What the parent is trying to say is that games use DirectX to access sound, video, network and CD drivers, basically. If the DirectX API was ported, it wouldn't matter much to a game what OS it was running on because all it cares about is the DirectX API calls. This is the idea behind cross-platform game APIs, as well as OpenGL etc.
While the guy probably didn't know this (hell, I didn't until it happened to me), two partitions can make or break a hard drive. On my laptop, I had one partition for Mac OS X and one for linux. One day, OS X decided it didn't want to boot. However, Linux booted fine. It turns out that the hard drive was failing and the first place it failed (that I noticed...) was right over OS X's boot partition. So, if the failure of the harddrive just starts and it fscks just one of the partitions, the other will still be readable...
That is not quite true. Quantum mechanics technically still holds at the macroscopic level. However, Newtonian physics is an "approximation" that is incredibly good in intermediate scales (i.e. not relativistic or quantum). I can guarantee you that the dog is not doing newtonian physics in his head; neither is he hardwired to do it that way. If you throw a ball at a puppy, he will not be able to catch it right away. Just like a little kid can't. We aren't hardwired to "think Newtonian." As it is, Newtonian physics are a representation of the world we live in, not the world itself.
Anyone can tell you what happens when you hit one object against another or toss one object against gravity at a certain angle.
Yes, they can, but that does not make them "hardwired" to do Newtonian physics; physics is the mathematical description of the real world, and so someone who lives in the real world and experiences it will have intuition into how physics works. If we lived and experienced in the quantum or the relativistic, we would have intuition into how that works as well. However, if you have never experienced something (even Newtonian physics), then you have no intuition about it because it is not something hardwired. Examples: on this very site a while back, there was a heated discussion about what would happen if there were a a tunnel bored completely through the Earth and you fell it in. What would happen? People disagreed. Also, Total Internal Reflection. I don't think that a dog, or a child, or anyone who hasn't taken a physics course or read about fiber optic cables would know about this. There is no intuition about it, but it is Newtonian physics. Physics is not hardwired into anybody's or anthing's brain. Our seemingly innate grasp is the ability to find patterns in the behavior of things, which is why the dog will know when to jump to catch a ball, or why the child knows where the ball will land (approximately). If we have no experience to find patterns in, we won't know our heads from our asses, metaphorically speaking.
As a consequence, you can grow intuition as you work with something. Which is why if you do enough quantum mechanical calculations, you will begin to have a sense of "what looks right," to have intuition about how quantum mechanics works. True, because we can only express quantum mechanics, our intuition in mathematical, but just like the physics student can translate the mathematical expressions of Newtonian physics into consequences in the real world (i.e. if the momentum of A is bigger than B, then they will both move mostly in the direction of A if they have an inelastic collision), the student of quantum mechanics can say "This Hamiltonian of an electron doesn't have any nodes. Then it must be in an s-orbital." Just because we are not as intimately familiar with quantum mechanics as we are with Newtonian physics because we live in the latter, not former, doesn't mean we can develop an intuition into how the former works.
That reminds me of the days I spent making mortars for fireworks with my friend. It is pretty awesome watching a flaming, colorful ball of light fly up into the air while dashing into the woods so that the police can't find you.
Or sticking bottle rockets into the eye sockets of this oddly humanoid hunk of metal and shooting them at the girls across the street.
Or taking apart disposable cameras to get the capacitors in the flash circuit to build a Tesla coil. Or putting said Tesla coil out on the front lawn and dancing around it waving fluorescent lights (which will glow when close enough to the tesla coil) on Halloween. Oddly enough...we had a lot of candy left over at our house that year...
If you perform a risky search (My best shot was "vista serial crack") and then click on a shady link...google will send you to this page before allowing you to proceed onto your destination.
