"The quote from an unknown person is useless because it doesn't tell us what high-energy neutrinos are, why they didn't know about the 28 detections until now, or what AGNs are."
AGNs? OMFG. Are we going to be inundated with reports about Anthropogenic Global Neutrinos now?
Some people mis-heard the centuries-old slang term "boatload" as "buttload", and thought "Hey! It 'sounds like' a more polite version of 'shitload'! That makes sense!" Hence the oft-heard "buttload". But "boatload" and "shitload" came from very different places and times.
It makes me cringe. I really don't intend to be a "grammar Nazi" but it really does grate.
Imagine if we could divine every meaning from what it "sounds like". It leads to some pretty hilarious errors. For example, "impervious" might mean "Get that sado-masochist out of our meeting room!"
"You are picking nits and inventing your own terminology and taxonomy. Extending your logic, parallel buses aren't parallel either, because they are actually bus-wide-word serial! Parallel or serial is determined by the smallest unit of information that is transferred across the transfer medium at the time, and PCIe isn't dividing single data unit transfer across its lanes. IOW, if you are sending single word across multi-lane PCIe, only a single lane is used."
Sorry, but it's not ME who's defining my own terms. You are trying to re-define serial.
Wikipedia says it nicely: the data in packets are striped across the lanes. Which means the bits are being sent in parallel... but that doesn't mean a whole word is being sent all at once.
What I meant to state earlier, but it accidentally got left out of my comment, is that PCIe is a hybrid of serial and parallel technologies. I did say it isn't serial. But I didn't claim it was parallel! It isn't parallel either. It's a combination of both technologies.
Did I code up my interrupt handler on my $2 microcontroller on a $20 dev board? Is it the right polarity? Is the rise time OK with the on-board driver or do I need a buffer IC? The list goes on.
I understand your point but those aren't very good examples. A logic analyzer will tell you if your polarity is correct. Unless I misunderstood you your interrupt handler is also a "square" wave. And if your rise times are questionable at all, you still don't need a scope because the answer is yes.
I suspect the OP doesn't actually do any board design, because if he did he'd be using his scopes and spending big bucks on really good ones.
I suspect you mean me (GP), not OP, because OP said you absolutely must have a scope.
I done lots of boards... but just one-offs, not designing for production. Never needed a scope for any of it.
Don't misunderstand me though: as I wrote earlier, a scope is very valuable and great to have, even if you're doing digital. I was just saying you can do an awful lot of digital work without one. In particular, I was referring to basement projects, nothing like motherboard design.
Did that happen already? Hypertransport looks like a serial bus, and Intel's QPI is much of the same thing. Likewise PCIe replaced PCI, like your printer cable exemple. All those buses are "serial, but you use multiple lanes anyway" though.
Yeah, because of that last part they're really not "serial". They're called serial because each device communicates independently (rather than a common shared bus like PCI), but the data packets are actually sent in parallel. So technically they're not serial at all, except for PCIe x 1, because its "bus" is only 1 bit wide.
"According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) 32,885"
And your point is? I don't dispute that drunk drivers cost lives but what does that have to do with it? Are you arguing that it is better to trade freedom for "security"? Hmmm... seems to me I remember a Franklin quote about that, too.
Here's a hint: if you want to make the world completely safe, and risk-free... entirely suitable for children, in fact... that's what you'll end up with: a world that is suitable only for children and nobody else.
If that's what you want, you go live there. Be my guest. But leave me and my country alone.
"So you see, it's a fairly basic UX misstep that could be avoided with some sort of hint."
Yes, but...
I agree with you. But this is a 100% avoidable mistake. NOT putting those things into interfaces -- and more, insisting that they're not needed or even wanted -- indicates a level of ignorant arrogance on the part of many young developers that has often astounded me.
An icon with the GPS bubble, with "GPS" underneath it.
Sure. I agree. That is another aspect of this "new" trend, to distance themselves from "skeuomorphics", which is part of that "fad" I mentioned before. And a self-destructing fad, too. To repeat what I wrote above: they didn't learn their history, so they are doomed to repeat it via lot of bad decisions like these.
The "modern" (nonsensical) "theory" is that icons do not need to be "skeuomorphic" (i.e., resemble a real-world object). I know this because I am a developer and a lot of young developers I hear from have swallowed this kool-aid. They think that an icon should divorce itself from any real-world similarity, and just be an abstract symbol.
