Intel delays chip-making changes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33549916 <comment><USER3> Bunnie Huang on Moore's Law, [http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/08/features/moo...](http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/08/features/moores- law/viewall)

 _".. WIRED buys the iPhone 6 schematic book (above) for 25 RMB (£2.70) .. It 's like getting a master class on circuit design .. for £2.70, engineers in China can get a leg up on the best and brightest university-educated kids by studying these designs ..

.. there are established, legitimate businesses that earn their keep creating schematics from circuit boards. As the pace of Moore's law diminishes, learning through reverse engineering will become increasingly effective, as me-too products will have a larger market window to amortise reverse- engineering efforts before the next new thing comes along.

.. Even a modest deceleration of Moore's law can have a dramatic effect: a five per cent reduction in the pace of gate-length shrinkage -- from 16 percent to 11 per cent per year -- increases the available time to develop products within a technology generation by 50 per cent, from two years up to three.

.. Instead of running in fear of obsolescence, open-source hardware developers now have time to build communities around platforms; we can learn from each other, share blueprints and iterate prototypes before committing to a final design._"

<comment><USER4> Where did the designers who designed the iPhone 6 learn?

<comment><USER5> House for the Feeble Minded.

<comment><USER6> This is a reference to the classic Asimov short story Profession ([http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html](http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html)) and should not have been downvoted.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for that story, akin to China Mieville's concept of "breach" in _The City and The City_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Putting huge numbers of ordinary CPUs on a chip only helps until the memory bus runs out of bandwidth. For GPU-type devices, the computation/memory request ratio is higher, so GPUs can have many more compute units. GPUs are now used for lots of other parallel computations, and there's room for expansion in pure-computation GPU-like devices that don't drive a display.

Historically, unusual massively parallel architectures have been commercial failures. "Build it and they will come" doesn't work there. There's a long history of weird supercomputer designs, starting with the ILLIAC IV and continuing through the Ncube. The only mass-market product in that space was the PS3's Cell, which was too hard to program and didn't have enough memory per CPU. (The Cell had only 256KB (not MB) per Cell CPU.)

The next big thing may be parts optimized for machine learning. That's massively parallel. We may, at last, see "AI chips".

<comment><USER8> I mainly agree with that sentiment. What do you think about the TOMI tech, though?

[http://www.venraytechnology.com/Making%20a%20Frosted%20Cake%...](http://www.venraytechnology.com/Making%20a%20Frosted%20Cake%20and%20Processor%20in%20Memory.htm)

I think it was a brilliant reframing of the problem: move CPU's to memory with its cost-benefit analysis rather than vice versa (status quo). The design also achieves what some exascale proposals are _trying_ to achieve with R&D in terms of better integrating CPU & memory with lower energy. It's also massively parallel (128 cores) and optimized for big data. Close to your next big thing.

It's main risk right now is that DRAM vendors are more conservative and mass market than most fabs. There's not all this MOSIS, multi-project runs, and so on. Their low-volume cost is currently high (tens of thousands). They might be facing a chicken-and-egg problem in terms of hitting enough volume to get a nice, production deal. I do like their tech and think it has far more potential than what they're doing right now.

<comment><USER9> >> It's main risk right now is that DRAM vendors are more conservative and mass market than most fabs.

recently micron released a memory based processor/state-machine architecture called "automata". This might be a good sign that the problem you mention will be solved.

<comment><USER8> That was a _really neat_ processor. That's what happens when hardware vendors look at FSM problems their way instead of support software developer's way (eg C lang). The best bet might for those using memory fab tech to haggle one of the fabs to do MPW's on, say, one production line. Fab as a whole can keep cranking out tons of memory chips, new players can crank out theirs, and any risk is very limited.

The problem has already been solved outside memory fabs several times over. The memory fabs just need to take some steps, themselves. If I were them, I'd push I.P. vendors to follow path of Micron and Venray just to get more fab customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > When first formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore 50 years ago, this > suggested that chip power could double every 12 months.

Actually, when first formulated by Moore, it was that transistor density doubled every 12 months (he later revised it to 2 years.)

Per Wikipedia, it was David House who applied it to performance (and, when he did, it was with an 18 month timeframe.)

<comment><USER11> >Actually, when first formulated by Moore, it was that transistor density doubled every 12 months

No, it was the number of integrated components on a chips, not transistor density.

Anyway, I think the article's statement is fine. Doubling the number of components _would_ suggest that performance doubles too.

<comment><USER12> Does a car with 12 cylinders drive twice as fast as one with 6? Or accelerate?

Performance is too complicated to just say "CPU X doubles perf".. because likely some perf cases stayed the same, some got better, but some got worse (think deep pipelines).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope Intel uses this pause to implement things like DJB's suggestions for the Intel instruction set:

[http://blog.cr.yp.to/20140517-insns.html](http://blog.cr.yp.to/20140517-insns.html)

<comment><USER14> When a company delays a product launch, it's usually because they have too much work to do, not not enough.

<comment><USER15> Intel didn't delay a product launch, they delayed a PROCESS launch, which is a much bigger deal given their previous cadence towards the bottom. Physics is kicking the silicon industry's ass.

Meanwhile, the guys doing HDL and verification at Intel don't even notice the process delay, they just go about what they're doing, leaving them plenty of time to implement whatever (namely GPU improvements, which is what most of the industry has been requiring for newer Windows/Mac OS Xes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > When first formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore 50 years ago, this > suggested that chip power could double every 12 months.

What? I don't think it was ever 12 months, but 18-24 months.

> Now, improvements are expected approximately every 24 months.

No, they said it will take 2.5 years now instead of two.

[http://seekingalpha.com/article/3329035-intels-intc-ceo- bria...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/3329035-intels-intc-ceo-brian- krzanich-on-q2-2015-results-earnings-call-transcript)

I wouldn't expect the 10nm chips at least until mid-2017, which should put Intel neck in neck with TSMC and Samsung's 10nm processes, which at most might be launched a few months later.

It also looks like IBM and its partners (Samsung/Global Foundries) will actually _beat_ Intel to 7nm (probably early/mid 2019 for Samsung/GF - <USER2> 2019/early 2020 for Intel).

While IBM is talking about EUV lithography, Intel still seems to be complaining about multi-pattern lithography, so it seems pretty clear that Intel is behind IBM for 7nm. They also haven't said anything yet about what materials they'll use for 7nm transistors, just that they will require something different than Silicon.

The best part about this is that now Intel can't hide the x86 baggage in mobile behind its one generation ahead process node, which made Atom more or less competitive (at least in performance and power consumption, but not in price).

With ARM chips on very similar process nodes and arriving at the same time on the market, there should be no contest for the ARM chips in mobile.

<comment><USER17> Also it's not 'chip power' but 'number of transistors'. Common misunderstanding.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, even without the step to 10nm, the third generation 14nm chips will probably be a bit faster than the second generation. Density can't be improved but there is surely efficiency to be realized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't really bother me as we've seen it coming for years. Anyone playing smart is not relying on a process node jump rather than better architected systems. I think the fact that they bought Altera and might do on-board FPGA logic more than balances out here. I'll take an FPGA-accelerator on their on- chip NOC over an incremental increase in performance/energy any day. Even big companies such as Microsoft are wisening up to the fact that a proper split between CPU and FPGA logic has significant advantages.

I'm curious to see what AMD will do in response to both the delays and Altera acquisition. Wait, a quick Google shows AMD to be so bad off that a FPGA company (Xilinx) might buy them. Lol. Ok, well the market is about to get interesting again one way or the other.

<comment><USER19> I don't even want to think about the antivirus implications of running FPGA code.

<comment><USER20> Eh, as long as it's on the other side of a hardware based IO-MMU, I'm not super concerned.

<comment><USER8> Those are overhyped so as to be buzzwords. All the IO-MMU really does is make the data come to and go from a certain point of memory. What it does when it hits the system software or applications is a whole, different risk area. See OS process separation vs all the ways it's bypassed with app & kernel-level vulnerabilities.

So, you consider that the FPGA might sabotage data you send through it or what comes from it. Be monitoring or doing validation on both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Kind of wondering what this means relative to competitors.

Intel is at 14nm now since 2014 and Samsung recently got to 14nm in Galaxy S6? And Samsung and TSMC have similar roadmaps for 10nm? So conceivably others might be catching up to Intel in fab? Say it ain't so? (I'm asking because I don't follow these things closely but that was the picture I got.)

If Intel doesn't maintain their big edge in fab I'm not sure they can charge the kind of premium they have been. 64-bit ARM is going to start looking mighty attractive for a lot of use cases.

<comment><USER22> Samsung's 14nm isn't as dense as Intel's because it's sort of a hybrid of a 20nm process and a 14nm one. TSMC's 16nm is apparently just their 20nm process but with FinFETs so will be the least dense of the three. I suspect their 10nm will also end up less dense than what Intel puts out but we'll have to wait and see on that.

As far as timetables for production, recent rumors put TSMC's 10nm plans at 2017 as well, delayed from their original Q4 2016 goal. Haven't see anything about delays on Samsung's side so they might actually get there first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the current techniques are becoming too complicated and Intel is now fully going to focus on EUV. The new EUV machines are reaching 70% availability on average, according to the producer ASML[1].

[1] [http://www.asml.com/asml/show.do?lang=JA&ctx=5869&rid=52080](http://www.asml.com/asml/show.do?lang=JA&ctx=5869&rid=52080)

</comment><comment><USER24> If Moores law ends with 14nm, I wonder what we'll be doing 10 years from now.

<comment><USER25> It is very obvious what we will be doing, and this has been discussed many times: add more metal layers.