I completely agree that they should be able to read if they are fluent (unless there is some funky spelling or different writing paradigm than we have). But your experience with learning languages is really interesting. For me, it goes Reading -> Writing -> Listening/Speaking. Writing isn't all that tough because, like with reading, you can go back to a trouble spot, or look a word up in a dictionary. However, with listening and speaking, you must do it all in real-time. Listening is hard(er?) for me because half the time, the speaker sounds like s/he is speaking in English, even when I know she is not. And speaking is difficult because you have to "invent" ways to express an idea with tools that aren't very familiar to you yet.
I really am not sure how much the government owns the physical unit of currency. Sure, they can recall them, decide whether it is legal, make it devalue *oooh, they're good at that one* but I do not believe that they can prosecute you for doing anything to your money. It isn't illegal to burn your money. Or decide to melt down your pennies for the copper (well, at least, it wasn't when I did it...). Individual property ownership laws apply to any money you have in your possession. However, like you said, the government can decide if a coin is legal tender or not. I think what it boils down to is: if you intentionally mess with money, you are making it no longer money. So that's your loss, but the government isn't able to prosecute you for doing it.
But what I was saying is that for most applications (like web-browsing, office documents, whatever), there is no "special processor" that will speed things up tremendously. Even for graphics, for games and media, if the graphics card is leveraged correctly, that is a super-optimized special processor. So like I was saying, the majority of uses (data compression, speech and encryption are the only applications I've seen that can be improved. But that definitely does not mean that there aren't others) of a computer are already pretty well optimized.
I don't quite understand what you're saying. What is the problem? That Microsoft's stuff is, to use a technical term, shit? Well, for me, Apple does a better job with their Macs and Mac OS X. I also use linux extensively, and find that that is a very viable alternative to Windows. I just don't really get what you are trying to get across.
Which is why I say they have backed themselves into a corner in the next sentence. But I don't see why manufacturers would threaten to sue them if they dropped support for a piece of hardware. That's completely in their right to do so, especially if that piece of equipment is old, regardless of their monopoly status. Of course, the manufacturers could sue them, but its bound to be pointless litigation.
I agree with you. I can understand people wanting to throw whatever they want into a computer (or even building their own components or whatever), but what I was saying is that people want choices but how many do they actually want? Macs are customizable to an extent that captures some majority of the market. It's a tradeoff. You can't really have both exceptional quality and exceptional support. Apple has chosen to optimize for quality while Microsoft (to me) has tried to do both and has ended up mediocre in both instances.
Then there are Apple products which are intended for the braindead (but only those who have handlers smart enough to realize that the braindead are braindead) and work perfectly out of the box, and do it with a little bit of security in mind. Apple's products are something you don't need to be savvy to use, but are still more secure than Microsoft products.
And under Windows, I have never wondered why my hardware wouldn't get recognized. Or where the wireless network I was just on disappeared to. Or why the GUI decided it didn't want to be loaded anymore. Or any one of another hassles.
Then on Linux, I was routinely stymied by an inability to get a machine to boot at all. Or...well, really, that's the biggest problem I've had.
And then on OS X, I am often frustrated that programs written for UNIX operating systems don't compile even when all the libraries are installed and accounted for and I've hacked the config file for a half hour and found the function the configure script PROMISED me wasn't there.
Things break. Or don't work like they're supposed to. I really should have replied to the parent, but anybody who is complaining because something doesn't work flawlessly is no longer living in reality.
Your argument is kind of specious. Apple's job is easier because they made a decision: quality over customizability. Microsoft made the other decision. And it has led to products that are poor in quality, sometimes dreadfully so. You'd think that Microsoft would say "Enough is e-goddamn-nough already," and drop some legacy stuff; but they have gotten themselves into a hole with that and it looks like they won't be able to climb out unless they do drop some of those hardware configurations. What Apple did was say, "Well, it looks like most people want THIS kind of computer, so we will build one, and then make quality software that just works REALLY well with it." It was a business decision. My opinion (in case you haven't guessed) is that Apple's was the wiser one.
And if Apple was working on a x86 version of OS X since they started actively developing it, one could hardly say they would still be on PowerPC chips...
