Please ignore the subject line starting with "Go to Columnist Pate..."

On Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:31:21 -0700, nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu wrote:

> What my daughter said to my wife at dinner last night. We had just been
> upstairs working on the computer. I was playing a CD (Don Giovanni,
> Mozart) while uploading some photos to snapfish to get prints my wife
> wanted. The upload was going slowly when my daughter came in, so we
> switched to gthumb to look at the photos in our gallery (mostly of her).
> I pointed out that the computer was doing 3 things at once. Later we
> opened up openoffice and she wrote a story. She was proud that she knew
> which words have "e" on the end and which ones don't. She is still
> learning how to use the mouse---double clicking is hard for her.
>
> I open up Thunderbird mail client and Firefox every morning when I go to
> work. Been doing this for years now. Often have openoffice open at the
> same time, as well as other apps. For me that is typically TeX/LaTeX,
> ghostview, gcc, xemacs, Adobe acroread, and software that I wrote
> myself.
>
> I love having the four desktops I can switch among. I really miss that
> when I use my Mac.
>
> All on Linux. Never had a crash/freeze/lock-up because of too many
> apps. It will no doubt happen if you try this with too little RAM, I'd
> recommend at least 512MB. Modern Linux distros should work well with
> this amount RAM. I don't think Vista does.

Actually, unless you have more than one processor, it only does one thing
at a time - it simply rotates among them very quickly. A computer is
nothing but a fast idiot - does exactly what it is told.

nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu wrote:
> Please ignore the subject line starting with "Go to Columnist Pate..."

ray espoused:
> On Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:31:21 -0700, nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu wrote:
>
>> What my daughter said to my wife at dinner last night. We had just been
>> upstairs working on the computer. I was playing a CD (Don Giovanni,
>> Mozart) while uploading some photos to snapfish to get prints my wife
>> wanted. The upload was going slowly when my daughter came in, so we
>> switched to gthumb to look at the photos in our gallery (mostly of her).
>> I pointed out that the computer was doing 3 things at once. Later we
>> opened up openoffice and she wrote a story. She was proud that she knew
>> which words have "e" on the end and which ones don't. She is still
>> learning how to use the mouse---double clicking is hard for her.
>>
>> I open up Thunderbird mail client and Firefox every morning when I go to
>> work. Been doing this for years now. Often have openoffice open at the
>> same time, as well as other apps. For me that is typically TeX/LaTeX,
>> ghostview, gcc, xemacs, Adobe acroread, and software that I wrote
>> myself.
>>
>> I love having the four desktops I can switch among. I really miss that
>> when I use my Mac.
>>
>> All on Linux. Never had a crash/freeze/lock-up because of too many
>> apps. It will no doubt happen if you try this with too little RAM, I'd
>> recommend at least 512MB. Modern Linux distros should work well with
>> this amount RAM. I don't think Vista does.
>
> Actually, unless you have more than one processor, it only does one thing
> at a time - it simply rotates among them very quickly. A computer is
> nothing but a fast idiot - does exactly what it is told.

The computer is rather more than the processor, though, and therefore,
the analogy is, to my mind, quite correct. Although the processor might
only do one operation per cycle, the operating system, if it's something
like Linux, can handle multiple tasks at the same time, because it knows
how to manage the system resources in order to do this. The fact that
the resources are being shared is not a major issue for the user here,
and certainly not something a young child would be likely to either
understand or even care very much about.

This whole debate is really centered on what you mean by "thing" versus
what the child meant by "thing". I rather doubt she was considering
memory reads or add with carry, say...

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