Adjusted for inflation, $30k then is around $45k now. Tesla sells a Model 3 for just over $35k.
It doesn't make any sense to hold someone to a promise like that and not adjust it for inflation. I think you can legitimately complain that he didn't meet the timeline he was aiming for.
I think your point is fair, but look at the 2026 Nissan Leaf.
The base is around $28k. This feels like one of the first "affordable" EVs in the USA. It also comes with decent tech without a subscription, and has comparable ranges to Teslas.
> This may highlight to some folks abroad
> the importance of the US's 2nd Amendment,
> and an armed civilian population
British India, the USSR, East Germany, Francoist Spain, Apartheid South Africa, Communist Romania etc. etc. The 20th century is full of repressive regimes with even more repressive gun laws that fell due to protests etc.
The idea that everyone can show up at the protest with their AR-15, somehow defeat the state's security forces in armed combat, and that the result will be some enlightened republic is an American fantasy, informed by what's at best a selective reading of American history.
If it comes to that you're much more likely to end up under some warlord. Afghanistan and especially Africa are full of people who are well armed and where exactly that's happened more often than not.
The actual idea is that this will give individual members of the "security forces" a plausible excuse to not repress the protests violently - which can be very helpful in shifting the overall incentives towards a peaceful transition of power.
> The one thing I'll want is what we'll never
> get which is just making it easier to delete
> e-mails in bulk.
This already "exists", go to a label, tick the top checkbox above all the rows, then "Select all 5,192 conversations in 'ThisLabel'", then "Delete".
"Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.
But you can do this by setting up a local IMAP client and doing mass-deletes that way. Perhaps the easiest on e.g. *nix systems is to use isync (the "mbsync" command) to "sync" between two folders locally and remotely, with a rule saying "anything deleted locally, delete it on the remote too".
Then just sync between an empty local folder and your remote target folder, and it'll slowly grind through it. You can also use a local GUI E-Mail client, but most of those become slow/unresponsive with a mass-delete operation, whereas you can spin up multiple "mbsync" commands with retries.
Beware that GMail has (or did, last I tried this) some sort of per-account I/O limit or similar, so if you're doing background operations like this you might find the web interface (even on an unrelated computer/network connection) becomes slow or unresponsive.
> This already "exists", go to a label, tick the top checkbox above all the rows, then "Select all 5,192 conversations in 'ThisLabel'", then "Delete".
Also works with any search.
> "Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.
I've found it to work fairly reliably with that much or more, if you leave the tab open and just wait. It seems to do an initial UI update with those ~5k or so, then continue deleting in the background. Feels like it's done entirely in the frontend, where it deletes a batch, grabs the next, delete, grab next, delete, etc etc etc.
> Steve Jobs himself envisioned a
> web app future as the future of[...]
I'm not putting cynical motivations past Apple, but you're reading too much (or too little?) into what Jobs said at the time.
His remarks at the time of the initial iPhone release (with the benefit of hindsight) were clearly because they weren't ready to expose any sort of native API's.
Pissing on you and telling you it's raining was typical Jobs reality distortion field marketing, and not an indication that he actually believed it was raining.
> the novel V2 rocket weapons
> that killed an average of 2
> civilians per launch
That's positively humanitarian in the context of WWII. Can you name any other weapon system developed during that war which had such a low civilian casualty rate, adjusted for the money spent on it?
While the weapons systems work for an adversary is itself a little problematic, IMHO it is his role supervising work done with slave labor under horrendous conditions in concentration camps while rising through the ranks of the SS that makes him a completely unsuitable choice as a namesake.
At best it indicates a callous willingness to tolerate the extreme abuse of others in the direct pursuit of his personal advancement.
There's nothing humanitarian in building weapons for the nazi cause, even if they didn't kill people at the time. The nazi project itself planned (and executed) for the elimination of millions, and Von Braun was involved in it.
Actually a shipping container full of micro-SD cards hurtling down the highway has lower overall bandwidth than a 56k modem.