Physics simulations and image processing can be (and are) done on GPUs. Same for any hardcore math stuff, like Folding Proteins. The problem with the AMD approach is that there are only so many (and I don't think it is many, but I really don't know, so if you do, please let me know) different kinds of operations. Like I said, the physics simulations and image processing are the same type of problem and also conveniently tackled very proficiently by graphics hardware.
But these "application-specific processors" arent "processors for one application." They are processors that do a specific type of calculation; for instance, a TCP/IP stack implemented in hardware, or a physics unit, or a graphics chip. In order to make a web-browsing "chip," you would need a bunch of these specialized chips, which is why most applications/programs/binaries are run on a general processing unit. In terms of you not-so-bad car analogy, for a browser, you need a car that is a bus, and an off-roader and a commuter car (or whatever). It needs an "SUV" of a computer chip. So if you primarily use a computer for web browsing, then any CPU is going to be fine because browsers aren't computationally intensive (although if you use Firefox maybe grab some extra memory???); meanwhile, the gamer might like that physics coprocessor because that would speed up games that support the processor and the media guy might like an operating system that supports a lot of offloading of audio/video computations (*cough* OS X *cough*) to the graphics card AND a really nice graphics card. There already are specialized processors in a computer these days, but there are only so many processes that can be specialized simply*.
*Doubtlessly, this is what AMD is researching: trying to make everyday tasks into some special form that can be run through some super-extra-optimized pipeline...I am just unsure of how that can be done in some/a lot of cases.
Destroying legal tender (or, in fact, damaging it in any way) and then trying to pass it for legal tender is illegal. Destroying it is not, seeing as, in theory anyway, the United States is a free country and you can do what you want with what you own. And surprisingly, money is not owned by the Government. However, it is illegal to deface money and then try to use it (this was used to stop people from "clipping coins" back when they were actually something valuable...like silver or gold. Now, there's less point to it, but if copper and nickel keep getting more expensive, who knows?)
Point taken about the GPL. However, this license says nothing about playing the music, which is what musicians care about. They are free to freely download the music and even use it in performances they charge for. It sounds roughly analogous to the GPL (or maybe BSD license?) in that you can download for free and use it in stuff (i.e. musical concerts or recordings) that you charge money for, but do not need to pay royalties or anything on it. Music and software aren't the same so the one doesn't map conformally onto the other, but the basic idea is the same.
What about the analogue of "look and feel" patents in the analog (i.e. physical) world? Can you patent the design of something? Should you be able to? Yes.
I'm sure that whoever makes those nice cushion things on pens got a patent, and I'm sure that's part of the user interface that makes it nicer. The patent on it makes sure that whoever invents it can profit from their work inventing it. Should that be unpatentable? The reason patents were invented were to protect innovation and invention. That's still a good thing.
As a musician, let me tell you that music is not like software. This music is truly free because, well, you don't need to buy it. There is nothing in the license that says you cannot perform it; there is nothing in the license that says you cannot charge people to listen to your performance. For what it is, a publication of sheet music for free, it is an amazing thing because sheet music is usually a very expensive thing. Additionally, the editing house that produced this edition (Bärenreiter) is almost universally regarded as the best and is therefore the most expensive. The complete score for the Mozart requiem (something I use only because I need to pick one up) normally costs 120.00 euros. That is a fat wad of cash, and now something I don't need to spend.
This is intended for musicians who want to play or for teachers who want to use Mozart as examples in their class (instead of copying out of books, which is technically illegal, but widely done because how else are you going to conveniently give students something that they can look at and analyze and learn from?). In those cases, there would be no reason to need to download the whole thing or redistribute it. If you will accept the poor analogy, sheet music is like source code; when you learn is and perform it, it's like compiling it. Here, these people are giving out the source code, but they are making sure that the only place the source code is gotten from is their website. The license is no more onerous than the GPL; there are conditions that you must accept if you want to download and use it.
He stated that it had a hole discontinuity when he said that the limit existed even though the function was not defined at that point; they mean the same thing because each implies the other.
