But what about Perl? I think it'll have a shallower learning curve for BASIC adopters, *and* help them on their way to learning C!
Perhaps. In some ways, Perl is like BASIC - it encourages bad habits. (That's about where the similarity stops though).
Of course, I may simply be scarred from having seen too much messy Perl code. It's certainly a powerful language, and I don't mind dabbling in it occasionally. But Python suits my style much better.
It's a personal thing. Which is why, of course, this discussion has become a language war, rather than a discussion of the topic in the story that was originally posted...
As an aside, why did the parent message to this get moderated down?
Just because you disagree with something doesn't mean it should be moderated down! I disagreed with their opinion, too. But I'd rather see you say *why* you think someone is wrong, than simply say "You're wrong" - or even worse, say it by anonymously moderating them down.
-Spiv.
Re:basic can be very powerfull
on
KBasic
·
· Score: 2
I bet you/.ers didn't know you can have algorithyms in vb as well.
I bet you didn't know that VB is Turing-Complete, did you, huh? Or that at a fundamental level everything that can be done by VB can be done by any other Turing-Complete language? It seems to me that it is obvious that algorithms are possible in VB. Hell, they're possible in Intercal too, no doubt. It's Turing-Complete.
Try PostScript. Just because its a language for printers doesn't mean that is all it can do.
-Spiv.
PS - you seem to have problem with "prejiduce" and "loyalists", while keeping a closed mind yourself. Think of it this way: BASIC suits you, so you like it. That is fine, you are welcome to have that opinion. Why can't others believe that OO is possible or even easy to do in C, or that it may even be better to do in OO in C than C++? Just because you like BASIC, doesn't mean C is a bad choice of language for everyone else (and vice-versa, of course...).
I realise this is not a popular opinion around here, but Visual Basic is really not a bad language. It's obviously not designed for use by seasoned coders on large projects, but as a starter language or for getting a small job done quickly...it really is excellent.
No, it isn't.
Visual Basic is a very poor language. The form editor isn't bad, the Object Browser quite handy, the IDE is so-so, but the language is terrible. Here is some food for thought:
Arrays. Say you've got a function which returns an array of some sort - let's say an array of variants to make it easy. How do you return an array of 0 items cleanly?
Object-Orientation. Ever attempted type-safe inheritance or polymorphism in VB? Variants do not count.
String Concatenation. Say you have an HTML page being generated by an ActiveX component called from ASP in IIS (apologies for the MS jargon... this really happened at my workplace though). If you are generating a table, and it has, say 20 columns by 100 rows (or in our case, sometimes more), you naturally would simply generate a big string of the HTML and pass it back to the ASP to spit out, right? But in the process of generating those 2000 table cells, you do quite a few string concatenations. Here's the problem: VB's string concatenation is O(n^2)! (as according to MS, apparently, not to mention our own testing). It can take many seconds or even minutes to spit out something that should be done in a fraction of a second. In the end we wrote a "FastString" component in C++ and used that in the VB. It instantly brought one test case down from 8.5 minutes to 2.5 seconds. Not exactly what I'd call getting a "job done quickly".
So, the obvious question: What's the alternative that's so much better, huh? As a matter of fact, I do have one in mind: Python. It does everything VB does, and much much more. The language is a lot nicer than Visual Basic. *Especially* for beginners. The in-built types are just so much more powerful. Lists and dictionaries being integral parts of the language automatically makes those simple jobs much simpler. (Yes, I realise there is Scripting.Dictionary for VB, but it's not as convenient.)
More impressively, with Python you don't hit your head against a brick wall when you decide to attempt something larger than 50 lines - it's a language that scales well between beginners *and* experts.
If you're wondering, yes I do hate VB with a vengenance, and I code in it (almost) every day. I feel qualified to rant.
*sigh*... here's a shorter one that is quite
pretty. I should point out though that it was written by a friend of mine, not me. I'm typing this from memory, so mistakes are possible.
