It might have some use. "store" is chiefly American English. British would prefer "shop", though they should definitely be able to understand what you are talking about. But in both BE and AE "store" would also mean "to keep".
Re:Version changes are the most visible evidence.
on
Firefox 9.0 Beta Available
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started.
Its sounding more and more like youve managed to hose your windows install, and are blaming it on firefox. Seriously, how is a userland app running with non-admin privileges going to "corrupt Microsoft Windows", hmmm?
Yet it happens. Adobe Flash under Firefox seems to be able to kill my Linux system. I'm not saying that Flash is executing in kernel space, but it seems that if there is a bug in system services or kernel, Flash (and so Firefox) will find it. (see Murphy laws)
So you are saying that every major release of Gnome was disappointing? Kinda reminds me of Windows and/or MSOffice. Every new release was met with anger.
That's because they make radical changes in places that they shouldn't and people was getting used to them. If you put me now to a modern windows machine, I wouldn't be able to even change the mouse cursor speed.
They do it because want people do "wow" and "whoa" when they first see it. Rather than add actual improvements, like speed, clean up code, etc.
There is worse. Here, at least when I worked at a computer shop before go to the university, the most known computer importer (I think we have only two in Greece) offered tech support through a telephone number with insane cost, something like 1.3€/minute. Seen that in America? No?
As for chinese boards and W7 license fees. No licenses aren't free. Granted they're cheaper than retail but not free. Dell for example offers you a plentiful of OS options (all of them MS) at different prices. But no linux. And no, I can't sell them to anyone else, as they are tied to the system sold. They can install only to the specific machine with default programs. You don't have any options, you just put the CD, press enter, and it reformats your drive as it was from the beginning. Just for curiosity, I searched at the most prominent _local_ price search machine for "linux" and I found 5 laptops and 1 desktop, all below 350€. So it makes me think, will really Chinese makers make secure boot-free motherboards? Probably yes for the US who have a significant market but for small countries? And will be respectable makers? It seems pretty reasonable for me to guesstimate that MS will make deals with bigger makers to have only W8-approved models.
As for PEBKAC, yes, if Linux apps would have a cost, shitware would exist. It is not a feature of W7 kernel. It is part of Windows ecosystem. I don't blame W7 specifically but the whole environment. Damn, you have to pay/crack for an application to burn an ISO or use a rar file!!
I believe too that the secure boot will not stop determined people from installing Linux. In the worst case they can install NT Loader which in turn boot Linux. But it makes the issue more complicated. To call the manufacturer, to find the certificates, etc. And if I buy a mobo from eBay? Should I make intercontinental calls to the US? Do you know how easy is it to understand a foreign language through VoIP with multiple tandem encoding at low bitrate? (I'm referring to Quantum) How can I threaten the company if I am not a US citizen if they don't give it to me? And it'll be great if it's from the US. If it is from China? How many people speak Chinese? Furthermore, ok. let's say that I get a certificate for grub-0.97. When grub-1.0 gets out, should I get a new certificate? Again?
I am worried that the platform becomes increasingly closed. I don't want to have to ask permission to do something with my own computer.
As for SSDs, I've never lost a byte and I have had quite a few SSDs from the time of SLCs of 16GB. I do backup my most important data (university stuff) but not the other. I have lost countless conventional hard disks. Most were kind enough to show bad sectors first so I saved my data. But WD tends to break suddenly. I generally abuse my disks, have them with external cases, carry them with my travel case, waist pack, etc. CD/DVDs are even worse. Unbranded are certain loss of data, I stopped buying them at all, even if they're 10 times cheaper. As for CDRWs, I think they're worse. But my worst disasters were my faults. I remember restoring the MBR (with the dd command) to the partition (sda1) instead of disk (sda). Everything was lost!
As for PEBKAC, it's just that Windows facilitates that behavior. For example not requiring a password to destroy your system, and the fact you have to navigate through tens of porn offers to find a crack for a program.
And as for choice, I don't know what happens there, but here no, not at all. All computers, desktops or laptops come with windows preinstalled. Period. You can't change that. I have bought two windows licences, that I didn't use at all. You can't return them. I know that some companies offer Ubuntu or FreeDOS but not here. Apart from Apples, only very expensive servers or exotic hardware may have Solaris. For a brief period there were some 7" netbooks that had linux, but no more.
Linux for the DESKTOP? You mean, we'll have all the n00bs spoiling our 1337n355? Knock on wood!
