An interim CEO cannot credibly announce such sweeping plans. What they can do is take immediate steps, even if merely symbolic, to restore morale. They could include:
- Selling off Carly's private air force, a sign of management looking for itself while laying off thousands
- inviting Walter Hewlett back on the board (or another member of the Hewlett or Packard families)
- Taking other small concrete steps to show the HP Way is back
Her marketing "genius" consisted of recklessly giving cheap financing to marginal companies during the dot-com boom. While the mania lasted, she was hailed as a genius, and cashed in her chips to move to somewhere else before the inevitable train wreck. Lucent almost died due to all the bad debts accrued when all those fly-by-night carriers went bankrupt.
If the new management can return hope to HP's despairing staff, I am sure they can work miracles.
XIII is a FPS based on a hit French illustrated series of the same name, and loosely inspired by the JFK assassination. You play the role of an amnesiac who finds out he is somehow implicated in the assassination of a US President, and must clear your name and recover your past. The twist at the end is stunning. Interestingly, the 3D is rendered to resemble cel animation, very cool.
Probably not what you were thinking of, but a Mac makes a fine digital jukebox. I use a dual G5 PowerMac with iTunes and a Squeezebox in my bedroom, but I get the best results with the optical digital audio out on the Mac connected directly to my AV amp's digital input. The new iMac G5 also has a digital optical audio out. And you get an excellent wall-mountable digital photo frame in the bargain...
You would be surprised to find out how good an iPod (or any of the better competing models) can be if you use lossless codecs like FLAC or Apple's ALAC.
These codecs work like ZIP, no loss of quality or detail unlike MP3, and if you listen to subtle music (e.g. classical or jazz) in a not too noisy environment, it will make a big difference.
I am in the process of re-ripping my classical CD collection to ALAC, and once I am done, I won't have to touch a silver disc again - my G5 streams CD audio to my AV amplifier via Toslink optical fiber digital audio, and on the go, I have an iPod 15GB (3rd gen), which can store roughly 50CD's worth of lossless audio.
The HushPC ITX is absolutely quiet and low-power, but rather expensive. The new iMac G5 runs a full Unix OS, very low noise, plus you can wall-mount it and use it as its own control panel or as a digital picture frame. It's not really low-power, though.
I was in a chat session with their engineers yesterday. It looks like they have adaptive disk scheduling algorithms to balance the load across the drives (e.g. if a drive is faster than others, it will get correspondingly more I/O). The scheduler also tries to balance I/O among processes and filesystems sharing the data pool.
This is a good thing - queueing theory shows a single unified pool has better performance than several smaller ones. People who try to tune databases by dedicating drives to redo logs don't usually realize what they are doing is counterproductive - they optimize locally for one area, at the expense of global throughput for the entire system.
ZFS uses copy-on-write (a modified block is written wherever the disk head happens to be, not where the old one used to be). This means writes are sequential (as with all journaled filesystems) and also since the old block is still on disk (until it is garbage collected) this gives the ability to take snapshots, something that is vital for making coherent backups now that nightly maintenance windows are mostly history. This also leads to file fragmentation so enough RAM to have a good buffer cache helps.
Because the scheduler works best if it has full visibility of every physical disk, rather than dealing with an abstract LUN on a hardware RAID, they actually recommend ZFS be hosted on a JBOD array (just a bunch of disks, no RAID) and have the RAID be done in software by ZFS. Since the RAID is integrated with the filesystem, they have the scope for optimizations that is not available if you have a filesystem trying to optimize on one side and a RAID controller (or separate LVM software) on the other side. Network Applicance does something like this with their WAFL network filesystem to offer decent performance despite the overhead of NFS.
With modern, fast CPUs, software RAID can easily outperform hardware RAID. It is quite common for optimizations like hardware RAID made at a certain time to become counterproductive as technology advances and the assumptions behind the premature optimization are no longer valid. A long time ago, IBM offloaded some database access code in its mainframe disk controllers. It used to be a speed boost, but as the mainframe CPU speeds improved (and the feature was retained for backward compatibility), it ended up being 10 times slower than the alternative approach.
