91–100 of 193 posts
Years ago when my daughter was around 5 I was showing her a raspberry Pi zero I had just picked up. I told her - years ago before Daddy was your age a computer like this used to be as big as a house. Her response was - “houses were that small?”
Have you seen houses from the 1920s -- she's not that far off
When I see comparisons like this, the first thought I have is not the benchmarks, but rather what the most “heroic” real-world calculation of the day would have been on something like the Cray-1, and how to replicate those calculations today on something like a RPi. Weather/climate models? Rad-hydro? The fidelity would almost certainly be super low compared to modern FEA software, but it would be a fun exercise to tr…
the first machine went to Los Alamos
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/these...
I've gone through the pi rabbit hole to the kubernetes/swarm level. Just skip that stuff at this point and get a mini pc. The money comes out to be the same and I promise it is way less of a hassle.
It's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing cluster of 2023... promising to themselves that one day they're finally going to build that hobby project with one of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
such a dystopian future... I hope we are not still using plastic then :)
How is this dystopian? Plastic is a really great material -- and way more eco-friendly than metal for building computers. It's only mass-produced single-use plastics like water bottles that are bad for the environment.
I've gone through the pi rabbit hole to the kubernetes/swarm level. Just skip that stuff at this point and get a mini pc. The money comes out to be the same and I promise it is way less of a hassle.
What make and model would you recommend for a mini PC? I was thinking of getting one lately.
Plenty fast for a couple of VMs with web servers. It's also a lot better for 24/7 than RPi, as I was always struggling with SD card wear
I've gone through the pi rabbit hole to the kubernetes/swarm level. Just skip that stuff at this point and get a mini pc. The money comes out to be the same and I promise it is way less of a hassle.
The Cray-1 has a much better couch.
There's a line in the Jurassic Park book where a character is made suspicious by an offhand assertion (by Nedry) that he is using a multi XMP system . Rpi4s are nice, in a sense, because you can only rarely honestly claim that the speed of the system is holding you back. Most times, presumably, it's the efficiency of the operations you are telling it to execute.
> "Jesus," David said. "That's a Cray 2!"
> "Ten of them." McKittrick said.
> "I didn't know they were out yet."
> McKittrick almost preened. "Only ten. Come on, I want to show you something."