Interesting thought - it's quite possible, I suppose. I seem to recall hearing/reading about the impact of the 1918 flu in North Dakota on the family that lived in the house we were staying in (small town, so it was easy to find the records). The mid-20s couple died, but the grandmother and child survived. I seem to recall something about it being respiratory related: the lungs filled up with fluid resulting in the person drowning.
If that was the primary cause of death in 1918, it seems like it'd be pretty "easy" to deal with the flu symptoms today: just siphon fluid from people's lungs until they defeat the flu. On the other hand, if people live longer with the flu, and the flu runs its course, an additional, more virulent strain might develop.
Wouldn't it be supremely ironic if this were to become a pandemic, and the only people who survived in the 'healthy adult' age group (say, 16-40 or so), or those with a higher survival rate, were smokers? I wonder if any correlation could be drawn between the 1918 pandemic casualties and smoking - I doubt such information is available due to how drastically that flu impacted societal advancement.
Swine, avian, and human transgenic flu? Hmm. Kinda like the flu epidemic of 1918 which killed millions, isn't it?
I wonder if this has anything to do with the same strain of flu which was recently (2003 IIRC) re-engineered, or recovered, by a scientist from a sample (or something like that) of the 1918 pandemic.
Might I ask what your 'config' is (I assume you mean the hardware you're running on)? My primary machine is a P3-M 1.2GHz w/ 512M, and it is painfully slow at times.
The NSLU2 isn't exactly a fair assessment, particularly with bind. The NSLU2 is, at best, a 266MHz Xscale, which Linksys shipped underclocked to 133Mhz. Also, bind isn't exactly a light system - on my 700Mhz Celeron system, serving a small 6-host, 3-user max LAN makes bind be the highest CPU-utilizing process (often). That system also runs apache, mysql, and a small drupal install. Statistics on CPU utilization still shows bind utilizing a lot of CPU utilization.
The irony is that Linux has helped MS in more than one way: it's provided a plausible scrapegoat for problems (damn Linux hackers fucking up the internet!), provided an example of "competition", and provided an example of "bundling" that, in the future, MS will be able to use to say "see, everyone does it now!" (referring to all distros + MacOS).
Somehow, I think you misunderstood what this article is about.
It's not about SSD. It's about a "cloud" cluster, performing the same amount of work as (say) a dual quad core server due to its ability to distribute load over many more cores.
Which somewhat negates the argument of using SSDs to free main memory for other stuff.
You misunderstand how that's supposed to work. You don't "free main memory" to SSD. The idea is to use SSD as a pre-buffer for RAM, so it's quicker to access than reading from disk.
You buffer from a 500Tb SAN to a 100Gb SSD, to 32Gb of RAM, to 4Mb of L3, to 2Mb of L2, to 512Mb of L1 - or whatever. You don't buffer -to- a slower device, but for a faster one, so the data will be available for the pipeline when it's needed. You want to use as much of the faster memory as possible, to increase system speed.
Using SSD to reduce RAM usage, by putting swap on SSD, is really, really dumb.
That may (and really is) true. But how well does your machine work with concurrency? Or, for that matter, how fast is the processor?
8Gb of RAM is nice and all, especially with modern software and emulated environments. But how many
For a web-facing system - or anything serving multiple requests per second from different locations, with multiple threads all needing a quick response - having 21 500MHz cores would be much better than having 4 2.6GHz cores. That is, provided you could handle distributing the requests in an efficient manner. And the RAM limitation isn't really much of a limitation, when you consider that any one thread is not likely to use nearly 256Mb, for a web query, stored procedure, etc..
At any rate, this is a proof of concept (and really, not such a good one when you consider what's possible). The benefit is the number of cores in the system and how well you could serve up data, not so much the total amount of RAM.A better implementation could, very likely, be done for roughly the same cost (or less) utilizing similarly clocked multicore ARM processors. Take twenty 2 cores per board, 512Mb+, 500Mhz systems, cluster them... it starts getting impressive in the workload (and reduced I/O wait).
The WINE libraries are moving into their own right as a development platform, it would seem. Take, for instance, Picasa - it uses WINE as well.