' VGA Spheres by Peter Aylett
defint a-z
screen 13
randomize timer
for a = 0 to 31
palette a, a*2
palette a, a*2*&h100
palette a, a*2*&h10000
next a
do until inkey$ <> ""
x = int(rnd()*320)
y = int(rnd()*200)
c = int(rnd()*3)*32
for r = 0 to 31
circle(x,y ),r,c+32-r
circle(x,y +1),r,c+32-r
next
loop
Seeing as I'm working for a company which is in the middle of writing just such a package (but for windows only), I thought I should chuck my $0.02 in...
Basically, the situation is this: we run a reasonably successful live investor-information website, with level 2 and a fair swag of technical charts, etc etc. We are, however, hitting the limits of what a website can provide for our customers, even with Java and (gasp!) ActiveX. So, it was decided to write an application, which would give us more control over the interface, better interactivity, and better performace, blah blah blah.
But our company isn't even vaguely interested in writing the application for Linux/BSD. Why? Simple. Where's the money in it? The cost of developing such a package is large, and it won't be trivial to port to another OS. We are going to get our money from a) selling the software, and, more importantly b) selling subscriptions. Although, perhaps we'll give away the software, seeing as it would be useless without a subscription to our data service.
Virtually none of our existing website customers use anything but Windows. I can't even remember the last time we had a support issue from someone with a Mac. Our potential customers are all using Windows, at least as far as we can tell.
Perhaps there are a small handful of Linux users out there who'd be kinda interested in our stuff if it was ported to Linux. That's not enough to recoup the costs of development, and probably not enough to recoup the costs of support either.
If anyone knows anything about someone providing a Linux app for this sort of stuff, I'd love to know who and see what their app can do, but basically, I don't see it'll happen until the general populous start using Linux. Which is a while off - from talking to some of our customers, I know that most of them aren't computer geeks - many don't know you can open a second browser window in IE. This mean Linux has to become a) at least as easy to use as Windows (not as hard as just "easy-to-use";), and b) widespread among non-technical people, before a program such you want seems likely. There just don't seem to be alot of people both interested in using Linux and interested in daytrading.
It does bugs me that we only support Windows, but for the moment there really is no other option I can see, unless a large volume of daytraders suddenly put up their hands saying "I want to use Linux".
At least the CNet journalist didn't actually claim that Intel was "open sourcing" the Itanium itself - just that it was being friendly to open source development for the Itanium by releasing specs.
Pity I can't say the same for/. -- "Intel Open Sources Itanium". In the headline of all places!
Oddly enough, even the usually savvy The Register stuffed this one up too - "Open source CPUs..."
Sometimes the laws are wrong and we know this is the case when the majority of the population break the law when given the chance.
I'm not sure I agree with that as a reliable way of determining right or wrong.
Consider this example: If 90% of the population decide to beat up the other 10% just because they don't like them, is that therefore right?
I'm not going to go into a detailed discussion of what is "right", however - that particular topic was debated at length in the recent RMS interview. But I thought I should point out that such a simplistic view doesn't quite work...
I can't believe Linus allowed "sponsored by MP3.com" to be applied to the master source tree.
Uh, no, he didn't. Reiserfs isn't in the master source tree -- it's looking like it will eventually be included, possibly sometime during 2.4.x and almost definitely in 2.5, but it's certainly not in there yet. The code still needs a bit of work, I believe.
And even if you can't detect any increase in speed, it's still faster
???
If it's not noticably faster, then what's the point spending 3 hours optimising the code? How is that being efficient? (think efficiency of programmer time, not just of cpu cycles)
i'm not advocating writing 90% sloppy code and 10% fantastic code... it should be 90% good code and 10% very good code.
It's simply that "good" code isn't always the fastest. Good also means "readable", "maintainable", "simple" -- things which aren't always possible with an optimised solution, or at least tend to be harder. And when optimisation isn't going to make any useful difference, then sacrificing those other aspects for it is The Wrong Thing.
