Some cable and even DSL providers offer an average with a minimum below that and no maximum so long as you're not abusing the system. I'm not sure how Time Warner handles that. I have friends on several providers who regularly experience download speed spikes well over the advertised speed.
The minimum spec for the original XP and for SP3 both is a 233Mhz processor and 64MB of RAM. A 300Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM was recommended. These were extremely low-balled numbers, but a system configured such would boot and run.
Many of the applications require much more than that, though. IE7 requires 64MB minimum for just itself. Here's that requirements page.
If you take 64 MB for the OS and 64 MB for the browser, a 128MB system will probably swap from a single browser window loading a complex page, let alone doing a large download.
Now, add in Windows Firewall, some anti-virus software, and a couple of other resident programs. For testing, most of this should be turned off. The Windows Firewall I'd leave on because my Linux box would have iptables and possibly Shorewall or some other management wrapper around iptables running.
Firefox 3 isn't exactly stingy on memory use, if that's what he's using on both platforms. Neither is Flash, as it seems most download speed test web sites use.
So, yeah, he might be swapping pretty heavily at 512 MB although you're right that the base system would run okay with even less than that.
That's not the only explanation for such a difference, though. He might be running on-demand virus scanning against the download. He might not be telling us that he's saving the download to disk and one has a faster, after-market hard drive in it. An uncontrolled test is only of anecdotal value.
Oh, well, the 'Pledge of Allegiance' isn't what pieisgood said. Yeah, it was added to that. The original Pledge was written by a flag company marketing person. It has no legal bearing on anything. You can choose not to recite the pledge, or you can choose to recite it without 'under God'.
The 'anthem' which was mentioned I'm guess refers to 'The Star-Spangled Banner', which does not contain the words 'under God' in any way in any verse. The first verse, which is almost always the only thing you hear, does not mention God, gods, deities, imps, angles, demons, halos, heaven, hell, saints, or sinners once. The only verse which mentions God is the fourth verse in the lines 'Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation' and 'And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."'. That fourth verse also calls the US 'Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land'. I believe Francis Scott Key wrote all four verses as they still stand today.
You're right. If it is truly a scam in which they weren't clear about the price, then defeat it on those grounds. Don't try to run your own scam against the scammers.
Credit is being fronted a product and being allowed to pay afterward. So yes, this is credit, at least over here in the US. Just because they didn't make her apply for credit doesn't mean they didn't extend credit to her. If it wasn't sold on credit, she'd have had to pay up front.
Actually, you can legally charge any amount you want for most Open Source software. It doesn't have to be limited to the cost of bandwidth. Most people center their business around support contracts and improved documentation not because it's illegal to charge for the code but because other sources don't charge for the code at all.
The Constitution did not have "under God" added in the 1950s. It simply did not. No matter what you may have heard, it did not. Go back to Civics or Social Studies or Happy-Feel-Good-Hippies-R-Us or whatever your lackluster school calls it these days and kick your teacher in the ass if you were taught that anyone added "under God" to the Constitution.
Yeah, I think we're agreed. I want my exabyte per cubic centimeter holographic storage now, damn it. It'd be nice if it could transfer all that data at, oh, say, 100TB per second, too. Then I could back up a whole lot really fast and carry it home on my keychain. Until then, tapes, flash drives, external hard drives, clusters, and backup file servers will have to do.
The problem is, they don't want us to think like us. They want us to think like them. We are different, and that's a problem for the people who want us to be "normal".
Sure, we have some difficulties, but we have other abilities most "normal" people don't. If someone wants to be "normal", then these treatments are great for them. If someone can't learn to overcome or live with the negatives of ADHD and take advantage of the positives, then let them choose the treatments.