I don't know much about the whole affair, but considering that some applications will run better under Linux + WINE than in Windows, and that this case is also likely true in Windows, it's hardly all that surprising. The code is likely better, and it's easier than (say) using Mono/.NET, and better than Java, for Windows/Linux development.
The worst environment I had to work IT in (granted, not programming, but a lot of similar processes and scripting) was in an old radiology room. It was on the outside of the building, with an emergency exit door that was not properly sealed. This was welcome during the summer months (it counteracted the 50F-ish AC - I tend to prefer a warmer room), but did nothing during the winter, with the -20F winds of the region blowing right through the crack.
Furthermore, the facility was undergoing extensive construction, and I was right at the heart of it. They were demolishing part of the old building (a large cement structure) at the time so they could put on a new wing. This meant there were jackhammers pounding the ground a good 20 feet from where I sat, or earth movers going back and forth. If I couldn't hear and feel the earth movers, my skin and hair was vibrating with the impact of the hammer.
That wasn't the worst of it, though. This organization was in a small town and culturally inbred like a chihuahua. I could count the men who worked there on one hand (out of maybe 150 employees total), all of which were doctors aside from myself and one other individual. Because we were not doctors, and we were IT, we got the (very) short end of the stick in terms of treatment from the largely-female staff. (Think: what happens in a family with multiple women, once a month?)
Finally, my boss was a hormonally imbalanced middle-aged woman who had been living with a boyfriend for the last decade who would neither marry her or stop sleeping around. She would come to work hung over almost every single day, and was cross and irritable until after noon. Furthermore, she got it in her mind shortly after I arrived that I was to be Eliminated (or so it seems): she would say one thing in a meeting, then countermand that instruction shortly thereafter in an email. It didn't matter which of the two things I did, it was still the wrong thing to do. And there was a slew of unspoken, irrational expectations which I also fell short on.
So glad I'm not there. Worse than being unemployed, certainly.
I had a web design course in college a scant 2 years ago where the instructor thought "web design" was the sum total of creating a mock-up in Photoshop, chopping it up, and putting it in borderless, marginless tables with links.
"Web design" is a meaningless term which is almost offensive. Not saying you're as clueless as all that, but seriously...
Consider the possibility that as a north easterner, you may be giving or receiving inappropriate social cues when you are in the mid west or south.
Well yes, that's likely. People communicate much more directly in the NE, from my experience, and direct communication seems to often cause offense in the Midwest, even if it's something relatively trivial.
Well, compared to the Midwest, the Northeast dialect is very "clipped". It's faster; words will sometimes run together. The approach to communication is also much more direct: even men will make more direct eye contact, talking about issues (instead of, say, the weather) is more common, and the people are generally more relational.
New Yorkers, in my opinion, tend to be some of the most gracious and sympathetic city-dwellers I know of. Of course, traditions and dispositions tend to vary tremendously from borough to borough. I've been living in the south for the past few years, and have found "Southern Hospitality" to be largely a myth, apart from the initial friendly facade that people tend to put on -- at the very least, the northeast doesn't deserve the rap it gets from the rest of the country.
I agree, agree, agree!
It's not just the South, though; it's also the Midwest. It seems that the South and the Midwest have a very ill-deserved reputation as being hospitable places. They aren't.
I grew up in the Northeast (NY, PA) and truly, the level of "friendliness" compared to central VA, Iowa, Dakotas, and so on... it's off the charts.
Like you said, the initial friendliness is there, but just don't stay there if you're not originally from there. You will be an Outsider (even in a more urban area), because you did not grow up there, and you've got an ever-so-slightly-different cultural and social background. You will not fit in, and instead of being open and accepting, you are shunned and looked down on - behind your back.
In the NE, people will (more often than not) let you know if they have a problem with you or your behavior. Rude? Maybe. But it beats the hell out of said person sharing their negative opinion about you with their neighbors, friends, etc. and it finally getting back to you months later. (Try this one on: finding out from a coworker, in a town of 200k who lives on the opposite side of the city from you, that your next-door neighbor is pissed at you.)
The one exception I've found is that night people in the Midwest are more friendly than pretty much everyone. That is, people who are bored with their jobs, at night: gas station attendants and the like. They'll sit for a chat, if they have the time, and are very disarmed. Though, I suspect this largely has to do with crime rates.
