HAMR Time... No longer for MC Hammer..

[newfiend]

Seagate has some new tech in the works that will dramatically increase HDD space called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). It could increase space up to 60TB.. I would love to have a couple of these in my HTPC.. More info here: http://www.techspot.com/news/47860-seag ... -tech.html
newfiend

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[mark1234]

Like, wow!

You sure a couple would be enough? I've got four SATA sockets on my motherboard...

[newfiend]

I know, right... Imagine all that media on one PC.

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[richard1980]

I'm sure the initial price for 1 will set you back enough you won't want to buy another one for a while.

[mark1234]

I'm sure the initial price for 1 will set you back enough you won't want to buy another one for a while.

Spoil sport! Of course you're right, but you didn't have to shatter the dream!

[newfiend]

LOL.. Of course Richard is right..but it would be sweet to have all that room!
now if we could just get that much space in SSD that's affordable.
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[barnabas1969]

"If you build it, they will come." (Field of Dreams 1989)

Really... the bigger they make the storage/memory/bandwidth/IPS/whatever... the bigger the developers make the files/programs/content/whatever. Does anyone here remember the days when we thought that a 40MB (mega, not giga) hard drive was more space than ANYONE could ever fill up? How about the days when 1MB (mega, not giga) of RAM was "more than anyone will ever use"???

Not that long ago, 1GB of RAM or 1TB of disk space was unthinkable. Now it's just run of the mill.

Remember the first time you went from 56K modems to a T1 (1.44Mbps), or broadband??? How about when you went from 1200 BAUD to 2400/4800/9600/etc???

I sure do. It was INCREDIBLE when it became possible to send data over a phone line at 9600 and then eventually 56K!!! When they made the leap to 1GB of disk storage, it was amazing. Do you remember when they broke the 1GHz barrier with CPU's? It will just keep getting bigger, faster, more, better. And then, the programs/content will just get more bloated. The bigger/faster they make it, the more the software/content creators take advantage of that. Nobody really cares about efficiency.

I used to work for a semiconductor manufacturer. We made devices for the military and aerospace industries. I can't go into much more detail due to security reasons. My primary responsibility in the early 1990's was to maintain/repair a few mainframe computers (and their attached measurement devices). Those machines were built in the late 1960's. At the time, my company owned five of them... and there were only about a dozen left in the world. One of them was so unique that there were only two left in the world... one in the US and one in Malaysia. Those two systems had a special time measurement system attached to them (Fortunately for me, I had all the original blueprints for all of these systems... and the people in Malaysia would contact me for help. It also gave me a great learning opportunity... how many of you have had the opportunity to troubleshoot a faulty CPU down to the transistor level -- and repair it, or have worked on ferrite core memory modules?).

The company I worked for was busily writing programs for newer systems to replace the functionality of the old 1960's systems. The funny thing was this... the old systems were faster and more accurate than the new ones. They were built for efficiency. The programmers for the old systems wrote code to maximize the efficiency.

When the engineers discovered the discrepancies between the new machines and the old ones, they assumed that the old machines must be wrong. I had to confirm this to make the military happy. My tests confirmed just the opposite... the old machines were correct.... in fact, they were dead-on. The most precise time-measurement equipment we had... confirmed that the old systems were accurate to less than 0.01 pico-seconds.

The engineers used to joke about how the old machines couldn't possibly be doing a "real" test... because they ran so fast. For example, the tests for one product line ran 1-2 seconds per device on the old machines... and almost a full minute per device on the new ones.

Basically, as hardware gets faster, programmers get sloppier.

Just my 2 cents.

[richard1980]

It's Moore's Law vs Wirth's Law/Gates' Law.

[adam1991]

The company I worked for was busily writing programs for newer systems to replace the functionality of the old 1960's systems. The funny thing was this... the old systems were faster and more accurate than the new ones. They were built for efficiency. The programmers for the old systems wrote code to maximize the efficiency.

Along those lines, here's possibly the best computer ever built, even to this day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

Talk about people who knew what they were doing. The reliability here is staggering--and this from a time when the technology was in its infancy.

Man, those were some smart people.

if you haven't already, you must read about it:

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Hu ... 575&sr=8-1

back to the topic, suddenly tuning six streams at once seems....puny....

[barnabas1969]

One of the things about that job that really sticks in my mind was the first time I saw these computers. They hired me specifically for this project... they had just bought RCA Semiconductor in Findlay, Ohio, and moved these systems from Ohio to Florida. Each system was comprised of five or six racks. I helped reassemble them during my first couple of weeks on the job. Lots of really old cables to connect between the bays.

Remember as a kid, watching Sci-Fi movies... and the computers in the movies with all those blinking lights? I always assumed that the lights were just for show. No "real" computer would have all those, right? Wrong. These systems had little lights all over the place. They blinked almost continuously while the systems were in operation. They actually had meaning too. You could stop the CPU on an instruction (after editing the machine language in core memory), and then go look at the lights to read the data in registers and such.

