You're completely correct. But then, the same can be said about roads, bridges, railroads, all that stuff we've been neglecting. Instead we've been trying to be a "service economy", as if you can have service with everybody doing the serving and nobody doing the actual work.
No, AT&T U-verse is not available in my area. (Ironically, I work for the company that makes the computers that U-verse uses.) And even if it were, that hardly compares with the gigabit speeds available in some countries.
Your "big picture" sounds pretty cherry picked. And doing better than France when it comes to Telecom is not exactly ground breaking.
If you find the current level of broadband availability in the U.S. acceptable, good for you. Most of us don't. Even if your figures are correct, and our penetration is "not so bad", the best you can say is that we're keeping up with a bunch of mediocre countries. Upgrading would drastically improve our competitiveness, and stimulate the economy — both things that badly need doing just at the moment.
The reason Korea has such rapid broadband is because it's like one giant city. You too could have Korean-like broadband if you moved to a major city (or tech center) like Seattle, L.A., New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. Even here in suburban PA I have access to 100 megabit/s broadband via comcast.
Dude, I live in Silicon Valley. I tried to get 5 Mbs, but it wasn't supported, even though I live close to a major business district. I could spend a ton and get Comcast service (it would cost because I have no desire to get cable TV) but I don't believe that they really provide 100 Mbs reliably. If you do, I have a Nigerian prince who needs your help.
And even if it were true, premises fiber is more than 10 times that fast.
Speaking of which, I'm really tired of the density argument. The Seoul region is pretty dense, but not that dense. It has 20 million people in 2,000 square miles. Compare the New York/Newark agglomeration, which has 19 million people in 3,000 square miles. Almost as many people in 1 1/2 times the area. Is that enough to account for such a huge difference in fiber penetration? I don't think so.
It doesn't really matter who's AG. The "think of the children" fanatics have a lot of clout, and no President this side of Ron Paul is going to go against them. (And before you say "We should have elected Ron Paul" consider the dude's totally pathetic primary results; hyperlibertarianism has no mass following.) POBE has to deal with the biggest economic crisis since WW II; two nasty wars; a bunch of other potential wars in places like South Asia, Africa, and the eastern med; fixing health care; and a bunch of other stuff.
In that context, no leader with any intelligence is going to use up political capital on something like internet filters.
If you see "educational computing" as playing Oregon Trail and using a CD-ROM encyclopedia, then I guess it is no big deal. But that assumes that students just have access to a couple of non-networked computers at the back of the room that they get to use for a couple of hours a week. That approach stopped making sense about the time the Apple II was discontinued. Real educational computing means that students use computers in every single class. In the hard sciences, they use them to do complex calculations and run simulations. In social sciences, they use them to do research and gather data. In all classes (but especially the humanities) they use them for writing.
That last use should be obvious. Writing is a lot easier on a computer. Students who get to write their assignments on a computer enjoy it more and work harder.
But why are we even debating this? America has a horrible shortage of technically savvy people. I work for a computer manufacturer, and less than half the people I work with were born in the U.S. And why is this? Because it's easier to get proper technical training in Bangalore or Chengdu then it is in Cleveland. That's got to change.
Did you miss the (rather conspicuous) use of the word "broadband"? Our network infrastructure sucks quite badly, and if he's talking about upgrading it, that's a lot of domestic blue-collar jobs.
If POBE is really serious, he'll look at giving us real broadband, like the premises fibre that Korean consumers enjoy. If he does that, Corning will have to de-mothball a factory or two, and a lot of people will be needed to dig ditches and pull cable. Sounds pretty stimulating to me.
I used to be a big fan of Cowon's products. But in recent years they've given in to feature bloat and overdesign. Right now they don't seem to sell anything except the "high priced PMPs" that (as you say) aren't worth the cost. And even if they were, they're a total pain to use.
I just had to replace my media player, and the only one that seemed to suit my needs was the Creative Zen Stone. Which has a very limited choice of audio formats. But I'm perfectly happy listening to everything on MP3, even if it means I'm uncool.
I can't believe that some people care more about which MP3 player he uses than what policies he's going to implement.
Excuse me? How does having an interest in trivia preclude interest in the Big Stuff? I just spent 5 minutes writing this post on The Great MP3 Scandal. Before that, I spent 45 minutes watching PEBO talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, Mumbai, Pakistan, the economy, and his dogwhistle appointment for Secretary of Veteran Affairs. I spent a lot of time (probably more than I should) googling for the latest news and opinion on the new administration. Does the 5 minutes I spent on trivia render meaningless all the time I spend doing serious reading about Obama's plans and policies?
