It's still there. One article said roughly half the people in Australia will get skin cancer. I have a friend in New Zealand who says skin cancer is a major problem there and nobody goes out without covering up when it gets bad. Just use Google and you will find a ton of information. Though this has little to do with global warming.
I noticed the same thing. I think a good part of that is just the narrower columns, which requires less eye movement. I can read fairly quickly, but narrower columns help me read faster since I don't have to track each line of text nearly as much.
Unfortunately at work I am stuck with an ATI X1300 card with Linux. I have to put up with text in my editor getting constantly corrupted, my mouse cursor corrupted and lots of other weird quirks. I tried to fire up Google Earth and that just hung. All of these things work perfectly on my nVidia cards at home, and over the years I've used nVidia (since the Gforce 2) I've only rarely had problems.
Even ATI's installer sucks badly. It took a week before I could finally get the ATI driver to install on the computer, in part because it had integrated graphics (which did not work at all with X). The Vesa drivers for the ATI card are far too slow to be usable.
Diesels historically have put out far more pollutants (especially NOx and soot) than their gasoline counterparts. They've improved, though the technology is still a bit premature, and switching to low sulfur in the US will help significantly since a lot of technology to remove NOx gets clogged up with sulfur.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a diesel hybrid, especially since diesel engines can be very efficient when run at a constant RPM and use an electric motor to control the vehicle speed (this is how diesel locomotives have worked for the last 50+ years). This could be implemented like a diesel locomotive or through a system like Toyota's parallel hybrid technology which also supports this. I think Toyota's hybrid technology would work even better if combined with a good diesel engine, though Toyota isn't know for their diesel engines in cars like European cars. I think a series hybrid with diesel would provide much less benefit.
They are not and I say this with experience. A hybrid can recover energy from braking, but it works best with light braking than hard braking, plus regeneration is not 100% efficient. Planning ahead adds significantly to the milage.
Those are two of my pet peeves as well. I will often drive slow but keep to the right and generally try and go with the flow of traffic on the freeway. The worst by far though is when someone merges in front of me and decides to only go 35MPh on the freeway when everyone else is going 70. I have to brake hard for the idiot then worry about getting rear-ended and look for some way to pass them, which can be impossible in moderate traffic. People like this cause huge traffic snarls. I think of traffic a bit like fluid dynamics. Keep a smooth flow and everything works. Introduce turbulence and you create a traffic jam. I see it every time there's a major merge or even when a lane goes away since most people seem to wait until the very end to merge.
It all depends on how much driving you do and the cost of gas. It is likely gas will hit $4/gallon this summer (it's already over $3.30/gallon where I live), and if one takes into account how the cost of gas is constantly rising and if you plan to hold on to your car for a few years it will more than pay for itself. Plus in my case I got a tax rebate of $3150 last year and got a set of stickers so I can drive in the carpool lane (which I rarely use, but it adds several thousand dollars to the resale value of the car).
How long before $5/gallon? All we need is a disaster with one of our oil suppliers (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, etc.) to cause prices to spike, or another hurricane season that damages pipelines in the gulf or a problem at a major refinery or shipping terminal. Also, many of the oil producing countries are not all that happy with the US right now.
There has been at least one terrorist attempt on the oil supply in Saudi Arabia. If, God forbid, they are ever successful it will cause prices to really spike.
Also, the biggest bottleneck right now is the refineries. The oil companies have not invested in new refineries due to the high capital cost involved, plus the scarcity is to their advantage since if demand is high but supply is limited, the price goes up.
This was done where I live to anticipate commuting patterns. It works great for those who drive around the speed limit. For all the idiots who go faster, they just hit a lot of red lights while those who understand it hit all green lights.
Actually, the Prius can run the gasoline motor at a constant RPM in the way it is designed. The actual speed of the output is controlled exclusively by two motors/generators. One motor is optimized for generating electricity and the other is optimized for providing torque to the wheels. By varying the amount of power shunted from the generator to the motor the output speed can be controlled since more power from the generator causes it to draw higher torque from the engine which in turn causes the power sent to the wheels from the engine to decrease, but increases the speed. A diagram is shown here.
