Month: March 2018

I’m sure you’ve seen people walking around wearing those signature white headphones that are made by a company I am known to detest. There is a new wireless flavor of those headphones, and everyone who has a pair LOVES to rant about how magical they are. Since they are made by Apple, I knew there had to be other products out there for a comparable price, and luckily, that happened to be Samsung.

Let me start off by saying that I am a bit of an audiophile. And when I say “a bit,” I mean that I refuse to own an audio device (including cell phone) that does not have built-in equalizer control, and have trashed an expensive pair of Bang & Olufsen headphones because of their mediocre sound clarity and bass reproduction.

Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, wrote a paper in 1965 that reviewed at the past 7 years of semiconductors. He predicted that every 18 to 24 months, the amount of components you could fit in the same space would double. This exponential growth, known as Moore’s Law, has continued roughly on track since then. With this doubling comes decreases in size, increases in power, and decreases in the cost of electronics. It’s what put computers in every office, and smart phones in every pocket. In 1977, purchasing a Cray-1 supercomputer would cost you $8,860,000 ($36,239,300 in 2018 dollars). The primary use of this massive 5.5 ton beast was to compute what was known as “Floating Point Operations,” which is a specific type of calculation that require either very large or very small numbers to be calculated quickly. The Cray 1 could do roughly 160 million of these per second.