I maintain a server for research use with 16GB of RAM.
If any process uses up more than 90% of that, in most cases, better to kill the process than to let it go to swap.
If swap actually needs to be used, chances are that there is a huge memory leak that is out of control and the system will end up thrashing.
As a result of past experience, I believe in such situations, better to set memory limits, and disable swap completely. The system itself will run on a few hundred megs, keep that reserved, all the other memory is up for grabs by research processes, anything more than that will bring the system to a crawl anyway, so may as well stop the process than the entire system by not using swap altogether.
MS Wants people to pay for Vista then go pay again for XP. It's the ingeniousness of Vista, pay for 2, use only 1. I'm not sure if MS allows people free downgrades, but many Joe Sixpacks will pay for XP also.
One could argue that unless one has witnessed evolution from once species to the next, it is also unprovable. One may have strong evidence to back it up, but there can still be reasonable doubt.
I think you're agreeing with me here with respect to the number of mutations... I said "the number of individual genetic mutations would be large", so it should be clear that a single mutation doesn't make a new species.
I'm no expert in this, but it seems you're strengthening my point by pointing out that the entire group would have to be isolated from everyone else, and I presume it must be for a large number of generations.
It seems that the probability of a species having enough mutations to become another species is extremely low, and in order for it to be 'random' it must take a lot longer than the evidence shows. If such mutations did occur within the timeline perceived by the evidence supporting it, there has to be some non-random outside factor coming into play.
To add to this, the probability of the previous intermediary species completely dying out also seems a little sketchy to me. Why don't we see monkies with developed vocal cords or something of the like today? What makes humans so different that we're the only species that has the power to communicate abstract ideas?
Evidence is by no means conclusive. Scientifically, it seems to many that it may be the best way to explain how we got here. To automatically shut down anyone who disagrees regardless of whether or not the mention a deity is unscientific.
I once heard someone use the following analogy with respect to evolution. He mentioned that if every cell in the universe were a pentium 4 processor (he used the current cpu clock speed at the time) computing all the genetic makeups to cause a mutation, he said for a single species of animal to be mutated to another it would take in the order of trillions of years. Maybe somebody here with more knowledge could help redo the computation, as I don't remember the details.
The fact is that for a monkey to mutate into a human, the number of individual genetic mutations would be large, and the probability that it would have more than one 'beneficial' mutation is low. Also, don't two such species need to have the same mutation in order to reproduce with eachother (as per my understanding, part of the definition of a new species is that it can only procreate with a species of it's own kind). Could someone tell me how many generations it would take for such a significant set of mutations to happen under statistically normal conditions? And, if the conditions were not statistically normal, why?
Here is another perfect example of a value question being marked as Troll.
It seems to me that EVOLUTIONISM IS A 'RELIGION' to many people. Anyone who disagrees or even questions it, even with valid scientific claim gets viciously attacked for not believing in the so-called 'truth'.
About 2500 years back, there was a religion of the Pythagoreans that believed that there was no such thing as an irrational number and that all numbers had to be representable as a fraction of two other numbers. Their whole explanation of the universe depended on the non-existence of irrational numbers. When they themselves discovered their own logic system can create such irrational numbers (such as sqrt(2)) they were shocked and many had trouble living with the reality and once source I read said that they required the discoverer to commit suicide.
Could someone please explain what is different between the Darwinian and the Pythagoreans?
It seems to me here by the fact that the parent post being scored as -1 Troll, that anyone who disagrees with Darwin's theory of evolution is automatically assigned the status of troll, regardless of whether or not they have scientific basis for their arguments.
Darwin himself gave a very specific list of discoveries that need to be made in order to validate his theory. I think that if Darwin were here today, he would say that those discoveries relating to specific kinds of intermediary species have not been made, and he would reject his own past theory.
How is it possible to extrapolate that since bacteria can mutate to become antibiotic resistant, all life forms on earth are a result of a mutation from a more primordial species?
The real question is, if you do win the contest is this something you'd want to put on your resume? Would someone hire somebody who is capable and who has actually done something like this?