Intel processors only have a dozen layers which stack up to less than ~1 um. The numbers of transistors/layers could in theory be increased by 1000x if the layers were stacked ~1 mm high. How to do this with lithographic processes is an open question, but it is absolutely doable in theory. No physical limits prevent us from doing that.

<comment><USER26> Heat would be a massive issue with more layers, right?

<comment><USER27> From a purely seat-of-my-pants-im-trying-to-remember-college point of view, I believe the heat is caused far more by pumping tons of electricity, rather than physical size/layout.

A big problem (and also probably why they're so thin) is that at a certain size latency becomes a _huge_ issue. This is where clock speed increases come into play (electrons move faster) along with die decreases (electrons can travel shorter distances).

If you can run 100mph, but you have to run 200 miles vs. someone who can walk 1mph, but only has to walk 10 feet... I wish I had some more concrete examples but I can't come find anything off the top of my head.

<comment><USER28> Heat is caused by resistance when the electricity moves through the metal. The more metal the electricity is flowing through, the more material there is incur resistance and generate heat, correct? If so, then more layers = more heat.

<comment><USER29> > Heat is caused by resistance when the electricity moves through the metal.

Sort of. But if you _reduce_ resistance you increase heat since more current will flow.

On the other hand, if you _increase_ resistance AND also keep the current the same _then_ you'll get more heat. But! to keep that current constant you must increase the voltage.

So it's not so simple as "resistance = heat".

> The more metal the electricity is flowing through, the more material there > is incur resistance

Depends on if the metal is in parallel or series. If in parallel, then the more metal the lower the resistance, if in series then higher resistance.

> If so, then more layers = more heat.

Right result, wrong method of getting there. More layers (which would be in parallel) would be _less_ resistance. But less resistance means more current flow (since they'll keep the voltage the same), and more current flow means more heat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I saw another article that referred to this as a sign of the slowing of Moore's law. However, Moore's law has its variances so I'm not really worried about that.

What I do wonder about is why we are not seeing more cores as we go down to smaller nodes. 2 and 4 cores are common now, but have been seemingly for a decade. Why aren't we seeing 8, 16, 32 and 64 cores? If you reduce the feature size and effectively thus double the surface area available, why not increase the cores? It seems the new area is going into integrated GPUs (never as good as discrete GPUs, but certainly cheaper) and cache. Cache can improve performance but not like more cores. While intel does a tick/tock design revision, each core seems to grow to fit the available space, with only adding a few instructions, which only add marginal utility. Not the same as doubling the number of cores, which would double theoretical performance.

Under Erlang/Elixir, we are able to get close to linear speedup from additional cores. I understand other languages struggle with multi-threaded programming, but should CPU designs be hobbled simply because the software industry is not where it should be?

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER10> > Why aren't we seeing 8, 16, 32 and 64 cores?

Intel has 8-core i7s, up to 18-core Xeon processors, and up to 61 cores in Xeon Phi coprocessor packages.

> If you reduce the feature size and effectively thus double the surface area > available, why not increase the cores?

Because, outside of narrow domains, software that can effectively use lots of cores doesn't exist, so you don't provide good bang for the customers buck by doing that. For most customers, there's no utility for that.

> Cache can improve performance but not like more cores.

And vice versa -- more cores can improve performance, but not like cache. Which is more useful depends on software and workloads.

> Under Erlang/Elixir, we are able to get close to linear speedup from > additional cores.

On the right kind of workloads. And, the people with those kind of workloads, have many-core processors available.

<comment><USER31> Any web server that serves at scale can readily use 1024 cores... Nginx, servers built in Go, Erlang and many more. It would reduce hosting costs and complexity substantially.

<comment><USER32> It's not as easy as you seem to think to e.g. (de-)multiplex a single TCP port to/from 1024 cores, and that's before you actually try to keep any application state in sync. _Lots_ of stuff breaks at that level of concurrency.

<comment><USER33> First part makes sense, but the last part doesn't. Keeping application state in sync doesn't need to affect the throughput of events coming out of a multi- threaded application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Chris Mack has been vocal on this. And not only was he probably right about Moore's Law (defined as scaling that decreases the cost per transistor) being dead last year[1] (the cost per transistor curve has been flattening out), but now Intel can't even keep pace with process shrinks _at any price the market will bear_.

That doesn't mean progress will _stop_ , however[2], but rather that progress (and a revised definition of Moore's Law) will be defined by chip redesigns and particularly specialized functionality that doesn't take many gates to implement but makes chips more valuable.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBrEx- FINEI#t=1m13s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBrEx-FINEI#t=1m13s)

[2] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/the- multi...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/the-multiple- lives-of-moores-law)

</comment><comment><USER35> I just read about how they were delaying the AVX512 until 'Knights Landing' (Xeon Phi) and with Haswells mediocre improvements Intel has really not come up with anything substantial in years. Hopefully the recent Altera acquisition will help them innovate

<comment><USER36> > with Haswells mediocre improvements Intel has really not come up with > anything substantial in years

Not really. This statement is true regarding desktop CPUs, but we all know for at least five years now Intel's focus is not desktop CPU performance anymore, but mobile. Hence most of the improvements we see are for mobile, like better embedded graphic (Sandy/Ivy Bridge forward) and improved power consumption (Haswell).

<comment><USER37> Intel really shouldn't get credit for the Sandy Bridge IGP, because that's just where they caught up to the NVidia IGPs that they'd banned. The first generation of Core series mobile chips represented a major step backwards from the user's perspective because Intel would no longer let NVidia make chipsets, so Intel's IGPs no longer had to compete against the GeForce 9400M and 320M. Ivy Bridge was the first time Intel actually moved the market forwards in terms of mobile IGP performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> But will it have non-disabled HTM?

EDIT: Its a real question. Working HTM would negate pretty much any bad news from Intel in my mind.

</comment><comment><USER39> Did the BBC forget a comma in the title? I'm having a hard time parsing it.

Edit: or perhaps a dash? Really it's just a horrible title all around.

<comment><USER40> Yes, a dash; "chip-making changes" makes much more sense. Horrible title indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Moore's law plateaued years ago. Sure they are adding more cores but thats because they have made no progress on the clock speed in nearly a decade. FPGA's are going to be the next go to for performance until cpu clock speeds improve

<comment><USER41> Moore's Law is about transistor count, not clock speed. They used to go together, now they don't, but Moore's Law is still doing OK. This is an indication that it may be coming to an end, finally.

<comment><USER42> Richard from DotNetRocks does an Awesome show on this. [https://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1130](https://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1130)</comment></comment></comment>


Now you see them: DARPA's Stealth Revolution (2008) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/(2O24)%20Global%20Nav%20-%20About%20Us%20-%20History%20-%20Resources%20-%2050th%20-%20Stealth%20(Approved).pdf <comment><USER2> "Management at Lockheed's Skunk Works soon learned of the DARPA competition. Lockheed had not been invited to participate because they had not produced a fighter in nearly 20 years and DARPA was unaware of their work on the A-12/SR-71 aircraft."

<comment><USER3> I'll bet. The idea that DARPA was ignorant of a fighter program by one of the largest weapons contractors in the country/world is absurd.

<comment><USER4>
      > The idea that DARPA was ignorant of a fighter program by one of the largest weapons contractors in the country/world is absurd.

It's a more nuanced story. What they didn't understand was that the A-12 series of aircraft (A-12, YF-12, SR-71 and even D-21) were specifically designed with early low observables principles & materials in mind. There was a lot of classification with these aircraft, particularly due to their initial customer (CIA rather than DoD). They needed to obtain permission from the CIA to discuss the low observables aspects with DARPA.

These kinds of issues (inability to discuss relevant classified developments with other defense or intelligence entities that might benefit from knowing) is a routine and valid criticism of classification practice.

<comment><USER3> Eh, color me a skeptic on this. I just find it very hard to believe. Agree to disagree on it, as it were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DARPA has dozens of projects.

[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Technology- Article.asp?ArtNum=...](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Technology- Article.asp?ArtNum=59)

We have self-driving cars and the Internet because of DARPA. It sort of like a government sponsored X-Prize.

<comment><AUTHOR> Self driving cars because of DARPA? Hmmmm. Interesting. Gotta read up on that.

May I ask name of the Genesis project for self driving cars?

<comment><USER6> I was the Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) program and it lead to the pioneering of neural networks by CMU.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilP4aPDTBPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilP4aPDTBPE)

[http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&c...](http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&context=compsci)

<comment><USER5> The idea of neural networks go back a lot further than CMU.

[http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/ai/a-brief-history- of-...](http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/ai/a-brief-history-of-neural- nets-and-deep-learning/)

<comment><USER6> I should've been more clear IIRC ALVINN was the first ANN based computer vision decision making implementation in the world at the time. It was also one of the first practical applications of an ANN in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The most inspiring para for me ->

Under HAVE BLUE, Lockheed built two manned technology dem- onstrators to validate Lockheed's pole model results. Even though these test vehicles made use of conventional o -the-shelf compo- nents and subsystems, they were truly revolutionary. Their shap- ing and materials were so important that their impact on aircraft survivability changed the way the U.S. Air Force ghts. Technologies nurtured by DARPA included RCS reduction, RAM development, infrared shielding, reduced visual signatures, low-probability-of- intercept radar, inlet shielding, exhaust cooling and shaping, and other signature reduction disciplines. First ight occurred in April 1977, and both aircraft were tested extensively. Eventually both were lost during ight test mishaps, but the results were clear. On Nov. 16, 1978, Lockheed received a contract for full-scale engineering devel- opment of what would become the F-117.</comment>


RFC 2550 – Y10K and Beyond (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2550

<comment><USER2> You can already hit these problems today. People always think about the _current_ date, although there very valid are reasons to store future (or past) dates.

For example, if you're are a scientist you might want to calculate where planet xyz is in 100,000 years - and store that date on your computer, today.

