Nope, but it did occur to me that they've essentially reproduced the First Person Shooter -- what dedicated player hasn't "ducked" away from incoming fire, or tried to peer around the corner of the monitor when trying to see around a corner?? Same behaviour, really -- putting yourself in the place of your onscreen avatar's viewpoint to the point that you lose track of which body you actually inhabit, and react as if the avatar is real and YOU.
Hamilton, Montana, grange (rural) volunteer fire department, 1970s. Others that I heard of in the same area when I lived in MT, but don't recall exactly where... the cite I recall because I knew someone who lived there.
Ah, games. Not being a gamer, I don't suffer those consequences:) Seems it behooves gamers to not only have assloads of RAM and video capability, but to also stash the pagefile on the fastest available device.
Ha, that's a clever idea. It would need to be at least 25mb, tho, as I recall that's the minimum size that these old plugins look for. Anyway, I'll have to try it, what the hell... if they don't actually query Windows, it may be enough to fool 'em.
Would sure be weird if for some unknown reason the plugins actually tried to make Windows write to it:)
My understanding is that Windows uses the pagefile primarily for single-use and rarely-used stuff, a great deal of which is read only at boot-time or when programs start up. So it can indeed "fill up" even when there's plenty of RAM left over. And you don't really want rarely-used data cluttering RAM if your RAM supply is limited.
BUT... "rarely used" is a relative term. There is a registry setting (which I don't know off the top of my head tho I'm sure a search would find it) that forces Windows to keep all that "rarely used" OS-related stuff in RAM instead of paged out, and I gather this setting improves performance immensely -- for the same reasons as killing the pagefile entirely does (reads from disk are painfully slow compared to reads from RAM).
As to the slow boot -- did you have the pagefile set permanent? and preferably on its own partition so it can't become fragmented? Temporary pagefile that has to be written at boot time, plus fragmented all to hell (which does nothing for stability) due to the disk being fragmented, is about the slowest/worst way to do it.
First thing I do on any machine that's going to have a pagefile is give the nasty thing its own partition, which the user is forbidden to use for anything else. If for some reason a separate partition is impossible, I kill the pagefile and all tempfiles, defrag, then reset the pagefile at a fixed permanent size, so it won't refragment.
I don't have any 64bit CPUs here (yep, I live in a cave:) -- and I thought that was required to run the 64bit version??
My linux test machine is a P4-2GHz, 512mb RAM, Jetway mobo (very ordinary), 3dfx Voodoo 4500 video card -- I *think* that last is what it's hanging up on, per one of the few coherent error messages, but that doesn't explain why the disk partitioner throws up (it's only a 17GB HD, nothing special), or worse, goes thru the motions but nothing actually happens (except that it nukes the previous install, if any).
Do have to say, Mandriva 2009 was sure sluggish on this machine.... Ubuntu 5 was too, but 6 and 7 were fine. And they all did whatever the hell they wanted with their swap space, I have no idea:)
But I suppose technically correct, unless you load the entire image into memory, frex on a system with no hard disk, or with the current live CDs.
Back in the early '90s, a friend's dad had such a system in his gov't job, as a security measure -- it had a gig of RAM (then worth somewhere over $25,000) and NO hard disk. He loaded the OS and apps from tape every time he used the machine.
Yep, and I wonder why I didn't think of it myself, since back in the DOS era, RAMdisks were routine for a lot of similar uses. Windows must rot the brain.:)
People sure do get hung up on the subject, eh? Just turn swap off, and if it don't work right without it, turn it back on. D'oh!!
On your other note... I couldn't get Ubuntu 8.x to install on my test box (which ran U-5/6/7 just fine). Mandriva 2009 with KDE runs okay too, but MDK2009 with Gnome also failed to install. Both fails bogged down when trying to prep the HD. Appears something's wrong between these latest Gnome-bearing distros and that machine's hardware, but damned if I know what -- and it's not THAT old!
From TFA... Iraq is pumping out old saline groundwater, presumably so new fresh groundwater can come in -- copying a technique used in Australia.
