If you have a reasonable amount of RAM there's no reason to leave it turned on.
If the swapping algorithm is so bad that it swaps unnecessarily, then yes, turning off swap will help. But a good swapping algorithm remains useful even if you have 16 GB of RAM. Large sections of many processes are basically "run once, then ignore" or even "never run". Most processes have a decent amount of startup code that is never referenced after the first half second of execution, or load multi-megabyte shared libraries into process memory space to get two short functions (or, similarly, contain code that only runs under exceptional circumstances). If you disable swap, you're denying access to that memory not only to other programs (which we'll assume for the sake of argument don't run out of RAM themselves, since you use the phrase "reasonable amount of RAM"), but for I/O caching.
If you've got a program regularly crawling part of your directory structure, or you're writing frequently to files, the RAM freed by swapping out the junk parts of each program could be used for a productive purpose. Delaying the write means you can write a contiguous block all at once, allowing higher priority I/O to go through without forcing the low priority I/O program to block, and it can also mean reduced fragmentation on the disk.
Similarly, a predictive caching algorithm can improve responsiveness with that otherwise wasted RAM you've decided *must* be kept in memory. If you always start a program around 6 PM when you get home, the system can recognize this from the metrics and preload it. If you don't run it, oh well, the RAM was used just as effectively as if it held unused, unswappable contents. If you do use it, your program starts nigh instantaneously. If the program itself has a specific performance profile, where specific data files are predictably read, the computer can cache them using the RAM freed by swap, reducing loading times and increasing responsiveness. That might seem wasteful (spinning up the hard disk when it isn't needed), but in other cases it saves energy; if you're seeding a torrent, and the computer has enough memory, it may cache the whole file in memory; voila, no matter what piece a client asks for, the disk doesn't need to spin up.
That said, no swap algorithm is perfect. And if you've got 4+ GB of RAM and all you're doing is running a browser, an office suite and maybe a game, the difference will be small (or non-existent if all your programs and all reasonable file system caching can fit in memory). This doesn't mean swap is useless; all it means is that it's not perfect.
I've never fully understood why we don't impose financial death penalties in cases like these. If all of his existing assets would not exist save for the quasi-treasonous offense (I recognize that it doesn't meet the technical definition for treason unless we've declared war on China while I wasn't looking), then take all of his assets. Every penny, every investment, every stick of lumber, every square centimeter of land. If you allow him or his family to profit from this in any way, then you've provided a reason for potential spies to begin spying in the future.
Well, in a certain sense it's a rational mode of thought. If you're the type who generally distrusts the government for rational reasons (too much power concentrated in too few hands), the same rationale would apply to sufficiently large corporations. A small corporation lacks the ability to do anything really harmful, but a larger corporation with enough hooks in your life can abuse power in much the same way the government can.
Please apply Hanlon's razor before leaping to conspiracy theories. Or Occam's razor might inform you that a conspiracy among thousands of scientists is a highly improbable occurrence; look for a solution that doesn't involve a perfect lid of secrecy among a group of (frequently) socially inept people.
Valentine's Day, in the flowers & chocolates & gifts intensive form has only been around for about half a century. Cards for about 150-200 years. General associations with romance are 600+ years old.
Beyond that, I wouldn't call it entirely male thinking. I know a few women who despise Valentine's day precisely because it focuses all the romance into one day. Same goes for holidays like Mother's Day and Father's Day. It's not that they hate the things people do on the holiday, its that they hate the forced, scheduled "must be on this day, and probably won't be seen again until my birthday" aspect of it.
Hell, I've read all the original books (written by Frank himself) and I still don't think I could summarize the plot.
That's because, by the time you get to the last two or three books, it's purely intellectual masturbation on the part of Herbert. The Dune series was the biggest test for my "if I start a series, I finish it" rule. The first book is very good, the next two were okay (I enjoyed them), the fourth book was still interesting on a certain level, if a over the top. The last two books were sewage. The complexity goes through the roof, but it doesn't have a payoff. Summarizing the plot (not the details of the setting) of the first book is relatively simple, but by the last book you're trying to describe a plot involving psychically invisible Jews, nymphomaniac killer nuns, mind-absorbing shapeshifters. And that's on top of the weirdness in the original book (mile long sandworms that produce a chemical that lets you talk to your ancestors, see the future, double your lifespan and press your shirts). It's like he's trying to one-up himself solely by introducing more weirdness as opposed to engaging plot.