Most code, especially for CGI scripts, is so time critical that obfuscating it is a real benefit. If you've got the spare time, sure, go ahead, optimise every single byte of code you write. Where I work, I don't get that luxury - and fair enough, why should I get paid if 90% of my time is spent doing something that gives no real benefit?
Remember, everything in moderation, and that includes optimisation.
There is a classic CS quote that says that a program spends 90% of its time in 10% of its code. Make this code run twice as fast and you will nearly double the speed of your program. Optimise everything else and you won't see any difference at all.
You could optimise the other 90% - but why? Programs tend to do alot of looping over a very small percentage of their total code. Most of the statements in your code will get executed only once, but a small chunk of it will get executed 100s or possibly even 1000s of times.
If you can figure out where most of the time is being spent in your code, and optimise that, you'll be much better off than simply optimising some random parts. If you can somehow shave 50% of the speed from a part of the program which is only taking 10% of the total time, you've saved 5%. If you can shave a mere 20% from the part taking 90%, then you save 18%.
It's not a matter of being half-hearted... it's a matter of being intelligent. Why optimise and possibly obfuscate most of your code, when doing it to a carefully chosen section is so much more effective?
Whenever I read a games mag review which says something like: * Graphics: 4.5/5 * Sound: 4/5 * Gameplay: 2/5 * Overall: 4/5 I feel a little saddened. I'd personally be willing to completely discard fancy graphics and sound in my games if it meant better gameplay. I still think Tetris is fun. I still think Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant is fun. I still think Doom is fun. I still think Zork, yes Zork is fun. Defender of the Crown on the C64 is fun.
Yes, some of those had cutting edge graphics. I don't have anything against them - but I just don't consider them essential, or even important, to a game being any good, except perhaps where "atmospherics" matter. But who cares how dark and forboding a level of Bloodthirsty Let's Kill'em All Rampage 3D is, if the playability is shite?
These days, you'll often find Zangband sitting on tty2 of my box at home.
If a game is pretty to look at, and sounds cool, then fine... but you may as well be watching TV (or replaying your Matrix DVD for the umpteenth time).
I know this is a rant, but I just yearn for the good ol' days, y'know?:)
Actually, there is fourth version of Python: Stackless Python - a version of Python which doesn't use the C Stack.
If you are wondering "Why?" right now, and the usual answer "Why Not?" doesn't satisfy, then the link goes some way toward explaining what the advantages are (specifically, much faster for some classes of problems).
I also so that it was rather strange that a word processor does not have a "Print Preview" function.
I suspect the idea is that you're using a WYSIWYG word processor, so Print Preview is redundant. You want to see what's going to print, you zoom out to Full Page. I've found it works well for me.
Anyhow, I am looking forward to this. I have liked WP ever since I first used it (WP5.1), and I still like how it's a word processor which does what I tell it to, rather than deciding for me what I want done. (Unlike certain unnamed products).
The amount of physical RAM free is rarely more than a few megs, as you've probably noticed (this is the "free" value in your example). Incidentally, my preferred way to determine free memory is with the free command.
What probably caused you to go into the swap there was you ran a big program or two at some point (Netscape, and X in general can be real killers). Linux will automatically scale down the buffers and cache to practically zero if necessary. Try running some programs that eat memory and watch the memory stats some time. It will only swap if necessary. When it does swap, it only swaps dormant processes, which you'll find plenty of in most standard distributions. Typically, you'll find you've got junk like nfsd and httpd and other more bizarre daemons running that you don't really need, and these unused processes will be what has swapped.
Because what is swapped was sleeping, it is likely to stay that way, so you only get a one-off performance hit from the swapping. When you close down your large apps, you'll find the memory which gets freed goes back to being used for cache/buffers, instead of swapping stuff back into memory. Why? Because that would be just as slow as swapping it out in the first place, and it's handy to keep that RAM free (bigger cache == better performance). If any of those processes wake up, they'll get automatically swapped back in.
