"as soon as an application wants it the cached data is wiped and it is handed over for use. The performance penalty is tiny"
That "tiny" hit happens millions of times, so it isn't tiny. It's degrading memory performance across the system.
Excessive caching is not massive overall speed boost. The vast majority of that cache is never used and almost all of that boost can be gained with a cache the fraction of the size.
How about pre-loading all functionality possible in case a page needs it so it is accessed faster? How about the few lines of code going through an full JIT compilation so it runs faster? How about the fact that we're not throwing text on a screen but rather rendering on a complex canvas that can these days do pretty much anything?
The first was always the case. The second is CPU not ram.
The third is mostly bloat but hey why not implement a more and more complex canvas to support a platform that is nothing but template driven cookie sites. Photoshop 4 might be unimpressive relative to modern Photoshop but it had a canvas to shame anything in the modern browser and weighed in at 26MB.
"For all the complaints about memory usage increasing over the years, barring actual memory leaks you can almost linearly trend these increases with various performance increases in the browser itself."
Impressive given that they render pages more and more slowly. As far as I can tell any gains have been inefficient implementations to support and partially offset the inefficient practices of modern web developers.
"Please, use all my RAM if the system is faster as a result. It's why I bought it."
Me too but that isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about using an order of magnitude more memory or more to support poor an inefficient implementation, rinse and repeat, across every layer of the system and every application. Importing massive libraries and frameworks which eat tons of resources and carry thousands of bugs because a developer is too lazy to "reinvent the wheel" for a couple three or four line basic function. And then layer framework after framework on top of that because the funky custom objects of framework A don't work in framework B and then framework C because the dev didn't even know everything he needed was already loaded along with A and B because those things are so damn abstracted nobody knows everything that is in them.
The same is true for the execution with all our gains and advancements being used to subsidize lazy development. With the death of Moore's law, this is a problem. People contrast modern horribly inefficient abstraction practices with the tight asm instruction packing of early days where people were squeezing everything into a few k of ram with 1mhz processors using clever and unmaintainable tricks. Believe it or not, there are practices that are dramatically more efficient which are neither of those two extremes.
The same reason there is a huge push for diversity in tech even though the geek crowd which runs tech was raised on fantasy and sci-fi with all sorts of scenarios that exposed them to diversity concepts outside their bias and thus has always been pretty welcoming to anyone who had the stuff.
The more people they get into the labor pool the more they serve to stagnate or drive down wages.
"Firstly, unused RAM is wasted RAM. If it's not used for anything else you might as well use it for cache. Modern operating systems support this, allowing applications to allocate RAM for caching but immediately release it if something else needs to use it."
I mentioned caching. There is nothing new in this, there is a performance hit if there is contention for that memory which is why the default cache gets set to a reasonable value for an application like a web browser, is user tunable, and the rest should remain for other applications which actually need more cache.
This attitude needs to die, Moore's law is dead and we need to start optimizing applications again. Most of this logic started as performance increased in game development where the application basically took over and typically ran full screen. This logic made sense. It doesn't make sense when the same logic is used by every shared application and library it doesn't make sense when overspending resources becomes the universal default.
"HTML5 itself is quite complex - the browser has to build up a "document object model" that allows CSS and Javascript to interact with it. CSS and Javascript are also quite complex and for speed browsers use just-in-time compilation with the results cached."
Ummm... yeah. And web browsers have back buttons and cache menus and bookmarks too! I can name random stuff people complaining about bloat are already aware of as well.
Everything you are saying here is something I already referenced in my comment but with a tone that suggests that somehow it explains where it has all gone. It isn't going to either because modern browsers are insanely bloated with a ridiculously oversized footprint..
"It would only be a coincidence if the dirt from the next town did not have similar properties."
I'd contend it would still be a coincidence even if the bacteria exists throughout a fair bit of the region. There are no passed down tales of healing with the dirt where I live and I'd venture this particular variety of highly effective bacteria isn't here either.
"However, it is quite common for soil bacteria to make anti bacterial toxins." It is not however common for those toxins to more effective than known antibiotics for killing superbugs. The bacteria in this soil do.
"According to folk tradition, people would not "play in the dirt", rather they would wrap it in cloth, and place it under their pillow:"
I've heard of druidic traditions of using mud packs and burying in dirt/mud the current traditions may well stem from them. However, given the amount of skin and oil and outright filth in bedding, especially bedding since druidic times tossing it under the pillow could serve to inoculate the bedding.