Well, if the missile defense system *doesn't work*, then the benefits of "visiting giant rocks in space" will clearly outweigh it (and yes, there are benefits, if not necessarily for the Moon in particular, no matter how pithily you dismiss them).
He's complaining about government waste, not abrogation of freedom. Just because both happen to limit your freedom doesn't mean he's being ideologically inconsistent.
Or course, this would be because no one would get in a car anymore. When half the accidents will be through no fault of your own, why would you risk impaling yourself?
Replacing 'because' with 'cuz' is theoretically a form of language evolution. Simplifying commonly used words is an acceptable evolution, particularly when there is no risk of misinterpretation. On the other hand, inserting commas in the same way you sprinkle Parmesan cheese is not language evolution. The lack of consistency impairs the ability to convey ideas; the student which produced the writing is likely incapable of producing the same patterns of commas twice. Misplaced commas, along with poor capitalization and spelling, can lead to all sorts of misinterpretations, e.g. the panda which "Eats, shoots and leaves," or the time I "helped my uncle jack off a horse." Language evolution is different from language deterioration.
I'd contend that's less of a vendor lockin formula, and more a problem in establishing a standard that would allow for the improvements that come regularly. Different battery designs charge in different ways; do we want to say that we should make a single standard charger with a set voltage/current that a modern battery can accept, thus ruling out possible advances in battery or ultracapacitor design that might require a different design?
By contrast, gas is a fairly simple proposition. You need to pump a liquid from one storage tank to another; the design on the receiving end (a hole connected to a pipe) is pretty easy to agree on. The size of the tank isn't increasing substantially (I seem to recall even early cars had tanks of a couple gallons in size), so if the design limits the pumping speed a bit, it just means spending 5 minutes instead of 1 minute fueling up. With an electric car, it could mean standardizing on a 4+ hour charge, to the exclusion of the ideal target of a 5 minute charge.
That said, one way to standardize would be to move the specialization into the car. If the car can do the transformation and manage the charging if provided with wallsocket power, then it would be trivial to standardize: You charge from an extension cord. Problem is, that adds hundreds of dollars or more to every car. And that adds up. So right now, we're getting a different sort of compromise: The car is cheaper and lighter, but it requires the charging circuitry to be at the station. You don't need to pay for as much charge control and transformation circuitry (there are hundreds of cars for every charge station), but you end up with a mishmash of "standards".
Once electric cars actually become available to more than a tiny fraction of the populace, and the battery tech advances to the point where more than a tiny fraction of the populace is interested, I expect to see standards, but right now, there's no real incentive to standardize.
They're a draft. Which means public comment opens, politicians get involved, etc. Write a letter expressing your concern to the FCC and your representatives. That's the whole point of a *draft*.
Technically, there are another half dozen or so DSL providers that are all selling service over the same lines. They're all considered business class though, and charge twice times as much for the speeds.
Beyond that, the government granted (and regulated) monopolies were necessary to get the initial investment going. The alternative is the government builds all the lines and leases access to the phone/cable/ISP companies (which the libertarian ideal would hate), because it's impractical and an insurmountable barrier to entry if every provider needs to run its own cable to every street; a sufficiently split market would make any such investment insane, since you couldn't expect to get more than 1/X of the customers, where X is the number of companies that wired the area. And since the cables are running on the common telepone poles, you'll eventually hit a weight limit.
Umm... You do have a choice. The FCC is setting the minimum floor of neutrality. ISPs can still compete on raising that bar, even though they won't (and despite your utopian fantasies, would not have done so without FCC regulation either). Not to mention that this is an FCC draft; the Democrats have only marginal influence over the outcome of a draft produced primarily by civil servants.