<comment><USER3> One doesn't have to go that far. Mortgages, life insurance, annuity assurance and the like can run for more than the mere 23 years that are between now and 2038.

Heck, I won't even be retired in 2038 if things continue to work as they do now.

<comment><USER2> Apparently it already caused trouble with AOLServer in 2006 [0] because there was a database connection timeout of 1 billion seconds which hit the 32bit limit.

[0]: [http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg09...](http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg09844.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please label this as 1999, April Fool's Day .

</comment><comment> cs- We're 16 days behind 1st of April, at the time of this writing...

<comment><USER5> And should expect more novel NTP and time issues before it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also see: [http://longnow.org/about/](http://longnow.org/about/) which aims to fix Y10K/YAK/YXK but unfortunately not Y100K/Y64K/YCK (yet anyway).

</comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting seeing how Wikidata has been storing dates. They store things like the time that the universe started as a date, which means the year is about 11 digits.

JavaScript's Date object doesn't like such big dates - I don't think it works with anything greater than a few hundred million years.

</comment><comment><USER8> > A 32-bit counter for the number of seconds since 1970 [UNIX] wraps in 2038.

What's the bet this one actually causes problems

<comment><USER9> It already has: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem#Early_problem...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem#Early_problems)</comment></comment>


AOL Retires 9,500 Servers, Saves $5 Million  - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/03/29/aol-retires-9500-servers-in-uptime-roundup/

<comment><USER2> "Decommissioning a single 1U rack server can result in $500 per year in energy savings, an additional $500 in operating system licenses, and $1,500 in hardware maintenance costs, according to Uptime."

Well that seems a bit optimistic. Lets say your 1U server pulled 450 watts (way over the top, its typically less than 375 unless you're doing the supercomputer GPU thing) that is 3.9MWhr per year or at 11 cents/kWh or $433.62. Lets say you put them in REALLY CRAPPY data centers with a PUE of 2.5 (modern ones are 1.2 - 1.5, Facebook's OCP is like 1.1 but with 2.5 that is $1,084/year in 'energy' costs. License costs of, uh $0, well if you use a RHEL support contract its about $125/machine depending, and we'll assume you lose both disks and a power supply _every fucking year_ so your hardware replacement costs are another $500? So rather than the $2,500/year in expense Uptime claims I would put it under $2K worst case, and likely closer to $1.5K.

So inflated numbers aside, I don't doubt for a moment that it is a Good Thing that AOL is killing off the oldest 25% of their gear. If it was on a 4 year depreciation cycle then they could replace it with roughly 1/3 as many machines using Sandybridge type machines and may 1/5 as many machines with Ivybridge gear.

As a technologist I am sad sometimes that it isn't worth the power to run a 5 year old server, but it is the life we live in.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure AOL is factoring in power used for cooling and labor for maintenance in those numbers.

<comment><USER2> I am sure they are. That is the rational for the 'PUE' adjustment.

Typical data center charges a power 'rate' for your actual power (either metered or fixed) and then a 'environment' or 'rent' charge which covers the cost of power they are buying to keep your stuff cool. That ratio, the power you use in your machines, vs the total power you use inclusive of the datacenter is the "PUE Factor". Old school data centers, which were built on a model similar to a mainframe 'machine room' that larger corporations had, had very expensive and clunky cooling which meant that while you paid maybe 11 cents for a kW of power to compute, the datacenter was charging you 25 cents per kW to remove the that heat, so the ratio would be '(25+11)/11' or 3.27! facilities built in the 90's had ratios in the 2.2 - 2.7 range, built in the oughts its usually 1.8 - 2.3 and built in the 10's its closer to 1.3 - 1.8. Dedicated facilities like Facebook, Amazon, and Google build get even better ratios.

Another thing that these places will offer is called 'smart hands' or 'remote hands' or 'tech on demand' who for $50 - $150/hr will go out and swap out a part that you've drop shipped to the place. Assuming you've got power strips that you can remotely power cycle and IPMI boards for doing 'boot from BIOS' type work you generally need no staff at all on-site, so your grossed up power/cooling/rent charge is all you end up paying. This makes it easy for ops guys like me to compare options, which range from a low of about $150/kWh- month to $250/kWh-month (some 'retail' co-location facilites go as high as $600/kWh-month but that is not a bulk deal for someone like AOL or a search engine like Blekko) So at the low end of $150/kWh-month that is (150 x 12 or $1,800/yr and for a 1U server pulling < 500 watts net cost around $750/year in all up data center 'recurring' costs). At $250/kw*month its only $1,500 a year. My estimate at $1,084/year earlier is pretty achievable for anyone putting 9,500 machines into a data center.

[edit: remove asterisks]

<comment><USER4> Interesting. Do you have pointers to some background material? I'd like to see what made cooling more efficient. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Well there are Google's papers they presented at the data center summit and the whole open compute project which touches on this as well.

Simply put the evolution has followed this path:

Machine Room -> air temp is 68 degrees 24/7/365

Modified Machine Room -> rows of machines are lined up alternately facing toward each other and away from each other, cold air is preferentially directed up from the floors in the 'cold' aisles.

Tolerance Limits -> Google and others establish that 'commodity' machines work just fine at an ambient temperature of 80 - 90 degrees F so they cut back on the level of cooling, substitute external air when its cooler than 75 degrees outside.

Full containment -> various systems to provide cooling just to the active hardware, places like SwitchNap in Vegas build structures around the rows, third parties put plastic enclosures around rows to contain cold air, or to force all hot air out of a plenum.

Most of the 'win' has been reducing the temperature differential between the data center and ambient air, and reducing the volume of air that has to be cooled.

Once you do that, alternate air cooling methods (like evaporation cooling) can be used rather than compressor chillers.

[1] <http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/best-practices.html> (they have additional tricks up their sleeve)

[2] [http://opencompute.org/project_category/data-center- technolo...](http://opencompute.org/project_category/data-center-technology/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well that's one way to spin slowly losing all of your customers as a good thing I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER6> 9500 servers cost only $5M per year? Sounds like putting a positive spin on evicting outdated, idle boxes. Did I tell you I ate my veggies last night?

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's the original blog post with terrible cowboy metaphors: [http://blog.uptimeinstitute.com/2012/03/uptime-institute- pay...](http://blog.uptimeinstitute.com/2012/03/uptime-institute-pays-bounty- on-dead-servers/)

"AOL sent 9,484 head to the stockyards, representing a 26% turnover in server assets across the company. The roundup resulted in a total savings of $5.05 million from reduced utility costs, maintenance, and licensing costs, and includes cash in hand of $1.2 million from asset sales and reclamation. Environmental benefits were seen in the reduction of almost 20 tons of carbon emissions."

</comment><comment><USER8> > _"NBCUniversal finished second in the contest, as its infrastructure team > removed 284 servers..."_

Interesting that's #2; that's not very many. Sounds like most companies who retire more than this regularly didn't know this was a thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am confused, are they removing the servers or upgrading them for more efficient ones?

<comment><USER10> I wasn't clear on the either. It didn't seem to state that the 9,500 servers were being replaced by fewer, more efficient machines; just that it was getting rid of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Should I start buying IBM or Intel's shares? They have to replace the servers right?

<comment><USER12> Not if they're losing business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I got excited about the title of this article when I read the first two words, but then I discovered more words after that.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is sortof the equivalent of a 400lbs person losing 100lbs. They're still still on deaths door.</comment>


A programmers and testers mind - <AUTHOR> http://ideqa.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-programmers-mind-and-testers-mind.html <comment><USER2> I don't if I agree with this 100%, but you did make some decent points</comment>


Ask YC: Does anyone have the full-text to "Anatomy of a Lisp Machine"? - <AUTHOR>

I've been researching Lisp machines for a term paper, and have come across more citations than actual articles.  Most full texts I find aren't very good at summarizing the ideas -- for instance, Tom Knight's masters thesis is interesting, but a bit too forest-for-the-trees.  One citation of particular interest on account of the author:
Graham, Paul
Anatomy of a LISP machine
Artificial Intelligence Volume 37 ,  Issue 12 (December 1988)
Pages: 26 - 32
Year of Publication: 1988
ISSN:0004-3702
Does anyone happen to have the full-text of this?  Any other reputable sources you think might be useful for someone reading up on Lisp machines -- particularly the Operating Systems they used, e.g., Genera?  (Not in an attempt to offshore research to others; just thought I'd ask in case I missed the obvious classics or, as it would seem from my search thus far, if many sources exist merely as citations that I can't seem to get a hold of.) <comment><USER2> I put it online for you at <http://paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/lm.tex>

I haven't re-read it, but I don't remember it being particularly good. This was not published in _Artificial Intelligence_ , but in _AI Expert_ , a popular magazine I wrote articles for to make a little extra money in grad school.

<comment><AUTHOR> _This was not published in Artificial Intelligence, but in AI Expert_

Ah. So it was. Thanks, though!</comment></comment>


FOMC cuts surprise 75 bps - <AUTHOR>

FOMC cuts from 4.25 to 3.50. <comment><USER2> Isn't this just a short term solution ?

In the longer run it will raise inflation, especially with the unemployment rates being as low as they are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely a short term solution. However, Fed has two prong mandate. Unemployment and inflation. In the short run they can try to affect unemployment by cutting rates as the economy goes into recession. In the long run they will have to pay attention to the inflation figures. Given the recent write downs by financial institutions, the way the equity markets outside of the US are behaving, and the last unemployment number, it makes sense for the Fed to try to help out the economy in the short run.</comment></comment>


How the Linux desktop shoots itself in the foot. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworld.com/14911/five_ways_the_linux_desktop_shoots_itself_in_the_foot

<comment><USER2> This article is symptomatic of people thinking about "Linux Desktop" as a concrete thing (or project, or idea), while it isn't. It's an ecosystem of vendors (targeting different markets), projects, technologies, and you can't directly compare it with standalone companies like Microsoft or Apple that (mostly) have a consistent and focused product/marketing strategies.

