Hrm. I think it might be the case that both implimentations are available, depending on which kernel version is in use. I've seen processes get killed off, the system freeze solid, and I've seen processes simply refuse to load in a situation where there's not sufficient memory.
Of course, I might be mistaken here.:P it's been a long time since I've even come close to running out of memory.
You not only fail to refute my claim that swap in linux is not needed when there's a sufficiently large amount of RAM on a system, you back it up.
Granted, there's no reason to not have swap - accept for the forementioned security issue of erasing data. Thus, there is a reason. Additionally, overrunning your RAM isn't an issue if you've got enough - the 256M you mention is a half what I consider sane, and 1/4th what I'd consider a 'large amount'. Conversely, there's really not much of a reason to -not- run swap-free.
The only valid 'excuse' to use swap that I can think of is if you run a desktop which you keep on for long periods of time without any substantial state changes, or a server with barely any memory (= 256M). In other words, a situation where you've got a fair amount of stuff in memory, with not all of it being readily used, or a situation where you don't have enough RAM to run all your applications at once without swaping. I haven't run into that situation in quite a while with 512M. I suspect that, given 2 or 3 more years, 512M will start to run into that limitation in Linux as well, and 1G will be the mininum with which such a task is feasable.
This (the talk of H1-B workers not taking American jobs) is all rhetoric nonsense without sound statistical analysis.
The fact is, Americans are feeling the employment pinch, and H1-B permanent immigrants (because they more frequently than not try and get their citizenship here) continue to arrive here in fairly high numbers. There's a fairly real discrepency there, I think.
That is, unless most of the unemployed IT folks are like the majority of the IT folks I know. The lot of them are posessing lackluster intelligence, are unwilling to learn new things outside a clickable GUI wizard, lazy (not the good kind of lazy, either), and just fairly useless all around. In that case, I'm glad these Indians are getting jobs here and becoming citizens.
the down side: you can't actually view posts you made as AC without scrolling through the morass of others' comments. There's no "comments posted as AC" section for you to view for yourself so you can see your collection of +5 Flaimbait comments...
So don't use a swap partition. If it's a concern of your's, at least. What are you, a criminal?:P
If you're using gaim, chances are high that you're also using linux. There's no rational reason to be using a swap partition on a linux desktop, what with the price of RAM these days.
This just points out how radically divorced from reality DJB is. Sure, he writes awesome secure code, but look at how irrational and hardline he was concerning security hole discovery - 44 for a class in how many months? Those are pretty incredible results, IMO.
This, in conjunction with how hardline he is concerning distribution (and other factors) of his open source software only make me question how sane he is. Genius? Great. But he's as socially inept as a 5 year old. Greatness provokes greater expectations, which in reality, are not realistic.
No, the reason it's stupid is because land on a virtual island has no demand. With no demand, it doesn't matter how much it costs - people won't pay for it.
Now, there might be demand provoked through fancy marketing. That's a possibility, but I doubt people would opt for it unless the cost associated competes with that of other MMORPGs. I hope he got more than just models, textures, and the like, because he's going to need an engine and servers to run this little investment...
The only way I could see this happening is have the cost structure built somewhat like a normal MMORPG, but a fair bit lower. Maybe even have a free "life" subscription with purchase of the game, or give it away entirely. Players don't -have- to buy anything within the game: they can simply be wanderers, peasants, and what have you - possibly "working" for those that do "own" land. Other people besides the top owner (the 'state') might be able to make money with this scheme, as well by buying a parcel of land (say, a medium sized estate for $1000) and 'renting' out rooms to virtual people, hiring them to make virtual goods, and then selling the virtual goods. Through this method, the 'state' would make money through sale of land. Maybe have a "property tax" in addition to the cost of buying the land, so that if the owner lapses on payments, the 'state' can reposess the land and then sell it again plus improvements for even more.
Let's do a little math to see how this -might- work - at least to recoup initial investment and operational costs (and let's even assume that they don't even have a fully operational game). In addition to the 26.5k they've already spent on it, let's say they have to spend another 500,000 on development and set-up costs (a fairly conservative estimation, I think, provided they don't have an entire game world). Let's also say that it takes 1,500 game dollars (we'll call 'em "creds") to live amiably within a decent appartment within this game world for a month. We'll say that this sum will transfer to $15 USD, the going monthly rate for MMORPGs.