Now, this is a FINE idea, if you are talking about symbols that have become international standards. Things like the symbol on power buttons (the circle with the little line at the top), or the "pause" function (parallel vertical bars).
But how did these symbols get to be international standards? Because they were agreed upon by international committees and they appeared everywhere on actual, physical buttons, for decades.
But these other icons they're putting out have no immediate association for people. There is no standard; people don't know what they mean. Which makes for a terrible interface. It can take a user whole minutes to learn what an icon means, when an "old style, skeuomorphic" icon (especially with a text label), which these young developers so thoroughly revile and rail against, would have been picked up by the eye and brain in 10 milliseconds.
Yes, they're throwing out decades of hard lessons learned by thousands (if not millions) of human-computer UI developers, and they somehow think that' good. I can only guess it's because they don't know any better.
"Words have meanings. But meaning is established by usage, not "history". Read a book or three."
Of course words change. But they don't change instantly via whim or fad. (Though they are often created that way.)
My honest estimate is that there is about a 98% probability that I have read far more books than you. Further, "connotation" is a large part of "meaning", and understanding connotation comes through understanding the history.
"Irregardless of this supposed mistranslation, isn't 'raising the question' both more sensible-sounding (i.e., who the heck "begs" to ask a question?) and a convenient means of avoiding the completely unnecessary collision with the name of the fallacy?"
First, "irregardless" does not mean the same as "regardless". What you actually wrote was "in regard to". If, that is, we go by the accepted meaning of the prefix "ir-".
Second, while it might be more sensible-sounding, this is exactly the problem I was getting at: people assuming meanings because of how something "sounds", without regard to the actual history or historical meaning of the word.
Having stated that, though, GP is still wrong, because while "beg the question" was a mistranslation of "petitio principii", nevertheless what "petitio principii" actually meant, regardless of its literal translation, was the same as the meaning of "beg the question": to assume the conclusion within the question.
If you use a word that had one definition 200 years ago and an opposite meaning today (and there are some of those) is it reasonable to expect people to interpret it as you want?
It is reasonable to expect that the connotation of the word is still similar to its original meaning. It is also reasonable to expect that people who don't understand the connotations of words will use them inappropriately, regardless of what a dictionary says.
Yes, words change. But dictionaries also report common usage, not authoritative meanings.
I am sure you were hoping for "No it cant because it has some restriction" but the answer is "yes it can" so now the ball is in your court. It is all free and open but guaranteed nothing will come of it, it is *always* like this with Linux nerds.
I would not be so "sure" if I were you. I wasn't "hoping" for anything of the sort. I made a simple, honest statement of fact.
Why do you assume some kind of secret psychological motivation? Why do you discount the possibility of someone having an honest opinion, free of ulterior motives, that is different from yours? That seems awfully arrogant.
"And this is an "insightful" comment? Oh my! Confirms my suspicion that Slashdot is a gathering of social misfits typing from their parents basements nurturing each other by modding up each other's inane comments."
Or, probably more likely, it is an indication that you're the one who is out of touch.
"Of course, fiber from chip to chip may be the next thing. This isn't new tech (the PPC 603 had this), but it might be what is needed to allow for CPUs to communicate closely coupled, but have signal path lengths be not as big an engineering issue. Similar with the CPU and RAM."
Fiber from chip to chip is probably a dead end, unless you're just primarily taking advantage of the speed of serial over parallel buses.
The problem is that you have to convert the light back to electricity anyway. So while fiber is speedier than wires, the delays (and expense) introduced at both ends limits its utility. Unless you go to actual light-based (rather than electrical) processing on the chips, any advantage to be gained there is strictly limited.
Probably more practical would be to migrate from massively parallel to faster serial communication. Like the difference between old parallel printer cables to USB. Granted, these inter-chip lineswould have to be carefully designed and shielded (high freq.), but so do light fibers.
"I do hope you get taken out by a drunk, drugged unlicensed driver whilst avoiding one of these."
I hope he runs over you first. Your belief in regard to what constitutes "freedom" is a hell of a lot more dangerous than some drunk driver.
--
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." -- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785.
"You know, like this relentless drive to make things flat, single shaded and without borders / lines or dividers making information / data easier to identify. It's all mashed together."
This "flat-ification" of the UI did have a bit of a rationale behind it, but they turned it into a fad and carried it too far.
3D elements, shading, colors, dividers between elements, etc... all are part good UI design that was developed over a period of decades. It is ultimately based on psychology and neurophysiology, and what makes up a good human-computer interface.
