Memory isn't an unlimited resource you just hoard whenever you think you need it.
No, but on modern operating systems with half-way decent memory management code, it's hardly the super precious commodity you seem to imagine. What matters far, far more is working set -- that is the amount of memory that the application is actively using within a short period of time (and not including, for instance, cached info like that described by the article) -- and total memory including swap space.
Right now my instance of firefox is taking up 128 megs!
Doesn't sound like much of a problem on a modern desktop system.
[Well I don't know, maybe windows has crappy MM, I haven't used it recently.]
Given the article writer's apparent cluelessness (e.g., he doesn't seem to know what the term "memory leak" actually means), and hyperventilating tone, I'd just write him off as a troll.
The big one is of course salary, I know a lot of people who are really secretive about this one. Why? Who cares - it's really only interesting if your raking it in - in which case it's probably published in some kind of company return - or your making the same as any other joe schmo and it's published in some crappy salary review (or close enough).
There seems to be some kind of (bizarre imho) moral taboo against revealing one's salary in some cases. I've had very good friends react in horror when I asked how much they made (in a context where it was a natural thing to ask); morever, I could not get a coherent explanation as to why they cared so much... just "it's not something one says."
The IT department ordered that all copies of Desktop be uninstalled, even though the dubious functionality is turned off by default.
Pretty amusing, considering that stuff like this is a direct competitor to IT departments.
Given the utter incompetence of the typical IT department, I'll bet google wins in the end though. I sure hope so; the local sysadmin-type people in my dept are fine, but the sooner the incompetents in charge of "central IT policy" are shown the door, the better.
Your argument obviously boiling down to the fact that it's genre that matters - you can't make a blanket statement that cinematics do/don't matter. And I agree. (For the record, I'm not ashamed to admit that I did cry like a baby when Aeris died in FF7 - and I knew it was coming!)
There's also the obvious point that the cinematics have to be good to have the intended effect, and given that the skills required to make good cinema are rather different than those required to make a good game in general, many developers really muck it up.
[I always thought Square had an awful record on that score -- for every truly impressive/moving scene they turn out, there are a dozen that are so corny and/or overly melodramatic they make my eyes bleed. The word "subtlety" doesn't seem to be in Square's dictionary...]
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic
on
Wine vs Windows Benchmarks
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From what I know about Gentoo, as a whole, yes. I run KDE on a 2.4 with 512MB of RAM and have effectively 0 swapping happening (until I fire up a massive Java app, or do like 80 things at once). Gentoo's speed isn't the "-fmad-compile-optimize-h4x", it's just how the OS itself is built and configured by default
Um, the question was whether he'd see a marked improvement changing from debian/ubuntu -- and given that Debian uses the same kernel as gentoo, and the same apps, it's very unlikely that there will be any difference in performance unless it comes from the "-fmad-compile" options. [In my experience, the -fmad-compile won't make any difference in practice either unless you're talking about very specialized balls-to-the-wall code like scientific computing or whatever.]
The "0 swapping happening" is an attribute of the linux kernel, not the distro; I notice the same thing under debian (in fact I generally see no disk i/o at all unless I'm writing files, because of linux's excellent disk caching). If the OP is having problems with swapping it means that he doesn't have enough memory for the apps he's using; a distro change is unlikely to help with that.
I dunno how good his predictions have been, and for a tech-writer, his knowledge level about tech stuff sometimes seems depressingly low (while above average for the general populace, it's certainly way below that of the typical slashdot denizen).
David Pogue does have one big saving grace though: when he's wrong/muddled about something, he seems to have no problem admitting it his next column (after being informed of the problem by 23,347 email messages from slashdot readers:-). He seems genuinely willing to explore his mistakes and learn from them -- all in print.
I think this sets a great example, and is indeed even educational for the average reader. It's certainly a refreshing change from typical tech-journal pundits (who will never admit error or change their position, despite being off in bizarro-land about 75% of the time).
If Bush wasn't warned, than his counsel is incompetant.
It wouldn't be surprising it were the latter though -- GWB has shown a scary tendency to use blind loyalty, rather than competence, as his criteria for choosing appointees...
Apparently cheap CPU's intended for embedded applications dont have an MMU so they can't run any serious OS.
