A hard drive is magnetic tape-like permanent memory, RAM
is temporary memory comprised of transistor turned on or off.
P.S.
You can always take the lid off and point.
>> And to make matters worse, next year Bill Gates will come out with a Windows version that blends the two even closer, so you won’t have to tell the difference or be able to without some hacking. He already has done this a little, with virtual memory.
Sorry to disappoint you but Bill Gates did not invent virtual memory which existed before Mr Gates knew anything about computers.
I agree with Chief Crunch.
The thread is elitist.
I am a cabinetmaker. Often I will meet new people who haven’t got the faintest idea how their funiture was built, or what the names of the different joints used are. When I do something for them, they are usually too unschooled in the trade to even realize the nature of the solution. Mildly frustrating when the solution is an elegant one, but that’s okay. I’m the proffesional there to help the layman. That’s how it works.
Realize this people!
Yes, but a computer is not a cabinet, or a toaster, or anything like that. It’s an incredibly complicated piece of equipment that can have thousands of things go wrong with it at any time. Taking a little time and educating yourself towards its use once you have it will help in future endeavors. I don’t care if people know the names for things, but expecting to just be able to go out and buy a computer and not have any idea how it works is just ridiculous.
But I will not refer to a dado as a dowel or suggest that you need to plane down the phillips screws on my dovetail.
If I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, I will not annoy you by pretending that I do.
And BTW, I consider your skills a lot more skilled than mine.
But the difference that you - and Chief Crunch - are missing is that people often don’t have to build or do serious maintenance on their own cabinets. Further, you don’t get people telling you how they think a cabinet should be built.
This thread isn’t talking about people who don’t know a doohickey from a whatsit… it’s referring to people who think they know, and are just plain wrong.
There’s a difference between not knowing and having incorrect information.
“Elitist”… ::snort:: Calling someone “elitist” is a brand of elitism all of its own.
I think it’s funny when someone refers to the hard drive as a “fixed disk”. Microsoft still doggedly uses this term in their documentation and has caused thousands of people to be instantly identified as computer illiterates when they use the term in conversation.
You can check out TechTales for hundreds of these stories, too.
As for the OP, I have never run into those unfortunate people YET… not to say I know eveything about computers (I don’t, and freely admit this), but aren’t there some things that you should know? No, I’m not being elitist, either… I have no pretensions in that direction.
Careful here. There are firmware programs and even hardware programs. The former is in the BIOS and the latter is burnt (permanently) into the CPU. I believe that modern Intel chips are actually some sort of general purpose chips that are programmed in what is called microcode by actually burning out connects.
Although drive space is not the same thing as random access memory, it IS memory. And I suspect that html has macros and that writing macros is programming. Certainly, the markup language that I use virtually every day is, among other things, a very high level programming language. I assume the same is true of html.
I know just enough about computers to get me in trouble and yet I am constantly amazed by how much less other people know.
Still, I remain unimpressed by those self professed “computer whiz kids/geeks” who think they are too cool for the room and try to impress me with their stats.
You know the ones who say “I’ve got a P2 with a 10 gig hd and 64 of RAM” and I’m supposed to be impressed or something. Please.
Now my P3, 50 gig hd with 256 RAM, that’s impressive.
No. I said exactly what I meant.
Software and programs are synonymous. Either designates a collection of instructions that may be executed by a processor. Software (or programs) that are permanently “burnt” into a device can be called the special name, firmware. It is still software (or a program), period. There are chips called Programmable Gate Arrays (PGAs), that begin life generically and have their function defined later. Intel processors do not use this technology. PGAs are generally used for prototyping or very low volume production.
Hard drives are not memory. Memory, by definition can be directly addressed by the CPU. You can shuffle stuff out of memory to the hard drive to free up space. This is what “virtual memory” is. But, that is not memory. You can shuffle a stack of papers off your desktop into a filing cabinet to make room on your desk to work, but that does not make a filing cabinet a desktop. If you can do an assembly language command that will directly load the contents of whatever it is, directly into a CPU register, it is probably memory. If not, it isn’t memory. Note, my defintion freely allows someone to classify the bios or other roms to be considered as memory.
I specifically mentioned the two common “macro” languages, in my post. These are properly called scripting languages. They are, specifically, java script and visual basic script. Yes, I would agree that using one of those could be considered programming. Base HTML is not a programming language. There is no honest way to parse it, that it would be consider such. However, when people are learning jscript or vbscript, it is usually a separate learning process from HTML and the person would say they are learning jscript or vbscript.
scotth:
Sorry, but I’ve seen hard disk referred to as memory in books on computer architecture. While they aren’t RAM, they are memory (I’m looking at a book called Computer Architecture by Mueller and Paul that says so). And I’ve never heard of the definition that memory has to be directly accessible by the processor.