But there are a lot of "fresh young faces" in the industry today, that never bothered to learn this stuff, and so because they don't know their history, they will be doomed to repeat it.
Originally, making the UI "flatter" was supposed to save CPU and GPU resources. But today's CPUs and GPUs are more than capable of handling it.
And Google is hardly the only offender. Apple "dumbed down" some of their OS X interface elements as part of their "bringing OS X and iOS together" strategy... like rather stupidly taking the color out of the icons in the Finder sidebar. But it really doesn't make sense to make one UI worse in order to match the other... the idea is supposed to be to improve the other until it is as good as the first.
"Yeah, well, if you want to live in 18-oh-negative, go ahead."
Ignoring history can be very counterproductive and even destructive.
Words have meanings. It pays to know what those meanings are. If you just want to make meanings up whenever and however you want, then the word "meaning" itself becomes meaningless. For example, any contract I might have with you could mean anything I wanted it to. I could decide that the "dollars" I was supposed to pay you actually meant "grains of rice".
"What would you call a carefully crafted narrow specific exception to a fee or tax or regulation or law, if not a loophole?"
It may be used differently now, but originally -- even before it meant "a hole to shoot arrows through" -- it was a hole in a wall people used for spying. It was a thing that nobody knew about or noticed, and wasn't supposed to be there. This then came to mean an unintentional hole or flaw in the law that lawmakers hadn't noticed.
So in the original legal sense of the word, things that are intentionally put in a law are not "loopholes".
"I agree... Another loop hole in the laws and someone (big company) is abusing it..."
What in the world makes you think this is a "loophole"?
Loopholes are unintentional gaps in the law. The probability that this was not entirely intentional is pretty close to zero. The DMCA was crafted by lobbyists for the "big content" companies.
Slashdot Mirror
"Is it ia huge problem though?"
If tools like Mathematica are dependent on the floating-point precision of a given processor, They're Doing It Wrong.
"The quote from an unknown person is useless because it doesn't tell us what high-energy neutrinos are, why they didn't know about the 28 detections until now, or what AGNs are."
AGNs? OMFG. Are we going to be inundated with reports about Anthropogenic Global Neutrinos now?
It's a pet peeve of mine.
:o)
Some people mis-heard the centuries-old slang term "boatload" as "buttload", and thought "Hey! It 'sounds like' a more polite version of 'shitload'! That makes sense!" Hence the oft-heard "buttload". But "boatload" and "shitload" came from very different places and times.
It makes me cringe. I really don't intend to be a "grammar Nazi" but it really does grate.
Imagine if we could divine every meaning from what it "sounds like". It leads to some pretty hilarious errors. For example, "impervious" might mean "Get that sado-masochist out of our meeting room!"
"You are picking nits and inventing your own terminology and taxonomy. Extending your logic, parallel buses aren't parallel either, because they are actually bus-wide-word serial! Parallel or serial is determined by the smallest unit of information that is transferred across the transfer medium at the time, and PCIe isn't dividing single data unit transfer across its lanes. IOW, if you are sending single word across multi-lane PCIe, only a single lane is used."
Sorry, but it's not ME who's defining my own terms. You are trying to re-define serial.
Wikipedia says it nicely: the data in packets are striped across the lanes. Which means the bits are being sent in parallel... but that doesn't mean a whole word is being sent all at once.
What I meant to state earlier, but it accidentally got left out of my comment, is that PCIe is a hybrid of serial and parallel technologies. I did say it isn't serial. But I didn't claim it was parallel! It isn't parallel either. It's a combination of both technologies.
Did I code up my interrupt handler on my $2 microcontroller on a $20 dev board? Is it the right polarity? Is the rise time OK with the on-board driver or do I need a buffer IC? The list goes on.
I understand your point but those aren't very good examples. A logic analyzer will tell you if your polarity is correct. Unless I misunderstood you your interrupt handler is also a "square" wave. And if your rise times are questionable at all, you still don't need a scope because the answer is yes.
I suspect the OP doesn't actually do any board design, because if he did he'd be using his scopes and spending big bucks on really good ones.
I suspect you mean me (GP), not OP, because OP said you absolutely must have a scope.
I done lots of boards... but just one-offs, not designing for production. Never needed a scope for any of it.
Don't misunderstand me though: as I wrote earlier, a scope is very valuable and great to have, even if you're doing digital. I was just saying you can do an awful lot of digital work without one. In particular, I was referring to basement projects, nothing like motherboard design.