If you're not in a bigger town, good luck
It's kind of ironic that I will, on occasion, run into someone and chat with them for hours about anything and everything, having a grand old time. It's only at the end of the conversation that I inquire about where they're from. Almost invariably, they were in the military (moved around a lot), and/or grew up in NY, MA, PA, or another of the larger NE states. (And no, the accent isn't usually a tell: it makes a lot of sense to lose a NE accent out here, quickly, as it's yet another thing that makes you stand out in a bad way.)
In small towns, it's even more pronounced - to the point of open hostility. For instance, if you're driving through a small town and stop for gas, you will sometimes get an overtly hostile attitude. Not always the case, but more often than not, it's very much a "wtf are you doing here, interfering with me and my boys sitting around doing nothing?"
The one place I've visited where "friendly Midwesterners" might apply as I've noticed it applying in NY is is Texas (San Antonio). It's just too bad NY politicians have made it so difficult to make a living in NY of late.
Not only that, but even though they're using the bulk mail rate, all that junk mail stuffing your mail box each day is helping subsidize the cost of first class postage.
You've got that backwards. First-class postage subsidizes bulk mailing; that's why, in part, that bulk mail costs a fraction of what 1st class mail costs.
Think about how much bulk mail you get, vs. what you used to get. If bulk mail subsidized 1st class mail, stamps would be cheaper than they were in 1990.
A while back someone gave me a bunch of old ATV/motorcycle) type batteries (think: heavy sealed battery, two exposed terminals). I'd say they weigh about 10-15lb each, and their longer side was just about the size of the return envelope many places send out with their junk mail. Had to go to the post office because the mailman wouldn't take 'em, but it was worth it...
I've found a good "idiot filter" to keep the serial forwarders at bay is to have an email address composed of a non-colloquial latin phrase (though one which a literate person would know).
However, I do have one anomaly resulting from this. An intelligent, yet elderly professor-friend of mine keeps sending me forwards. Granted, they are usually funny, as he's no slouch - but it's still irritating.
Re: the firefox issue... Consider changing your disk io scheduler from cfq to anticipatory (as). You can do this as a boot-time option, or per-drive.
For instance:
cat/sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
Will show you which scheduler you're using. It'll probably return 'cfq'. In my experience, cfq is a POS for desktop use, as any disk i/o blocks horribly with the default disk cache settings on most distros.
To temporarily change (will reset on reboot or once you echo a different scheduler name to said sysfs file),
echo as -n >/sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
Or add (to make it permanent) the following to the kernel parameters in menu.lst:
elevator=as
The noop and deadline elevators/schedulers are also options, but they don't really help for desktop loads. Though, YMMV.
(Anticipatory scheduler was the 'default' before 2.6.18 or so, and IMO is much better for desktop Linux. Night/day performance difference.)
Why should you care if your neighbor is using Windows, or something else?
There are thousands of good reasons, literally, but here are the ones which might stick in your maw more readily:
* Conficker * Sasser * Bugbear * Blaster * Melissa * Love Bug * Code Red * (insert next bug here)
It's not so much a matter of why they should use Linux (or OS X) but why they shouldn't be using Windows. It's bad for them, their data, their friends and family, and their data. And it makes many a professional IT person suffer through cleaning up their messes. (How do you think water sanitation workers would feel if you shoved caustic substances down -your- toilet?)
Yes, I realize that as Windows/IE loses market share, other software will start being targeted. But as that happens, software variety will increase. A larger software ecosystem not only improves the quality of various competing projects but it results in a much higher cost of doing business/lower return for spam, spyware, and worm writers.
The likes of the big box stores - Best Buy in particular - are not selling the Eee with Linux for a couple of major reasons:
1) They can't sell support for it because a) they don't have anyone who can offer support for Linux b) there's precious little to support which can be charged... and...
2) They can't sell software for them, because there isn't any.
3) Being a lower-priced item, I'd guess there's a lower profit margin.
So, basically, there's business case impetus to "stick with Windows". I mean, seriously: for the kind of person who shops at Best Buy, which would sell better: that it has XP, so it's familiar, or it has Linux, which is free and secure?
The former, in the ones I've got (ie, the whole thing slides in and out of an assembly). I've got flash drives which are physically too small for the whole 'cable' approach. Also, the cable approach is likely more expensive to boot.