That's because whoever's attempting to load an ideal 400 million micro-SD cards into one will take approximately forever carefully trying to line up even one row of them on the floor of a shipping container, before having the whole thing fall over like dominoes.
And even if they manage that, the whole thing will tumble over once they need to deal with the first row of the container's side corrugation. Nobody at the department of Spherical Cows in Vacuums thought to account for those dimensions[1] not lining up with the size of micro-SD cards.
If they do manage some approximation of this it'll take forever just to drive this down the road, let alone get the necessary permits to take the thing on the highway.
Turns out not a lot of semi truck trailers or roads are prepared to deal with a 40 ft container weighing around 100 metric tons (the weight of one packed to the brim with sand, a close approximation).
The good news is that such transportation gets more fuel efficient the longer the trip is.
The bad news is that the container will arrive mostly empty, as it's discovered that shipping container door panel gaps and road vibrations conspire to spread a steady stream of micro-SD cards behind you the entire way there.
Commuters in snowy areas held up behind the slowly moving "OVERSIZED LOAD!" with a mandatory police escort wonder if it's a trial for a new type of road salt that makes a pleasant crunchy sound as you drive over it.
Finally, an attempt to recover the remaining data fails. The sharding strategy chosen didn't account for failure due to road salt ingression into the container, cards at the bottom of the container being crushed to dust by the weight of those above, or that the leased container hadn't been thoroughly cleaned since last transporting, wait, what is that smell?
100 metric tons is nothing really when it comes to trucking, logging trucks in Sweden are commonly hurling through down dirt roads at 70-80km/h with 70 ton loads (mostly limited to that because that's the maximum allowed weight without oversize escorts currently), the Finns are experimenting with 100 ton loads for logging purposes (for environmental reasons).
That's not even mentioning Australian road trains that seem to commonly pull around 150 tons with some being up to 200 tons (The load would be slightly spread out to more containers but still one truck-load).
Still, 400 million SD-cards is still a silly experiment.
The weight limits are for public roads. Private logging roads can run whatever they want and Canada had(have?) some impressive rigs routinely hauling 100+ tons. Just do an image search for Hayes/Pacific logging truck.
I tried setting that up, but now the trucker's union is refusing to talk to me, citing concerns that the platters will all spin up due to road vibration, derailing the truck in a ditch due to the cumulative gyroscopic forces.
They remain unconvinced that chatGPT has told me it "should be fine", and have inquired as to whether I don't have better things to do than trying to win increasingly obscure and contrived arguments on HN. Please advise.
Fascinating, I wasn't aware of that. They still offer an "AWS Snowball", which is 200 TB instead of 100 PB, but around the size of half a full size suitcase instead of a semi truck. You then ship that back and forth.
If you need 100 PB then moving 500 of those around seems a lot easier for everyone involved than managing a special snowflake truck.
Dans Data (RIP that website, apparently) did this backup tapes to microSD cards update about 15 years ago.
He started with "Well, first we need to know how big our station wagon is. I hereby arbitrarily declare it to be a 1985 Volvo 240, which has 2.2 cubic metres of cargo capacity." and "I'm also going to assume that the wagon isn't really packed totally full of memory cards, such that they cascade into the front whenever you brake and will avalanche out of the tailgate when it's opened. Let's say they are packed almost to the roof of the car, but in cardboard boxes, which reduce the usable cargo capacity to a nice round two cubic metres."
The calculated "Assuming uniform and perfect stacking of objects of this volume, with zero air space, you can fit 24,242,424 of them into two cubic metres."
But he also addressed the packing problem, saying:
"In the real world there'd obviously be air spaces, even if you painstakingly stack the tiny cards in perfect layers. My size approximation, that ignores the more-than-0.5mm height of the thick end of the card, could make the perfect-layers calculation quite inaccurate. But if you're just shovelling cards into the boxes and not stacking them, though, there will be even more empty space between cards, and the thicker ends won't matter much.
