Look buddy, I don't doubt that there are PCIe cards that are useful to professionals. What I doubted was the desire to hook them up to a laptop. This post happily provided one example, so I clearly stand corrected. I still don't buy your premise that Macbook Pros with external boxes for these sorts of things are going to be common.
Just so you know, the second link in your list shows a (non-PCIe card, but rather meant-to-be-external) device available with either a Thunderbolt or USB3.0 interface. There is still a Thunderbolt-only device there too that looks to be the higher-end device, and obviously there's the PCIe card version (which is clearly targeted at non-external use given their external device offerings, btw). But doesn't this demonstrate that USB3.0 *can* solve at least some of these more niche use cases, and thus there *is* overlap with/thread to Thunderbolt?
Why buy a desktop when you can simply plug the PCI-E cards straight into your laptop?
What PCIe cards are you plugging in again? Graphics cards? You still have yet to demonstrate that it is not a novelty. I have never seen a CAD setup like that. Nor have I heard of a gaming rig that uses a laptop CPU but has an external graphics box. Maybe you're right and it will be all the rage in CAD houses.
And if you're a pro with a desktop, and you run out of PCI-E slots
You're kidding, right?
A lot of pros are adopting Thunderbolt because it allows them to use the devices that used to require a desktop quickly and easily with a laptop, and they can reduce their machine count by one.
What devices are these? Still graphics cards?
That was an example to demonstrate the fallacy of your question. You can't use anything other than positive natural numbers (i.e. {1,2,3,4,...}) to enumerate a number of something like a "number of parts". Zero "parts" doesn't make any sense. You haven't shown anything generally wrong with dividing by zero in the real world, you've just shown a problem with your own question.
Did you read the rest of the post?
Nah, you've got a couple problems in your example.
First, your exact real-world problem doesn't make sense with a divisor that is less than one, which is how you get close to zero. Five dollars divided into 0.5 parts? What does that even mean?
Now let's flip around your real world example to something that makes sense. Five dollars divided into how many parts, where each part gets $0.50? 5/0.50 = 10 parts. Five dollars divided into how many parts, where each part gets 0.0000001? 50000000. Five dollars divided into how many parts, where each part gets 0? Infinity.
People generally can't feel temperature differences that fine over their whole bodies. For purposes of weather, Celsius units are closer to what people can actually feel.
I think setting the dynamic range of 0-100 based on human extremes (see below) is fine, but I don't think this is an important point really. Both scales have to have finer granularity than "cold, medium, and hot" and they do.
Only because that's what they're used to. In other measurements, what's "normal" isn't going to be 0-100, and people are used to handling them all the time.
One comment on this before we get to your examples. You can't look at averages, because they aren't meaningful - you have to look at the range, so mean+variance+std deviations. Basically, you look at what the likely numbers that people are going to use.
- What's a fast and a slow driving speed? Is it in units of 0-100?
As a matter of fact, yes. 0 is not moving and numbers near it are slow, 100 mph is "really fast" (using the terminology from the original picture I linked). If you're measuring in km/h, you have the same problem as Celsius where the scale isn't nicely correlated to normal human activity
- What's an average range for human height? Is it in units of 0-100?
Human height doesn't change all that much, and really only changes for about 20 years out of a lifespan of ~80. (Hey, notice how lifespans are also good with 0-100? 0 is really young, 100 is really old)
I guess I have to concede your point though. The scale can be arbitrary and people will get used to it. That doesn't mean that one scale itself is superior or inferior.
Fahrenheit was just retrofitted to it later to be defined by it based on 32 & 212 degrees to make the original, almost completely arbitrary scale have some logical basis. (It was originally based on chilled brine and human body temperature.)
That's exactly my point (no one figured out why Fahrenheit works out this way until you said it just now). Human body temperature being 100 on the scale sets the scale to something that humans have intrinsic experience with. Obviously not human body temperature directly, but outside weather temperature which is related to human body temperature by virtue of evolution giving us a body temperature that tolerates those outside temperatures. On the low end, Fahrenheit used a freezing point of something lower than water, probably something he considered "really cold". My point being, he set the 0-100 range of his scale to extremes that humanes were reasonably likely to encounter. Just judging by that for human use (ignoring all the other SI benefits), I think this makes it a superior scale to Celsius.
Only if you have an integer fetish.
Most people do.
Furthermore, somehow 95% of the world somehow seems to exist just fine without Fahrenheit so the integer granularity advantage you are touting seems to be of dubious value. You also seem to be discounting the benefit of being able to communicate with 95% of the world without using a conversion chart.
If converting units is so trivial (as many, many people on this thread point out), you should have no trouble communicating with anyone using Fahrenheit.
Why is 0-100 a significant number instead of, say, 0-32?
0-100 allows for finer granularity of temperature representation without resorting to fractions or decimals, which, while simple enough, are more cumbersome than integers for the average person to deal with. 0-100 also is a natural measure of "low" and "high", not the least of which is because we use percentages all the time which are based on a 0-100 scale. For people who have experience rebasing their definitions of low and high (like math-oriented people), it doesn't matter. For the average person, it does.
Instead of saying, "I'm 80% of the way to freaking hot today," you can say, "I'm 7/8 of the of way to hot today." Wouldn't that be just as nice?
No. 8ths are harder to deal with than 100ths.
We experience temperature more like a street address that we happen to be on -- it's nice here and maybe a little less nice "further down the block." We don't mathematically weigh a 9 point temperature difference so much as recall from experience what that feels like. For telling how comfortable temperature is, the units don't matter at all so long as they can be related to past experience.
I definitely agree with you there. I'm used to Fahrenheit temperature so I know that 70 degrees F is comfortable and 90 degrees F is hot. If I were used to Celsius then I'd be comfortable with its numbers, sure.
In that respect Fahrenheit has no advantages over Celsius except the familiarity of its defenders with it.
I hope you realize that your same argument applies to Celsius as well.
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
