You shouldn't be installing things like Firefox manually.
I shouldn't? Really? I thought Linux was about freedom. So I should have used IceWeasel and IceDove (the guy that came up with the ugly green, I want a word with... At least keep it blue, like *ice*) on Debian. Well, I have news for the Debian people: I do not want to confuse my users. They have been using Firefox and Thunderbird for ages and they know how those apps look.
So, I installed Thunderbird and Firefox from mozilla.org in/opt, exactly as a decent administrator would do. After all, that's what/opt is for... That's also where Java lives and Adobe Reader...
Why does everyone do as if SCSI is so hard? Terminator at each side of the chain. Finished. I never had a problem. I had more grief with IDE master/slave disks that with SCSI.
As a notorious dumpster diver, I get my parts for free. XP and Ubuntu capable machines... Nice finds have been 1.2GHz Athlon XP and a P-IV 1.9GHz. Thrown away harddisks seem to be in the 20-40Gig range. RAM is rare, but I have a nice collection of RAM that lived in my own PCs. AGP graphic cards are very common in the dumpster, as are 100Mbps NICs.
If I want a "cheap" PC, I go to the local recycling centre. Having so much parts by now, I don't bother with anything that isn't at least a P-III socket 370.
Of course there is no warranty, but you get what you pay for.
True... Though these days, one usually has to run server software that does what the big-ass-sun server will be doing, plus your development tools on your own desktop.
Let's say, that the load brings back your computer to normal levels;-)
But I agree, most developer should get mid-range machines, and I am a developer.
Do you make Volkswagens for the Masses or Maseratis for the cognicenti? Doing BOTH is real tough (ask Detroit).
Funny you picked Volkswagen, which owns Audi, Skoda, Seat, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, and I'm probably forgetting some.
Skoda being the cheapest (I think), you could get a Skoda Fabia (smallest car in their range) which costs 8888€ to a Bugatti Veyron if you have the 1500000€ required.
I am amazed that people keep talking about web-based operating systems
And I'm amazed that people call anything that runs in a web browser an operating system. If it needs an operating system to run, it is not an operating system. Simple....
Example: The mac mini is slightly underspec for a developer ( mainly: harddisk sucks, only 2 GB memory max )
Like pretty much every corporate laptop and that's what developers get at the company I work for. I really would like to know what you develop, because these days, developers are rarely the people needing the top-of-the-line-pushed-up-machines around. That's for video, photo and audio processing people.
My own desktop has a whopping 4Gig. I don't think I ever went over the 2Gig usage ever.... At work, I have 2Gig on my laptop and I hover daily between 1.4Gig an 1.6Gig usage. My personal laptop also has 2Gig, usage right now: 458Meg.... Whooohooo...
I don't think you really understand. Indeed, businesses won't use it, but both Linux and Mac OX use the same hardware to have the same effects... where Vista requires a dedicated graphics card. Think about it... Even if businesses would adopt Vista, the corporate IT people would lock it down *and* disable the glitz. How many corporate desktops do you know that run Luna? I don't know many, it harms productivity.
For business, I don't see a damned thing that makes Vista better than XP. The new filesystem might have done it, but it isn't there.
I installed WinXP Pro SP2 on a 300MHz laptop yesterday. It has 128Meg RAM. I did it because I didn't manage to install Linux and wanted to diagnose if the system was working properly. Everything worked. From newsgroups I found it's most likely a BIOS problem (something with floppy emulation mode for bootable CD-Roms). I didn't do much with the machine, but the standard theme of WinXP worked okay. (Personally I always use "Classic", even on high-end machines) Memory usage was about 100Meg, so I probably could have run an application or two...
Well, my laptop is 1.6GHz, but it's a Dual Core Turion.... Unless you have a 1.6GHz P-IV, you cannot compare with what he has found in the bin....
Also, you do not seem to understand what readyboost is. Readyboost is no "swap on a memory stick": it caches your harddisk. If it were real swap and you were to kick it out accidentaly (and it if was used at that moment), then your system would die. What readyboost does, is preload stuff that you might need soon (yes, this can include swap, but the write on disk will have to happen, so trashing is still there, you just won't notice all that much), but it's just a mirror. It's just used as a big-ass cache for your harddisk. A bit like "do-it-yourself-hybrid-disks".