You might contend I could play the "what if" game forever. Changing the parameters forever. Normally you'd be right. But there is a very simple logical flaw in your reasoning vs mine and these researchers. We've started with the observation of the results and are forming hypothesis, and they have tested theirs successfully while I'm piggy backing on their results, you've started from a conclusion that isn't based on evidence or observation and seek to justify it.
"Sandy Hook taught me that the non-regulated industries have lobbyists that prevent regulation."
Aviation is hardly an unregulated industry but in most regulated industries it is industries that pay the lobbyists to fight FOR regulation. They make sure the regulations carry fines, fees, and most of all red tape that keeps anyone from entering their industry without very deep pockets and a pack of insiders. In the meantime, the more regulation the more protection they have against lawsuits. Which is exactly why Boeing will walk away from this unscathed. They disclosed everything to the FAA and followed all good practices and compliance procedures to ensure the aircraft was safe. The FAA giving their blessing means short of having lied or misrepresented something somewhere Boeing is in the clear.
Probably not. Most people think safety regulation is to protect consumers. It isn't. It is to protect the entrenched companies that can afford to dedicate departments to compliance, pay the fees, and pay the lobbiests for more (which said company in turns publicly protests).
Because Boeing followed all reasonable efforts to comply in good faith with all FAA safety regulations and good practices and the FAA certified the system as being safe, short of some hidden or misleading information submitted, it is going to be a serious uphill battle to claim negligence on the part of Boeing here.
Boeing wasn't negligent, the FAA was and until their bread stops being buttered by the people they are supposed to regulate it will happen with the FAA and every other safety agency. Until lobbyists and politicians bread stops being buttered by the same safety regulation that is difficult for upstarts to comply with but presents no real barrier to megacorps like Boeing will continue to be the rule of the day.
It takes A LOT of pictures to explain 2GB. Good luck coming up with something in browsers that explains their memory consumption. Even with the... dear god 3600 lines of text that composes this page (vs the 50-75 you could do it in, maybe 150-200 if you were counting js and css). There just isn't any magic here. Even that ugly video enabled ad that is probably larger than the entire browser should be would only explain a few mb. This page and every linked page still isn't going to explain more than 100mb and the entire browser should itself should use less than that.
Sad but true and there really is no good explanation for it. I just closed everything an opened chrome, clocked in at 350mb. Loaded slashdot as the only page, suddenly it skyrockets to 850mb and then slowly settles back to 550-650mb. Now there definitely isn't enough content in this page to explain 10mb and even with the linked pages you have nowhere near the 200mb it has absorbed in content. It does make me wonder just what the hell it is using so much memory for.
Compared to the 4mb footprint of Netscape 4 or IE 3.5 you've gained what... some adjustments to javascript and css? That explains maybe 10mb of the increase. A gargantuan cache? That would explain another 64mb maybe. The actual page content? If anything the pages actually have less content with html, css, and light weight icons being the styling of choice these days it's almost all text. A 2mb page would be massive but they use shitty autochurned output for most sites these days so call it 8mb, across all the linked pages that will fill your 64mb cache. With a little breathing room added in that is what about 100mb that can be explained?
"But if HR can shop the world, the chance of a statistical fit goes up. Whether that's a rational way to pick a tech worker or not is moot, it's the way HR/recruiters typically think."
Not at all, those listings are in some cases designed to match exactly the person the manager wants to promote but they are required to post the position for "fair access" or more commonly to screen out U.S. Applicants. There is nothing saying the person they hire actually has to meet those requirements so they can screen out US applicants and then hire an H1B who doesn't meet them.
H1Bs are about dillute the labor pool in order to stagnate wages. There are other advantages, salary is usually part of it but a small part. The h1b is required to keep working there for a period before they can get another job. The H1B usually has no issues with infiltrating the position and then training replacements, developing automations, or assisting the company in preparing to outsource.
Someone else mentioned costing less and the period of indentured service companies get from H1B workers. But beyond that there is a bigger goal, dilluting the wage pool. There are enough people to fill the jobs, there aren't enough people to stagnate wages or even send them into decline which is what employers want.
They simply don't want to pay this class of engineer as much as they pay the other.
If they were the owners it wouldn't be a factor at all. But they are a third party. Technically? It might currently not be insider trading. But SEC is like the IRS, all it takes is for them to decide it smells bad and they can apply discretion. Following the letter of the rules to do something shady doesn't pass unless they decide to let it pass.
IANAL. But in this case they are systematically trading on insider information to gain an advantage over other potential investors in companies that are in a pre-public fundraising stage. That doesn't smell bad, it smells like the bog of eternal stench.
"It is pretty far fetched to assume that playing in the dirt is beneficial because of its anti-bacterial properties."
