planteen

30 year mortgage rates are around 3.65% this week. So if a buyer puts down 20%, that will be around $259k in interest over the life of the $400k loan, putting the total interest at half of what you said (~$760k total the life of the loan versus $1 million).

While certainly the US population is aging and slowing in growth rate, I have not seen any predictions for a population decline by 2050 or even 2100.

You are right that further urbanization is expected and buying outside of cities may not be a good investment.

Yeah I guess that explains the fond memories part.

Some 32-bit parts are totally flat. Like low-end ARM parts with SRAM and no MMU. Compare that to a 8-bit or 16-bit PIC microcontroller where you need to bank switch to have a usable amount of memory for your application and its heaven.

But yeah, I see what you are saying. Still, pulling the wool over someone's eyes doesn't seem so bad to me about virtual->physical memory and TLBs as it does making them jump through a distinction between pointer types, but maybe I am in the minority on that.

Totally agree. I've been making the same argument elsewhere on this thread. People are disagreeing with saying things were simpler back then. I don't know how anyone can have fond memories of a 16-bit CPU with segments or bank switching compared to a modern flat model and think it was simpler.

It does though, if you mix near and far pointers, you are going to be getting crashes. Pointer equality and comparison are non-trivial. Whereas on a modern 32-bit CPU you don't have any such distinction.

A 16-bit space is not at all simplified, it's far more complex. Because of that, it is a terrible choice. It's a much more difficult memory model to learn in. In a flat 32-bit address space, a pointer is a pointer and it just works. It's much easier to conceptualize and learn on. Have you ever programmed for a bank switched memory computer? It's a nightmare. It's extra mental gymnastics pushed on the developer that have been irrelevant for a long time.

I don't think your example is a valid comparison. It's more like do you think all teenagers need to learn to drive a horse driven carriage before they learn on a modern car?

I remember hearing about these around 2008 and then the application being pushed was no cables to your fancy flat screen TV. Blu-ray player uses UWB RF so no cables are necessary. I don't think anyone saw then the end of physical media and the rise of streaming on the horizon.

I also remember in 2008 hearing about how RFID would soon be ubiquitous on consumer products like UPCs and you could just load up a cart with groceries and walk out the door without scanning anything. That one may actually pan out, but it is much later than it was supposed to be.

That sounds like a great idea, but you today we can't even synthesize arbitrary VHDL/Verilog code efficiently. The author needs an understanding of hardware architecture to write something that synthesizes versus just a test harness not intended to be synthesized.

Sure you can learn a lot but I have no idea why you would choose Turbo C in 2020 over say a Raspberry Pi with GCC. Turbo C (discontinued in 1990) is going to expose a bunch of irrelevant things today, as even most microcontrollers are 32-bit:

painful 16-bit near/far memory model

a single task operating system (DOS) that has been long obsolete

no support for networking or threads

I could go on and on.

...I've done it and it was nothing like that.

Some things are much easier with ODB electronics though. Like if a cylinder is misfiring, you pull out a code scanner and see exactly which spark plug needs to get replaced.

I mean that sounds more like "It's a pain in the ass to change a headlight in my girlfriend's car, so I have her bring it to a shop" than a right to repair issue. Or are you saying the shop needs special tooling to get the job done? What kind of car is it? There's usually a few YouTube videos showing how to do things like this.

I have an older gas guzzling SUV on a truck chassis. Lots of repairs are a lot easier than my wife's car, because there is a lot more space. But that is a fundamental tradeoff between two vehicle classes and gas guzzlers versus high MPG crossovers. My SUV is newer than her car too.

> Can you quickly preserve the food in your fridge/freezer without electricity?

What do you even mean by this?

"The power is out kids! Start a bonfire in the front yard, we're making pemmican and jerky!"

In all seriousness, I've been through a number of multi-day power outages. You leave the door to your fridge/freezer shut as much as possible. When you open it, you make it infrequent and fast. They are well insulated, things stay cold for a long time.

Yes this and it is also much harder to switch off a heavy DC load than an AC one. Once current starts flowing in DC and you try to open a switch, an arc will form that never gets extinguished since the voltage doesn't cross 0 like it does in AC. Hence why switches are always significantly derated for DC versus AC.

If it's publically traded, yeah, nothing nefarious happened. But if it's private, all bets are off. Often, options there are nothing more than a couple of pages of paper tracked by the company itself. It may very well require legal advice to unwind what happened.