I think I killed a couple of these guys in a few years back by trying to clean them using a spray cleaner directly on the keys, rather than on a cloth first. When those old PS/2's booted up after that, I'd here it repeatedly beeping, and I'd know I'd need to grab another keyboard.
Re:No advantage to DDR3 (?)
on
DDR3 RAM Explained
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sorry, just wanted to append some details:
- We were using XP Pro x64 edition - I believe there was 4GB RAM, possibly 8GB - I tested exactly the same program that we wrote and compile with the same input data and timed it between the DDR2 and DDR3 machines. - The processing took exactly the same number of seconds on both platforms. (Approx 20sec). Testing on older Xeon 3.6 gave me approx 50sec, and Pentium D-3.2 at 30 seconds.
No advantage to DDR3 (?)
on
DDR3 RAM Explained
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I was asked to purchase 4 of the fastest desktop PC's I could find (just less than a year ago) for a contract placement; I ended up going with the QX6850 and for 3 machines DDR2-800, and with the extra money on the 4th machine, going with a capable motherboard and DDR3-1333; hoping for at least some speed difference.
First of all, as the technology was brand new at the time, the motherboard, although capable of 1333mhz ram, it only detected it as 1066 (we double checked they sold us the right stuff), so we manually set the RAM in the BIOS to run at 1333.
After all the setup, on otherwise almost identically configured machines, we found absolutely 0 performance gain on the DDR3 machine over the other 3 DDR2-800 machines. Although one might argue that our applications we were using to test were not so memory intensive, the fact is it was a computationally intensive task that regularly accessed about 200-300mb of data from ram. I would think that even if everything would be pre-fetched into the 8MB CPU cache before it was used, we should at least see some small difference.
In the end, it seems that we spent an extra $800 for no noticeable performance gain.
You guys beat me to the post about sharks; but when I opened up the page after reading it in RSS, I had a little laugh at the fact that "Sharks" was one of the keyword 'meta-tags' underneath the summary: "power, science, laser, starwars, sharks (tagging beta)"
I'm not much of a gamer, so to me 2K is perfectly fine for the home user. I can't see what it's missing. (Relative to other MS OS's).
With respect to Vista, yes stability is terrible, especially when it comes to driver compatibility issues, but on the plus side, I was pretty impressed with the a couple of changes..
I'm not mentioning these things to 'boost' vista in any way, but rather to emphasize a couple of positive points that could be used elsewhere, possibly in other OS's.
I like the new way Explorer lets you change directories by clicking on arrows to the left of every level in the structure, makes working with files much easier and quicker.
Another positive change was the fact that if a couldn't copy/move/delete in XP, an entire copy of multiple directories and files would cancel in the middle; while in Vista, it allows you to skip the file and continue. This bug was VERY VERY ANNOYING, especially when copying entire structures with thousands of files and hundreds of directories.
Although many users complain about how Vista always asks for security credentials before doing a lot of things, I am actually glad about this. As a SysAdmin, I am happy to know that my OS is confirming that it needs root/admin access before doing something; especially if it could prevent someone from accidentally screwing something up.
All negative issues about Vista aside, I'd like to hear what others think about these 3 things; maybe some of these things can be implemented elsewhere?
I'm also on Rogers, I don't think I ever payed to receive computer texts, but now I have it just sending to my 416XXXXXXX@pcs.rogers.com address (which used to be free until 2 years ago, Rogers decided to put a 'spam filter' feature on it, that I needed to pay-per-message [by replying via text] or $5/month to bypass)
Why not just have 1 driver there just taking a bunch of drivers around to locations, and that way you get a ride home in your own car. Not sure how much better it will work out since the drivers need to be picked up, but it may make things slightly more efficient if there are multiple calls to the nearby regions.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean it.
Read them.
Death by squirt.
I maintain a server for research use with 16GB of RAM.
If any process uses up more than 90% of that, in most cases, better to kill the process than to let it go to swap.
If swap actually needs to be used, chances are that there is a huge memory leak that is out of control and the system will end up thrashing.
