You're using CS logic. It's a well accepted (and lamented) fact of UI design that people don't understand (in general) hierarchies. Now, menus are inherently hierarchical, but OSs go to great lengths to make them as flat as possible. Using an obviously tree-inspired terminology is a sure way to make yourself not understood.
Of course, if you put a Mac and an XP machine in the same situation, the XP machine will still end up getting used. Heck, to build on your analogy, consider a stick-shift Ferrari and an automatic Mercedes in the same garage. The typical person will go for what's he's familiar with, not necessarily what's better.
Interesting. When I got my 2405FPW, I just turned on the machine and it worked. My situation was a bit hair too, because it's hooked up to a laptop that already has a display, but Ubuntu picked it up just fine.
You're forgetting that to most people, "shutdown" is a command to do an action, not a command to perform a procedure. You could argue that yes, technically shutdown is a procedure and not a single action, but people don't think that way. When speaking of single actions, "start" does technically work (you can "start to run", "start to kick", "start to jump"), but nobody thinks that way unless the "starting" is important in and of itself (ie: "started to kick, but pulled back"). When they're thinking of a specific action, they're thinking of that verb.
English is not your first language, huh? The OP said:
"the higher end card?"
The higher end card, not a higher end card. 'The' refers to things that already exist. If the poster meant the dealer could make up a GS or GR or ST, then he would have said "a higher end card".
Um, you didn't even understand the damn thing you quoted. It says right in the part you bolded: "resell them as the higher end card?"
There is no 16 pipeline version of the GeForce 6800. The 16 pipeline cards, the 6800 GT and the 6800 Ultra, are different cards that use not just a 16-pipeline chip, but also higher-end RAM. So the "higher end card" he referred to *is* the 6800 GT. There is nothing inbetween!
I understand that, but if you actually read the thread, the "NVIDIA already does that" comment was directed at somebody asking "how long until dealers buy up 6800's, unlock the pipelines, and sell them as 6800GT's?" The thread was talking about complete cards, not individual chips. My point was that NVIDIA doesn't do that with complete cards --- the GT cards use different RAM as well.
I just realize that the math terms in that post make it seem like the above is an attempt to make a formally logical statement. They are not. They present statistical conclusions, not rigorous proofs.
Technically, "most parents" directly referred to the parents brought up by the original poster, which is why that part of the OP's statement was quoted right above the one you pointed out. Since only human parents are capable of browbeating environmentalism into their children, it must be surmised that in my statement *all parents* are human.
Correcting flawed logic is fine and good, but taking quotes out of context to do it is not. If that quote had been posted by itself, that would have been one thing. But you were reading a work of prose, which is written assuming the reader uses context to resolve ambiguities. I'm as anal about logic as the next guy, but you've got to play by the rules of the medium under consideration.
"Genius" is a subset of "people" that is selective based on the critereon "is smart". Thus, conjectures regarding intelligence do not apply equally to people and geniuses. On the other hand, the set of parents is a subset of people that is selective based on the critereon "has children", which has little to do with intelligence, so with regards to intelligence, the subset "parents" is a random subset of "people". Therefore conjectures about intelligence are applicable to both sets.
Let me give you an example. "Most prime numbers are integers, and most integers are factorable, therefore most prime numbers are factorable". That is invalid, because the set of "prime numbers" is selective based on factorability. However, the statement "Most Fibinocci numbers are integers, and most integers are factorable, therefore most Fibinoccia numbers are factorable" is valid.
Yep. It's far better to get $200 ($150 retail) every year than to get $400 cards every couple of years. I recently build a machine, and I got a 6600GT instead of a 6800GT, even though my budget for the computer could have easily handled it. Why? Because next year, when the midrange G70-based cards come out, I can easily conscience spending another $150 to replace this $130 card, while if I had bought a $350 card, the decision would not have been so easy.
No, because in the case with the Turbo button, there was nothing wrong with the chips. This is more like a retailer sending clothes with slight defects to an outlet store where its sold at a cheaper price.
