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25 Years Old and an Offshore IT Manager
dcblogs writes "The Chinese outsourcing market, at $1.7 billion last year, is growing at 38% a year, according to research by the Everest Group. This is creating opportunities for Westerners who want to go to China, learn the language, and help these Chinese offshore companies reach overseas markets. There are job opportunities for people with management experience or who are young and willing to gamble. Here's the story of one 25-year-old who started learning Mandarin on his plane ride over to China, three years ago, and is now an international development manager for an IT offshoring firm."
look at Vista, it is one of the main highlights of this, it eats up RAM very quickly
Not this again. Vista does eat up RAM for application cache. This means it is effectively using the RAM you spent money on. Once the RAM is needed for more important things Vista will release whatever is required. Why have RAM if your OS doesn't use it?
But if you think about it that may be the correct behaviour for best performance. I agree Windows memory management is terrible, and often seems to do stupid things, but I think that the case for optimal performance is a little more complex than you mention.
An (horrific and oversimplified) example: I run a simulation with a very large dataset (in the order of hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes of data), but it's in the background/not all the data is required at once. In the meantime I open and close firefox a few times. Now in your ideal, as much of my simulation data would remain in memory as possible, and firefox would be left out of the cache. However that won't lead to the optimum performance since firefox will be reloaded from disk each time which will be slower. In fact assuming all my RAM is used up by the simulation data, then some of it will have to page out to load firefox. It makes more sense to keep the firefox object code in RAM even after it has closed since it will respond faster if it is used again, and the simulation data was paged out anyway because there was not enough RAM, so no matter what it will have to be reloaded. It is admittedly a gamble, but I can see the case for paging out data that is incredibly rarely used in favour of having more memory available for a performance enhancing cache. This same behaviour is used on Linux and no doubt other systems.
That said I do agree that Windows seems to cling too much to its application cache, if you have several applications consuming very large amounts of memory and CPU time it seems that Windows is incapable of distributing the resources well. I have used Solaris systems that have had 6 or 7 simulations, each with gigabytes of data running simultaneously on a four processor machine. I only noticed that there was this much load when I went to run a simulation myself and it was quite slow. The responsiveness of other applications and the user interface was barely affected, something which I'd attribute to an operating system that does the right thing with memory and processor allocation.