Use a swapfile instead of a partition
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Use a swapfile instead of a partition. 2.6 kernels cache the location of the file, so there's no performance hit for swap files compared to swap partitions. I'll give a quick HOWTO:
1. decide how much you want (you can change it later, I have 128MB on all my boxes with over 512MB RAM). The example uses 128MB
2. #dd bs=1M count=128 if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap 3. mkswap/var/swap 4. edit/etc/fstab for:/var/swap none swap sw 0 0 5. swapon -a 6. There is no step six!
But the best way to know how much swap you need is to peek at #top every now and then, or #cat/proc/meminfo and see how much you're using when you've got the system strained, use twice that amount, not less than 128MB.
LOL. Except the way it really worked is with e-mail, not the predicted negro family technician on an auto-teleprompter in the basement.
Not trying to be crass, just a reflection on the times.
It's a freakin' DREAM COME TRUE!
on
Fix a Troubled Mac
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sure. There's a LOT less hardware calls, but when there's one, there are bound to be many of the same type.
I have about 200 Macs under my responsibility, and since November I've not had to fix ONE hardware issue with a desktop (excepting two dead keyboards). I've sent a few iBooks in, but those have been abused for almost three years by fourth-graders.
When I notice one iBook drive go, though, I know there are six more waiting to die, so I tested them all and sent the dying ones back.
The PC-support guy has about twice as many computers to handle, but he easily does five times as many hardware repairs as I do.
As for software, if you really know *NIX, you can keep users pretty happy while limiting their destructive whims to their own home folders, which is a joy.
We don't have popups, adware, spyware, worms, or viruses on our side of the fence, so there's a LOT fewer support calls. You do, however, have to keep users up-to-date withtheir software, and that means registering each machine in ARD so you can push packages. I spend a decent part of my day in front of ARD getting reports on OS versions to track down any update-stragglers.
Active-Directory integration lets me give some users temporary admin rights to their machines if I trust them, which is way cool. You can run roaming profiles via SMB and AD as well if you like, so non-admin users can't write a damn thing to local drives.
Imaging is painless, as there's netboot; and you NEVER have to make separate images for different breeds of hardware, the image for the G5 works fine on the bondi-blue iMac.
ARD lets me remote into people's machines and SHOW them how to do attachments in email, etc. Saves me the walk across campus.
There is a big learning curve though, not to USE a Mac, but to admin them. You've got to learn the whole 'vibe' and get a feel for the types of problems these strange machines can exhibit. And don't forget to memorize your startup keystrokes, command-option-p-r can save you quite a bit of time.
I'd worry about RSI injuries, DDR is a lot more intense than a focused workout, you're slamming the pads to make time somethines, whereas on a jog or a bike you can conrtol the physical impacts much better.
Milestone 1 was in 1998. I was just starting to use Linux back then, I clearly recall using Milestone 8 during my internship at a school in fall of 1999.
Agreed. But it's time to start working towards some unification and integration on desktop apps because the 'UNIX Way' has failed to capture the desktop market.
Mozilla is OSS, so improvements to any part of it wil ripple through the different products automatically. FireFox, ThunderBird, Mozilla and Camino are all coming from the same base code, and improvement to that code improves all the products. Continuing to develop the 'monolithic' mozilla is vital to the rest of the projects, because the monolithic app showcases and tests the ground for features that may or may not dribble down to the 'birds.
Thinking about it like 'if you write code for Mozilla, you DIDN'T write for FireFox" is backwards, if you improved Mozilla you improved ALL of the mozilla.org offerings.
If you add code to Mozilla that does AOL mail or AIM protocol, that would be fscking AWESOME! Someone else will modularize it and make it a plugin for FireFox later, and we'll have a better offering, and it won't be shoved down anyone's throat.
Personally, I just moved from Mozilla (for mail and web) to FireFox and ThunderBird, I'm not at all impressed. I saved a few MB of RAM, but overall I was happier with the monolithic app. I switched so that I could file bugs and make the new apps better.