Another original use for UPS (UPS Stores, actually) is as a drop-off point for stuff to sell on eBay. You don't even have to have an eBay account - this company will take care of everything for you (for a commission, of course).
The Register had an article that explained why a bounty system won't change much - the cost of investigating and prosecuting is too high. When hunting terrorists, it's a small price to pay, but law enforcement and prosecutors have finite resources and they have to prioritize. That's why the techniques used to nab terrorists aren't going to be applied to hunting spammers anytime soon.
There is an alternative, however, that could make anti-spam enforcement much more effective, and nip the problem in the bud. Visa/MC would give the FTC and their European counterparts "poisoned" credit card numbers to use on spammer sites. Any merchant account that attempts a transaction using such a number would be immediately frozen and its balance forfeited. A portion of the proceeds could be set aside to pay for Visa/MC's costs, giving them an incentive to participate.
You could even imagine a next step - since the spammers' clients would be known, you could fine them, since they are the ones who keep spammers in business in the first place.
If you want the Tab Browser Extensions to work, use the "Smoke" theme instead of the default one. Kind of ironic that Firefox is standardizing on the OS X inspired theme on all platforms, when that theme is broken on OS X itself...
The InfoWorld article has a more candid take: they don't want to be sued by the compromised major site owners. Even if the lawsuits do not succeed, the cost of defending against them is potentially ruinous for anyone not a Fortune 500.
Unlike companies, private individuals have better protection in the many states that have anti-SLAPP laws. These laws allow a judge to summarily dismiss SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation, i.e. intimidation by litigation) and award legal costs to the defendant.
All ISPs know about how regularly the big free email providers (or worse, paid for service in the case of AOL) go down all the time, causing backu-ups for the ISPs' mail servers and headaches for sysadmine.
Remember Hanlon's razor: never ascribe to malice what can be better explained by incompetence.
It is not active during startup or shutdown. This window of vulnerability will be fixed in SP2. That said, I wouldn't trust a "firewall" written by people clueless enough not to enable it before the network stack goes up.
But on the other side of the fence, as a prospective manager interviewed by a future employee. I did not get the job, but I don't know if that was because I flunked the employee interview...
In another case, I had to interview my successor in a management position. He had all the relevant experience and seemed a good fit, so I gave my approval, but I found out later he was a control freak and managed to alienate most of the highly qualified staff we had. So take my interviewing record with a grain of salt.
First of all, for a managerial position, technical skills are almost irrelevant, hard as it may be to admit for an engineer. Management is all about people skills, attention to detail, and integrity.
There is no easy test to find out in a short interview how well someone has these skills (apart from obvious klutzes), and the wrong people you want to ward against are sometimes the most skilled at faking during an interview. You won't find an easy way to spot micromanagers, control freaks, liars, wafflers or managers who won't stand up for their staff. Worse, if you grill the prospect too hard, he may remember it and some can be vindictive.
I hate to break it to you, but you are pretty much in a no-win situation, unless you are lucky enough to find one of the 5% of easily detected psychopaths. You might want to pass on the interviewing responsibility to a colleague you trust, but who isn't a future subordinate of the manager.
As an evidence datum to the fact there are no good tests for managerial capacity, let me point to the method used by the Sandhurst military academy in the UK to identify cadets with leadership potential - they put all the cadets together and assign them a difficult objective in a stressful environment, and watch the group self-assemble and let the leaders "bubble up". Short of doing a month-old simulation of "The Apprentice", this method won't be practicable for you.
DVD-A is supported by most DVD players, but not by CD players. Most SACDs are the hybrid type that work with CD players, but a few "universal" DVD players like my Pioneer DV-47 and DV-45 support them as well. For classical music, which is most of what I listen to, SACD seems to be leading in title availability, and only adds a couple dollars to the price.
I tried a double-blind test of two albums I have in both CD and SACD, Bach's Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould (the 1982 recording), and Hickox's recording of Vaugan-Williams' Norfolk Rhapsodies and Pastoral Symphony (technically, the SACD version is not "pure" DSD but rather converted from 24bit/98Khz PCM).