Actually linux runs fine on many CPUs without an MMU (I did the port to one, the NEC v850). The previous name for this project was "uClinux", but the majority of uClinux changes were folded into the mainline kernel at about version 2.5.46 or so.
A much bigger limitation is memory -- many embedded CPUs only have like 12KB of RAM (embedded on the chip)!! To run linux, you really need at least 1MB of RAM on top of the memory for the kernel itself (which can be in flash ROM or something); embedded boards for running linux typically come with a minimum of 8MB of RAM.
For running apps, execute-in-place can allow the application text segment to remain in ROM.
If you've got the memory, the CPU itself can be pretty anemic by modern standards, e.g., a 40 MHz clock and no MMU.
They don't use a standard USB cable; unless you enable certain options they won't show up as a standard external drive when plugged in
Huh?? What's non-standard about it?
When my GF got an ipod mini, I plugged its USB cable into the USB keyboard on my creaky 1990s PC (only has USB 1.1) running debian GNU/linux, and mounted it as a disk. I even copied some MP3 files over to the ipod and listened to them. Copying was kinda slow because the PC only had USB 1.1, but otherwise it seemed to work just fine...
Aren't we all fawning over the possibility of running Linux on a new iMac now?
Er, no/kinda/um...
I have a pretty anemic system at present (450MHz PIII), and have recently started to do some ray-tracing.
For ray tracing, the sort of balls-to-the-wall systems in this review are the sort of thing you want, but frankly the idea of ending up with yet another giant space-consuming ATX box that sounds like a jet-engine at takeoff is sort of depressing.
FWIW, I think the current imacs are pretty icky too [I don't like the whole integrated monitor/system style in the first place, and the current imacs are not all up to Apple's standards of elegance -- they're just sort of thick and clumsy looking].
What I'd really like is a system that's as small and as quiet as possible, e.g. the mac-mini, but with a beefed up (dual core?) processor/memory-system. Obviously the heat management would need to be upgraded too, so it couldn't be as small as a MM, but it seems like with appropriate technology (liquid cooling to giant heat sink on the rear?), it needn't be anywhere as bloated as the typical ATX box.
Are there are any happy mediums like this out there? Systems that are reasonably small and quiet, but still somewhat fast for doing computation-bound problems?
I'm glad to see this review anyway though, I'm thoroughly sick of the typical "windows office productivity apps" benchmarking you see on other review sites...
Re:I haven't gotten spam for years ...
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
The downsides to using challenge-response are (1) lots of people will hate you, and (2) you'll lose a fair proportion of real mail.
If you're ok with those, then er, go ahead, I guess. I don't think this applies to most people though...
This crap is why people are flocking to Digg.com. Even though the discussions there suck because of no threading (yet), it's not really different from here, and when people are scamming the front page, everyone gangs together and undiggs it to remove it!
Um, it is different from here because the comments on digg are a cesspool of uninformed, uninteresting, crap, and digg readers appear to be a pretty dim lot. Slashdot's comments are infinitely better.
Since I (like the majority of readers, apparently) read for the comments, not for the articles, digg is hardly an attractive alternative; indeed, there seems little to distinguish it from the other 7 bazillion lame web-forums out there.
What seems to not make it across is that anything that cannot be expressed in code cannot be expressed in documentation either.
Do you really think that? However great your code is, it inevitably is going to contain assumptions and higher-level structure; for readers to fully understand the code, they have to know about them, and simple english text is a concise and powerful way of communicating that information.
An example might be a comment saying: "This code uses algorithm X, which was picked because it has the following properties in the following situations, which are important in the context of this code because..."
Obviously there is a lot of straight-forward low-level code that simply doesn't need commenting if you write it well, but it seems bizarre to think that comments are altogether unnecessary.
Re:From my point of view
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem with C++ is that it is neither as simple as C nor has it the benefits of Java and C# as they allow for code that is easier to read and understand. The available tools are also better for the competing environments on the upper side.
My experience with C++ and Java is that Java is simpler to get your head around, but can really get annoying once you get going, because of the number of gross hacks and workarounds required to avoid excessive heap allocation. Compared to C, C++ often results in dramatically clearer code, simply because it offers the ability to wrap things with enough syntactic sugar that it makes source code much more concise.
However, taking advantages of C++'s strengths requires some discipline, and requires programmers to understand what's going on to some degree, and as we all know, the great majority of programmers are idiots.
