One of the biggest bottlenecks in many workloads is latency. Cache miss and the CPU stalls waiting for main memory. Flash storage, even on an nvme bus is two orders of magnitude slower than ram.

For example L3 cache takes approximately 10-20 nano seconds, ram takes closer to 100 nano seconds, nvme flash is more than 10,000 nano seconds (>10 microseconds).

Depending on your age you may remember the transition from hard drives to ssds. They could make a machine feel much snappier. Early PC ssds weren’t significantly faster throughput than hard drives (many now are even slower writing when they run out of SLC cache), what they were is significantly lower latency.

As an aside, Intel and Microns 3d xpoint was super interesting technically. It was capable of < 5000 nano seconds in early generation parts, meaning it sat in between DDR ram and flash.

Gigabytes plural? Maybe a while. Gigabyte singular? Already a thing. AMD EPYC 9684X(https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-generation-9004-and-8004-series/amd-epyc-9684x.html)

I think “long covid” is something that has existed for a long time, well not long covid specifically but long term side effects of colds and flu.

A few years before covid I got a terrible cold or flu. Name a symptom of the flu and I probably had it, it was hard to even get myself to the toilet.

But what was so unique is even after the aches, the cough, and sore throat etc symptoms disappeared I didn’t recover. I was exhausted. Even weeks later I’d fluctuate between days of being fine to the next barely able to get out of bed.

It took at least 3 months after traditional flu symptoms had finished till that started to taper off. And at least another 3 before I started feeling truly myself again.

I never had one (but did want one, just financially couldn’t justify it at the time), but it would have a great fit for me. I just wanted a watch to tell the time, and display my phone notifications plus vibrate to alert me to them. That would have been legitimately useful for the job I was in at the time which was challenging to carry a phone (but it was nearby in my bag).

Now, I have no use for any of that. But I am now interested in a heart rate monitor that doesn’t hoover my data to replace my old dedicated Polar heart rate monitor (which also told the time, but I only wore it exercising), so the more expensive model is tempting!

This is one of my motivations for dumping my games and modding my consoles. Pull out Wii sports and it doesn’t work? No problems I’ll run it off usb.

To add another example to your great post.

And when there are exceptions, they are based on the type of good. Eg in Australia GST isn’t charged on fresh fruit and vegetables in a grocery store. It doesn’t matter whether an orange was grown in Australia or internationally it will be tax free.

Whereas with a tariff, a orange grown locally will be tax exempt whereas the imported one (from a tariff applied country) will.

The Fastmail app itself is mostly a wrapper around the web app with integrations for notifications etc. Sans notifications it works perfectly as an installed PWA on Android. Ive been using it like that for months.

Alternatively there are lots of IMAP apps available. I was testing Thunderbird for Android recently and that works pretty well too.

Disclaimer: I work for Fastmail. But any opinions I have on here are my own.

Like, how long did it take them to adopt broadband technology on their consoles? The Wii?

While I agree they’re behind the times on their consoles re online, I think it’s more a software issue. I don’t think criticising the hardware functionality is quite fair.

The predecessor to the Wii was the Gamecube which came out in 2001, where few people had broadband internet

The other consoles in that generation were the ps2, xbox, and briefly dreamcast. Of those, only the xbox came with built in networking, until the playstation slim release in 2004. The dreamcast, ps2 and Gamecube all offered additional adapters to provide ethernet (and the dreamcast and Gamecube had dial up modems available too). So the Gamecube was in line with most of the competition.

The Wii had out of the box WiFi (and an adapter for ethernet available) which put it in a similar space to its competitors. Only the ps3 had both WiFi and ethernet out of the box at launch. The 360 only had ethernet until a refresh that added WIFI. And the Wii was also coming in at a significantly lower price point.

Indeed

While not hard drives, at $dayjob we bought a new server out with 16 x 64TB nvme drives. We don’t even need the speed of nvme for this machines roll. It was the density that was most appealing.

It feels crazy having a petabytes of storage (albeit with some lost to raid redundancy). Is this what it was like working in tech up till the mid 00s with significant jumps just turning up?

Blast from the past! I had this on cdrom. As a child I remember our old computer that had Sim City 2000 on didn’t have a cdrom drive. Our new computer did. I fondly remember copying my favourite cities from the old to new via floppy disk. Those were the days!

That’s super interesting. Do you have a source you could link for this data?

The Android app has done this for years too.

After connecting my (non Microsoft) email account to the Outlook Android app I noticed the login location was geolocated in the USA… I live in Australia.

Unfortunately there’s no way to turn it off.