I listened to them from a Pioneer DV-45 through a Headroom Little headphone amp and Sony MDR-F1 headphones. The double blind consisted of shuffling the discs with my eyes closed and popping one of them in the player. I then tried to guess whether what I was hearing was SACD or CD. 3 times out of 5, I failed.
I retried the experiment after careful A/B listening to the discs, and I was then able to distinguish them in 4 out of 5 cases. Glenn Gould's humming along is a little easier to detect.
I am sure you could get better separation using a more expensive setup than my $1000 one, but I have a hard time believing it is going to make a huge difference. The audiophile world is full of companies selling snake oil like $1000 power cords, and relying on cognitive dissonance to convince buyers they can actually hear a difference.
Conclusion: the difference is there, but it is very minimal. Don't believe the SACD or DVD-A advocates who tell you about "night and day" differences, no more than you should to vinyl LP advocates who do it mostly because of the perverse retro chic.
If you have a good surround setup, you may benefit from the multi-channel experience, but in the real world most recordings are not that well mastered, and that is going to be the limiting factor in most cases.
If you want the best audio experience, get off the couch and go to a live concert. The home audio experience is going to be at best 25% of the real thing. Paying $50,000 on an audiophile setup to go from 24.5% to 24.99% is a phenomenally stupid waste of money.
My conclusion is that the much-maligned CD Audio is an excellent format that exceeds the useful parameters of any home audio experience, and am busy backing up my CD collection to lossless codecs on my home computer.
Swap thrashing is a symptom, not a cause
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A swapless system won't be faster for the same workload, usually the contrary, in fact, since lack of swap denies the system the opportunity to optimize RAM hit ratios. What a swapless system can do is force admission control on new processes in the system, thus enforcing a no-overcommit policy on RAM, and therefore increasing responsiveness at the expense of global throughput.
Swap thrashing in a desktop environment is usually the sign of a workload that is too high for available memory, e.g. trying to run far too many apps simultaneously. No amount of OS smarts is going to compensate for overbooking RAM with too large a working set. The solution is to increase RAM or not run as many apps simultaneously.
Swap thrashing in a server environment is usually the sign of improper server configuration. Naive administrators configure too many processes, thinking they will avoid a bottleneck if all server processes are busy, but all they achieve is turning RAM into the bottleneck rather than the server processes themselves. If you have a web server and configure Apache to have too many running processes, these processes will spend their time contending for RAM instead of doing useful work. Too many cooks spoil the broth. A swapless system would prevent excessive Apache processes from starting in the first place, thus alleviating the problem (at the expense of high error rates, which is probably not acceptable), but performance won't be anywhere as good as a system with swap and properly sized Apache process limits.
Swap is not a panacea. It should not be used to protect against runaway processes (setrlimit is here for that). It is useful in absorbing sporadic spikes in traffic without causing denial of service, and to shunt away uselessly allocated virtual memory (ahem, memory leaks).
As for the idea of putting swap on a RAMdisk, it is completely brain-dead (unless you have exotic memory arrangements such as NUMA) - the kernel is going to waste a lot of time copying memory from the active region to the ramdisk region and back. A straight swapless system will be preferable.
There is no hard and fast rule for sizing swap, it depends on your workload, such as the average ratio of RSS to SIZE. The usual rule of thumb is between 1x and 2x main memory.
You are actually incorrect. Corporations have progressively been granted many rights. For a leftist history of this, check out this interview of Noam Chomsky. To paraphrase Cato the Elder, "Suffer corporations to become your equals, and they will become your superiors".
In the specific case of the First Amendment, read about the Kasky vs. Nike case, where a Kasky used a California law to sue Nike for allegedly false statements about sweatshops. Nike tried to have the case dismissed in a CA court as violating its First Amendment rights, i.e. they claimed the First Amendment give it the right to lie, while at the same time not admitting they lied. The CA court disagreed, and ruled the statements in question (a letter from a Nike executive to press) were "commercial speech" and not subject to the same level of protection as First Amendment protected speech. Nike appealed to the US Supreme Court, which at first accepted to hear the case, then later reversed itself and punted it back to the CA Supreme Court to first decide on whether Nike did in fact lie or not. Thus, the question of whether corporations have full First Amendment rights has not yet been definitely settled.