Mine almost is. I built it as a hot and nasty workstation about three years ago, everything had a fan (CPU, GPU, HD slot, northbridge, and case x4). Slowly I've been replacing all the parts with newer revions that don't need fans.
I went from a RADEON to a fanless RADEON 7500, the CPU is an Athlon-XP Barton 1.8GHz underclocked to 1.4GHz, and I'm switching from the KT-266a to the KT-600 chipset, which is fanless and less juice-hungry.
I've also disabled all fans but the top case fan and the CPU fan, and it's cooler than my old parts were with 4 case fans!
That's what I want, a low-power fanless micro-atx motherboard with high-quality integrated LAN (3Com or Intel).
These chips sound ideal for my purposes (cheap and fast fanless general-purpose machines for desktops, set-tops, and file serving)
I get by just dandy on anything 800MHz or above. It would be nice to have the north and south bridges integrated into one package on the underside of the CPU, the whole unit could live on a daughtercard to the main board which would really be a PCI-X bus with all the ports and gadgets. Think of how flexible that would be, you could get some SERIOUS upgrade potential with that configuration, since the MoBo and DoBo would be joined by PCI-X instead of this integrated proprietary v-link-type crap.
I'm waiting for solid-state laptops. My desktop systems use about 2.5 - 4GB of disk space, with my files on the server, but I could get some serious stuff done with an 8GB solid-state laptop, and they'd be virtually indestructible.
Maybe it would work better to have a boatload of RAM (4-8GB) caching the most-used parts of a filesystem on a very low level, so the drive only spins up when the cache can't satisfy. The RAM could also hold a shadow file for periodic writes to mass storage (be it network or spinning media). Your hard drive would only kick in for a few seconds every hour to flush it's write buffers.
Mozilla isn't bloaty though, I've been using it since 'milestone 18' back in the mid-nineties when it was a bit pokey and broken.
Have you done a quantitative ascessment of this feeling that Moz is big or slow? I think Mozilla is quite fast, certainly faster than IE. Also, I think that if you could un-marry windows and IE and get a full grasp of how much RAM IE was using (even when it's not loaded, mshtml.dll and friends are in RAM) you'd change your story.
Every web browser is going to use a fair amount of RAM because it needs at least a window-sized buffer to composite on. Safari and IE are tricky because they use the OS libraries for that, so it's not as easy to see the footprint, but Moz does it inside itself, so the footprint looks somewhat massive.
The reason is that people really do think that MHz matters. I heard the procurement manager explain tot he CIO a few days ago that "The 2.4GHz celeron is the same SPEED as the 2.4GHz Pentium 4, and it's almost twice as fast as the 1.2GHz Macs that we could buy, so we should buy the celerons."
I had to stop myself from busting some faces at his comment for political reasons, but I DID do a demonstration for the dean of students of a 500MHz Mac G4 kicking a 1.4GHz Dell's ass in start time, digitizing media, compression, and browsing speed.
LOL. I remember quite clearly sitting in the office with the new CIO and explaining that digitizing a CD took about ten minutes, and how 2500 of them would take 25,000 minutes if I wasn't doing anything else. Then I explained how there are only 420 work/minutes each day for me, and how even the slightest deviation would stop the digitizing, and that the minimum digitizing time was sixty days, fudged to 180 because I have other work (an entire job) to do.
The look on the face of these people when they realized how out-of-whack their non-estimations were was priceless.
anywho, they were happy to hear that I found a way to get it done at no 'real' cost by having student workers do the grunt-work. Now it's almost done and they want a LOT of features added to the web-based front-end. I have to explain again how if they don't want to spend massive loot to farm it out to a contrator I have to have the time to LEARN AN ENTIRE COMPUTER LANGUAGE which could take months.
When I started my job thfe first project I was handed was a leftover from the last set of folks there:
Digitize 2500 CDs. Now. And without spending any money.