So, to answer your question, no tuning is needed. The disk cache only takes memory not needed by processes. If RAM is low, the disk cache will shrink to virtually nothing, and if still more memory is needed, sleeping processes will get swapped. If RAM then gets freed up, the cache will expand again to fill the void. If a swapped process becomes active again, it gets swapped back into memory.
If you are really concerned, try disabling unused services on your system free memory. This is relatively distribution specific; refer to your documentation. But the only time when you should be worried is when RAM is so low that even mostly active processes get swapped - because then you'll get lots of disk thrashing. My guess is if your system is running with 20-odd megs of buffers and cache (plus 7Mb free), you're probably quite comfortable.
You might like to spend a little bit of time playing with top (table of processes). It lists your processes, and can be set to sort by CPU usage, Memory size, etc.
I note that Katz has mentioned that Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact don't rate Linux as a viable competitor. This is of course going to spark a bit of discussion - so I'd like to point out a couple of things.
Firstly, Judge Jackson is really only considering the next few years in this. Any further is just too far into the future to speculate on whether a monopoly would still be able to exist.
More interestingly, I'd like to point out that he's not evalutating Microsoft's position in the server market - he's looking at the desktop market - Windows 95/98 (not NT), the bundling of IE, the forced preloading of Windows by OEMs. This case is about the consumer market. In fact, I read a survey recently which stated that Linux has 17% of the server market - only half as much as NT, and certainly looks like competition to me.
So, when put in context, is the statement that Linux poses no threat to MS's monopoly at all surprising? Most would agree that Linux isn't ready to dominate the desktop market yet - the interface, whether you hide it behind KDE, GNOME, or whatever, is still a touch rough around the edge's for the average user's liking - not to mention the lack of a wide range of apps for Linux. Linus himself has said that Linux won't be ready to challenge the desktop market for at least another three years.
Finally, I heartily recommend The Register as a site with excellent coverage of the MS vs. DoJ trial - and the MS vs. Caldera trial.
Okay, I have a strange idea that might be able to work.
I noted that recently on Freshmeat, someone had found a way to play VQF files in Linux, even though the only way to get a player is through getting a Windows.dll from the Sony website.
How? By using Wine. The plug-in talks to Wine, and Wine passes that on to the (Linux) music player.
Could the same principle be employed for this? The API for Netscape plug-ins is surely basically the same between Linux and Windows. Give the plug-ins a way to be able to execute in the new environment, they may never know the difference.
I suspect this could be achieved through a "wrapper" plug-in, that translates between the plug-in for Windows and the browser for Linux. Even sound could be made to work, I suspect - Wine is pretty nifty these days.
The main problem I see is that only x86 Linux people will benefit from this. This is, however, the main market, and at least having it there will help "win the battle".
If only I knew more about Wine... or had some spare time:) - I'd really like to see this happen, if at all possible.
Seems to me anyone with an ounce of good sence knows people in power can't be trust. Period.
Perhaps. But I don't think we can trust the general populous either - who voted those dodgy politicians in the first place?:)
I would even venture so far as to say I think we'd get someone even more like a politician if the President were to be popularly elected - they'd have to run an election campaign, make statements and even promises about what they'd do if elected - give reasons why candidate X shouldn't be elected (because "candidate X is a lying muckraker"...) - essentially do everything a politician does.
Whereas the last person politicians will want to choose to put in a place of power... is another politician:)
Doom was a masterpiece, but all the blathering about Wolfenstein 3D is peculiar.
Doom was completely memorizable too - sure, it had more/larger/non-orthoganol maps. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be memorized. I'm sure some of my friends still know the whole thing off-by-heart...
I was wondering about this myself - it's happened to both myself and a friend today. Bizarre.
The moderation guidelines still state that they were last updated 9.9... I don't remember anything being said anywhere about a change in the rules... anyone know what's up?