I'd guess Australia doesn't share aquifers with any other countries, and intends to "refill" from rainforest runoff, which I expect the northern parts of Australia have more of than they need.
I'm wondering if Iraq's rivers and runoff suffice to replenish its groundwater, without "robbing" groundwater from a neighbouring nation??
As to saline-friendly crops, occurs to me that those areas most affected are also most likely to shortsightedly irrigate with salt water when such crops are available, making the net problem worse.
I'm sitting here in front of a Win98 machine that's been running without a swapfile for 7 or 8 years now... and it's WAY smoother than with a pagefile. This box has 1GB of RAM, but I've never seen W98 use over 450mb even when I've got a whole bunch of big apps running. Also, it's routinely had uptimes in excess of 8 weeks, so it's pretty clear the lack of a pagefile doesn't negatively impact stability:)
However, the GP's DOS-style idea of using a RAMdisk for temp/paging space would be good for those stupid Photoshop plugins that if they don't see any pagefile, think there's "not enough memory" no matter how much RAM you have... might have to try that, since the machine has half a gig of RAM twiddling its digital thumbs.
XP will let you turn off the pagefile; the problem is a (originally in Win2K) bug that sometimes makes you root thru the registry to find and delete the setting that refuses to go away. I haven't run into it in a while so can't recall offhand where it was, but it was easy enough to find.
Back in the DOS era, I used the RAMdisk solution for those few apps that needed a lot of temp space (relatively speaking), which was the swapfile of that era. I had a memory card that couldn't be used as system RAM, but worked fine as a RAMdisk. Worked a treat, and quadrupled system performance.
I've been running without a pagefile, in all versions of Windows, for about 10 years now -- on any machine with more than 512mb.
The only drawback is that a few stupid Photoshop plugins whine and refuse to run, because if they don't see a pagefile, they believe there is "not enough memory" -- a holdover from the era when RAM was expensive and the pagefile was a busy place. Sometimes I think about making a very small pagefile just for them, but have never actually got around to doing it.
An interesting point. And I believe that people should have the right to end their lives if they so choose. IMO Grandpa has the right to decide whether it's time to go, and this empowers him to make that decision when otherwise he might not be able to.
But guns don't empower the bad guys MORE than they empower the good guys.
Whereas being the biggest muscleman on the street definitely empowers you more than the average person, who may not be physically able to match you no matter how much he works at it. The disparity between a 100 lb. girl and a 250 lb. weightlifter CANNOT be leveled by their physical attributes alone.
Having personally used a gun to defend both my "9 stone weakling" self and others from a 300 pound muscleman, I speak with the voice of experience.
This sounds to me like he had a problem with trying to prove to himself that he was no longer afraid, so he sought out confrontation. But one man's personal problems should not be used to dictate to everyone else, most of whom have outgrown such behaviour.
Best reason for it I've seen all day!! Especially in light of one of the comments below TFA, which noted that the whole reason was to make Medicare pay for them.
My bank uses the visual token thing along with standard login/password. I get to name the token myself, and the bank's site displays that name along with the image, to assure me that I'm in the right place. I've named mine something weird or spelled strangely, so even if a spoof site had the right visual token, it's unlikely in the extreme that they'd =also= have the right name for it.
However, I suppose it could still be pillaged by a smart screen-scraper, and the same goes for anything that can be displayed or typed.
Volunteer fire departments have that same problem -- what to do about people who refuse to contribute? Most have hit on a simple solution: if you don't pay your fair share to support the VFD, they *will* just stand by and let your house burn. Usually it only takes one such example.
Second, considering that asteroid hits are neither an everyday occurrance, nor something we can realistically defend against anyway, one has to wonder just exactly who benefits from the money this will suck out of the U.S.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, but it did occur to me that they've essentially reproduced the First Person Shooter -- what dedicated player hasn't "ducked" away from incoming fire, or tried to peer around the corner of the monitor when trying to see around a corner?? Same behaviour, really -- putting yourself in the place of your onscreen avatar's viewpoint to the point that you lose track of which body you actually inhabit, and react as if the avatar is real and YOU.