Its a market issue. Basically, the defect rate of the 300m transistor chips ensures that a significant number will have at least some non-operational pipelines. Instead of throwing away those cores (and increasing prices to compensate), they clock them lower, pair them with cheaper RAM, and sell them as cheaper cards. Now, if the manufacturing process gets better, they might not have enough defective cards to sell as cheaper parts. They can't just take all the perfect chips and sell them as expensive cards, because then there would be a shortage of the low-end product which would drive up their price. So they take the perfect chips and put them in budget cards.
Um, why shouldn't it? Nobody releases parts tweeked to the maximum they can, because if they did, there is a very high possibility the parts would fail. Would you prefer NVIDIA just release the parts with all pipelines unlocked, and when you bought one there would be a 50/50 chance some of them wouldn't work?
How are they "screwing you over"? They're selling you the product that you paid for. Futhermore, the price you paid for it is quite a bit less because the "perfect" parts (the ones able to run with all 16 pipelines at higher clockspeeds), are sold at a premium, allowing other parts to be sold more cheaply.
No, NVIDIA does not do that. The GeForce 6800GT is a different card than the 6800, namely in that it uses more advanced (and more expensive) GDDR-3 memory while the regular 6800 does not.
An accident at launch could have released highly toxic materal from the plutonium batteries.
While this is true, my basic problem is that most people opposed to RTGs can't understand this statement in context. The environmental impact statement of this project is particularly useful. Its in this PDF on page 19. But let's analyze that statement anyway, piece by piece.
1) An "accident" could have released material, but it was unlikely. The containers were tested under explosions, fires, shrapnel, reentry heat, and impact. The RTGs were tough enough that they could hit concrete at terminal velocity and release only a minscule amount of fuel (0.22 grams).
2) Yes, Plutonium is "highly toxic". But most people complaining about the RTGs don't worry about "toxic". They worry about "nuclear explosion" or "fallout". Of course, none of those can result from the failure of an RTG. 10kg of toxic material (only a fraction of which would actually be released in a failure) is hardly your biggest worry. I'd be more worried about the thousands of pounds of very nasty fuel in solid rocket boosters.
3) The fuel in the RTG's isn't plutonium, its plutonium dioxide. This is an important difference, because the latter is very stable, almost inert (it was believed to be completely inert until 1999), and is insoluable in water. It also has a very high melting temperature and an even higher vaporization temperature. The net result is that the mechanisms through which it can enter the environment in the event of an accident are very limited. Basically, it would have to be bulverized and become airborne. Pulverizing 10kg of a hard material encased in a strong, unrestrained container, with just a single explosion is non-trivial. The physics of the situation tend to make the container just fly away and land in the dirt.
So basically, an accident was exceedingly unlikely, and even if it did happen, release was unlikely, and even if that happend, you had bigger things to worry about at that point.
You can operate on a basis of reasonable risk management
It's not "reasonable risk management". It's "not caving in to complete paranoia".
assuming the general public is entirely ignorant of physics
The general public *is* ignorant of physics.
I'm sure there are plenty of people in the "general public" who have studied more physics and bio/chemistry than you have.)
Well that's fine and good, and I don't doubt that biology and chemistry can tell you that plutonium will cause poisoning and cancer. However, biologists and chemists are not engineers or environmental scientists. They cannot tell you the probability of an RTG failing in an explosion, nor can they tell you the environmental mechanisms through which plutonium could spread even in the case of a failure. Nor can they tell you what sort of population impact such a spread would have anyway. Finally, they are not trained to make risk assessments of this nature. Engineers build bridges (and planes and cares and buildings), that thousands of people trust their lives too every day, without a second thought, using the exact same risk assessment mechanisms the NASA folks used. If you're going to question the NASA folks, the intellectually honest thing to do would be to grill the guy who designed your car about what risks he took with your life.
I agree that people sometimes go way overboard with their resistance to anything nuclear, but that attitude was instilled in them, or their parents, pretty forcefully.
Most parents are people, and most people are stupid, therefore most parents are stupid. Is having stupid parents supposed to be an excuse for being ignorant?