I eventually sat down with the CIO and explained that this isn't something you can do in a day, week, or month. We eventually had student workers plug away at it in their free time and it took eight months.
All this because someone said, "sure, I just digitized a CD a few minutes ago, digitizing the whole roomful shouldn't take more than a few days."
that's actually how some solar power stations work. They have a bunch of mirrors that aim the sunlight to a glass globe filled with water, the water boils out and powers a turbine, condenses out and returns to the globe via a valve and pump.
Overall it works better than solar cells because it's so simple and you harness the heat energy rather than the light itself, but therer's only economy to it on a large scale, you need enough space to get a huge amount of water to constantly boil. Also, it's significantly harder to get this thing working on less-than-ideal days; solar cells still collect juice on slightly cloudy or overcast days, but this method doesn't work nearly as well.
Still, a good way to apply solar energy when in conditions that permit. I'd like to set up a small unit with a fresnel lens and 'boiling globe' to generate hot water (which I'll pump through a radiator) for my house in the winter. The problem I see is with safety, that beam has to be EXACTLY where I want it or I'll burn the house down.
I laugh at you both. I first browsed the web on a Mac with 4MB RAM, and it was the MONSTER of the block. It had a 2400bps modem and the web consisted primarily of sites hosted at universities and government buildings with lots and LOTS of star-trek miscellany.
Back then there weren't any of these 'search engines' so you sort of had to know where you wanted to go. I remember a poster we had of a 'map' of the internet, and there were about 30 major nodes on it, with little listings of several sites per node. It was way cool.
Of course, this was at a friend's house, at MY place we only had a 286 with a 300bps modem, 640K RAM, and 'Ocean State FreeNet' BBS service.
The box under the monitor that you put the CD in is not the hard drive, it's the MODEM!
At least it is to the fifty-five year-old and up New England female demographic.
I didn't know if the tech people decided to pull a fast one on these ladies by feeding them misinformation or if they just feel better using 'loftier' terms for the computer case instead of 'the box'.
What do you mean it's no different? I disagree. I didn't STEAL anything. Granted, it wasn't the kind of thing I could do for a living and sleep easy, but I surely wasn't responsible for the damage done by the theft itself (lost work, broken windows, etc.).
Where you draw the line of responsibility is your own business, but providing a service to criminals is certainly very different than committing criminal acts.
Um, as far as I know there really isn't any sort of priority on looking for dangerous asteroids withour name on it. I don't think there's ANY sort of massive funded concerted effort to monitor the skies for incoming rocks.
Yes, exactly, freedom from the stranglehold of fear the Islamic world has on our Christian nation. Freedom from suicide bombers lurking in every corner of every city and town.
I'm glad you see things our way. It's very important that we be free to practice the will of Jesus Christ, our savior. Surely the towelhe^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Arabs want our fertile land and beautiful women all for their own. I'm quite confident that Jesus Christ is beside us as we valiantly vanquish the Iraqi threat and close Saddam's terrible torture prisons.
I'm afraid you're confused. On 9/12/2001 the USA officially switched from a 'freedom to' model to the less terror-friendly 'freedom from' model.
Please stop thinking you can do anything besides work, sleep, and consume; it's making the others think twice.
Any more from you and it's off to Guantanamo for state-enforced vacation.
Have a nice day! And watch that parcel!
G5 is cooler than a P4
on
G5 in an iMac
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The G5 puts out a LOT less heat than a comparably-equipped Pentium 4 chip.
The reason we don't have the G5s in everything is that it takes a lot of time to design, fab, and test motherboards for Apple's designs. Also, the 970FX is coming soon, and it's much cooler than the straight 970, so there's no rush to move to the current series of CPU.
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Use a swapfile instead of a partition. 2.6 kernels cache the location of the file, so there's no performance hit for swap files compared to swap partitions. I'll give a quick HOWTO:
/var/swap /etc/fstab for: /var/swap none swap sw 0 0
/proc/meminfo and see how much you're using when you've got the system strained, use twice that amount, not less than 128MB.
