The OS was Vista, and the program was written in.Net to use the function PrivateMemorySize64. MSDN says it returns "the amount of memory which cannot be shared with other processes". It also says it's the same as the "Private Bytes" value in taskmon. Probably it means that it's the amount of memory the process received from mallocs (or rather GlobalAllocs/LocalAllocs/HeapAllocs), and which can't be assigned to some other process.
It's worth noticing that the guy bothered with a GUI and an interactive filtering option for such a simple program. I wonder whether he ever heard of CLI, because it looks like a perfect fit for this kind of program.
By the way, why not post CoralCDN links (append.nyud.net to hostname) instead of direct links when the site in question is small and likely to be Slashdotted?
This is most likely related to the Flash plugin. The second suspect would be the Java plugin. For me Firefox never crashed on a website without Flash and Java, but I had a few crashes due to Flash bugs.
In the early days of the WWW the idea with popular pages was that they could be cached all over the internet. Your server checks with their server and if it has the page in cache already then that is what gets served up. This is called "proxy server". Ask your ISP whether they have one. By taking this a bit further where multiple proxies can exchange data directly we have a distributed Web cache. See www.coralcdn.org for an example of that. It works on Wikipedia pages too.
The problem is that there's not much to compute at Wikipedia. The limiting factor is bandwidth. A distributed web cache like Coral Cache might work, but this generally isn't called distributed computing, just like P2P networks aren't. The main problem would be that web caches have high update latency, but probably it wouldn't matter too much on Wikipedia.
If you haven't noticed, "Web 2.0" is a long estabilished buzzword - which means it carries little meaning, but it looks good in advertising. Just like "information superhighway", "enterprise feature" or "user friendly".
We don't really know whether black holes emit Hawking radiation because it's still a theoretical prediction. We can't detect it because it's extremely faint even for the closest probable black holes. Smaller black holes should emit more intensive Hawking radiation. For extremely small holes this radiation should cause them to "evaporate" in a fraction of a second. If LHC can create a tiny black hole, it has a chance to verify whether Hawking's prediction is true.
Black holes themselves - yes. However, most black holes have accretion disks around them, and when the matter in the disk "falls" on the black hole it attains immense speed and emits X-rays and gamma rays. This is why we are mostly certain that the Milky Way has a massive black hole in its center.
The point was not that you lose your license, but that you have your car confiscated and you can't buy a new one after 3 instances of being caught "speeding" 85 kph in an 80 kph zone. That's an entirely different thing.
Plurality voting result in two-party governments being formed, while majority voting results in pluralist governments. This is called Duverger's law. It's very counterintuitive, but this is how elections work.
The only problem is that the RSX chip is inaccessible from Linux due to the hypervisor, and can only be utilized games from Sony. So you actually get 1/10 of your stated 2 TFLOPS in supercomputing applications. This is because the PS3 itself is sold close to production costs or even at a loss, and the real profit for Sony is derived from games. Allowing RSX to be used for supercomputing would destroy their business model.
It's not Intel chips that have 74.8% share, it's x86 chips. Those are produced by both AMD and Intel. In fact, there are 7 systems with x86 hardware in the top 10, and the 4 faster ones use AMD Opterons (Crays are also Opterons) while the 3 slower use Xeons.
France gets more than 50% of their power from nuclear plants Actually, that's more like 79%... Nuclear power in France The 99.8% figure is the nuclear power share of the largest utility company. You get 79% when you divide 425.8 TWh (nuclear output) by 540.6 TWh (total output).
And what about long-term storage of nuclear waste? Rather than coming up with an elaborate solution to an artificial problem we should try to remove the problem itself. It's not the safe waste storage that is the problem, it's the once-through cycle that must go the way of the dodo.
building a couple hundred new nuclear power facilities is really really expensive... I'm talking "why don't we explore the idea of orbital Solar Power Satellites beaming microwave power back to a collector grid in Montana" expensive. That's nowhere that expensive. Nuclear plants are not some crackpot's sci-fi dream. There are many of them working right now around the world.
To rely purely on solar for your house (I assume it's in the countryside), you need: 1. Lots of solar panels to generate the power you need for your electric oven and lawn mower, 2. A freaking huge battery because you might like to use some electricity and have hot water in your bathroom at night, 3. Not have any winter, or you freeze - in winter, power output of solar panels is reduced while power consumption raises dramatically due to heating, 4. Buy weather insurance in case heavy clouds deprive you of a large portion of your energy output.
Not having to pay the electricity bill is really cool, but I think there's no way to do that now. The implications of point 3 are especially dire for a solar economy. Storing a day's worth of energy is hard enough but storing half a year's worth is plain impossible.