I, personally, prefer my symptoms to Ritalin. When I need to concentrate and I'm having difficulty, I have caffeine. It doesn't time release and actually keep me from thinking how I usually think. If this biofeedback would allow me to switch my mind back and forth between modes, then that's great. I don't want to give up what makes me who I am and forces me to think like someone else, though. Sure, some things are easier on Ritalin or Prozac, but other things are harder. I can deal with ADHD. I'd rather deal with it than have it taken from me.
The difference is that it's a matter of absolutes. Lots of people can get into a state of hyperfocus. People with ADHD are often in that state or can't concentrate on a single task at all. Either everything else is shut almost completely out, or any little thing can pull attention away.
Hyperfocus is like a drug. Breaking someone's hyperfocus is like taking cigarettes from a smoker or coffee from a caffeine addict.
ADHD isn't just about dopamine, either. People with ADHD can process any combination of dopamine, serotonin, and/or adrenalin differently. It is often all three.
Poor attitude is not ADHD. Neither are depression, social anxiety disorder, PTSD, OCD, or many other abnormalities with similar ranges of effects. There are diagnostic tests for ADHD that include ruling out other disorders. PET scans, IQ tests, psychological profiles of the whole household, and more are often recommended for proper diagnosis. "Johnny is bored in class" is not a diagnosis of ADHD.
Thank you for voicing that distinction so eloquently on Slashdot.
Now I guess we need to consider whether all the antisocial behavior on Slashdot is an outlet for those already antisocial or if the community is conditioning for it.
You could always seek to nominate someone who wouldn't run on their own. You could even campaign for individual pieces of legislation you like rather than people. Legislation that reforms how politicians are elected or how they serve comes along every so often, for example.
Tapes do suck. They are inconvenient. Even the best tape management software makes you wait for fast-forward and rewind if you don't need all the data on the tape. They break. They are often easily corrupted or erased, much more so than disks.
That's not to say they're not worthwhile. Sometimes you need to use a solution that sucks because you can't find anything better for your situation. Some can't afford a fully redundant, physically distributed cluster. Some people have data sets too large to afford the bandwidth of a dedicated online backup server in a colo facility.
Use tape if you must, but be prepared to hope for a better way. Tapes suck, but losing important data sucks more.
I back up everything to CD or DVD that will fit as a single project (which is almost everything I do). I also store all my work on a server in another location. I also have my main copy on RAID 5. I have a small cluster for some projects. I also make backups of some stuff to tape, which is my least favorite data redundancy method of all of these. The CDs, DVDs, and tapes go into fire safes, one copy in my office and one in my home. The tapes mostly only take stuff too big for DVD.
Others I know have multiple backup servers each with their own RAID 5 or RAID 1. Some have fully redundant clustering for every bit of data they use, and this option is becoming cheaper and cheaper.
In the early 90's it was Apple. Sun is a perennial favorite now. I never read one of these things saying Hayes or Zeos would get bought or go under. Where's my Hayes DSL adapter?
Zeos merged with Micron and now they are Crucial and MPC. Now guess who's in chapter 11? MPC/Micron is.
What poll foresaw Digital going to Compaq or Compaq going to HP? Magitronic sure seems to have failed. eMachines was bought. Alienware is owned by Dell.
These polls are silly. Some of these companies have more cash reserves than small countries have budgets. There's always a risk of a company large or small failing, but this poll means nothing.
Don't campaign for someone the parties let you choose. Convince someone you already trust to run, then campaign for them. If you can only trust yourself, then run yourself or find some way to limit your contact with what the politicians can control. Just be careful who comes knocking at your compound's door.;-)
RAID isn't a backup, but both RAID and backups address the issue of data loss. They just address it at different points. The general idea is to never have just one copy. It's a good idea wo have multiple copies both of the current data (RAID or clustering) and the backup (tape, external drives, dedicated offsite backup server, or part of your cluster offsite).
Cluster from the start. Put every copy of your data is on at least three disks in at least two physical locations. Then you already have off-site backup and don't have to transport the drives with data on them.