And it doesn't help the situation one bit, when the only response when concerns are raised is "go away, you are ignorant"
What if "you are ignorant" is the correct answer? I do not buy the idea that it is the du
Well, good luck to you, but you're basically claiming "give it five years, and the bureaucracy will be streamlined quite considerably". Historical trends for bureaucracy have tended toward growth, not atrophy. It's an admirable goal, but I'll believe it when I see it.
It is thrown in with welfare because it is a mechanism for providing for the general welfare of the citizenry. Just because most people use "welfare" as a pejorative doesn't mean that it actuall is one. Lots of things are actually "welfare" taxes. For example, if you live in a big city in the South, your state taxes are "welfare". I live in the DC suburbs and the vast majority of my state taxes (70% or so), go to "welfare" for the poorer parts of the state. It is fundementally no different than tax money used to provide for the unemployeed, in both cases certain people get a lot more than they pay in. The only difference is that middle-class America doesn't like to use the "welfare" pejorative to refer to the welfare they get.
Are you joking? You do realize that a huge percentage of the United States' high cost of healthcare comes from the enormous amount of paperwork required by our privitized health insurance? It *does* cost private companies a lot of money to maintain complience --- they just pass it on to the customer.
Because you can't be counted on to maintain that agreement if you're dying on the street. The ultimate reality of social security programs is that they come from the need to maintain social order. Poor people are dangerous for social order. They commit crimes, and when they get together, they can create riots. Welfare offers a way to coopt those forces before becoming a problem.
Remember that much of today's welfare infrastructure was concieved right after the Great Depression. At the time, the disintegration of social order due to popular unrest was a very real possibility. While it seems like a remote possibility now, it's not. If offered a way out of paying social security taxes, the vast majority of people will opt out, and a large percentage of those will be left with nothing. Unfortunately, most of those people will not just sit down and die on the street, but rather cause social unrest.
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You're using CS logic. It's a well accepted (and lamented) fact of UI design that people don't understand (in general) hierarchies. Now, menus are inherently hierarchical, but OSs go to great lengths to make them as flat as possible. Using an obviously tree-inspired terminology is a sure way to make yourself not understood.
Of course, if you put a Mac and an XP machine in the same situation, the XP machine will still end up getting used. Heck, to build on your analogy, consider a stick-shift Ferrari and an automatic Mercedes in the same garage. The typical person will go for what's he's familiar with, not necessarily what's better.
Interesting. When I got my 2405FPW, I just turned on the machine and it worked. My situation was a bit hair too, because it's hooked up to a laptop that already has a display, but Ubuntu picked it up just fine.
You're forgetting that to most people, "shutdown" is a command to do an action, not a command to perform a procedure. You could argue that yes, technically shutdown is a procedure and not a single action, but people don't think that way. When speaking of single actions, "start" does technically work (you can "start to run", "start to kick", "start to jump"), but nobody thinks that way unless the "starting" is important in and of itself (ie: "started to kick, but pulled back"). When they're thinking of a specific action, they're thinking of that verb.
He's saying that toungue-in-cheek. He's trying to point out that hardware support is the fault of the vendor, not the OS developer.
Oh, I've got one. My CompUSA USB wlan adapter. Doesn't work on XP, no matter which driver I try to install.
Funny thing is, it used to work on XP, on that machine no less. Linux uses it happily.
English is not your first language, huh? The OP said:
"the higher end card?"
The higher end card, not a higher end card. 'The' refers to things that already exist. If the poster meant the dealer could make up a GS or GR or ST, then he would have said "a higher end card".
Um, you didn't even understand the damn thing you quoted. It says right in the part you bolded: "resell them as the higher end card?"
There is no 16 pipeline version of the GeForce 6800. The 16 pipeline cards, the 6800 GT and the 6800 Ultra, are different cards that use not just a 16-pipeline chip, but also higher-end RAM. So the "higher end card" he referred to *is* the 6800 GT. There is nothing inbetween!
I understand that, but if you actually read the thread, the "NVIDIA already does that" comment was directed at somebody asking "how long until dealers buy up 6800's, unlock the pipelines, and sell them as 6800GT's?" The thread was talking about complete cards, not individual chips. My point was that NVIDIA doesn't do that with complete cards --- the GT cards use different RAM as well.