On the other hand, school vouchers lead to creation of massive schools with thousands of students in overloaded classes where no one gets proper attention, and as a consequence juvenile crime rates go up. With school vouchers small schools for the skilled can't exist, because they will have no money.
There's one more thing. The population of the world is much bigger than it was in ancient times, so naturally there are more smart people. The impression that we're smarter now than we were 3000 years ago is not only because of better education and learning tools, but also simply because there's more of us, and the amount of useful work the society can do is much larger.
In Poland that's exactly the opposite. When you pass 9th grade you go through a merit-based recruitment process for the high schools, and the best schools only take the top students. Moreover, the best schools are all public. The second round of elimination is at the college level - day courses at public universities are free of charge (!), and those "free" courses are generally the best, so there is fierce competition - at the University of Warsaw, around 25 students apply per place for the most popular courses. It may be cruel, but since for the best students the entire education path is free of charge, it's not uncommon for smart people from the countryside to become top professionals in their field, and advance into the middle class in one generation.
On the other hand, the not-so-genius students can have a hard time. but then there are decent private colleges which usually recruit people on a first come, first serve basis.
It's like saying that you shouldn't be upset when somebody shits on your lawn when you leave. You suffer no economic loss (actually the grass might become greener because of that so you have a gain), and you had no control over who can be on your lawn because you were away, so you should just shut up, right?
The GPL, DMCA, and EULA's are all the spawn of evil idiots. The idea of equating DMCA and GPL is so ideologically perverted that I stand in awe of your post, which must have been inspired by Satan himself. I will not even try to dissect the logic behind your argument, because my brain might become damaged in the process and I might suddenly feel compelled to eat hamsters, start a vanity blog or create furry porn.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the combination of tooling, labor, and licensing adds up to close to that amount. Why aren't they charging a premium on their Ubuntu PCs then? They are surely bought much less frequently than their Windows offerings.
This isn't about Microsoft's monopoly, it's about economies of scale. Why they don't charge extra for an Ubuntu laptop then? I bet they sell much less of them than their Vista machines. This is exactly about Microsoft's monopoly. The market wants XP. They are killing it off anyway. This is what monopoly is about - when the consumers can't buy what they want, but must buy whatever the monopoly offers.
There is nothing Firefox can do about handling a certain plugin. All plugins are presented with the same API. It's like saying that Microsoft should fix Word so that it displays your document better. Moreover, IE plugin and Firefox plugin don't have much in common, because they use completely different APIs. You should blame Adobe that they can't handle NSAPI.
The Daily WTF is not the best place for open sourcerers, RMS worshippers and other idealists, and sometimes smells of Visual Basic and other vile secretions of a certain company, but is very fun nonetheless.
Be sure to first look up the fundamental memes: picture of a printout on a wooden table, The Real WTF is..., brillant (sic), and Oracle NULL=''.
I think I see an opportunity for a Lunar observatory project... If nobody asks "why do we need to part with our beloved $ to build a giant telescope on the Moon", at least until after it's built, this project may even succeed. While I understand those indulging in astrophysics, I suspect the amount of scientific hedonism the society can tolerate to be limited, and this project could cause a reaction that would harm e.g. CERN.
Slashdot Mirror
The OS was Vista, and the program was written in .Net to use the function PrivateMemorySize64. MSDN says it returns "the amount of memory which cannot be shared with other processes". It also says it's the same as the "Private Bytes" value in taskmon. Probably it means that it's the amount of memory the process received from mallocs (or rather GlobalAllocs/LocalAllocs/HeapAllocs), and which can't be assigned to some other process.
It's worth noticing that the guy bothered with a GUI and an interactive filtering option for such a simple program. I wonder whether he ever heard of CLI, because it looks like a perfect fit for this kind of program.
By the way, why not post CoralCDN links (append .nyud.net to hostname) instead of direct links when the site in question is small and likely to be Slashdotted?
This is most likely related to the Flash plugin. The second suspect would be the Java plugin. For me Firefox never crashed on a website without Flash and Java, but I had a few crashes due to Flash bugs.
The problem is that there's not much to compute at Wikipedia. The limiting factor is bandwidth. A distributed web cache like Coral Cache might work, but this generally isn't called distributed computing, just like P2P networks aren't. The main problem would be that web caches have high update latency, but probably it wouldn't matter too much on Wikipedia.
If you haven't noticed, "Web 2.0" is a long estabilished buzzword - which means it carries little meaning, but it looks good in advertising. Just like "information superhighway", "enterprise feature" or "user friendly".