If you can't afford a live cluster spread across two or more locations, then colocate a server with a bunch of drive space in it. Upload all your work there and keep your local copy backed up on tape, SAN, NAS, local external drives, or whatever as well.
The main point is to never have only one current copy and also never have only one backup copy. If you're only backing up to one set of tapes, you'll find a bad tape sooner or later. At least make copies of the tapes, one to keep local and one to send offsite.
Another important topic is version control. It does you no good to have one backup set and one current version of something if you need the version from two months ago last Thursday and it's in neither set.
We used to say the same thing about 2 MB floppies and 40MB hard drives. Do full backup sets across tapes and then do incremental backups, too. An alternative is to have a live clustering system with built-in redundancy of storage in the first place.
100GB is much bigger than the 80MB and 250MB tapes we used to use. Sure, they keep getting bigger. So what? They still suck, even if they suck less.
Offsite backups for company site A are at company site B, and vice versa. The Internet and VPNs are wonderful things. With a fast connection, your cluster (whether FS level or application level) can be spread out among multiple physical locations in the first place.
You need to actually get out and campaign for someone you can trust. Everyone wants change, but it doesn't just happen. I used to, before moving, have a US House member who responded with very specific wording to the issues I brought up. Well, it was likely a staff member of his, but the wording was still very specific to what I wrote about. I can be confident it wasn't a form letter. Unfortunately, he and I still differed on what the policy of Congress should be on some things I wrote to him about.
The biggest difference was that the US Postal Service can make marketing agreements with companies like AOL to put their marketing materials in local post offices nationwide at the detriment to smaller, more local ISP businesses. The advertising was exclusive among ISPs, so the competition couldn't even breach those walls. Yes, this was some time ago. I was against this as an abusive monopoly in advertising space within federally funded and owned facilities. Representative Shimkus saw no problem with it, despite having several independent local and regional ISPs in his district at the time.
It's likely that since we as a country continue allowing public funds and the "independent" media to reinforce the two-party oligarchic system, the two parties will keep electing themselves to power.
So long as that is the case, not very many many quality candidates with differing viewpoints will run. Of those who run, only those who manage to be backed by the two main parties in spite of their differences from the party line will get any airtime. Ross Perot opened a major window of opportunity in this country, but his campaign wasn't as slick and polished as the people are used to seeing. Still, there are strong pockets of his party and a few other parties in state races in some states. We can always hope someone will catch the national media's attention as more than a bumbling curiosity outside the Democrat/Republican dynasty.
The constitution of Missouri guarantees the right to a "free" public education. Whether the taxes being paid and mismanaged is better than an unfunded mandate to send your kids to school and lower taxes remains to be seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Some cable and even DSL providers offer an average with a minimum below that and no maximum so long as you're not abusing the system. I'm not sure how Time Warner handles that. I have friends on several providers who regularly experience download speed spikes well over the advertised speed.
The minimum spec for the original XP and for SP3 both is a 233Mhz processor and 64MB of RAM. A 300Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM was recommended. These were extremely low-balled numbers, but a system configured such would boot and run.
Many of the applications require much more than that, though. IE7 requires 64MB minimum for just itself. Here's that requirements page.
If you take 64 MB for the OS and 64 MB for the browser, a 128MB system will probably swap from a single browser window loading a complex page, let alone doing a large download.
Now, add in Windows Firewall, some anti-virus software, and a couple of other resident programs. For testing, most of this should be turned off. The Windows Firewall I'd leave on because my Linux box would have iptables and possibly Shorewall or some other management wrapper around iptables running.
Firefox 3 isn't exactly stingy on memory use, if that's what he's using on both platforms. Neither is Flash, as it seems most download speed test web sites use.
So, yeah, he might be swapping pretty heavily at 512 MB although you're right that the base system would run okay with even less than that.
That's not the only explanation for such a difference, though. He might be running on-demand virus scanning against the download. He might not be telling us that he's saving the download to disk and one has a faster, after-market hard drive in it. An uncontrolled test is only of anecdotal value.