And yet this site would have never been discovered if playing in dirt didn't turn out to be beneficial for the locals who were aware of it over the course of thousands of years. Or are you suggesting playing in the dirt was not beneficial and this superbug killer bacteria that was found when looking for the explanation of the benefit is just a coincidence?
Sure but other bacteria/fungus/mold will evolve ways to beat those bacteria. Most of this resistance probably doesn't come from us using the antibiotics at all but rather from the bacteria competing with each other. Which is how they evolve their offensive (antibiotic) capabilities in the first place.
I think the overuse concern is overblown in any case. The issue isn't the drugs being overused, the issue is the drugs not being used completely. If you take the full course and you completely wipe out the infection then there is nothing remaining to evolve. It's when you mostly kill the infection but there are stragglers in the low level antibiotic environment that there is a chance to breed resistant bacteria.
"No it doesn't. I'ts a pointless rote memorisation of a series of steps."
Ummm... yes. The steps which constitute decimal division.
I find it difficult to understand how you implemented anything if "perform two steps, rinse and repeat as needed", is too complicated for you. Other than being slightly more difficult without paper I don't see how it is any more or less complicated than anything else in arithmetic.
Actually a big part of the problem in the world is that the social crap has taken over the universities. Virtually none of it gets replicated but it is touted as "science" and sadly credibility from real and reliable science like physical sciences rubs off on it.
Further, it is language, its definition is common usage. Sure they are cheekily phrased but consistently exactly the opposite of what the GP suggested, as is all usage of the term I've seen here (the only place I see anyone using this term).
Hell if you are going to insist they expand the problems at least expand in a useful way. 2 + 3 becomes 2+2+1. 10 + 3 = 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 1. At least that would teach them to reduce problems in a way that provides ready translation to computation.
This, right here. Exactly what concept are you claiming isn't gotten here? If you can count you know 100% of the underlying concepts in addition, every single time, without a requirement for a proof. You aren't introducing anything new by breaking it into smaller pieces.
A lack of comprehension of the underlying concepts of basic arithmetic isn't an issue for most anyone without brain damage and with an IQ over 80.
Slashdot Mirror
"as soon as an application wants it the cached data is wiped and it is handed over for use. The performance penalty is tiny"
That "tiny" hit happens millions of times, so it isn't tiny. It's degrading memory performance across the system.
Excessive caching is not massive overall speed boost. The vast majority of that cache is never used and almost all of that boost can be gained with a cache the fraction of the size.
How about pre-loading all functionality possible in case a page needs it so it is accessed faster?
How about the few lines of code going through an full JIT compilation so it runs faster?
How about the fact that we're not throwing text on a screen but rather rendering on a complex canvas that can these days do pretty much anything?
The first was always the case. The second is CPU not ram.
The third is mostly bloat but hey why not implement a more and more complex canvas to support a platform that is nothing but template driven cookie sites. Photoshop 4 might be unimpressive relative to modern Photoshop but it had a canvas to shame anything in the modern browser and weighed in at 26MB.
"For all the complaints about memory usage increasing over the years, barring actual memory leaks you can almost linearly trend these increases with various performance increases in the browser itself."
Impressive given that they render pages more and more slowly. As far as I can tell any gains have been inefficient implementations to support and partially offset the inefficient practices of modern web developers.
"Please, use all my RAM if the system is faster as a result. It's why I bought it."
Me too but that isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about using an order of magnitude more memory or more to support poor an inefficient implementation, rinse and repeat, across every layer of the system and every application. Importing massive libraries and frameworks which eat tons of resources and carry thousands of bugs because a developer is too lazy to "reinvent the wheel" for a couple three or four line basic function. And then layer framework after framework on top of that because the funky custom objects of framework A don't work in framework B and then framework C because the dev didn't even know everything he needed was already loaded along with A and B because those things are so damn abstracted nobody knows everything that is in them.
The same is true for the execution with all our gains and advancements being used to subsidize lazy development. With the death of Moore's law, this is a problem. People contrast modern horribly inefficient abstraction practices with the tight asm instruction packing of early days where people were squeezing everything into a few k of ram with 1mhz processors using clever and unmaintainable tricks. Believe it or not, there are practices that are dramatically more efficient which are neither of those two extremes.
The same reason there is a huge push for diversity in tech even though the geek crowd which runs tech was raised on fantasy and sci-fi with all sorts of scenarios that exposed them to diversity concepts outside their bias and thus has always been pretty welcoming to anyone who had the stuff.
The more people they get into the labor pool the more they serve to stagnate or drive down wages.