The five ways outlined are:

Lack of vendor support - author mentiones SLED, but conveniently skips over the fact that Canonical also provides commercial support for its "arguably the most popular Linux desktop" desktop systems.

Lack of advertising/marketing - a bunch of video commercials (RH's Truth Happens, Novell's PC/Mac/Linux spoof), Ubuntu's CD shipping program and release jams/parties many of the distroes organise & support is not insignificant; it probably is pocket change to Microsoft's marketing machines, but the entire budgets of these companies are probably a pocket change to Microsoft's marketing machines.

Too much bad techie attitude - surprise, someone's a jerk on the internet - you can find l33t people in most online communities. More than average historically in linux communities, but the author does acknowledge there are good sources of online help nowadays (e.g. Ubuntu forums). Esp. the Ubuntu's code of conduct (and similar more or less formal codes in other communities) tries (and IMHO goes a long way to) minimise this problem.

Too much infigthing - goes on to recite a recent developer-oriented flamewar and concludes "no-one outside certain developer circles cares". So, why does the author care? Open development means not only is the source code open, all the joys and flames related to it are as well.

Not enough developer co-operation - again, if you compare the cooperation between different teams in a same company, and between teams in different independent (and possibly competing) companies or projects, the latter will not look as good. I agree with the basic premise, "not enough developer cooperation", because we can never have enough of that, but the arguments are just wrong. And, the given example - that fedora and ubuntu have different package systems - has nothing whatsoever to do with developer cooperation.

Two positive examples of cooperation:

1\. KDE and GNOME using (or planning to use) same underlying technology: glib, webkit, telepathy, and the rest of the freedesktop.org stack, and actually co- hosting their main conferences last year.

2\. All the distros working closely with their upstream projects (e.g. many of debian developers, ubuntu MOTUs and fedora developers actually _are_ the upstream developers too).

(Note: I'm biased, as Linux has been my primary desktop for quite some time now and I'm actively involved in GNOME and freedesktop, but I've tried to look at this as impartially as possible. My biggest pet peeve is people really thinking about a "Linux desktop" is a single project).

<comment><USER3> > _It's an ecosystem of vendors (targeting different markets), projects, > technologies, and you can't directly compare it with standalone companies > like Microsoft or Apple that (mostly) have a consistent and focused > product/marketing strategies._

Saying that it's an apples to oranges comparison you're just dodging the problem.

Ubuntu competes directly with Windows. OpenSuse competes directly with Windows. Debian competes directly with Windows. So is Red Hat to a lesser extent. And these distributions have the same software on them, only organized differently.

So how are these direct competitors doing? You can measure that with the availability or lack of third-party commercial support (we are talking about the desktop here).

Adobe Photoshop isn't available for any Linux distribution, isn't it? I've worked there. Those people aren't interested in maintaining the Windows monopoly. They are only interested in selling their software. And there was at least one big internal debate over whether Linux is viable as a target or not (with the light on the horizon being Asus eepc and Ubuntu). The result of that is Flex Builder for Linux, and guess what, it ain't doing so well.

> _Open development means not only is the source code open, all the joys and > flames related to it are as well._

I've never worked for a company that had such internal fights. Maybe there are such bad apples out there, but I find them unacceptable and if they'd happen where I work, I'd quit on the spot.

And these fights are implicating end-users as well. I've asked on the official opensuse forum how to get my DWL-g122 ver.C1 wireless stick working, and some twit hijacked my call for help with a moral discussion about how that driver isn't "free software".

> _you can find l33t people in most online communities_

Yeah, well, some communities are better than others. The more pragmatic a community is, the friendlier it is. I've really tried being active on the Ubuntu forums, I really did. But the sheer volume of answers ranging from "that's not Free" to "it's your fault for not wanting to relearn everything you know" ... it's just overwhelming.

NOTE: I've also been a Linux user for like 6 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That article is terrible. It's subjective and in many cases downright false. _Linux_ suffers from interoperability problems? I have never come across a single Linux program that wouldn't run on my machine. Linux even runs a lot of Windows programs through Wine. "Bad techie attitude"? A few people are jerks and they tend to be the loudest. This is true in every field, not just Linux. Lack of vender support and advertising? One of the main appeals of Linux is that it isn't (primarily) a commercial product.

Wow... the comments are even worse. We even got a Nazi reference in!

<comment><USER5> Sadly, I think the issues mentioned in this comment are exactly the point, primarily the last issue. Most desktop consumers using Windows and MacOS aren't used to dealing with a product that isn't a household name.

While lack of vendor support and advertising (no "one right way to do things") appeals to those of us who can invest time learning to maintain our software, people like my parents need someone to call when things go wrong. And it is extremely important that the person they call be courteous and accepting to a fault; my experiences with Dell customer service have been nothing but unhelpful, but none of them have ever chewed me out for failing to read the manual. My experiences with people apparently acting as volunteer service- providers for GNU software online (via IRC) have been both unhelpful and insulting. Perhaps the fault is mine for trying to find help on IRC; sadly, with a lack of a well-advertised vendor offering support, I'm left to scrounge help wherever I can find it.

To be fair, it is perhaps reasonable to ask the question of whether people in charge of most Linux distros actually should want to dominate the desktop. But if people do want to create distros that would move in on that space, they should understand that it's exactly these sorts of "subjective" assessments of the OS that would block widespread adoption. This isn't a technical problem. It's a sales problem---a problem of not investing as much time and money into the people-to-people interactions as into the people-to-technology interactions. Both are needed for widespread adoption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my opinion, the first two reasons are valid. But the author forgots the main reason: There simply is not compelling reason for the majority of people to switch to a Linux desktop.

Nearly all the good Open Source desktop apps run under Windows as well. But there are quite a lot of good Windows and Mac apps that won't run under Linux. There's no good replacement and Wine is too complicated to be a feasible solution.

Commercial desktop ISVs don't support Linux for 3 simple reasons: (1) There's no standard decentral installer. This is the _most important tool_ for desktop ISVs in their sales funnel and Linux has none (or rather: too many half- finished ones). (2) It's not a single coherent platform but several different ones. And it's not going to change without a decentral installer. (3) It's easier and more profitable to develop web and mobile applications today.

There's nothing the Linux community can do about (3). But (1) could be solved and in the long run, also (2). If these two problems for commercial ISVs could be solved, the supply of desktop applications could increase.

Then, desktop distribution could also make money by reselling these applications. Then, it would also be rationale to advertise.

But that's not going to happen, for one cannot rationally discuss the need of a decentral installer with many Linux users (or Linux distributions).

<comment><USER7> I think you nailed it in your first sentence. I ran Ubuntu for about 9 months before I switched to a Windows 7 RC release. Why? Well, the software I wanted to run isn't available for linux, or requires a virtual environment to run it (and OSX doesn't run without hacks on custom-built hardware).

And the "free" desktop software equivalents? Well, they are just about worth their price (with some exceptions). Most developers in the open source community never finish their desktop products. And just about no one in the commercial software industry makes a desktop app for linux natively. Put simply, you can't even _pay_ for something good.

Just try finding a decent photo manager for linux with _any_ degree of polish. F-spot/Digikam? Basically hobby projects -- no finishing at all -- random bugs in fricken _obvious_ places (do they run their own software?). How 'bout Picasa? Ok, more professional, but oh yeah, it's a windows app running on Wine. Pathetic :-)

</rant>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is what happened when non-engineering people become part of engineering. Everything is looks wrong.

'90: "Dear X, your program does not work in my system, here is a patch."

'00: "WTF, i cannot run this program, what should i do ?"

There is nothing wrong in Linux as OS, in fact it's become more mature and usable since i first install it. Most problems that i read in forum now is about not working hardware or from people that does not know how to read manual or to lazy.

</comment><comment><USER9> I glanced at the article long enough to know that I didn't need to read it all ... what does he mean by "the linux desktop". He links to Corel's 1999 offering, which is a distro using KDE. Does he mean distro? I noticed he mentions KDE and Gnome disagreements but he doesn't appear to say why devs disagreeing are ruining "the linux desktop", again whatever that is supposed to be.

He could have started by defining what he meant?!

Read the manual is actually sometimes the best response. I answer questions on the Inkscape "answers" page and "how do I erase" comes up about once a week, sometimes only a few lines above the previous person asking the question:

<rant & car analogy = bonus!>If I describe a car problem and someone on teh internetz tells me "it's your head gasket, it's blown mate" I'd expect to have to look up what that means. Yet with computers if someone says "it's your menu.lst entry, you need to add ACPI=off [or whatever]" people can't be arsed to read up on it.</rant>

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't help but wonder if it's a mistake to try and push widespread adoption of Linux distros in the desktop space. It's possible there's insufficient money to be made in that space--Apple is a hardware company; Microsoft is a de-facto monopoly but rumor has it that they're going to have to struggle to recoup costs on their desktop OS in a world that cares less and less about the details of the host system.

Maybe the right solution for desktop adoption is "If you want to run Linux on your desktop machine, that's neat. But don't think you're going to be pushing Windows off of your neighbor's desktop."

<comment><USER9> But if he bought a netbook he probably has linux already.

Microsoft actually make some good software (don't tell my LUG I said that) but do I really need Windows Seven Ultimate Basic Home Advanced Edition to use a browser, email and wordprocessor? No, I can have a nice linux desktop with buttons on the desktop for FF, Thunderbird and OOo.org.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The thing that bothers me in Ubuntu is this: Sometimes I want to do something with a desktop app on a file in /var/ or /bin/ the desktop app tells me "permission denied" or what have you. How the hell do I type "SUDO" and my password? Even if there is a way (which I doubt) if it isn't obvious to me, then it certainly will not be obvious to other potential users.