To use a few words you may have to hit Wikipedia about - I know I did - a random close pack of monodisperse microSD-shaped objects will be considerably tighter than one for, say, spheres. I wouldn't be surprised if it only reduced the theoretical no-air-space density by 20%, provided you shake the boxes while you're filling them.
So let's stick with a 20% density reduction from random packing, giving 0.8 times the theoretical density of perfectly-packed cards. Or nineteen million, three hundred and ninety-three thousand, nine hundred and thirty-nine cards, in the boxes, in the station wagon."
He was writing in 2015, and settled on 16GB cards and being reasonable, getting 275 pebibytes. If we switched them to the 1TB cards mentioned upthread that'd be 17 exabytes in a 2 cubic meter stationwagon cargo area, or in a 67 cubic meter shipping container you'd get 575 exibytes. And that's the "load with a shovel and shack to pack down" number, so perhaps 720EiB if someone took that forever to carefully pack them.
Your 100 tons problem is real, it seems shipping containers (both 20 and 40 foot) seem to top out with a cargo payload of 28 tons. So let's call it "only" 161EiB shovel loads.
The font of all hallucinations and incompetent math tells me "The total amount of data on the internet is estimated to be around 40 zettabytes as of 2025, which is equivalent to 40,000 exabytes." So you'd only need 250 shipping containers or so to store a copy of the entire internet. And that's barely 1% of the capacity of a modern large cargo ship. I guess for reliability you'd use 500 shipping containers in redundant mirrored RAID1 config, each half travelling on a different ship.
Dan also noted: "Unfortunately, even if your cards and card readers could all manage 50 mebibytes per second of read and write speed, getting all of that data onto and off of the cards at each end of the wagon-trip in no more than 24 hours would require around 68,400 parallel copy operations, at each end."
That works out to 2.3 million readers for one parallel copy of one containers worth of data in one day. And 570 million for 250 container's worth.
> he also addressed the packing problem, saying[...]
If we're going to take this "packing problem" a tad more seriously, then the notion that someone might spend on the order of $2.5 billion on micro-SD cards for their station wagon (assuming 1TB at $100/card), but isn't in a position to contact an SD card manufacturer to solve this problem for them is a bit absurd.
> This is rare enough that I'm pushing the recovery
> of it up near the top of my project queue.
The reader is left to wonder what the software librarian at the Computer History Museum could have possibly found recently that warrants a placement ahead of Unix v4 in their project queue. A copy of Atlantian Unix from the ancient Library of Alexandria?
Definitionally if they're "pushing it near the top" they're not only using FIFO, there's a priority ordering involved...
My guess is there's stuff in progress and maybe they need to arrange access to or setup the readers for a tape that old and of potentially unknown format.
So much of this is old and potentially delicate and they don't have unlimited space to work in so they'd have to pack up some other in progress digitization project to setup the tape flux digitizer and maybe have to arrange to get the correct one for this type of tape too.
> how does Tesla know repairs
> have been made after a minor
> accident?
Speculation: It was brought to Tesla after an accident, which inspected it, and quoted a repair price the owner didn't like, so his cousin Bob fixed it, but it's still marked as "HV needs inspection/repair" in Tesla's system?
This may not be what you're asking, but it's rather trivial if you're setting up an SMTP gateway that proxies traffic to another SMTP that handles the IP address reputation management etc.
E.g. I do that with Exim on my Debian laptop and have it relay outgoing messages to Gmail's SMTP. It's great if what you want out of it is being able to send E-Mail while "offline", the messages will get locally queued until you've got an outgoing connection, much better than relying on individual MUA's to handle that, and it'll work with one-off invocations like piping to mail(1) etc.
Adjusted for inflation, $30k then is around $45k now. Tesla sells a Model 3 for just over $35k.
It doesn't make any sense to hold someone to a promise like that and not adjust it for inflation. I think you can legitimately complain that he didn't meet the timeline he was aiming for.