In practice, the engine runs at a variety of speeds, but it seems to prefer running the engine at the most efficient speed and torque when it can.
Exactly. I do both. I drive a hybrid and anticipate the traffic ahead of me, braking as soon as I see a light ahead of me turn yellow to try and anticipate when it will turn green and the car ahead of me to minimize braking and acceleration. It takes me just as long to get where I am going as the car next to me who accelerates hard when the light goes green only to brake hard at the next red light. It's not uncommon for me to exceed the EPA ratings for my car (which many people find hard to do).
I agree with this. I routinely see people accelerating quickly from a light when the next light is red, only to brake hard at the next light and repeat this. In my case, if I see the next light is red I will start slowing down immediately and try and anticipate when it will turn green. This results in a lot less braking and acceleration which has a noticeable impact in milage (I drive a hybrid so this is quickly visible on the graph). If the speed limit is 40 and I see the next light is red, I'll accelerate to 15-25mph instead of 40. From time to time drivers behind me pass me, but in the end they save no time compared to me, even for a few blocks. If I see a long stretch of green lights I'll drive at a regular speed. If more drivers did this it will save wear and tear on their cars and save on gas. Accelerating hard only to have to brake at the next light or two waste a lot, since in most vehicles braking just turns all that energy into heat. I get a number of drivers annoyed, but in the end it doesn't cost them any time at all. I often time it right so I don't have to brake at all when I reach the next light and reach the car in front of me matching the same speed.
In a sense I am combining the best of both. It is not uncommon for me to hit over 60MPg in situations like this (which is higher than the sticker says).
Similarly, on the freeway I try and maintain a constant speed, often using the cruise control which also saves a lot. When not in a hurry I'll stay in the right lanes so those who want to drive at 90MPh can do so. (Hybrid owners who don't move to the right when driving the speed limit are assholes IMO).
In stop and go freeway traffic I'll look ahead and choose a speed so I don't have to slow down and accelerate as much. The only thing that changes is the gap between me and the car in front of me. A few cars cut in front, but not many.
These techniques work well whether a car is a hybrid or not.
Hybrids also work best when braking slowly over a longer period of time since they can recapture more energy. For non-hybrids it just means less acceleration is required in the future.
For me it's sort of a game, to try and minimize fuel usage without affecting the time it takes to reach my destination.
You have no idea how lucky you are. It is not unusual for me to hit $0.34/kwh where I live. One reason the rates are so high is much of the power generation in California is natural gas, which has become increasingly expensive. I have friends who have power bills hitting over $2000/month! One of them installed a 6KWh solar array which made big difference and the other is also considering solar. My bill only hits $150-$250 per month. A side effect of this and building requirements put in place since the 1970s have resulted in California using about 60% of electricity per capita as the rest of the country as well as the amount of electricity per capita remaining nearly constant since the 1970s (CO2 production is actually about 30% less).
One reason it's so expensive here is much of the electricity is generated by natural gas, which has become very expensive in recent years. I would love to see more nuclear power plants built in the state (as well as breeder reactors to deal with the waste). Solar helps, but won't solve all the needs.
I believe Disney was one of the major players behind the suit of ReplayTV because the ReplayTV could automatically skip commercials and also had limited file sharing capabilities (with a limited number of other ReplayTV users). They tried to force ReplayTV to monitor all of the user remote activity to record what was skipped, what programs were watched, etc. which Replay successfully fought off.
I'm still pissed at Disney for one of the DVD's I bought which has a 12 minute preview which forbids me from fast-forwarding, and more annoying, it has a bug with my DVD player which requires me to restart the movie about 3/4 through it where I have to watch the damned preview again.
Somebody should take the CEO and their lawyers and force them to watch the previews over and over again for a month straight interspersed with programming where the same 90 minute infomercial shows over and over again which they cannot skip.
Citibank is one of the financial institutions who is vulnerable due to their lack of https as well. I'm fairly pissed off at them over that and other problems with their web interface which is mostly designed for IE only.