Not wanting to be pessimistic: but I'm typing this on a P-IV 2.6GHz HT/512Meg RAM and XP flies. Task Manager reports 394Meg used, and I know for a fact that I have multiple applications open and in a second session so does my wife (including OpenOffice.org 2). No readyboost required... The same machine would crawl with Vista....:-(
Having myself been a "computer science" teacher (for 13-18+ year olds), I can already say you that you're on the right track. Unfortunately, you have to start for some to explain what a mouse is, how to click, how to drag-n-drop. Oh, and the fun part is the keyboard: shift, control, alt, enter. All these things need to be explained. Sure, half of the class will be bored to tears, but if you don't do it, half of the class will be unable to do anything you want them to do.
Oh, and I left teaching mainly because it turned out to be "teach-monkey-to-write-report-in-word" style courses. I was naive... Changing that is incredibly difficult because you have no contol over the curriculum: others write it for you. After many years, you can get in the process of changing it, but consider this: you have been writing courses over many years and you'd lose all of it when drastically changing the curricula. I wouldn't do it: teaching is really an "adapt-or-die" job, and it involves heavy bureauracy. I have been working in big financial institutions, and thought it was bad there, but frankly: nothing compares to schools on that aspect.
Apology accepted. I think we agree about something else: I think you're a decent person for accepting my "proposal of truce":-) Glad to see there are still reasonable slashdotters.
Yeah, but 19455 is is no way (integer)divisible by 512 and in such way you *knew* he was talking about actual file sizes and not about stored-on-disk sizes. That 19455 would have been the same reported on ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, xfs, zfx, hfs, HPFS and fucking FAT.
I have no idea why he included that, but that specification had no sense at all.
Okay, let's settle this: I was wrong that he did not specify the filesystem. I apologize for that, but you could have nicely pointed this out. I'm not a bad guy, I know when to apologize. You admit you were technically in the wrong, and we're clear.
Personally, I was more pissed that you attacked me and called me an IDIOT than anything else. If you would have kept a civilised tone, I would not have taken the same tone. My own post was technical, and neutral. I was not impolite at all (in the original post).
It constantly amazes me how idiotic replies can get when you nail someone on a technical error. I do realise that the original poster was talking about file sizes, but you *had* to bring file systems into it. I have news for you: if I load a file in memory, I can exactly allocate the memory required. That file of 19KByte will be 19KByte in memory if I load it directly. Sure, I won't be doing much with it, but nobody was talking about program datastructures either. So, the original poster was still talking about sizes, same as in the article!
So, there you enter, with pointing out that the filesystem is organized differently and on top of that fail to get the technical details right. Sure, NTFS can have clusters in different sizes, but fact is: according to that table, any reasonable harddisk will have 4096Byte clusters. You have to specifically override it (that's stated in the knowledge base article). I'd challenge you to find a home-user PC that has cluster sizes different than 4096Bytes! Not talking about manually tweaked servers, or so where I trust that a competent admin will make the right choices. Even with tweaked servers, look at this: The maximum default cluster size under Windows XP is 4 kilobytes (KB) because NTFS file compression is not possible on drives with a larger allocation size.. That's a good reason to stick to the 4K cluster.
You also should do something about your reading comprehension. The article talks about a 160kbit capacity. The original poster converted this to bytes. A bit shoddily, but correctly according to SI Standards. 160 Kbit / 8bit = 20 KByte. K=1000, and thus 20000KByte is the capacity from the article. Nothing about his filesystem. The only thing that comes from the filesystem in the original posters post, is the 19455Byte figure, and that once clearly is the "Size" indicator and not the "Size on Disk" indicator.
