I agree with the other poster: that's a crappy analogy. I've never seen, touched, tasted, heard or felt the Loch Ness Monster, either, and I find it surprising that other people believe in its existence.
Belief can be tricky to explain at the best of times, but belief in God is probably the hardest of the lot. There is no conclusive argument that a being posessing the attributes commonly ascribed to the Judaeo-Christian God exists, or does not exist. There are lots of failed attempts, though: that's what makes first year Philosphy so much fun! Arguing for either atheism or some form of theism on slashdot is unlikely to convince anyone that you're "right", but it does show up some amusing (or worrying) misconceptions and inanities.
But the Linux drivers for most devices don't care about the BIOS: they talk directly to the hardware. That's how I'm able to use PCI NICs and IDE controllers with x86 BIOSes on my old PowerMac. I can't see why NVidia would be any different.
... so why would an NVidia GPU have to be designed for a particular processor? AGP and PCI are supposed to be CPU-agnostic (unlike the ill-fated VESA local bus).
Re:The horrors of the Nikon Coolpix UI
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 1
As the owner of the aforementioned Coolpix 4300, I must agree. All the manual options are hidden in the interminable menu structure, and most of the time I end up using the scene or automatic modes, with the most complex option being fiddling with the exposure or focus mode (which don't require use of the menu).
Real cameras, like my Pentax MZ-M, have lots of nice physical controls, like focus/zoom/aperture rings around the lens that you can rotate while peering through the viewfinder to see what effect they have. If you want to manually change the shutter speed on a consumer digital camera, you have to wade through the menus, which is enough to make most people not bother.
The Coolpix is still better, though, if only because it has autofocus:-)
No one's ever managed to convince me that RPN is wonderful. Yes, it's easier to implement on the calculator - but these days RAM and faster CPUs are cheap. And it's not exactly easy to get your head around: you need to keep track of a reasonable amount of state while evaluating complex expressions, and if you're not sure of the structure of said expressions in advance, it can become very confusing. Any alleged benefits would therefore presumably only be helpful if you used your calculator *a lot*, and for those of us who are not quite so enamoured with mathematics as they used to be, the low mental load of algebraic notation, coupled with the relative infrequency of calculator use for anything complex, renders RPN unnecessary.
I think you'll find, though, that if it doesn't play MP3, and people can't therefore use it to play all the MP3s they've downloaded, that they'll start to have a preference for the format of the music being stored.
Most Wikis I have used support [[free links]] if you really want to use them, but for QuickAndDirty stuff CamelCase is fast and easy. And MediaWiki has its own (IMHO) bad design decisions, too: the ability to include arbitary HTML means that you're stuck with HTML as your only output format.
You may not know it, but the 'P' in APNIC stands for "Pacific". I live in APNIC space - but I'm not from China or Korea. Of course, I probably have no reason to talk to equipment on your network, but you'd better hope you're not hosting a website that people in New Zealand or Australia want to access at any sort of reasonable speed...
GC is nice. It's for people who really want to spend more time solving problems than thinking about memory managment. It's not an absolute requirement... but there's a reason I haven't written any non-performance-critical code in a language without GC in over two years:-)
The problem is: you're asking *everyone* who talks SMTP between mail servers to upgrade their software. You're asking *everyone* who produces such software to agree on a standard to replace SMTP to prevent spam. There are many people out there who can't, or won't, upgrade. Yes, it would be nice if they would, but they won't -- lack of technical expertise, lack of time, unwillingness to run bright shiny new code that's been untested in the real world for a reasonable period of time, old systems that updates are no longer available for and they can't afford or aren't able to upgrade... the real world contains many such problems. And I haven't seen any proposal yet that involves changing the protocol and looks like it will actually produce the desired result (less/no spam, with *no* collateral damage).
Most *clueful* people I know just use spamassassin or some sort of bayesian filter, and this returns email to a state of usefulness for them.
But AOL's customers will all whine when mail to them starts being bounced. Thousands of small buisnesses with "appliance" servers that have worked for the last five years will be up in arms. etc.
The internet has too many users to expect them to all change software at once.
My standard "oh, it's x times faster than the other box" metric is how many times faster than real time oggenc encodes CD tracks. Not very scientific, but... it's nice to know my 1.9GHz Athlon encodes Vorbis as fast as the new 2.6GHz machines in the graduate lab at university:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not emacs, but then emacs is overkill for editing /etc/init.d/firewall on a 486 firewall.
It's not vi, but... I'm not going to incite another flamewar.
It's not Turbo Pascal 3, but then I don't have an XT anymore.
And more importantly, it was part of my first Slackware install, providing a friendly editor to a refugee from MS-DOS.
All Hail Joe!
Damn! I was going to say that!
:-)
Although the TP3 manual was enjoyable, especially including the CP/M sections
I agree with the other poster: that's a crappy analogy. I've never seen, touched, tasted, heard or felt the Loch Ness Monster, either, and I find it surprising that other people believe in its existence.