Besides, as I say in my previous post, Obama's choice of an MP3 player isn't that trivial.
But, as you point out, this is news for nerds, so we're interested in the technology. And the kind of technolgy PEBO uses says a lot about who he is and what kind of president he's going to be. Take that famous Blackberry of his. Apparently he pretty much ran his campaign machine through the thing. Now he's probably going to have to give it up and fall back on a laptop. And any technerd worth the name wants to know what kind of laptop, what email and IM software he's going to use, etc., etc.
PEBO's choice of an MP3 player is more personal, but it's not totally irrelevant to our assessment of the guy. He's going to make decisions that affect how we use the Internet, what kind of computers we're able to buy, even what kind of software we use. So his choices of personal technology are of more than incidental interest. If he owned an iPod, I'd think it likely that he bought into the whole techncool meme that seems to surround Apple products. If he owned some more obscure brand, than I'd gues that he's somebody like me who spends a bit of time googling about features and downloading manuals before he makes a buy decision. The fact that he uses a Zune suggests to me that he just wanted something that would download his tune from his PC to his player without a lot of hassle.
Trivia? Sure. But it still says more about the guy than his brand of underwear.
Seriously, though, this silly message is nothing to joke about. If they didn't bother to review the user dialogs when porting to the PC, you have to wonder what else they missed.
I could be mistaken, but I thought Windows requires each physical memory page to be backed by something on disk, either page file or memory mapped files (e.g. all executables and dlls are like that, which is why you can't remove executable files on disk when the program is still running).
It obviously doesn't require code to be "backed up" by swap data, since you're allowed to set the swap space to zero. (Not recommended, but it does work.) I believe that memory mapping is indeed used to load executable files into RAM, but that doesn't make use of virtual memory any faster.
By your definition, everybody has the option of not eating, if they don't mind not starving to death. (Why is this thread full of silly semantic quibbles?)
Note: virtual memory is not necessarily on disk. "Virtual" memory just refers to the fact that the memory address that the application uses isn't the physical memory address (and in fact there might not *be* a physical memory address this instant), nothing more.
What you say is strictly true, but to quote my Critical Thinking professor, if something is "strictly true", the person that's saying it is often telling a lie.
If a program is entirely in RAM, and part of it is read, then yes, you've just "used virtual memory" without going to disk. So what? Virtual memory wasn't invented just because computer architects thought existing address schemes weren't clever enough. It was invented so you could use disk space to emulate extra RAM at the cost of a loss of performance. Perhaps you think the question should be phrased "why do we allocate disk to use with virtual memory" instead of "why do we use virtual memory". But the latter form of the question is a perfectly clear abbreviation, except to somebody who's more interested in picking semantic nits than actually answering the question.
As for your fragmentation statement: you're wrong. You'd be right if swapped out data stayed swapped out until the very moment it was access. But that would be very slow. The OS tries to anticipate what you're going to need, and that often means a long series of sequential reads.
You must be confused about virtual vs. physical memory. In modern processors, there is no penalty for using virtual memory, all translation from virtual to physical address space is done internal to the processor and you won't notice the difference.
Huh? That's totally wrong. If it were true, you wouldn't need any RAM.
It's true that address translation is hard-wired in modern processors. But that just means that figuring out where the data is is as fast as for data that's already in RAM. Actually reading or writing it is only as fast as the media it's stored on. So if you have a lot of big applications running, and there isn't enough RAM for them all to be in physical memory at once, your system "thrashes", as data migrates back and forth between the two media. That's why adding RAM is very often the best way to speed up a slow system, especially if you're running Microsoft's latest bloatware. Defragging the swap disk can also be helpful.
To answer the original question: actually, you often don't need any virtual memory. But sometimes you do. Disk space is cheap, so it makes sense to allocate a decent amount of virtual memory and just not worry about whether it's absolute necessary.
According to the story "Vixie knew how easy it was to listen in on cell calls". Doesn't sound like he was thinking of the NSA at all. More like all the casual cell eavesdroppers that used to be common when most people were still on analog.
But suppose the NSA is an issue. They never taps landlines? If you're going to be that uptight, you don't fixate on one particular vulnerability. You need a general security strategy. The includes never using any third party channel without securing it first.