Now, a person can do one of two things: they can pay the $15 and not 'make' money in-game, or they can buy land and assets in-game which have the potential to make them money. A player might purchase (for, say, 180,000 cred - $1800) a pub from the 'state'. They could then purchase ales, foods, and what have you from the 'state' at bulk prices and sell them to other gamers for a slightly inflated price - the equivilant of maybe $0.05 for each item to the customer.
This would be a good venture for the pub purchaser, as they could recoup their initial investment in a matter of a months (say, 1 cent profit every 10 seconds for a month = real-world $518.40, or $0.72/hr for a month).
Theoretically, it could work. In my mind, this is actually a pretty nifty idea, and would be fun to at least play (and I don't play MMORPGs online). This would particularly be the case if the 'gamers' could add completely custom items to make and sell (within set game world restraints), and there was little story/quest development by the owners. (Think: Commercialism MMORPG). By using real money, they introduce an element which provokes the feeling of actual 'investment' in the players, creating a unique real-world economy instead of what all other MMORPGs have - just credits, gold, and what have you, which have no intrisic value of their own.
Of course, it's possible they're planning something entirely different, and have a new conceptual idea which they'll inflate with marketing to the point of profitability.:P
as an ammendum, it did indeed just finish indexing. I did a search for an sxw file I'd just saved with the name "nyc-story.sxw". I searched for just nyc, and then just for story. It found the document with neither instance (and the document is on my desktop).
I just downloaded and installed this thing. 4.some megs for what appears to be an IE plugin. There doesn't seem to be the option to make the 'search' bar integrate with the taskbar at all (which was what my initial pre-install impression was).
I will say that I'd half expected for there to be a minimalist appearance. Nay, there's about 10 different buttons on the bar that gets installed in IE, and I was initially pestered with 2 desktop bar-specific nags. Additionally, the damn thing defaults to searching the web, not the desktop.
So I've been sitting here for about 10 minutes waiting for the thing to build an index. The Google Destop Search tool has about 40Mb of files on this machine, and I honestly don't think I've got much more than (if even) 1Gb of files on it. I've run a search for a couple files within the "My Documents" directory, and nothing turned up. There's no indication that the index is being built, or when it might be done, etc.
There also doesn't appear to be must customization ability for the actual search tool, either. Just build, or rebuild the index. No "exclude directory" type stuff.
The additional pop-ups look useful, though, for an IE user. It's all standard fare for a Firefox user, of course. Considering that most people that would likely use such a tool from MS are likely already using Firefox, I'd say chacnes are slim this sees much fanfare.
Can't say I'm impressed. It's got the same intrusive feel of Clippy, with the nice interface of MSN Search. Not impressed in the least.
How in the world is "5 hours of battery life" a good amount of juice for a portable?
It's a portable game device. Poeple will sit down and play it for 2, 3 hours at a time. They'll play it on the comode. They'll take it on trips (planes, car) which will last all day.
In my mind, trips is the main reason to have such a device in the first place. If I can't play the device for the entire trip (or even half of a 16-hour trip), what in the world is the point of having it?
The battery is rechargeable, not replaceable. I can't very easily pop it out and put a replacement in, as I can with a Gameboy. Never mind that a gameboy will run for weeks on dead batteries.
I'd agree with you completely, if it were just a case of someone going out and walking about to do things. However, this is the case of someone sitting or standing still for 24 hours, on cement. Your feet will get cold sooner than later, and you need to be warm. There's a reason why hunters that hunt from tree stands bundle up well, and doubly so for doing it when it's even colder than 40F.
Additionally, I'm used to a high-wind region of the country. IE, 20MPH winds are on the low end of things. Compact that with the fact that I'm not bred for this cold (more of a medeteranian complexion)
It'd be fairly trivial (a couple afternoon's worth of work for a skilled and experienced scripter) to make something which works better than the combination of the unix file tools (slocate, find, file, grep, etc.). In essence, you'd use those tools in conjunction with perl and a mysql database. You could either have a series of scripts do direct db manipulation, or you could have a daemon which transverses the db communications for the per-user script.