Belief can be tricky to explain at the best of times, but belief in God is probably the hardest of the lot. There is no conclusive argument that a being posessing the attributes commonly ascribed to the Judaeo-Christian God exists, or does not exist. There are lots of failed attempts, though: that's what makes first year Philosphy so much fun! Arguing for either atheism or some form of theism on slashdot is unlikely to convince anyone that you're "right", but it does show up some amusing (or worrying) misconceptions and inanities.
But the Linux drivers for most devices don't care about the BIOS: they talk directly to the hardware. That's how I'm able to use PCI NICs and IDE controllers with x86 BIOSes on my old PowerMac. I can't see why NVidia would be any different.
... so why would an NVidia GPU have to be designed for a particular processor? AGP and PCI are supposed to be CPU-agnostic (unlike the ill-fated VESA local bus).
As the owner of the aforementioned Coolpix 4300, I must agree. All the manual options are hidden in the interminable menu structure, and most of the time I end up using the scene or automatic modes, with the most complex option being fiddling with the exposure or focus mode (which don't require use of the menu).
:-)
Real cameras, like my Pentax MZ-M, have lots of nice physical controls, like focus/zoom/aperture rings around the lens that you can rotate while peering through the viewfinder to see what effect they have. If you want to manually change the shutter speed on a consumer digital camera, you have to wade through the menus, which is enough to make most people not bother.
The Coolpix is still better, though, if only because it has autofocus
No one's ever managed to convince me that RPN is wonderful. Yes, it's easier to implement on the calculator - but these days RAM and faster CPUs are cheap. And it's not exactly easy to get your head around: you need to keep track of a reasonable amount of state while evaluating complex expressions, and if you're not sure of the structure of said expressions in advance, it can become very confusing. Any alleged benefits would therefore presumably only be helpful if you used your calculator *a lot*, and for those of us who are not quite so enamoured with mathematics as they used to be, the low mental load of algebraic notation, coupled with the relative infrequency of calculator use for anything complex, renders RPN unnecessary.
Says he, who owns an HP48G but never uses it.
It's actually Xeno's paradox, but anyway...
See, there was a use for my calculus textbook after all!
I think you'll find, though, that if it doesn't play MP3, and people can't therefore use it to play all the MP3s they've downloaded, that they'll start to have a preference for the format of the music being stored.
In New Zealand, we have party scrutineers hanging around the people who count votes. They're not about to let you change the ballots.
Domain names are cheap.
So, why does apple not include something like this by default? It makes their laptops so much more usable!
Ha! Buy mine instead! Only, er, three weeks old...
Grr.
Not sure if that's a particularly good analogy, translated to non-computer terms it's more like
First they came for the Bank Robbers
and I did not speak out - because I wasn't a bank robber
Then they came for the Home Handymen
and I did not speak out - because I didn't know what DIY stood for
Then they came for the Photocopier Users
and I did not speak out - because I was out of toner
Then they came for me -
and by then I just thought the whole thing was stupid.
I don't think you'll find many harassed sysadmins willing to speak out for crackers.
Most Wikis I have used support [[free links]] if you really want to use them, but for QuickAndDirty stuff CamelCase is fast and easy. And MediaWiki has its own (IMHO) bad design decisions, too: the ability to include arbitary HTML means that you're stuck with HTML as your only output format.
You may not know it, but the 'P' in APNIC stands for "Pacific". I live in APNIC space - but I'm not from China or Korea. Of course, I probably have no reason to talk to equipment on your network, but you'd better hope you're not hosting a website that people in New Zealand or Australia want to access at any sort of reasonable speed...
I fully concur. Zoe is wonderful; I haven't deleted any mail in the last two years. But I want something faster!
GC is nice. It's for people who really want to spend more time solving problems than thinking about memory managment. It's not an absolute requirement... but there's a reason I haven't written any non-performance-critical code in a language without GC in over two years :-)
The problem is: you're asking *everyone* who talks SMTP between mail servers to upgrade their software. You're asking *everyone* who produces such software to agree on a standard to replace SMTP to prevent spam. There are many people out there who can't, or won't, upgrade. Yes, it would be nice if they would, but they won't -- lack of technical expertise, lack of time, unwillingness to run bright shiny new code that's been untested in the real world for a reasonable period of time, old systems that updates are no longer available for and they can't afford or aren't able to upgrade... the real world contains many such problems. And I haven't seen any proposal yet that involves changing the protocol and looks like it will actually produce the desired result (less/no spam, with *no* collateral damage).
Most *clueful* people I know just use spamassassin or some sort of bayesian filter, and this returns email to a state of usefulness for them.
But AOL's customers will all whine when mail to them starts being bounced. Thousands of small buisnesses with "appliance" servers that have worked for the last five years will be up in arms. etc.
The internet has too many users to expect them to all change software at once.
Or, of course, ISPs could just multicast-enable their networks...
You mean like Introvertster?
Damn. Guess I'd better leave then :-)
My standard "oh, it's x times faster than the other box" metric is how many times faster than real time oggenc encodes CD tracks. Not very scientific, but ... it's nice to know my 1.9GHz Athlon encodes Vorbis as fast as the new 2.6GHz machines in the graduate lab at university :-)