Have you even been flying since 1970? All the flight attendants now are the SAME ONES that the airlines hired back in the day. They formed unions and made careers out of it.
In other words, they are all like 50 years old now.
I don't know much about memory usage under Windows, but here on Linux I am running X with KDE 3.3.2, Firefox AND Konqueror, Citrix, Konsole and some other stuff, and my total actual RAM in use is about 165MB. Of course there's a bunch of RAM in use by the disk cache but it doesn't make sense to count that. Nothing is in swap.
On Linux at least the memory usage numbers reported by individual applications can be misleading, since it's hard to account for things like copy-on-write. It's easier to look at a system's overall numbers, and I think 165MB is pretty respectable.
As for the "more than one CD" complaint, Linux distributions these days come bundled with about all the software there is. Windows XP doesn't even include a C compiler as far as I know. But I always just install Debian from a net-install CD and download the packages I actually want. The resulting installed system is not particularly huge.
As a transplant patient, I have to say that I'm not aware of any anti-rejection drugs that are regularly injected. Certainly all my anti-rejection drugs are pills.
What people need to grasp though is that it's not TAKING the pills, it's what they do to you. I've been on them for close to three years, and I haven't had any major problems, but I could give you a list of minor ones. The most major I suppose was a period of anemia and leukopenia coupled with severe weight loss due to appetite loss. For that they had to test me for lymphoma and leukemia, and I'll tell you that a bone marrow biopsy is way worse than insulin injections. I also had to inject EPO to treat the anemia, but that was only once a week or so.
Transplants are a good road, but they are not the end of the road, and they are a treatment, not a cure. Certainly I hope that all this research will lead the way to better treatments, but for now I'm just glad to not be on dialysis.
Your organization is fixed, sort of like what a good secretary would do with a set of filing cabinets.
Then one day you go looking for a song, and you remember the album name but not the band, and you find yourself digging through each band folder looking for the right album. Just like the secretary has to spend the whole afternoon digging if I ask for, say, all invoices over $1,000 -- he has things filed by year and by vendor, but not by price.
Organization is not bad, but current systems require us to put things into a hierarchy. If you want to organize by genre, artist, and album, you have to decide which one is the more "general" classification, even though artist and genre are completely independent variables. You could just as easily put artist first, then genre, at least if you listen to artists that like to experiment.
Instead of making a tree, it's more natural for us to make a sort of web. When I go looking for a song on the iPod, for instance, I can start where I want -- with genres, or with artists, or with composers, etc. There is no need to establish "root" and "sub" classifications -- all these are independent facts.
This isn't just true of music, though. Going back to our secretary example, current file systems force people to organize things much the way a filing cabinet would. Which is your top level -- date, vendor, customer, or department? Any given classification system will only be effective for one class of lookup, and you can't change it easily later.
Why NOT put it all into one folder, then choose for every lookup whether you want to look at it by date first, or vendor first, or what? Why organize in advance, when computers can easily keep track of all these various independent variables, and organize at run time?
WinFS has been dropped from Longhorn as it won't be ready in time. Well, actually they dropped it and then came up with something else CALLED WinFS which has nothing to do with what you are talking about. The search in Longhorn is an index system just like Spotlight, and everything still runs on NTFS.
Don't expect Microsoft's new file system to be available before 2010. At this point nobody knows what form it will take. WinFS has been kicked around for about a decade now and nothing has come of it, so Microsoft may choose to make incremental improvements to NTFS instead of going the database-driven route.
Ridiculous. Again, the last quarter was Christmas.
Do some math -- note that in the first quarter, the average revenue per unit was like $1350. In this quarter, it dropped quite a bit. This suggests that either Apple sold a bunch of Minis or a bunch of eMacs, and I have a guess.
Power in a DC circuit is volts times amps. (In AC it is sort of more complicated but generally similar). You run high voltages on high power lines so that you don't need as much current. With less current, you can use smaller cables.
That's why major power lines are run at thousands of volts.
Heck, I couldn't hack my way out of a cold either! That's one badass virus, conditioned over millions of years. I'm glad I've got an advanced defense system which is a lot smarter than I am about such matters.
Cyanide is just a form of baryonic matter. You can find it in any apricot. So whatever regulations are on feeding people apricots, they should also be applied to feeding people cyanide.