I've got one of these (red adata mini-usb): it's roughly the size of an SD card, and is missing the traditional USB connector - but it still works. Slides in and out with minimal effort (but not so little that it falls out). It's been on my keychain now for about 1.5 years. Only shortcoming is that it doesn't 'fit' snugly in some USB ports, but it's not such an issue that it's unreadable/unusable.
CFLs appear to also have a "cycle" limit. We've tried a variety of CFLs in the bathroom vanity fixture, and they just don't last very long. A couple months, maybe - much worse than the incandescent bulbs in the same role. This is, pathetically, remedied by simply leaving the bathroom light on during the evenings (but then, I'm not certain we're actually saving any electricity by using CFLs... and it makes shower sex a bit ghastly).
Also, there's the whole cold-weather thing. Traditional fluorescent tubes will start up in the garage for me, provided it's over 0F or so. Not so for CFLs; I went back to incandescent.
Personally, I'm quite satisfied w/ a warm color CFL in the table lamp next to our couch. It does its job of providing low lighting in the room quite well. It's a bit dim for reading and the color makes the pages difficult to read, but otherwise, it's fine.
appear to be intended - (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
Short of genocide, that's what war is. It's to get the opposition - largely composed by the civilian population of an area - to surrender, or provoke a surrender. To break the war machine.
This is the danger we put ourselves in by catering to the whims of self-important lawyers. They pass laws and regulations which make even commonsense things "wrong" and "illegal".
Trying to put warfare within the context of war is a loser's game. IE, if you do so, you will lose. Sorting out the right and wrong is for the victor to do, not something which should be done strategically.
There is no silver bullet. Nobody realistic is expecting cutting-edge, consumer hardware to run field-specific software, and you shouldn't either.
Now, if ARM takes over the market, certainly there'd be such commercial "field specific" software available. Vendors will adapt, though it'd likely take a couple years.
In the mean time, people like you (anyone who needs a specific application which only runs on x86) will be 'stuck' on the more expensive, higher-power-consumption-and-heat x86 (Microsoft) systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting thought - it's quite possible, I suppose. I seem to recall hearing/reading about the impact of the 1918 flu in North Dakota on the family that lived in the house we were staying in (small town, so it was easy to find the records). The mid-20s couple died, but the grandmother and child survived. I seem to recall something about it being respiratory related: the lungs filled up with fluid resulting in the person drowning.
If that was the primary cause of death in 1918, it seems like it'd be pretty "easy" to deal with the flu symptoms today: just siphon fluid from people's lungs until they defeat the flu. On the other hand, if people live longer with the flu, and the flu runs its course, an additional, more virulent strain might develop.
Wouldn't it be supremely ironic if this were to become a pandemic, and the only people who survived in the 'healthy adult' age group (say, 16-40 or so), or those with a higher survival rate, were smokers? I wonder if any correlation could be drawn between the 1918 pandemic casualties and smoking - I doubt such information is available due to how drastically that flu impacted societal advancement.
Swine, avian, and human transgenic flu? Hmm. Kinda like the flu epidemic of 1918 which killed millions, isn't it?
I wonder if this has anything to do with the same strain of flu which was recently (2003 IIRC) re-engineered, or recovered, by a scientist from a sample (or something like that) of the 1918 pandemic.
Might I ask what your 'config' is (I assume you mean the hardware you're running on)? My primary machine is a P3-M 1.2GHz w/ 512M, and it is painfully slow at times.
... slide .... * penguin jumps down small CGI ice ramp *
The NSLU2 isn't exactly a fair assessment, particularly with bind. The NSLU2 is, at best, a 266MHz Xscale, which Linksys shipped underclocked to 133Mhz. Also, bind isn't exactly a light system - on my 700Mhz Celeron system, serving a small 6-host, 3-user max LAN makes bind be the highest CPU-utilizing process (often). That system also runs apache, mysql, and a small drupal install. Statistics on CPU utilization still shows bind utilizing a lot of CPU utilization.
The irony is that Linux has helped MS in more than one way: it's provided a plausible scrapegoat for problems (damn Linux hackers fucking up the internet!), provided an example of "competition", and provided an example of "bundling" that, in the future, MS will be able to use to say "see, everyone does it now!" (referring to all distros + MacOS).