Seriously, though. I don't quite care if the average John Doe will use Linux. It is sufficient for me to have the platform I want and like. There's no need the world embrace my beliefs or lifestyle. I always was an outsider, not only relating to computers, and I'm fine with that. However I do put Linux in my parent's or my sister's pcs for example. I mean, they just need FF with flash for Facebook and Google, and Skype. That's it. Nothing else.
However I'm VERY worried that with the economic growth of MS/Apple, that they abuse their position. I was frightened when I learned how crippled is iphone. It doesn't appear as mass storage device. It doesn't take SD or play flash. You need proprietary apps to download mp3s. You need Apple services to download apps, only the ones that she approves (!!!) and after taking a fee (!!!). Even to customize the phone you need to hack it. As for MS, the certificates she imposes to boot BIOS. The specs that she doesn't open. I mean, isn't she happy having the 90% of the share of PCs? Let us do our job too! That's why I hate those two companies.
About superfetch etc, Idk, I just have my ssd for everything but my porn. For that there's either a hard disk or youporn.com. And I actually use only 38GB out of the 80GB of my X25-M, despite leaving large source files in/var/tmp or source tarballs in distribution directories. I can't understand why people need 600GB ssds. I really don't know. I am neither aware of ExpressGate or SplashTop, but my linuix box does indeed boot in a few seconds -- unless I forget dns client searching for ip.
CLI is not inherent in Windows philosophy. I know there's a scripting shell, Power-something, but I doubt 1% of users will install it.
As for PEBKAC: I don't know why, but all Windows machines of John Doe's I happen to sit for a few minutes, are filled with countless little shitty worthless little programs, that in order for example to show you a "free" wallpaper they install a ton of other software. They add some search engines in Firefox, they add sponsored ads in Google search (YES, I've seen that!!!), a couple of toolbars in IE & FF, for some reason they all run in the background, god knows why. Utilities that add stupid smileys in MSN, annoying flashing images and weird fonts. If you sit in a Windows PC, it blinks and makes sounds like a UFO.
That's in the Windows ecosystem. It's not in Windows OS per se, but it's the philosophy of cheap commercial software. I'm not blaming all commercial software, just those millions utilities and extensions to do the most simple things. For tools like UNIX's dd or bzip2 or libisofs or bigger applications like k3b or evince or eog or mplayer that come all standard in a Linux distribution, you have to download them separately, with all their bloated packages. I remember the sound cards (SB Audigy2) driver in Windows was 120MB or more. In Linux it's 513,021 bytes. And each of them needs its crackz, warez, serialz, keygens, which you must in pain search amongst porn sites and totally irrelevant dummy sites who offer search "services". And the crackz's version doesn't match, and you have to find newer, and if you find it you can't upgrade the app because it will damage the exe, or you must disconnect from the internet for the activation, and so on and so on. You make fun of me compiling, but the only I need to do is to "emerge mplayer" and wait. Compare it to the time you need to download the huge bloated PowerDVD download, the time you need to find the crack etc, and you'll see that in Gentoo you need only the 1/10th of the time.
I really don't mind if Windows 7 is a decent OS. It should be. But that's ecosystem -- it's a holy mess. I will install W7 sometime, just to play Heroes of Might and Magic VI when it comes out. But that's it. I'm totally alien to Windows. How can I live without my terminal emulator and zsh. GCC implementation on Windows is crippled. I don't k
WTF? Why in the name of all that is good would you want to compile everything? Nothing better to do with your winter? It isn't like we don't have excess...well everything when it comes to computers. Sure i could see compiling a custom build when you have 4Mb of RAM and a 10MHz CPU, but today? that is just nuts! I can see now why you made jokes about them, geez!
No, no, we don't compile everything for performance. Packages that would gain from compiling using native features of the cpu, mplayer comes to mind, already offer libraries with SSE/SSE2/etc implementations in binary, that do their work fine from binary builds. And even if we would gain 0.1% of performance while recompiling gcc, it is offset by having to wait for hours for it to compile.
We compile everything to feel superior. Easy tasks are made purposefully difficult and time consuming, to avoid n00bs spoiling our 1337n335. But even that did not keep them out. The standard package system, portage, was too easy to learn. For example installing a package was as dump easy as "emerge mplayer"! And it was fully documented! So people created paludis, another package system. There I needed more than two days to manage to install a package, after having to switch between the two package systems in order to resolve dependencies. The other system is almost undocumented and its commands are so cryptic that I personally needed to sacrifice a goat to understand that in order to install a package I had to "cave resolve -x mplayer"! Genius! Who would imagine that the install command is called "resolve"? And who would imagine that you need to explicitly say "execute"?