"Firstly, unused RAM is wasted RAM. If it's not used for anything else you might as well use it for cache. Modern operating systems support this, allowing applications to allocate RAM for caching but immediately release it if something else needs to use it."
I mentioned caching. There is nothing new in this, there is a performance hit if there is contention for that memory which is why the default cache gets set to a reasonable value for an application like a web browser, is user tunable, and the rest should remain for other applications which actually need more cache.
This attitude needs to die, Moore's law is dead and we need to start optimizing applications again. Most of this logic started as performance increased in game development where the application basically took over and typically ran full screen. This logic made sense. It doesn't make sense when the same logic is used by every shared application and library it doesn't make sense when overspending resources becomes the universal default.
"HTML5 itself is quite complex - the browser has to build up a "document object model" that allows CSS and Javascript to interact with it. CSS and Javascript are also quite complex and for speed browsers use just-in-time compilation with the results cached."
Ummm... yeah. And web browsers have back buttons and cache menus and bookmarks too! I can name random stuff people complaining about bloat are already aware of as well.
Everything you are saying here is something I already referenced in my comment but with a tone that suggests that somehow it explains where it has all gone. It isn't going to either because modern browsers are insanely bloated with a ridiculously oversized footprint..
"It would only be a coincidence if the dirt from the next town did not have similar properties."
I'd contend it would still be a coincidence even if the bacteria exists throughout a fair bit of the region. There are no passed down tales of healing with the dirt where I live and I'd venture this particular variety of highly effective bacteria isn't here either.
"However, it is quite common for soil bacteria to make anti bacterial toxins." It is not however common for those toxins to more effective than known antibiotics for killing superbugs. The bacteria in this soil do.
"According to folk tradition, people would not "play in the dirt", rather they would wrap it in cloth, and place it under their pillow:"
I've heard of druidic traditions of using mud packs and burying in dirt/mud the current traditions may well stem from them. However, given the amount of skin and oil and outright filth in bedding, especially bedding since druidic times tossing it under the pillow could serve to inoculate the bedding.
You might contend I could play the "what if" game forever. Changing the parameters forever. Normally you'd be right. But there is a very simple logical flaw in your reasoning vs mine and these researchers. We've started with the observation of the results and are forming hypothesis, and they have tested theirs successfully while I'm piggy backing on their results, you've started from a conclusion that isn't based on evidence or observation and seek to justify it.
"Sandy Hook taught me that the non-regulated industries have lobbyists that prevent regulation."
Aviation is hardly an unregulated industry but in most regulated industries it is industries that pay the lobbyists to fight FOR regulation. They make sure the regulations carry fines, fees, and most of all red tape that keeps anyone from entering their industry without very deep pockets and a pack of insiders. In the meantime, the more regulation the more protection they have against lawsuits. Which is exactly why Boeing will walk away from this unscathed. They disclosed everything to the FAA and followed all good practices and compliance procedures to ensure the aircraft was safe. The FAA giving their blessing means short of having lied or misrepresented something somewhere Boeing is in the clear.
Probably not. Most people think safety regulation is to protect consumers. It isn't. It is to protect the entrenched companies that can afford to dedicate departments to compliance, pay the fees, and pay the lobbiests for more (which said company in turns publicly protests).
Because Boeing followed all reasonable efforts to comply in good faith with all FAA safety regulations and good practices and the FAA certified the system as being safe, short of some hidden or misleading information submitted, it is going to be a serious uphill battle to claim negligence on the part of Boeing here.
Boeing wasn't negligent, the FAA was and until their bread stops being buttered by the people they are supposed to regulate it will happen with the FAA and every other safety agency. Until lobbyists and politicians bread stops being buttered by the same safety regulation that is difficult for upstarts to comply with but presents no real barrier to megacorps like Boeing will continue to be the rule of the day.
It takes A LOT of pictures to explain 2GB. Good luck coming up with something in browsers that explains their memory consumption. Even with the... dear god 3600 lines of text that composes this page (vs the 50-75 you could do it in, maybe 150-200 if you were counting js and css). There just isn't any magic here. Even that ugly video enabled ad that is probably larger than the entire browser should be would only explain a few mb. This page and every linked page still isn't going to explain more than 100mb and the entire browser should itself should use less than that.
I blame people obsessed with OOP
Sad but true and there really is no good explanation for it. I just closed everything an opened chrome, clocked in at 350mb. Loaded slashdot as the only page, suddenly it skyrockets to 850mb and then slowly settles back to 550-650mb. Now there definitely isn't enough content in this page to explain 10mb and even with the linked pages you have nowhere near the 200mb it has absorbed in content. It does make me wonder just what the hell it is using so much memory for.