Somehow, I think you misunderstood what this article is about.
It's not about SSD. It's about a "cloud" cluster, performing the same amount of work as (say) a dual quad core server due to its ability to distribute load over many more cores.
Which somewhat negates the argument of using SSDs to free main memory for other stuff.
You misunderstand how that's supposed to work. You don't "free main memory" to SSD. The idea is to use SSD as a pre-buffer for RAM, so it's quicker to access than reading from disk.
You buffer from a 500Tb SAN to a 100Gb SSD, to 32Gb of RAM, to 4Mb of L3, to 2Mb of L2, to 512Mb of L1 - or whatever. You don't buffer -to- a slower device, but for a faster one, so the data will be available for the pipeline when it's needed. You want to use as much of the faster memory as possible, to increase system speed.
Using SSD to reduce RAM usage, by putting swap on SSD, is really, really dumb.
That may (and really is) true. But how well does your machine work with concurrency? Or, for that matter, how fast is the processor?
8Gb of RAM is nice and all, especially with modern software and emulated environments. But how many
For a web-facing system - or anything serving multiple requests per second from different locations, with multiple threads all needing a quick response - having 21 500MHz cores would be much better than having 4 2.6GHz cores. That is, provided you could handle distributing the requests in an efficient manner. And the RAM limitation isn't really much of a limitation, when you consider that any one thread is not likely to use nearly 256Mb, for a web query, stored procedure, etc..
At any rate, this is a proof of concept (and really, not such a good one when you consider what's possible). The benefit is the number of cores in the system and how well you could serve up data, not so much the total amount of RAM.A better implementation could, very likely, be done for roughly the same cost (or less) utilizing similarly clocked multicore ARM processors. Take twenty 2 cores per board, 512Mb+, 500Mhz systems, cluster them... it starts getting impressive in the workload (and reduced I/O wait).
In theory, at least.
The WINE libraries are moving into their own right as a development platform, it would seem. Take, for instance, Picasa - it uses WINE as well.
I don't know much about the whole affair, but considering that some applications will run better under Linux + WINE than in Windows, and that this case is also likely true in Windows, it's hardly all that surprising. The code is likely better, and it's easier than (say) using Mono/.NET, and better than Java, for Windows/Linux development.
The worst environment I had to work IT in (granted, not programming, but a lot of similar processes and scripting) was in an old radiology room. It was on the outside of the building, with an emergency exit door that was not properly sealed. This was welcome during the summer months (it counteracted the 50F-ish AC - I tend to prefer a warmer room), but did nothing during the winter, with the -20F winds of the region blowing right through the crack.
Furthermore, the facility was undergoing extensive construction, and I was right at the heart of it. They were demolishing part of the old building (a large cement structure) at the time so they could put on a new wing. This meant there were jackhammers pounding the ground a good 20 feet from where I sat, or earth movers going back and forth. If I couldn't hear and feel the earth movers, my skin and hair was vibrating with the impact of the hammer.
That wasn't the worst of it, though. This organization was in a small town and culturally inbred like a chihuahua. I could count the men who worked there on one hand (out of maybe 150 employees total), all of which were doctors aside from myself and one other individual. Because we were not doctors, and we were IT, we got the (very) short end of the stick in terms of treatment from the largely-female staff. (Think: what happens in a family with multiple women, once a month?)
Finally, my boss was a hormonally imbalanced middle-aged woman who had been living with a boyfriend for the last decade who would neither marry her or stop sleeping around. She would come to work hung over almost every single day, and was cross and irritable until after noon. Furthermore, she got it in her mind shortly after I arrived that I was to be Eliminated (or so it seems): she would say one thing in a meeting, then countermand that instruction shortly thereafter in an email. It didn't matter which of the two things I did, it was still the wrong thing to do. And there was a slew of unspoken, irrational expectations which I also fell short on.
So glad I'm not there. Worse than being unemployed, certainly.
Used to teach web design, eh?
I had a web design course in college a scant 2 years ago where the instructor thought "web design" was the sum total of creating a mock-up in Photoshop, chopping it up, and putting it in borderless, marginless tables with links.
"Web design" is a meaningless term which is almost offensive. Not saying you're as clueless as all that, but seriously...