It could probably be done fairly easily without infringing on permissions, too - just do a sanity check to make sure the files are in $HOME. In linux, it's unlikely that anyone would sanely have much data outside of $HOME. I s'pose you could write it so that someone could configure the daemon to index the files in (say),/data or/raid5 as well fairly trivially, without infringing on the files in/home/ that don't belong to them. Then, simply have a seperate database for each 'index source', and a specific user could be allowed to search multiple sources.
As far as the files in/etc,/var, etc. - they're fairly static and all fairly standard per distro. No need to index them.
I'd undertake the project myself, but I really don't know how I'd go about categorizing data so that a person could easily find the files with specific text. Would it actually involve indexing the entire textual content of a person's $HOME/source? That's the only thing I can think of, and even then it seems like it might be a little slow/tedious. Any other ideas?
... is not cold at all. It's only 41 degrees Fahrenheit (the metric I'm most familiar with). Unless there was a fair amount of wind, that seems pretty tame to me.
If a person is reasonably well bundled up, they shouldn't have a problem. By "reasonably well bundled" I mean decent socks (wool), long underwear, a warm hat (which covers your ears) mittens, and a proper non-synthetic coat such as wool and/or down. Basically, you'll be warmer if you don't use synthetics (thus is my experience). If you're going to be standing there the whole 24 hours, you're going to want to sleep - otherwise your body temperature will plumet drastically, and you're in trouble. A down and/or wool (amazingly warm!) sleeping bag will almost be necessary.
I suspect that most people took turns throughout the 24 hour period.
Vasectomies have been statistically linked with an increase in both testicular and prostrate cancer.
Additionally, there are quite a few anicdotal cases (of a significant statistical quantity) of a vasectomy resulting in a lessened sexual drive and lack of satisfaction in relationships. This effect is significantly elevated with people in long-term relationships.
If you look at it from a naturalist/evolutionist perspective, it makes sense. Sex is for spreading the seed, and if you're physically unable to spread seed, you biology might decide it's not worth the effort any more for you.
Bravo! Very well done. That is, if it's an original work.:)
However, might you not mean sung to Bohemian Rhapsody instead of "Inperial Rhapsody"? (or, as I suspect you intended, "Imperial Rhapsody") I know of no such "Inperial Rhapsody". Maybe I'm simply uninformed?
Yes, I was thinking the same thing myself. That, and that the terms of the agreement seemed a bit odd - specifically that the purchasing company would be allowed to use the IBM and Thinkpad names for 5 whole years!
Then again, it might just be that IBM is quick and efficient about this kind of thing, and wanted off the ship -yesterday- and wasn't willing to wait any longer.
Linux is free. It's the support that is 'expensive'.
However, if you were to compare the cost of that support to an equivilant sum from Microsoft or Dell, you -might- get a high-level support technician. Once. For half an hour.
I'd personally love to get an iBook or powerbook for my next laptop. The problem?
Their keyboards suck, horribly. As do all Apple keyboards (with the exception of the "really old" ones). They're too soft and the key spacing or bevel is peculiar and/or uncomfortable which leads to fat fingers on my part.
I'll likely buy my next laptop from "IBM" as well, simply due to the superiority of the keyboards on Thinkpads vs. any other laptop I've ever seen. That purchase will likely be made in 1.5 years or so, provided nothing better has come along, and the Thinkpad line hasn't been drained of quality to bring it down to the level of Dell or Gateway.
Dude, seriously. Upgrade that piece of shit with some more memory. It's completely obscene to run anything faster than 300MHz with less than 512M in Windows, particularly Windows XP.
Words and phrases such as "multimedia", "porn", "complex", "gadgets", "violent games", "expensive", "functionally useless" seem like a fairly complete summary to me.
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Hrm. I think it might be the case that both implimentations are available, depending on which kernel version is in use. I've seen processes get killed off, the system freeze solid, and I've seen processes simply refuse to load in a situation where there's not sufficient memory.
:P it's been a long time since I've even come close to running out of memory.
Of course, I might be mistaken here.