And one would proceed to analyze the functions with limits because the limit as x goes to zero of any number besides zero divided by x does not exist. But the limit as x goes to 0 of 0/x is 0, not NAN.
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I actually prefer C-double-sharp because that is just D...
What the parent is trying to say is that games use DirectX to access sound, video, network and CD drivers, basically. If the DirectX API was ported, it wouldn't matter much to a game what OS it was running on because all it cares about is the DirectX API calls. This is the idea behind cross-platform game APIs, as well as OpenGL etc.
While the guy probably didn't know this (hell, I didn't until it happened to me), two partitions can make or break a hard drive. On my laptop, I had one partition for Mac OS X and one for linux. One day, OS X decided it didn't want to boot. However, Linux booted fine. It turns out that the hard drive was failing and the first place it failed (that I noticed...) was right over OS X's boot partition. So, if the failure of the harddrive just starts and it fscks just one of the partitions, the other will still be readable...
It's just really bad when you start squirting black though.
Yes, they can, but that does not make them "hardwired" to do Newtonian physics; physics is the mathematical description of the real world, and so someone who lives in the real world and experiences it will have intuition into how physics works. If we lived and experienced in the quantum or the relativistic, we would have intuition into how that works as well. However, if you have never experienced something (even Newtonian physics), then you have no intuition about it because it is not something hardwired. Examples: on this very site a while back, there was a heated discussion about what would happen if there were a a tunnel bored completely through the Earth and you fell it in. What would happen? People disagreed. Also, Total Internal Reflection. I don't think that a dog, or a child, or anyone who hasn't taken a physics course or read about fiber optic cables would know about this. There is no intuition about it, but it is Newtonian physics. Physics is not hardwired into anybody's or anthing's brain. Our seemingly innate grasp is the ability to find patterns in the behavior of things, which is why the dog will know when to jump to catch a ball, or why the child knows where the ball will land (approximately). If we have no experience to find patterns in, we won't know our heads from our asses, metaphorically speaking.
As a consequence, you can grow intuition as you work with something. Which is why if you do enough quantum mechanical calculations, you will begin to have a sense of "what looks right," to have intuition about how quantum mechanics works. True, because we can only express quantum mechanics, our intuition in mathematical, but just like the physics student can translate the mathematical expressions of Newtonian physics into consequences in the real world (i.e. if the momentum of A is bigger than B, then they will both move mostly in the direction of A if they have an inelastic collision), the student of quantum mechanics can say "This Hamiltonian of an electron doesn't have any nodes. Then it must be in an s-orbital." Just because we are not as intimately familiar with quantum mechanics as we are with Newtonian physics because we live in the latter, not former, doesn't mean we can develop an intuition into how the former works.
That might be my favorite typo ever. Mod it funny, coz it is!
That reminds me of the days I spent making mortars for fireworks with my friend. It is pretty awesome watching a flaming, colorful ball of light fly up into the air while dashing into the woods so that the police can't find you.
Or sticking bottle rockets into the eye sockets of this oddly humanoid hunk of metal and shooting them at the girls across the street.
Or taking apart disposable cameras to get the capacitors in the flash circuit to build a Tesla coil. Or putting said Tesla coil out on the front lawn and dancing around it waving fluorescent lights (which will glow when close enough to the tesla coil) on Halloween. Oddly enough...we had a lot of candy left over at our house that year...
Oh man, I wish I could do all that again.
Well, I mean, google does do something like it...
If you perform a risky search (My best shot was "vista serial crack") and then click on a shady link...google will send you to this page before allowing you to proceed onto your destination.
I completely agree that they should be able to read if they are fluent (unless there is some funky spelling or different writing paradigm than we have). But your experience with learning languages is really interesting. For me, it goes Reading -> Writing -> Listening/Speaking. Writing isn't all that tough because, like with reading, you can go back to a trouble spot, or look a word up in a dictionary. However, with listening and speaking, you must do it all in real-time. Listening is hard(er?) for me because half the time, the speaker sounds like s/he is speaking in English, even when I know she is not. And speaking is difficult because you have to "invent" ways to express an idea with tools that aren't very familiar to you yet.
