Installation

[BetterRed]

@hidden.platypus - SSD v HDD performance difference is like a Ferrari 458 Spider v Mack truck, an Intel 486 v an Intel i5, or if your old enough to remember - mercury delay line v magnetic core memory

They're also quieter which can be important if you're audio editing.

BR

[theducks]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@hidden.platypus - SSD v HDD performance difference is like a Ferrari 458 Spider v Mack truck, an Intel 486 v an Intel i5, or if your old enough to remember - mercury delay line v magnetic core memory

They're also quieter which can be important if you're audio editing.

BR

In core we trust
flick-flick-flick-flick- Deposit (PDP-8L, 8E and PDP-16)

[hidden.platypus]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

It's not, because of only one thing: you do stuff the Apple way, or you don't do them. That's the only argument I need for not buying an Apple computer.

@Katsunami: Just so. As I said before, I want my computer to do precisely what I tell it even when I don't know what I'm talking about. At least then when I know better I only have one level of ignorance to surmount. I once tried to move an mp3 that belonged to me from my computer to a friend's iPhone. That was enough validation for me that in the PC v. Apple wars I'd not sided with the forces of darkness (or at least tyrannical ineptitude which in all honesty might actually be worse.)

Originally Posted by Katsunami

[Y]ou could read the Otori series, by Lian Hearn, starting with "Across the Nightingale Floor."

Thank you for that. I'll try to get myself a copy.

Originally Posted by Katsunami

If you are into fantasy a bit and don't shy away from novels categorized as Young Adult...

I have no problem with YA books. Anything written well tends to transcend genre. I have a serious issue with YA movies (oh how I hate that my daughter loves them--if I have to watch another Hunger/Divergent anything. . .and I will. . . oh I'm sure I will ) but I have issues with most of the garbage Hollywood puts out so that's not saying much. I don't mind the storylines, but why do they find it so difficult to make their stories at least internally consistent?

Spoiler:

Ok the greatest general (greatest military strategist, highly trained in hand to hand combat, tactics, planning, protracted campaigns, world colonization--has successfully led the charge to annex worlds, and just the other day proved he was sufficiently politically astute to successfully lead a coup and usurp the highest office in the land) comes to Earth, ostensibly to capture a combat neophyte; and he doesn't come alone comes with trusted members of his army; and just coming to Earth grants him super powers; and somehow fails to scout or recon? And the alien who has pledged to protect the people of his adopted planet fails to consult the all seeing/all knowing computer intelligence that personally, and professionally knew the general until after a half of the Earth's population has already been destroyed? Really?

However, I have no problem telling people that the Harry Potter series is one of the best orderly organized series of words written in the English language since apes began scratching scribbles into paper.

This from a person who lists A Prayer for Owen Meany and Of Human Bondage among my favorite books .

I like to tell the story that I was introduced to JK Rowling (after I'd turned up my nose at her for at least 4 years by that time) by one of the most intelligent people I've ever met in my life. A gentleman who happens to weigh just slightly south of 300 lbs and needs to duck each time he walks through a normal heighth doorway.

Harry Potter is wonderful he said, after you get past the first two books. The first two are a little juvenile he said. And he said it in a sort of guilty/bashful way, you know? But when a giant says things guiltily somehow he also communicates that you'd best keep your mouth shut if you know what's good for you. It may be the towering over you thing. He also happened to be serving a triple life sentence at the time...well is still serving the sentence now to the best of my knowledge--each life sentence a consequence of each of his three "bodies" as he would put it.

Spoiler:

And when I say most intelligent person I ever knew: A) I'm certain that had he not wished to be incarcerated, he could very easily have avoided it (the only evidence at trial was his full confession volunteered when he turned up at the police station and advised them he had committed the murders. As an aside he only reluctantly went to trial because the DA sought public office and apparently believed that the best vehicle with which to announce his self-nominating candidacy was a very public, very loud, high profile death penalty trial--a bit of hubris the jury rewarded him for by rendering not-guilty verdicts on all the greater offences) 2) he taught himself to program in C++ and Visual Basic in prison without the aid of a computer--as in with pen and notebook. He later lobbied the prison system to allow inmates to attend computer classes, and persuaded them to install computers for that very purpose but that's another story.