Hamilton, Montana, grange (rural) volunteer fire department, 1970s. Others that I heard of in the same area when I lived in MT, but don't recall exactly where ... the cite I recall because I knew someone who lived there.
Thank you! That's definitely the setting I was thinking of.
Heh.. or maybe your subconscious read him better than you knew :)
Ah, games. Not being a gamer, I don't suffer those consequences :) Seems it behooves gamers to not only have assloads of RAM and video capability, but to also stash the pagefile on the fastest available device.
You must be prescient :)
But then again, so is he...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=186827&cid=15414804
!!!
I'd never heard of anyone putting the linux swap on a RAMdisk...!!
Have heard of folks who turn it off entirely, tho.
Ha, that's a clever idea. It would need to be at least 25mb, tho, as I recall that's the minimum size that these old plugins look for. Anyway, I'll have to try it, what the hell... if they don't actually query Windows, it may be enough to fool 'em.
Would sure be weird if for some unknown reason the plugins actually tried to make Windows write to it :)
My understanding is that Windows uses the pagefile primarily for single-use and rarely-used stuff, a great deal of which is read only at boot-time or when programs start up. So it can indeed "fill up" even when there's plenty of RAM left over. And you don't really want rarely-used data cluttering RAM if your RAM supply is limited.
BUT... "rarely used" is a relative term. There is a registry setting (which I don't know off the top of my head tho I'm sure a search would find it) that forces Windows to keep all that "rarely used" OS-related stuff in RAM instead of paged out, and I gather this setting improves performance immensely -- for the same reasons as killing the pagefile entirely does (reads from disk are painfully slow compared to reads from RAM).
As to the slow boot -- did you have the pagefile set permanent? and preferably on its own partition so it can't become fragmented? Temporary pagefile that has to be written at boot time, plus fragmented all to hell (which does nothing for stability) due to the disk being fragmented, is about the slowest/worst way to do it.
First thing I do on any machine that's going to have a pagefile is give the nasty thing its own partition, which the user is forbidden to use for anything else. If for some reason a separate partition is impossible, I kill the pagefile and all tempfiles, defrag, then reset the pagefile at a fixed permanent size, so it won't refragment.
I wouldn't install Norton-anything on my worst enemy's machine... unless I couldn't find something worse :D
I don't have any 64bit CPUs here (yep, I live in a cave :) -- and I thought that was required to run the 64bit version??
My linux test machine is a P4-2GHz, 512mb RAM, Jetway mobo (very ordinary), 3dfx Voodoo 4500 video card -- I *think* that last is what it's hanging up on, per one of the few coherent error messages, but that doesn't explain why the disk partitioner throws up (it's only a 17GB HD, nothing special), or worse, goes thru the motions but nothing actually happens (except that it nukes the previous install, if any).
Do have to say, Mandriva 2009 was sure sluggish on this machine.... Ubuntu 5 was too, but 6 and 7 were fine. And they all did whatever the hell they wanted with their swap space, I have no idea :)
That's a unique perspective :)
But I suppose technically correct, unless you load the entire image into memory, frex on a system with no hard disk, or with the current live CDs.
Back in the early '90s, a friend's dad had such a system in his gov't job, as a security measure -- it had a gig of RAM (then worth somewhere over $25,000) and NO hard disk. He loaded the OS and apps from tape every time he used the machine.
Yep, and I wonder why I didn't think of it myself, since back in the DOS era, RAMdisks were routine for a lot of similar uses. Windows must rot the brain. :)
People sure do get hung up on the subject, eh? Just turn swap off, and if it don't work right without it, turn it back on. D'oh!!
On your other note... I couldn't get Ubuntu 8.x to install on my test box (which ran U-5/6/7 just fine). Mandriva 2009 with KDE runs okay too, but MDK2009 with Gnome also failed to install. Both fails bogged down when trying to prep the HD. Appears something's wrong between these latest Gnome-bearing distros and that machine's hardware, but damned if I know what -- and it's not THAT old!