Actually, I think the AC has a valid point. If you read the article, it nowhere says, or even implies, they were killed for their spamming. It is believed to be because of their "shady" business practices.
Just read the comments. How many posters look like they actually bothered to follow the link?
Certainly, the AC could have been a little more polite, but I just wish people would take the time to read the link for themselves, rather than believe everything they read on/.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps. In some ways, Perl is like BASIC - it encourages bad habits. (That's about where the similarity stops though).
Of course, I may simply be scarred from having seen too much messy Perl code. It's certainly a powerful language, and I don't mind dabbling in it occasionally. But Python suits my style much better.
It's a personal thing. Which is why, of course, this discussion has become a language war, rather than a discussion of the topic in the story that was originally posted...
-Spiv.
As an aside, why did the parent message to this get moderated down?
Just because you disagree with something doesn't mean it should be moderated down! I disagreed with their opinion, too. But I'd rather see you say *why* you think someone is wrong, than simply say "You're wrong" - or even worse, say it by anonymously moderating them down.
-Spiv.
I bet you didn't know that VB is Turing-Complete, did you, huh? Or that at a fundamental level everything that can be done by VB can be done by any other Turing-Complete language? It seems to me that it is obvious that algorithms are possible in VB. Hell, they're possible in Intercal too, no doubt. It's Turing-Complete.
Try PostScript. Just because its a language for printers doesn't mean that is all it can do.
-Spiv.
PS - you seem to have problem with "prejiduce" and "loyalists", while keeping a closed mind yourself. Think of it this way: BASIC suits you, so you like it. That is fine, you are welcome to have that opinion. Why can't others believe that OO is possible or even easy to do in C, or that it may even be better to do in OO in C than C++? Just because you like BASIC, doesn't mean C is a bad choice of language for everyone else (and vice-versa, of course...).
No, it isn't.
Visual Basic is a very poor language. The form editor isn't bad, the Object Browser quite handy, the IDE is so-so, but the language is terrible. Here is some food for thought:
Arrays. Say you've got a function which returns an array of some sort - let's say an array of variants to make it easy. How do you return an array of 0 items cleanly?
Object-Orientation. Ever attempted type-safe inheritance or polymorphism in VB? Variants do not count.
String Concatenation. Say you have an HTML page being generated by an ActiveX component called from ASP in IIS (apologies for the MS jargon... this really happened at my workplace though). If you are generating a table, and it has, say 20 columns by 100 rows (or in our case, sometimes more), you naturally would simply generate a big string of the HTML and pass it back to the ASP to spit out, right? But in the process of generating those 2000 table cells, you do quite a few string concatenations. Here's the problem: VB's string concatenation is O(n^2)! (as according to MS, apparently, not to mention our own testing). It can take many seconds or even minutes to spit out something that should be done in a fraction of a second. In the end we wrote a "FastString" component in C++ and used that in the VB. It instantly brought one test case down from 8.5 minutes to 2.5 seconds. Not exactly what I'd call getting a "job done quickly".
So, the obvious question: What's the alternative that's so much better, huh? As a matter of fact, I do have one in mind: Python. It does everything VB does, and much much more. The language is a lot nicer than Visual Basic. *Especially* for beginners. The in-built types are just so much more powerful. Lists and dictionaries being integral parts of the language automatically makes those simple jobs much simpler. (Yes, I realise there is Scripting.Dictionary for VB, but it's not as convenient.)
More impressively, with Python you don't hit your head against a brick wall when you decide to attempt something larger than 50 lines - it's a language that scales well between beginners *and* experts.
If you're wondering, yes I do hate VB with a vengenance, and I code in it (almost) every day. I feel qualified to rant.
[breathes deeply]
Ahhh.... that's better.
-Spiv.
*sigh*... here's a shorter one that is quite pretty. I should point out though that it was written by a friend of mine, not me. I'm typing this from memory, so mistakes are possible.
