Re: Storage Cost Calculation
Abohfu venant zinkeng vicezik at gmail.com writes: Hard drives have been the secondary storage of choice on computers for many years. They have improved in speed, in capacity, and in cost for over 50 years. It's interesting to look at how the prices have dropped, or, conversely, how much storage your money will buy now as compared to many years ago. This improvement is an example of Moore's Law This site was written by a person (in 2009) who had considered this amazing trend. He collected a lot of data about hard drive capacity and price. The formula he extrapolated by using the data he found iscost per gigabyte = 10-0.2502(year-1980) + 6.304where year is the year for which the extrapolated cost was desired. This formula is based on data from 1980 to 2010.Your program should develop a table of costs, based on the user's inputs of the starting and ending years and the formula. The table should produce columns as seen below, The column Year is the year, starting at the point the user says to start at, and going to the ending year, stopping there. The size of the step in the table is also specified by the user. The user inputs are all integers. Your program can assume that. NOTE: The ending year, stopping there phrase is a bit ambiguous. If you want to use the ending year as the stop value in a range function, that is fine. If you want to add one to the ending year and use that as the stop value, that is also ok. In the tables below, end year plus one was used. Tab characters can be used. Sample Run:Big Blue Hard Drive Storage Cost Enter the starting year: 1992 Enter the ending year: 2015 What step size for the table? 4 Hard Drive Storage Costs Table Start Year = 1992 End Year = 2015 Year Cost Per Gigabyte ($) 1992 2002.627 1996 199.894 2000 19.953 2004 1.992 2008 0.199 2012 0.02 Another Run:Big Blue Hard Drive Storage Cost Enter the starting year: 1998 Enter the ending year: 2010 What step size for the table? 2 Hard Drive Storage Costs Table Start Year = 1998 End Year = 2010 Year Cost Per Gigabyte ($) 1998 63.154 2000 19.953 2002 6.304 2004 1.992 2006 0.629 2008 0.199 2010 0.063 QUESTION Could someone help me with a design and a python program to implement that design to solve the above problem? divdiv dir=ltr ul li pHard drives have been the secondary storage of choice on computers for many years. They have improved in speed, in capacity, and in cost for over 50 years. It's interesting to look at how the prices have dropped, or, conversely, how much storage your money will buy now as compared to many years ago. This improvement is an example ofnbsp;a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law;Moore's Law/a/p pa href=http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte;This site/anbsp;was written by a person (in 2009) who had considered this amazing trend. He collected a lot of data about hard drive capacity and price. The formula he extrapolated by using the data he found is/pcost per gigabyte = 10-0.2502(year-1980) + 6.304brwherenbsp;yearnbsp;is the year for which the extrapolated cost was desired. This formula is based on data from 1980 to 2010.pYour program should develop a table of costs, based on the user's inputs of the starting and ending years and the formula. The table should produce columns as seen below, The column Year is the year, starting at the point the user says to start at, and going to the ending year, stopping there. The size of the step in the table is also specified by the user. The user inputs are all integers. Your program can assume that.nbsp;NOTE:nbsp;The ending year, stopping there phrase is a bit ambiguous. If you want to use the ending year as the stop value in a range function, that is fine. If you want to add one to the ending year and use that as the stop value, that is also ok.nbsp;In the tables below, nbsp;end year plus one was used.nbsp;Tab characters can be used./p pSample Run:/pBig Blue Hard Drive Storage Cost Enter the starting year: 1992 Enter the ending year: 2015 What step size for the table? 4 Hard Drive Storage Costs Table Start Year = 1992 End Year = 2015 Year Cost Per Gigabyte ($) 1992 2002.627 1996 199.894 2000 19.953 2004 1.992 2008 0.199 2012 0.02 pAnother Run:/pBig Blue Hard Drive Storage Cost Enter the starting year: 1998 Enter the ending year: 2010 What step size for the table? 2 Hard Drive Storage Costs Table Start Year = 1998 End Year = 2010 Year Cost Per Gigabyte ($) 1998
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sun, 28 Sep 2014 20:07:31 +, Duncan Booth wrote: Later on the B+ had 64k of RAM and the B+128 had 128k of RAM and in each case the additional RAM was paged in as necessary but I don't think the RAM in the B was ever expandable. You could get various expansions to page multiple roms, I had a machine at one point with 15 multiple internally and a zif socket on top. I think there was a board that sat across the 4 paged ROM sockets which then had a cable to another board with 16 sockets on it, and one of the 16 sockets came through the case in a ZIF. Aries or Dabs or Watford Electronics I expect. I also remember soldering switches to TEAC drives from RS to make them 40 / 80 track switchable. Duncan, your name looks mighty familiar . Do you know a Judith? -- Denis McMahon, denismfmcma...@gmail.com -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