But even then, some people managed to make working gentoo systems. So Exherbo was born. Haven't tried it yet. Partly because it DEMANDS that plain users contribute to the developement. (I remember 10-15 years a go, when I was a little kid, I wrote to the local linux mailing list that I can't find a driver for my printer -- they told me to write my own!!)
As for threads? Servers will ALWAYS be heavily threaded that goes without saying. But I think unless someone trips over the holy grail we have reached pretty much the plateau when it comes to users. They simply aren't doing enough to warrant going thread crazy. I always check my users performance in Win 7 just to see if there is anything they need to increase after about a month and you know what I find? Most of the time the computer is twiddling its thumbs because they simply can't give it enough work to stress it, and that with even the low end Athlon duals and triples, they simply can't come up with enough work to stress the CPU more than a few seconds at a time. as I said I'm "Mr Multitask" and when i'm mobile I find the tasks I have rarely peg out the Brazos APU, web tasks simply aren't that heavy.
And the tasks you listed is a perfect example of why I think AMD is on the right track: Both farmville and Flash videos are GPU accelerated and since the GPU has 80 stream processors it can handle plenty while leaving the CPU to other tasks. So far the ONLY task I found that pegs the CPU for more than a few seconds is a virus scan, and even that quickly drops after about a minute.
Virus scan... How many years I have to install an antivirus... I remember catching a virus, I think it was called "Natas" (Satan backwards) back in my MSDOS 5 box. It infected my pkzip.com... Since then the only time remember to be bothered installing an anti-virus it was in Windows 2000 I think, the last version of windows I used before switching to linux, that something (remote possibly) killed a supposedly critical process and Windows had to reboot in a minute, want it or not.
Well, Gentoo is a Linux distribution for psychopaths. It compiles everything, including its own tools, though some packages are offered in binary form too. And for a compile you can choose what to compile in and what to leave out, using the so-called "USE flags". Installing OOo in a slow (say Pentium 4) machine from source can be an act deserving a medal of courage. Full installation can take several days in such a machine. However my C2Q needed only half a day to recompile everything.
As for parallelism: I got my Computer Engineering degree a year ago. Despite the low funding of universities in my country (Greece), it is apparent that scientists and professors push courses of parallel computing in undergraduate curriculum. PThreads are now being taught at second year (of 5 total). Some projects I made while undergraduate demanded multithreading (I programmed a basic http server IIRC), despite the subject was not parallelization. There is also a postgrad program "Parallel and Distributed Systems" in a local university here. So I really think that work is being done to this direction.
But even in the everyday life there are still many workloads that are multithreaded. I mean, even having FF to play FarmVille and Chromium to play YouTube needs two threads (I don't play flash games and play music with Youtube at the same time because no two flash applications can run in the same browser without crippling performance).
Many applications for work, MATLAB comes to my mind right now, are multithreaded.
That is why I have been saying for awhile now "ever since CPUs went dual core they have been good enough" because I've found that even though the average person is single threaded
Do you have any idea how many threads are spawned when you type emerge --jobs world in a Gentoo system?
I don't quite agree. I remember my 8086 PS/2 had 640kB. If you had a TSR like SideKick Plus could take 100-200kB. Command.com and the other.sys whose name i can't recall, needed another 150kB. If you wanted to run Lotus 1-2-3, I think your RAM would fill.
Both PayPal and eBay charge "large" fee for small transfers, like $5. eBay takes IIRC 8.75% and PayPal has a minimum charge. So when you're buying a gadget from the Chinese, it is a rip off.
But for larger transfers, say $500, fees are minimal.
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Only if you have a Beowulf cluster of them!
It might have some use. "store" is chiefly American English. British would prefer "shop", though they should definitely be able to understand what you are talking about. But in both BE and AE "store" would also mean "to keep".
No, it's "Guinea Pig Units"
Linux gets used @ smallfry sites because they can't afford higher quality Windows stuff like big companies above obviously can!
Are you aware that >92% of TOP500 supercomputers run linux? (and the rest UNIX)
Hey, people don't click this, it's not real goatse!