Oh, well, the 'Pledge of Allegiance' isn't what pieisgood said. Yeah, it was added to that. The original Pledge was written by a flag company marketing person. It has no legal bearing on anything. You can choose not to recite the pledge, or you can choose to recite it without 'under God'.
The 'anthem' which was mentioned I'm guess refers to 'The Star-Spangled Banner', which does not contain the words 'under God' in any way in any verse. The first verse, which is almost always the only thing you hear, does not mention God, gods, deities, imps, angles, demons, halos, heaven, hell, saints, or sinners once. The only verse which mentions God is the fourth verse in the lines 'Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation' and 'And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."'. That fourth verse also calls the US 'Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land'. I believe Francis Scott Key wrote all four verses as they still stand today.
You're right. If it is truly a scam in which they weren't clear about the price, then defeat it on those grounds. Don't try to run your own scam against the scammers.
Credit is being fronted a product and being allowed to pay afterward. So yes, this is credit, at least over here in the US. Just because they didn't make her apply for credit doesn't mean they didn't extend credit to her. If it wasn't sold on credit, she'd have had to pay up front.
Actually, you can legally charge any amount you want for most Open Source software. It doesn't have to be limited to the cost of bandwidth. Most people center their business around support contracts and improved documentation not because it's illegal to charge for the code but because other sources don't charge for the code at all.
How the hell are they going to ban this from being read in South Carolina, after I type it from Illinois:
Shit fuck Satan death sex drugs rape (thanks Anthrax (that's a band name, not terrorism))
How about George Carlin's seven words? "shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits"?
The FCC won't fine you for saying "ass" or "hole", but you can't say "asshole" on broadcast radio shows. Why the fuck not?
The Constitution did not have "under God" added in the 1950s. It simply did not. No matter what you may have heard, it did not. Go back to Civics or Social Studies or Happy-Feel-Good-Hippies-R-Us or whatever your lackluster school calls it these days and kick your teacher in the ass if you were taught that anyone added "under God" to the Constitution.
Yeah, I think we're agreed. I want my exabyte per cubic centimeter holographic storage now, damn it. It'd be nice if it could transfer all that data at, oh, say, 100TB per second, too. Then I could back up a whole lot really fast and carry it home on my keychain. Until then, tapes, flash drives, external hard drives, clusters, and backup file servers will have to do.
The problem is, they don't want us to think like us. They want us to think like them. We are different, and that's a problem for the people who want us to be "normal".
Sure, we have some difficulties, but we have other abilities most "normal" people don't. If someone wants to be "normal", then these treatments are great for them. If someone can't learn to overcome or live with the negatives of ADHD and take advantage of the positives, then let them choose the treatments.
I, personally, prefer my symptoms to Ritalin. When I need to concentrate and I'm having difficulty, I have caffeine. It doesn't time release and actually keep me from thinking how I usually think. If this biofeedback would allow me to switch my mind back and forth between modes, then that's great. I don't want to give up what makes me who I am and forces me to think like someone else, though. Sure, some things are easier on Ritalin or Prozac, but other things are harder. I can deal with ADHD. I'd rather deal with it than have it taken from me.
The difference is that it's a matter of absolutes. Lots of people can get into a state of hyperfocus. People with ADHD are often in that state or can't concentrate on a single task at all. Either everything else is shut almost completely out, or any little thing can pull attention away.
Hyperfocus is like a drug. Breaking someone's hyperfocus is like taking cigarettes from a smoker or coffee from a caffeine addict.
ADHD isn't just about dopamine, either. People with ADHD can process any combination of dopamine, serotonin, and/or adrenalin differently. It is often all three.
Poor attitude is not ADHD. Neither are depression, social anxiety disorder, PTSD, OCD, or many other abnormalities with similar ranges of effects. There are diagnostic tests for ADHD that include ruling out other disorders. PET scans, IQ tests, psychological profiles of the whole household, and more are often recommended for proper diagnosis. "Johnny is bored in class" is not a diagnosis of ADHD.