Steven D'Aprano steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info wrote: The Model B supported more graphics modes, had a six-pin DIN connector for a monitor (both the A and B had UHF output for connecting to a television, but only the B supported a dedicated monitor), had support for an optional floppy disk controller and even an optional hard drive controller. It also had RS-232 and Centronics parallel interfaces, a 20-pin user port for I/O, and even support for a second CPU! The Model A didn't support any of those. I won't disagree with most of those, but the graphics modes were simply a function of the available memory as RAM was shared between programs and graphics. The model A couldn't do the higher resolution graphics modes as they took too much out of the main memory (up to 20k which would have been tricky with 16k total RAM). At the time, the BBC Micro memory was (I think) expandable: the Model B could be upgraded to 128K of memory, double what Bill Gates allegedly said was the most anyone would ever need. (He probably didn't say that.) So what we need is to find out what an upgrade would have cost. The memory expansion in the original BBC Micro was mostly ROM. The total addressable space was 64k, but 16k of that was the Acorn operating system and another 16k was paged ROM: by default you got BBC Basic but you could install up to 4 16k ROMs for languages such as BCPL or Logo or to drive external processor cards. That isn't to say of course that you couldn't expand the RAM: a company I worked for in the 80s that wrote the BCPL and Logo ROMs also manufactured a 1MB RAM card with battery backup. Later on the B+ had 64k of RAM and the B+128 had 128k of RAM and in each case the additional RAM was paged in as necessary but I don't think the RAM in the B was ever expandable. -- Duncan Booth -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Storage Cost Calculation
- Hard drives have been the secondary storage of choice on computers for many years. They have improved in speed, in capacity, and in cost for over 50 years. It's interesting to look at how the prices have dropped, or, conversely, how much storage your money will buy now as compared to many years ago. This improvement is an example of *Moore's Law* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law This site http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte was written by a person (in 2009) who had considered this amazing trend. He collected a lot of data about hard drive capacity and price. The formula he extrapolated by using the data he found is *cost per gigabyte = 10-0.2502(year-1980) + 6.304* where *year* is the year for which the extrapolated cost was desired. This formula is based on data from 1980 to 2010. Your program should develop a table of costs, based on the user's inputs of the starting and ending years and the formula. The table should produce columns as seen below, The column Year is the year, starting at the point the user says to start at, and going to the ending year, stopping there. The size of the step in the table is also specified by the user. The user inputs are all integers. Your program can assume that. *NOTE:* The ending year, stopping there phrase is a bit ambiguous. If you want to use the ending year as the stop value in a range function, that is fine. If you want to add one to the ending year and use that as the stop value, that is also ok. *In the tables below, end year plus one was used.* Tab characters can be used. *Sample Run:* Big Blue Hard Drive Storage Cost Enter the starting year: 1992 Enter the ending year: 2015 What step size for the table? 4 Hard Drive Storage Costs Table Start Year = 1992 End Year = 2015 Year Cost Per Gigabyte ($) 1992 2002.627 1996 199.894 2000 19.953 2004 1.992 2008 0.199 2012 0.02 *Another Run:* Big Blue Hard Drive Storage Cost Enter the starting year: 1998 Enter the ending year: 2010 What step size for the table? 2 Hard Drive Storage Costs Table Start Year = 1998 End Year = 2010 Year Cost Per Gigabyte ($) 1998 63.154 2000 19.953 2002 6.304 2004 1.992 2006 0.629 2008 0.199 2010 0.063 - QUESTION - Could someone help me with a design and a python program to implement that design to solve the above problem? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 4:53 AM, Abohfu venant zinkeng vice...@gmail.com wrote: QUESTION Could someone help me with a design and a python program to implement that design to solve the above problem? We are not going to do your homework for you. