161–170 of 215 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, I’m still in the datacenter storage business and our service delivery costs have been going down. You have to look at the service as a whole… nvme let us retire frames, etc. I think hyperscale margins are high, and I think between the many tiers of storage and backend technology they are constantly cooking cost out.
But still content keeps growing, and income per user won't. Doesn't that mean that at one point you're out of runway?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should be results. Tech giants are too big to fail, as are the big banks and insurers. If we break up the banks and insurers by product offerings, then why not break up big tech? Each company gets split into 3 smaller firms, each with access to all the IP of the mothership. They get to fight for their customers, and barter over business assets, to figure out who owns what.
I find it so highly ironic that anyone truly believes this would end up better. They would not fight over customers, in the same way the breakup of AT&T did not result in a fight over customers - only a more complete, nimble, and effective domination of the entire US that lasts to this day. These companies are hamstrung by their size and internal cultural infighting - you will break them into much more effective unit…
But for me the biggest "for" argument isn't that the broken up companies will compete with each other (that makes no sense because you'd break them up along business lines where they don't compete anyway).
Instead for me it is that it removes cross subsidies both financial (as in "we can give away this loss making application because we make so much money from X) and marketing (our new product Y is inferior to the existing product Z but we can make Y the default in our other apps and then people will just use it).
This removal of cross subsidies does increase competition.
However it's possible to force the removal of cross subsidies by other means (eg, the old "force the user to be able to select the search engine in Internet Explorer" regulation etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presages an interesting digital future in which nothing ever truly goes away, it just gets slower and slower. An endless inner migration that never quite hits the stopping point, and which could theoretically be reversed if only the slowed content garnered enough attention.
I'd expect a significantly different scale. Specifically, I'd expect normal tiers ranging from "instant" to "several seconds", then a huge gap, then a rock bottom tape archive. From a more zoomed out look, you could simplify it to only two speeds. The fast speed taking 0-15 seconds, and the slow speed taking minutes to hours. Any content that's been accessed once or twice in the last week or month would be on the nor…
The next immediate step from online tapes today could be offline tapes with online indexes & robotic retrieval systems. These exist today. The continuous falloff would be a matter of priority ranking given to content requests-- not merely FIFO-- so ever less popular irrelevant content gets shoved further back in the robotic retrieval queue. A recently iced bit of content might be top priority for the tape loader while something not touched in years might sit hours down the queue. The continuous decline isn't defined by the storage media but instead by the capacity of the retrieval systems. Speed would continue on a slow decline as content increases even more and the low economic value of that content make investing in increased capacity impractical.
Eventually you get to a point in some far off future where the retrieval time for some obscure bucket of bits is measured in significant fractions of a human lifetime, where a dying grandfather requests a video of his wedding 70 years earlier only to have it arrive just in time for his own grandson's dying moments decades later.
I think I've gone too far imagining unlikely slow storage dystopian futures though, so I'm going to stop now before I start ranting about the Slow God who needs only enough access requests from the masses of his adherents to prioritize his retrieval from the depths of cold storage. But Dante Alighieri warned of what was stored in the coldest depths and it was no god... Oh God what hath this comment awakened?!?!
Okay now I'm really done.
AWS's pricing strategy changed a few years ago. Previously, they'd drop prices aggressively with much fanfare every time they did. Nowadays, they almost never drop prices, but release new offerings they say will save money [for certain use cases]: - Gravitron 2 is slightly cheaper than Intel instances, with a greater price/performance ratio—at least for some applications. - m6i is same price as m5, but new generation…
It’s noteworthy to me that available memory has not increased in some time. You can find machines with more memory, and perhaps the number of classes has increased, but outside of very narrow envelopes it might be cheaper to have 2 m6i’s with undersubscribed CPUs than to try to increase the amount of cpu per core on something else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd expect a significantly different scale. Specifically, I'd expect normal tiers ranging from "instant" to "several seconds", then a huge gap, then a rock bottom tape archive. From a more zoomed out look, you could simplify it to only two speeds. The fast speed taking 0-15 seconds, and the slow speed taking minutes to hours. Any content that's been accessed once or twice in the last week or month would be on the nor…
I suppose that's what it would look like currently, but as content increases and the aggregate long tail of unpopular material grows ever larger there could be shifts in desirable storage solution characteristics that fit different economic niches. An extremely dense, extremely cheap, and extremely slow WORM storage device could find a place somewhere in the future. Cheap as in order(s) of magnitude less. The next im…
And I'm already assuming the tapes are offline, because online tapes would just be a waste of money.
Another issue is finding enough content suitable for very high latency systems. Right now they seem to basically just be for backups.
Storage price reductions slowing down or even coming to a halt makes me wonder what this means for "infinite storage" companies. I'm talking services like Facebook, Youtube, that are "free" (ad supported) where on a daily basis an absurd amount of new content is added, yet almost nothing ever removed. If storage needs grow endlessly yet storage costs stopped going down, wouldn't that mean that the model in the long t…
AWS's pricing strategy changed a few years ago. Previously, they'd drop prices aggressively with much fanfare every time they did. Nowadays, they almost never drop prices, but release new offerings they say will save money [for certain use cases]: - Gravitron 2 is slightly cheaper than Intel instances, with a greater price/performance ratio—at least for some applications. - m6i is same price as m5, but new generation…
This is how every market player is incentivized to behave, apart from regulatory authorities acting to prosecute monopolistic behavior. 1. Price and compete aggressively to grow market share, put competitors out of business, and even transform the market, if possible 2. Once you become the dominant player (i.e. a monopoly), raise prices (or don't lower them) as much as possible without damaging your market position T…
AWS's pricing strategy changed a few years ago. Previously, they'd drop prices aggressively with much fanfare every time they did. Nowadays, they almost never drop prices, but release new offerings they say will save money [for certain use cases]: - Gravitron 2 is slightly cheaper than Intel instances, with a greater price/performance ratio—at least for some applications. - m6i is same price as m5, but new generation…
It’s noteworthy to me that available memory has not increased in some time. You can find machines with more memory, and perhaps the number of classes has increased, but outside of very narrow envelopes it might be cheaper to have 2 m6i’s with undersubscribed CPUs than to try to increase the amount of cpu per core on something else.