As much as I'm an "old fart" kind of person, I really don't "get" the click keyboards anyway. I don't like the noise and it really doesn't feel that good anyway. The clicky fans often talk about how membrane keyboards are all bad, but the thing is, there are varying degrees and qualities of membranes.
Quite true. Some membrane keyboards are horrible, while others I prefer to discrete keyboards. I've also wondered about the clicky cult. I thought computers were supposed to make our work easier, so why do I feel I'm pounding on an Underwood with some keyboards? Perhaps it's just a stupid macho thing for some people.
surely compiler designers (being an largely non-stupid bunch) are going to start aiming for parallel execution as standard?
Scientific programmers have enjoyed these non-stupid compilers for a long time, my personal data points being from 2001 with Fortran 90. The key lesson IMHO is to use a higher level language and trust the compiler, instead of trying to optimize it yourself in a portable assembler like C.
The equivalents of drive letters in Linux are partition device names, for example/dev/hda1. There's this idea of being user friendly so that users don't have to worry about individual drives. The admin will have set things up properly in the single unix filesystem tree, so that users can access descriptive directories like/home/wicko.
So the Windows way is a confusing mixture of low-level and high-level concepts. One aspect of this confusion is that C: is both the partition and the filesystem. It's not obvious, for example, how to deal with the raw partition. In unix the difference is clear.
Having run both AdvFS and ZFS, I _vastly_ prefer the layered approach of ext3/LVM/md/etc.
As a unix user, I generally prefer a layered approach. How did something like ZFS manage to come from unix people for unix, rather than from
our friends in Redmond?
Here's another one for rTorrent. In my experience, it's pretty much the only choice if you want to run multiple torrents with detailed control in one text terminal (for example a window in screen).
It's probably true that Firewire does much more in hardware than USB. Heck, you don't even need a computer to connect two FW devices together. It's a network of equal peers, whereas USB always has a smart host and a dumb device. This is why FW is not suitable for the simplest peripherals like mice and keyboards.
There's also a simple fact you can check from the connector: USB only has one lane (differential pair of wires) for bit traffic, whereas Firewire has one for each direction. (The same issue makes SATA better than PATA.) There's quite a bit of an overhead for negotiating the change of direction, which happens pretty often. And simply by looking at the numbers, 400 Mbps in both directions is faster in total than 480 Mbps in one direction at a time.
Seconded. Most hard drives "cheat" with a RAM buffer, so why not flash drives?
I find the idea of using faster flash as a buffer strange, though. I understand that a huge RAM buffer doesn't make sense in a kind of device that's often improperly unmounted. But a small, specialized area of flash would wear out much faster than the rest of the drive.
I also like my Stokke very much, though it's just a lowly Variable Balans. Stokke has this general philosphy that humans are not built to stay in one posture for a long time, and their chairs encourage you to move around.
Also, considering Microsoft has so many employees, I have no doubt, that there have been people working there that comitted far worse than a crime of passion. Doesn't mean that the product is bad... Well, okay it is, but not because of some employee going nuts.
No, the products are bad because of a single executive going nuts, the Chair Executive Officer.
Might there be a chance to finally get open source drivers from nvidia now they team up with VIA?
You're kidding, right?
So far VIA has been terrible with Linux. I've had much better experiences with Nvidia, even with their closed-source drivers. This talk about VIA being open in comparison to Intel is funny, considering Intel has provided opensource Linux drivers for their hardware for years.
I really wish I could find a keyboard that ditched the keypad (or moved it to the left) but kept the standard arrangement for all the other keys.
The IBM Space Saver is your friend.
As much as I'm an "old fart" kind of person, I really don't "get" the click keyboards anyway. I don't like the noise and it really doesn't feel that good anyway. The clicky fans often talk about how membrane keyboards are all bad, but the thing is, there are varying degrees and qualities of membranes.
Quite true. Some membrane keyboards are horrible, while others I prefer to discrete keyboards. I've also wondered about the clicky cult. I thought computers were supposed to make our work easier, so why do I feel I'm pounding on an Underwood with some keyboards? Perhaps it's just a stupid macho thing for some people.
surely compiler designers (being an largely non-stupid bunch) are going to start aiming for parallel execution as standard?
Scientific programmers have enjoyed these non-stupid compilers for a long time, my personal data points being from 2001 with Fortran 90. The key lesson IMHO is to use a higher level language and trust the compiler, instead of trying to optimize it yourself in a portable assembler like C.
Your wife makes my modus ponens grow.
I live in the Southern hemisphere, so actually the joke is going under my head, you insensitive clod!
On Soviet-Korean Mars, only old people grow asparagus.
You'll have to talk to Hoover to register domains under it, though.
Dam!
See also: DOS + Windows 3.1 -> Vista.
The equivalents of drive letters in Linux are partition device names, for example /dev/hda1. There's this idea of being user friendly so that users don't have to worry about individual drives. The admin will have set things up properly in the single unix filesystem tree, so that users can access descriptive directories like /home/wicko.
So the Windows way is a confusing mixture of low-level and high-level concepts. One aspect of this confusion is that C: is both the partition and the filesystem. It's not obvious, for example, how to deal with the raw partition. In unix the difference is clear.
You could always run Climateprediction.net.
As a unix user, I generally prefer a layered approach. How did something like ZFS manage to come from unix people for unix, rather than from our friends in Redmond?
AFAIK, "doctor" is a shorter and corrupted version of "didaktor" which literally means "teacher".
Here's another one for rTorrent. In my experience, it's pretty much the only choice if you want to run multiple torrents with detailed control in one text terminal (for example a window in screen).
DOSemu, QEMU, MAME, etc. are not emulators. They just provide compatibility layers. Also, Lame Ain't MP3 Encoder.
It's probably true that Firewire does much more in hardware than USB. Heck, you don't even need a computer to connect two FW devices together. It's a network of equal peers, whereas USB always has a smart host and a dumb device. This is why FW is not suitable for the simplest peripherals like mice and keyboards.
There's also a simple fact you can check from the connector: USB only has one lane (differential pair of wires) for bit traffic, whereas Firewire has one for each direction. (The same issue makes SATA better than PATA.) There's quite a bit of an overhead for negotiating the change of direction, which happens pretty often. And simply by looking at the numbers, 400 Mbps in both directions is faster in total than 480 Mbps in one direction at a time.
So their games have been upgraded to run on the PS3?
For really intelligent life, you'd need trimethylxanthine.
I was just discussing this the other day, and my friend found this: http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/flash/flashendurance.asp
Seconded. Most hard drives "cheat" with a RAM buffer, so why not flash drives?
I find the idea of using faster flash as a buffer strange, though. I understand that a huge RAM buffer doesn't make sense in a kind of device that's often improperly unmounted. But a small, specialized area of flash would wear out much faster than the rest of the drive.
I also like my Stokke very much, though it's just a lowly Variable Balans. Stokke has this general philosphy that humans are not built to stay in one posture for a long time, and their chairs encourage you to move around.
IIRC, the BIOS maker Phoenix had an embedded browser, so Mozilla's "Phoenix Browser" was considered misleading.
Given that kind of a premise, how stupid was it to rename it Firebird, given the bazillion products with that name already?
No, the products are bad because of a single executive going nuts, the Chair Executive Officer.
You're kidding, right?
So far VIA has been terrible with Linux. I've had much better experiences with Nvidia, even with their closed-source drivers. This talk about VIA being open in comparison to Intel is funny, considering Intel has provided opensource Linux drivers for their hardware for years.
No. I'm a chemist, and it doesn't help much to add more electrons to doubt.
My ears sense a disturbance from all that clickety-clicking...