Exactly. The Citibank web site I use for my credit card suffers from this exact problem. I can think of several ways one could implement a man-in-the-middle attack with the end user being none the wiser. Banks also need to train their users to not accept certificate failures and to use a bookmark on the https site.
All of my other financial web sites use https for logging on.
You do realize that many people who were snatched and held at Gitmo were found to be completely innocent and were snatched by "not nice" people because Pakistan and other places were paid for each suspect they rounded up. There are many people who have been proven to be innocent there that still cannot return home to their friends and families because their home country refuses to let them back in.
What happens to the innocent people there who eventually go home? There are many held at Gitmo who have already proven to be innocent who are stuck there because their home countries won't allow them back.
No matter how bad these people are, we should not stoop to their level and must respect human rights, otherwise we are little better than they are. This country was founded on certain principals, and if we throw them out because of terrorists, then the terrorists have won.
I agree we should throw the book at those responsible for terrorism, but I also believe in habeus corpus. If they're guilty, lock them up forever or in some cases death, but make sure they're guilty first. Our current behavior has robbed the US of the moral high ground in the eyes of many outside this country.
After all, would you fully trust the word of Pakistan about who is innocent and who is guilty? After all, they were one of the Taliban's biggest supporters up until 9/11 and still support them through numerous warlords.
As for blaming Carter, you also should blame Ronald Reagan for quietly cowing to the terrorists in Lebanon and illegally supplying weapons to Iran or supporting WMDs in Iraq and Saddam. Carter was a wimp and screwed up, but so did Ronald Reagan. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Interventions _of_the_Reagan_AdministrationWikipedia.
Snapshots in the filesystem itself make much more sense than the LVM. For one thing, the filesystem can be designed to have this functionality in mind and can be much more efficient about it rather than LVM which just takes a generic snapshot approach.
Having used snapshots where I work via a NetAPP server I can attest at their usefulness. I just go to ~/.snapshot and go back in hours, days, weeks or months.
With ZFS it can be fully automatic so if, say, I'm editing a file several times and screw it up, I can easily go back to a previous snapshot, and the snapshot could even be from a few seconds back. Since the filesystem is aware of snapshotting, it can be faster and more efficient and more flexible than what LVM can do.
It could almost be like an automatic SVN where I can automatically, for example, go to the state of the filesystem on April 28, 11:42:13am. I believe (I may be wrong here) that LVM requires the user to specify when a snapshot should take place.
I'm not sure that ZFS is the end-all be-all filesystem for Linux, but Linux has a long way to go before it can compete with filesystems like what NetAPP offers.
Another problem with LVM that could be solved with a filesystem is shrinking a logical volume. If I want to remove a drive I can notify the filesystem and since it knows what files are on that drive it can move them off of it. Or if you have one drive that's a lot faster than the others you could tell the file system which files are performance critical so it will place those files on that drive and put non-critical files on other drives.
Interesting... I just did a search on something I am interested in: 'linux pic microcontroller programmer' since I am thinking of getting into PIC programming for a hobby. Google's first choice was by far the best. It took me to a comprehensive page covering numerous PIC related projects that run on Linux, with links to a lot of information that exactly fits what I'm looking for. Yahoo came in second, taking me to a Linux Journal article that covers one of the programmers listed on the first page (and the first page has links to the article as well), though the page only covered one package and MSN came in a very distant 3rd, taking me to a Wikipedia article which only has a single sentence mentioning Linux and it didn't have a lot to do with programming, although the Wikipedia page does have links to some of the information I'm looking for at the bottom. There is a reason Google is so popular, and it's more than its brand.
If I had to rate the links on a scale of 1 to 10 based on relevance, Google would get 10, Yahoo would get 5 and MSN would get 2.
At least on my KDE desktop whenever I need to run a tool that requires root privileges it pops up a dialog asking for my password without even having to access the command line. Granted, not everything is in there but a fair amount is and more commands can easily be added. I would guess Gnome has something similar. I only log in as root if I need to muck about with a bunch of things, otherwise it isn't needed.