1. decide how much you want (you can change it later, I have 128MB on all my boxes with over 512MB RAM). The example uses 128MB
2. #dd bs=1M count=128 if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap
3. mkswap
4. edit
5. swapon -a
6. There is no step six!
But the best way to know how much swap you need is to peek at #top every now and then, or #cat
LOL. Except the way it really worked is with e-mail, not the predicted negro family technician on an auto-teleprompter in the basement.
Not trying to be crass, just a reflection on the times.
Sure. There's a LOT less hardware calls, but when there's one, there are bound to be many of the same type.
I have about 200 Macs under my responsibility, and since November I've not had to fix ONE hardware issue with a desktop (excepting two dead keyboards). I've sent a few iBooks in, but those have been abused for almost three years by fourth-graders.
When I notice one iBook drive go, though, I know there are six more waiting to die, so I tested them all and sent the dying ones back.
The PC-support guy has about twice as many computers to handle, but he easily does five times as many hardware repairs as I do.
As for software, if you really know *NIX, you can keep users pretty happy while limiting their destructive whims to their own home folders, which is a joy.
We don't have popups, adware, spyware, worms, or viruses on our side of the fence, so there's a LOT fewer support calls. You do, however, have to keep users up-to-date withtheir software, and that means registering each machine in ARD so you can push packages. I spend a decent part of my day in front of ARD getting reports on OS versions to track down any update-stragglers.
Active-Directory integration lets me give some users temporary admin rights to their machines if I trust them, which is way cool. You can run roaming profiles via SMB and AD as well if you like, so non-admin users can't write a damn thing to local drives.
Imaging is painless, as there's netboot; and you NEVER have to make separate images for different breeds of hardware, the image for the G5 works fine on the bondi-blue iMac.
ARD lets me remote into people's machines and SHOW them how to do attachments in email, etc. Saves me the walk across campus.
There is a big learning curve though, not to USE a Mac, but to admin them. You've got to learn the whole 'vibe' and get a feel for the types of problems these strange machines can exhibit. And don't forget to memorize your startup keystrokes, command-option-p-r can save you quite a bit of time.
I'd worry about RSI injuries, DDR is a lot more intense than a focused workout, you're slamming the pads to make time somethines, whereas on a jog or a bike you can conrtol the physical impacts much better.
Milestone 1 was in 1998. I was just starting to use Linux back then, I clearly recall using Milestone 8 during my internship at a school in fall of 1999.
This is not the unix way of doing things.
Agreed. But it's time to start working towards some unification and integration on desktop apps because the 'UNIX Way' has failed to capture the desktop market.
Mozilla is OSS, so improvements to any part of it wil ripple through the different products automatically. FireFox, ThunderBird, Mozilla and Camino are all coming from the same base code, and improvement to that code improves all the products. Continuing to develop the 'monolithic' mozilla is vital to the rest of the projects, because the monolithic app showcases and tests the ground for features that may or may not dribble down to the 'birds.
Thinking about it like 'if you write code for Mozilla, you DIDN'T write for FireFox" is backwards, if you improved Mozilla you improved ALL of the mozilla.org offerings.
If you add code to Mozilla that does AOL mail or AIM protocol, that would be fscking AWESOME! Someone else will modularize it and make it a plugin for FireFox later, and we'll have a better offering, and it won't be shoved down anyone's throat.
Personally, I just moved from Mozilla (for mail and web) to FireFox and ThunderBird, I'm not at all impressed. I saved a few MB of RAM, but overall I was happier with the monolithic app. I switched so that I could file bugs and make the new apps better.
Mine almost is. I built it as a hot and nasty workstation about three years ago, everything had a fan (CPU, GPU, HD slot, northbridge, and case x4). Slowly I've been replacing all the parts with newer revions that don't need fans.