Heh, I'm certainly entirely unqualified to operate telephone infrastructure. I'll grant you that though I'm not sure what relevance it has.
As for a laptop -- well, we were discussing servers, I thought. Servers are different from laptops, obviously. However, I do happen to have a laptop in my filing cabinet that does in fact have its transformer built in to the case -- Compaq made laptops like that, years ago. They are a little too bulky, though it is a nice convenience that you can use a standard power cord.
I think you misunderstood me about volts -- of course it's entirely possible to run 500 watts at 12 volts, and I know how a car battery works. But it would be a bad idea to try to run power to servers at 12 volts -- we are talking some seriously thick power cables.
That's why when people run DC to servers it is at a higher voltage, and in any case the servers still need power supplies to provide the different voltages for various components. And yeah, there are reasons to do that, but they don't solve heat problems by any stretch. The OP was suggesting running 12VDC directly to the *motherboard*, which I still say is impractical.
I don't think the power supplies contribute a really major portion of the heat to servers these days. It's all about disks and processors.
As for power consumption, I don't see how converting the power outside the rack uses less power than converting it inside the rack. And it won't improve reliability since each server will still need a power supply, it will just be a DC-DC one. I don't think you can (reasonably) run a 500-watt power line at 12 volts. Not to mention that you need more than one voltage.
No, handwaving is when you tell me that there's a cheaper machine that's competitive with the Mini, but it has completely different specs and a 90-day warranty. Handwaving is when you tell me you can add a video card for $10, but you can't show me a video card comparable to the one in the Mini for close to that price.
I went to Dell's site and picked out their cheapest unit. I added a 1-year warranty and selected a DVD drive and CD-RW (since they don't sell a combo, apparently). The price on that is $347, and it still doesn't have a video card, and it still doesn't have Firewire. These weren't even options (so much for choice). Yeah, I can add all that myself, since I happen to be experienced enough to know what parts I need and what is compatible with what, but that's not true for a regular user. That's why people buy whole computers, not parts.
My dad brews his own beer, so he's perfectly comfortable walking in to a store and saying "oh look, I can buy this malt and these hops and..." I bet that when you go to the store, you're looking for a finished beer, not parts of one. That's why I'm trying to compare the Mini to actual computers you can buy, not lists of parts.
Price/performance is an interesting metric if you are buying your computer to run SETI@Home, but that is not what home computers are for. On price/features, the Mini is definitely competitive. When you add the form factor and the reduced noise and the software, it is a very strong offering.
Then show me a real quote for a machine that has the same specs. So far it's been a bunch of handwaving. What's the price on a real PC that someone is actually selling that I can buy as one complete piece which has equivalent specs to a Mini? Then we can consider how much the form factor (and the bundled software) costs, and whether it's worth it.
Don't show me something with no video and tell me that I can add a video card myself if I want. Duh, I've been putting PC systems together since 1994; after ten years I'm sick of it and have better things to do.
I don't think you can get an ATI Radeon 9200 for $10. That's what's in the Mini. The graphics are not the best but the PC quoted was crap and probably can't even do DVI.
It is great that with the PC you can get less, for less. But I don't live in a 3rd world country, so I don't really care that Apple doesn't have a product for the bottom; I'm interested in the middle anyway. As for upgrades, that's a useless benefit if the machine never is upgraded, which most aren't.
Really. I think it's supposed to be the Powerbooks that encourage improvement. If Taco doesn't find them encouraging enough I could sure give them a shot.
I think we get annoyed with amateurish editing because most of us have jobs that are frankly more difficult and less rewarding than that of Slashdot editor.
They are probably hoping that criminals WILL read this, will think "ohmygawd I'd better use a random password", will type up a bunch of random characters, and will promptly proceed to write it down. At least that's what I've seen regular users do when you tell them they need complex passwords, and I don't see why criminals would be any different.
I don't understand why you would need to increase the size of the page file when you had just increased the RAM.
The size of the page file needs to be the amount of virtual memory you need available minus the amount of physical RAM. So when you increase the RAM, it's appropriate to decrease the size of the page file, unless you are simultaneously planning on using more total virtual memory.
In the Ancient Times, there were systems where the total virtual memory size was equal to the size of the page file. These systems were wasteful of page file space, so the rule of thumb that a pagefile should be twice the RAM was invented.