The originals poster only error was to use the doc format, because it contains metadata. Metadata doesn't grow in the same way as the text, so the 19K overhead he claimed will not grow to 38K when he types his second character. He was indeed trying to ridicule the word format. He was aiming for a Funny, and you just were plain technically wrong.
any Word document from 1 byte to 19 kb will require the same amount of storage
I doubt that. Default cluster size of NTFS is 4KiB. So, a 4096 byte large file will take the same amount on disk as the 1 byte file. The 4097 byte file, though, will use up two clusters. Linky for the unbelievers. In Windows, you can always right click on a file and it will report both usages: "Size" and "Size on Disk". I just tried with a 17KiB ODS file that I had lying around: "Size = 16771 Bytes", "Size on Disk = 20480 Bytes". Exactly as expected.
Note that the actual sector size on most harddisks is 512Bytes.
Finally: the article is talking about RAM, where each byte is individually accessible, so your whole argumentation has no point at all in this context.
Yeah, actually, yes, it's annoying... That and last time I was in Trier (Germany), there were no AGP cards on sale anymore either. I'm not going to drive to Frankfurt or Brussels for a graphics card. The whole point of buying online is to avoid this crap, but as said: I can't buy online. Simply because many online shops don't ship electronics to Luxembourg. (e.g. Amazon will ship books, but not electronics...)
Since it's only a license, it doesn't matter... The physical media doesn't count for shit if you ask Microsoft. I can't sell you the Windows 95 licence I got for my Toshiba Sattelite CT210, can I?
Well, the FX5500 might run Vista.... (128Meg Model) Thing is: is it really worth it? That machine runs Debian by now, you know. It's all okay. I bought an NVidia 6600, but it refused to work on my Tyan Tiger MPX. I guess new AGP cards simply won't work with my "old SMP motherboard"
I live in Luxembourg. This country has more money than you can think of, and in such was, you can only find PCI-Express cards at retailers now. It's a very small market. Online ordering is difficult, because many online stores don't want to ship to Luxembourg and if they do the taxes can be very high. (Up to 33% of the price)
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, one of my favourite brands.... Still have my point, right?
Yes, you're right... a newbie is better off with packages, but then I use Debian and not Ubuntu. Guess, that also rules out the newbie, eh?
As for /opt, I guess it would be "optional". KDE used to live there, yeah, I know, it shows my age.
You shouldn't be installing things like Firefox manually.
I shouldn't? Really? I thought Linux was about freedom. So I should have used IceWeasel and IceDove (the guy that came up with the ugly green, I want a word with... At least keep it blue, like *ice*) on Debian. Well, I have news for the Debian people: I do not want to confuse my users. They have been using Firefox and Thunderbird for ages and they know how those apps look.
So, I installed Thunderbird and Firefox from mozilla.org in /opt, exactly as a decent administrator would do. After all, that's what /opt is for... That's also where Java lives and Adobe Reader...
and don't forget your terminators
Why does everyone do as if SCSI is so hard? Terminator at each side of the chain. Finished. I never had a problem. I had more grief with IDE master/slave disks that with SCSI.
As a notorious dumpster diver, I get my parts for free. XP and Ubuntu capable machines... Nice finds have been 1.2GHz Athlon XP and a P-IV 1.9GHz. Thrown away harddisks seem to be in the 20-40Gig range. RAM is rare, but I have a nice collection of RAM that lived in my own PCs. AGP graphic cards are very common in the dumpster, as are 100Mbps NICs.
If I want a "cheap" PC, I go to the local recycling centre. Having so much parts by now, I don't bother with anything that isn't at least a P-III socket 370.
Of course there is no warranty, but you get what you pay for.
True... Though these days, one usually has to run server software that does what the big-ass-sun server will be doing, plus your development tools on your own desktop.
Let's say, that the load brings back your computer to normal levels ;-)
But I agree, most developer should get mid-range machines, and I am a developer.
Do you make Volkswagens for the Masses or Maseratis for the cognicenti? Doing BOTH is real tough (ask Detroit).
Funny you picked Volkswagen, which owns Audi, Skoda, Seat, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, and I'm probably forgetting some.
Skoda being the cheapest (I think), you could get a Skoda Fabia (smallest car in their range) which costs 8888€ to a Bugatti Veyron if you have the 1500000€ required.
I am amazed that people keep talking about web-based operating systems
And I'm amazed that people call anything that runs in a web browser an operating system. If it needs an operating system to run, it is not an operating system. Simple....
