Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error.
No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
googles
Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:
Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909
No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.
For now... except managers don't want to actually think, yet do want to be in control of even the tiniest aspects of every single fucking thing (see e.g. Boeing planes literally falling out of the sky, against the wishes of the engineers bc the managers figured that this way of skipping maintenance and then covering that truth from federal safety commissioners was "better"... for the sake of their profits ofc), so how soon until their unthinking need to "feel like" they are in control leads them to using computers to control the people, without even those humans who hold the admin rights ever making any conscious decisions?
I suspect that a thinking computer may be correct far more often than an unthinking human.:-D
I cannot stomach much of it, but it is fun to go back and watch older media related to technology - e.g. the six million dollar man has like spinning tape disks, when computers were entire-room affairs.
So he was right, using the definition at that time, though there was also so much potential for more.
Also it is funny to hear them say that technology would literally make the six million dollar man "better", not just "well again" or "he will have side effects but his capabilities will be far above the norm" or some such. One glance at Google these days, or a Boeing plane, does not inspire me to think of the word "better" than what came before even from those exact companies. Technology moves forward, but I am not so sure that the new is always "better" than the old. It was an interesting bias that they had though, during the cold war and after the moon landing.
And I believe tape storage hadn't even been invented when Watson said that. It may have even been pre-magnetic tape entirely because I believe he said it before a computer was actually invented (unless you count Babbage's difference engine). It was a prediction of what the world would need if computers existed if I remember correctly.
And it makes total sense, bc the idea of a "PC" hadn't been tried yet, bc the technology simply wasn't yet up to the task. And yeah I think I remember the same thing about that quote, though who knows:-P.
Anyway, it was hard for computers to be wrong about simple arithmetic operations, but they've come a long way since then, and AIs are now wrong more often than not.
Well, I imagine the write-once, re-write-never part also may limit its applicability too:-). Then again, for a purpose where the data doesn't need to be constantly changing, like storing a TV show or movie, possibly even music if someone wants to listen to albums rather than randomized songs, it could offer a lot of practical utility to many people.
Oh you can totally erase and reuse the tapes. Depending on the tape software you can also rewrite parts or replace older files with incremental updates. It just really takes a while of rewinding. And the noise it makes is kinda retro...
The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base's 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.
Plus X-37B has flown round the earth for two and a half years on its longest flight. I know it's not really what he was thinking about as it's launched in space from a rocket in orbit but then that just adds even more to the notion tech advancement can be almost impossible to predict.
He also isn't talking about airplanes, but airships. Sure plenty of planes make the journey every day, but zero airships do because they really are quite useless for it. Obviously he was wrong becauae a few airships did end up making Atlantic crossings, but they were slow, cramped, and dangerous compsred to ocean liners.
At a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC's 640KB usable RAM limit: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
I don't think that you can do the current XL models with 8GB, even for low-resolution images. Maybe with --lowvram or something.
I've got a 24GB RX 7900 XT and would render higher resolution images if I had the VRAM -- yeah, you can sometimes sort of get a similar effect by upscaling in tiles, but it's not really a replacement. And I am confident that even if they put a consumer card out with 128GB, someone will figure out some new clever extension that does something fascinating and useful...as long as one can devote a little more memory to it...