<comment><USER9> If this annoys you and you can't work out how to fix that annoyance or work around it then messing around in /var or /bin is going to ruin your installation. Having a barrier to entry is often a good idea IMO.

One could solve it by having a "reveal content" button that allows you to enter the dir by entering the su password ... but I think that makes it a little too easy.

For me Alt+F2 and "kdesudo dolphin" doesn't seem too tricky (especially with autocomplete) to get a root fm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My read of the article describes a Linux desktop as a system that can be maintained without opening a terminal window. That entails a lot of GUI and a distribution that works well underneath it. Why exactly is that a good thing? Are all of these GUI users going to start donating to free projects? What is the upside?

</comment><comment><USER12> Linux is a kernel, GNU/Linux is a server operating system. It's all based on UNIX and no amount of hacky patching can make it a coherent and integrated desktop system. It'll always have some shitty spot that ruins the experience somewhere.

Things like Haiku are the future.</comment>


Is Evernote's RESTless API Approach A Model For Other API Designs? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.programmableweb.com/2013/10/03/is-evernotes-restless-api-approach-a-model-for-other-api-designs/

<comment><USER2> Confuses REST architectural style with XML vs. binary encoding issues.</comment>


Record-efficiency turbine farms are being inspired by sealife (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/fish-school-us-on-wind-power?utm_source=tss&utm_medium=desktop&utm_campaign=linkfrom

<comment><USER2> An out there question, because that picture of the arrangement of wind turbines reminded me of a depiction of a superconductor in a physics book. Is there any relationship between air flowing more freely between pairs of contra-rotating wind turbines, and pairs of electrons, with opposite spin, flowing freely though a superconductor?

(If so, there's an article for Dr. Karl: the connection between fish and quantum mechanics!)</comment>


Why has C prevailed over Pascal? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/114846/19141

<comment><USER2> > Why has C prevailed over Pascal?

A combination of factors beyond those cited in the linked discussion:

1\. C was closer to the machine, less abstract, at a time when abstraction was more expensive than it is now.

2\. You could weave C and assembly together in the same program, developing under the same compiler, making it possible for an assembly-language programmer to migrate to C in small increments.

3\. Pascal was strict when strictness cost more than it does now.

4\. Pascal had much more overhead than C did, both in development and in operation, at a time when a typical machine had very little memory or storage space.

5\. C had more documentation available, and more users to consult, than Pascal.

So overall one might say "momentum" was the reason.

I can remember in the early days at Apple (around 1980) loading Pascal into an Apple II using floppy disks -- three or more, as I recall, each read completely -- and thinking how Pascal had better be pretty wonderful to justify all that effort. And it wasn't.</comment>


How U.S. universities have become a major arena for espionage - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/10/25/spy-vs-spy-how-u-s-universities-have-become-a-major-arena-for-international-and-domestic-espionage <comment><USER2> This is about a book I just saw at a bookstore called Spy Schools, detailing how American Universities are spy recruiting hot spots, being exploited by the agencies/circus.</comment>


Everything is too long - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonsteinberg.com/2009/11/everything-is-too-long/

<comment><USER2> 20-30 minutes of content is plenty to satisfy me. I really enjoy the ignite format, where the slides are on a 30sec timer, but they do too many presentations. We need events where there's lots of pressure on the attendees to keep the presentation tight and fewer presentations in the whole event.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find that people consistently use 10 words to say what can be said in 3.

<comment><USER3> They talk excessively.

<comment><USER4> They blabber.

<comment><USER5> Blabber adds a negative subtext. Not all extended conversation is blabber, even if much of it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Exactly !! The ironic part is startup founders and VCs are probably the people who need to network more and learn more from these conferences.....however, we startup founders need to work on our startups too....and more than anyone else, I think.

</comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr

</comment><comment><USER8> that's what she said..</comment>


Ask HN: How long do you support iOS4 before moving to iOS5? - <AUTHOR>

I understand iOS upgrade adoption is quite high, but how long do you wait? Do you force users to upgrade? <comment><USER2> Personally, I pay much more attention to what is being deprecated, and plan my upgrades with that trailing horizon in mind.

Forget about if the newest release of a class is easier for me (the developer) to use, if it doesn't deliver a significant performance advantage to my end user, I ignore the new features and stick with the oldest version still supported.

Obviously I couldn't do that with an entirely new functionality like iCloud, but for something like MPMoviePlayerController? Forget about it.

I know it can get annoying to check the iOS version before every method call, but well designed code can minimize this greatly.

Personally I'll be supporting iOS 4 until a good bit of the stuff I use in it is deprecated by Apple.</comment>


We are no longer cogs in a machine, we are neurons in a brain - <AUTHOR> https://letmeexplainyou.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/we-are-no-longer-cogs-in-a-machine-we-are-neurons-in-a-brain/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just some random musings.</comment>


Earth's magnetic field is acting up - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00007-1?utm_source=twt_nnc&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews&sf205680051=1 <comment><USER2> "Pottery jugs from between the eighth and second centuries B.C. bear administrative stamps that changed with the political situation. Unbeknown to the people firing these jugs, the act of heating locked information about the Earth's geomagnetic field into minerals present in the clay. Because the stamps provide precise information about when the pots were fired, the study allows a detailed look at geomagnetic changes over 600 years."

[https://www.livescience.com/57868-earth-magnetic-field- spike...](https://www.livescience.com/57868-earth-magnetic-field-spike- ancient-times.html)

<comment><USER3> This is one of the most amazing things about humans to me. I marvel at how it's possible to get so much information about our universe by observing so little. Astronomy is another field that I'm really impressed with. It's possible to infer things about galaxies, stars, planets, etc. just buy observing some light coming from them to our little blue planet. Absolutely crazy.

How many such techniques we haven't even discovered or technology is not there to observe such things?

I really enjoyed reading Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark that explores such things.

<comment><USER4> I always love reading the crazy new techniques for extracting text from rotten old paper and papyrus. I distinctly remember reading a few months back an article about someone detecting trace chemicals from an old pocket bible or something, and deduced the owner had liver disease or something equally insane. wish I could find that article!

<comment><USER5> I was just about to post the link to this New Yorker article in response to GP's question. I believe this is the one you're referring to:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/do-proteins- ho...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/do-proteins-hold-the-key- to-the-past)

 _Under the right conditions, proteins can survive for millions of years. In recent years, proteomic studies of art works and archeological remains have yielded biological information of startling clarity, revealing gossamer-thin layers of fish glue on seventeenth-century religious sculptures and identifying children's milk teeth from pits of previously unrecognizable Neolithic bones._

<comment><USER4> Yes! Thank you, it was somehow impossible to Google this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oddly enough, this has a sizable impact to general aviation. Heading is typically measured using a gyro, but the heading values are calibrated to magnetic north (typically via a magnetometer or manually against a compass).

The creep of the magnetic field is noticeable in particular in the numbering of runways - they are numbered according to their heading. Some runways that have existed for a few decades are, accordingly, off by a few degrees. An older runway numbered "35" may have an actual approach heading of 340 (340 degrees from magnetic north). Not a huge problem when flying by eye, but it has the capability of causing some confusion when flying using instruments. Alternately, the runway numbers can even change.

As for GPS, this won't solve the problem either, since GPS can give you a "true" flight path using the movement over time, which with wind will not always match the actual heading of the aircraft due to wind.

<comment><USER7> This is pretty sad. For at least decades, maybe even centuries, there have existed compasses that let you rotate the "north" indicator to match the current local magnetic declination. Adjusting as you travel is no different than the pressure adjustments that pilots make for altimeters. There is no good reason we couldn't have all of the airports using geographic north. That one is far more resistant to change, with continental drift and Earth axis wobble being far slower than magnetic pole movement.

<comment><USER8> Ease and reproducibility of the measurement is more important than its absolute accuracy. Whisky-ball magnetic compasses are cheap and easy to build, and have been throughout aviation's history, and don't require access to an accurate geomagnetic survey to use.

Its interesting that you mention pressure adjustments, because:

* Above 18,000 feet in the US, you don't make pressure adjustments - because its more important to know that your neighbors in the airspace are measuring their altitude the same way you are than it is to know exactly how far off the ground you are. In other parts of the world the threshold is lower, sometimes much lower.

* Airspeed is also measured with a pressure instrument, whose accuracy is affected by the density of the air, which in turn is affected by temperature and altitude. But the speed limits in the regulations, and the speeds ATC might tell you to fly, are all based on the uncorrected output of the pressure instrument - "indicated air speed", as its called. You only try to adjust for altitude and pressure when using the airspeed for navigation.

<comment><USER9> Sectional charts also display magnetic variation, there's no reason to change the instruments when you can do basic math.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Earth's magnetic pole has been known to switch sides in the past. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal)

"183 reversals over the last 83 million years... A brief complete reversal, known as the Laschamp event, occurred only 41,000 years ago during the last glacial period. ... Geologists first noticed that some volcanic rocks were magnetized opposite to the direction of the local Earth's field.".

<comment><USER11> When this happens, does the magnetism "rotate" around the Earth, or does it fade out and fade back in reversed?

<comment><USER12> Closer to fading out and back in.

<comment><USER13> Does this mean anything for the protection the planet receives from cosmic rays or solar wind?

<comment><USER14> Indeed. Some people believe these "unshielded" periods might had some influence on the evolution of the species. Without those, the rate of change is just not enough to get to humans...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've read a number of pieces over the years that a geomagnetic reversal might be near, and there have been flips as short as a couple of hundred years. Where "near" may be in my lifetime or in the next 500 years.