' VGA Spheres by Peter Aylettdefint a-z
screen 13
randomize timer
for a = 0 to 31
palette a, a*2
palette a, a*2*&h100
palette a, a*2*&h10000
next a
do until inkey$ <> ""
x = int(rnd()*320)
y = int(rnd()*200)
c = int(rnd()*3)*32
for r = 0 to 31
circle(x,y ),r,c+32-r
circle(x,y +1),r,c+32-r
next
loop
Seeing as I'm working for a company which is in the middle of writing just such a package (but for windows only), I thought I should chuck my $0.02 in...
Basically, the situation is this: we run a reasonably successful live investor-information website, with level 2 and a fair swag of technical charts, etc etc. We are, however, hitting the limits of what a website can provide for our customers, even with Java and (gasp!) ActiveX. So, it was decided to write an application, which would give us more control over the interface, better interactivity, and better performace, blah blah blah.
But our company isn't even vaguely interested in writing the application for Linux/BSD. Why? Simple. Where's the money in it? The cost of developing such a package is large, and it won't be trivial to port to another OS. We are going to get our money from a) selling the software, and, more importantly b) selling subscriptions. Although, perhaps we'll give away the software, seeing as it would be useless without a subscription to our data service.
Virtually none of our existing website customers use anything but Windows. I can't even remember the last time we had a support issue from someone with a Mac. Our potential customers are all using Windows, at least as far as we can tell.
Perhaps there are a small handful of Linux users out there who'd be kinda interested in our stuff if it was ported to Linux. That's not enough to recoup the costs of development, and probably not enough to recoup the costs of support either.
If anyone knows anything about someone providing a Linux app for this sort of stuff, I'd love to know who and see what their app can do, but basically, I don't see it'll happen until the general populous start using Linux. Which is a while off - from talking to some of our customers, I know that most of them aren't computer geeks - many don't know you can open a second browser window in IE. This mean Linux has to become a) at least as easy to use as Windows (not as hard as just "easy-to-use" ;), and b) widespread among non-technical people, before a program such you want seems likely. There just don't seem to be alot of people both interested in using Linux and interested in daytrading.
It does bugs me that we only support Windows, but for the moment there really is no other option I can see, unless a large volume of daytraders suddenly put up their hands saying "I want to use Linux".
Sorry about the long, rambling post.
-Spiv.
At least the CNet journalist didn't actually claim that Intel was "open sourcing" the Itanium itself - just that it was being friendly to open source development for the Itanium by releasing specs.
Pity I can't say the same for /. -- "Intel Open Sources Itanium". In the headline of all places!
Oddly enough, even the usually savvy The Register stuffed this one up too - "Open source CPUs..."
-Spiv.
I'm not sure I agree with that as a reliable way of determining right or wrong.
Consider this example: If 90% of the population decide to beat up the other 10% just because they don't like them, is that therefore right?
I'm not going to go into a detailed discussion of what is "right", however - that particular topic was debated at length in the recent RMS interview. But I thought I should point out that such a simplistic view doesn't quite work...
-Spiv.
*cough*... try looking at his post again... *cough*
-Spiv.
???
If it's not noticably faster, then what's the point spending 3 hours optimising the code? How is that being efficient? (think efficiency of programmer time, not just of cpu cycles)
i'm not advocating writing 90% sloppy code and 10% fantastic code... it should be 90% good code and 10% very good code.
It's simply that "good" code isn't always the fastest. Good also means "readable", "maintainable", "simple" -- things which aren't always possible with an optimised solution, or at least tend to be harder. And when optimisation isn't going to make any useful difference, then sacrificing those other aspects for it is The Wrong Thing.
Most code, especially for CGI scripts, is so time critical that obfuscating it is a real benefit. If you've got the spare time, sure, go ahead, optimise every single byte of code you write. Where I work, I don't get that luxury - and fair enough, why should I get paid if 90% of my time is spent doing something that gives no real benefit?