Moreover, I’m gonna have to say that HTML is a programming language. It’s not imperative or Turing-complete, but it is a way of specifying what you want the computer to do.
Appearently that book sucks, or maybe it only has that one error. If a hard drive (or floppy disc, magnetic tape, punch card, etc) is called memory, it should at least have some type of modifier term such as “external” or “long term”. More properly, the term storage would be combined with one of those modifiers.
HTML, as I am sure you are aware, stands for Hypertext Markup Language. That very accurate describes what it is. It is a Markup (or document description) language. It is not a programming language.
You use HTML to describe a document.
On HTML, I will make it clearer.
Infomation in a computer falls into two categories. Instructions and data.
HTML clearly falls into the class of data. Programming is generating instructions. Instructions are used to process data.
While the data can influence what will happen when a computer is running, that does not make it a program. HTML is a type of data.
If writing HTML is programming, so is entering data in Quickbooks. Both equally specifiy “what you want the computer to do.”
Nope, memory is memory. That isn’t the only book that I’ve seen this in (in fact, I’ve never seen one that didn’t include the cache and permanent storage as memory). Memory is anything that stores bits when they’re not in the processor. And actually, I’m not entirely sure that RAM is directly accessible from the processor–I think there’s a memory controller that serves as an intermediate level.
As for HTML as a programming language, why can’t I consider <b> to be the instruction “Make the text bold from here on out”? That’s a valid interpretation of it. Moreover, on the processor level, there’s no difference between data and instructions–that’s an artificial division we insert to understand our programs, but I’ve written machine level code which required a block of memory to be treated as data and an instruction.
Furthermore, I don’t think that anyone disputes that Prolog is a programming language, and it contains no instructions, only rules. Not every programming language deals with sequential lists of statements and variable assignments. LIke I said, HTML is not Turing-complete, but it is a programming language.
The difference between HTML and entering data in Quickbooks is that the latter requires user input, whereas the former consists of writing a file that will be interpreted as instructions later on.
From the stand point of the processor, RAM is pretty much directly accessible. But, if you wanna call external storage memory, I guess I can’t stop ya.
This is completely wrong. There is a HUGE distinction at the processor level between data and instruction. The difference is between the instruction and the operand. HTML will never, ever, ever be converted to an instruction. It will be purely used as operands when processed by executing the instructions that make up the web browser program. If you have written machine language, you should know that you can move instructions around like data, but once you point the program counter at it, there is a difference.
I’ve done projects in prolog as well. Agreed the language syntax in unusual, but it will generate instructions.
First, you can create an HTML document without writing it by hand. Would you call that programming? I wouldn’t. Do you count writing a paper in Word programming? No, you probably call it entering data. Did you know you can create a valid Word document by hand, without word? It sucks, because it is stored in a binary format rather than plain text, but it is doable. Is that programming? I can’t bring myself to call it that.
When you are writing HTML, even by hand you are just entering data. HTML will not be interpreted as instruction later on. The browser program treats it as a data file, just as word treats a word document as a data file.
Why should someone have to know how a computer operates to use it? Do you know exactly how a microwave works?
Sorry, I’m a layman. In layman’s terms, why is HTML not a programming language?
yacc lets you generate code to parse another language. Maple (a popular mathematical software suite) will generate C code to describe any object you’ve defined in there. Does that make C less of a language? HTML generates instructions, in the same way that an interpreted language like perl does. What’s the difference?
The processor treats data and instructions differently, but there’s no inherent difference between the two. Rather, it’s what you do with them.
Prolog code is also treated as data, not instructions (it’s interpreted, I believe), but everyone calls that a programming language.
Anyway, if we want to continue discussing this, we should start another thread.
So some of us are computer illiterate. We all have to start some where.
Computers are confusing for those new to them. So we know we want a computer when we go to the store. Most of us know that we want to run games or a certain program. So we don’t know the details of what we need. That’s why we are in the store to figure out what we need.
When I ordered mine, I just knew I wanted to run graphic intensive programs and some games. Oh, and be able to connect to the internet.
We don’t deserve to be slapped over the lack of knowledge. We’ll get our computers home and turn it on. Roll our eyes when it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Say a few curse words (yes, I have cursed mine many times and I’m not completely computer illiterate.) But eventually, we’ll figure it out or find someone to help us figure it out.
Give us a chance to learn. You can’t tell me that you all knew everything you do about computers to start with.