Like pretty much every corporate laptop and that's what developers get at the company I work for. I really would like to know what you develop, because these days, developers are rarely the people needing the top-of-the-line-pushed-up-machines around. That's for video, photo and audio processing people.
My own desktop has a whopping 4Gig. I don't think I ever went over the 2Gig usage ever.... At work, I have 2Gig on my laptop and I hover daily between 1.4Gig an 1.6Gig usage. My personal laptop also has 2Gig, usage right now: 458Meg.... Whooohooo...
True, but it is trivial to keep the boot partion unencrypted when you put the ACLs right for the system.
I don't think you really understand. Indeed, businesses won't use it, but both Linux and Mac OX use the same hardware to have the same effects... where Vista requires a dedicated graphics card. Think about it... Even if businesses would adopt Vista, the corporate IT people would lock it down *and* disable the glitz. How many corporate desktops do you know that run Luna? I don't know many, it harms productivity. For business, I don't see a damned thing that makes Vista better than XP. The new filesystem might have done it, but it isn't there.
You could also use truecrypt. I like that one... The corporation I work for shelled out quite some money to get their laptops encrypted.... *sigh*
Exactly, dumpster diving for computers rules: Real gems can be found.
I installed WinXP Pro SP2 on a 300MHz laptop yesterday. It has 128Meg RAM. I did it because I didn't manage to install Linux and wanted to diagnose if the system was working properly. Everything worked. From newsgroups I found it's most likely a BIOS problem (something with floppy emulation mode for bootable CD-Roms). I didn't do much with the machine, but the standard theme of WinXP worked okay. (Personally I always use "Classic", even on high-end machines) Memory usage was about 100Meg, so I probably could have run an application or two...
Well, my laptop is 1.6GHz, but it's a Dual Core Turion.... Unless you have a 1.6GHz P-IV, you cannot compare with what he has found in the bin....
Also, you do not seem to understand what readyboost is. Readyboost is no "swap on a memory stick": it caches your harddisk. If it were real swap and you were to kick it out accidentaly (and it if was used at that moment), then your system would die. What readyboost does, is preload stuff that you might need soon (yes, this can include swap, but the write on disk will have to happen, so trashing is still there, you just won't notice all that much), but it's just a mirror. It's just used as a big-ass cache for your harddisk. A bit like "do-it-yourself-hybrid-disks".
Not wanting to be pessimistic: but I'm typing this on a P-IV 2.6GHz HT/512Meg RAM and XP flies. Task Manager reports 394Meg used, and I know for a fact that I have multiple applications open and in a second session so does my wife (including OpenOffice.org 2). No readyboost required... The same machine would crawl with Vista.... :-(
Having myself been a "computer science" teacher (for 13-18+ year olds), I can already say you that you're on the right track. Unfortunately, you have to start for some to explain what a mouse is, how to click, how to drag-n-drop. Oh, and the fun part is the keyboard: shift, control, alt, enter. All these things need to be explained. Sure, half of the class will be bored to tears, but if you don't do it, half of the class will be unable to do anything you want them to do.
Oh, and I left teaching mainly because it turned out to be "teach-monkey-to-write-report-in-word" style courses. I was naive... Changing that is incredibly difficult because you have no contol over the curriculum: others write it for you. After many years, you can get in the process of changing it, but consider this: you have been writing courses over many years and you'd lose all of it when drastically changing the curricula. I wouldn't do it: teaching is really an "adapt-or-die" job, and it involves heavy bureauracy. I have been working in big financial institutions, and thought it was bad there, but frankly: nothing compares to schools on that aspect.
Apology accepted. I think we agree about something else: I think you're a decent person for accepting my "proposal of truce" :-) Glad to see there are still reasonable slashdotters.
Yeah, but 19455 is is no way (integer)divisible by 512 and in such way you *knew* he was talking about actual file sizes and not about stored-on-disk sizes. That 19455 would have been the same reported on ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, xfs, zfx, hfs, HPFS and fucking FAT.
I have no idea why he included that, but that specification had no sense at all.