Did that happen already? Hypertransport looks like a serial bus, and Intel's QPI is much of the same thing. Likewise PCIe replaced PCI, like your printer cable exemple. All those buses are "serial, but you use multiple lanes anyway" though.
Yeah, because of that last part they're really not "serial". They're called serial because each device communicates independently (rather than a common shared bus like PCI), but the data packets are actually sent in parallel. So technically they're not serial at all, except for PCIe x 1, because its "bus" is only 1 bit wide.
If you do not need a scope, then you do not do any real electronics.
I would say that's just a bit over-broad. For most digital work these days, you really just need a logic analyzer.
Having said that, if you are doing just about anything but "pure" digital work, do do pretty much need a scope.
"According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) 32,885"
And your point is? I don't dispute that drunk drivers cost lives but what does that have to do with it? Are you arguing that it is better to trade freedom for "security"? Hmmm... seems to me I remember a Franklin quote about that, too.
Here's a hint: if you want to make the world completely safe, and risk-free... entirely suitable for children, in fact... that's what you'll end up with: a world that is suitable only for children and nobody else.
If that's what you want, you go live there. Be my guest. But leave me and my country alone.
"So you see, it's a fairly basic UX misstep that could be avoided with some sort of hint."
Yes, but...
I agree with you. But this is a 100% avoidable mistake. NOT putting those things into interfaces -- and more, insisting that they're not needed or even wanted -- indicates a level of ignorant arrogance on the part of many young developers that has often astounded me.
An icon with the GPS bubble, with "GPS" underneath it.
Sure. I agree. That is another aspect of this "new" trend, to distance themselves from "skeuomorphics", which is part of that "fad" I mentioned before. And a self-destructing fad, too. To repeat what I wrote above: they didn't learn their history, so they are doomed to repeat it via lot of bad decisions like these.
The "modern" (nonsensical) "theory" is that icons do not need to be "skeuomorphic" (i.e., resemble a real-world object). I know this because I am a developer and a lot of young developers I hear from have swallowed this kool-aid. They think that an icon should divorce itself from any real-world similarity, and just be an abstract symbol.
Now, this is a FINE idea, if you are talking about symbols that have become international standards. Things like the symbol on power buttons (the circle with the little line at the top), or the "pause" function (parallel vertical bars).
But how did these symbols get to be international standards? Because they were agreed upon by international committees and they appeared everywhere on actual, physical buttons, for decades.
But these other icons they're putting out have no immediate association for people. There is no standard; people don't know what they mean. Which makes for a terrible interface. It can take a user whole minutes to learn what an icon means, when an "old style, skeuomorphic" icon (especially with a text label), which these young developers so thoroughly revile and rail against, would have been picked up by the eye and brain in 10 milliseconds.
Yes, they're throwing out decades of hard lessons learned by thousands (if not millions) of human-computer UI developers, and they somehow think that' good. I can only guess it's because they don't know any better.
In other words, it's Dunning-Kruger, made fad.
"Words have meanings. But meaning is established by usage, not "history". Read a book or three."
Of course words change. But they don't change instantly via whim or fad. (Though they are often created that way.)
My honest estimate is that there is about a 98% probability that I have read far more books than you. Further, "connotation" is a large part of "meaning", and understanding connotation comes through understanding the history.
"Irregardless of this supposed mistranslation, isn't 'raising the question' both more sensible-sounding (i.e., who the heck "begs" to ask a question?) and a convenient means of avoiding the completely unnecessary collision with the name of the fallacy?"
First, "irregardless" does not mean the same as "regardless". What you actually wrote was "in regard to". If, that is, we go by the accepted meaning of the prefix "ir-".
Second, while it might be more sensible-sounding, this is exactly the problem I was getting at: people assuming meanings because of how something "sounds", without regard to the actual history or historical meaning of the word.
Having stated that, though, GP is still wrong, because while "beg the question" was a mistranslation of "petitio principii", nevertheless what "petitio principii" actually meant, regardless of its literal translation, was the same as the meaning of "beg the question": to assume the conclusion within the question.
If you use a word that had one definition 200 years ago and an opposite meaning today (and there are some of those) is it reasonable to expect people to interpret it as you want?
It is reasonable to expect that the connotation of the word is still similar to its original meaning. It is also reasonable to expect that people who don't understand the connotations of words will use them inappropriately, regardless of what a dictionary says.
Yes, words change. But dictionaries also report common usage, not authoritative meanings.