I really am not sure how much the government owns the physical unit of currency. Sure, they can recall them, decide whether it is legal, make it devalue *oooh, they're good at that one* but I do not believe that they can prosecute you for doing anything to your money. It isn't illegal to burn your money. Or decide to melt down your pennies for the copper (well, at least, it wasn't when I did it...). Individual property ownership laws apply to any money you have in your possession. However, like you said, the government can decide if a coin is legal tender or not. I think what it boils down to is: if you intentionally mess with money, you are making it no longer money. So that's your loss, but the government isn't able to prosecute you for doing it.
But what I was saying is that for most applications (like web-browsing, office documents, whatever), there is no "special processor" that will speed things up tremendously. Even for graphics, for games and media, if the graphics card is leveraged correctly, that is a super-optimized special processor. So like I was saying, the majority of uses (data compression, speech and encryption are the only applications I've seen that can be improved. But that definitely does not mean that there aren't others) of a computer are already pretty well optimized.
I don't quite understand what you're saying. What is the problem? That Microsoft's stuff is, to use a technical term, shit? Well, for me, Apple does a better job with their Macs and Mac OS X. I also use linux extensively, and find that that is a very viable alternative to Windows. I just don't really get what you are trying to get across.
Which is why I say they have backed themselves into a corner in the next sentence. But I don't see why manufacturers would threaten to sue them if they dropped support for a piece of hardware. That's completely in their right to do so, especially if that piece of equipment is old, regardless of their monopoly status. Of course, the manufacturers could sue them, but its bound to be pointless litigation.
I agree with you. I can understand people wanting to throw whatever they want into a computer (or even building their own components or whatever), but what I was saying is that people want choices but how many do they actually want? Macs are customizable to an extent that captures some majority of the market. It's a tradeoff. You can't really have both exceptional quality and exceptional support. Apple has chosen to optimize for quality while Microsoft (to me) has tried to do both and has ended up mediocre in both instances.
Then there are Apple products which are intended for the braindead (but only those who have handlers smart enough to realize that the braindead are braindead) and work perfectly out of the box, and do it with a little bit of security in mind. Apple's products are something you don't need to be savvy to use, but are still more secure than Microsoft products.
And under Windows, I have never wondered why my hardware wouldn't get recognized. Or where the wireless network I was just on disappeared to. Or why the GUI decided it didn't want to be loaded anymore. Or any one of another hassles.
Then on Linux, I was routinely stymied by an inability to get a machine to boot at all. Or...well, really, that's the biggest problem I've had.
And then on OS X, I am often frustrated that programs written for UNIX operating systems don't compile even when all the libraries are installed and accounted for and I've hacked the config file for a half hour and found the function the configure script PROMISED me wasn't there.
Things break. Or don't work like they're supposed to. I really should have replied to the parent, but anybody who is complaining because something doesn't work flawlessly is no longer living in reality.
Your argument is kind of specious. Apple's job is easier because they made a decision: quality over customizability. Microsoft made the other decision. And it has led to products that are poor in quality, sometimes dreadfully so. You'd think that Microsoft would say "Enough is e-goddamn-nough already," and drop some legacy stuff; but they have gotten themselves into a hole with that and it looks like they won't be able to climb out unless they do drop some of those hardware configurations. What Apple did was say, "Well, it looks like most people want THIS kind of computer, so we will build one, and then make quality software that just works REALLY well with it." It was a business decision. My opinion (in case you haven't guessed) is that Apple's was the wiser one.
And if Apple was working on a x86 version of OS X since they started actively developing it, one could hardly say they would still be on PowerPC chips...
Physics simulations and image processing can be (and are) done on GPUs. Same for any hardcore math stuff, like Folding Proteins. The problem with the AMD approach is that there are only so many (and I don't think it is many, but I really don't know, so if you do, please let me know) different kinds of operations. Like I said, the physics simulations and image processing are the same type of problem and also conveniently tackled very proficiently by graphics hardware.