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sep 27, 2014 1:06 AM, Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com wrote: We are not going to do your homework for you. Perhaps it was a take home test... What then? :-) Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 9:14 PM, Skip Montanaro skip.montan...@gmail.com wrote: On Sep 27, 2014 1:06 AM, Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com wrote: We are not going to do your homework for you. Perhaps it was a take home test... What then? :-) Then we are not going to do his take home test for you. I feel like I'm using a Hungarian phrasebook here... ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 9:14 PM, Skip Montanaro skip.montan...@gmail.com wrote: On Sep 27, 2014 1:06 AM, Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com wrote: We are not going to do your homework for you. Perhaps it was a take home test... What then? :-) Then we are not going to do his take home test for you. I feel like I'm using a Hungarian phrasebook here... https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list My hovercraft is full is eels. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 9:14 PM, Skip Montanaro skip.montan...@gmail.com wrote: On Sep 27, 2014 1:06 AM, Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com wrote: We are not going to do your homework for you. Perhaps it was a take home test... What then? :-) Then we are not going to do his take home test for you. I feel like I'm using a Hungarian phrasebook here... My hovercraft is full of eels. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Abohfu venant zinkeng vice...@gmail.com wrote: This site was written by a person (in 2009) who had considered this amazing trend. He collected a lot of data about hard drive capacity and price. The formula he extrapolated by using the data he found is cost per gigabyte = 10-0.2502(year-1980) + 6.304 where year is the year for which the extrapolated cost was desired. This formula is based on data from 1980 to 2010. A nice illustration in the perils of extrapolation. Per the formula, hard drives should be $0.006 per gigabyte now. I don't see anything on newegg.com for less than $0.03 per gigabyte; the best deals appear to be at the 2 TB level. And we're only 4 years out of the data range. It also seems odd to quantify technical advancement in a way that is easily affected by fluctuations in the strength of the US dollar. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On 2014-09-27 15:30, Ian Kelly wrote: On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Abohfu venant zinkeng vice...@gmail.com wrote: This site was written by a person (in 2009) who had considered this amazing trend. He collected a lot of data about hard drive capacity and price. The formula he extrapolated by using the data he found is cost per gigabyte = 10-0.2502(year-1980) + 6.304 where year is the year for which the extrapolated cost was desired. This formula is based on data from 1980 to 2010. A nice illustration in the perils of extrapolation. Per the formula, hard drives should be $0.006 per gigabyte now. I don't see anything on newegg.com for less than $0.03 per gigabyte; the best deals appear to be at the 2 TB level. And we're only 4 years out of the data range. It also seems odd to quantify technical advancement in a way that is easily affected by fluctuations in the strength of the US dollar. I once did a calculation of my own about the cost of RAM. In 1981 the BBC Micro was released. There were 2 versions, model A with 16K and model B was 32K. The price difference was £100, so that's £100 for 16K of RAM. Today you can get 16GB of RAM for about the same price. If you'd wanted that much RAM 30 years ago, it would've cost you £100m! -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Fri, 26 Sep 2014 11:53:32 -0700, Abohfu venant zinkeng vice...@gmail.com wrote: QUESTION - Could someone help me with a design and a python program to implement that design to solve the above problem? As a side note, it would be handy to compare HD cost to CD cost. I am still trying to get my own personal copy of the Internet. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 3:01 AM, Seymore4Head Seymore4Head@hotmail.invalid wrote: As a side note, it would be handy to compare HD cost to CD cost. I am still trying to get my own personal copy of the Internet. If you set your sights a bit lower, Google might be able to help. They pretty much have their own copy of the World Wide Web, indexed and cached. I've no idea how many dollars they annually spend on hard drives, but probably it uses SI prefixes most of the world has never heard of... ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 11:12 AM, Chris Angelico ros...