In KDE, all I have to do to add an application with root privileges is mark the application as "Run as a different user" and a dialog will pop up asking for that user's password before launching that application under sudo. The default username, if none is filled in, is root.
A tickless solution will use a little less CPU. Now the amount of power used will not be much more with a regular tick, but it makes a bigger difference when running in a VM (VMWARE, Xen, etc.) since there is a lot more overhead to process all the timer interrupts in all of the OSes that are running. Perhaps more importantly, you can get much more accurate timers without having to increase the tick rate. If I need to sleep for 200us I don't need the timer to run at 5000 ticks/second.
It's interesting then that I went to a doctor's appointment on Monday and the doctor quickly typed in the medication and clicked on the pharmacy I wanted to go to and everything was done with no paper. The facility is out patient only in my city in northern California. It's been like this for the last two years. Everything is electronic, with a computer in every examination room. It also ties in to their web site so I can access the information and get test results through the web or schedule appointments through the web. And this is not Kaiser *shudder*.
My family had Kaiser for a while and all I can say is NEVER AGAIN.
As far as I know, Linux never had a 49.7 day problem, but it did have a problem at 497 days. I have a machine at home running the 2.4.20 kernel and every 497 days my uptime restarts, but it hasn't crashed. It's gone through 2 rollovers so far and has been up for over 3.72 years. It will hit its next rollover around September. I really need to build a new server... I just don't know if it will be as reliable as this one has been.
It means that they were able to successfully remove the blood sucking parasites from the kernel.
Most kernels use a periodic system timer tick to do various housekeeping chores, like rescheduling tasks, sending packets, flushing files from the cache, etc. Usually this occurs at some periodic rate, i.e. every 1-10ms for Linux and every 10-15ms for Windows (according to this article.
This is a bit wasteful of CPU resources, since the kernel might not need to do anything for quite a while, or it might want a high resolution timer with higher accuracy than normal system timer. For example, when the system is idle, the CPU still must wake up and process a timer interrupt for every timer tick, and if it's set to 1ms there are 1000 interrupts per second.
A tickless kernel instead only schedules the next tick for when it is needed, so if the system is idle and nothing needs to happen for 50ms, then the next tick will be scheduled 50ms later. On the other hand, if a timer needs to go off in 750 microseconds, the kernel can schedule the next interrupt to go off then, giving much higher accuracy.
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It's still there. One article said roughly half the people in Australia will get skin cancer. I have a friend in New Zealand who says skin cancer is a major problem there and nobody goes out without covering up when it gets bad. Just use Google and you will find a ton of information. Though this has little to do with global warming.
I noticed the same thing. I think a good part of that is just the narrower columns, which requires less eye movement. I can read fairly quickly, but narrower columns help me read faster since I don't have to track each line of text nearly as much.
Unfortunately at work I am stuck with an ATI X1300 card with Linux. I have to put up with text in my editor getting constantly corrupted, my mouse cursor corrupted and lots of other weird quirks. I tried to fire up Google Earth and that just hung. All of these things work perfectly on my nVidia cards at home, and over the years I've used nVidia (since the Gforce 2) I've only rarely had problems.
Even ATI's installer sucks badly. It took a week before I could finally get the ATI driver to install on the computer, in part because it had integrated graphics (which did not work at all with X). The Vesa drivers for the ATI card are far too slow to be usable.
Diesels historically have put out far more pollutants (especially NOx and soot) than their gasoline counterparts. They've improved, though the technology is still a bit premature, and switching to low sulfur in the US will help significantly since a lot of technology to remove NOx gets clogged up with sulfur.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a diesel hybrid, especially since diesel engines can be very efficient when run at a constant RPM and use an electric motor to control the vehicle speed (this is how diesel locomotives have worked for the last 50+ years). This could be implemented like a diesel locomotive or through a system like Toyota's parallel hybrid technology which also supports this. I think Toyota's hybrid technology would work even better if combined with a good diesel engine, though Toyota isn't know for their diesel engines in cars like European cars. I think a series hybrid with diesel would provide much less benefit.
They are not and I say this with experience. A hybrid can recover energy from braking, but it works best with light braking than hard braking, plus regeneration is not 100% efficient. Planning ahead adds significantly to the milage.