I suppose in the end, the best progamming language for idiots will win...
Unfortunately, now that all iPods no longer support FireWire, this will be my last iPod that can be bootable.
Wait, ipods no longer support firewire?!? I thought Apple was the #1 firewire cheerleader... What happened?
I'm confused because I had vaguely been thinking of adding a firewire card to my circa 1999 PC as a way to add an external harddrive (the idea being that it would be compatible with any new system I bought while still being convenient and reasonably fast), and that I could also buy and ipod and use firewire to download to it (I only have USB1, which works with ipods, but is... slow).
Starbucks. It does very well in Japan (every location I've seen in Tokyo is equally busy as locations in the U.S. and Canada). And Starbucks did not alter its menu.
Starbucks Japan doesn't have a dramatically different menu than SB USA, but they've clearly changed it over time to better suit Japanese tastes. This is especially true of food; e.g. sandwiches 5 years ago were more "US style" and they have slowly become um, more "Japanese style" (i.e., they now suck; Japanese are not good at sandwiches), and the biscotti were changed from SB's half-way decent biscotti to some sort of bizarre biscotti-shaped butter cookie.
[and of course there's the size issue: SB Japan actually offers small drinks that are somewhat small; ordering a small in the US gets you puzzled looks and the smallest available size is roughly the size of a 55-gallon drum.]
This isn't surprising of course, if something doesn't sell well you'd be nuts to keep selling it unchanged...
Minidisc only failed to take hold in America; in Japan it was a huge success. These days MP3 players seem to have occupied MD's niche, but for quite a few years bags and even clothing often came with special pockets sized exactly to hold an MD player...
I think eradicating malaria and AIDS is good for society. In fact, I would go so far as to say that that would be better for society than building a flashy new maglev train in the richest nation in the world.
Er, OK then, how about a maglev between Kuala Lumpur and Sudan?
Software, these days, is designed around workflows and dataflows. In other words, software is no longer simply a device in a designated state onto which data is mapped.
Er, what "software these days" are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to resemble anything I've ever used. [Maybe mouth-breather programming tools (MS-visual-net-basic-studio++, that sort of thing)?]
My immediate suspicion would be a virus/worm/spywarebot calling home.
I really don't think it's that. Despite their use of windows, most of the users are quite technically savvy (most are doing software development and/or chip design), and they seem to be quite good about doing what's necessary to avoid nastiness. There's also an organized structure for making sure people keep their machines up to date, and the admins actually follow through to make sure people do it. When there's a virus outbreak in the news, they go into overdrive to make sure people are ready.
As this network noise has been constant for quite a while (at least 6 months), it does seem to be something "real". Maybe it's some kind of badly designed service-discovery protocol?
Is the media confusing the difference between crackers and hackers again? Or is my understanding of the definitions out of date? (ie hackers = good, crackers = evil hackers)
It's just that the words have different accepted meanings in different contexts; there are no absolute "definitions".
Potentially confusing to be sure, but that's natural language for you (though in practice, of course, nobody actually gets confused over this issue; some people just like to use the unrealized possibility of confusion as an excuse to make their favorite rant).
A bit off-topic, but I'm curious if anyone can answer this for me:
At work our network setup recently changed from static-IP based to DHCP based. I run a debian machine, and not all that much seems different for me, just that the machine gets its info from a server at bootup.
However, running various network sniffing tools shows that all the windows machines on the network have become insanely chatty -- every windows machine seems to be constantly sending out packets, regardless of whether they're actually doing anything or not. Given that there are hundreds of windows machines on the (ethernet) network, this means A Lot of Packets.
I find this quite annoying because it horribly clogs up the results if I run some tool to look at network activity (usually to see if something's wrong with one of my machines). I don't know if it actually degrades the network performance appreciably (the packet size seems to be fairly small), but I assume that having zillions of pointless packets getting sent can't be a good thing for performance on an ethernet...
Anyone know WTF those machines are doing? Is this some "feature" gone berzerk?
[I don't recall windows machines doing this in the past; although the change seems to co-incide with our move to DHCP, I suppose maybe it could also be due to people upgrading to newer versions of windows.]
Slashdot Mirror
Memory isn't an unlimited resource you just hoard whenever you think you need it.
