The Computer And General Tech Thread - Software, Hardware, Questions, etc.

[Raphael]

I have a question about the point or pointlessness of getting an ssd for an older computer. It is generally known that ssds are faster than hdds. But, of course, they can't be faster than their connection to the motherboard. So, if the best hard drive connection my motherboard has is an old SATA 2 connection, would an ssd connected to it still be noticeably faster than an hdd?

HDD's are going to be slower one way or another

Thank you!

the only case I'd recommend to get an HDD is if the partition is going to be written to very frequently, as SSD's do wear out in a way that HDD's do not

That's something I don't really get - people generally seem to recommend putting your OS and software files on an SSD - but aren't those precisely the places that get written to really often?

[Travis B.]

the only case I'd recommend to get an HDD is if the partition is going to be written to very frequently, as SSD's do wear out in a way that HDD's do not

That's something I don't really get - people generally seem to recommend putting your OS and software files on an SSD - but aren't those precisely the places that get written to really often?

Other way around - you only infrequently update your OS and software files, whereas documents and swap are written frequently. Remember, reading from an SSD does not wear it out, and executing software typically does not write to the software being executed.

Also, the advantage of having your OS and your software on an SSD is that it will significantly speed up booting and loading software from disk.

[Zju]

My view of Rust is that it is the language C++ should be but isn't. That said, there are plenty of use cases where using C++ (or Rust) is pure insanity - they are just too complex and give you few benefits for very many things. Of course I think that there are better high-level languages than Python, such as Haskell, Scheme, and Juiia, as much as I liberally use Python at my day job.

Completely agreed with you on this.

In my view the best data science, as they call it, language out there today is Julia. You get all the benefits of a high-level language with the sheer performance of a low-level language, with a design meant specifically to cater to the people using Matlab today (and who used Fortran in the past) while not making any sacrifices design-wise (aside from the IMO unfortunate choice of one-indexed arrays, which of course is specifically because Matlab and Fortran used one-indexed arrays).

How adequate would Julia be to make, say, an SCA?

[Travis B.]

Completely agreed with you on this.

In my view the best data science, as they call it, language out there today is Julia. You get all the benefits of a high-level language with the sheer performance of a low-level language, with a design meant specifically to cater to the people using Matlab today (and who used Fortran in the past) while not making any sacrifices design-wise (aside from the IMO unfortunate choice of one-indexed arrays, which of course is specifically because Matlab and Fortran used one-indexed arrays).

How adequate would Julia be to make, say, an SCA?

Oh, Julia is an excellent choice for a general-purpose programming language - you could definitely write an SCA in it.

[alice]

It has a nice font, too.

[Travis B.]

It has a nice font, too.

The font would be better if it had a slashed zero! But aside from that, it looks quite nice.

[Raphael]

OK, wish me luck. Barring something unforeseen, I'm about to install my first SSD. I've already managed the first stage, that is, installing the SSD itself in the use-a-2.5-inch-hard-drive-in-a-3.5-inch-slot thingy. Now I "just" have to install that thingy in the slot inside my pc. That is, as far as the physical side of things is concerned. Afterwards, I still have to reinstall 2 different OSes, reinstall a large load of software, and copy a whole lot of files. All in all, I expect this to take me quite a while.

Oh, and here's a part of the assembly kit, with parts of some of my fingers for scale:

installationkit-1.jpg (237.02 KiB) Viewed 6977 times

I wouldn't have thought that screws and screwdrivers would be capable of looking cute, but these somehow do.

[sasasha]

I recently acquired an iMac G4 (from 2003) and got quite excited as (a) it still works and (b) it fits in my bedroom cupboard, so I can use it as a set workstation, which I've been wanting a while.

Now, said cupboard is a long way from my router, and the G4 has ethernet but no wireless support. However, I started using the database function of Appleworks and found it very intuitive and a great way to develop and present vocab for my Aretian language family. So I'm just going to keep at it, and try to find a way to get the database off at the end.

It runs OS X Tiger. I'm hoping I can get it to work with bradrn's conlanger's keyboard...

[Travis B.]

I recently acquired an iMac G4 (from 2003) and got quite excited as (a) it still works and (b) it fits in my bedroom cupboard, so I can use it as a set workstation, which I've been wanting a while.

Now, said cupboard is a long way from my router, and the G4 has ethernet but no wireless support. However, I started using the database function of Appleworks and found it very intuitive and a great way to develop and present vocab for my Aretian language family. So I'm just going to keep at it, and try to find a way to get the database off at the end.

It runs OS X Tiger. I'm hoping I can get it to work with bradrn's conlanger's keyboard...

That Mac is a PowerPC Mac (remember that Macs switched from PowerPC to Intel ages ago, and recently have switched from Intel to ARM), so you'll need find software that runs on PowerPC Macs, which is easier said than done.

[Raphael]

Good luck, sasasha!

OK, wish me luck. Barring something unforeseen, I'm about to install my first SSD. I've already managed the first stage, that is, installing the SSD itself in the use-a-2.5-inch-hard-drive-in-a-3.5-inch-slot thingy. Now I "just" have to install that thingy in the slot inside my pc. That is, as far as the physical side of things is concerned. Afterwards, I still have to reinstall 2 different OSes, reinstall a large load of software, and copy a whole lot of files. All in all, I expect this to take me quite a while.

And I'm mostly done. Still some stuff to do before it works as it did before again, but I plan to do that tomorrow. Phew. You're right, Travis - all kinds of small things work noticeably faster now.