I just realize that the math terms in that post make it seem like the above is an attempt to make a formally logical statement. They are not. They present statistical conclusions, not rigorous proofs.
Technically, "most parents" directly referred to the parents brought up by the original poster, which is why that part of the OP's statement was quoted right above the one you pointed out. Since only human parents are capable of browbeating environmentalism into their children, it must be surmised that in my statement *all parents* are human.
Correcting flawed logic is fine and good, but taking quotes out of context to do it is not. If that quote had been posted by itself, that would have been one thing. But you were reading a work of prose, which is written assuming the reader uses context to resolve ambiguities. I'm as anal about logic as the next guy, but you've got to play by the rules of the medium under consideration.
"Genius" is a subset of "people" that is selective based on the critereon "is smart". Thus, conjectures regarding intelligence do not apply equally to people and geniuses. On the other hand, the set of parents is a subset of people that is selective based on the critereon "has children", which has little to do with intelligence, so with regards to intelligence, the subset "parents" is a random subset of "people". Therefore conjectures about intelligence are applicable to both sets.
Let me give you an example. "Most prime numbers are integers, and most integers are factorable, therefore most prime numbers are factorable". That is invalid, because the set of "prime numbers" is selective based on factorability. However, the statement "Most Fibinocci numbers are integers, and most integers are factorable, therefore most Fibinoccia numbers are factorable" is valid.
Yep. It's far better to get $200 ($150 retail) every year than to get $400 cards every couple of years. I recently build a machine, and I got a 6600GT instead of a 6800GT, even though my budget for the computer could have easily handled it. Why? Because next year, when the midrange G70-based cards come out, I can easily conscience spending another $150 to replace this $130 card, while if I had bought a $350 card, the decision would not have been so easy.
No, because in the case with the Turbo button, there was nothing wrong with the chips. This is more like a retailer sending clothes with slight defects to an outlet store where its sold at a cheaper price.
Its a market issue. Basically, the defect rate of the 300m transistor chips ensures that a significant number will have at least some non-operational pipelines. Instead of throwing away those cores (and increasing prices to compensate), they clock them lower, pair them with cheaper RAM, and sell them as cheaper cards. Now, if the manufacturing process gets better, they might not have enough defective cards to sell as cheaper parts. They can't just take all the perfect chips and sell them as expensive cards, because then there would be a shortage of the low-end product which would drive up their price. So they take the perfect chips and put them in budget cards.
Um, why shouldn't it? Nobody releases parts tweeked to the maximum they can, because if they did, there is a very high possibility the parts would fail. Would you prefer NVIDIA just release the parts with all pipelines unlocked, and when you bought one there would be a 50/50 chance some of them wouldn't work?
Um, you should have known that before you bought the card. It's not like this information isn't in every GeForce 6800 review in existance...
How are they "screwing you over"? They're selling you the product that you paid for. Futhermore, the price you paid for it is quite a bit less because the "perfect" parts (the ones able to run with all 16 pipelines at higher clockspeeds), are sold at a premium, allowing other parts to be sold more cheaply.
No, NVIDIA does not do that. The GeForce 6800GT is a different card than the 6800, namely in that it uses more advanced (and more expensive) GDDR-3 memory while the regular 6800 does not.
An accident at launch could have released highly toxic materal from the plutonium batteries.
While this is true, my basic problem is that most people opposed to RTGs can't understand this statement in context. The environmental impact statement of this project is particularly useful. Its in this PDF on page 19. But let's analyze that statement anyway, piece by piece.
1) An "accident" could have released material, but it was unlikely. The containers were tested under explosions, fires, shrapnel, reentry heat, and impact. The RTGs were tough enough that they could hit concrete at terminal velocity and release only a minscule amount of fuel (0.22 grams).
