December 28, 2008
Walter Bright wrote:
> John Reimer wrote:
>> Wired is not necessarily backwards. :)  Despite the tangly lines, it's just easier to keep secure.
> 
> There are more reasons to like wireds. Plug the wire in, and it works, you're up on the LAN. With wireless, there's usually 3-5 minutes of fiddling to get connected. And if it won't connect, you have no idea why, so you go cold boot the machine, cold boot the wireless access point, hold the antenna up, etc. Phui.
> 
> Don't tell me this is fixed, either. I just got a brand new eee pc. Plug in the wire, boom, perfection. Use the built in wireless, and fiddle, faddle, cold boot, faddle, fiddle, cold boot, fiddle, faddle, ah, now it's working. This is in the *AS SHIPPED* configuration, not something I downloaded or installed.

Got to say, Linux's #1 drawback is lack of solid wireless support. It can get very, very unnerving. Particularly because of the chicken-and-egg thing: you install Linux and you want to get the wifi working, but you can't download the appropriate driver because you can't connect. Then the default network-manager is really crappy. My Linux experience improved considerably when I found a drop-in replacement called wicd (http://wicd.sf.net).

Andrei
December 28, 2008
Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote in message news:gj7591$2tec$1@digitalmars.com...
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> "Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote in message news:gj6mds$28iv$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>> Ah ha, there's that usual "if you go and buy a PC" catch. Which begs the question, why would I? My existing system does everything I need it to do perfectly fine. And since I'm not petty enough to allow anyone to shame me into buying a new system just by calling my *current* system "legacy", that leaves no real reason for me to buy a new one.
>>>> I agree that often there is little incentive to upgrade. In particular incentive can be negative when it comes to Vista vs. XP.
>>>>
>>> I'm incredibly jealous of how Vista only highlights the filename (minus suffix) when you go to rename a file. I *really* want that. But yea, that alone isn't enough to balance out the reasons against upgrading.
>>>
>>>> [snip]
>>>>>> so supporting 64bit is just supporting the current technology. it's not about fancy servers or anything like that, just supporting the current standards. that's a minimun that should be expected from any compiler implementation nowadays.
>>>>>> b) even though for now there is a compatability mode in most OSes, why would I want to limit the performance and abilities of my PC to old technology which is being faded away?
>>>>>>
>>>>> Even in 32-bit "legacy" mode, 64-bit systems are absurdly fast anyway.
>>>> Talk about adding insult to injury. This is a rather random statement to make. Really, browsing the Web, writing documents, or writing emails is all you want from a computer? I'd say, until computers are not at least potentially capable of doing most intellectual tasks that people do, we're not in the position to say that computers are fast enough. When seen from that perspective, computers are absurdly slow and scarce in resources. The human brain's capacity bypasses our largest systems by a few orders of magnitude, and if we want to claim doing anything close, we should at least have that capacity. But even way, way before that, any NLP or speech recognition system that does anything interesting needs days, weeks, or months to train on computer clusters, when it all should run in real time. Please understand that from that perspective the claim that computers are plenty fast and memory is plenty large is rather shortsighted.
>>>>
>>> When a reasonably-priced computer comes around that can actually do those sorts of things, I may very well be finally enticed to upgrade. But like you said, as it stands right now, even the high-end stuff can't do it. So it's really a non-issue for now.
>> I don't understand. This is like a reply to another thread. This anyone would agree with. I agree that for your current computing work and perceived needs you don't feel about upgrading your hardware. I mean, what's really there to disagree. But that has nothing to do with the generalizations aired before a la "64-bit systems are absurdly fast anyway" or that there's no need for 64-bit. To write software that tackles hard problems one really needs the fastest hardware one's budget can buy. I can't understand what you say except in the frame that you indiscriminately assume that everybody else has your wants and needs from a computer (and consequently is a snob for getting a relatively fast one). Really that's a rather... unsophisticated world view to go by. I'm even amazed I need to spell this out.
>>
> 
> You didn't need to spell it out, you just needed to pay more attention to what I've said, as you appear to have misunderstood much of it.  I've flat out said a number of times by now that, yes, there are legitimate uses for 64-bit. Heck even my original post regarding 64-bit indicated as much ("What are you writing, video editors and 3D modeling apps?"). What I *have* been saying is that #1 **I** am not currently interested in 64-bit, and #2 I feel there are too many people out there that only *think* they need it, and even worse, expect that everyone else should also be jumping head-first into 64-bit just because it's there. (Note again, that in that previous sentence, I did *not* indicate that "no one" has a need for 64-bit).
> 
> Nowhere have I ever said that 64-bit is and forever will be useless for everyone. Please stop coloring my comments in that light.