All I know about my imported fruit is the "grown in Chile" sticker
At last something that was not made in China, if you indeed intended to write "Chile" and not misspelled it.
Ok, there are vein and iris readers on eBay. What then?
With hard disks went that high price, I guess there would be a problem...
God, you must be a politician!
Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started.
Its sounding more and more like youve managed to hose your windows install, and are blaming it on firefox. Seriously, how is a userland app running with non-admin privileges going to "corrupt Microsoft Windows", hmmm?
Yet it happens. Adobe Flash under Firefox seems to be able to kill my Linux system.
I'm not saying that Flash is executing in kernel space, but it seems that if there is a bug in system services or kernel, Flash (and so Firefox) will find it. (see Murphy laws)
Did they fix the lack of minimize button?
Dual socket, inexpensive, and in ITX motherboard?
So you are saying that every major release of Gnome was disappointing?
Kinda reminds me of Windows and/or MSOffice. Every new release was met with anger.
That's because they make radical changes in places that they shouldn't and people was getting used to them.
If you put me now to a modern windows machine, I wouldn't be able to even change the mouse cursor speed.
They do it because want people do "wow" and "whoa" when they first see it. Rather than add actual improvements,
like speed, clean up code, etc.
You say there was not any inter-company espionage in the US at least at the early days ('80s)?
Come on...
There is worse. Here, at least when I worked at a computer shop before go to the university, the most known computer importer (I think we have only two in Greece) offered tech support through a telephone number with insane cost, something like 1.3€/minute. Seen that in America? No?
As for chinese boards and W7 license fees. No licenses aren't free. Granted they're cheaper than retail but not free. Dell for example offers you a plentiful of OS options (all of them MS) at different prices. But no linux. And no, I can't sell them to anyone else, as they are tied to the system sold. They can install only to the specific machine with default programs. You don't have any options, you just put the CD, press enter, and it reformats your drive as it was from the beginning. Just for curiosity, I searched at the most prominent _local_ price search machine for "linux" and I found 5 laptops and 1 desktop, all below 350€. So it makes me think, will really Chinese makers make secure boot-free motherboards? Probably yes for the US who have a significant market but for small countries? And will be respectable makers? It seems pretty reasonable for me to guesstimate that MS will make deals with bigger makers to have only W8-approved models.
As for PEBKAC, yes, if Linux apps would have a cost, shitware would exist. It is not a feature of W7 kernel. It is part of Windows ecosystem. I don't blame W7 specifically but the whole environment. Damn, you have to pay/crack for an application to burn an ISO or use a rar file!!
OS/2 now in 2011, really? :D
I believe too that the secure boot will not stop determined people from installing Linux. In the worst case they can install NT Loader which in turn boot Linux.
But it makes the issue more complicated. To call the manufacturer, to find the certificates, etc. And if I buy a mobo from eBay? Should I make intercontinental calls to the US? Do you know how easy is it to understand a foreign language through VoIP with multiple tandem encoding at low bitrate? (I'm referring to Quantum) How can I threaten the company if I am not a US citizen if they don't give it to me? And it'll be great if it's from the US. If it is from China? How many people speak Chinese? Furthermore, ok. let's say that I get a certificate for grub-0.97. When grub-1.0 gets out, should I get a new certificate? Again?
I am worried that the platform becomes increasingly closed. I don't want to have to ask permission to do something with my own computer.
As for SSDs, I've never lost a byte and I have had quite a few SSDs from the time of SLCs of 16GB. I do backup my most important data (university stuff) but not the other. I have lost countless conventional hard disks. Most were kind enough to show bad sectors first so I saved my data. But WD tends to break suddenly. I generally abuse my disks, have them with external cases, carry them with my travel case, waist pack, etc. CD/DVDs are even worse. Unbranded are certain loss of data, I stopped buying them at all, even if they're 10 times cheaper. As for CDRWs, I think they're worse. But my worst disasters were my faults. I remember restoring the MBR (with the dd command) to the partition (sda1) instead of disk (sda). Everything was lost!
As for PEBKAC, it's just that Windows facilitates that behavior. For example not requiring a password to destroy your system, and the fact you have to navigate through tens of porn offers to find a crack for a program.