I don't know about you, but I live in NYC, have a choice of at least three different providers (two cable, one DSL, maybe more since I last checked). The policies imposed are nearly identical between the three, and, as in the case of Comcast, I have no doubt that the stated policy and the de facto policy differ. Exactly which one am I supposed to "flock" to?
Given that the Kindle's target market is book readers, I don't think tablets like this will have much effect. It's more of a laptop replacement than a book reader; eInk is way more readable, and requires charging far less often. Yes, multiple single-purpose devices can get bulky, but then, I was already carrying around my books anyway. If I wanted a laptop, I'd look at the iPad as an alternative (just like I'd look at a netbook), but if I want to read books and newspapers, I'll stick with paper or eInk.
I'm not saying it will fail, I'm saying it will take market share from laptops far more than eBook readers.
Of course, when the range between eruptions is 660K to 800K, the low end of that would still make it another 20K years before the next eruption, or roughly twice the entire length of the history of human civilization. "About due" in geological time is very different from most people's view of "about due".
Yes, I'm aware the eruption could come earlier than previously observed, but it's not really worth worrying about events with astronomical odds that you can do nothing about now is it?
The end result is the same as that predicted for nuclear winter. Radiation is not the primary danger from a "real" nuclear winter, it's the smoke and soot that would spread through the atmosphere, drastically reducing the amount of sunlight received at the surface, killing plants and reducing temperatures everywhere. When a supervolcano goes off, the effects are nearly identical.
For example, one search for a benchmarking comparison turns up this (sorry, Google wouldn't give a good direct link), which shows roughly equivalent performance.
Do you have a citation on the "faster than.NET CLR" claim? My impression was that they were roughly equivalent; Java might be a tiny bit faster on identical code, but the CLR won in cases where CLR supported idioms were important (e.g. use of collections with primitives would cost Java time boxing and unboxing, while the CLR can use them in collections natively).
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If you have a reasonable amount of RAM there's no reason to leave it turned on.
If the swapping algorithm is so bad that it swaps unnecessarily, then yes, turning off swap will help. But a good swapping algorithm remains useful even if you have 16 GB of RAM. Large sections of many processes are basically "run once, then ignore" or even "never run". Most processes have a decent amount of startup code that is never referenced after the first half second of execution, or load multi-megabyte shared libraries into process memory space to get two short functions (or, similarly, contain code that only runs under exceptional circumstances). If you disable swap, you're denying access to that memory not only to other programs (which we'll assume for the sake of argument don't run out of RAM themselves, since you use the phrase "reasonable amount of RAM"), but for I/O caching.
If you've got a program regularly crawling part of your directory structure, or you're writing frequently to files, the RAM freed by swapping out the junk parts of each program could be used for a productive purpose. Delaying the write means you can write a contiguous block all at once, allowing higher priority I/O to go through without forcing the low priority I/O program to block, and it can also mean reduced fragmentation on the disk.
Similarly, a predictive caching algorithm can improve responsiveness with that otherwise wasted RAM you've decided *must* be kept in memory. If you always start a program around 6 PM when you get home, the system can recognize this from the metrics and preload it. If you don't run it, oh well, the RAM was used just as effectively as if it held unused, unswappable contents. If you do use it, your program starts nigh instantaneously. If the program itself has a specific performance profile, where specific data files are predictably read, the computer can cache them using the RAM freed by swap, reducing loading times and increasing responsiveness. That might seem wasteful (spinning up the hard disk when it isn't needed), but in other cases it saves energy; if you're seeding a torrent, and the computer has enough memory, it may cache the whole file in memory; voila, no matter what piece a client asks for, the disk doesn't need to spin up.
That said, no swap algorithm is perfect. And if you've got 4+ GB of RAM and all you're doing is running a browser, an office suite and maybe a game, the difference will be small (or non-existent if all your programs and all reasonable file system caching can fit in memory). This doesn't mean swap is useless; all it means is that it's not perfect.