Okay, let's settle this: I was wrong that he did not specify the filesystem. I apologize for that, but you could have nicely pointed this out. I'm not a bad guy, I know when to apologize. You admit you were technically in the wrong, and we're clear.
Personally, I was more pissed that you attacked me and called me an IDIOT than anything else. If you would have kept a civilised tone, I would not have taken the same tone. My own post was technical, and neutral. I was not impolite at all (in the original post).
It constantly amazes me how idiotic replies can get when you nail someone on a technical error. I do realise that the original poster was talking about file sizes, but you *had* to bring file systems into it. I have news for you: if I load a file in memory, I can exactly allocate the memory required. That file of 19KByte will be 19KByte in memory if I load it directly. Sure, I won't be doing much with it, but nobody was talking about program datastructures either. So, the original poster was still talking about sizes, same as in the article!
So, there you enter, with pointing out that the filesystem is organized differently and on top of that fail to get the technical details right. Sure, NTFS can have clusters in different sizes, but fact is: according to that table, any reasonable harddisk will have 4096Byte clusters. You have to specifically override it (that's stated in the knowledge base article). I'd challenge you to find a home-user PC that has cluster sizes different than 4096Bytes! Not talking about manually tweaked servers, or so where I trust that a competent admin will make the right choices. Even with tweaked servers, look at this: The maximum default cluster size under Windows XP is 4 kilobytes (KB) because NTFS file compression is not possible on drives with a larger allocation size.. That's a good reason to stick to the 4K cluster.
You also should do something about your reading comprehension. The article talks about a 160kbit capacity. The original poster converted this to bytes. A bit shoddily, but correctly according to SI Standards. 160 Kbit / 8bit = 20 KByte. K=1000, and thus 20000KByte is the capacity from the article. Nothing about his filesystem. The only thing that comes from the filesystem in the original posters post, is the 19455Byte figure, and that once clearly is the "Size" indicator and not the "Size on Disk" indicator.
The originals poster only error was to use the doc format, because it contains metadata. Metadata doesn't grow in the same way as the text, so the 19K overhead he claimed will not grow to 38K when he types his second character. He was indeed trying to ridicule the word format. He was aiming for a Funny, and you just were plain technically wrong.
Oh, I didn't know that particular trick. Thanks for pointing it out.
any Word document from 1 byte to 19 kb will require the same amount of storage
I doubt that. Default cluster size of NTFS is 4KiB. So, a 4096 byte large file will take the same amount on disk as the 1 byte file. The 4097 byte file, though, will use up two clusters. Linky for the unbelievers. In Windows, you can always right click on a file and it will report both usages: "Size" and "Size on Disk". I just tried with a 17KiB ODS file that I had lying around: "Size = 16771 Bytes", "Size on Disk = 20480 Bytes". Exactly as expected.
Note that the actual sector size on most harddisks is 512Bytes.
Finally: the article is talking about RAM, where each byte is individually accessible, so your whole argumentation has no point at all in this context.
Yeah, actually, yes, it's annoying... That and last time I was in Trier (Germany), there were no AGP cards on sale anymore either. I'm not going to drive to Frankfurt or Brussels for a graphics card. The whole point of buying online is to avoid this crap, but as said: I can't buy online. Simply because many online shops don't ship electronics to Luxembourg. (e.g. Amazon will ship books, but not electronics...)
Oh, come on.
Since it's only a license, it doesn't matter... The physical media doesn't count for shit if you ask Microsoft. I can't sell you the Windows 95 licence I got for my Toshiba Sattelite CT210, can I?
Well, the FX5500 might run Vista.... (128Meg Model) Thing is: is it really worth it? That machine runs Debian by now, you know. It's all okay. I bought an NVidia 6600, but it refused to work on my Tyan Tiger MPX. I guess new AGP cards simply won't work with my "old SMP motherboard"
I live in Luxembourg. This country has more money than you can think of, and in such was, you can only find PCI-Express cards at retailers now. It's a very small market. Online ordering is difficult, because many online stores don't want to ship to Luxembourg and if they do the taxes can be very high. (Up to 33% of the price)
Nah, it's copyright infringement. You new here?