2) Yes, Plutonium is "highly toxic". But most people complaining about the RTGs don't worry about "toxic". They worry about "nuclear explosion" or "fallout". Of course, none of those can result from the failure of an RTG. 10kg of toxic material (only a fraction of which would actually be released in a failure) is hardly your biggest worry. I'd be more worried about the thousands of pounds of very nasty fuel in solid rocket boosters.
3) The fuel in the RTG's isn't plutonium, its plutonium dioxide. This is an important difference, because the latter is very stable, almost inert (it was believed to be completely inert until 1999), and is insoluable in water. It also has a very high melting temperature and an even higher vaporization temperature. The net result is that the mechanisms through which it can enter the environment in the event of an accident are very limited. Basically, it would have to be bulverized and become airborne. Pulverizing 10kg of a hard material encased in a strong, unrestrained container, with just a single explosion is non-trivial. The physics of the situation tend to make the container just fly away and land in the dirt.
So basically, an accident was exceedingly unlikely, and even if it did happen, release was unlikely, and even if that happend, you had bigger things to worry about at that point.
You can operate on a basis of reasonable risk management
It's not "reasonable risk management". It's "not caving in to complete paranoia".
assuming the general public is entirely ignorant of physics
The general public *is* ignorant of physics.
I'm sure there are plenty of people in the "general public" who have studied more physics and bio/chemistry than you have.)
Well that's fine and good, and I don't doubt that biology and chemistry can tell you that plutonium will cause poisoning and cancer. However, biologists and chemists are not engineers or environmental scientists. They cannot tell you the probability of an RTG failing in an explosion, nor can they tell you the environmental mechanisms through which plutonium could spread even in the case of a failure. Nor can they tell you what sort of population impact such a spread would have anyway. Finally, they are not trained to make risk assessments of this nature. Engineers build bridges (and planes and cares and buildings), that thousands of people trust their lives too every day, without a second thought, using the exact same risk assessment mechanisms the NASA folks used. If you're going to question the NASA folks, the intellectually honest thing to do would be to grill the guy who designed your car about what risks he took with your life.
I agree that people sometimes go way overboard with their resistance to anything nuclear, but that attitude was instilled in them, or their parents, pretty forcefully.
Most parents are people, and most people are stupid, therefore most parents are stupid. Is having stupid parents supposed to be an excuse for being ignorant?
And it doesn't help the situation one bit, when the only response when concerns are raised is "go away, you are ignorant"
What if "you are ignorant" is the correct answer? I do not buy the idea that it is the du
Well, good luck to you, but you're basically claiming "give it five years, and the bureaucracy will be streamlined quite considerably". Historical trends for bureaucracy have tended toward growth, not atrophy. It's an admirable goal, but I'll believe it when I see it.
It is thrown in with welfare because it is a mechanism for providing for the general welfare of the citizenry. Just because most people use "welfare" as a pejorative doesn't mean that it actuall is one. Lots of things are actually "welfare" taxes. For example, if you live in a big city in the South, your state taxes are "welfare". I live in the DC suburbs and the vast majority of my state taxes (70% or so), go to "welfare" for the poorer parts of the state. It is fundementally no different than tax money used to provide for the unemployeed, in both cases certain people get a lot more than they pay in. The only difference is that middle-class America doesn't like to use the "welfare" pejorative to refer to the welfare they get.
Are you joking? You do realize that a huge percentage of the United States' high cost of healthcare comes from the enormous amount of paperwork required by our privitized health insurance? It *does* cost private companies a lot of money to maintain complience --- they just pass it on to the customer.
Because you can't be counted on to maintain that agreement if you're dying on the street. The ultimate reality of social security programs is that they come from the need to maintain social order. Poor people are dangerous for social order. They commit crimes, and when they get together, they can create riots. Welfare offers a way to coopt those forces before becoming a problem.
Remember that much of today's welfare infrastructure was concieved right after the Great Depression. At the time, the disintegration of social order due to popular unrest was a very real possibility. While it seems like a remote possibility now, it's not. If offered a way out of paying social security taxes, the vast majority of people will opt out, and a large percentage of those will be left with nothing. Unfortunately, most of those people will not just sit down and die on the street, but rather cause social unrest.
Yay for you! Well, said.