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 3:01 AM, Seymore4Head Seymore4Head@hotmail.invalid wrote: As a side note, it would be handy to compare HD cost to CD cost. I am still trying to get my own personal copy of the Internet. If you set your sights a bit lower, Google might be able to help. They pretty much have their own copy of the World Wide Web, indexed and cached. I've no idea how many dollars they annually spend on hard drives, but probably it uses SI prefixes most of the world has never heard of... http://what-if.xkcd.com/63/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 3:21 AM, Ian Kelly ian.g.ke...@gmail.com wrote: If you set your sights a bit lower, Google might be able to help. They pretty much have their own copy of the World Wide Web, indexed and cached. I've no idea how many dollars they annually spend on hard drives, but probably it uses SI prefixes most of the world has never heard of... http://what-if.xkcd.com/63/ Yes, I've seen that. Probably the most readable financial figures that anyone's ever put together. :) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
MRAB wrote: In 1981 the BBC Micro was released. There were 2 versions, model A with 16K and model B was 32K. The price difference was £100, so that's £100 for 16K of RAM. That doesn't follow. The model A might have been £1 (in which case you could get 16K for £1) or it might have been £1. All your calculation shows is that model B was £100 more expensive. There are three more-or-less equally valid statistics you could have used to calculate the price of RAM: the average, minimum, or maximum. With only two data points, it doesn't matter whether you use the mean or median to calculate the average. Of the three, the minimum is probably the most useful. Today you can get 16GB of RAM for about the same price. Funny that you say that. I just googled for price of RAM, and the very first result talks about how much the price of RAM has *increased* recently: Other components show similar increases — Kingston 8GB packs have gone from $66 to $79, and Corsair's 16GB RAM packs are up to $150, from $130. A year ago, 16GB of DDR3-1600 from Corsair was $67, which gives you some idea of just how much prices have already risen. ... And my browser just crashed and I can't be bothered restarting it, so you can do your own googling if you want the source :-) -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Steven D'Aprano steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info wrote: MRAB wrote: In 1981 the BBC Micro was released. There were 2 versions, model A with 16K and model B was 32K. The price difference was £100, so that's £100 for 16K of RAM. That doesn't follow. The model A might have been £1 (in which case you could get 16K for £1) or it might have been £1. All your calculation shows is that model B was £100 more expensive. There are three more-or-less equally valid statistics you could have used to calculate the price of RAM: the average, minimum, or maximum. With only two data points, it doesn't matter whether you use the mean or median to calculate the average. Of the three, the minimum is probably the most useful. The RAM was presumably the only difference between the two models, so as long as Model A cost at least £100 (which seems likely; a bit of quick Googling suggests that it may have been of the order of £400), a £100 difference can plausibly be called the price of the RAM. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
Chris Angelico wrote: The RAM was presumably the only difference between the two models, so as long as Model A cost at least £100 (which seems likely; a bit of quick Googling suggests that it may have been of the order of £400), a £100 difference can plausibly be called the price of the RAM. Hah! I read MRAB as saying the *RAM* came in two models, Model A RAM and Model B RAM. I wondered why they didn't just say 16K versus 32K, but it was the 1980s, who knows why people did anything back then... But no, you can't put the £100 difference down to the price of the RAM even if RAM were the only difference between the two model Micros. There's not enough information to tell how much of that £100 represents the cost of RAM, and how much is pure profit on the part of the vendor, Acorn. In fact, there were considerable differences apart from RAM: The Model B supported more graphics modes, had a six-pin DIN connector for a monitor (both the A and B had UHF output for connecting to a television, but only the B supported a dedicated monitor), had support for an optional floppy disk controller and even an optional hard drive controller. It also had RS-232 and Centronics parallel interfaces, a 20-pin user port for I/O, and even support for a second CPU! The Model A didn't support any of those. http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2011/11/30/bbc_micro_model_b_30th_anniversary/ At the time, the BBC Micro memory was (I think) expandable: the Model B could be upgraded to 128K of memory, double what Bill Gates allegedly said was the most anyone would ever need. (He probably didn't say that.) So