As a result of past experience, I believe in such situations, better to set memory limits, and disable swap completely. The system itself will run on a few hundred megs, keep that reserved, all the other memory is up for grabs by research processes, anything more than that will bring the system to a crawl anyway, so may as well stop the process than the entire system by not using swap altogether.
The lens was clean, the nearby space station had to empty out the sewage tanks, I guess this was the first time it passed in front of the hubble.
/. looks like a hockey stick.
Don't you guys get it?
MS Wants people to pay for Vista then go pay again for XP. It's the ingeniousness of Vista, pay for 2, use only 1. I'm not sure if MS allows people free downgrades, but many Joe Sixpacks will pay for XP also.
If you repel the sharks, the lasers will go too.
In case anyone doesn't get the above two posts, try it on a calculator, and turn it upside down (for the latter post)
One could argue that unless one has witnessed evolution from once species to the next, it is also unprovable. One may have strong evidence to back it up, but there can still be reasonable doubt.
I think you're agreeing with me here with respect to the number of mutations... I said "the number of individual genetic mutations would be large", so it should be clear that a single mutation doesn't make a new species.
I'm no expert in this, but it seems you're strengthening my point by pointing out that the entire group would have to be isolated from everyone else, and I presume it must be for a large number of generations.
It seems that the probability of a species having enough mutations to become another species is extremely low, and in order for it to be 'random' it must take a lot longer than the evidence shows. If such mutations did occur within the timeline perceived by the evidence supporting it, there has to be some non-random outside factor coming into play.
To add to this, the probability of the previous intermediary species completely dying out also seems a little sketchy to me. Why don't we see monkies with developed vocal cords or something of the like today? What makes humans so different that we're the only species that has the power to communicate abstract ideas?
Didn't NP Completeness not go unproven for many years?
Evidence is by no means conclusive. Scientifically, it seems to many that it may be the best way to explain how we got here. To automatically shut down anyone who disagrees regardless of whether or not the mention a deity is unscientific.
I once heard someone use the following analogy with respect to evolution. He mentioned that if every cell in the universe were a pentium 4 processor (he used the current cpu clock speed at the time) computing all the genetic makeups to cause a mutation, he said for a single species of animal to be mutated to another it would take in the order of trillions of years. Maybe somebody here with more knowledge could help redo the computation, as I don't remember the details.
The fact is that for a monkey to mutate into a human, the number of individual genetic mutations would be large, and the probability that it would have more than one 'beneficial' mutation is low. Also, don't two such species need to have the same mutation in order to reproduce with eachother (as per my understanding, part of the definition of a new species is that it can only procreate with a species of it's own kind).
Could someone tell me how many generations it would take for such a significant set of mutations to happen under statistically normal conditions? And, if the conditions were not statistically normal, why?
Here is another perfect example of a value question being marked as Troll.
It seems to me that EVOLUTIONISM IS A 'RELIGION' to many people. Anyone who disagrees or even questions it, even with valid scientific claim gets viciously attacked for not believing in the so-called 'truth'.
About 2500 years back, there was a religion of the Pythagoreans that believed that there was no such thing as an irrational number and that all numbers had to be representable as a fraction of two other numbers. Their whole explanation of the universe depended on the non-existence of irrational numbers. When they themselves discovered their own logic system can create such irrational numbers (such as sqrt(2)) they were shocked and many had trouble living with the reality and once source I read said that they required the discoverer to commit suicide.
Could someone please explain what is different between the Darwinian and the Pythagoreans?
It seems to me here by the fact that the parent post being scored as -1 Troll, that anyone who disagrees with Darwin's theory of evolution is automatically assigned the status of troll, regardless of whether or not they have scientific basis for their arguments.
Darwin himself gave a very specific list of discoveries that need to be made in order to validate his theory. I think that if Darwin were here today, he would say that those discoveries relating to specific kinds of intermediary species have not been made, and he would reject his own past theory.
How is it possible to extrapolate that since bacteria can mutate to become antibiotic resistant, all life forms on earth are a result of a mutation from a more primordial species?