Remember, everything in moderation, and that includes optimisation.
-Spiv.
Read his first paragraph again:
You could optimise the other 90% - but why? Programs tend to do alot of looping over a very small percentage of their total code. Most of the statements in your code will get executed only once, but a small chunk of it will get executed 100s or possibly even 1000s of times.
If you can figure out where most of the time is being spent in your code, and optimise that, you'll be much better off than simply optimising some random parts. If you can somehow shave 50% of the speed from a part of the program which is only taking 10% of the total time, you've saved 5%. If you can shave a mere 20% from the part taking 90%, then you save 18%.
It's not a matter of being half-hearted... it's a matter of being intelligent. Why optimise and possibly obfuscate most of your code, when doing it to a carefully chosen section is so much more effective?
-Spiv.
Hear Hear!
Whenever I read a games mag review which says something like:
* Graphics: 4.5/5
* Sound: 4/5
* Gameplay: 2/5
* Overall: 4/5
I feel a little saddened. I'd personally be willing to completely discard fancy graphics and sound in my games if it meant better gameplay. I still think Tetris is fun. I still think Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant is fun. I still think Doom is fun. I still think Zork, yes Zork is fun. Defender of the Crown on the C64 is fun.
Yes, some of those had cutting edge graphics. I don't have anything against them - but I just don't consider them essential, or even important, to a game being any good, except perhaps where "atmospherics" matter. But who cares how dark and forboding a level of Bloodthirsty Let's Kill'em All Rampage 3D is, if the playability is shite?
These days, you'll often find Zangband sitting on tty2 of my box at home.
If a game is pretty to look at, and sounds cool, then fine... but you may as well be watching TV (or replaying your Matrix DVD for the umpteenth time).
I know this is a rant, but I just yearn for the good ol' days, y'know? :)
-Spiv.
Actually, there is fourth version of Python: Stackless Python - a version of Python which doesn't use the C Stack.
If you are wondering "Why?" right now, and the usual answer "Why Not?" doesn't satisfy, then the link goes some way toward explaining what the advantages are (specifically, much faster for some classes of problems).
I also so that it was rather strange that a word processor does not have a "Print Preview" function.
I suspect the idea is that you're using a WYSIWYG word processor, so Print Preview is redundant. You want to see what's going to print, you zoom out to Full Page. I've found it works well for me.
Anyhow, I am looking forward to this. I have liked WP ever since I first used it (WP5.1), and I still like how it's a word processor which does what I tell it to, rather than deciding for me what I want done. (Unlike certain unnamed products).
"Connection Refused"
That didn't take long...
"try disabling unused services on your system free memory"
should be:
"try disabling unused services on your system to free memory"
As far as I am aware, this isn't really an issue.
The amount of physical RAM free is rarely more than a few megs, as you've probably noticed (this is the "free" value in your example). Incidentally, my preferred way to determine free memory is with the free command.
What probably caused you to go into the swap there was you ran a big program or two at some point (Netscape, and X in general can be real killers). Linux will automatically scale down the buffers and cache to practically zero if necessary. Try running some programs that eat memory and watch the memory stats some time. It will only swap if necessary. When it does swap, it only swaps dormant processes, which you'll find plenty of in most standard distributions. Typically, you'll find you've got junk like nfsd and httpd and other more bizarre daemons running that you don't really need, and these unused processes will be what has swapped.
Because what is swapped was sleeping, it is likely to stay that way, so you only get a one-off performance hit from the swapping. When you close down your large apps, you'll find the memory which gets freed goes back to being used for cache/buffers, instead of swapping stuff back into memory. Why? Because that would be just as slow as swapping it out in the first place, and it's handy to keep that RAM free (bigger cache == better performance). If any of those processes wake up, they'll get automatically swapped back in.
