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I actually switched to chrome many years ago because firefox was abusing system resources and chrome was much lighter.
I did the same! I’m now given to understand that that was Google’s goal with Chrome - make the easiest-to-use and most lightweight browser to bring everyone in, then ramp up the trackers and bloat. I think I need to export my bookmarks and look into Firefox again…
You Should. Firefox has gotten so much Better. Not to mention all the literal BULLSHIT Google has done and will be doing with their browser.
The way Chrome works now, every tab is its own instance. Firefox, each window is its own instance.
I use Firefox, TOR, and even Edge sometimes these days for its nifty "Drop" feature. You'll never catch me using Chrome.
Fun fact: It's a much simpler job to guide a vehicle to a planetary body than it is to render a webpage with a flat theme.
Source: It came to me in a dream
Well... You need like what, 3 floats for position and 4 more for orientation. Multiply that by 3 to get velocity and acceleration values. Then I don't know a few more floats per sensor and you have your whole state space in a few bytes.
Meanwhile a single image is like a megabyte so yeah.
Source: it's past midnight and I should have gone to sleep ages ago
And don't forget about redundancies
The programming for the Apollo program was hand woven so comparing it to modern systems is kinda like comparing apples to oranges
Honestly the computers for the Apollo program were amazing and I highly recommend looking into the whole thing more, it's so incredibly cool
People also forget that most of the actual calculations were done on paper first; the computers were basically just executing precalculated instructions.
This is the stack of code used for the navigation software for the Apollo program.
(Fun fact: standing next to it is Margaret Hamilton, director of NASA's Software Engineering Division & the lead of the team who wrote that code.)
Additional fun fact: Margaret Hamilton is the person who coined the term "software engineering"
These are multiple printouts of the code. The computer did not only execute precalculated instruction. (This would be a sequencer BTW.). Try it yourself AGC.
That is pretty cool. I might try it tonight since I'm at work right now. Thanks!
Though, to be fair, I did say that most of the code was precalculated.
I'm not quite sure if even that is correct. The AGC, as far as I understand it, did do quite a bit of calculation on the fly and was essentially the first digital fly by wire system. It did rely on input from the crew and ground control for eg correcting its state vector etc etc, but it even has dedicated vector instructions if I recall correctly. Can't really precompute all that much when you can't be sure things will go to plan and you're dealing with huge distances. It did have eg separate programs for different phases of the flight but they weren't really precalculated as such, more like different modes that eg read input from different sensors etc etc.
The US space program was pretty big on having a human in the loop though, much more so than the Soviet one which relied more on automation and the pilot was more of a passenger in a sense, sort of a failsafe for the automatic systems.
The book Digital Apollo goes into all this this in more detail, I can highly recommend it if you're a ginormous nerd like I am and think that computers we've shot into space are endlessly fascinating
I didn't know that. Thanks for telling me! I'll have to check out that book. It sounds fascinating. :)
Some people still don't seem to comprehend the difference between an embedded system and a general purpose computer.
We've had general purpose computers for decades but every year the hardware requirements for general purpose operating systems keep increasing. I personally don't think there has been a massive spike in productivity using a computer between when PCs usually had 256-512mb to now where you need at least 8gb to have a decent experience. What has changed are growing protocol specs that are now a bloated mess, poorly optimised programs and bad design decisions.
Ya know I thought those were the pillarmen menacing symbols(I dont know japanese scripts), and ya know what it fits.
I personally don’t think there has been a massive spike in productivity using a computer between when PCs usually had 256-512mb to now
For general use/day to day stuff like web browsing, sure, I agree, but what about things like productivity and content creation? Imagine throwing a 4K video at a machine with 512 MiB RAM - it would probably have troubles even playing it, let alone editing/processing.
Your original comment mentioned general purpose computers. Video production definitely isn't general purpose.
What do you mean by productivity?
Video production is something you can do on a general purpose computer because it runs a flexible OS that allows for a wide range of use cases. As opposed to a purpose built embedded system that only performs the tasks for which it was designed. Hence, not general purpose. I believe this was their point anyway, not just like a computer for office work or whatever.
Yup, exactly this.
Video production is general purpose computing just like opening a web browser to look at pictures of cats is - it's just that the former is way more resource intensive; it is done in software that runs on an OS that can run a dozen other things which in turn runs on a CPU that can usually run other OSes - as opposed to a purpose built system meant to do very specific things with software often written specifically for it.
We've had video editing software available to most personal computers since at least 1999 with imovie and 2000 with windows movie maker. IMO this is all general computer users need.
Professional level video production is not general computing, it's very niche. Yes it's nice that more people have access to this level of software but is it responsible.
The post does raise some real issues, increasing hardware specs is not consequence free. Rapidly increasing hardware requirements has meant most consumers have needed to upgrade their machines. Plenty of these could have still been in operation to this day. There is a long trail of e-waste behind us that is morally reprehensible.
You don't need to be a "professional" to edit 4k videos at home, people do that every day with videos they took on their effing phone.
And that's the point. What people do with their computers today requires far more resources than computers did in the late 90s. I'm sorry, but it's completely idiotic to believe that most people could get by with 256 - 512MB of RAM.
"Morally reprehensible" give me a break, you simply don't know what you're talking about. so just stop.
So what are you suggesting - everyone to stick to 640x480 even though many smartphones today shoot 4K/60?
That's true I guess. But it probably helped that they had a big fucking rocket to get there.
You don't think you'll ever really use all 32GB at the same time until you're running a virtual machine or two and open task manager to see that you're consistently using over 82% of your RAM, which happened to me today.
Compute intensive stuff usually demands those levels of RAM. I know for gaming the recommendation nowadays is 16GB while 8GB are considered "works for now". There are some games though that still benefit from more RAM (I upgraded to 32GB on my old PC for a Beta of a Sim game as it maxed out my 16GB to the point of lagging my PC)
Isn't there some computer science hypothesis (or whatever) about how the more complex computers get the more inefficient they must get as well?
Yeah, the average PC probably has 5 separate installations of Chrome, for different apps
Computers haven't become less efficient. They can still crunch numbers like crazy.
It's the software. Why spend a month making something when you can just download some framework that does what you want in one hour. Sure, it used 10 times as much memory and CPU, but that's still only a 1 second delay with a modern computer and the deadline for release is approaching fast.
Repeat that process often enough and you have a ridiculously bloated mess of layers upon layers of software. Just for fun you can start up some old software and play around with it in an emulator to be baffled how quick it all works on a modern system.
For people who want to know more about the fascinating computer in the Apollo space craft.
They even had some hand-braided ram or whatever for systems that abso-fucking-luteley must not fail
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
34C3 - The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
There's an even better alternative on the CCC's website, the original source of the video ;)
https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9064-the_ultimate_apollo_guidance_computer_talk