What's particularly laughable is this bit:
Vixie began the conversation by reading aloud a series of numbers--a code that would later allow him to authenticate Gustafsson's emails and prove that he was communicating with the right person.
I wonder what that "series of numbers" was? Vixies public key? He could have sent that via any insecure channel (and email is an easier way to copy it without error) and anyway it would certify Vixie to Gustafsson, not vice-versa.
Perhaps the story got garbled in the telling, but it sounds to me like Vixie was sending Gustafsson a symmetric key. That would mean that anybody who was listening in on the conversation would have been able to read every encyrpted email sent between the two of them.
Take a look at what's already out there. Mostly over 500 Telnic employees grabbing henry.tel and david.tel. Yawn.
These all seem to follow a template. Obviously Telnic told all its people to create domains to help publicize the product. Teensy little mistake: the pages do nothing to obfuscate personal email addresses. Got spam?
Is it just me, or does it seem like Vixie sometimes gets pretty stupid? He can't be a total idiot, considering all that he's accomplished. But insistence on using landlines for discussions of this issue are pretty laughable. It's true that analog cell conversations were open to anybody with the right kind of radio receiver. But by 2002, nobody who lived in an urban area was still using analog. I believe it's actually harder to tap a digital cell than it is a landline. After all, landlines are analog between the phone and the switch. You can, of course, pull digital conversations of the air with a lot of expensive equipment, but anybody with the resources to do that not somebody you can hide from anyway.
I seem to recall other incidents of weird Vixie fixattions, though I can't remember specifics.
You know, I always seem to end up buying Logitech mice. I'm not brand-conscious, and I only want the most basic features (if you consider a scroll wheel and optical tracking "basic"). You'd expect such an item to be a beige commodity by now, but whenever I need a new mouse, the cheapest one in the store that looks like it would fit in my hand is always a Logitech.
Slashdot Mirror
You're completely correct. But then, the same can be said about roads, bridges, railroads, all that stuff we've been neglecting. Instead we've been trying to be a "service economy", as if you can have service with everybody doing the serving and nobody doing the actual work.
Oooh, 10 Mbs. Be still my beating heart.
No, AT&T U-verse is not available in my area. (Ironically, I work for the company that makes the computers that U-verse uses.) And even if it were, that hardly compares with the gigabit speeds available in some countries.
Your "big picture" sounds pretty cherry picked. And doing better than France when it comes to Telecom is not exactly ground breaking.
If you find the current level of broadband availability in the U.S. acceptable, good for you. Most of us don't. Even if your figures are correct, and our penetration is "not so bad", the best you can say is that we're keeping up with a bunch of mediocre countries. Upgrading would drastically improve our competitiveness, and stimulate the economy — both things that badly need doing just at the moment.
Great minds think alike:
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2008/12/06/obama%E2%80%99s-wpa/
The reason Korea has such rapid broadband is because it's like one giant city. You too could have Korean-like broadband if you moved to a major city (or tech center) like Seattle, L.A., New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. Even here in suburban PA I have access to 100 megabit/s broadband via comcast.
Dude, I live in Silicon Valley. I tried to get 5 Mbs, but it wasn't supported, even though I live close to a major business district. I could spend a ton and get Comcast service (it would cost because I have no desire to get cable TV) but I don't believe that they really provide 100 Mbs reliably. If you do, I have a Nigerian prince who needs your help.
And even if it were true, premises fiber is more than 10 times that fast.
Speaking of which, I'm really tired of the density argument. The Seoul region is pretty dense, but not that dense. It has 20 million people in 2,000 square miles. Compare the New York/Newark agglomeration, which has 19 million people in 3,000 square miles. Almost as many people in 1 1/2 times the area. Is that enough to account for such a huge difference in fiber penetration? I don't think so.
It doesn't really matter who's AG. The "think of the children" fanatics have a lot of clout, and no President this side of Ron Paul is going to go against them. (And before you say "We should have elected Ron Paul" consider the dude's totally pathetic primary results; hyperlibertarianism has no mass following.) POBE has to deal with the biggest economic crisis since WW II; two nasty wars; a bunch of other potential wars in places like South Asia, Africa, and the eastern med; fixing health care; and a bunch of other stuff.
In that context, no leader with any intelligence is going to use up political capital on something like internet filters.