From TFA ... Iraq is pumping out old saline groundwater, presumably so new fresh groundwater can come in -- copying a technique used in Australia.
I'd guess Australia doesn't share aquifers with any other countries, and intends to "refill" from rainforest runoff, which I expect the northern parts of Australia have more of than they need.
I'm wondering if Iraq's rivers and runoff suffice to replenish its groundwater, without "robbing" groundwater from a neighbouring nation??
As to saline-friendly crops, occurs to me that those areas most affected are also most likely to shortsightedly irrigate with salt water when such crops are available, making the net problem worse.
I've had that thought too :)
Alas, sometimes the plugin required is old as dirt and has no modern replacement. :(
I'm sitting here in front of a Win98 machine that's been running without a swapfile for 7 or 8 years now... and it's WAY smoother than with a pagefile. This box has 1GB of RAM, but I've never seen W98 use over 450mb even when I've got a whole bunch of big apps running. Also, it's routinely had uptimes in excess of 8 weeks, so it's pretty clear the lack of a pagefile doesn't negatively impact stability :)
However, the GP's DOS-style idea of using a RAMdisk for temp/paging space would be good for those stupid Photoshop plugins that if they don't see any pagefile, think there's "not enough memory" no matter how much RAM you have... might have to try that, since the machine has half a gig of RAM twiddling its digital thumbs.
XP will let you turn off the pagefile; the problem is a (originally in Win2K) bug that sometimes makes you root thru the registry to find and delete the setting that refuses to go away. I haven't run into it in a while so can't recall offhand where it was, but it was easy enough to find.
Back in the DOS era, I used the RAMdisk solution for those few apps that needed a lot of temp space (relatively speaking), which was the swapfile of that era. I had a memory card that couldn't be used as system RAM, but worked fine as a RAMdisk. Worked a treat, and quadrupled system performance.
I've been running without a pagefile, in all versions of Windows, for about 10 years now -- on any machine with more than 512mb.
The only drawback is that a few stupid Photoshop plugins whine and refuse to run, because if they don't see a pagefile, they believe there is "not enough memory" -- a holdover from the era when RAM was expensive and the pagefile was a busy place. Sometimes I think about making a very small pagefile just for them, but have never actually got around to doing it.
An interesting point. And I believe that people should have the right to end their lives if they so choose. IMO Grandpa has the right to decide whether it's time to go, and this empowers him to make that decision when otherwise he might not be able to.
But guns don't empower the bad guys MORE than they empower the good guys.
Whereas being the biggest muscleman on the street definitely empowers you more than the average person, who may not be physically able to match you no matter how much he works at it. The disparity between a 100 lb. girl and a 250 lb. weightlifter CANNOT be leveled by their physical attributes alone.
Having personally used a gun to defend both my "9 stone weakling" self and others from a 300 pound muscleman, I speak with the voice of experience.
This sounds to me like he had a problem with trying to prove to himself that he was no longer afraid, so he sought out confrontation. But one man's personal problems should not be used to dictate to everyone else, most of whom have outgrown such behaviour.
Best reason for it I've seen all day!! Especially in light of one of the comments below TFA, which noted that the whole reason was to make Medicare pay for them.
BTW, perhaps a better link for your sig, much richer in irony: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191964&cid=15767171 ;)
My bank uses the visual token thing along with standard login/password. I get to name the token myself, and the bank's site displays that name along with the image, to assure me that I'm in the right place. I've named mine something weird or spelled strangely, so even if a spoof site had the right visual token, it's unlikely in the extreme that they'd =also= have the right name for it.
However, I suppose it could still be pillaged by a smart screen-scraper, and the same goes for anything that can be displayed or typed.
Volunteer fire departments have that same problem -- what to do about people who refuse to contribute? Most have hit on a simple solution: if you don't pay your fair share to support the VFD, they *will* just stand by and let your house burn. Usually it only takes one such example.
Second, considering that asteroid hits are neither an everyday occurrance, nor something we can realistically defend against anyway, one has to wonder just exactly who benefits from the money this will suck out of the U.S.