[hidden.platypus]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

...SSD v HDD performance difference is like, [] if your old enough to remember - mercury delay line v magnetic core memory

@BetterRed
No. Not old enough to remember the mercury delay line.

I came into being, as it were, in the MS-DOS 3.0 days and fondly recall the almost uncontainable EXCITEMENT of booting up the machine with 5 1/4 drives and then removing the boot disk and inserting another disk to use OS functions and air conditioning being absolutely integral to the proper running of a computer. If I remember correctly at one point 5 1/4 drives had a larger capacity than 3.5 drives. And the arguments that ensued when it was announced that 3 1/2 inch drives would hold more than 720 kb.

What do you mean it has more than a megabyte on it? On one disk? A 3 1/2 inch disk? Are you sure? Is it the same size? What you're saying makes no sense. More than a megabyte? I don't even think that's possible.

And how scared everyone was that computers weren't going to be able to read the new "increased capacity" floppy drives. And how you could buy the wrong disk. That is a disk that would fit into a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive slot but your computer would be unable to read it.

To this day my e-reader displays text in florescent green because I'm most comfortable with that color.

I remember a world where people who used computers didn't say weird things like "gooey" and you had to be able to read (and count) in order to be able to use a computer and by extension the internet. And when I'm being honest I lament that this is no longer the case. If only we still had dial-up log ons to protect us from the unwashed.

I harbor a pet hypothesis that the fatter pipes allowing for transmission of video and image display (and oh that ungodly abomination once known as Flash ) literally ruined the internet, and presaged its destruction and harbor a grudge against Facebook that prevents me from ever having an account for related reasons.


Maybe WiFi or some long-range iteration will save us.

Remember when people on the internet were weird so nobody used it to try to sell us things? When people couldn't understand why you would build a website, or a database, or help someone do so?

A: You're not even getting paid for it.
B: What's wrong with that?

My daughter once asked me why I can type so fast and I explained that at one time you had to be able to type at a certain speed or you'd get left out of the conversation. She blanched as she realized that there was a time when you couldn't "just talk" to other people because there wasn't any universal audio transmission protocol. She was also suitably mortified when I explained that once computers didn't convert a colon and a closed parentheses into a hi-res pac-man (but everyone still understood what it meant), and people argued about whether using a semi-colon and a closed parentheses was a heretical violation of protocol not quite along the lines of shooting someone the bird, but certainly frowned upon.

I also tried to explain the concept of chat-rooms to her but I could see she didn't understand, but that also could have been that she was still recovering from my having just explained that at one time you had to "sign off" from the internet and prior to e-mail there wasn't any real reliable way to know if you'd be able to chat with your friends (aka the people you were talking to yesterday) and you might actually have to use a phone to coordinate everyone logging on to the same server because sometimes servers were full, or offline, or the program automatically placed you in a server that none of your friends were on. She heard nothing after "before e-mail". It's like I said before people had electricity. Her brain apparently wont allow her to accept a world before what, in her mind, is a hopelessly outmoded technology but apparently ubiquitous enough that she can't imagine the world without it. I might as well had said "before we drank water out of cups and glasses." What? So what did you do then Dad? Use your hands?

I remember the amount of anxiety I used to feel when one of my hundreds of something everybody called floppies even though they weren't came up missing because the label indicated that I'd spanned a zip file across 4 of them. I remember robust debates about taking floppies through airport security because the metal detector might ruin them. And having that happen to me and being unable to convince people that was indeed the case.

I remember the absolute wonder of holding something that held one gigabyte in your hand, and saving feverishly to buy a Jazz drive. I remember when the thing I wanted most in the world was basically a CD player that could read and play mp3s burned on CD-RW.

Now I don't even know how much space I have. With the thumb drives, and tablets, and smartphones, and self-powered USB external drives (I remember when that was impossible! Crazy, I tell you. Crazy! What do you mean that you can have enough power coming out of a universal connector to power a hard-drive. Do you have any idea how much power you would neeeeed?)

But nothing before that. I'm still a baby compared to you and @theducks.