Consider the possibility that as a north easterner, you may be giving or receiving inappropriate social cues when you are in the mid west or south.
Well yes, that's likely. People communicate much more directly in the NE, from my experience, and direct communication seems to often cause offense in the Midwest, even if it's something relatively trivial.
Well, compared to the Midwest, the Northeast dialect is very "clipped". It's faster; words will sometimes run together. The approach to communication is also much more direct: even men will make more direct eye contact, talking about issues (instead of, say, the weather) is more common, and the people are generally more relational.
New Yorkers, in my opinion, tend to be some of the most gracious and sympathetic city-dwellers I know of. Of course, traditions and dispositions tend to vary tremendously from borough to borough. I've been living in the south for the past few years, and have found "Southern Hospitality" to be largely a myth, apart from the initial friendly facade that people tend to put on -- at the very least, the northeast doesn't deserve the rap it gets from the rest of the country.
I agree, agree, agree!
It's not just the South, though; it's also the Midwest. It seems that the South and the Midwest have a very ill-deserved reputation as being hospitable places. They aren't.
I grew up in the Northeast (NY, PA) and truly, the level of "friendliness" compared to central VA, Iowa, Dakotas, and so on... it's off the charts.
Like you said, the initial friendliness is there, but just don't stay there if you're not originally from there. You will be an Outsider (even in a more urban area), because you did not grow up there, and you've got an ever-so-slightly-different cultural and social background. You will not fit in, and instead of being open and accepting, you are shunned and looked down on - behind your back.
In the NE, people will (more often than not) let you know if they have a problem with you or your behavior. Rude? Maybe. But it beats the hell out of said person sharing their negative opinion about you with their neighbors, friends, etc. and it finally getting back to you months later. (Try this one on: finding out from a coworker, in a town of 200k who lives on the opposite side of the city from you, that your next-door neighbor is pissed at you.)
The one exception I've found is that night people in the Midwest are more friendly than pretty much everyone. That is, people who are bored with their jobs, at night: gas station attendants and the like. They'll sit for a chat, if they have the time, and are very disarmed. Though, I suspect this largely has to do with crime rates.
If you're not in a bigger town, good luck
It's kind of ironic that I will, on occasion, run into someone and chat with them for hours about anything and everything, having a grand old time. It's only at the end of the conversation that I inquire about where they're from. Almost invariably, they were in the military (moved around a lot), and/or grew up in NY, MA, PA, or another of the larger NE states. (And no, the accent isn't usually a tell: it makes a lot of sense to lose a NE accent out here, quickly, as it's yet another thing that makes you stand out in a bad way.)
In small towns, it's even more pronounced - to the point of open hostility. For instance, if you're driving through a small town and stop for gas, you will sometimes get an overtly hostile attitude. Not always the case, but more often than not, it's very much a "wtf are you doing here, interfering with me and my boys sitting around doing nothing?"
The one place I've visited where "friendly Midwesterners" might apply as I've noticed it applying in NY is is Texas (San Antonio). It's just too bad NY politicians have made it so difficult to make a living in NY of late.
Not only that, but even though they're using the bulk mail rate, all that junk mail stuffing your mail box each day is helping subsidize the cost of first class postage.
You've got that backwards. First-class postage subsidizes bulk mailing; that's why, in part, that bulk mail costs a fraction of what 1st class mail costs.
Think about how much bulk mail you get, vs. what you used to get. If bulk mail subsidized 1st class mail, stamps would be cheaper than they were in 1990.
A while back someone gave me a bunch of old ATV/motorcycle) type batteries (think: heavy sealed battery, two exposed terminals). I'd say they weigh about 10-15lb each, and their longer side was just about the size of the return envelope many places send out with their junk mail. Had to go to the post office because the mailman wouldn't take 'em, but it was worth it...
I've found a good "idiot filter" to keep the serial forwarders at bay is to have an email address composed of a non-colloquial latin phrase (though one which a literate person would know).
However, I do have one anomaly resulting from this. An intelligent, yet elderly professor-friend of mine keeps sending me forwards. Granted, they are usually funny, as he's no slouch - but it's still irritating.
Re: the firefox issue... Consider changing your disk io scheduler from cfq to anticipatory (as). You can do this as a boot-time option, or per-drive.