Whether it should or not is a value judgment. Opinions differ. I personally don't believe it should apply to non-humans, but I can see how groups like the ACLU or the EFF would be muzzled if they did not have rights (oh wait, this is happening already).
Babbage is there, but not George Boole or Blaise Pascal...
Alan Kay, Norbert Wiener, Edsger Dijkstra, Donald Knuth or Ken Thompson are not there, but frankly minor contributors like Coleman Furr (who?) are.
This looks like the Nobel Literature prixe, where those deliberately passed over (usually because they were too controversial like Joyce or Borges) constitute a much more eminent group than many of those who did get it.
I seldom agree with the far-out right-wing politics of Pournelle, but this essay strikes home:
Saturn was the most powerful machine ever made by man; and NASA took two working Saturns and laid them out as lawn ornaments so that they would not compete with Space Station and Shuttle. This was deliberate destruction of the people's property, but those who did it were promoted, not sent to prison where they ought to be. Perhaps that is too strong: but they ought to be dismissed with prejudice, barred from ever working on any government or government financed or government approved project whatever. It was done for pure politics to ensure the need for Shuttle. And it was criminal.
I disagree. Tog makes for a very entertaining writer, but usability is not the cut and dried quantitative engineering discipline he and his buddies at Nielsen-Norman Group make it out to be, no matter how much they fetichize pseudo-scientific laws like Fitt's law.
Tog also tends to be very doctrinaire. He was always in denial over the notion the keyboard might be a more efficient UI for experienced users (see this Ask Tog column)), and he bears much responsibility for the fact the Mac is not as easy to use from the keyboard as Windows or OS/2 with their CUA guidelines. The Mac doesn't implement tabbing order correctly for pull-down menus, as anyone who has used Mozilla or Safari on the Mac to fill out forms can attest.
I had the opportunity to see one at MacWorld. They are very hefty and made of ultra-heavy gauge aluminum (feels more solid than the G5 case). Also very heavy.
The aluminum case is not enough to dissipate the heat generated by the 4 drives, so they also have a fan, but it is a very quiet one (as much as one can jusdge such a thing in a trade show).
The case is also available in a 2 drive 1/2 terabyte version for around $600.
Slashdot Mirror
An interim CEO cannot credibly announce such sweeping plans. What they can do is take immediate steps, even if merely symbolic, to restore morale. They could include:
- Selling off Carly's private air force, a sign of management looking for itself while laying off thousands
- inviting Walter Hewlett back on the board (or another member of the Hewlett or Packard families)
- Taking other small concrete steps to show the HP Way is back
Her marketing "genius" consisted of recklessly giving cheap financing to marginal companies during the dot-com boom. While the mania lasted, she was hailed as a genius, and cashed in her chips to move to somewhere else before the inevitable train wreck. Lucent almost died due to all the bad debts accrued when all those fly-by-night carriers went bankrupt.
If the new management can return hope to HP's despairing staff, I am sure they can work miracles.
XIII is a FPS based on a hit French illustrated series of the same name, and loosely inspired by the JFK assassination. You play the role of an amnesiac who finds out he is somehow implicated in the assassination of a US President, and must clear your name and recover your past. The twist at the end is stunning. Interestingly, the 3D is rendered to resemble cel animation, very cool.
Probably not what you were thinking of, but a Mac makes a fine digital jukebox. I use a dual G5 PowerMac with iTunes and a Squeezebox in my bedroom, but I get the best results with the optical digital audio out on the Mac connected directly to my AV amp's digital input. The new iMac G5 also has a digital optical audio out. And you get an excellent wall-mountable digital photo frame in the bargain...
You would be surprised to find out how good an iPod (or any of the better competing models) can be if you use lossless codecs like FLAC or Apple's ALAC.
