Synergy worked great without perceptible lag for normal desktop stuff in the late 90s (including across all the steam powered pcs in the school computer room).
I chatted to a Facebook engineer at one of the early HN London events back in 2013, got talked into sending through a CV and I've been with ... Meta ever since.
Very grateful to this community as it had genuinely never occurred to me to apply to work for big tech. Which is obviously dumb, I've been obsessed with the industry since the early 90s, a good reminder that goals and sense of possibilities can be surprisingly blinkered by our environment/culture.
This is the key observation - hitting breakpoints in efficiency that let us remove active cooling, silicon area or heatsinks reduce weight, cost & complexity.
Latency can be a key consideration. Async style code can make it a lot easier to fire off a set of requests in parallel and wait for all the responses to come back (e.g. with https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/asynchronous-operations/concurren...), rather than the serial request waterfall a basic thread-per-request model will push you towards.
I hope being able to assemble the turbine & the "foundations" together in a factory brings better economies of scale than factory turbine with foundations built in situ.
Being able to move the bulk of building an offshore turbine into a factory could lead to amazing economies of scale. It'll be an incredible assembly line to pull together 10,000 ton of materials but if we need to build hundreds of thousands it might well be worth doing. There should be a gentle stream of these things bobbing out into the sea, ready to be taken by tug to their resting place.
Read tracking is a feature of many/most popular chat clients (certainly hangouts, messenger & whatsapp), and anecdotally it seems to be valuable. Of course, everyone would love to see the read status of other people yet be able to control their own read state (there are endless browser extensions promising this for chat apps, a tremendous self compromise vector). Will it ever be possible to offer this in a federated system or will it be limited to the walled gardens?