In modern days, the old rule is usually not so bad, since systems with a lot of physical RAM tend to have that because a large VM footprint was expected on the system (else why buy so much RAM)? However, as RAM becomes cheaper, I think it is getting a little out of hand (at least for conventional desktop systems). A little bit of a page file is still good, because you will always have allocated VM that is not used for hours or days on end, but a home computer with 512MB of RAM doesn't usually need a gig of page space.
This is why the Linux system makes a lot of sense. Unless the intended purpose of a machine changes dramatically, or physical RAM is removed, it's usually possible to come up with a good idea of the total amount of paging space needed at install time. If the machine starts running out of VM it is usually better to add RAM than to add swap, anyway.
20% matters to me. It may not be a great increase, but beyond a certain size the device doesn't fit right in the pockets I want it to fit in, and the iPod is about that maximum size.
Personally I think the higher-capacity models of the iPod are too thick. Then again if I did need that much storage there aren't exactly a lot of options that are thinner.
Maybe 20% is nit-picking but most serious iPod competitors are like twice the physical volume of the iPod. In some models the tradeoff is more battery life but I personally don't need more than four hours. Any longer than that and I'm likely to get bored of music anyway.
The point of my post is that it's dumb to say "you can get 5 more gigs for $50 less, ipod suxors!" It's hard to find a product that is just as good as the iPod in every way yet costs less. It's easy to find a product that is better than the iPod in about any *single* factor you could name, but so what?
Nearly all of your "superior to the iPod" products either have less capacity, take up more space, or are made entirely of plastic.
Don't try to tell me that I don't need as much space. Don't try to tell me that a device with a volume that's 20% greater than the iPod's is "almost as small". Don't try to tell me that a device with a plastic back is "durable enough".
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Have you even been flying since 1970? All the flight attendants now are the SAME ONES that the airlines hired back in the day. They formed unions and made careers out of it.
In other words, they are all like 50 years old now.
I don't know much about memory usage under Windows, but here on Linux I am running X with KDE 3.3.2, Firefox AND Konqueror, Citrix, Konsole and some other stuff, and my total actual RAM in use is about 165MB. Of course there's a bunch of RAM in use by the disk cache but it doesn't make sense to count that. Nothing is in swap.
On Linux at least the memory usage numbers reported by individual applications can be misleading, since it's hard to account for things like copy-on-write. It's easier to look at a system's overall numbers, and I think 165MB is pretty respectable.
As for the "more than one CD" complaint, Linux distributions these days come bundled with about all the software there is. Windows XP doesn't even include a C compiler as far as I know. But I always just install Debian from a net-install CD and download the packages I actually want. The resulting installed system is not particularly huge.
As a transplant patient, I have to say that I'm not aware of any anti-rejection drugs that are regularly injected. Certainly all my anti-rejection drugs are pills.
What people need to grasp though is that it's not TAKING the pills, it's what they do to you. I've been on them for close to three years, and I haven't had any major problems, but I could give you a list of minor ones. The most major I suppose was a period of anemia and leukopenia coupled with severe weight loss due to appetite loss. For that they had to test me for lymphoma and leukemia, and I'll tell you that a bone marrow biopsy is way worse than insulin injections. I also had to inject EPO to treat the anemia, but that was only once a week or so.
Transplants are a good road, but they are not the end of the road, and they are a treatment, not a cure. Certainly I hope that all this research will lead the way to better treatments, but for now I'm just glad to not be on dialysis.
Your organization is fixed, sort of like what a good secretary would do with a set of filing cabinets.
Then one day you go looking for a song, and you remember the album name but not the band, and you find yourself digging through each band folder looking for the right album. Just like the secretary has to spend the whole afternoon digging if I ask for, say, all invoices over $1,000 -- he has things filed by year and by vendor, but not by price.
Organization is not bad, but current systems require us to put things into a hierarchy. If you want to organize by genre, artist, and album, you have to decide which one is the more "general" classification, even though artist and genre are completely independent variables. You could just as easily put artist first, then genre, at least if you listen to artists that like to experiment.
Instead of making a tree, it's more natural for us to make a sort of web. When I go looking for a song on the iPod, for instance, I can start where I want -- with genres, or with artists, or with composers, etc. There is no need to establish "root" and "sub" classifications -- all these are independent facts.