We don't really know whether black holes emit Hawking radiation because it's still a theoretical prediction. We can't detect it because it's extremely faint even for the closest probable black holes. Smaller black holes should emit more intensive Hawking radiation. For extremely small holes this radiation should cause them to "evaporate" in a fraction of a second. If LHC can create a tiny black hole, it has a chance to verify whether Hawking's prediction is true.
Black holes themselves - yes. However, most black holes have accretion disks around them, and when the matter in the disk "falls" on the black hole it attains immense speed and emits X-rays and gamma rays. This is why we are mostly certain that the Milky Way has a massive black hole in its center.
The point was not that you lose your license, but that you have your car confiscated and you can't buy a new one after 3 instances of being caught "speeding" 85 kph in an 80 kph zone. That's an entirely different thing.
Plurality voting result in two-party governments being formed, while majority voting results in pluralist governments. This is called Duverger's law. It's very counterintuitive, but this is how elections work.
The only problem is that the RSX chip is inaccessible from Linux due to the hypervisor, and can only be utilized games from Sony. So you actually get 1/10 of your stated 2 TFLOPS in supercomputing applications. This is because the PS3 itself is sold close to production costs or even at a loss, and the real profit for Sony is derived from games. Allowing RSX to be used for supercomputing would destroy their business model.
It's not Intel chips that have 74.8% share, it's x86 chips. Those are produced by both AMD and Intel. In fact, there are 7 systems with x86 hardware in the top 10, and the 4 faster ones use AMD Opterons (Crays are also Opterons) while the 3 slower use Xeons.
Nuclear power in France
The 99.8% figure is the nuclear power share of the largest utility company. You get 79% when you divide 425.8 TWh (nuclear output) by 540.6 TWh (total output).
To rely purely on solar for your house (I assume it's in the countryside), you need:
1. Lots of solar panels to generate the power you need for your electric oven and lawn mower,
2. A freaking huge battery because you might like to use some electricity and have hot water in your bathroom at night,
3. Not have any winter, or you freeze - in winter, power output of solar panels is reduced while power consumption raises dramatically due to heating,
4. Buy weather insurance in case heavy clouds deprive you of a large portion of your energy output.
Not having to pay the electricity bill is really cool, but I think there's no way to do that now. The implications of point 3 are especially dire for a solar economy. Storing a day's worth of energy is hard enough but storing half a year's worth is plain impossible.
On the other hand, school vouchers lead to creation of massive schools with thousands of students in overloaded classes where no one gets proper attention, and as a consequence juvenile crime rates go up. With school vouchers small schools for the skilled can't exist, because they will have no money.
There's one more thing. The population of the world is much bigger than it was in ancient times, so naturally there are more smart people. The impression that we're smarter now than we were 3000 years ago is not only because of better education and learning tools, but also simply because there's more of us, and the amount of useful work the society can do is much larger.
In Poland that's exactly the opposite. When you pass 9th grade you go through a merit-based recruitment process for the high schools, and the best schools only take the top students. Moreover, the best schools are all public. The second round of elimination is at the college level - day courses at public universities are free of charge (!), and those "free" courses are generally the best, so there is fierce competition - at the University of Warsaw, around 25 students apply per place for the most popular courses. It may be cruel, but since for the best students the entire education path is free of charge, it's not uncommon for smart people from the countryside to become top professionals in their field, and advance into the middle class in one generation.
On the other hand, the not-so-genius students can have a hard time. but then there are decent private colleges which usually recruit people on a first come, first serve basis.
It's like saying that you shouldn't be upset when somebody shits on your lawn when you leave. You suffer no economic loss (actually the grass might become greener because of that so you have a gain), and you had no control over who can be on your lawn because you were away, so you should just shut up, right?
This is exactly about Microsoft's monopoly. The market wants XP. They are killing it off anyway. This is what monopoly is about - when the consumers can't buy what they want, but must buy whatever the monopoly offers.
And most of their legacy Windows malware too!
There is nothing Firefox can do about handling a certain plugin. All plugins are presented with the same API. It's like saying that Microsoft should fix Word so that it displays your document better. Moreover, IE plugin and Firefox plugin don't have much in common, because they use completely different APIs. You should blame Adobe that they can't handle NSAPI.
The Daily WTF is not the best place for open sourcerers, RMS worshippers and other idealists, and sometimes smells of Visual Basic and other vile secretions of a certain company, but is very fun nonetheless.
Be sure to first look up the fundamental memes: picture of a printout on a wooden table, The Real WTF is..., brillant (sic), and Oracle NULL=''.
While I understand those indulging in astrophysics, I suspect the amount of scientific hedonism the society can tolerate to be limited, and this project could cause a reaction that would harm e.g. CERN.