You not only fail to refute my claim that swap in linux is not needed when there's a sufficiently large amount of RAM on a system, you back it up.
Granted, there's no reason to not have swap - accept for the forementioned security issue of erasing data. Thus, there is a reason. Additionally, overrunning your RAM isn't an issue if you've got enough - the 256M you mention is a half what I consider sane, and 1/4th what I'd consider a 'large amount'. Conversely, there's really not much of a reason to -not- run swap-free.
The only valid 'excuse' to use swap that I can think of is if you run a desktop which you keep on for long periods of time without any substantial state changes, or a server with barely any memory (= 256M). In other words, a situation where you've got a fair amount of stuff in memory, with not all of it being readily used, or a situation where you don't have enough RAM to run all your applications at once without swaping. I haven't run into that situation in quite a while with 512M. I suspect that, given 2 or 3 more years, 512M will start to run into that limitation in Linux as well, and 1G will be the mininum with which such a task is feasable.
This (the talk of H1-B workers not taking American jobs) is all rhetoric nonsense without sound statistical analysis.
The fact is, Americans are feeling the employment pinch, and H1-B permanent immigrants (because they more frequently than not try and get their citizenship here) continue to arrive here in fairly high numbers. There's a fairly real discrepency there, I think.
That is, unless most of the unemployed IT folks are like the majority of the IT folks I know. The lot of them are posessing lackluster intelligence, are unwilling to learn new things outside a clickable GUI wizard, lazy (not the good kind of lazy, either), and just fairly useless all around. In that case, I'm glad these Indians are getting jobs here and becoming citizens.
the down side: you can't actually view posts you made as AC without scrolling through the morass of others' comments. There's no "comments posted as AC" section for you to view for yourself so you can see your collection of +5 Flaimbait comments...
So don't use a swap partition. If it's a concern of your's, at least. What are you, a criminal? :P
If you're using gaim, chances are high that you're also using linux. There's no rational reason to be using a swap partition on a linux desktop, what with the price of RAM these days.
"Come on, 'Rod', it's the only education we've got."
This just points out how radically divorced from reality DJB is. Sure, he writes awesome secure code, but look at how irrational and hardline he was concerning security hole discovery - 44 for a class in how many months? Those are pretty incredible results, IMO.
This, in conjunction with how hardline he is concerning distribution (and other factors) of his open source software only make me question how sane he is. Genius? Great. But he's as socially inept as a 5 year old. Greatness provokes greater expectations, which in reality, are not realistic.
No, the reason it's stupid is because land on a virtual island has no demand. With no demand, it doesn't matter how much it costs - people won't pay for it.
:P
Now, there might be demand provoked through fancy marketing. That's a possibility, but I doubt people would opt for it unless the cost associated competes with that of other MMORPGs. I hope he got more than just models, textures, and the like, because he's going to need an engine and servers to run this little investment...
The only way I could see this happening is have the cost structure built somewhat like a normal MMORPG, but a fair bit lower. Maybe even have a free "life" subscription with purchase of the game, or give it away entirely. Players don't -have- to buy anything within the game: they can simply be wanderers, peasants, and what have you - possibly "working" for those that do "own" land. Other people besides the top owner (the 'state') might be able to make money with this scheme, as well by buying a parcel of land (say, a medium sized estate for $1000) and 'renting' out rooms to virtual people, hiring them to make virtual goods, and then selling the virtual goods. Through this method, the 'state' would make money through sale of land. Maybe have a "property tax" in addition to the cost of buying the land, so that if the owner lapses on payments, the 'state' can reposess the land and then sell it again plus improvements for even more.
Let's do a little math to see how this -might- work - at least to recoup initial investment and operational costs (and let's even assume that they don't even have a fully operational game). In addition to the 26.5k they've already spent on it, let's say they have to spend another 500,000 on development and set-up costs (a fairly conservative estimation, I think, provided they don't have an entire game world). Let's also say that it takes 1,500 game dollars (we'll call 'em "creds") to live amiably within a decent appartment within this game world for a month. We'll say that this sum will transfer to $15 USD, the going monthly rate for MMORPGs.
