• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Time isn’t the only factor for adoption. Between the adoption of IPv4 and IPv6, the networking stack shifted away from network companies like Novell to the OSes like Windows, which delayed IPv6 support until Vista.

    When IPv4 was adopted, the networking industry was a competitive space. When IPv6 came around, it was becoming stagnant, much like Internet Explorer. It wasn’t until Windows Vista that IPv6 became an option, Windows 7 for professionals to consider it, and another few years later for it to actually deployable in a secure manner (and that’s still questionable).

    Most IT support and developers can even play with IPv6 during the early 2000s because our operating systems and network stacks didn’t support it. Meanwhile, there was a boom of Internet connected devices that only supported IPv4. There are a few other things that affected adoption, but it really was a pretty bad time for IPv6 migration. It’s a little better now, but “better” still isn’t very good.


  • It seems you are mixing the concepts of voting systems and candidate selection. FPP nor FPTP should not sound scary. As a voting systems, FPP works well enough more often than many want to admit. The name just describes it in more detail: First Preference Plurality.

    Every voting system is as bottom-up or top-down as the candidate selection process. The voting system itself doesn’t really affect whether it is top down or bottom up. Requiring approval/voting from the current rulers would be top-down. Only requiring ten signatures on a community petition is more bottom up.

    The voting systems don’t care about the candidate selection process. Some require precordination for a “party”, but that could also be a party of 1. A party of 1 might not be able to get as much representation as one with more people: but that’s also the case for every voting system that selects the same number of candidates.

    Voting systems don’t even need to be used for representation systems. If a group of friends are voting on where to eat, one problem might be selecting the places to vote on, but that’s before the vote. With the vote, FPP might have 70% prefer pizza over Indian food, but the Indian food vote might still win because the pizza voters had another first choice. Having more candidates often leads to minority rule/choice, and that’s not very good for food choice nor community representation.




  • I’m still rocking a Galaxy Watch 4: one of the first Samsung watches with WearOS. It has a true always-on screen, and most should. The always-on was essential to me. I generally notice within 60 minutes if an update or some “feature” tries to turn it off. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing off about your comment.

    It’s a pretty rough experience. The battery is hit or miss. At good times, I could get 3 days. Keeping it locked, (like after charging) used to kill it within 60 minute (thankfully, fixed after a year). Bad updates can kill the battery life, even when new: from 3 days life to 10 hours, then to 3 days again. Now, after almost 3 years, it’s probably about 30 hours, rather than 3 days.

    In general, the battery life with always-on display should last more than 24 hours. That’d be pretty acceptable for a smartwatch, but is it a smartwatch?

    It can’t play music on its own without overheating. It can’t hold a phone call on its own without overheating. App support is limited, but the processor seems to struggle most of the time. Actually smart features seem rare, especially for something that needs consistent charging.

    Most would be better off with a Pebble or less “smart” watch: better water resistance, better battery, longer support, 90% of the usable features, and other features to help make up for any differences.


  • tl;dr

    The memory bandwidth isn’t magic, nor special, but generally meaningless. MT/s matter more, but Apple’s non-magic is generally higher than the industry standard in compact form factors.

    Long version:

    How are such wrong numbers are so widely upvoted? The 6400Mbps is per pin.

    Generally, DDR5 has a 64-bit data bus. The standard names also indicate the speeds per module: PC5-32000 transfers 32GB/s with 64-bits at 4000MT/s, and PC5-64000 transfers 64GB/s with 64-bits at 8000MT/s. With those speeds, it isn’t hard for a DDR5 desktop or server to reach similar bandwidth.

    Apple doubles the data bus from 64-bits to 128-bits (which is still nothing compared to something like an RTX 4090, with a 384-bit data bus). With that, Apple can get 102.4GB/s with just one module instead of the standard 51.2GB/s. The cited 800GB/s is with 8: most comparable hardware does not allow 8 memory modules.

    Ironically, the memory bandwidth is pretty much irrelevant compared to the MT/s. To quote Dell defending their CAMM modules:

    In a 12th-gen Intel laptop using two SO-DIMMs, for example, you can reach DDR5/4800 transfer speeds. But push it to a four-DIMM design, such as in a laptop with 128GB of RAM, and you have to ratchet it back to DDR5/4000 transfer speeds.

    That contradiction makes it hard to balance speed, capacity, and upgradability. Even the upcoming Core Ultra 9 185H seems rated for 5600 MT/s-- after 2 years, we’re almost getting PC laptops that have the memory speed of Macbooks. This wasn’t Apple being magical, but just taking advantage of OEMs dropping the ball on how important memory can be to performance. The memory bandwidth is just the cherry on top.

    The standard supports these speeds and faster. To be clear, these speeds and capacity don’t do ANYTHING to support “8GB is analogous to…” statements. It won’t take magic to beat, but the PC industry doesn’t yet have much competition in the performance and form factors Apple is targeting. In the meantime, Apple is milking its customers: The M3s have the same MT/s and memory technology as two years ago. It’s almost as if they looked at the next 6-12 months and went: “They still haven’t caught up, so we don’t need too much faster, yet-- but we can make a lot of money until while we wait.”