3 hours... Seems about right. Notice that your memory used for caching has increased..
Like I said: "need" is a strong word. Do you "need" the additional performance that you'd get from having more memory for caching files? If your average system uptime is as low as yours (if you turn off your system when not in use), and you have that little stuff running... Probably not. If you're working on your machine all day and you access a reasonably large amount of data, then swap is probably a good idea.
Are those numbers from a freshly booted or mostly idle system?
On a longer running system, you'd expect to see more of that free space used for buffers. If you have swap, you can push out little used pages for additional caching. Thus swap can be a performance boost.
Why does it have to be environmental? It could just as easily be behavioral. Having kids at an older age... Partaking in certain activities before/during conception/pregnancy...
Why is the default theory always to blame somebody else?
Lieberman didn't come very close to losing his seat at all. He actually lost the primary, but won the seat by a comfortable margin in the general election.
Dodd was a senator when I was born. When I was 5, he visited the neonatal ward that my mother was head nurse of to take a stereotypical politician-kisses-baby photo. I vividly remember looking up at him in the hall while he told somebody on his staff "Let's get out of here. I hate babies". Aside from being a dick in general, his policies suck too. Being "in trouble with the electorate" couldn't happen to a nicer guy, but I'll believe him losing his seat without resignation when I see it.
The "reduces choice" logic goes something like this:
The only reason that IE only features can be used by developers/content producers is due to the ubiquity of Internet Explorer. If content uses IE only features, consumers are forced to use IE. The only reason Internet Explorer is ubiquitous is because Microsoft used its Operating System monopoly to create massive market share in the Browser market.
Oh, I agree. You may not be 12, but that may accurately reflect your maturity level.
It becomes amusing to me, though, in two scenarios. When it gets applied to stereotypes, and when the person making the accusation does so in an immature fashion. Bonus points for when both occur. (I saw a news article once where it came out that a certain politician played WoW, horde side. The reporter explained this away as saying the Alliance was mostly played by pre-teens. I'm sure you have to be older than 12 to get through journalism school, but he wins the "immature award" for that one...)
forcing a 10MB patch download every single time the game is installed
Every time it's installed? Look at the current generation of HD consoles. Seems like every time I turn one of them on it wants to download a damned software update before I can play. I've reverted to detaching them from the internet.
In my experience playing MMOs for the last 10 years, I've learned one thing. Most people think that everybody who isn't part of their little circle of friends is (11|12|13)years old.
(Alliance|Horde|The other faction) is full of 12 year olds. Damned punk-ass 11 year old ninja'd my loot! Some rude kid was being a racist in [chat channel]. etc..
To be fair, in this case they're actually taking the $800b from the people who buy the bonds that will fund the deficit spending that will pay for this. If you were to give the money to the people you're taking it from, you may as well just skip the bill entirely.:)
This is an economic stimulus bill. There are only three things in your list of cuts that should have even been in the bill in the first place. That doesn't mean that they're not worthy. It just means that they're not stimulus. Even if Obama hyperbolically says "what do you think stimulus is?"
There's a lot of other crap in this bill that should be cut. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth.
Incidentally, the three things were: * $2 billion for broadband * $16 billion for school construction * $3.5 billion for higher education construction
Given the current price of copper, I'd expect that it would be a difficult thing to change in an established community right now without actually increasing prices though...
I tried finding some reference for you, but NStar's impeccable customer service provides obfuscated schedules of rates. Delivery and service charges average out to about $0.10/kWh (don't forget to count that flat monthly service fee). If you add the variable basic rate charge in, that gets you up to $0.24/kWh in the winter.
Two years after I moved, I was still fighting with their collections department. Their crews were on strike when I moved, so they didn't do a final reading of my meter until two months after I left. They insisted for quite a while that I pay the subsequent tenant's electric bill for those two months. Just browsing their website for the last 10 minutes reminded my how much I loath them.
I used to pay $0.25/kWh for my electricity (including delivery charges, etc).
Yeah, I switched to energy efficient everything, and got my bill down to about $110/month... But that's still ridiculous.
I moved one town over. Instead of N*Star, the town I now live in has a municipal power company. The electricity comes from the same place, but I only pay $0.11/kWh now, and the profit goes to my town to (presumably) be used for local infrastructure (what they actually waste it on is another story entirely).
I assume the exclamation point indicates that the author thinks that this is not only a problem, but that it's exceedingly obvious that it's a problem?