For instance:
cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
Will show you which scheduler you're using. It'll probably return 'cfq'. In my experience, cfq is a POS for desktop use, as any disk i/o blocks horribly with the default disk cache settings on most distros.
To temporarily change (will reset on reboot or once you echo a different scheduler name to said sysfs file),
echo as -n > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
Or add (to make it permanent) the following to the kernel parameters in menu.lst:
elevator=as
The noop and deadline elevators/schedulers are also options, but they don't really help for desktop loads. Though, YMMV.
(Anticipatory scheduler was the 'default' before 2.6.18 or so, and IMO is much better for desktop Linux. Night/day performance difference.)
Why should you care if your neighbor is using Windows, or something else?
There are thousands of good reasons, literally, but here are the ones which might stick in your maw more readily:
* Conficker
* Sasser
* Bugbear
* Blaster
* Melissa
* Love Bug
* Code Red
* (insert next bug here)
It's not so much a matter of why they should use Linux (or OS X) but why they shouldn't be using Windows. It's bad for them, their data, their friends and family, and their data. And it makes many a professional IT person suffer through cleaning up their messes. (How do you think water sanitation workers would feel if you shoved caustic substances down -your- toilet?)
Yes, I realize that as Windows/IE loses market share, other software will start being targeted. But as that happens, software variety will increase. A larger software ecosystem not only improves the quality of various competing projects but it results in a much higher cost of doing business/lower return for spam, spyware, and worm writers.
The likes of the big box stores - Best Buy in particular - are not selling the Eee with Linux for a couple of major reasons:
1) They can't sell support for it because ... and ...
a) they don't have anyone who can offer support for Linux
b) there's precious little to support which can be charged
2) They can't sell software for them, because there isn't any.
3) Being a lower-priced item, I'd guess there's a lower profit margin.
So, basically, there's business case impetus to "stick with Windows". I mean, seriously: for the kind of person who shops at Best Buy, which would sell better: that it has XP, so it's familiar, or it has Linux, which is free and secure?
The former, in the ones I've got (ie, the whole thing slides in and out of an assembly). I've got flash drives which are physically too small for the whole 'cable' approach. Also, the cable approach is likely more expensive to boot.
I've got one of these (red adata mini-usb): it's roughly the size of an SD card, and is missing the traditional USB connector - but it still works. Slides in and out with minimal effort (but not so little that it falls out). It's been on my keychain now for about 1.5 years. Only shortcoming is that it doesn't 'fit' snugly in some USB ports, but it's not such an issue that it's unreadable/unusable.
CFLs appear to also have a "cycle" limit. We've tried a variety of CFLs in the bathroom vanity fixture, and they just don't last very long. A couple months, maybe - much worse than the incandescent bulbs in the same role. This is, pathetically, remedied by simply leaving the bathroom light on during the evenings (but then, I'm not certain we're actually saving any electricity by using CFLs... and it makes shower sex a bit ghastly).
Also, there's the whole cold-weather thing. Traditional fluorescent tubes will start up in the garage for me, provided it's over 0F or so. Not so for CFLs; I went back to incandescent.
Personally, I'm quite satisfied w/ a warm color CFL in the table lamp next to our couch. It does its job of providing low lighting in the room quite well. It's a bit dim for reading and the color makes the pages difficult to read, but otherwise, it's fine.
Congratulations, you just defined war:
appear to be intended - (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
Short of genocide, that's what war is. It's to get the opposition - largely composed by the civilian population of an area - to surrender, or provoke a surrender. To break the war machine.
This is the danger we put ourselves in by catering to the whims of self-important lawyers. They pass laws and regulations which make even commonsense things "wrong" and "illegal".
Trying to put warfare within the context of war is a loser's game. IE, if you do so, you will lose. Sorting out the right and wrong is for the victor to do, not something which should be done strategically.
There is no silver bullet. Nobody realistic is expecting cutting-edge, consumer hardware to run field-specific software, and you shouldn't either.
Now, if ARM takes over the market, certainly there'd be such commercial "field specific" software available. Vendors will adapt, though it'd likely take a couple years.
In the mean time, people like you (anyone who needs a specific application which only runs on x86) will be 'stuck' on the more expensive, higher-power-consumption-and-heat x86 (Microsoft) systems.