There's no paging. Everything has to fit in memory.
Are you sure about this?
I found this at qnx.com:
Swap file usage under QNX Realtime Platform
Q: We have a large application that uses a lot of memory. Is there any way to extend the virtual filesystem so it will run better?
A nice 64MB swap that it can use would be great.
A: The QNX Realtime Platform installs a 64MB
swapfile when the OS is installed, providing there is enough room on the partition to which it is installed. If there was, the message "enabling swap file" will be present upon booting the system. For an application to use the swap space, the OS needs to be told that the pages can be swapped. This is done with the call "munlockall()".
The tool 'swapctl' is used to monitor the state (get stats, etc) of the swapfile.
Of particular note is advice advice on setting the "contrast" and "brightness" knobs correctly (most people don't know how to do this). There's more background about these two controls, and some great pictures, by the same guy, at:
I always learned that you aren't supposed to start a sentence with 'and' or 'but', but sometimes I want to because it makes sense at the time. Can I break this rule?
Re: Starting a sentence with but. Nick Carbone
R.
Guess what! You're in luck. In this case, the rule has changed. The prohibition against beginning a sentence with a co-ordinating conjunction--and, or, or but--has been lifted because despite the prohibition, writers quite often did begin sentences with one of the three. And so the new rule now states, according to Sidney Greenbaum in The Oxford English Grammar (1996, Oxford U. Press), "sentences may begin with a co-ordinating conjunction that points back to a previous sentence or set of sentences" (381).
[...]
I'm only pointing this out to you, grammar nazi, because I want you to be the best damn grammar nazi you can be!
Yes, you are right. Thank you. I'm always eager to improve my grammar skillz.
I haven't been able to find any definitive guidance on punctuating that sentence, but since finishing the story is a restrictive phrase, the comma seems to be unnecessary. It certainly reads better without the comma.
Grammar nazi, I'm a big fan, love your work, but there's a few things you got wrong.
Firstly, a few notes on your punctuation:
There's no need to capitalize the first word after a semi-colon [first sentence, second paragraph].
In "Come on Cliff, break things...", Cliff is a vocative phrase, so it needs to be set off with a pair of commas.
In "it does make sense but has too many prepositional phrases", but introduces an independent clause, so it should be preceded by a comma (please see rule #4 in Strunk's Guide. BTW, if you're not already familiar with Strunk's Guide, take a look. You'll dig it).
Secondly, a few observations on your writing style.
I thought I was going to be blind before I could finish the story
I like that. It's funny. But it could be improved. It's too long and unwieldy. Applicable Strunk's rules here are #12, "Put statements in positive form", and #13, "Omit needless words".
With these in mind, the sentence could be better recast: I nearly went blind, finishing the story.
Finally, unless you have a particular (quantitative) quality metric in mind, it doesn't make sense to maintain an amount of quality [final sentence]; amount of is unneeded.
molog: Yes. Suffering is life and animals and humans will always suffer in some way.
elflord: This logic is dangerous -- you can use the same idea to justify inflicting any kind of suffering for personal gain.
Dangerous maybe, but it's true. There was some religious order somewhere (the Jaines?) who would sweep the ground in front of them in order not to step on ants. Very few vegetarians or vegans would go that far.
Vegans say that the violence caused by milk production is unacceptable (apparently, you are okay with milk drinking).
It's not possible to live and not cause violence. How much violence is acceptable, is of course an open question.
Eiffel has this, they call it constrained genericity, which just means that you can specify that the template parameter must be a particular type or a decendant of that type.
e.g. Instances of this array class:
class SORTABLE_ARRAY [S->COMPARABLE]
can only store COMPARABLE objects (or objects that inherit from COMPARABLE).
Asides from that, there are some good reasons for not being wedded to the "Everything should thread" model. Foremost, multiple fork()ed processes insulates you quite a bit. If a thread in a process starts overwriting random memory, that affects ALL threads running. A well written server running as multiple processes won't be affected nearly as much by misbehaving siblings.
A well written process shouldn't be misbehaving in the first place (because it's well written right?).
If it is misbehaving, then it's buggy. If it's buggy, I'd prefer that the bugs manifest themselves in an obvious way, rather than not being "affected nearly as much". There's far too much software around that covers up its own bugs, resulting in subtle errors, and difficulty in determining it's working correctly or not.
You are right. I just read the article. It's about open source "fanaticism", written by a Mac guy. It makes some good points.