what we need is to find out what an upgrade would have cost. http://www.progettoemma.net/mess/system.php?machine=bbca -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 12:47 PM, Steven D'Aprano steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info wrote: Chris Angelico wrote: The RAM was presumably the only difference between the two models, so as long as Model A cost at least £100 (which seems likely; a bit of quick Googling suggests that it may have been of the order of £400), a £100 difference can plausibly be called the price of the RAM. Hah! I read MRAB as saying the *RAM* came in two models, Model A RAM and Model B RAM. I wondered why they didn't just say 16K versus 32K, but it was the 1980s, who knows why people did anything back then... But no, you can't put the £100 difference down to the price of the RAM even if RAM were the only difference between the two model Micros. There's not enough information to tell how much of that £100 represents the cost of RAM, and how much is pure profit on the part of the vendor, Acorn. In fact, there were considerable differences apart from RAM: I don't care about pure profit on the part of the vendor - that's part of the end-user cost of RAM. But if my presumption is incorrect, there's no way to put a price on just the RAM. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
Chris Angelico wrote: On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 12:47 PM, Steven D'Aprano steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info wrote: [...] But no, you can't put the £100 difference down to the price of the RAM even if RAM were the only difference between the two model Micros. There's not enough information to tell how much of that £100 represents the cost of RAM, and how much is pure profit on the part of the vendor, Acorn. In fact, there were considerable differences apart from RAM: I don't care about pure profit on the part of the vendor - that's part of the end-user cost of RAM. No, it's part of the end-user cost of the BBC Micro model B. What we want to know is the cost in 1981 of buying a 16K memory chip, without the rest of the computer. Even that's not necessarily a good indication, since there are all sorts of things which could distort the price. Historically, both IBM and Apple are well known for (ab)using monopoly power to keep the price of spare parts extremely high. If (say) Acorn charged £85 for a 16KB memory chip, while other manufacturers charged £15, we wouldn't want to treat Acorn's prices as the cost of RAM in 1981. We want to compare typical, competitive prices, not RTBO (Rip The Bastards Off) prices. I used to work for a company that made and sold electronic sensor taps. There were four components: a spout, a solenoid, a transformer, and a sensor. If you bought the four components individually, as spare parts, it would cost you about twice as much as buying the entire kit. Some of that reflects the fact that there's about the same amount of overhead (ordering, billing, storage, packing, delivery...) whether it's a $300 kit or a $30 spout, but most of it reflects monopoly power. When selling the kit, we were competing with other brands of electronic and hands-free taps. When selling the parts, we had a monopoly on the parts: other brands of parts wouldn't fit our taps, and our parts wouldn't fit theirs. I don't quite remember the exact figures, but markup on the entire unit was about 30%, and markup on the parts were about 100-200%, I think. And this is partly why, for a long time, Apple spare parts were so much more expensive than non-Apple spares that wouldn't fit in your Macintosh. You had a choice of RAM from three or four manufacturers for your PC, and no choice at all for your Mac. (I don't know if this is still the case now, I haven't used a Mac seriously since System 7.) But if my presumption is incorrect, there's no way to put a price on just the RAM. My point exactly :-) -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Storage Cost Calculation
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 8:47 PM, Steven D'Aprano steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info wrote: http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2011/11/30/bbc_micro_model_b_30th_anniversary/ At the time, the BBC Micro memory was (I think) expandable: the Model B could be upgraded to 128K of memory, double what Bill Gates allegedly said was the most anyone would ever need. (He probably didn't say that.) So what we need is to find out what an upgrade would have cost. Actually it was 640K in the alleged Bill Gates quote, although I do believe that quote has pretty much been debunked. It was allegedly stated in 1981, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of it circulating prior to about 1992. Gates himself denies ever having said it, and maintains that he in fact held the opposite opinion. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