No, but on modern operating systems with half-way decent memory management code, it's hardly the super precious commodity you seem to imagine. What matters far, far more is working set -- that is the amount of memory that the application is actively using within a short period of time (and not including, for instance, cached info like that described by the article) -- and total memory including swap space.
Right now my instance of firefox is taking up 128 megs!
Doesn't sound like much of a problem on a modern desktop system.
[Well I don't know, maybe windows has crappy MM, I haven't used it recently.]
Given the article writer's apparent cluelessness (e.g., he doesn't seem to know what the term "memory leak" actually means), and hyperventilating tone, I'd just write him off as a troll.
The big one is of course salary, I know a lot of people who are really secretive about this one. Why? Who cares - it's really only interesting if your raking it in - in which case it's probably published in some kind of company return - or your making the same as any other joe schmo and it's published in some crappy salary review (or close enough).
There seems to be some kind of (bizarre imho) moral taboo against revealing one's salary in some cases. I've had very good friends react in horror when I asked how much they made (in a context where it was a natural thing to ask); morever, I could not get a coherent explanation as to why they cared so much... just "it's not something one says."
The IT department ordered that all copies of Desktop be uninstalled, even though the dubious functionality is turned off by default.
Pretty amusing, considering that stuff like this is a direct competitor to IT departments.
Given the utter incompetence of the typical IT department, I'll bet google wins in the end though. I sure hope so; the local sysadmin-type people in my dept are fine, but the sooner the incompetents in charge of "central IT policy" are shown the door, the better.
Your argument obviously boiling down to the fact that it's genre that matters - you can't make a blanket statement that cinematics do/don't matter. And I agree. (For the record, I'm not ashamed to admit that I did cry like a baby when Aeris died in FF7 - and I knew it was coming!)
There's also the obvious point that the cinematics have to be good to have the intended effect, and given that the skills required to make good cinema are rather different than those required to make a good game in general, many developers really muck it up.
[I always thought Square had an awful record on that score -- for every truly impressive/moving scene they turn out, there are a dozen that are so corny and/or overly melodramatic they make my eyes bleed. The word "subtlety" doesn't seem to be in Square's dictionary...]
From what I know about Gentoo, as a whole, yes. I run KDE on a 2.4 with 512MB of RAM and have effectively 0 swapping happening (until I fire up a massive Java app, or do like 80 things at once). Gentoo's speed isn't the "-fmad-compile-optimize-h4x", it's just how the OS itself is built and configured by default
Um, the question was whether he'd see a marked improvement changing from debian/ubuntu -- and given that Debian uses the same kernel as gentoo, and the same apps, it's very unlikely that there will be any difference in performance unless it comes from the "-fmad-compile" options. [In my experience, the -fmad-compile won't make any difference in practice either unless you're talking about very specialized balls-to-the-wall code like scientific computing or whatever.]
The "0 swapping happening" is an attribute of the linux kernel, not the distro; I notice the same thing under debian (in fact I generally see no disk i/o at all unless I'm writing files, because of linux's excellent disk caching). If the OP is having problems with swapping it means that he doesn't have enough memory for the apps he's using; a distro change is unlikely to help with that.
I dunno how good his predictions have been, and for a tech-writer, his knowledge level about tech stuff sometimes seems depressingly low (while above average for the general populace, it's certainly way below that of the typical slashdot denizen).
:-). He seems genuinely willing to explore his mistakes and learn from them -- all in print.
David Pogue does have one big saving grace though: when he's wrong/muddled about something, he seems to have no problem admitting it his next column (after being informed of the problem by 23,347 email messages from slashdot readers
I think this sets a great example, and is indeed even educational for the average reader. It's certainly a refreshing change from typical tech-journal pundits (who will never admit error or change their position, despite being off in bizarro-land about 75% of the time).
If Bush wasn't warned, than his counsel is incompetant.
It wouldn't be surprising it were the latter though -- GWB has shown a scary tendency to use blind loyalty, rather than competence, as his criteria for choosing appointees...
this point has been made before,
by cognitive scientist john searle in his paper
Yeah, but who takes searle seriously, given the confused muddle of his "arguments" ("the brain is a magic voodoo machine!")?
But slower than Chuck Norris.
Probably a better actor though.
Apparently cheap CPU's intended for embedded applications dont have an MMU so they can't run any serious OS.
