>    Monitor screen sizes do not seem to follow this trend, however, and
 > seem to grow a lot more linearly.

Assuming the supported resolution is changing proportionately, this is 
actually quadratic growth in terms of number of pixels.

This is probably limited by graphics hardware in some way (although I'm 
not sure how fast that grows in "power"). It's also limited by the fact 
that popular OSs such as Windows still use pixels as a unit of 
measurement, so there's limited benefit to higher resolutions as it 
shrinks the size of important objects on screen.

  - Slime

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Slime <pov### [at] slimelandcom> wrote:
>  >    Monitor screen sizes do not seem to follow this trend, however, and
>  > seem to grow a lot more linearly.

> Assuming the supported resolution is changing proportionately, this is 
> actually quadratic growth in terms of number of pixels.

  The standard measurement for screen size is the length of the diagonal.

> This is probably limited by graphics hardware in some way (although I'm 
> not sure how fast that grows in "power"). It's also limited by the fact 
> that popular OSs such as Windows still use pixels as a unit of 
> measurement, so there's limited benefit to higher resolutions as it 
> shrinks the size of important objects on screen.

  Resolution has little to do with screen size.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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I don't know about physical size, but there's something I've always 
wondered about:

Let me pick an example at random. When USB flash drives first came out, 
64MB was about the biggest drive you would possibly buy. Today you can 
easily pick up a 4GB drive that costs less than the price of having it 
physically delivered to your house.

So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with? Why did 
they have to start by making 64MB drives, and then starting to make 
128MB drives, and then moving on to 256MB drives, and so forth? Why 
couldn't they just go directly to 4GB? What enables them to make those 
today but prevented them from making them back then?

Why do you have to design, test, manufacture and sell a 64MB drive 
before you can attempt to make a 128MB one? How does the former help you 
do the latter? Why can't you just jump straight to 4GB? (Or perhaps even 
more than that?)

I can't think of any /technical/ reason. (Besides "that's how it's 
done".) The only rational reason I can think of is that if you keep 
putting out slightly better devices year after year, people are going to 
keep upgrading their stuff, and that gives you income. If you just went 
straight out and sold the best possible device, then once everyone has 
got one, you'd have nothing new to sell to them, and you'd have no money.

Then again, cars don't improve in performance at all. Today's cars have 
performance within a few percent of cars made 40 years ago. And yet, 
people still buy cars.

I suppose a car is different to a piece of technology. Cars wear out. 
Cars are status symbols. Cars are fashion accessories. Some of that 
applies to a very limited extent to computers or phones, but it really 
doesn't apply to something like a USB flash drive.

On the other hand, pens and pencils don't improve in performance either, 
and they still sell plenty of those. Flash drives could be considered as 
being like pens. (Hell, they even /call them/ "pen drives" sometimes...)

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I don't know about physical size, but there's something I've always
> wondered about:
>
> Let me pick an example at random. When USB flash drives first came out,
> 64MB was about the biggest drive you would possibly buy. Today you can
> easily pick up a 4GB drive that costs less than the price of having it
> physically delivered to your house.
>
> So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with? Why did
> they have to start by making 64MB drives, and then starting to make
> 128MB drives, and then moving on to 256MB drives, and so forth? Why
> couldn't they just go directly to 4GB? What enables them to make those
> today but prevented them from making them back then?
>

When they started making flash memory chips, the manufacturing technology was
not as advanced as it is now.

have much less memory cells.
Also the manufacturing yield was probably much less due to contamination in the
manufacturing process.
What that means is that the bigger the area of a single chip, the higher the
probability of contamination and the fault of the chip. This has a parabolic
relation. This meant that chip sizes were kept small to increase yield.
Nowadays processes have much better yield and much smaller structure sizes which
means you can have a higher storage density.

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Why do you have to design, test, manufacture and sell a 64MB drive
> before you can attempt to make a 128MB one? How does the former help you
> do the latter? Why can't you just jump straight to 4GB? (Or perhaps even
> more than that?)

If I'm correct you do work in a research facility. So even you're not a
researcher you should know how research works.
That's exactly what happens with chip technology.
You start researching, get a workable product with low performance. To finace
further research, you start selling it, knowing that you can do better.
Performance keeps improving, prices drop and so on.

Just compare the chip size of an old simm memory card to a DDR3 memory module.
The chip case will be about the same, but the contained memory is magnitudes
lager.

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>> So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with?
>>
>
> When they started making flash memory chips, the manufacturing technology was
> not as advanced as it is now.

So the question "why wasn't hardware more advanced back then?" has the 
answer "manufacturing technology was not as advanced back then". Which 
immediately provokes the question "why wasn't the manufacturing 
technology more advanced back then?"

> Nowadays processes have much better yield and much smaller structure sizes which
> means you can have a higher storage density.

I'm fairly sure that back when they were selling 64MB flash drives, it 
was already common for a PC to have multiple GB of RAM. So clearly the 
feature sizes already existed.

> If I'm correct you do work in a research facility. So even you're not a
> researcher you should know how research works.
> You start researching, get a workable product with low performance. To finance
> further research, you start selling it, knowing that you can do better.
> Performance keeps improving, prices drop and so on.

I can understand how something /complicated/ - like, say, a processor - 
would take time. Inventing a new feature takes a lot of R&D. But just 
making the transistors smaller? I don't really see why they have to 
shrink in tiny little baby steps. Why not just go the whole hog straight 
away?

Part of the answer is manufacturing process, which just takes us back to 
where we started - now we're arguing about a different bit of hardware. ;-)

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with?

  You could just as well ask why don't they make 64TB drives right now.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 08/03/2012 11:59 AM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with?
>
>    You could just as well ask why don't they make 64TB drives right now.

Yep, I'd be interested to hear the answer to that one too.

And why they aren't making petabit network cards yet. And why nobody 
sells gigabit USB connectors. And why there's no 64-core CPUs yet. [That 
last one at least has a plausible explanation: There's no software yet.]

Basically, why do all technological devices have to improve in small 
increments? Why can't they take big strides?

Sometimes there's a plausible answer. Nobody needs it. There's no 
software for it. The laws of physics make it difficult to cross this 
particular boundary. But a lot of the time, it just seems arbitrary...

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On 08/03/2012 11:59 AM, Warp wrote:
> > Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
> >> So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with?
> >
> >    You could just as well ask why don't they make 64TB drives right now.

> Yep, I'd be interested to hear the answer to that one too.

  Did you know that technology has to first be developed before it can
be used?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

>>>     You could just as well ask why don't they make 64TB drives right now.
>
>> Yep, I'd be interested to hear the answer to that one too.
>
>    Did you know that technology has to first be developed before it can
> be used?

OK. So why spend time and money developing a 32TB drive when you could 
just go develop a 64TB drive instead?

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >>>     You could just as well ask why don't they make 64TB drives right now.
> >
> >> Yep, I'd be interested to hear the answer to that one too.
> >
> >    Did you know that technology has to first be developed before it can
> > be used?
>
> OK. So why spend time and money developing a 32TB drive when you could
> just go develop a 64TB drive instead?

So why didn't Mr Benz build a 500HP S-Class with surround audion, ABS and 20
Airbags in 1886?
Just in case you're wondering:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen
Because he didn't know how to.

Why aren't you able to play beethoven's 7th when you were 5 years old?

That's basically the same question and the same answer: You didn't know how to.
The engineers didn't know how to either.
They had to spend decades to perfect the processes.

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