Now, a person can do one of two things: they can pay the $15 and not 'make' money in-game, or they can buy land and assets in-game which have the potential to make them money. A player might purchase (for, say, 180,000 cred - $1800) a pub from the 'state'. They could then purchase ales, foods, and what have you from the 'state' at bulk prices and sell them to other gamers for a slightly inflated price - the equivilant of maybe $0.05 for each item to the customer.
This would be a good venture for the pub purchaser, as they could recoup their initial investment in a matter of a months (say, 1 cent profit every 10 seconds for a month = real-world $518.40, or $0.72/hr for a month).
Theoretically, it could work. In my mind, this is actually a pretty nifty idea, and would be fun to at least play (and I don't play MMORPGs online). This would particularly be the case if the 'gamers' could add completely custom items to make and sell (within set game world restraints), and there was little story/quest development by the owners. (Think: Commercialism MMORPG). By using real money, they introduce an element which provokes the feeling of actual 'investment' in the players, creating a unique real-world economy instead of what all other MMORPGs have - just credits, gold, and what have you, which have no intrisic value of their own.
Of course, it's possible they're planning something entirely different, and have a new conceptual idea which they'll inflate with marketing to the point of profitability.
Anyway, I've said enough.
Great. How much did it cost to develop this virtual island? More than $26,000?
Land is a very inexpensive investment with a good return and a practical application. This 'virtual island' thing is just silly.
guess I got lucky with my vintage Gameboy.
*cough*
damn commercialists.
as an ammendum, it did indeed just finish indexing. I did a search for an sxw file I'd just saved with the name "nyc-story.sxw". I searched for just nyc, and then just for story. It found the document with neither instance (and the document is on my desktop).
Hrm.
I just downloaded and installed this thing. 4.some megs for what appears to be an IE plugin. There doesn't seem to be the option to make the 'search' bar integrate with the taskbar at all (which was what my initial pre-install impression was).
I will say that I'd half expected for there to be a minimalist appearance. Nay, there's about 10 different buttons on the bar that gets installed in IE, and I was initially pestered with 2 desktop bar-specific nags. Additionally, the damn thing defaults to searching the web, not the desktop.
So I've been sitting here for about 10 minutes waiting for the thing to build an index. The Google Destop Search tool has about 40Mb of files on this machine, and I honestly don't think I've got much more than (if even) 1Gb of files on it. I've run a search for a couple files within the "My Documents" directory, and nothing turned up. There's no indication that the index is being built, or when it might be done, etc.
There also doesn't appear to be must customization ability for the actual search tool, either. Just build, or rebuild the index. No "exclude directory" type stuff.
The additional pop-ups look useful, though, for an IE user. It's all standard fare for a Firefox user, of course. Considering that most people that would likely use such a tool from MS are likely already using Firefox, I'd say chacnes are slim this sees much fanfare.
Can't say I'm impressed. It's got the same intrusive feel of Clippy, with the nice interface of MSN Search. Not impressed in the least.
How in the world is "5 hours of battery life" a good amount of juice for a portable?
It's a portable game device. Poeple will sit down and play it for 2, 3 hours at a time. They'll play it on the comode. They'll take it on trips (planes, car) which will last all day.
In my mind, trips is the main reason to have such a device in the first place. If I can't play the device for the entire trip (or even half of a 16-hour trip), what in the world is the point of having it?
The battery is rechargeable, not replaceable. I can't very easily pop it out and put a replacement in, as I can with a Gameboy. Never mind that a gameboy will run for weeks on dead batteries.
I'd agree with you completely, if it were just a case of someone going out and walking about to do things. However, this is the case of someone sitting or standing still for 24 hours, on cement. Your feet will get cold sooner than later, and you need to be warm. There's a reason why hunters that hunt from tree stands bundle up well, and doubly so for doing it when it's even colder than 40F.
Additionally, I'm used to a high-wind region of the country. IE, 20MPH winds are on the low end of things. Compact that with the fact that I'm not bred for this cold (more of a medeteranian complexion)
Precisely why I've turned down jobs in the region. :)
I talked about this with a friend a while ago.
/data or /raid5 as well fairly trivially, without infringing on the files in /home/ that don't belong to them. Then, simply have a seperate database for each 'index source', and a specific user could be allowed to search multiple sources.