Why?
Is there evidence that manufacturers are cheating? (no) They problem is that the loophole in the requirements. So if the manufacturers aren't cheating, why not continue to stick them with the bill for compliance testing?
I had a huge pine tree explode in my back yard at the start of this winter. Usually happens if there's a big ice storm early in the season. The last time I remember widespread tree explosions was in the winter of 1997, which was much worse than this winter. This winter, power was out for four days, and there was a good 2" coat of ice on all the trees. In '97, power was out for weeks, and the ice was 6" thick on large trees and buildings.
Yes, it's literally an explosion. There is a loud bang, and the tree breaks into very small pieces. There is still wood shrapnel across my back yard (since I haven't cleaned it up yet), and the next morning the whole area smelled like pine.
CD-ROMs don't. They use "Zone CAV". It's much cheaper and easier to make a drive spin at a constant angular velocity. Unfortunately that results in higher data rates at the outer edges of the disc, so what drives do is they split the disc up into zones. The disc is spun faster for a zone closer to the center of the disc.
Older CD-ROM drives used straight constant-angular-velocity, and would advertise the fastest data rate (which was at the outer edge of the disc).
The only time a modern CD drive will spin with constant linear velocity is when it's playing back audio in real-time. And even then, many players buffer now, so they use the Zone CAV method anyway.
This will continue to be a problem as long as we have a "marketing metric". We only have to look out for this stuff because manufacturers sought to optimize the metric, rather than the overall quality (even though the goal of having the metric in the first place was as a representation of the quality).
Well, 1 and 4 are right, but 2 is just plain moronic, and 3 is only right some of the time.
Some of the best, and most profitable software is written by a small team with user experience in mind. Some of the most profitable software costs more to run than it did to write. If your project doesn't have a hard requirement for performance, your spec is faulty.
You're right, though, that performance is a bad reason to stay away from bytecode apps. Most slow Java apps are slow because the complexity is higher than necessary (I'd argue that this is because Java makes it easy to hide algorithmic complexity, but C++ suffers from this too), not because they're non-native.
This is a joke, right? Please tell me you're just trolling.
I'm not going to give you a full list (mostly because I don't think slashdot allows comments that large), but for starters Ubuntu Desktop gives you a full office suite, and a non-"lite" e-mail client.
With a few exceptions (Windows Media Player, for example), you don't really get *any* full-featured software with Windows. You have to add all that after the fact. (No, I don't consider Internet Explorer to be "full-featured".)
I posting mostly just to concur with what you've said.
For the past 10 years, I've been a professional open-source software developer. For the first half of my career, I did a lot of GPL work (buzzword compliance always outweighs legal concerns). Now, however, most companies avoid GPL projects like the plague and stick with BSD-like licenses. If a BSD licensed project solves a problem, companies will use it, enhance it, and re-contribute code upstream (to reduce maintenance costs, usually). Their developers participate extensively in developer communities, etc.. If a GPL project is the only existing code that solves the problem, they're most likely to start from scratch and keep the code closed.
The GPL is seen to be a liability. If you use GPLd components, you must GPL your product or use elaborate, inefficient, and as you say, arbitrary techniques to keep the code separate. That's a huge disadvantage to a commercial development company. As it turns out, it's a huge disadvantage to the prospective GPL'd projects that would have otherwise been used too. Those projects typically wouldn't really be interested in the business logic of some commercial product anyway, and have lost out on well-financed developer backing.
GPL is about the freedom of the code: "I've shown you the code, if you use it, show your code to anyone who wants it". BSD is about the freedom of the software: "Hey, I wrote this. Use it."
GPL is more about the rights of the upstream developer, and BSD is more about the rights of the downstream developer. They both are "more free" to one of the two parties, and "less free" to the other.
In my experience, no matter what the FSF's initial intentions, authors of GPL software are generally more concerned about reserving rights for themselves than preserving freedom for others. (That rule has plenty of exceptions.)
Slashdot Mirror
3 hours... Seems about right. Notice that your memory used for caching has increased..
Like I said: "need" is a strong word. Do you "need" the additional performance that you'd get from having more memory for caching files? If your average system uptime is as low as yours (if you turn off your system when not in use), and you have that little stuff running... Probably not. If you're working on your machine all day and you access a reasonably large amount of data, then swap is probably a good idea.
Here's mine:
Are those numbers from a freshly booted or mostly idle system?