Those are two of my pet peeves as well. I will often drive slow but keep to the right and generally try and go with the flow of traffic on the freeway. The worst by far though is when someone merges in front of me and decides to only go 35MPh on the freeway when everyone else is going 70. I have to brake hard for the idiot then worry about getting rear-ended and look for some way to pass them, which can be impossible in moderate traffic. People like this cause huge traffic snarls. I think of traffic a bit like fluid dynamics. Keep a smooth flow and everything works. Introduce turbulence and you create a traffic jam. I see it every time there's a major merge or even when a lane goes away since most people seem to wait until the very end to merge.
It all depends on how much driving you do and the cost of gas. It is likely gas will hit $4/gallon this summer (it's already over $3.30/gallon where I live), and if one takes into account how the cost of gas is constantly rising and if you plan to hold on to your car for a few years it will more than pay for itself. Plus in my case I got a tax rebate of $3150 last year and got a set of stickers so I can drive in the carpool lane (which I rarely use, but it adds several thousand dollars to the resale value of the car).
How long before $5/gallon? All we need is a disaster with one of our oil suppliers (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, etc.) to cause prices to spike, or another hurricane season that damages pipelines in the gulf or a problem at a major refinery or shipping terminal. Also, many of the oil producing countries are not all that happy with the US right now.
There has been at least one terrorist attempt on the oil supply in Saudi Arabia. If, God forbid, they are ever successful it will cause prices to really spike.
Also, the biggest bottleneck right now is the refineries. The oil companies have not invested in new refineries due to the high capital cost involved, plus the scarcity is to their advantage since if demand is high but supply is limited, the price goes up.
This was done where I live to anticipate commuting patterns. It works great for those who drive around the speed limit. For all the idiots who go faster, they just hit a lot of red lights while those who understand it hit all green lights.
In practice, the engine runs at a variety of speeds, but it seems to prefer running the engine at the most efficient speed and torque when it can.
Exactly. I do both. I drive a hybrid and anticipate the traffic ahead of me, braking as soon as I see a light ahead of me turn yellow to try and anticipate when it will turn green and the car ahead of me to minimize braking and acceleration. It takes me just as long to get where I am going as the car next to me who accelerates hard when the light goes green only to brake hard at the next red light. It's not uncommon for me to exceed the EPA ratings for my car (which many people find hard to do).
I agree with this. I routinely see people accelerating quickly from a light when the next light is red, only to brake hard at the next light and repeat this. In my case, if I see the next light is red I will start slowing down immediately and try and anticipate when it will turn green. This results in a lot less braking and acceleration which has a noticeable impact in milage (I drive a hybrid so this is quickly visible on the graph). If the speed limit is 40 and I see the next light is red, I'll accelerate to 15-25mph instead of 40. From time to time drivers behind me pass me, but in the end they save no time compared to me, even for a few blocks. If I see a long stretch of green lights I'll drive at a regular speed. If more drivers did this it will save wear and tear on their cars and save on gas. Accelerating hard only to have to brake at the next light or two waste a lot, since in most vehicles braking just turns all that energy into heat. I get a number of drivers annoyed, but in the end it doesn't cost them any time at all. I often time it right so I don't have to brake at all when I reach the next light and reach the car in front of me matching the same speed.
In a sense I am combining the best of both. It is not uncommon for me to hit over 60MPg in situations like this (which is higher than the sticker says).
Similarly, on the freeway I try and maintain a constant speed, often using the cruise control which also saves a lot. When not in a hurry I'll stay in the right lanes so those who want to drive at 90MPh can do so. (Hybrid owners who don't move to the right when driving the speed limit are assholes IMO).
In stop and go freeway traffic I'll look ahead and choose a speed so I don't have to slow down and accelerate as much. The only thing that changes is the gap between me and the car in front of me. A few cars cut in front, but not many.
These techniques work well whether a car is a hybrid or not.
Hybrids also work best when braking slowly over a longer period of time since they can recapture more energy. For non-hybrids it just means less acceleration is required in the future.