These codecs work like ZIP, no loss of quality or detail unlike MP3, and if you listen to subtle music (e.g. classical or jazz) in a not too noisy environment, it will make a big difference.
I am in the process of re-ripping my classical CD collection to ALAC, and once I am done, I won't have to touch a silver disc again - my G5 streams CD audio to my AV amplifier via Toslink optical fiber digital audio, and on the go, I have an iPod 15GB (3rd gen), which can store roughly 50CD's worth of lossless audio.
The HushPC ITX is absolutely quiet and low-power, but rather expensive. The new iMac G5 runs a full Unix OS, very low noise, plus you can wall-mount it and use it as its own control panel or as a digital picture frame. It's not really low-power, though.
I was in a chat session with their engineers yesterday. It looks like they have adaptive disk scheduling algorithms to balance the load across the drives (e.g. if a drive is faster than others, it will get correspondingly more I/O). The scheduler also tries to balance I/O among processes and filesystems sharing the data pool.
This is a good thing - queueing theory shows a single unified pool has better performance than several smaller ones. People who try to tune databases by dedicating drives to redo logs don't usually realize what they are doing is counterproductive - they optimize locally for one area, at the expense of global throughput for the entire system.
ZFS uses copy-on-write (a modified block is written wherever the disk head happens to be, not where the old one used to be). This means writes are sequential (as with all journaled filesystems) and also since the old block is still on disk (until it is garbage collected) this gives the ability to take snapshots, something that is vital for making coherent backups now that nightly maintenance windows are mostly history. This also leads to file fragmentation so enough RAM to have a good buffer cache helps.
Because the scheduler works best if it has full visibility of every physical disk, rather than dealing with an abstract LUN on a hardware RAID, they actually recommend ZFS be hosted on a JBOD array (just a bunch of disks, no RAID) and have the RAID be done in software by ZFS. Since the RAID is integrated with the filesystem, they have the scope for optimizations that is not available if you have a filesystem trying to optimize on one side and a RAID controller (or separate LVM software) on the other side. Network Applicance does something like this with their WAFL network filesystem to offer decent performance despite the overhead of NFS.
With modern, fast CPUs, software RAID can easily outperform hardware RAID. It is quite common for optimizations like hardware RAID made at a certain time to become counterproductive as technology advances and the assumptions behind the premature optimization are no longer valid. A long time ago, IBM offloaded some database access code in its mainframe disk controllers. It used to be a speed boost, but as the mainframe CPU speeds improved (and the feature was retained for backward compatibility), it ended up being 10 times slower than the alternative approach.
Will this mean they will stop using the incredibly annoying and almost epilepsy-inducing cap codes?
Another original use for UPS (UPS Stores, actually) is as a drop-off point for stuff to sell on eBay. You don't even have to have an eBay account - this company will take care of everything for you (for a commission, of course).
There is an alternative, however, that could make anti-spam enforcement much more effective, and nip the problem in the bud. Visa/MC would give the FTC and their European counterparts "poisoned" credit card numbers to use on spammer sites. Any merchant account that attempts a transaction using such a number would be immediately frozen and its balance forfeited. A portion of the proceeds could be set aside to pay for Visa/MC's costs, giving them an incentive to participate.
You could even imagine a next step - since the spammers' clients would be known, you could fine them, since they are the ones who keep spammers in business in the first place.
If you want the Tab Browser Extensions to work, use the "Smoke" theme instead of the default one. Kind of ironic that Firefox is standardizing on the OS X inspired theme on all platforms, when that theme is broken on OS X itself...
The InfoWorld article has a more candid take: they don't want to be sued by the compromised major site owners. Even if the lawsuits do not succeed, the cost of defending against them is potentially ruinous for anyone not a Fortune 500.
Unlike companies, private individuals have better protection in the many states that have anti-SLAPP laws. These laws allow a judge to summarily dismiss SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation, i.e. intimidation by litigation) and award legal costs to the defendant.
Not just email specifically from Gmail.
AOL and Yahoo are even worse.