I am sure you were hoping for "No it cant because it has some restriction" but the answer is "yes it can" so now the ball is in your court. It is all free and open but guaranteed nothing will come of it, it is *always* like this with Linux nerds.
I would not be so "sure" if I were you. I wasn't "hoping" for anything of the sort. I made a simple, honest statement of fact.
Why do you assume some kind of secret psychological motivation? Why do you discount the possibility of someone having an honest opinion, free of ulterior motives, that is different from yours? That seems awfully arrogant.
"And this is an "insightful" comment? Oh my! Confirms my suspicion that Slashdot is a gathering of social misfits typing from their parents basements nurturing each other by modding up each other's inane comments."
Or, probably more likely, it is an indication that you're the one who is out of touch.
Android is built on Linux. If it can't run Linux, it can't run Android.
"Of course, fiber from chip to chip may be the next thing. This isn't new tech (the PPC 603 had this), but it might be what is needed to allow for CPUs to communicate closely coupled, but have signal path lengths be not as big an engineering issue. Similar with the CPU and RAM."
Fiber from chip to chip is probably a dead end, unless you're just primarily taking advantage of the speed of serial over parallel buses.
The problem is that you have to convert the light back to electricity anyway. So while fiber is speedier than wires, the delays (and expense) introduced at both ends limits its utility. Unless you go to actual light-based (rather than electrical) processing on the chips, any advantage to be gained there is strictly limited.
Probably more practical would be to migrate from massively parallel to faster serial communication. Like the difference between old parallel printer cables to USB. Granted, these inter-chip lineswould have to be carefully designed and shielded (high freq.), but so do light fibers.
"I do hope you get taken out by a drunk, drugged unlicensed driver whilst avoiding one of these."
I hope he runs over you first. Your belief in regard to what constitutes "freedom" is a hell of a lot more dangerous than some drunk driver.
--
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." -- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785.
When you use it enough to learn what the icons mean, it is faster and easier to use them, than to go through a tree of menu items.
I know many casual users will not appreciate that, but for the people who do it all the time, it's just plain good UI design.
"You know, like this relentless drive to make things flat, single shaded and without borders / lines or dividers making information / data easier to identify. It's all mashed together."
This "flat-ification" of the UI did have a bit of a rationale behind it, but they turned it into a fad and carried it too far.
3D elements, shading, colors, dividers between elements, etc... all are part good UI design that was developed over a period of decades. It is ultimately based on psychology and neurophysiology, and what makes up a good human-computer interface.
But there are a lot of "fresh young faces" in the industry today, that never bothered to learn this stuff, and so because they don't know their history, they will be doomed to repeat it.
Originally, making the UI "flatter" was supposed to save CPU and GPU resources. But today's CPUs and GPUs are more than capable of handling it.
And Google is hardly the only offender. Apple "dumbed down" some of their OS X interface elements as part of their "bringing OS X and iOS together" strategy... like rather stupidly taking the color out of the icons in the Finder sidebar. But it really doesn't make sense to make one UI worse in order to match the other... the idea is supposed to be to improve the other until it is as good as the first.
"Yeah, well, if you want to live in 18-oh-negative, go ahead."
Ignoring history can be very counterproductive and even destructive.
Words have meanings. It pays to know what those meanings are. If you just want to make meanings up whenever and however you want, then the word "meaning" itself becomes meaningless. For example, any contract I might have with you could mean anything I wanted it to. I could decide that the "dollars" I was supposed to pay you actually meant "grains of rice".
"What would you call a carefully crafted narrow specific exception to a fee or tax or regulation or law, if not a loophole?"
It may be used differently now, but originally -- even before it meant "a hole to shoot arrows through" -- it was a hole in a wall people used for spying. It was a thing that nobody knew about or noticed, and wasn't supposed to be there. This then came to mean an unintentional hole or flaw in the law that lawmakers hadn't noticed.
So in the original legal sense of the word, things that are intentionally put in a law are not "loopholes".
"The government already regulates it under existing financial regulations.
What makes you think its somehow exempt from laws that effect everything else?"
I did not claim it was exempt. In fact, I don't see one thing here that has anything at all to do with my comment.
"I agree... Another loop hole in the laws and someone (big company) is abusing it..."
What in the world makes you think this is a "loophole"?
Loopholes are unintentional gaps in the law. The probability that this was not entirely intentional is pretty close to zero. The DMCA was crafted by lobbyists for the "big content" companies.