On a longer running system, you'd expect to see more of that free space used for buffers. If you have swap, you can push out little used pages for additional caching. Thus swap can be a performance boost.
"Need" is a strong word though.
Why does it have to be environmental? It could just as easily be behavioral. Having kids at an older age... Partaking in certain activities before/during conception/pregnancy...
Why is the default theory always to blame somebody else?
Lieberman didn't come very close to losing his seat at all. He actually lost the primary, but won the seat by a comfortable margin in the general election.
Dodd was a senator when I was born. When I was 5, he visited the neonatal ward that my mother was head nurse of to take a stereotypical politician-kisses-baby photo. I vividly remember looking up at him in the hall while he told somebody on his staff "Let's get out of here. I hate babies". Aside from being a dick in general, his policies suck too. Being "in trouble with the electorate" couldn't happen to a nicer guy, but I'll believe him losing his seat without resignation when I see it.
The "reduces choice" logic goes something like this:
The only reason that IE only features can be used by developers/content producers is due to the ubiquity of Internet Explorer. If content uses IE only features, consumers are forced to use IE. The only reason Internet Explorer is ubiquitous is because Microsoft used its Operating System monopoly to create massive market share in the Browser market.
Oh, I agree. You may not be 12, but that may accurately reflect your maturity level.
It becomes amusing to me, though, in two scenarios. When it gets applied to stereotypes, and when the person making the accusation does so in an immature fashion. Bonus points for when both occur. (I saw a news article once where it came out that a certain politician played WoW, horde side. The reporter explained this away as saying the Alliance was mostly played by pre-teens. I'm sure you have to be older than 12 to get through journalism school, but he wins the "immature award" for that one...)
BadAnalogyGuy.
You have been trolled.
forcing a 10MB patch download every single time the game is installed
Every time it's installed? Look at the current generation of HD consoles. Seems like every time I turn one of them on it wants to download a damned software update before I can play. I've reverted to detaching them from the internet.
In my experience playing MMOs for the last 10 years, I've learned one thing. Most people think that everybody who isn't part of their little circle of friends is (11|12|13)years old.
(Alliance|Horde|The other faction) is full of 12 year olds.
Damned punk-ass 11 year old ninja'd my loot!
Some rude kid was being a racist in [chat channel].
etc..
To be fair, in this case they're actually taking the $800b from the people who buy the bonds that will fund the deficit spending that will pay for this. If you were to give the money to the people you're taking it from, you may as well just skip the bill entirely. :)
This is an economic stimulus bill. There are only three things in your list of cuts that should have even been in the bill in the first place. That doesn't mean that they're not worthy. It just means that they're not stimulus. Even if Obama hyperbolically says "what do you think stimulus is?"
There's a lot of other crap in this bill that should be cut. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth.
Incidentally, the three things were:
* $2 billion for broadband
* $16 billion for school construction
* $3.5 billion for higher education construction
From Acton, MA to Littleton, MA.
Given the current price of copper, I'd expect that it would be a difficult thing to change in an established community right now without actually increasing prices though...
I tried finding some reference for you, but NStar's impeccable customer service provides obfuscated schedules of rates. Delivery and service charges average out to about $0.10/kWh (don't forget to count that flat monthly service fee). If you add the variable basic rate charge in, that gets you up to $0.24/kWh in the winter.
Two years after I moved, I was still fighting with their collections department. Their crews were on strike when I moved, so they didn't do a final reading of my meter until two months after I left. They insisted for quite a while that I pay the subsequent tenant's electric bill for those two months. Just browsing their website for the last 10 minutes reminded my how much I loath them.
For comparison, in Littleton I pay $0.0829/kWh + a flat $5 fee per month with some fees and credits that essentially cancel each other out.
Everybody knows that a 64-bit time_t overflows in stardate year 584942000 (Using the TNG stardate system). Sheesh.
I used to pay $0.25/kWh for my electricity (including delivery charges, etc).
Yeah, I switched to energy efficient everything, and got my bill down to about $110/month... But that's still ridiculous.
I moved one town over. Instead of N*Star, the town I now live in has a municipal power company. The electricity comes from the same place, but I only pay $0.11/kWh now, and the profit goes to my town to (presumably) be used for local infrastructure (what they actually waste it on is another story entirely).
I assume the exclamation point indicates that the author thinks that this is not only a problem, but that it's exceedingly obvious that it's a problem?
Why?