And as for choice, I don't know what happens there, but here no, not at all. All computers, desktops or laptops come with windows preinstalled. Period. You can't change that. I have bought two windows licences, that I didn't use at all. You can't return them. I know that some companies offer Ubuntu or FreeDOS but not here. Apart from Apples, only very expensive servers or exotic hardware may have Solaris. For a brief period there were some 7" netbooks that had linux, but no more.
Linux for the DESKTOP? You mean, we'll have all the n00bs spoiling our 1337n355? Knock on wood!
Seriously, though. I don't quite care if the average John Doe will use Linux. It is sufficient for me to have the platform I want and like. There's no need the world embrace my beliefs or lifestyle. I always was an outsider, not only relating to computers, and I'm fine with that. However I do put Linux in my parent's or my sister's pcs for example. I mean, they just need FF with flash for Facebook and Google, and Skype. That's it. Nothing else.
However I'm VERY worried that with the economic growth of MS/Apple, that they abuse their position. I was frightened when I learned how crippled is iphone. It doesn't appear as mass storage device. It doesn't take SD or play flash. You need proprietary apps to download mp3s. You need Apple services to download apps, only the ones that she approves (!!!) and after taking a fee (!!!). Even to customize the phone you need to hack it. As for MS, the certificates she imposes to boot BIOS. The specs that she doesn't open. I mean, isn't she happy having the 90% of the share of PCs? Let us do our job too! That's why I hate those two companies.
About superfetch etc, Idk, I just have my ssd for everything but my porn. For that there's either a hard disk or youporn.com. And I actually use only 38GB out of the 80GB of my X25-M, despite leaving large source files in /var/tmp or source tarballs in distribution directories. I can't understand why people need 600GB ssds. I really don't know. I am neither aware of ExpressGate or SplashTop, but my linuix box does indeed boot in a few seconds -- unless I forget dns client searching for ip.
CLI is not inherent in Windows philosophy. I know there's a scripting shell, Power-something, but I doubt 1% of users will install it.
As for PEBKAC: I don't know why, but all Windows machines of John Doe's I happen to sit for a few minutes, are filled with countless little shitty worthless little programs, that in order for example to show you a "free" wallpaper they install a ton of other software. They add some search engines in Firefox, they add sponsored ads in Google search (YES, I've seen that!!!), a couple of toolbars in IE & FF, for some reason they all run in the background, god knows why. Utilities that add stupid smileys in MSN, annoying flashing images and weird fonts. If you sit in a Windows PC, it blinks and makes sounds like a UFO.
That's in the Windows ecosystem. It's not in Windows OS per se, but it's the philosophy of cheap commercial software. I'm not blaming all commercial software, just those millions utilities and extensions to do the most simple things. For tools like UNIX's dd or bzip2 or libisofs or bigger applications like k3b or evince or eog or mplayer that come all standard in a Linux distribution, you have to download them separately, with all their bloated packages. I remember the sound cards (SB Audigy2) driver in Windows was 120MB or more. In Linux it's 513,021 bytes. And each of them needs its crackz, warez, serialz, keygens, which you must in pain search amongst porn sites and totally irrelevant dummy sites who offer search "services". And the crackz's version doesn't match, and you have to find newer, and if you find it you can't upgrade the app because it will damage the exe, or you must disconnect from the internet for the activation, and so on and so on. You make fun of me compiling, but the only I need to do is to "emerge mplayer" and wait. Compare it to the time you need to download the huge bloated PowerDVD download, the time you need to find the crack etc, and you'll see that in Gentoo you need only the 1/10th of the time.
I really don't mind if Windows 7 is a decent OS. It should be. But that's ecosystem -- it's a holy mess. I will install W7 sometime, just to play Heroes of Might and Magic VI when it comes out. But that's it. I'm totally alien to Windows. How can I live without my terminal emulator and zsh. GCC implementation on Windows is crippled. I don't k
WTF? Why in the name of all that is good would you want to compile everything? Nothing better to do with your winter? It isn't like we don't have excess...well everything when it comes to computers. Sure i could see compiling a custom build when you have 4Mb of RAM and a 10MHz CPU, but today? that is just nuts! I can see now why you made jokes about them, geez!
No, no, we don't compile everything for performance. Packages that would gain from compiling using native features of the cpu, mplayer comes to mind, already offer libraries with SSE/SSE2/etc implementations in binary, that do their work fine from binary builds. And even if we would gain 0.1% of performance while recompiling gcc, it is offset by having to wait for hours for it to compile.