If you see "educational computing" as playing Oregon Trail and using a CD-ROM encyclopedia, then I guess it is no big deal. But that assumes that students just have access to a couple of non-networked computers at the back of the room that they get to use for a couple of hours a week. That approach stopped making sense about the time the Apple II was discontinued. Real educational computing means that students use computers in every single class. In the hard sciences, they use them to do complex calculations and run simulations. In social sciences, they use them to do research and gather data. In all classes (but especially the humanities) they use them for writing.
That last use should be obvious. Writing is a lot easier on a computer. Students who get to write their assignments on a computer enjoy it more and work harder.
But why are we even debating this? America has a horrible shortage of technically savvy people. I work for a computer manufacturer, and less than half the people I work with were born in the U.S. And why is this? Because it's easier to get proper technical training in Bangalore or Chengdu then it is in Cleveland. That's got to change.
Did you miss the (rather conspicuous) use of the word "broadband"? Our network infrastructure sucks quite badly, and if he's talking about upgrading it, that's a lot of domestic blue-collar jobs.
If POBE is really serious, he'll look at giving us real broadband, like the premises fibre that Korean consumers enjoy. If he does that, Corning will have to de-mothball a factory or two, and a lot of people will be needed to dig ditches and pull cable. Sounds pretty stimulating to me.
How many people do you know in Spain? And asking for a stranger to do the transaction for you is a good way to get ripped off.
I used to be a big fan of Cowon's products. But in recent years they've given in to feature bloat and overdesign. Right now they don't seem to sell anything except the "high priced PMPs" that (as you say) aren't worth the cost. And even if they were, they're a total pain to use.
I just had to replace my media player, and the only one that seemed to suit my needs was the Creative Zen Stone. Which has a very limited choice of audio formats. But I'm perfectly happy listening to everything on MP3, even if it means I'm uncool.
You're right, that's a well thought-out piece that strongly backs up the author's claim that he's been doing this for a while.
Quibbles: if he's that kind of independent worker, how come he has time to goof off at slashdot?
And why can't anybody remember the difference between "lose" and "loose"?
I can't believe that some people care more about which MP3 player he uses than what policies he's going to implement.
Excuse me? How does having an interest in trivia preclude interest in the Big Stuff? I just spent 5 minutes writing this post on The Great MP3 Scandal. Before that, I spent 45 minutes watching PEBO talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, Mumbai, Pakistan, the economy, and his dogwhistle appointment for Secretary of Veteran Affairs. I spent a lot of time (probably more than I should) googling for the latest news and opinion on the new administration. Does the 5 minutes I spent on trivia render meaningless all the time I spend doing serious reading about Obama's plans and policies?
Besides, as I say in my previous post, Obama's choice of an MP3 player isn't that trivial.
Actually, there are venues where the first family's sartorial choices are of great interest.
But, as you point out, this is news for nerds, so we're interested in the technology. And the kind of technolgy PEBO uses says a lot about who he is and what kind of president he's going to be. Take that famous Blackberry of his. Apparently he pretty much ran his campaign machine through the thing. Now he's probably going to have to give it up and fall back on a laptop. And any technerd worth the name wants to know what kind of laptop, what email and IM software he's going to use, etc., etc.
PEBO's choice of an MP3 player is more personal, but it's not totally irrelevant to our assessment of the guy. He's going to make decisions that affect how we use the Internet, what kind of computers we're able to buy, even what kind of software we use. So his choices of personal technology are of more than incidental interest. If he owned an iPod, I'd think it likely that he bought into the whole techncool meme that seems to surround Apple products. If he owned some more obscure brand, than I'd gues that he's somebody like me who spends a bit of time googling about features and downloading manuals before he makes a buy decision. The fact that he uses a Zune suggests to me that he just wanted something that would download his tune from his PC to his player without a lot of hassle.
Trivia? Sure. But it still says more about the guy than his brand of underwear.
One word: branding.
You'll be fine, as long as you've been backed up!
Seriously, though, this silly message is nothing to joke about. If they didn't bother to review the user dialogs when porting to the PC, you have to wonder what else they missed.
I could be mistaken, but I thought Windows requires each physical memory page to be backed by something on disk, either page file or memory mapped files (e.g. all executables and dlls are like that, which is why you can't remove executable files on disk when the program is still running).
It obviously doesn't require code to be "backed up" by swap data, since you're allowed to set the swap space to zero. (Not recommended, but it does work.) I believe that memory mapping is indeed used to load executable files into RAM, but that doesn't make use of virtual memory any faster.