/etc, /var, etc. - they're fairly static and all fairly standard per distro. No need to index them.
It'd be fairly trivial (a couple afternoon's worth of work for a skilled and experienced scripter) to make something which works better than the combination of the unix file tools (slocate, find, file, grep, etc.). In essence, you'd use those tools in conjunction with perl and a mysql database. You could either have a series of scripts do direct db manipulation, or you could have a daemon which transverses the db communications for the per-user script.
It could probably be done fairly easily without infringing on permissions, too - just do a sanity check to make sure the files are in $HOME. In linux, it's unlikely that anyone would sanely have much data outside of $HOME. I s'pose you could write it so that someone could configure the daemon to index the files in (say),
As far as the files in
I'd undertake the project myself, but I really don't know how I'd go about categorizing data so that a person could easily find the files with specific text. Would it actually involve indexing the entire textual content of a person's $HOME/source? That's the only thing I can think of, and even then it seems like it might be a little slow/tedious. Any other ideas?
I'd love ot have such a tool...
... is not cold at all. It's only 41 degrees Fahrenheit (the metric I'm most familiar with). Unless there was a fair amount of wind, that seems pretty tame to me.
If a person is reasonably well bundled up, they shouldn't have a problem. By "reasonably well bundled" I mean decent socks (wool), long underwear, a warm hat (which covers your ears) mittens, and a proper non-synthetic coat such as wool and/or down. Basically, you'll be warmer if you don't use synthetics (thus is my experience). If you're going to be standing there the whole 24 hours, you're going to want to sleep - otherwise your body temperature will plumet drastically, and you're in trouble. A down and/or wool (amazingly warm!) sleeping bag will almost be necessary.
I suspect that most people took turns throughout the 24 hour period.
Vasectomies have been statistically linked with an increase in both testicular and prostrate cancer.
Additionally, there are quite a few anicdotal cases (of a significant statistical quantity) of a vasectomy resulting in a lessened sexual drive and lack of satisfaction in relationships. This effect is significantly elevated with people in long-term relationships.
If you look at it from a naturalist/evolutionist perspective, it makes sense. Sex is for spreading the seed, and if you're physically unable to spread seed, you biology might decide it's not worth the effort any more for you.
Bravo! Very well done. That is, if it's an original work. :)
However, might you not mean sung to Bohemian Rhapsody instead of "Inperial Rhapsody"? (or, as I suspect you intended, "Imperial Rhapsody") I know of no such "Inperial Rhapsody". Maybe I'm simply uninformed?
Yes, I was thinking the same thing myself. That, and that the terms of the agreement seemed a bit odd - specifically that the purchasing company would be allowed to use the IBM and Thinkpad names for 5 whole years!
Then again, it might just be that IBM is quick and efficient about this kind of thing, and wanted off the ship -yesterday- and wasn't willing to wait any longer.
Linux is free. It's the support that is 'expensive'.
However, if you were to compare the cost of that support to an equivilant sum from Microsoft or Dell, you -might- get a high-level support technician. Once. For half an hour.
I'd personally love to get an iBook or powerbook for my next laptop. The problem?
Their keyboards suck, horribly. As do all Apple keyboards (with the exception of the "really old" ones). They're too soft and the key spacing or bevel is peculiar and/or uncomfortable which leads to fat fingers on my part.
I'll likely buy my next laptop from "IBM" as well, simply due to the superiority of the keyboards on Thinkpads vs. any other laptop I've ever seen. That purchase will likely be made in 1.5 years or so, provided nothing better has come along, and the Thinkpad line hasn't been drained of quality to bring it down to the level of Dell or Gateway.
Dude, seriously. Upgrade that piece of shit with some more memory. It's completely obscene to run anything faster than 300MHz with less than 512M in Windows, particularly Windows XP.
Why doesn't someone just bother to look at the fucking street lamp which was supposedly shattered and solve the goddamn "problem"?
:P
Fucking scientists.
How do the masses perceive computers?
Words and phrases such as "multimedia", "porn", "complex", "gadgets", "violent games", "expensive", "functionally useless" seem like a fairly complete summary to me.