Simplicity is not what makes a filesystem fast. The main way to improve performance is to reduce the number and average distance of seeks, by avoiding fragmentation and storing file metadata near file contents. FAT and all its descendants are terrible at both.
I just tried installing FC2 this afternoon, and that was my plan: have NTLDR chain to GRUB or LILO in the boot sector of the Linux partition. But after new geometry was written to the partition table, Windows wouldn't even boot. Once I fixed that, I discovered that the partition Fedora made during install wasn't even on a cylinder boundary anymore, and I didn't have any lock getting BootPart to work with it.
... taped out, an expression that means the design was complete. (In the olden days, when engineers completed a chip design, they sent the computer tape out to other groups.)
Err, what? I thought this bit of jargon came from the process of creating a photomask by manually applying tape to a pane of glass. Am I mistaken?
I think the recommendation of "at least twice physical memory" makes sense only with a VM system which employs a one-to-one mapping between allocated pages and disk blocks. I do not believe either Linux or Windows works this way.
First, if this is a workstation for one person, not an application server, then you are not likely to feel performance is acceptable when paging does happen, regardless of the device where swap resides. Just because your OS installer insists that you allocate swap space doesn't mean you should use it often.
Second, transfer rates have increased about ten-fold since that drive was manufactured. (Access times haven't.) While it is ideal to have swap space on its own spindle and controller, it doesn't make much sense to optimize details like that but use such a slow disk.
Just make a swap file on your system disk and forget about it. If the rest of the machine is new, it should have enough physical memory that swap is mostly irrelevant.
Can we finally discard the anachronism of "saving" your work to nonvolatile storage? Back when all media was both slow and removable, it made sense to burden the user with this responsibility. But now, it's well past time for orthogonal persistance.
DDT is relatively harmless to humans, I'm quite comfortable eating it. In fact, DDT has saved many millions of lives by preventing the spread of malaria. The ban was a mistake.
Well, in the specific instance of editing an ID3 tag, it could be smart enough to notice that only one block of the file changed, and share the remaining blocks with the old version. And that's something you can only do efficiently with kernel help; if you want userspace libraries doing that kind of thing, you end up reimplementing most of the filesystem innards yourself.
I would like to think that the average dedication of someone ripping and encoding music is inversely proportional to its popularity, so odds are reasonably good that there exists at least one correctly labeled copy of any musical recording. It's just a question of how to route around the legal impediments to central indexing.
Once you get the mechanics of combat down, and learn the maps, Quake is mostly about anticipating what your opponent will do. As is almost any adversarial multiplayer game, really. Most of the important decisions in a Quake 1v1 are made when you can't see your opponent.
I don't think playing Quake did anything positive for my programming skills, although all the time spent writing mods and admin tools may have:)
So what you just told us is that Windows refused to boot even once on your misconfigured hardware, whereas when running Linux, the same problem took a long time to show up?
A filesystem is nothing like an relational database. I wish people would stop making this comparison, because it's completely misleading and unhelpful. A filesystem is not a set of user-defined tables, each of which contains an unordered set of rows. Queries and joins are not possible. Constraints and null values are not supported. Files within a directory have an inherent order. Files are variable-length and byte-addressable. Duplicate "rows" are not permitted. The principle relationship modeled is hierarchy... ever heard of a hierarchical database?
It depends entirely on the sort of updates you need to make. Transactions are a much heavier solution to concurrency than locking or simply storing things in a way which facilitates parallel updates (Maildir instead of mbox, for example). The value of putting all the necessary support in the operating system remains unproven. The main "transactions" required in a filesystem are adequately supported by open with O_EXCL, write with O_APPEND, rename, and mkdir. (Or don't you remember the days when mkdir was a setuid program?)
That book is actually much better than the purple and white book they sometimes use for 4210... I think of it as a reference, though. Perhaps you should take a look at the books the math department uses for Logic and Proof, or the one for Combinatorics and Graph Theory? An introductory text on number theory should also have good examples of proof by induction.
Note that the story submitter was probably not looking for a career where he is treated like an interchangeable cog. Frequently, when I give my boss "shit", it ends up saving a significant amount of labor. In a creative field, the person with a novel opinion and courage to voice it is not necessarily a liability.
Java really isn't that slow. Also, for long-lived server processes, garbage collection is a big win.
I would like to see a native compiler offer the same sort of runtime guarantees that Java achieves with a VM, but that is a difficult task. And I agree about moving beyond imperative languages; but I think the problem is really more one of education than tools.
OK, I'll grant you that some modern physics seems very non-intuitive. But apparently, so was the true nature of gravity, until Galileo set us straight.
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Simplicity is not what makes a filesystem fast. The main way to improve performance is to reduce the number and average distance of seeks, by avoiding fragmentation and storing file metadata near file contents. FAT and all its descendants are terrible at both.