We compile everything to feel superior. Easy tasks are made purposefully difficult and time consuming, to avoid n00bs spoiling our 1337n335. But even that did not keep them out. The standard package system, portage, was too easy to learn. For example installing a package was as dump easy as "emerge mplayer"! And it was fully documented! So people created paludis, another package system. There I needed more than two days to manage to install a package, after having to switch between the two package systems in order to resolve dependencies. The other system is almost undocumented and its commands are so cryptic that I personally needed to sacrifice a goat to understand that in order to install a package I had to "cave resolve -x mplayer"! Genius! Who would imagine that the install command is called "resolve"? And who would imagine that you need to explicitly say "execute"?
But even then, some people managed to make working gentoo systems. So Exherbo was born. Haven't tried it yet. Partly because it DEMANDS that plain users contribute to the developement. (I remember 10-15 years a go, when I was a little kid, I wrote to the local linux mailing list that I can't find a driver for my printer -- they told me to write my own!!)
As for threads? Servers will ALWAYS be heavily threaded that goes without saying. But I think unless someone trips over the holy grail we have reached pretty much the plateau when it comes to users. They simply aren't doing enough to warrant going thread crazy. I always check my users performance in Win 7 just to see if there is anything they need to increase after about a month and you know what I find? Most of the time the computer is twiddling its thumbs because they simply can't give it enough work to stress it, and that with even the low end Athlon duals and triples, they simply can't come up with enough work to stress the CPU more than a few seconds at a time. as I said I'm "Mr Multitask" and when i'm mobile I find the tasks I have rarely peg out the Brazos APU, web tasks simply aren't that heavy.
And the tasks you listed is a perfect example of why I think AMD is on the right track: Both farmville and Flash videos are GPU accelerated and since the GPU has 80 stream processors it can handle plenty while leaving the CPU to other tasks. So far the ONLY task I found that pegs the CPU for more than a few seconds is a virus scan, and even that quickly drops after about a minute.
Virus scan... How many years I have to install an antivirus... I remember catching a virus, I think it was called "Natas" (Satan backwards) back in my MSDOS 5 box. It infected my pkzip.com... Since then the only time remember to be bothered installing an anti-virus it was in Windows 2000 I think, the last version of windows I used before switching to linux, that something (remote possibly) killed a supposedly critical process and Windows had to reboot in a minute, want it or not.
Well, Gentoo is a Linux distribution for psychopaths. It compiles everything, including its own tools, though some packages are offered in binary form too. And for a compile you can choose what to compile in and what to leave out, using the so-called "USE flags". Installing OOo in a slow (say Pentium 4) machine from source can be an act deserving a medal of courage. Full installation can take several days in such a machine. However my C2Q needed only half a day to recompile everything.
As for parallelism: I got my Computer Engineering degree a year ago. Despite the low funding of universities in my country (Greece), it is apparent that scientists and professors push courses of parallel computing in undergraduate curriculum. PThreads are now being taught at second year (of 5 total). Some projects I made while undergraduate demanded multithreading (I programmed a basic http server IIRC), despite the subject was not parallelization. There is also a postgrad program "Parallel and Distributed Systems" in a local university here. So I really think that work is being done to this direction.
But even in the everyday life there are still many workloads that are multithreaded. I mean, even having FF to play FarmVille and Chromium to play YouTube needs two threads (I don't play flash games and play music with Youtube at the same time because no two flash applications can run in the same browser without crippling performance).
Many applications for work, MATLAB comes to my mind right now, are multithreaded.
I supposed that you being older on slashdot reader than me, you would be aware of gentoo jokes.
I still believe however that parallelism is a growing trend.
That is why I have been saying for awhile now "ever since CPUs went dual core they have been good enough" because I've found that even though the average person is single threaded
Do you have any idea how many threads are spawned when you type emerge --jobs world in a Gentoo system?
I don't quite agree. I remember my 8086 PS/2 had 640kB. If you had a TSR like SideKick Plus could take 100-200kB. Command.com and the other .sys whose name i can't recall, needed another 150kB. If you wanted to run Lotus 1-2-3, I think your RAM would fill.
Both PayPal and eBay charge "large" fee for small transfers, like $5. eBay takes IIRC 8.75% and PayPal has a minimum charge.
So when you're buying a gadget from the Chinese, it is a rip off.
But for larger transfers, say $500, fees are minimal.
How would you stalk at the girl next door with windows that don't allow the light come in?
You killed my imagination :(