So we may not know why it's moved more than model, but I don't think we should be unduly surprised.

Here's one recent piece implying a switch could be sooner rather than later: [https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192522-earths- magnetic-f...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192522-earths-magnetic- field-could-flip-within-our-lifetime-but-dont-worry-we-should-be-ok)

<comment><USER16> So what exactly does that mean? If I'm driving from Chicago to Milwaukee will my compass say I'm heading South?

<comment><USER17> I'd guess it would cause the mass death of animals that use the poles to navigate.

<comment><USER18> Wikipedia seems to suggest this is unlikely:

> Hypotheses have also advanced toward linking reversals to mass > extinctions.[47] Many such arguments were based on an apparent periodicity > in the rate of reversals, but more careful analyses show that the reversal > record is not periodic.[17] It may be, however, that the ends of superchrons > have caused vigorous convection leading to widespread volcanism, and that > the subsequent airborne ash caused extinctions.[48] > ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Mads Faurschou Knudsen and Peter Riisager, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PR, UK. Pages 71-74.

 _Based on an observed correlation between the Earth 's magnetic dipole moment and oxygen isotope paleo-precipitation records from caves in Oman and southern China, Knudsen and Riisager suggest that the Earth's magnetic field may have influenced the amount of rainfall in low-latitude regions during the past 5000 years. The physical mechanism that underpins the geomagnetic-climate link is provided by the cosmic-ray-climate theory, which suggests that galactic cosmic ray (GCR) particles entering the atmosphere influence the formation of low- altitude clouds and, in turn, climate. The geomagnetic field shields the Earth from GCR particles and, according to the cosmic-ray-climate theory, it therefore has the potential to influence cloud formation, rainfall, and climate. Since the amount of GCR particles entering the atmosphere is also modulated by the Sun, the cosmic-ray-climate theory is central to the ongoing scientific debate regarding the role of the Sun in climate change. Knudsen and Riisager lend support to the notion that variations in the Earth's magnetic field may influence the climate of our planet. They also deliver independent support for certain aspects of the cosmic-ray-climate theory._

[https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/gsoa- jgm0108...](https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/gsoa- jgm010809.php)

</comment><comment><USER20> > "On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which > describes the planet's magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, > from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones."

Boggles the mind to think that Mother Nature is the foundation for such significant technology.

If only the Twilight Zone was still around to do an episode on the magnetic north suddenly going MIA. It has gone south (literally) a couple times I believe.

<comment><USER21> "Boggles the mind to think that Mother Nature is the foundation for such significant technology."

As best I can tell Mother Nature is the foundation of ALL technology...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> On the picture, the movement of the pole slightly resembles a pendulum: it is slow at the beginning far from the geographic pole, and it speeding up as it nears it. Makes perfect sense, actually.

</comment><comment><USER23> Being a son of a geologist, I found it fascinating we could tell from geologic history how many times the earth's magnetic field has flipped. Turns out we're long overdue for a reversal.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Update, 9 January: The release of the World Magnetic Model has been > postponed to 30 January due to the ongoing US government shutdown.

This article isn't much without the accompanying model.

<comment><USER25> Since the US is on extended winter vacation, maybe China or Russia can maintain the world magnetic model?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It was foretold: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/)

</comment><comment><USER27> >> In 2018, the pole crossed the International Date Line into the Eastern Hemisphere. It is currently making a beeline for Siberia.

I knew Putin was a super villain. Now he's stealing the north pole!

</comment><comment><USER28> Article linked is truncated, last sentences lifted from here [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00007-1?utm_sourc...](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00007-1?utm_source=twt_nnc&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews&sf205680051=1)

<comment><USER15> That's a much better article, free of claims of scientific bafflement. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So it begins</comment>


Ask HN: One tab on Chrome takes about 100MB memory, why? - <AUTHOR> with say 30 tabs open, 3+ GB is gone, chrome is such a dominant memory consumer! in fact it takes about 10X more memory than everything else combined on my ubuntu all the time, why?<p>Yes I use onetab extensions etc to save memory, just wondering why one tab takes so much memory, is this a design fault? <comment><USER2> (I have worked as an engineer on both Ubuntu and Chrome)

> One tab on chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

It probably doesn't.

Much of that apparent memory usage is shared between all tabs, and the browser renderer process, etc. in the form of shared memory.

Quite a bit of it will be the executable code itself, which is "mapped" into memory, given an address, and allocated the full size but doesn't actually consume memory until it needs to be read from disk.

And a large part of that memory is going to be the giant white pixel buffer that you want it to draw into, which is typically mapped to a texture buffer in the GPU memory.

<comment><USER3> If I Shift-Esc in Chrome with one tab open, it shows that this tab ("Add Comment") consumes 0 bytes of shared memory and 163 828 kB of private memory.

Current window size is 1280x800. Assuming the render buffer is ARGB32 and assuming one render buffer (which is probably an incorrect assumption) that should be ~40MB. The GPU memory is listed as a separate entry in that view, but I don't know if that is also included in the "private memory" listing.

Going turn off javascript and restart and see what it says then.

EDIT: 164 856 kB w/o JS. So no change (relatively).

<comment><USER4> Zero bytes of shared memory? So you have no other processes running which have libc loaded in?

<comment><USER3>
        $ ldd chrome | wc -l
             124

Shift-Esc is Chrome's own task manager. I don't know how they count.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because it is 2018 and people have forgotten how to static HTML. All that lovely rendering code in your browser goes unused as people rewrite it in Javascript, badly; or even in C++ and then compile to web assembly, that's all the rage now, because why stick with one layer of abstraction when you can involve three?

Oh, and of course everyone rolls their own, so that website with the dancing pigs not only has its own stack, but also one for every ad and tracking network it pulls in. It takes a whole lot of javascript to provide that transparent pixel!

The situation is no better on the server side, of course. Why write static HTML for your pageful of text when you can have a web framework pulling C++ from a SQL database, compiling it to web assembly on the fly and vomiting forth to the browser just in time because someone might want their flying unicorn background to have different colour sparkles and pointing those people at a different static location is just gauche.

No, I'm not bitter, far from it. It all makes work for the working man to do.

<comment><USER6> I don't know, WebAssembly compiles to very small blobs (if done right), you can get a lot of functionality out of a few KBytes. Imagine if we could throw out all the high-level crap from the browser core (WebAudio's node graph, all the video and audio codecs, HTML/CSS/JS engines with all legacy features they need to support, etc etc... and replace that with wasm modules which are only loaded on demand. Then browsers would become much smaller, and web pages would only need space for the features they actually use.

Of course this wouldn't be a 'web browser' in the traditional sense, but a (reasonably) safe runtime platform for untrusted code without a central 'Big Brother' who decides what is good or bad for users.

<comment><USER5> I've not seen much WebAssembly "done right" to date; IME it is most often employed to spew gargantuan legacy C++ applications verbatim into the browser to avoid having to understand which parts are actually desired, whether and how they can be unpicked from the rest, and whether they are trivial enough to actually just reimplement in Javascript or otherwise as standalone modules. This does not bode well for the utopia of small clean blobs you propose, though I do agree it would be nice if it came to pass.

I am perhaps too pessimistic here; wasm is young and has still to develop much of its own culture. I shall watch that space with interest.

<comment><USER7> Don't worry. If we've managed to blow our binaries up to 100s of MB, we can do it with our websites, too!

(Seriously. Chromium is 124MB. How does anyone think web dev will go differently?)

<comment><USER8> We will never go back ; there is only a tiny niche group (embedded, retro and demoscene) that cares about tiny and efficient. The rest simply wants to deliver features fast. On their (I include myself in that often) island, most reason that computers are fast enough and have enough memory. But that arguments really does not take into account things like: multitasking (if all devs think like that, what happens when you run 20 apps at the same time?) and, in many cases, battery life (that does not have to be the case; bloat does not have to hog cpu but often does).

<comment><USER9> It's better yet if we can deliver features fast with internationalization, accessibility, security, maintainability, and so on. Whenever I dabble in retro computing, usually via emulation, I appreciate how much progress we've really made. And if a phone needs 2 GB of RAM, and a laptop needs 8, well, the world has much bigger problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > One tab on chrome takes about 100MB memory, why?

Two reasons

1) Because, Chrome is ready to do something with that tab: browse the web. Do this, create a browser that doesn't use much memory when a tab is idle. Switch back to that tab and interact with the page or go to a new page. You will experience latency. It will feel slow. That's why the tab uses a lot of memory. It is staying ready at all times to be interacted with by the user and the network.

2) The real reason: Chrome either has no memory budget or the memory budget was set to 100 MB. The engineers decided that some amount of memory usage was acceptable and that's what you get. If a new budget was created, say 10 MB, then what you would see is some very clever engineering to overcome the problems in the first reason I gave. Chrome would be responsive at all times and use very little memory per tab, but at great engineering cost. It would be very difficult, but interesting work.

<comment><USER11> I'm perfectly willing to wait a second for the page to be reloaded from solid- state storage, if I haven't visited the page for an hour or more.

Some people might say I shouldn't keep hundreds of tabs open for weeks. But I'm an old guy, and by my standards my laptop is a freakin supercomputer, so in my mind it should be able to handle all the web pages I can manually throw at it.

<comment><USER12> As a person who also has way too manu tabs open at all times, I've had success with the great suspender [0]. It "suspends" pages after a timeout so they use less memory.

[0]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

<comment><USER13> The current version also has a bug where it will create so many cookies on google-owned domains that it will exceed the header limit and cause a 500 response. The dev refuses to fix it until he implements a feature to make suspended tabs persist across updates, which is apparently slow going.

<comment><USER14> Well, it is opensource so anyone can fix it for fun or profit: [https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender](https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In modern days, it is usually a web page / app, who takes memory, not the browser environment itself.