I've never fully understood why we don't impose financial death penalties in cases like these. If all of his existing assets would not exist save for the quasi-treasonous offense (I recognize that it doesn't meet the technical definition for treason unless we've declared war on China while I wasn't looking), then take all of his assets. Every penny, every investment, every stick of lumber, every square centimeter of land. If you allow him or his family to profit from this in any way, then you've provided a reason for potential spies to begin spying in the future.
Well, in a certain sense it's a rational mode of thought. If you're the type who generally distrusts the government for rational reasons (too much power concentrated in too few hands), the same rationale would apply to sufficiently large corporations. A small corporation lacks the ability to do anything really harmful, but a larger corporation with enough hooks in your life can abuse power in much the same way the government can.
Please apply Hanlon's razor before leaping to conspiracy theories. Or Occam's razor might inform you that a conspiracy among thousands of scientists is a highly improbable occurrence; look for a solution that doesn't involve a perfect lid of secrecy among a group of (frequently) socially inept people.
Valentine's Day, in the flowers & chocolates & gifts intensive form has only been around for about half a century. Cards for about 150-200 years. General associations with romance are 600+ years old.
Beyond that, I wouldn't call it entirely male thinking. I know a few women who despise Valentine's day precisely because it focuses all the romance into one day. Same goes for holidays like Mother's Day and Father's Day. It's not that they hate the things people do on the holiday, its that they hate the forced, scheduled "must be on this day, and probably won't be seen again until my birthday" aspect of it.
Hell, I've read all the original books (written by Frank himself) and I still don't think I could summarize the plot.
That's because, by the time you get to the last two or three books, it's purely intellectual masturbation on the part of Herbert. The Dune series was the biggest test for my "if I start a series, I finish it" rule. The first book is very good, the next two were okay (I enjoyed them), the fourth book was still interesting on a certain level, if a over the top. The last two books were sewage. The complexity goes through the roof, but it doesn't have a payoff. Summarizing the plot (not the details of the setting) of the first book is relatively simple, but by the last book you're trying to describe a plot involving psychically invisible Jews, nymphomaniac killer nuns, mind-absorbing shapeshifters. And that's on top of the weirdness in the original book (mile long sandworms that produce a chemical that lets you talk to your ancestors, see the future, double your lifespan and press your shirts). It's like he's trying to one-up himself solely by introducing more weirdness as opposed to engaging plot.
Well, if the missile defense system *doesn't work*, then the benefits of "visiting giant rocks in space" will clearly outweigh it (and yes, there are benefits, if not necessarily for the Moon in particular, no matter how pithily you dismiss them).
He's complaining about government waste, not abrogation of freedom. Just because both happen to limit your freedom doesn't mean he's being ideologically inconsistent.
And that means you can't appreciate any other comic? A bit limiting don't you think?
Or course, this would be because no one would get in a car anymore. When half the accidents will be through no fault of your own, why would you risk impaling yourself?
Replacing 'because' with 'cuz' is theoretically a form of language evolution. Simplifying commonly used words is an acceptable evolution, particularly when there is no risk of misinterpretation. On the other hand, inserting commas in the same way you sprinkle Parmesan cheese is not language evolution. The lack of consistency impairs the ability to convey ideas; the student which produced the writing is likely incapable of producing the same patterns of commas twice. Misplaced commas, along with poor capitalization and spelling, can lead to all sorts of misinterpretations, e.g. the panda which "Eats, shoots and leaves," or the time I "helped my uncle jack off a horse." Language evolution is different from language deterioration.
Mod parent up. Clearly a foreigner: he used ensure properly, rather than using insure regardless of context!
Stop mixing up the CIA with the NSA.
I'd contend that's less of a vendor lockin formula, and more a problem in establishing a standard that would allow for the improvements that come regularly. Different battery designs charge in different ways; do we want to say that we should make a single standard charger with a set voltage/current that a modern battery can accept, thus ruling out possible advances in battery or ultracapacitor design that might require a different design?