I went from a RADEON to a fanless RADEON 7500, the CPU is an Athlon-XP Barton 1.8GHz underclocked to 1.4GHz, and I'm switching from the KT-266a to the KT-600 chipset, which is fanless and less juice-hungry.
I've also disabled all fans but the top case fan and the CPU fan, and it's cooler than my old parts were with 4 case fans!
That's what I want, a low-power fanless micro-atx motherboard with high-quality integrated LAN (3Com or Intel).
These chips sound ideal for my purposes (cheap and fast fanless general-purpose machines for desktops, set-tops, and file serving)
I get by just dandy on anything 800MHz or above. It would be nice to have the north and south bridges integrated into one package on the underside of the CPU, the whole unit could live on a daughtercard to the main board which would really be a PCI-X bus with all the ports and gadgets. Think of how flexible that would be, you could get some SERIOUS upgrade potential with that configuration, since the MoBo and DoBo would be joined by PCI-X instead of this integrated proprietary v-link-type crap.
I'm waiting for solid-state laptops. My desktop systems use about 2.5 - 4GB of disk space, with my files on the server, but I could get some serious stuff done with an 8GB solid-state laptop, and they'd be virtually indestructible.
Maybe it would work better to have a boatload of RAM (4-8GB) caching the most-used parts of a filesystem on a very low level, so the drive only spins up when the cache can't satisfy. The RAM could also hold a shadow file for periodic writes to mass storage (be it network or spinning media). Your hard drive would only kick in for a few seconds every hour to flush it's write buffers.
Mozilla isn't bloaty though, I've been using it since 'milestone 18' back in the mid-nineties when it was a bit pokey and broken.
Have you done a quantitative ascessment of this feeling that Moz is big or slow? I think Mozilla is quite fast, certainly faster than IE. Also, I think that if you could un-marry windows and IE and get a full grasp of how much RAM IE was using (even when it's not loaded, mshtml.dll and friends are in RAM) you'd change your story.
Every web browser is going to use a fair amount of RAM because it needs at least a window-sized buffer to composite on. Safari and IE are tricky because they use the OS libraries for that, so it's not as easy to see the footprint, but Moz does it inside itself, so the footprint looks somewhat massive.
The reason is that people really do think that MHz matters. I heard the procurement manager explain tot he CIO a few days ago that "The 2.4GHz celeron is the same SPEED as the 2.4GHz Pentium 4, and it's almost twice as fast as the 1.2GHz Macs that we could buy, so we should buy the celerons."
I had to stop myself from busting some faces at his comment for political reasons, but I DID do a demonstration for the dean of students of a 500MHz Mac G4 kicking a 1.4GHz Dell's ass in start time, digitizing media, compression, and browsing speed.
LOL. I remember quite clearly sitting in the office with the new CIO and explaining that digitizing a CD took about ten minutes, and how 2500 of them would take 25,000 minutes if I wasn't doing anything else. Then I explained how there are only 420 work/minutes each day for me, and how even the slightest deviation would stop the digitizing, and that the minimum digitizing time was sixty days, fudged to 180 because I have other work (an entire job) to do.
The look on the face of these people when they realized how out-of-whack their non-estimations were was priceless.
anywho, they were happy to hear that I found a way to get it done at no 'real' cost by having student workers do the grunt-work. Now it's almost done and they want a LOT of features added to the web-based front-end. I have to explain again how if they don't want to spend massive loot to farm it out to a contrator I have to have the time to LEARN AN ENTIRE COMPUTER LANGUAGE which could take months.
When I started my job thfe first project I was handed was a leftover from the last set of folks there:
Digitize 2500 CDs. Now. And without spending any money.
I eventually sat down with the CIO and explained that this isn't something you can do in a day, week, or month. We eventually had student workers plug away at it in their free time and it took eight months.
All this because someone said, "sure, I just digitized a CD a few minutes ago, digitizing the whole roomful shouldn't take more than a few days."
Do you by chance work at Citizens Bank? You sound familiar. :-)
Great. Now I know what 'original film' the Sci-Fi channel will try feeding me next month.