So, to answer your question, no tuning is needed. The disk cache only takes memory not needed by processes. If RAM is low, the disk cache will shrink to virtually nothing, and if still more memory is needed, sleeping processes will get swapped. If RAM then gets freed up, the cache will expand again to fill the void. If a swapped process becomes active again, it gets swapped back into memory.
If you are really concerned, try disabling unused services on your system free memory. This is relatively distribution specific; refer to your documentation. But the only time when you should be worried is when RAM is so low that even mostly active processes get swapped - because then you'll get lots of disk thrashing. My guess is if your system is running with 20-odd megs of buffers and cache (plus 7Mb free), you're probably quite comfortable.
You might like to spend a little bit of time playing with top (table of processes). It lists your processes, and can be set to sort by CPU usage, Memory size, etc.
Hope this helps.
I note that Katz has mentioned that Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact don't rate Linux as a viable competitor. This is of course going to spark a bit of discussion - so I'd like to point out a couple of things.
Firstly, Judge Jackson is really only considering the next few years in this. Any further is just too far into the future to speculate on whether a monopoly would still be able to exist.
More interestingly, I'd like to point out that he's not evalutating Microsoft's position in the server market - he's looking at the desktop market - Windows 95/98 (not NT), the bundling of IE, the forced preloading of Windows by OEMs. This case is about the consumer market. In fact, I read a survey recently which stated that Linux has 17% of the server market - only half as much as NT, and certainly looks like competition to me.
So, when put in context, is the statement that Linux poses no threat to MS's monopoly at all surprising? Most would agree that Linux isn't ready to dominate the desktop market yet - the interface, whether you hide it behind KDE, GNOME, or whatever, is still a touch rough around the edge's for the average user's liking - not to mention the lack of a wide range of apps for Linux. Linus himself has said that Linux won't be ready to challenge the desktop market for at least another three years.
Finally, I heartily recommend The Register as a site with excellent coverage of the MS vs. DoJ trial - and the MS vs. Caldera trial.
(IANAL, etc...)
Okay, I have a strange idea that might be able to work.
I noted that recently on Freshmeat, someone had found a way to play VQF files in Linux, even though the only way to get a player is through getting a Windows .dll from the Sony website.
How? By using Wine. The plug-in talks to Wine, and Wine passes that on to the (Linux) music player.
Could the same principle be employed for this? The API for Netscape plug-ins is surely basically the same between Linux and Windows. Give the plug-ins a way to be able to execute in the new environment, they may never know the difference.
I suspect this could be achieved through a "wrapper" plug-in, that translates between the plug-in for Windows and the browser for Linux. Even sound could be made to work, I suspect - Wine is pretty nifty these days.
The main problem I see is that only x86 Linux people will benefit from this. This is, however, the main market, and at least having it there will help "win the battle".
If only I knew more about Wine... or had some spare time :) - I'd really like to see this happen, if at all possible.
Comments?
Perhaps. But I don't think we can trust the general populous either - who voted those dodgy politicians in the first place? :)
I would even venture so far as to say I think we'd get someone even more like a politician if the President were to be popularly elected - they'd have to run an election campaign, make statements and even promises about what they'd do if elected - give reasons why candidate X shouldn't be elected (because "candidate X is a lying muckraker"...) - essentially do everything a politician does.
Whereas the last person politicians will want to choose to put in a place of power... is another politician :)
I thought it was a raycasting engine... *shrug*.
I was wondering about this myself - it's happened to both myself and a friend today. Bizarre.
The moderation guidelines still state that they were last updated 9.9... I don't remember anything being said anywhere about a change in the rules... anyone know what's up?
Actually, I think the AC has a valid point. If you read the article, it nowhere says, or even implies, they were killed for their spamming. It is believed to be because of their "shady" business practices.
Just read the comments. How many posters look like they actually bothered to follow the link?
Certainly, the AC could have been a little more polite, but I just wish people would take the time to read the link for themselves, rather than believe everything they read on /.