For me it's sort of a game, to try and minimize fuel usage without affecting the time it takes to reach my destination.
You have no idea how lucky you are. It is not unusual for me to hit $0.34/kwh where I live. One reason the rates are so high is much of the power generation in California is natural gas, which has become increasingly expensive. I have friends who have power bills hitting over $2000/month! One of them installed a 6KWh solar array which made big difference and the other is also considering solar. My bill only hits $150-$250 per month. A side effect of this and building requirements put in place since the 1970s have resulted in California using about 60% of electricity per capita as the rest of the country as well as the amount of electricity per capita remaining nearly constant since the 1970s (CO2 production is actually about 30% less).
One reason it's so expensive here is much of the electricity is generated by natural gas, which has become very expensive in recent years. I would love to see more nuclear power plants built in the state (as well as breeder reactors to deal with the waste). Solar helps, but won't solve all the needs.
I believe Disney was one of the major players behind the suit of ReplayTV because the ReplayTV could automatically skip commercials and also had limited file sharing capabilities (with a limited number of other ReplayTV users). They tried to force ReplayTV to monitor all of the user remote activity to record what was skipped, what programs were watched, etc. which Replay successfully fought off.
I'm still pissed at Disney for one of the DVD's I bought which has a 12 minute preview which forbids me from fast-forwarding, and more annoying, it has a bug with my DVD player which requires me to restart the movie about 3/4 through it where I have to watch the damned preview again.
Somebody should take the CEO and their lawyers and force them to watch the previews over and over again for a month straight interspersed with programming where the same 90 minute infomercial shows over and over again which they cannot skip.
Citibank is one of the financial institutions who is vulnerable due to their lack of https as well. I'm fairly pissed off at them over that and other problems with their web interface which is mostly designed for IE only.
Exactly. The Citibank web site I use for my credit card suffers from this exact problem. I can think of several ways one could implement a man-in-the-middle attack with the end user being none the wiser. Banks also need to train their users to not accept certificate failures and to use a bookmark on the https site.
All of my other financial web sites use https for logging on.
What happens to the innocent people there who eventually go home? There are many held at Gitmo who have already proven to be innocent who are stuck there because their home countries won't allow them back.
No matter how bad these people are, we should not stoop to their level and must respect human rights, otherwise we are little better than they are. This country was founded on certain principals, and if we throw them out because of terrorists, then the terrorists have won.
I agree we should throw the book at those responsible for terrorism, but I also believe in habeus corpus. If they're guilty, lock them up forever or in some cases death, but make sure they're guilty first. Our current behavior has robbed the US of the moral high ground in the eyes of many outside this country.
After all, would you fully trust the word of Pakistan about who is innocent and who is guilty? After all, they were one of the Taliban's biggest supporters up until 9/11 and still support them through numerous warlords.
As for blaming Carter, you also should blame Ronald Reagan for quietly cowing to the terrorists in Lebanon and illegally supplying weapons to Iran or supporting WMDs in Iraq and Saddam. Carter was a wimp and screwed up, but so did Ronald Reagan. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Interventions _of_the_Reagan_AdministrationWikipedia.
Snapshots in the filesystem itself make much more sense than the LVM. For one thing, the filesystem can be designed to have this functionality in mind and can be much more efficient about it rather than LVM which just takes a generic snapshot approach.
Having used snapshots where I work via a NetAPP server I can attest at their usefulness. I just go to ~/.snapshot and go back in hours, days, weeks or months.
With ZFS it can be fully automatic so if, say, I'm editing a file several times and screw it up, I can easily go back to a previous snapshot, and the snapshot could even be from a few seconds back. Since the filesystem is aware of snapshotting, it can be faster and more efficient and more flexible than what LVM can do.
It could almost be like an automatic SVN where I can automatically, for example, go to the state of the filesystem on April 28, 11:42:13am. I believe (I may be wrong here) that LVM requires the user to specify when a snapshot should take place.
I'm not sure that ZFS is the end-all be-all filesystem for Linux, but Linux has a long way to go before it can compete with filesystems like what NetAPP offers.