After 'Dinocroc' and 'Boa vs. Python' I'll have 'laser sharks' to enjoy.
that's actually how some solar power stations work. They have a bunch of mirrors that aim the sunlight to a glass globe filled with water, the water boils out and powers a turbine, condenses out and returns to the globe via a valve and pump.
Overall it works better than solar cells because it's so simple and you harness the heat energy rather than the light itself, but therer's only economy to it on a large scale, you need enough space to get a huge amount of water to constantly boil. Also, it's significantly harder to get this thing working on less-than-ideal days; solar cells still collect juice on slightly cloudy or overcast days, but this method doesn't work nearly as well.
Still, a good way to apply solar energy when in conditions that permit. I'd like to set up a small unit with a fresnel lens and 'boiling globe' to generate hot water (which I'll pump through a radiator) for my house in the winter. The problem I see is with safety, that beam has to be EXACTLY where I want it or I'll burn the house down.
You'd have to inhale 100mg?!? That's quite a bit!
A lethal dose of nicotine is 50mg.
A Pall Mall King cigarette has 0.2mg nicotine in it, and about 25mg of 'other' stuff.
So this would be like inhaling four cigarette's worth of gas? That's a lot.
FYI. I know some of the metrics are useless, but it's just an idea.
I laugh at you both. I first browsed the web on a Mac with 4MB RAM, and it was the MONSTER of the block. It had a 2400bps modem and the web consisted primarily of sites hosted at universities and government buildings with lots and LOTS of star-trek miscellany.
Back then there weren't any of these 'search engines' so you sort of had to know where you wanted to go. I remember a poster we had of a 'map' of the internet, and there were about 30 major nodes on it, with little listings of several sites per node. It was way cool.
Of course, this was at a friend's house, at MY place we only had a 286 with a 300bps modem, 640K RAM, and 'Ocean State FreeNet' BBS service.
And I'm only 21 years old!
The box under the monitor that you put the CD in is not the hard drive, it's the MODEM!
At least it is to the fifty-five year-old and up New England female demographic.
I didn't know if the tech people decided to pull a fast one on these ladies by feeding them misinformation or if they just feel better using 'loftier' terms for the computer case instead of 'the box'.
Please place the drive over on the kitchen table and wait five minutes for that program to become available.
What do you mean it's no different? I disagree. I didn't STEAL anything. Granted, it wasn't the kind of thing I could do for a living and sleep easy, but I surely wasn't responsible for the damage done by the theft itself (lost work, broken windows, etc.).
Where you draw the line of responsibility is your own business, but providing a service to criminals is certainly very different than committing criminal acts.
Um, as far as I know there really isn't any sort of priority on looking for dangerous asteroids withour name on it. I don't think there's ANY sort of massive funded concerted effort to monitor the skies for incoming rocks.
Yes, exactly, freedom from the stranglehold of fear the Islamic world has on our Christian nation. Freedom from suicide bombers lurking in every corner of every city and town.
I'm glad you see things our way. It's very important that we be free to practice the will of Jesus Christ, our savior. Surely the towelhe^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Arabs want our fertile land and beautiful women all for their own. I'm quite confident that Jesus Christ is beside us as we valiantly vanquish the Iraqi threat and close Saddam's terrible torture prisons.
I'm afraid you're confused. On 9/12/2001 the USA officially switched from a 'freedom to' model to the less terror-friendly 'freedom from' model.
Please stop thinking you can do anything besides work, sleep, and consume; it's making the others think twice.
Any more from you and it's off to Guantanamo for state-enforced vacation.
Have a nice day! And watch that parcel!
The G5 puts out a LOT less heat than a comparably-equipped Pentium 4 chip.
The reason we don't have the G5s in everything is that it takes a lot of time to design, fab, and test motherboards for Apple's designs. Also, the 970FX is coming soon, and it's much cooler than the straight 970, so there's no rush to move to the current series of CPU.