Moore's Law

Mystere said:

Actually, they can. Sort of. There are many factors that go into physics. For instance, a force working against another force can counteract it, and make it appear to violate laws of gravity. A favorite bar-trick of mine uses Equilibrium to counteract gravity.

Balancing Forks on the Tip of a Toothpick Trick - YouTube

Of course this doesn't REALLY change the law, but it does alter its effects.

All I'm saying is that Moore's 'Law' is not in the same category, is not the same logical type, as Newton's Law of Gravitation. It should have been called 'Moore's Observation', or something like that.

Newtons laws of gravitation and motion are special cases. They work fine for most situations on the surface of the earth or for most of the visible planets.

Ask Einstein how Newton's law fails to predict the position of Mercury though.

Nothing (not even light) continues in a straight line or at a constant velocity when relativistic points of view are taken into consideration. Everything is curved, even space.

8TB all at once? are we talking about a database or lots of music an image files? If you are a serious business user you will have fibre to your datacentre, but as far as you are concerned it is cloud storage. Not a piffling 80 Mbps internet connection, but similar rates to your Helium drive of say 12 GBps or even more. If businesses can do it today, it will be available to all within a few years. If the demand is there.

Fafhrd said:

Newtons laws of gravitation and motion are special cases. They work fine for most situations on the surface of the earth or for most of the visible planets.

Ask Einstein how Newton's law fails to predict the position of Mercury though.

Nothing (not even light) continues in a straight line or at a constant velocity when relativistic points of view are taken into consideration. Everything is curved, even space.

8TB all at once? are we talking about a database or lots of music an image files? If you are a serious business user you will have fibre to your datacentre, but as far as you are concerned it is cloud storage. Not a piffling 80 Mbps internet connection, but similar rates to your Helium drive of say 12 GBps or even more. If businesses can do it today, it will be available to all within a few years. If the demand is there.

Yes, I know all that, and you know what I meant.

Ok I don't want an eternal polemic. We both know what "Moore's Law" means, and as such has limited use, but it held true as an empirical observation until recently, when our requirements for ever more computing power started to slow down. It has been extrapolated to encompass all areas of evolving computer hardware, including storage and even the rate of growth of number of WWW pages.

That Moore's conjecture is of less impact and stature than those of Isaac Newton, I'd agree. If Newton has seen further by standing on the shoulders of Giants, then I suppose I have annoyed them by treading on their toes. Forgive me.

Our belief system enabled us to believe that there were immutable physical laws, until the 20th century - since then, it is realised that even in Physics, there are exceptions to even the simplest laws. Even Mathematics is at its most interesting when some bright star proves some longstanding conjecture, or falsifies it. So, the term law, in science, has been downgraded to a pretty good hypothesis borne out by all the data available at the time, but refuted by xxx under certain conditions (but its easier to call it a law). We'll still call it a Law when we teach it to schoolkids though.

I think this illustrates my point about changing perceptions of the way things used to be done, rather well:
No RTM for Windows 10, Microsoft Says - Thurrott.com

Fafhrd said:

Back in 1989/90, when I took a Masters in Information Studies, we had to do a group essay on the future of computing. At that time, the pundits were all saying that Silicon was nearing the limit of numbers of transistors/chip, hard disks were reaching the limit of storage, and that we had to find new technologies like optical computing, holographic storage, superconducting computers and gallium arsenide to replace Silicon.

386sx processors, 1 Mb RAM, VGA monitors and Windows 3.0, and 200MB hard disks were new and desirable - but out of range of our pockets. at more than £1500.

I am running Windows 10 on 10-year old hardware, and speed is not an issue, so something has changed, and it's not Moore's Law, it is the requirement for ever faster hardware has stopped.

128-bit computing, although the technology has been around for years, is not necessary. Even the Weather and climate forecasting number-crunching supercomputers perform with 64-bit technology. You might find your GPU uses some 128-bit processing, but that's all.

Why do you need an 8TB single point of failure in your PC when it is safer to upload to some cloud storage, and what app or OS needs 64 GB RAM to perform adequately?

When our needs start to exceed the current hardware possibilities, the Moore's Law curve will start climbing again, but someone will have to think of some new, attainable uses for computing first, and it isn't desktop apps, rocket science, medical imaging, pharmaceutical design or anything else you can think of, because anything you can think of has already been done.

Basically summed up right here. Moore's law applies and gets accelerated by market demands. There is more demand for battery life than hard drive space, more demand for faster internet than more processor cores.

What the average person does these days on quad core processors with four gigs of RAM is ample enough to last a decade. Back then, a single 100MHz processor with 64MB of RAM seemed like a lot, but then computing needs changed and that is puny.