Another problem with LVM that could be solved with a filesystem is shrinking a logical volume. If I want to remove a drive I can notify the filesystem and since it knows what files are on that drive it can move them off of it. Or if you have one drive that's a lot faster than the others you could tell the file system which files are performance critical so it will place those files on that drive and put non-critical files on other drives.
Interesting... I just did a search on something I am interested in: 'linux pic microcontroller programmer' since I am thinking of getting into PIC programming for a hobby. Google's first choice was by far the best. It took me to a comprehensive page covering numerous PIC related projects that run on Linux, with links to a lot of information that exactly fits what I'm looking for. Yahoo came in second, taking me to a Linux Journal article that covers one of the programmers listed on the first page (and the first page has links to the article as well), though the page only covered one package and MSN came in a very distant 3rd, taking me to a Wikipedia article which only has a single sentence mentioning Linux and it didn't have a lot to do with programming, although the Wikipedia page does have links to some of the information I'm looking for at the bottom. There is a reason Google is so popular, and it's more than its brand.
If I had to rate the links on a scale of 1 to 10 based on relevance, Google would get 10, Yahoo would get 5 and MSN would get 2.
At least on my KDE desktop whenever I need to run a tool that requires root privileges it pops up a dialog asking for my password without even having to access the command line. Granted, not everything is in there but a fair amount is and more commands can easily be added. I would guess Gnome has something similar. I only log in as root if I need to muck about with a bunch of things, otherwise it isn't needed.
In KDE, all I have to do to add an application with root privileges is mark the application as "Run as a different user" and a dialog will pop up asking for that user's password before launching that application under sudo. The default username, if none is filled in, is root.
A tickless solution will use a little less CPU. Now the amount of power used will not be much more with a regular tick, but it makes a bigger difference when running in a VM (VMWARE, Xen, etc.) since there is a lot more overhead to process all the timer interrupts in all of the OSes that are running. Perhaps more importantly, you can get much more accurate timers without having to increase the tick rate. If I need to sleep for 200us I don't need the timer to run at 5000 ticks/second.
It's interesting then that I went to a doctor's appointment on Monday and the doctor quickly typed in the medication and clicked on the pharmacy I wanted to go to and everything was done with no paper. The facility is out patient only in my city in northern California. It's been like this for the last two years. Everything is electronic, with a computer in every examination room. It also ties in to their web site so I can access the information and get test results through the web or schedule appointments through the web. And this is not Kaiser *shudder*.
My family had Kaiser for a while and all I can say is NEVER AGAIN.
As I said, it is running 2.4.20. The rollover problem was fixed in 2.4.21 so 2.6 should not have this issue.
sleep(5) currently sleeps for 5 seconds, however, calls like nanosleep should have much greater accuracy with a tickless timer.
As far as I know, Linux never had a 49.7 day problem, but it did have a problem at 497 days. I have a machine at home running the 2.4.20 kernel and every 497 days my uptime restarts, but it hasn't crashed. It's gone through 2 rollovers so far and has been up for over 3.72 years. It will hit its next rollover around September. I really need to build a new server... I just don't know if it will be as reliable as this one has been.
It means that they were able to successfully remove the blood sucking parasites from the kernel.
Most kernels use a periodic system timer tick to do various housekeeping chores, like rescheduling tasks, sending packets, flushing files from the cache, etc. Usually this occurs at some periodic rate, i.e. every 1-10ms for Linux and every 10-15ms for Windows (according to this article.
This is a bit wasteful of CPU resources, since the kernel might not need to do anything for quite a while, or it might want a high resolution timer with higher accuracy than normal system timer. For example, when the system is idle, the CPU still must wake up and process a timer interrupt for every timer tick, and if it's set to 1ms there are 1000 interrupts per second.
A tickless kernel instead only schedules the next tick for when it is needed, so if the system is idle and nothing needs to happen for 50ms, then the next tick will be scheduled 50ms later. On the other hand, if a timer needs to go off in 750 microseconds, the kernel can schedule the next interrupt to go off then, giving much higher accuracy.