The real question is, if you do win the contest is this something you'd want to put on your resume? Would someone hire somebody who is capable and who has actually done something like this?
I think I killed a couple of these guys in a few years back by trying to clean them using a spray cleaner directly on the keys, rather than on a cloth first. When those old PS/2's booted up after that, I'd here it repeatedly beeping, and I'd know I'd need to grab another keyboard.
Sorry, just wanted to append some details:
- We were using XP Pro x64 edition
- I believe there was 4GB RAM, possibly 8GB
- I tested exactly the same program that we wrote and compile with the same input data and timed it between the DDR2 and DDR3 machines.
- The processing took exactly the same number of seconds on both platforms. (Approx 20sec). Testing on older Xeon 3.6 gave me approx 50sec, and Pentium D-3.2 at 30 seconds.
I was asked to purchase 4 of the fastest desktop PC's I could find (just less than a year ago) for a contract placement; I ended up going with the QX6850 and for 3 machines DDR2-800, and with the extra money on the 4th machine, going with a capable motherboard and DDR3-1333; hoping for at least some speed difference.
First of all, as the technology was brand new at the time, the motherboard, although capable of 1333mhz ram, it only detected it as 1066 (we double checked they sold us the right stuff), so we manually set the RAM in the BIOS to run at 1333.
After all the setup, on otherwise almost identically configured machines, we found absolutely 0 performance gain on the DDR3 machine over the other 3 DDR2-800 machines. Although one might argue that our applications we were using to test were not so memory intensive, the fact is it was a computationally intensive task that regularly accessed about 200-300mb of data from ram. I would think that even if everything would be pre-fetched into the 8MB CPU cache before it was used, we should at least see some small difference.
In the end, it seems that we spent an extra $800 for no noticeable performance gain.
You guys beat me to the post about sharks; but when I opened up the page after reading it in RSS, I had a little laugh at the fact that "Sharks" was one of the keyword 'meta-tags' underneath the summary: "power, science, laser, starwars, sharks (tagging beta)"
KBD & Mouse would make good techniques for detecting stress levels.
Repeating banging of keys. Jerky movements of the mouse.
Actually, it probably won't work, because by the time someone is doing that, Windows has already crashed.
I'm not much of a gamer, so to me 2K is perfectly fine for the home user. I can't see what it's missing. (Relative to other MS OS's).
With respect to Vista, yes stability is terrible, especially when it comes to driver compatibility issues, but on the plus side, I was pretty impressed with the a couple of changes..
I'm not mentioning these things to 'boost' vista in any way, but rather to emphasize a couple of positive points that could be used elsewhere, possibly in other OS's.
I like the new way Explorer lets you change directories by clicking on arrows to the left of every level in the structure, makes working with files much easier and quicker.
Another positive change was the fact that if a couldn't copy/move/delete in XP, an entire copy of multiple directories and files would cancel in the middle; while in Vista, it allows you to skip the file and continue. This bug was VERY VERY ANNOYING, especially when copying entire structures with thousands of files and hundreds of directories.
Although many users complain about how Vista always asks for security credentials before doing a lot of things, I am actually glad about this. As a SysAdmin, I am happy to know that my OS is confirming that it needs root/admin access before doing something; especially if it could prevent someone from accidentally screwing something up.
All negative issues about Vista aside, I'd like to hear what others think about these 3 things; maybe some of these things can be implemented elsewhere?
http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~jgryn/research/wacv_dirmaps.pdf
I'm also on Rogers, I don't think I ever payed to receive computer texts, but now I have it just sending to my 416XXXXXXX@pcs.rogers.com address (which used to be free until 2 years ago, Rogers decided to put a 'spam filter' feature on it, that I needed to pay-per-message [by replying via text] or $5/month to bypass)
Why not just have 1 driver there just taking a bunch of drivers around to locations, and that way you get a ride home in your own car. Not sure how much better it will work out since the drivers need to be picked up, but it may make things slightly more efficient if there are multiple calls to the nearby regions.