By contrast, gas is a fairly simple proposition. You need to pump a liquid from one storage tank to another; the design on the receiving end (a hole connected to a pipe) is pretty easy to agree on. The size of the tank isn't increasing substantially (I seem to recall even early cars had tanks of a couple gallons in size), so if the design limits the pumping speed a bit, it just means spending 5 minutes instead of 1 minute fueling up. With an electric car, it could mean standardizing on a 4+ hour charge, to the exclusion of the ideal target of a 5 minute charge.
That said, one way to standardize would be to move the specialization into the car. If the car can do the transformation and manage the charging if provided with wallsocket power, then it would be trivial to standardize: You charge from an extension cord. Problem is, that adds hundreds of dollars or more to every car. And that adds up. So right now, we're getting a different sort of compromise: The car is cheaper and lighter, but it requires the charging circuitry to be at the station. You don't need to pay for as much charge control and transformation circuitry (there are hundreds of cars for every charge station), but you end up with a mishmash of "standards".
Once electric cars actually become available to more than a tiny fraction of the populace, and the battery tech advances to the point where more than a tiny fraction of the populace is interested, I expect to see standards, but right now, there's no real incentive to standardize.
Except the limitation in that case isn't artificial.
They're a draft. Which means public comment opens, politicians get involved, etc. Write a letter expressing your concern to the FCC and your representatives. That's the whole point of a *draft*.
Technically, there are another half dozen or so DSL providers that are all selling service over the same lines. They're all considered business class though, and charge twice times as much for the speeds.
Beyond that, the government granted (and regulated) monopolies were necessary to get the initial investment going. The alternative is the government builds all the lines and leases access to the phone/cable/ISP companies (which the libertarian ideal would hate), because it's impractical and an insurmountable barrier to entry if every provider needs to run its own cable to every street; a sufficiently split market would make any such investment insane, since you couldn't expect to get more than 1/X of the customers, where X is the number of companies that wired the area. And since the cables are running on the common telepone poles, you'll eventually hit a weight limit.
Umm... You do have a choice. The FCC is setting the minimum floor of neutrality. ISPs can still compete on raising that bar, even though they won't (and despite your utopian fantasies, would not have done so without FCC regulation either). Not to mention that this is an FCC draft; the Democrats have only marginal influence over the outcome of a draft produced primarily by civil servants.
I don't know about you, but I live in NYC, have a choice of at least three different providers (two cable, one DSL, maybe more since I last checked). The policies imposed are nearly identical between the three, and, as in the case of Comcast, I have no doubt that the stated policy and the de facto policy differ. Exactly which one am I supposed to "flock" to?
Right... Because if the gov't didn't do anything, this would somehow be better?
Given that the Kindle's target market is book readers, I don't think tablets like this will have much effect. It's more of a laptop replacement than a book reader; eInk is way more readable, and requires charging far less often. Yes, multiple single-purpose devices can get bulky, but then, I was already carrying around my books anyway. If I wanted a laptop, I'd look at the iPad as an alternative (just like I'd look at a netbook), but if I want to read books and newspapers, I'll stick with paper or eInk.
I'm not saying it will fail, I'm saying it will take market share from laptops far more than eBook readers.
Of course, when the range between eruptions is 660K to 800K, the low end of that would still make it another 20K years before the next eruption, or roughly twice the entire length of the history of human civilization. "About due" in geological time is very different from most people's view of "about due".
Yes, I'm aware the eruption could come earlier than previously observed, but it's not really worth worrying about events with astronomical odds that you can do nothing about now is it?
The end result is the same as that predicted for nuclear winter. Radiation is not the primary danger from a "real" nuclear winter, it's the smoke and soot that would spread through the atmosphere, drastically reducing the amount of sunlight received at the surface, killing plants and reducing temperatures everywhere. When a supervolcano goes off, the effects are nearly identical.
For example, one search for a benchmarking comparison turns up this (sorry, Google wouldn't give a good direct link), which shows roughly equivalent performance.
Do you have a citation on the "faster than .NET CLR" claim? My impression was that they were roughly equivalent; Java might be a tiny bit faster on identical code, but the CLR won in cases where CLR supported idioms were important (e.g. use of collections with primitives would cost Java time boxing and unboxing, while the CLR can use them in collections natively).