E.g. I am developing a web photo editor [https://www.Photopea.com](https://www.Photopea.com) . When you open large documents (dozens of layers in high resolution), it can use 4 GB of RAM or even more. That is simply because decompressed images are large. No matter what browser you use.

But I am still shocked about the memory requirements of some "modern" web apps. My app Photopea uses 80 MB after loading (with no documents open), because it has already loaded some brushes, patterns, gradients, shapes, and generated raster thumbnails for all of them.

GMail uses 280 MB right after loading. This is quite shocking, knowing that it should contain mostly text content.

<comment><USER16> GMail has a ton of Javascript. The basic HTML interface uses closer to 10MB (a bit tricky for me to measure in Firefox, since it doesn't use one process per tab)

<comment><USER17> And what functionality does it provide for that tons of javascript? I am asking honestly because most of the magic of gmail (which I love) is on the server side. The functionality that it has on the client side is trivial and in some cases atrocious. In these days it cannot even resize the compose box. The power of it's search bar should require trivial amount of client side code, so should the auto save. The only thing that should take up memory is client side caching of inbox which is primarily text.

What I'm missing here I'm honestly totally confused.

<comment><USER18> (Key point: Gmail uses over 100MB where FastMail uses 10MB. Careful engineering helps a lot.)

Gmail provides a lot more functionality with that JavaScript than you may think. There's a fair bit of magic that goes into making an email client work as you want it to.

That being said: most web apps are surprisingly inefficient in their memory usage (I find it surprising, anyway), and Gmail is no exception. I last used Gmail a bit over a year ago on Firefox, and it tended to start at about 60MB of explicit allocations, and work its way up to about 110MB. (Chrome being generally less memory-efficient than Firefox at present, I understand that figure to generally be two or three times as much.)

But a good email client doesn't need to be like that; compare FastMail (which company I work for, but this aspect of the design and awareness of memory consumption happened long before I joined): the current explicit allocations on my two FastMail sessions are: 10MB for my work account (mail, open for several days and used plenty), and 27MB for my personal account (mail has been open for a few days and used plenty, and then I just opened calendar, contacts, notes, files and settings, so that all the code for all of them is loaded and all their views initialised, and let it settle down from 53MB to 27MB).

A lot of these things come down to having people _care_ about performance (time, memory or whatever axis you like). Having a large team often makes it harder to get right too.

Almost all news sites, even many _blogs_ and should-be-very-bland web pages use more memory than FastMail.

<comment><USER17> That's what I believe too. Thing's are always harder to implement than you believe at first as a developer I know that. But even than the only explanation I can think of gmail's heaviness is not caring. In some ways it's even worse than a blog or news site which is often image heavy, required or not than can at least use up a lot of memory. Gmail on the other hand is not and it's something that is essentially meant to be opened for hours, gives a simple interface that suggests it would be light whereas taking up more memory than some bloated desktop client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I used the tool called ps_mem.py which measures both private memory and resident memory, at the moment with 50 tabs it took 4.5GB.

Those RAM was really fully taken, unlike the VSZ. With more TABs my 8GB system will start slow down, as swap kicks in.

Yes I used the suspender but disabled it, sometimes it causes issues for me. I now depend on OneTab to use my computer properly.

Also, for special TABS it can eat so much memory that my system essentially stops responding suddenly, which is really annoying as you never know when it will happen. Can Chrome limit certain bad behavior TABs especially when it starts to take up all the memories?

I know each Tab is a process so it will not crash the whole browser, but the memory usage should be better handled no matter what.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm eager for info too. But while we're waiting, I have a genuine, not snarky, question too: does this ever actually negatively impact people's use of their computer? I can't recall ever feeling like my browser having lots of tabs open has changed the experience. RAM and resource usage hasn't been on my mind in years.

<comment><USER20> Yes indeed.

My computer at work has 16 GB. It gets slow. Every now and then, I'll open a web page that pushes things past a limit. The browser becomes completely unresponsive and sometimes I can't even move my mouse. While I'm suffering from running out of memory, the browser decides to use up even more memory to pop up a dialog to taunt me about it.

This can even happen without user action, for example when a page automatically loads a new ad. The ads on reddit seem particularly bad in this way. Randomly, one will eat all my RAM.

I often end up having to hold down the power button for 5 seconds. That, and pulling the power cord, are the only reasonable recovery. If I get "lucky", as I did a few days ago, Linux will kill the X11 server; this violently shuts down the whole GUI.

I really really hate the situation. I blame most of it on Chromium and Firefox, both of which don't make a serious attempt to keep things under control. A bit of blame goes to the fact that resources allocated in the X11 server can not be easily mapped back to web pages and thus kept within page- specific memory quotas.

<comment><USER21> > I often end up having to hold down the power button for 5 seconds.

If you enable the magic SysRq key, Alt+Print Screen+F will trigger the OOM killer.

Quick enable for those who want it:

      kernel.sysrq = 1

in /etc/sysctl.d/90-sysrq.conf.

> I blame most of it on Chromium and Firefox

I rarely have this problem with modern Firefox, but also block ads so maybe that makes the difference. Chrome is always bad, though.

<comment><USER20> This would, in some way, let me regain control. Most likely it will have killed the X11 server and dumped me to a text console login prompt. If not that, maybe a browser will be killed.

The end result is roughly as bad as just rebooting, so I might as well just reboot.

<comment><USER21> It typically kills the browser. Sure, it gets you the same result as rebooting if you only have a browser open, but it's much faster =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> AFAIK, each tab in Chrome is a new process, rather than a thread. It's a lot easier to waste memory on duplicate stuff. The operating system will try to re-use as much memory as it can, but that's just a conservative guessing game.

I just opened 'example.com' 6 times in new tabs, and mapped out the memory of the new processes. Total memory size: 10GB. Resident set size: 427.28 MB. Private dirty rss: 104.23 MB. I did the same thing with two new pages & processes just to make sure: 3.3450 GB, 144.532 GB, 36.876 MB.

example.com is a tiny html page. So, yeah, I don't know what the hell it's doing with all that memory. I don't think the devs care how much memory they're using.

</comment><comment><USER23> To my overly long TODO-list I added a web browser project. I would like to see something akin to Links [0] or Lynx [1] with a bit of Dillo [2], but also for mobile.

Features & non-features:

\- it would generally work like the reader mode (no other modes) trying to place navigation links in a predictable place

\- user can easily select text size and color schemes

\- night mode (Android does not have one)

\- because of it's content focus it could offer great offline capabilities like full-text search through archive and version comparison

\- probably ignore most or all CSS

\- probably no JavaScript support

\- ad blocker for the rest

Can such a thing use it's own rendering engine on iOS? As I said I don't care about JS.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_\(web_browser\))

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_\(web_browser\))

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo)

<comment><USER24> What's the use of night mode? Even if someone needs to browse web in the darkness (which is a bad idea anyway), it should be implemented somewhere in the OS, not in applications.

<comment><USER23> Sometimes you need to browse in the darkness. It should be implemented in the OS, but it isn't. I don't have a mobile OS on my TODO list.

The night mode would be just a small additional setting on top of a color scheme selection.

<comment><USER25> If it's not implemented in the OS, wouldn't it make more sense to create an OS-level utility?

<comment><USER23> OS-level utility needs APIs that are not there in case of Android. All night- mode apps for Android are just a reddish overlay. It often falls apart when you something can't go through the overlay like AFAIR system passwords. I tried to use apps, but met with this wall several times.

Android did have a night mode, but it was experimental and removed in later versions. So other than alternative ROMs there's nothing there.

<comment><USER26> My 1st gen Pixel XL has had night mode since I bought it 1.5 years ago, and it has continued to work all the way to Android 8.1.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Try TidyTab, [https://github.com/eggplanetio/tidytab](https://github.com/eggplanetio/tidytab). Added benefits are it's a lot lighter and you get to sync your bookmarks across your devices. I was a longtime OneTab user and I suggested several features to the developer to make it just about the same feature wise for anyone migrating.

</comment><comment><USER28> Memory usage of a browser mostly depends on the web page. Compare a static web page with a JavaScript heavy web page that creates thousands of objects.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's pure madness. Still in 2012/13, Google maps operated on a 32MB RAM system (with desktop recording running in the background). [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xq4w2LD9ypv1zwv6oqPTciWvIDD...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xq4w2LD9ypv1zwv6oqPTciWvIDDPw9sd/view?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER30> There are several answers here:

\- Is 100 MB the marginal memory cost to add one more tab when you already have a bunch open, or is it the memory usage when you have a single tab open? Don't forget that there is a baseline amount of memory usage for the application itself.

\- Measuring memory usage is hard, doubly so for web browsers. You'd think it would just be about counting all the allocations, but shared libraries, sandboxes, and cache make it complicated. Just looking at the "memory usage" panels in Windows/macOS is often misleading: unfortunately I can't find the link at the moment, but there's a great article about how for Chrome, the number you get in those panels is wrong.

\- In response to the increasing demands of web standards, browsers have basically become mini-operating systems, and you'd expect them to have memory usage to match.

\- Websites are complicated: DOMs get bigger all the time, and it takes memory to store them, especially with the aggressive optimizations browsers use (see next point)

\- Browsers use a lot of techniques to maximize performance as much as possible: aggressive caching and JS engines that favor space-time tradeoffs for faster execution being the two big ones. But remember that these are all a question of degree: if there is less memory available, they will use less and just go slower. The browser is just using the RAM available.

tl;dr: you may not be measuring it correctly, it's a difficult problem space, browsers deliberately use as much memory as is available to optimize for speed

<comment><USER31> >\- In response to the increasing demands of web standards, browsers have basically become mini-operating systems, and you'd expect them to have memory usage to match.