But these "application-specific processors" arent "processors for one application." They are processors that do a specific type of calculation; for instance, a TCP/IP stack implemented in hardware, or a physics unit, or a graphics chip. In order to make a web-browsing "chip," you would need a bunch of these specialized chips, which is why most applications/programs/binaries are run on a general processing unit. In terms of you not-so-bad car analogy, for a browser, you need a car that is a bus, and an off-roader and a commuter car (or whatever). It needs an "SUV" of a computer chip. So if you primarily use a computer for web browsing, then any CPU is going to be fine because browsers aren't computationally intensive (although if you use Firefox maybe grab some extra memory???); meanwhile, the gamer might like that physics coprocessor because that would speed up games that support the processor and the media guy might like an operating system that supports a lot of offloading of audio/video computations (*cough* OS X *cough*) to the graphics card AND a really nice graphics card. There already are specialized processors in a computer these days, but there are only so many processes that can be specialized simply*.
*Doubtlessly, this is what AMD is researching: trying to make everyday tasks into some special form that can be run through some super-extra-optimized pipeline...I am just unsure of how that can be done in some/a lot of cases.
Destroying legal tender (or, in fact, damaging it in any way) and then trying to pass it for legal tender is illegal. Destroying it is not, seeing as, in theory anyway, the United States is a free country and you can do what you want with what you own. And surprisingly, money is not owned by the Government. However, it is illegal to deface money and then try to use it (this was used to stop people from "clipping coins" back when they were actually something valuable...like silver or gold. Now, there's less point to it, but if copper and nickel keep getting more expensive, who knows?)
Point taken about the GPL. However, this license says nothing about playing the music, which is what musicians care about. They are free to freely download the music and even use it in performances they charge for. It sounds roughly analogous to the GPL (or maybe BSD license?) in that you can download for free and use it in stuff (i.e. musical concerts or recordings) that you charge money for, but do not need to pay royalties or anything on it. Music and software aren't the same so the one doesn't map conformally onto the other, but the basic idea is the same.
What about the analogue of "look and feel" patents in the analog (i.e. physical) world? Can you patent the design of something? Should you be able to? Yes.
I'm sure that whoever makes those nice cushion things on pens got a patent, and I'm sure that's part of the user interface that makes it nicer. The patent on it makes sure that whoever invents it can profit from their work inventing it. Should that be unpatentable? The reason patents were invented were to protect innovation and invention. That's still a good thing.
As a musician, let me tell you that music is not like software. This music is truly free because, well, you don't need to buy it. There is nothing in the license that says you cannot perform it; there is nothing in the license that says you cannot charge people to listen to your performance. For what it is, a publication of sheet music for free, it is an amazing thing because sheet music is usually a very expensive thing. Additionally, the editing house that produced this edition (Bärenreiter) is almost universally regarded as the best and is therefore the most expensive. The complete score for the Mozart requiem (something I use only because I need to pick one up) normally costs 120.00 euros. That is a fat wad of cash, and now something I don't need to spend.
This is intended for musicians who want to play or for teachers who want to use Mozart as examples in their class (instead of copying out of books, which is technically illegal, but widely done because how else are you going to conveniently give students something that they can look at and analyze and learn from?). In those cases, there would be no reason to need to download the whole thing or redistribute it. If you will accept the poor analogy, sheet music is like source code; when you learn is and perform it, it's like compiling it. Here, these people are giving out the source code, but they are making sure that the only place the source code is gotten from is their website. The license is no more onerous than the GPL; there are conditions that you must accept if you want to download and use it.
He stated that it had a hole discontinuity when he said that the limit existed even though the function was not defined at that point; they mean the same thing because each implies the other.
And one would proceed to analyze the functions with limits because the limit as x goes to zero of any number besides zero divided by x does not exist. But the limit as x goes to 0 of 0/x is 0, not NAN.
Yup. Although for that post, I should have included a quote from New Math...