This isn't just true of music, though. Going back to our secretary example, current file systems force people to organize things much the way a filing cabinet would. Which is your top level -- date, vendor, customer, or department? Any given classification system will only be effective for one class of lookup, and you can't change it easily later.
Why NOT put it all into one folder, then choose for every lookup whether you want to look at it by date first, or vendor first, or what? Why organize in advance, when computers can easily keep track of all these various independent variables, and organize at run time?
WinFS has been dropped from Longhorn as it won't be ready in time. Well, actually they dropped it and then came up with something else CALLED WinFS which has nothing to do with what you are talking about. The search in Longhorn is an index system just like Spotlight, and everything still runs on NTFS.
Don't expect Microsoft's new file system to be available before 2010. At this point nobody knows what form it will take. WinFS has been kicked around for about a decade now and nothing has come of it, so Microsoft may choose to make incremental improvements to NTFS instead of going the database-driven route.
bzip2 on a very large block of zeroes is fairly processor-intensive, so might not be appropriate for all situations.
gzip compresses zeroes much faster, but not nearly as effectively.
Ridiculous. Again, the last quarter was Christmas.
Do some math -- note that in the first quarter, the average revenue per unit was like $1350. In this quarter, it dropped quite a bit. This suggests that either Apple sold a bunch of Minis or a bunch of eMacs, and I have a guess.
ever hear of Christmas?
Power in a DC circuit is volts times amps. (In AC it is sort of more complicated but generally similar). You run high voltages on high power lines so that you don't need as much current. With less current, you can use smaller cables.
That's why major power lines are run at thousands of volts.
Heck, I couldn't hack my way out of a cold either! That's one badass virus, conditioned over millions of years. I'm glad I've got an advanced defense system which is a lot smarter than I am about such matters.
I run Debian, so I'd be much more interested in articles on the state of laptop linux in 2004. I'll be there in a few months, with any luck.
Cyanide is just a form of baryonic matter. You can find it in any apricot. So whatever regulations are on feeding people apricots, they should also be applied to feeding people cyanide.
Come on, you can't possibly be serious.
Try looking up "reasonable", and take a look at a 50-amp power cord.
Heh, I'm certainly entirely unqualified to operate telephone infrastructure. I'll grant you that though I'm not sure what relevance it has.
As for a laptop -- well, we were discussing servers, I thought. Servers are different from laptops, obviously. However, I do happen to have a laptop in my filing cabinet that does in fact have its transformer built in to the case -- Compaq made laptops like that, years ago. They are a little too bulky, though it is a nice convenience that you can use a standard power cord.
I think you misunderstood me about volts -- of course it's entirely possible to run 500 watts at 12 volts, and I know how a car battery works. But it would be a bad idea to try to run power to servers at 12 volts -- we are talking some seriously thick power cables.
That's why when people run DC to servers it is at a higher voltage, and in any case the servers still need power supplies to provide the different voltages for various components. And yeah, there are reasons to do that, but they don't solve heat problems by any stretch. The OP was suggesting running 12VDC directly to the *motherboard*, which I still say is impractical.
I don't think the power supplies contribute a really major portion of the heat to servers these days. It's all about disks and processors.
As for power consumption, I don't see how converting the power outside the rack uses less power than converting it inside the rack. And it won't improve reliability since each server will still need a power supply, it will just be a DC-DC one. I don't think you can (reasonably) run a 500-watt power line at 12 volts. Not to mention that you need more than one voltage.
No, handwaving is when you tell me that there's a cheaper machine that's competitive with the Mini, but it has completely different specs and a 90-day warranty. Handwaving is when you tell me you can add a video card for $10, but you can't show me a video card comparable to the one in the Mini for close to that price.
I went to Dell's site and picked out their cheapest unit. I added a 1-year warranty and selected a DVD drive and CD-RW (since they don't sell a combo, apparently). The price on that is $347, and it still doesn't have a video card, and it still doesn't have Firewire. These weren't even options (so much for choice). Yeah, I can add all that myself, since I happen to be experienced enough to know what parts I need and what is compatible with what, but that's not true for a regular user. That's why people buy whole computers, not parts.