Another cool thing... when we plugged the memory cards into the memory bay (these cards were about 12"x20", each containing a whopping 4K of memory)... the programs were still loaded in RAM after being powered off and disassembled for more than a week!

[newfiend]

Wow.. That's amazing. Must have been some project. I remember as a kid thinking a commodore 64 was awesome and man .. Those big a$$ floppy disks .. Haha... Man how far we have come. Can't imagine what pc's will be another 20yrs from now. It just changes and advances so fast.. I have a hard time keeping up and I read about this stuff daily.

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[barnabas1969]

Well, they hired a lot of people due to their acquisition of RCA. They only moved key people down from Ohio. One of them was this programmer named Frank Capps. The guy was a genius. Unfortunately for those folks left behind in Ohio, most of them got laid off. Part of my job was to repair and maintain these old systems. I also repaired robotics equipment and other (newer) systems. It was a fun job but every quarter, they laid off a bunch of people. There were about 5000 people working at that location and they would lay off 200 or so every quarter. Eventually, I started to feel like my number was going to come up soon... so I found a new job. Six months after I quit, half of the people in the department where I worked got laid off.

But yeah... it's amazing how far things have progressed in my lifetime. I went to Kennedy Space Center a couple of weeks ago while my in-laws were here from Romania. I've been to KSC quite a few times... it's 5 miles from where I work now. I noticed something on this visit that I never noticed before. One of the video's they played mentioned the fact that we went to the moon just 42 years after Charles Lindbergh made the first trans-Atlantic flight from the US to mainland Europe. It's really amazing to think that only two generations after that historic flight, we sent men to the moon.

Edit: Oh, and your mentioning the Commodore 64: That "64" part stood for 64K of memory. The old systems at my job at the semiconductor manufacturer had a maximum memory capacity of 64K. We only had one system that had a full memory bay. And the CPU ran at 100KHz. Yes... as in Kilo.

[newfiend]

My computer lab in HS had all commodore 64's and the "smarter" kids got to use the Mac's.. We only had 2 or 3 in the class room .. LOL

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[barnabas1969]

My high school was selected as a beta site for the "Mac Net". Apple donated all the equipment. All of our grades were maintained on the Mac Net. One of my teachers was very techno-phobic, so she would ask me to enter all her grades for her. She gave me her username and password. Her username had unlimited access to change student records in every class in the school. I guess they never thought about security when they installed the system. I suppose I could have made some money by selling higher grades to students.

I didn't do that, but I did do some practical jokes. I created new fictitious students with names like "Seymour Butts", "Ilene Ulick", and other funny names. I assigned the fictitious students to my homeroom. When report cards came out, the homeroom teacher was calling the names and passing out the report cards. It was hilarious as he called out the names!

[newfiend]

LOL.. Well I wasn't so good..haha.. I got a commodore 64 for Xmas one year and a dot matrix printer.. Our report cards came out printed by a dot matrix printer.. I made a report card for a girl in school because her grades stank and she didn't want to get in trouble. So I did it.. Not thinking of the consequences. About 2 days later I was called to the principals office and had to admit to printing the falsified report card. Seems her parents were pretty smart and called the school to verify the grades. I got suspended from school for a week. Mom and Pop were NOT HAPPY!.. LOL.. Oh well guess I was cheeky then too. LOL.

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[barnabas1969]

I didn't get in any trouble for what I did. They must not have been able to track it back to my teacher's username. My homeroom teacher realized it was a joke after he called a couple of the names, but he must have thought it was funny because he continued to call the fake names as he got to each of them. I never told anyone what I did until long after high school. I guess I really could have changed grades and gotten away with it.

Funny thing too... my homeroom teacher was also my history teacher. He was a scrawny little guy with a Napoleon complex. My friend Nathan and I gave him all kinds of trouble. We would do stand-up comedy routines in his class... usually interrupting him while he was teaching, and acting as if he didn't exist when he told us to sit down and shut up. I was a total goof-off in 10th grade. I failed most of my classes that year and had to repeat the 10th grade. On my history final exam, I wrote my name at the top of the paper and turned it in without answering a single question. He gave me a "B" on that test... and I passed his class with a "D". I guess he didn't want me back for another year.

[newfiend]

That's so funny..Ilene Ulick...hahah....miss those days in HS where you could get away with being a total smarta$$. It goes by so fast and you have no idea just how good you have it. Then adulthood sets in, wives, kids, bills.. And problems with MC...lol sometimes wish I was 18 again but know what I know now so I could make better decisions. Oh well.. Live and learn.
newfiend

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[barnabas1969]

I wish I was 16 again and still know what I know now... so I could have more fun! Forget about the better choices!