By your definition, everybody has the option of not eating, if they don't mind not starving to death. (Why is this thread full of silly semantic quibbles?)
Note: virtual memory is not necessarily on disk. "Virtual" memory just refers to the fact that the memory address that the application uses isn't the physical memory address (and in fact there might not *be* a physical memory address this instant), nothing more.
What you say is strictly true, but to quote my Critical Thinking professor, if something is "strictly true", the person that's saying it is often telling a lie.
If a program is entirely in RAM, and part of it is read, then yes, you've just "used virtual memory" without going to disk. So what? Virtual memory wasn't invented just because computer architects thought existing address schemes weren't clever enough. It was invented so you could use disk space to emulate extra RAM at the cost of a loss of performance. Perhaps you think the question should be phrased "why do we allocate disk to use with virtual memory" instead of "why do we use virtual memory". But the latter form of the question is a perfectly clear abbreviation, except to somebody who's more interested in picking semantic nits than actually answering the question.
As for your fragmentation statement: you're wrong. You'd be right if swapped out data stayed swapped out until the very moment it was access. But that would be very slow. The OS tries to anticipate what you're going to need, and that often means a long series of sequential reads.
Gee, that's an original thought.
Unfortunately, not everybody has that option.
You must be confused about virtual vs. physical memory. In modern processors, there is no penalty for using virtual memory, all translation from virtual to physical address space is done internal to the processor and you won't notice the difference.
Huh? That's totally wrong. If it were true, you wouldn't need any RAM.
It's true that address translation is hard-wired in modern processors. But that just means that figuring out where the data is is as fast as for data that's already in RAM. Actually reading or writing it is only as fast as the media it's stored on. So if you have a lot of big applications running, and there isn't enough RAM for them all to be in physical memory at once, your system "thrashes", as data migrates back and forth between the two media. That's why adding RAM is very often the best way to speed up a slow system, especially if you're running Microsoft's latest bloatware. Defragging the swap disk can also be helpful.
To answer the original question: actually, you often don't need any virtual memory. But sometimes you do. Disk space is cheap, so it makes sense to allocate a decent amount of virtual memory and just not worry about whether it's absolute necessary.
According to the story "Vixie knew how easy it was to listen in on cell calls". Doesn't sound like he was thinking of the NSA at all. More like all the casual cell eavesdroppers that used to be common when most people were still on analog.
But suppose the NSA is an issue. They never taps landlines? If you're going to be that uptight, you don't fixate on one particular vulnerability. You need a general security strategy. The includes never using any third party channel without securing it first.
What's particularly laughable is this bit:
Vixie began the conversation by reading aloud a series of numbers--a code that would later allow him to authenticate Gustafsson's emails and prove that he was communicating with the right person.
I wonder what that "series of numbers" was? Vixies public key? He could have sent that via any insecure channel (and email is an easier way to copy it without error) and anyway it would certify Vixie to Gustafsson, not vice-versa.
Perhaps the story got garbled in the telling, but it sounds to me like Vixie was sending Gustafsson a symmetric key. That would mean that anybody who was listening in on the conversation would have been able to read every encyrpted email sent between the two of them.
These all seem to follow a template. Obviously Telnic told all its people to create domains to help publicize the product. Teensy little mistake: the pages do nothing to obfuscate personal email addresses. Got spam?
Is it just me, or does it seem like Vixie sometimes gets pretty stupid? He can't be a total idiot, considering all that he's accomplished. But insistence on using landlines for discussions of this issue are pretty laughable. It's true that analog cell conversations were open to anybody with the right kind of radio receiver. But by 2002, nobody who lived in an urban area was still using analog. I believe it's actually harder to tap a digital cell than it is a landline. After all, landlines are analog between the phone and the switch. You can, of course, pull digital conversations of the air with a lot of expensive equipment, but anybody with the resources to do that not somebody you can hide from anyway.
I seem to recall other incidents of weird Vixie fixattions, though I can't remember specifics.
You know, I always seem to end up buying Logitech mice. I'm not brand-conscious, and I only want the most basic features (if you consider a scroll wheel and optical tracking "basic"). You'd expect such an item to be a beige commodity by now, but whenever I need a new mouse, the cheapest one in the store that looks like it would fit in my hand is always a Logitech.
I wouldn't be surprised if Budweiser ships (far in excess of?) 1 billion units a year
And that's just to Chico State!!