My dad brews his own beer, so he's perfectly comfortable walking in to a store and saying "oh look, I can buy this malt and these hops and..." I bet that when you go to the store, you're looking for a finished beer, not parts of one. That's why I'm trying to compare the Mini to actual computers you can buy, not lists of parts.
Price/performance is an interesting metric if you are buying your computer to run SETI@Home, but that is not what home computers are for. On price/features, the Mini is definitely competitive. When you add the form factor and the reduced noise and the software, it is a very strong offering.
Then show me a real quote for a machine that has the same specs. So far it's been a bunch of handwaving. What's the price on a real PC that someone is actually selling that I can buy as one complete piece which has equivalent specs to a Mini? Then we can consider how much the form factor (and the bundled software) costs, and whether it's worth it.
Don't show me something with no video and tell me that I can add a video card myself if I want. Duh, I've been putting PC systems together since 1994; after ten years I'm sick of it and have better things to do.
I don't think you can get an ATI Radeon 9200 for $10. That's what's in the Mini. The graphics are not the best but the PC quoted was crap and probably can't even do DVI.
It is great that with the PC you can get less, for less. But I don't live in a 3rd world country, so I don't really care that Apple doesn't have a product for the bottom; I'm interested in the middle anyway. As for upgrades, that's a useless benefit if the machine never is upgraded, which most aren't.
The Mac Mini has a DVD/CD-RW, has an actual video card, and of course has a much smaller form factor. You can use that 19" monitor with it, too.
Really. I think it's supposed to be the Powerbooks that encourage improvement. If Taco doesn't find them encouraging enough I could sure give them a shot.
I think we get annoyed with amateurish editing because most of us have jobs that are frankly more difficult and less rewarding than that of Slashdot editor.
Hey, it says "Don't steal music" right on the plastic wrap.
They are probably hoping that criminals WILL read this, will think "ohmygawd I'd better use a random password", will type up a bunch of random characters, and will promptly proceed to write it down. At least that's what I've seen regular users do when you tell them they need complex passwords, and I don't see why criminals would be any different.
I don't understand why you would need to increase the size of the page file when you had just increased the RAM.
The size of the page file needs to be the amount of virtual memory you need available minus the amount of physical RAM. So when you increase the RAM, it's appropriate to decrease the size of the page file, unless you are simultaneously planning on using more total virtual memory.
In the Ancient Times, there were systems where the total virtual memory size was equal to the size of the page file. These systems were wasteful of page file space, so the rule of thumb that a pagefile should be twice the RAM was invented.
In modern days, the old rule is usually not so bad, since systems with a lot of physical RAM tend to have that because a large VM footprint was expected on the system (else why buy so much RAM)? However, as RAM becomes cheaper, I think it is getting a little out of hand (at least for conventional desktop systems). A little bit of a page file is still good, because you will always have allocated VM that is not used for hours or days on end, but a home computer with 512MB of RAM doesn't usually need a gig of page space.
This is why the Linux system makes a lot of sense. Unless the intended purpose of a machine changes dramatically, or physical RAM is removed, it's usually possible to come up with a good idea of the total amount of paging space needed at install time. If the machine starts running out of VM it is usually better to add RAM than to add swap, anyway.
20% matters to me. It may not be a great increase, but beyond a certain size the device doesn't fit right in the pockets I want it to fit in, and the iPod is about that maximum size.
Personally I think the higher-capacity models of the iPod are too thick. Then again if I did need that much storage there aren't exactly a lot of options that are thinner.
Maybe 20% is nit-picking but most serious iPod competitors are like twice the physical volume of the iPod. In some models the tradeoff is more battery life but I personally don't need more than four hours. Any longer than that and I'm likely to get bored of music anyway.
The point of my post is that it's dumb to say "you can get 5 more gigs for $50 less, ipod suxors!" It's hard to find a product that is just as good as the iPod in every way yet costs less. It's easy to find a product that is better than the iPod in about any *single* factor you could name, but so what?
Nearly all of your "superior to the iPod" products either have less capacity, take up more space, or are made entirely of plastic.
Don't try to tell me that I don't need as much space. Don't try to tell me that a device with a volume that's 20% greater than the iPod's is "almost as small". Don't try to tell me that a device with a plastic back is "durable enough".
The one who's never compared the products is you.