[Raphael]

Does anyone have any idea what this is, or what it's supposed to be good for? It was a part of the mount-a-2.5-inch-HD-in-a-3.5-inch-slot kit, but it doesn't seem to be needed to use that kit. (Ruler for scale.)

weirdthingy.jpg (209.63 KiB) Viewed 6911 times

[Travis B.]

Does anyone have any idea what this is, or what it's supposed to be good for? It was a part of the mount-a-2.5-inch-HD-in-a-3.5-inch-slot kit, but it doesn't seem to be needed to use that kit. (Ruler for scale.)

That looks like it was attached at one point to a box for it to hang on a metal rod on a store shelf.

[Raphael]

That looks like it was attached at one point to a box for it to hang on a metal rod on a store shelf.

What was it doing in a product bought in and delivered by an online shop, then?

[Travis B.]

That looks like it was attached at one point to a box for it to hang on a metal rod on a store shelf.

What was it doing in a product bought in and delivered by an online shop, then?

It was probably meant to be attached to the product were it then placed in a brick-and-mortar store.

[alice]

It has a nice font, too.

The font would be better if it had a slashed zero! But aside from that, it looks quite nice.

On the subject of Julia, could you recommend a good book* which is thorough, reasonably complete, and recent, ideally less than a year old?

*i.e. something on the archaic medium of "paper", not something you have to switch something on to be able to read in the daytime.

[Travis B.]

It has a nice font, too.

The font would be better if it had a slashed zero! But aside from that, it looks quite nice.

On the subject of Julia, could you recommend a good book* which is thorough, reasonably complete, and recent, ideally less than a year old?

*i.e. something on the archaic medium of "paper", not something you have to switch something on to be able to read in the daytime.

I don't really have a specific book to recommend myself, but here's a bunch of reviews of different Julia books you might consider looking at.

[bradrn]

Unfortunately, you should be aware that the Julia ecosystem is very buggy. Julia looks like a good language in some ways, but this is stopping me from using it.

[Travis B.]

Unfortunately, you should be aware that the Julia ecosystem is very buggy. Julia looks like a good language in some ways, but this is stopping me from using it.

It definitely is true that the Julia ecosystem is less mature than some other ones, but it has a lot of potential (it seems to be the closest thing to a proper replacement for Fortran out there, and it can also replace Python and Matlab too).

[bradrn]

Unfortunately, you should be aware that the Julia ecosystem is very buggy. Julia looks like a good language in some ways, but this is stopping me from using it.

It definitely is true that the Julia ecosystem is less mature than some other ones, but it has a lot of potential (it seems to be the closest thing to a proper replacement for Fortran out there, and it can also replace Python and Matlab too).

Unfortunately, these problems seem pretty deeply embedded in how the Julia ecosystem is structured. The explanation in this article, which I’ve also heard elsewhere, is that Julia libraries rely pretty heavily on informal interfaces. (They can’t really be formalised since the type system doesn’t allow for it.) And of course that makes it really easy for different libraries to accidentally have slight inconsistencies in how they use and implement these interfaces, which causes these endless bugs.

Also: ‘a proper replacement for Fortran’ is hyperbolic. As a Forth person, it should make sense to you when I say that Fortran gets its speed from being fairly low-level. (And also a few design choices which allow for extra optimisation, e.g. disallowing pointer aliasing.) Julia has a very good JIT compiler, but it’s still a high-level language. You couldn’t, for instance, reimplement BLAS in Julia (to my knowledge).

As a replacement for Python and MATLAB (and R), sure, that’s what it’s designed for… as long as you don’t mind tracking down nasty correctness bugs every now and then.

[Travis B.]

Unfortunately, you should be aware that the Julia ecosystem is very buggy. Julia looks like a good language in some ways, but this is stopping me from using it.

It definitely is true that the Julia ecosystem is less mature than some other ones, but it has a lot of potential (it seems to be the closest thing to a proper replacement for Fortran out there, and it can also replace Python and Matlab too).

Unfortunately, these problems seem pretty deeply embedded in how the Julia ecosystem is structured. The explanation in this article, which I’ve also heard elsewhere, is that Julia libraries rely pretty heavily on informal interfaces. (They can’t really be formalised since the type system doesn’t allow for it.) And of course that makes it really easy for different libraries to accidentally have slight inconsistencies in how they use and implement these interfaces, which causes these endless bugs.

The thing is to me this seems to not be all too different from what you find in most high-level, dynamic languages (read: not Haskell or Agda). There is no special reason why Python would be more resistant to such issues aside from the fact that it's more mature than Julia.

Also: ‘a proper replacement for Fortran’ is hyperbolic. As a Forth person, it should make sense to you when I say that Fortran gets its speed from being fairly low-level. (And also a few design choices which allow for extra optimisation, e.g. disallowing pointer aliasing.) Julia has a very good JIT compiler, but it’s still a high-level language. You couldn’t, for instance, reimplement BLAS in Julia (to my knowledge).

Yes, practically nothing will completely replace Fortran, as Fortran is basically as fast as you can get, aside from assembly. And yes, just like with Python, you can call Fortran from Julia need be. The key thing, though, is that Julia is basically the fastest you will get out of a truly high-level, dynamic language without calling an external library, unlike, say, Python, where code in the immediate language one is developing in is dead slow outside of external libraries (e.g. NumPy, SciPy) written in Fortran or C.