All ISPs know about how regularly the big free email providers (or worse, paid for service in the case of AOL) go down all the time, causing backu-ups for the ISPs' mail servers and headaches for sysadmine.
Remember Hanlon's razor: never ascribe to malice what can be better explained by incompetence.
It is not active during startup or shutdown. This window of vulnerability will be fixed in SP2. That said, I wouldn't trust a "firewall" written by people clueless enough not to enable it before the network stack goes up.
But on the other side of the fence, as a prospective manager interviewed by a future employee. I did not get the job, but I don't know if that was because I flunked the employee interview...
In another case, I had to interview my successor in a management position. He had all the relevant experience and seemed a good fit, so I gave my approval, but I found out later he was a control freak and managed to alienate most of the highly qualified staff we had. So take my interviewing record with a grain of salt.
First of all, for a managerial position, technical skills are almost irrelevant, hard as it may be to admit for an engineer. Management is all about people skills, attention to detail, and integrity.
There is no easy test to find out in a short interview how well someone has these skills (apart from obvious klutzes), and the wrong people you want to ward against are sometimes the most skilled at faking during an interview. You won't find an easy way to spot micromanagers, control freaks, liars, wafflers or managers who won't stand up for their staff. Worse, if you grill the prospect too hard, he may remember it and some can be vindictive.
I hate to break it to you, but you are pretty much in a no-win situation, unless you are lucky enough to find one of the 5% of easily detected psychopaths. You might want to pass on the interviewing responsibility to a colleague you trust, but who isn't a future subordinate of the manager.
As an evidence datum to the fact there are no good tests for managerial capacity, let me point to the method used by the Sandhurst military academy in the UK to identify cadets with leadership potential - they put all the cadets together and assign them a difficult objective in a stressful environment, and watch the group self-assemble and let the leaders "bubble up". Short of doing a month-old simulation of "The Apprentice", this method won't be practicable for you.
DVD-A is supported by most DVD players, but not by CD players. Most SACDs are the hybrid type that work with CD players, but a few "universal" DVD players like my Pioneer DV-47 and DV-45 support them as well. For classical music, which is most of what I listen to, SACD seems to be leading in title availability, and only adds a couple dollars to the price.
I tried a double-blind test of two albums I have in both CD and SACD, Bach's Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould (the 1982 recording), and Hickox's recording of Vaugan-Williams' Norfolk Rhapsodies and Pastoral Symphony (technically, the SACD version is not "pure" DSD but rather converted from 24bit/98Khz PCM).
I listened to them from a Pioneer DV-45 through a Headroom Little headphone amp and Sony MDR-F1 headphones. The double blind consisted of shuffling the discs with my eyes closed and popping one of them in the player. I then tried to guess whether what I was hearing was SACD or CD. 3 times out of 5, I failed.
I retried the experiment after careful A/B listening to the discs, and I was then able to distinguish them in 4 out of 5 cases. Glenn Gould's humming along is a little easier to detect.
I am sure you could get better separation using a more expensive setup than my $1000 one, but I have a hard time believing it is going to make a huge difference. The audiophile world is full of companies selling snake oil like $1000 power cords, and relying on cognitive dissonance to convince buyers they can actually hear a difference.
Conclusion: the difference is there, but it is very minimal. Don't believe the SACD or DVD-A advocates who tell you about "night and day" differences, no more than you should to vinyl LP advocates who do it mostly because of the perverse retro chic.
If you have a good surround setup, you may benefit from the multi-channel experience, but in the real world most recordings are not that well mastered, and that is going to be the limiting factor in most cases.
If you want the best audio experience, get off the couch and go to a live concert. The home audio experience is going to be at best 25% of the real thing. Paying $50,000 on an audiophile setup to go from 24.5% to 24.99% is a phenomenally stupid waste of money.
My conclusion is that the much-maligned CD Audio is an excellent format that exceeds the useful parameters of any home audio experience, and am busy backing up my CD collection to lossless codecs on my home computer.