Compared to the 4mb footprint of Netscape 4 or IE 3.5 you've gained what... some adjustments to javascript and css? That explains maybe 10mb of the increase. A gargantuan cache? That would explain another 64mb maybe. The actual page content? If anything the pages actually have less content with html, css, and light weight icons being the styling of choice these days it's almost all text. A 2mb page would be massive but they use shitty autochurned output for most sites these days so call it 8mb, across all the linked pages that will fill your 64mb cache. With a little breathing room added in that is what about 100mb that can be explained?
"But if HR can shop the world, the chance of a statistical fit goes up. Whether that's a rational way to pick a tech worker or not is moot, it's the way HR/recruiters typically think."
Not at all, those listings are in some cases designed to match exactly the person the manager wants to promote but they are required to post the position for "fair access" or more commonly to screen out U.S. Applicants. There is nothing saying the person they hire actually has to meet those requirements so they can screen out US applicants and then hire an H1B who doesn't meet them.
H1Bs are about dillute the labor pool in order to stagnate wages. There are other advantages, salary is usually part of it but a small part. The h1b is required to keep working there for a period before they can get another job. The H1B usually has no issues with infiltrating the position and then training replacements, developing automations, or assisting the company in preparing to outsource.
Someone else mentioned costing less and the period of indentured service companies get from H1B workers. But beyond that there is a bigger goal, dilluting the wage pool. There are enough people to fill the jobs, there aren't enough people to stagnate wages or even send them into decline which is what employers want.
They simply don't want to pay this class of engineer as much as they pay the other.
If they were the owners it wouldn't be a factor at all. But they are a third party. Technically? It might currently not be insider trading. But SEC is like the IRS, all it takes is for them to decide it smells bad and they can apply discretion. Following the letter of the rules to do something shady doesn't pass unless they decide to let it pass.
IANAL. But in this case they are systematically trading on insider information to gain an advantage over other potential investors in companies that are in a pre-public fundraising stage. That doesn't smell bad, it smells like the bog of eternal stench.
It is insider trading. Plain and simple.
"It is pretty far fetched to assume that playing in the dirt is beneficial because of its anti-bacterial properties."
And yet this site would have never been discovered if playing in dirt didn't turn out to be beneficial for the locals who were aware of it over the course of thousands of years. Or are you suggesting playing in the dirt was not beneficial and this superbug killer bacteria that was found when looking for the explanation of the benefit is just a coincidence?
Nonesense. This is nothing but evidence that the druids worked with aliens who engineered this bacteria for them.
Rather than turning this into a drug they should stick with this method of application. That will curb usage a bit.
Sure but other bacteria/fungus/mold will evolve ways to beat those bacteria. Most of this resistance probably doesn't come from us using the antibiotics at all but rather from the bacteria competing with each other. Which is how they evolve their offensive (antibiotic) capabilities in the first place.
I think the overuse concern is overblown in any case. The issue isn't the drugs being overused, the issue is the drugs not being used completely. If you take the full course and you completely wipe out the infection then there is nothing remaining to evolve. It's when you mostly kill the infection but there are stragglers in the low level antibiotic environment that there is a chance to breed resistant bacteria.
"No it doesn't. I'ts a pointless rote memorisation of a series of steps."
Ummm... yes. The steps which constitute decimal division.
I find it difficult to understand how you implemented anything if "perform two steps, rinse and repeat as needed", is too complicated for you. Other than being slightly more difficult without paper I don't see how it is any more or less complicated than anything else in arithmetic.
Actually a big part of the problem in the world is that the social crap has taken over the universities. Virtually none of it gets replicated but it is touted as "science" and sadly credibility from real and reliable science like physical sciences rubs off on it.
Of internet slang terms? Sure.
Further, it is language, its definition is common usage. Sure they are cheekily phrased but consistently exactly the opposite of what the GP suggested, as is all usage of the term I've seen here (the only place I see anyone using this term).
So, stop calling on kids in class. Simple.
"Its not really a very useful skill to learn though."
It is useful because doing long division helps you to actually understand how division works.
Nor the 80's or 90's.
Hell if you are going to insist they expand the problems at least expand in a useful way. 2 + 3 becomes 2+2+1. 10 + 3 = 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 1. At least that would teach them to reduce problems in a way that provides ready translation to computation.
This, right here. Exactly what concept are you claiming isn't gotten here? If you can count you know 100% of the underlying concepts in addition, every single time, without a requirement for a proof. You aren't introducing anything new by breaking it into smaller pieces.
A lack of comprehension of the underlying concepts of basic arithmetic isn't an issue for most anyone without brain damage and with an IQ over 80.