Actually linux runs fine on many CPUs without an MMU (I did the port to one, the NEC v850). The previous name for this project was "uClinux", but the majority of uClinux changes were folded into the mainline kernel at about version 2.5.46 or so.
A much bigger limitation is memory -- many embedded CPUs only have like 12KB of RAM (embedded on the chip)!! To run linux, you really need at least 1MB of RAM on top of the memory for the kernel itself (which can be in flash ROM or something); embedded boards for running linux typically come with a minimum of 8MB of RAM.
For running apps, execute-in-place can allow the application text segment to remain in ROM.
If you've got the memory, the CPU itself can be pretty anemic by modern standards, e.g., a 40 MHz clock and no MMU.
They don't use a standard USB cable; unless you enable certain options they won't show up as a standard external drive when plugged in
Huh?? What's non-standard about it?
When my GF got an ipod mini, I plugged its USB cable into the USB keyboard on my creaky 1990s PC (only has USB 1.1) running debian GNU/linux, and mounted it as a disk. I even copied some MP3 files over to the ipod and listened to them. Copying was kinda slow because the PC only had USB 1.1, but otherwise it seemed to work just fine...
.Mac iDisk is like a mounted network volume.
:-O
My, that does sound pretty convenient... What protocol does it use for the network disk? I wonder if I could use it from linux...
Aren't we all fawning over the possibility of running Linux on a new iMac now?
Er, no/kinda/um...
I have a pretty anemic system at present (450MHz PIII), and have recently started to do some ray-tracing.
For ray tracing, the sort of balls-to-the-wall systems in this review are the sort of thing you want, but frankly the idea of ending up with yet another giant space-consuming ATX box that sounds like a jet-engine at takeoff is sort of depressing.
FWIW, I think the current imacs are pretty icky too [I don't like the whole integrated monitor/system style in the first place, and the current imacs are not all up to Apple's standards of elegance -- they're just sort of thick and clumsy looking].
What I'd really like is a system that's as small and as quiet as possible, e.g. the mac-mini, but with a beefed up (dual core?) processor/memory-system. Obviously the heat management would need to be upgraded too, so it couldn't be as small as a MM, but it seems like with appropriate technology (liquid cooling to giant heat sink on the rear?), it needn't be anywhere as bloated as the typical ATX box.
Are there are any happy mediums like this out there? Systems that are reasonably small and quiet, but still somewhat fast for doing computation-bound problems?
I'm glad to see this review anyway though, I'm thoroughly sick of the typical "windows office productivity apps" benchmarking you see on other review sites...
The downsides to using challenge-response are (1) lots of people will hate you, and (2) you'll lose a fair proportion of real mail.
If you're ok with those, then er, go ahead, I guess. I don't think this applies to most people though...
This crap is why people are flocking to Digg.com. Even though the discussions there suck because of no threading (yet), it's not really different from here, and when people are scamming the front page, everyone gangs together and undiggs it to remove it!
Um, it is different from here because the comments on digg are a cesspool of uninformed, uninteresting, crap, and digg readers appear to be a pretty dim lot. Slashdot's comments are infinitely better.
Since I (like the majority of readers, apparently) read for the comments, not for the articles, digg is hardly an attractive alternative; indeed, there seems little to distinguish it from the other 7 bazillion lame web-forums out there.
What seems to not make it across is that anything that cannot be expressed in code cannot be expressed in documentation either.
..."
Do you really think that? However great your code is, it inevitably is going to contain assumptions and higher-level structure; for readers to fully understand the code, they have to know about them, and simple english text is a concise and powerful way of communicating that information.
An example might be a comment saying: "This code uses algorithm X, which was picked because it has the following properties in the following situations, which are important in the context of this code because
Obviously there is a lot of straight-forward low-level code that simply doesn't need commenting if you write it well, but it seems bizarre to think that comments are altogether unnecessary.
The problem with C++ is that it is neither as simple as C nor has it the benefits of Java and C# as they allow for code that is easier to read and understand. The available tools are also better for the competing environments on the upper side.
My experience with C++ and Java is that Java is simpler to get your head around, but can really get annoying once you get going, because of the number of gross hacks and workarounds required to avoid excessive heap allocation. Compared to C, C++ often results in dramatically clearer code, simply because it offers the ability to wrap things with enough syntactic sugar that it makes source code much more concise.