Is there evidence that manufacturers are cheating? (no) They problem is that the loophole in the requirements. So if the manufacturers aren't cheating, why not continue to stick them with the bill for compliance testing?
Wikipedia remembers better than I do. The storm I'm recalling was on January 5th 1998.
They even have an entry for this year's storm: Northeastern Ice Storm of 2008
I had a huge pine tree explode in my back yard at the start of this winter. Usually happens if there's a big ice storm early in the season. The last time I remember widespread tree explosions was in the winter of 1997, which was much worse than this winter. This winter, power was out for four days, and there was a good 2" coat of ice on all the trees. In '97, power was out for weeks, and the ice was 6" thick on large trees and buildings.
Yes, it's literally an explosion. There is a loud bang, and the tree breaks into very small pieces. There is still wood shrapnel across my back yard (since I haven't cleaned it up yet), and the next morning the whole area smelled like pine.
CD-ROMs don't. They use "Zone CAV". It's much cheaper and easier to make a drive spin at a constant angular velocity. Unfortunately that results in higher data rates at the outer edges of the disc, so what drives do is they split the disc up into zones. The disc is spun faster for a zone closer to the center of the disc.
Older CD-ROM drives used straight constant-angular-velocity, and would advertise the fastest data rate (which was at the outer edge of the disc).
The only time a modern CD drive will spin with constant linear velocity is when it's playing back audio in real-time. And even then, many players buffer now, so they use the Zone CAV method anyway.
This will continue to be a problem as long as we have a "marketing metric". We only have to look out for this stuff because manufacturers sought to optimize the metric, rather than the overall quality (even though the goal of having the metric in the first place was as a representation of the quality).
Well, 1 and 4 are right, but 2 is just plain moronic, and 3 is only right some of the time.
Some of the best, and most profitable software is written by a small team with user experience in mind. Some of the most profitable software costs more to run than it did to write. If your project doesn't have a hard requirement for performance, your spec is faulty.
You're right, though, that performance is a bad reason to stay away from bytecode apps. Most slow Java apps are slow because the complexity is higher than necessary (I'd argue that this is because Java makes it easy to hide algorithmic complexity, but C++ suffers from this too), not because they're non-native.
This is a joke, right? Please tell me you're just trolling.
I'm not going to give you a full list (mostly because I don't think slashdot allows comments that large), but for starters Ubuntu Desktop gives you a full office suite, and a non-"lite" e-mail client.
With a few exceptions (Windows Media Player, for example), you don't really get *any* full-featured software with Windows. You have to add all that after the fact. (No, I don't consider Internet Explorer to be "full-featured".)
NoScript is more intrusive than the ads though. Dynamic content is simply too pervasive.
I don't take enough pleasure in blocking "the man" (none at all, really) to justify dealing with NoScript's annoyances.
DHTML popups are no big deal at all. They don't open a new window. They don't "pop under". They don't re-open when you try to close them...
The solution to them is simple and already implemented. Close the tab, and never return to that site again. Ever.
Problem solved.
I posting mostly just to concur with what you've said.
For the past 10 years, I've been a professional open-source software developer. For the first half of my career, I did a lot of GPL work (buzzword compliance always outweighs legal concerns). Now, however, most companies avoid GPL projects like the plague and stick with BSD-like licenses. If a BSD licensed project solves a problem, companies will use it, enhance it, and re-contribute code upstream (to reduce maintenance costs, usually). Their developers participate extensively in developer communities, etc.. If a GPL project is the only existing code that solves the problem, they're most likely to start from scratch and keep the code closed.
The GPL is seen to be a liability. If you use GPLd components, you must GPL your product or use elaborate, inefficient, and as you say, arbitrary techniques to keep the code separate. That's a huge disadvantage to a commercial development company. As it turns out, it's a huge disadvantage to the prospective GPL'd projects that would have otherwise been used too. Those projects typically wouldn't really be interested in the business logic of some commercial product anyway, and have lost out on well-financed developer backing.
GPL is about the freedom of the code: "I've shown you the code, if you use it, show your code to anyone who wants it". BSD is about the freedom of the software: "Hey, I wrote this. Use it."
GPL is more about the rights of the upstream developer, and BSD is more about the rights of the downstream developer. They both are "more free" to one of the two parties, and "less free" to the other.
In my experience, no matter what the FSF's initial intentions, authors of GPL software are generally more concerned about reserving rights for themselves than preserving freedom for others. (That rule has plenty of exceptions.)