Allow me to partially disagree, it is true that browsers have basically become mini-operating systems, but not (IMHO) because of "increasing demands of web standards", because of "increasing demand of web publishers and all the crap that every other site has now embedded or is serving to you or is using to track this or that aspect of your visit".

A good question for the OP could be, how much memory does your Chrome use per tab if you disable javascript and open - say - 20 Hacker News pages?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> When I ran an Ubuntu desktop, I ran Chrome in a container in order to limit its memory use.

(I now run Chrome in a Ubuntu VM under bhyve on FreeBSD, which has the same memory limiting effect, plus giving me U2F support when I pass a USB controller through to the VM)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's rather obvious that chrome isn't intended for heavy duty as the tab bar becoming unusable above ~20 tabs. So I use multiple windows instead and max out 8 gb pretty quickly. I'm just glad it backs up dynamic content like edited form fields before those tabs get crashed to free up space. Also, it's quick to reach 7.9 gb, but goes a long way on that last ~100 mb. But of course a long running js leaking memory on some news site can bring it down.

Two times in a month the login manager crashed and I couldn't get back in from lock screen without killing a few processes manually on console. I'm going back to Firefox with noscript and tree style tabs, as soon as I finished working on all those open tabs ... so, probably never. I don't want to miss the history search and security of chromium.

So I should learn to use the history sidebar instead of tree tabs, and use the tab bar like a ring buffer, not a stack. And I should try deactivating js globaly, if there is a whitelist built-in.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well, here is one thing I observed.

Chrome allocates different process for every tab. Firefox doesn't do that. Just one process for all tab.

Suppose I open 10 tabs each on Chrome & Firefox. And suppose every tab needs 100MB of memory.

If you look up in task manager -

Chrome - 10 tabs - 10 different process - 100MB each = 1000MB = roughly 1GB

Firefox - 10 tabs - only 1 process - 1000MB = roughly 1GB for that one process.

<comment><USER35> Sounds like your Firefox version is out of date. Multi process Firefox has landed quite a while ago, with different memory and performance characteristics.

<comment><USER34> I'll check.

Guess Firefox copied this feature from Chrome.

<comment><USER36> Fortunately they didn't : they use one process for the browser UI, and a few (like two or four) processes for tabs which are dispatched between those process. It's way better than Chrome in term of memory consumption when you have lots of tabs opened.

<comment><USER37> I think, the number of processes (by default) is set to how many cores you have on your CPU. That way you can achieve almost the maximum of parallelism with a minimum of RAM use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Try checking memory of a cryptocurrency exchange. A couple gigs after some hours of activity. I would imagine that there's a memory leak, but it's weird that this performance is consistent across all 3-4 exchanges I've been using.

</comment><comment><USER39> I use Opera as my primary browser because Chrome is slow, a memory hog and makes the fans on my macbook air really noisy

<comment><USER40> At the core, Opera is still Chromium. Either way I use it primarily too, certainly snappier than Chrome itself

<comment><USER39> I'm aware it is core Chromium but it seems to run way faster...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Some lightweight browsers to try: dillo, midori, epiphany.

Also, ps_mem can be good for tracking what is using up your memory: [https://github.com/pixelb/ps_mem](https://github.com/pixelb/ps_mem)

</comment><comment><USER42> In large part, I suspect, chromes resource use stems from google wanting to scour everything you do. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it logs how many seconds your cursor is over ads and all other user input.

</comment><comment><USER43> Yes, it is a design fault.

<comment><USER44> What is design fault? Could you elaborate

<comment><USER43> The OP described the current design:

>with say 30 tabs open, 3+ GB is gone, chrome is such a dominant memory consumer! in fact it takes about 10X more memory than everything else combined

The last words in OP's post were "is this a design fault?"

Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I can't find the link, but there was something recently about how size of the js runtime has increased over time as all the new (es6) features have been added

</comment><comment><USER46> Well, it's not a priority for them. Pick a browser that prioritizes performance for web browsing instead of running JS web apps.

</comment><comment><USER47> Not a direct answer to your question, but 'the great suspender' extension puts unused tabs to sleep.

</comment><comment><USER48> Yesterday I had to restart chromium on my computer, because it ate all 32GiB of RAM.

</comment><comment><USER40> Only 100? Consider yourself lucky!

<comment><USER49> I know, I'm sitting at 2.2GB on mac with 4 open tabs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> well, using the current fad terminology: it is because every tab is a Native App. (i.e. an electron app -- i.e. a web page)

</comment><comment><USER51> Hey. Hey.

Chrome tabs are processes with shared memory, but they're still processes. On Linux, they get kernel space mapped in. That influences their total footprint even though it's shared.

Can people just use what amounts of trifiling amounts of RAM in 2012 and stop demanding every executable be as "efficient" by an antiquated pre virtual memory metric, please?

Chrome is astonishingly good at what it does.

<comment><USER52> I don't need every application to be the leanest that it can be. What I need is for every application stop assuming that 12 GB of free memory means that it's their 12 GB.

I understand the adage of free memory being wasted memory, but there's a context for that adage. E.g. if a user clicks off of a tab, the browser doesn't need to write that tab's contents to disk when 12 GB is free. A good trade off is to store the tab in memory, for X minutes. Write the tab (or more simply, the URL) to disk after those X minutes have elapsed.

<comment><USER36> Free memory isn't wasted memory though, it's file system cache memory ! If a software uses 100% of the available RAM, it means all your file system call are going to be hard drive IOs (not everybody has ssd mate).

<comment><USER51> If you actually cared about this you provision a ramdisk. But this is a talking point, not an actual argument.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Two Chinese Stalagmites Are a 'Holy Grail' for Accurate Radiocarbon Dating - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/two-stalagmites-found-in-chinese-cave-are-a-holy-grail-1831074289 <comment><USER2> Original paper links

Science (subscription required): [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1293](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1293)

SciHub: [https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.aau0747](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1126/science.aau0747)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't Rosetta Stone be a better metaphor than Holy Grail?

<comment><USER4> "Holy grail" is being used as an idiom and not a metaphor here.

<comment><USER5> Idioms are colloquial metaphors

<comment><USER6> No, they are not. The meaning of an idiom is not predictable from its constituent words, that's it. A metaphor involves some kind of meaning transfer. In this case some properties of the 'prototypical' Holy Grail (desirability mostly) are transferred to the stalagmites. The source for the transfer itself could potentially be an idiom, but in this case it's not, actually. The word 'grail', albeit rare, has a normal meaning (a kind of cup), and 'holy grail' is what it is: a holy cup. We just decided based on the strength of the literary tradition to call a particular object that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So... how do people actually know how much C14 was in something? Does dating only work if you know how much C14 was there originally? Otherwise how would you be able to measure the difference between what is there and what was there originally?

<comment><USER8> The idea is the level of C14 in the atmosphere is constant, and living organisms will have about about the same ratio of C14 to C12. When they die they no longer replenish the C14 so the amount decreases over time as it decays (it's radioactive). You can then calculate how old something is based on the ratio of remaining C14 to C12. I'm not sure what the process is that relates C14 to stalagmite because it's inorganic.

<comment><USER9> The article says they used thorium-230 dating to calibrate layered samples from the stalagmites. This cave was special because the stalagmites did not contain much carbon from limestone, but did include atmospheric carbon.</comment></comment></comment>


Gcapizzi/moka: A Go mocking framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gcapizzi/moka <comment><USER2> Just tried to post about Moka on here and I find out that someone has done it before me :D Thanks OP!

I'm the author of Moka, so if anyone has any question or feedback for me, please shoot :)</comment>


The bestmap ever? - <AUTHOR> https://bestmap.net <comment><AUTHOR> We build an aggregator of all transportation. It combines all e-scooters, bikes, car-sharing, metro, busses, trains, rental cars, flights, and more in one app. How do you like it? - [https://bestmap.net/](https://bestmap.net/)</comment>


$40/month life coaching tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.getfirstmate.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have no association with this company, just think it looks very cool.</comment>


George Orwell: What Is Fascism? (1944) - <AUTHOR> http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc <comment><USER2> Thanks for the link!

Wikipedia says in brief "radical authoritarian nationalism." [1] I think I remember hearing in high school that it was, by example, anyone that believe "Love it or Leave it" in regard to a country, but I think now that may be jingoism - related, but not necessarily the same.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism)</comment>


Twiddla: Zillon Percent Better at UI Design - <AUTHOR> http://twiddla.blogspot.com/2008/12/10-zillion-percent-better-at-ui-design.html

<comment><USER2> Can use Dabbleboard (<http://www.dabbleboard.com>) too :).

I'm impressed that Jason mentions us himself in a comment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Twiddla is amazing... will definitely be using it in the future.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just discovered this inline LaTeX editor through them. Cool

<http://www.sitmo.com/latex/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Balsamiq Mockups copycat!

<comment><USER4> That's the thing, though, right? Someone else adds drag and drop UI elements and Balsamiq's advantage fades. I think Balsamiq is really cool. I'm inspired by a single developer making a living from a website, but the barriers to entry are scary low.

<comment><USER6> I actually think that having a single developer can be a huge advantage, since you can react so fast to what people ask for.

I added this snap-to-grid and UI mockup piece to Twiddla in a single day. I bet that Dabbleboard didn't spend much longer than that getting their chat interface up. And check out Peldi here taking feature requests from people writing comments. I wouldn't be surprised if there's not a new version up next week with those issues addressed.

That's a really cool trend in software development. There's no way that Adobe CollabroDreadnaught Enterprise or WebEx MeetingBehemoth can hang in an environment like that. I think the next few years will see a lot of big established players get nibbled away at the ankles from small shops like us.

<comment><USER4> I hope so :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, I will be using this in the future as well.</comment>