As usual, we're in better agreement with your much more mellow follow-ups. It's hard to not misunderstand you (ahem) when there's no effort in qualifying the statements I've been commenting about. You have to admit that ``Even in 32-bit "legacy" mode, 64-bit systems are absurdly fast anyway'' is pretty much hard to misunderstand, no matter how much attention one pays. I mean, that's not going to be implicitly qualified with "for my needs". And particularly because it's followed by ``I mean, what's the slowest 64-bit x86 out there? A chip that's still pretty damn fast, that's what.'' I guess if I paid attention I would've read the "...to me" appendage. I'd say you have no case, which happens to me rather often; what I do is to simply admit I exaggerated and move on, even though I know deep inside that with the qualifications that I meant and with the nuances that were lost, I was more right than wrong.

Well I'm not going to continue this asinine "but you said this"/"but I didn't mean that" exchange as it's a waste of your time and mine, to say nothing about that Christmas spirit.


Andrei
December 28, 2008
Sean Kelly wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> - Graphics card that's pixel shader v1 (was a pre-pixel-shader GeForceMX 2 for a long time, only upgraded because I found this one for about $40 and wanted to play around with pixel shaders).
>>
>> I don't have a graphics card because of heat/fan/noise.
> 
> It's possible to get a GeForce 6800 with a passive cooler (heatsink) instead of a fan.  I bet you can get a newer one as well, though you may have to opt for the "mobile" version.  Either way, I've got an 8800 with a fan right now but it's really very quiet--it pays to read reviews that discuss noise levels of various brands.

My EVGA 7200GS/256MB has no active cooler either. Truth be told, it gets as hot as a cheerleader. I hasten to say that I wasn't really needing the video performance... but it was free after rebate :o).

Andrei
December 28, 2008
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Well I'm not going to continue this asinine "but you said this"/"but I didn't mean that" exchange as it's a waste of your time and mine, to say nothing about that Christmas spirit.

On Christmas day you can't get sore. Your fellow man you must adore. There's time to rob him all the more the other 364.
December 28, 2008
Michel Fortin wrote:
> On 2008-12-27 15:45:58 -0500, Walter Bright <newshound1@digitalmars.com> said:
> 
>> Michel Fortin wrote:
>>> (Not that I expect to see DMD generate PowerPC code in a near future.)
>>
>> There was a ppc code generator at one time, but it got lost.
> 
> What do you mean, lost?

The source code was lost. (I didn't write it.)


> Any chance of it being resurected? Even if it generates suboptimal code, it'd be great to have something that works.


December 28, 2008
== Quote from Nick Sabalausky (a@a.a)'s article
 But, yes, obviously there are going to be fringe-case
> exceptions even with this, such as researchers writing custom DNA-processing code that's only ever going to run on their super-duper-cluster.)

I'm one of these researchers, and it would make my life a heck of a lot easier if I could fit the entire human genome in my address space.  I don't do that much sequence analysis, or lack of 64-bit would be a deal-breaker for D.  I mostly do microarray analysis, which usually fits much better in 32-bit address space, unless I start doing things like pairwise analysis among probes (some machine learning techniques require this).  However, once in a while when my research does take a turn into genome sequence land, the 2-gig address space limit feels like a HUGE artificial limitation.

The alternative is to switch to nematode genomics, as their genome could have fit into my old Pentium II's RAM.
December 28, 2008
> I'm incredibly jealous of how Vista only highlights the filename (minus suffix) when you go to rename a file. I *really* want that.

So does thunar :)
December 28, 2008
John Reimer wrote:
> Hello Nick,
> 
...
> 
>> One other funny anecdote about "newer/trendier is not always better": I've been recruited by a friend of my mom to replace/supplement her small business's wireless network with a wired one.
>>
>> And now I'll stop rambling ;)
>>
> 
> 
> Wired is not necessarily backwards. :)  Despite the tangly lines, it's just easier to keep secure.
> 
> -JJR
> 
> 

Yeah.  It's a tradeoff.  I use both wired and wireless.  They complement each other nicely.  In an ideal setup both are available.

Whenever I run into someone who says something to the effect that wireless is superior and makes wired connections unnecessary, I get a little angry.  I hold it back of course, and realize that I should just pity them their ignorance.  If I have time and it's appropriate, I'll calmly explain why they are wrong ;)
December 29, 2008
Brian wrote:
>> I'm incredibly jealous of how Vista only highlights the filename (minus
>> suffix) when you go to rename a file. I *really* want that. 
> 
> So does thunar :)

Konqueror, too. But of course that would be too little a reason to make the switcharoo.

Andrei
December 29, 2008
Hello Nick,

> I'm incredibly jealous of how Vista only highlights the filename
> (minus suffix) when you go to rename a file. I *really* want that. But
> yea, that alone isn't enough to balance out the reasons against
> upgrading.

I can recommend ExplorerXP for this: http://www.explorerxp.com/

Try renaming multiple files, it's like search and replace.