that, e.g., 2x ram bandwidth - closer to 'oxen' than otherwise.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what did happen was - the 'strong oxen' died. simply died. and this made micros look good, because alive looks better than dead.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: kiler micros did better than the mainframe <<< noooo.... not for shared-memory problems! not then, not now. please, understand the basic issue.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: people didn't use to upgrade worth a shit << number crunching - existed. even if you're not involved with it, realize that it was original purpose of computer. it matters.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 2008 processor << can get ~2x the clock now. i fully grasp that for your application - there is no reason whatsoever to do this.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if it sucks, he'll do worse than you << find naggum's piece on how 'market can only tackle one dimension of multidimensional analysis.' yes, other fellow will fold the protein faster, while running poetteringisms.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it's always been cheaper to buy last year's tech and buy a lot of it and network it << to some extent, the problem i spoke of is a 'two strong oxen' problem. need shared memory.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if it sucks you don't update << and lose the contract to the fellow who isn't trying to fold protein on 486.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i was trying to disagree, logically, with 'we can simply preserve in amber hardware from golden age and use that for everything'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i'm more or less wasting life just by having the misfortune to be parked on planet 3 in 2014. this is quite clear.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: except the world broke since naggum wrote this. not even the oil prospectors write custom os now.
asciilifeform: same goes for any other similarly perverse application where 'horsepower' is money.
asciilifeform: leaving for a moment aside my own piles of junk metal - folks embroiled in scientific computing are inevitably doomed to use modern hardware. they cannot, economically, freeze in time and live in 2008 (or whenever) for eternity.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if i were to rent hardware, would have to do most of the management work personally on account of massive existing toolchain crud.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: last i checked, rented gpu was not worth the cost. but say i did. then i get: the very same modern hardware... just - rented.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: from a 'business perspective' very few of the things folks do to survive make sense. ice cream truck will not make the owner rich. nor the knife sharpener in buenos aires.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: no dc. we're talking about a handful of boxes in a cheapo office. if any more, must have dc cage, then nothing left to eat.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: visit more threadbare pauper's shops made of shoelace and bamboo
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: mircea_popescu: two 0 old cpus are faster than a 0 modern << not for molecular dynamics sim. need fast shared memory.☟︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: can only afford a few dozen chickens before 'bracket' rises (cost of next tier of floor space, cooling, begin to dwarf the machines)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you haven't even heard the rest of the fun. at my other job, also stuck with maximally modern hw. because how many floating point ops per second determines, more or less directly, how we're paid.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the single biggest hog in my butcher shop.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: not only winblows, though. but it's the 'heaviest' victim.
asciilifeform: did try to explain. winblows in emulator, for instance. i'm a 'reverse-engineer.'
asciilifeform: in fact you cannot run 2005 linux on 2014 hw. not if you want, e.g., video output. or networking.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: as i tried to explain, recent hardware means, inevitably, either recent kernel, or laborious pick-and-choose driver vivisection.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: was explaining why doomed to recent hardware!
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: cannot, much as i'd love to, use 486, or bk-0011, or handmade pdp-11 in fpga.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: need max cpu, max ram, or will hate life.
asciilifeform: jurov: i even know what mircea will say now - that poor choice of profession, should instead drill for oil in the north atlantic, or fight in syria.
asciilifeform: jurov: he also doesn't strictly have to leave home. or do work.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: on account of my profession, i need max disk, cpu, ram, attainable. in portable box. still say 486?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: remember, this is a box i have to actually live with.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: stupid << answer then. i requisitioned portable comp, could have asked for anything. should have asked for 486? with 640x480 lcd ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: who exactly is doomed to grunt on recent hardware << just about anyone using issued portables. anyone with rented servers. most folks.
asciilifeform: who cares about recent distros << recent distros - maybe no one. recent kernels - quite a few folks doomed to grunt on recent hardware. who don't have the muscles, time, or energy to vivisect the patches.
asciilifeform: gentoo's the last man standing << not standing. hobbling on leg stump like the knight in 'monty python'.
asciilifeform: kakobrekla: read the linked piece, see if you can decide for yourself
asciilifeform: durov << devoted cocksucker of u.s. state dept., disgraceful shill.
asciilifeform: e-book prices << price of w4r3z still == 0. nyooz at 11!11!
asciilifeform: thank you assbot, saving my leaf springs the wear!