However, taking advantages of C++'s strengths requires some discipline, and requires programmers to understand what's going on to some degree, and as we all know, the great majority of programmers are idiots.
I suppose in the end, the best progamming language for idiots will win...
Unfortunately, now that all iPods no longer support FireWire, this will be my last iPod that can be bootable.
... slow).
Wait, ipods no longer support firewire?!? I thought Apple was the #1 firewire cheerleader... What happened?
I'm confused because I had vaguely been thinking of adding a firewire card to my circa 1999 PC as a way to add an external harddrive (the idea being that it would be compatible with any new system I bought while still being convenient and reasonably fast), and that I could also buy and ipod and use firewire to download to it (I only have USB1, which works with ipods, but is
Starbucks. It does very well in Japan (every location I've seen in Tokyo is equally busy as locations in the U.S. and Canada). And Starbucks did not alter its menu.
Starbucks Japan doesn't have a dramatically different menu than SB USA, but they've clearly changed it over time to better suit Japanese tastes. This is especially true of food; e.g. sandwiches 5 years ago were more "US style" and they have slowly become um, more "Japanese style" (i.e., they now suck; Japanese are not good at sandwiches), and the biscotti were changed from SB's half-way decent biscotti to some sort of bizarre biscotti-shaped butter cookie.
[and of course there's the size issue: SB Japan actually offers small drinks that are somewhat small; ordering a small in the US gets you puzzled looks and the smallest available size is roughly the size of a 55-gallon drum.]
This isn't surprising of course, if something doesn't sell well you'd be nuts to keep selling it unchanged...
Minidisc only failed to take hold in America; in Japan it was a huge success. These days MP3 players seem to have occupied MD's niche, but for quite a few years bags and even clothing often came with special pockets sized exactly to hold an MD player...
I think eradicating malaria and AIDS is good for society. In fact, I would go so far as to say that that would be better for society than building a flashy new maglev train in the richest nation in the world.
Er, OK then, how about a maglev between Kuala Lumpur and Sudan?
Software, these days, is designed around workflows and dataflows. In other words, software is no longer simply a device in a designated state onto which data is mapped.
Er, what "software these days" are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to resemble anything I've ever used. [Maybe mouth-breather programming tools (MS-visual-net-basic-studio++, that sort of thing)?]
My immediate suspicion would be a virus/worm/spywarebot calling home.
I really don't think it's that. Despite their use of windows, most of the users are quite technically savvy (most are doing software development and/or chip design), and they seem to be quite good about doing what's necessary to avoid nastiness. There's also an organized structure for making sure people keep their machines up to date, and the admins actually follow through to make sure people do it. When there's a virus outbreak in the news, they go into overdrive to make sure people are ready.
As this network noise has been constant for quite a while (at least 6 months), it does seem to be something "real". Maybe it's some kind of badly designed service-discovery protocol?
Is the media confusing the difference between crackers and hackers again? Or is my understanding of the definitions out of date? (ie hackers = good, crackers = evil hackers)
It's just that the words have different accepted meanings in different contexts; there are no absolute "definitions".
Potentially confusing to be sure, but that's natural language for you (though in practice, of course, nobody actually gets confused over this issue; some people just like to use the unrealized possibility of confusion as an excuse to make their favorite rant).
A bit off-topic, but I'm curious if anyone can answer this for me:
At work our network setup recently changed from static-IP based to DHCP based. I run a debian machine, and not all that much seems different for me, just that the machine gets its info from a server at bootup.
However, running various network sniffing tools shows that all the windows machines on the network have become insanely chatty -- every windows machine seems to be constantly sending out packets, regardless of whether they're actually doing anything or not. Given that there are hundreds of windows machines on the (ethernet) network, this means A Lot of Packets.
I find this quite annoying because it horribly clogs up the results if I run some tool to look at network activity (usually to see if something's wrong with one of my machines). I don't know if it actually degrades the network performance appreciably (the packet size seems to be fairly small), but I assume that having zillions of pointless packets getting sent can't be a good thing for performance on an ethernet...
Anyone know WTF those machines are doing? Is this some "feature" gone berzerk?
[I don't recall windows machines doing this in the past; although the change seems to co-incide with our move to DHCP, I suppose maybe it could also be due to people upgrading to newer versions of windows.]