I just tried installing FC2 this afternoon, and that was my plan: have NTLDR chain to GRUB or LILO in the boot sector of the Linux partition. But after new geometry was written to the partition table, Windows wouldn't even boot. Once I fixed that, I discovered that the partition Fedora made during install wasn't even on a cylinder boundary anymore, and I didn't have any lock getting BootPart to work with it.
So I gave up and installed Debian.
... taped out, an expression that means the design was complete. (In the olden days, when engineers completed a chip design, they sent the computer tape out to other groups.)
Err, what? I thought this bit of jargon came from the process of creating a photomask by manually applying tape to a pane of glass. Am I mistaken?
I think the recommendation of "at least twice physical memory" makes sense only with a VM system which employs a one-to-one mapping between allocated pages and disk blocks. I do not believe either Linux or Windows works this way.
There's a big bonus to setting up like this, besides performance. There's less to backup from C: drive!
This is an attempt at humor, right?
First, if this is a workstation for one person, not an application server, then you are not likely to feel performance is acceptable when paging does happen, regardless of the device where swap resides. Just because your OS installer insists that you allocate swap space doesn't mean you should use it often.
Second, transfer rates have increased about ten-fold since that drive was manufactured. (Access times haven't.) While it is ideal to have swap space on its own spindle and controller, it doesn't make much sense to optimize details like that but use such a slow disk.
Just make a swap file on your system disk and forget about it. If the rest of the machine is new, it should have enough physical memory that swap is mostly irrelevant.
Can we finally discard the anachronism of "saving" your work to nonvolatile storage? Back when all media was both slow and removable, it made sense to burden the user with this responsibility. But now, it's well past time for orthogonal persistance.
"Hack" the RCS files? mv(1) hardly qualifies as hacking.
So what you are saying is that playing video games can prevent prostate cancer?
DDT is relatively harmless to humans, I'm quite comfortable eating it. In fact, DDT has saved many millions of lives by preventing the spread of malaria. The ban was a mistake.
Well, in the specific instance of editing an ID3 tag, it could be smart enough to notice that only one block of the file changed, and share the remaining blocks with the old version. And that's something you can only do efficiently with kernel help; if you want userspace libraries doing that kind of thing, you end up reimplementing most of the filesystem innards yourself.
I would like to think that the average dedication of someone ripping and encoding music is inversely proportional to its popularity, so odds are reasonably good that there exists at least one correctly labeled copy of any musical recording. It's just a question of how to route around the legal impediments to central indexing.
You might find EncSpot helpful for sorting on one axis--quality of encoding method.
Once you get the mechanics of combat down, and learn the maps, Quake is mostly about anticipating what your opponent will do. As is almost any adversarial multiplayer game, really. Most of the important decisions in a Quake 1v1 are made when you can't see your opponent.
:)
I don't think playing Quake did anything positive for my programming skills, although all the time spent writing mods and admin tools may have
Never seen a game marketed as "educational"?
So what you just told us is that Windows refused to boot even once on your misconfigured hardware, whereas when running Linux, the same problem took a long time to show up?
A filesystem is nothing like an relational database. I wish people would stop making this comparison, because it's completely misleading and unhelpful. A filesystem is not a set of user-defined tables, each of which contains an unordered set of rows. Queries and joins are not possible. Constraints and null values are not supported. Files within a directory have an inherent order. Files are variable-length and byte-addressable. Duplicate "rows" are not permitted. The principle relationship modeled is hierarchy... ever heard of a hierarchical database?
It depends entirely on the sort of updates you need to make. Transactions are a much heavier solution to concurrency than locking or simply storing things in a way which facilitates parallel updates (Maildir instead of mbox, for example). The value of putting all the necessary support in the operating system remains unproven. The main "transactions" required in a filesystem are adequately supported by open with O_EXCL, write with O_APPEND, rename, and mkdir. (Or don't you remember the days when mkdir was a setuid program?)
That book is actually much better than the purple and white book they sometimes use for 4210... I think of it as a reference, though. Perhaps you should take a look at the books the math department uses for Logic and Proof, or the one for Combinatorics and Graph Theory? An introductory text on number theory should also have good examples of proof by induction.
Note that the story submitter was probably not looking for a career where he is treated like an interchangeable cog. Frequently, when I give my boss "shit", it ends up saving a significant amount of labor. In a creative field, the person with a novel opinion and courage to voice it is not necessarily a liability.
Look at all them there polygons!
"Our interest in salicorni cultivation was mainly to reclaim salty soil."
Java really isn't that slow. Also, for long-lived server processes, garbage collection is a big win.
I would like to see a native compiler offer the same sort of runtime guarantees that Java achieves with a VM, but that is a difficult task. And I agree about moving beyond imperative languages; but I think the problem is really more one of education than tools.
OK, I'll grant you that some modern physics seems very non-intuitive. But apparently, so was the true nature of gravity, until Galileo set us straight.