The troll (or, if he's not a troll, the guy with severe reading comprehension problems) neglected to preserve the emphasis on the word "sell" in his quote, altering the meaning somewhat.
Re:now I know you all probably read linuxsux.com..
on
Grosse Pointe Quickies
·
· Score: 1
Here in Australia, one of the rules we learn when studying for the multiple-choice part of our driving test, is to maintain a 2 second following time between you and the car in front (which is intended to account for reaction time and braking time in an emergency). It's almost universally ignored. Tailgating is endemic where I live.
But you are right, the point needs to be emphasized. Apart from improving traffic dynamics, it would make for fewer accidents. (I was driving along a freeway yesterday, and there was wreckage and police taking up two of the three lanes, from a rear end collision. Fucked the traffic dynamics up completely, needless to say).
There was a story a few years ago, in New Scientist I think, about some experiments in England, where they had some electronic signs spaced along some highway. Each sign displayed a recommended speed, which was calculated to even out traffic flow.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure about this?
I found this at qnx.com:
And an archetype is ...?
You truly are skilled in the arts of Pedantry. Master! *kowtows repeatedly*
I'm only pointing this out to you, grammar nazi, because I want you to be the best damn grammar nazi you can be!
I haven't been able to find any definitive guidance on punctuating that sentence, but since finishing the story is a restrictive phrase, the comma seems to be unnecessary. It certainly reads better without the comma.
The link to "vocative phrase" is incorrect, it should go here, which is contained in Darling's Guide to Grammar and Writing.
Firstly, a few notes on your punctuation:
- There's no need to capitalize the first word after a semi-colon [first sentence, second paragraph].
- In "Come on Cliff, break things
...", Cliff is a vocative phrase, so it needs to be set off with a pair of commas. - In "it does make sense but has too many prepositional phrases", but introduces an independent clause, so it should be preceded by a comma (please see rule #4 in Strunk's Guide. BTW, if you're not already familiar with Strunk's Guide, take a look. You'll dig it).
Secondly, a few observations on your writing style. I like that. It's funny. But it could be improved. It's too long and unwieldy. Applicable Strunk's rules here are #12, "Put statements in positive form", and #13, "Omit needless words".With these in mind, the sentence could be better recast: I nearly went blind, finishing the story.
Finally, unless you have a particular (quantitative) quality metric in mind, it doesn't make sense to maintain an amount of quality [final sentence]; amount of is unneeded.
There's a lack of freedom (as in freedom) of choice currently.
elflord: This logic is dangerous -- you can use the same idea to justify inflicting any kind of suffering for personal gain.
Dangerous maybe, but it's true. There was some religious order somewhere (the Jaines?) who would sweep the ground in front of them in order not to step on ants. Very few vegetarians or vegans would go that far.
Vegans say that the violence caused by milk production is unacceptable (apparently, you are okay with milk drinking).
It's not possible to live and not cause violence. How much violence is acceptable, is of course an open question.
In the full example, SORTABLE_ARRAY specializes, by inheritance, the plain generic class ARRAY, adding a sort method.
So, the point of it is to specialize existing generic classes.
I agree with everything you say, except for the memory leak bit. How is Pascal better than C++ where memory leaks are concerned?
Eiffel has this, they call it constrained genericity, which just means that you can specify that the template parameter must be a particular type or a decendant of that type.
e.g. Instances of this array class:
class SORTABLE_ARRAY [S->COMPARABLE]
can only store COMPARABLE objects (or objects that inherit from COMPARABLE).
A well written process shouldn't be misbehaving in the first place (because it's well written right?).
If it is misbehaving, then it's buggy. If it's buggy, I'd prefer that the bugs manifest themselves in an obvious way, rather than not being "affected nearly as much". There's far too much software around that covers up its own bugs, resulting in subtle errors, and difficulty in determining it's working correctly or not.
The troll (or, if he's not a troll, the guy with severe reading comprehension problems) neglected to preserve the emphasis on the word "sell" in his quote, altering the meaning somewhat.
But you are right, the point needs to be emphasized. Apart from improving traffic dynamics, it would make for fewer accidents. (I was driving along a freeway yesterday, and there was wreckage and police taking up two of the three lanes, from a rear end collision. Fucked the traffic dynamics up completely, needless to say).
There was a story a few years ago, in New Scientist I think, about some experiments in England, where they had some electronic signs spaced along some highway. Each sign displayed a recommended speed, which was calculated to even out traffic flow.
It doesn't seem to include a Page Description Language (which is what PostScript is).