A swapless system won't be faster for the same workload, usually the contrary, in fact, since lack of swap denies the system the opportunity to optimize RAM hit ratios. What a swapless system can do is force admission control on new processes in the system, thus enforcing a no-overcommit policy on RAM, and therefore increasing responsiveness at the expense of global throughput.
Swap thrashing in a desktop environment is usually the sign of a workload that is too high for available memory, e.g. trying to run far too many apps simultaneously. No amount of OS smarts is going to compensate for overbooking RAM with too large a working set. The solution is to increase RAM or not run as many apps simultaneously.
Swap thrashing in a server environment is usually the sign of improper server configuration. Naive administrators configure too many processes, thinking they will avoid a bottleneck if all server processes are busy, but all they achieve is turning RAM into the bottleneck rather than the server processes themselves. If you have a web server and configure Apache to have too many running processes, these processes will spend their time contending for RAM instead of doing useful work. Too many cooks spoil the broth. A swapless system would prevent excessive Apache processes from starting in the first place, thus alleviating the problem (at the expense of high error rates, which is probably not acceptable), but performance won't be anywhere as good as a system with swap and properly sized Apache process limits.
Swap is not a panacea. It should not be used to protect against runaway processes (setrlimit is here for that). It is useful in absorbing sporadic spikes in traffic without causing denial of service, and to shunt away uselessly allocated virtual memory (ahem, memory leaks).
As for the idea of putting swap on a RAMdisk, it is completely brain-dead (unless you have exotic memory arrangements such as NUMA) - the kernel is going to waste a lot of time copying memory from the active region to the ramdisk region and back. A straight swapless system will be preferable.
There is no hard and fast rule for sizing swap, it depends on your workload, such as the average ratio of RSS to SIZE. The usual rule of thumb is between 1x and 2x main memory.
Two words: Arthur Andersen.
In the specific case of the First Amendment, read about the Kasky vs. Nike case, where a Kasky used a California law to sue Nike for allegedly false statements about sweatshops. Nike tried to have the case dismissed in a CA court as violating its First Amendment rights, i.e. they claimed the First Amendment give it the right to lie, while at the same time not admitting they lied. The CA court disagreed, and ruled the statements in question (a letter from a Nike executive to press) were "commercial speech" and not subject to the same level of protection as First Amendment protected speech. Nike appealed to the US Supreme Court, which at first accepted to hear the case, then later reversed itself and punted it back to the CA Supreme Court to first decide on whether Nike did in fact lie or not. Thus, the question of whether corporations have full First Amendment rights has not yet been definitely settled.
Whether it should or not is a value judgment. Opinions differ. I personally don't believe it should apply to non-humans, but I can see how groups like the ACLU or the EFF would be muzzled if they did not have rights (oh wait, this is happening already).
This "hall of fame" has zero credibility
Babbage is there, but not George Boole or Blaise Pascal...
Alan Kay, Norbert Wiener, Edsger Dijkstra, Donald Knuth or Ken Thompson are not there, but frankly minor contributors like Coleman Furr (who?) are.
This looks like the Nobel Literature prixe, where those deliberately passed over (usually because they were too controversial like Joyce or Borges) constitute a much more eminent group than many of those who did get it.
You mean the 16C. The 15C is a scientific programmable calculator that does not have a hex mode.
Britney Spears could be replaced by a pink noise generator, that would still be an improvement...
Tog also tends to be very doctrinaire. He was always in denial over the notion the keyboard might be a more efficient UI for experienced users (see this Ask Tog column)), and he bears much responsibility for the fact the Mac is not as easy to use from the keyboard as Windows or OS/2 with their CUA guidelines. The Mac doesn't implement tabbing order correctly for pull-down menus, as anyone who has used Mozilla or Safari on the Mac to fill out forms can attest.
I had the opportunity to see one at MacWorld. They are very hefty and made of ultra-heavy gauge aluminum (feels more solid than the G5 case). Also very heavy.
The aluminum case is not enough to dissipate the heat generated by the 4 drives, so they also have a fan, but it is a very quiet one (as much as one can jusdge such a thing in a trade show).
The case is also available in a 2 drive 1/2 terabyte version for around $600.