Thank you for voicing that distinction so eloquently on Slashdot.
Now I guess we need to consider whether all the antisocial behavior on Slashdot is an outlet for those already antisocial or if the community is conditioning for it.
You could always seek to nominate someone who wouldn't run on their own. You could even campaign for individual pieces of legislation you like rather than people. Legislation that reforms how politicians are elected or how they serve comes along every so often, for example.
Tapes do suck. They are inconvenient. Even the best tape management software makes you wait for fast-forward and rewind if you don't need all the data on the tape. They break. They are often easily corrupted or erased, much more so than disks.
That's not to say they're not worthwhile. Sometimes you need to use a solution that sucks because you can't find anything better for your situation. Some can't afford a fully redundant, physically distributed cluster. Some people have data sets too large to afford the bandwidth of a dedicated online backup server in a colo facility.
Use tape if you must, but be prepared to hope for a better way. Tapes suck, but losing important data sucks more.
I back up everything to CD or DVD that will fit as a single project (which is almost everything I do). I also store all my work on a server in another location. I also have my main copy on RAID 5. I have a small cluster for some projects. I also make backups of some stuff to tape, which is my least favorite data redundancy method of all of these. The CDs, DVDs, and tapes go into fire safes, one copy in my office and one in my home. The tapes mostly only take stuff too big for DVD.
Others I know have multiple backup servers each with their own RAID 5 or RAID 1. Some have fully redundant clustering for every bit of data they use, and this option is becoming cheaper and cheaper.
In the early 90's it was Apple. Sun is a perennial favorite now. I never read one of these things saying Hayes or Zeos would get bought or go under. Where's my Hayes DSL adapter?
Zeos merged with Micron and now they are Crucial and MPC. Now guess who's in chapter 11? MPC/Micron is.
What poll foresaw Digital going to Compaq or Compaq going to HP? Magitronic sure seems to have failed. eMachines was bought. Alienware is owned by Dell.
These polls are silly. Some of these companies have more cash reserves than small countries have budgets. There's always a risk of a company large or small failing, but this poll means nothing.
More like a swift trial and long prison sentence. Fraud is a felony.
Hell, Via is still muddling through in both of those markets, and they're much smaller than AMD.
Don't campaign for someone the parties let you choose. Convince someone you already trust to run, then campaign for them. If you can only trust yourself, then run yourself or find some way to limit your contact with what the politicians can control. Just be careful who comes knocking at your compound's door. ;-)
RAID isn't a backup, but both RAID and backups address the issue of data loss. They just address it at different points. The general idea is to never have just one copy. It's a good idea wo have multiple copies both of the current data (RAID or clustering) and the backup (tape, external drives, dedicated offsite backup server, or part of your cluster offsite).
Cluster from the start. Put every copy of your data is on at least three disks in at least two physical locations. Then you already have off-site backup and don't have to transport the drives with data on them.
If you can't afford a live cluster spread across two or more locations, then colocate a server with a bunch of drive space in it. Upload all your work there and keep your local copy backed up on tape, SAN, NAS, local external drives, or whatever as well.
The main point is to never have only one current copy and also never have only one backup copy. If you're only backing up to one set of tapes, you'll find a bad tape sooner or later. At least make copies of the tapes, one to keep local and one to send offsite.
Another important topic is version control. It does you no good to have one backup set and one current version of something if you need the version from two months ago last Thursday and it's in neither set.
We used to say the same thing about 2 MB floppies and 40MB hard drives. Do full backup sets across tapes and then do incremental backups, too. An alternative is to have a live clustering system with built-in redundancy of storage in the first place.
100GB is much bigger than the 80MB and 250MB tapes we used to use. Sure, they keep getting bigger. So what? They still suck, even if they suck less.
Offsite backups for company site A are at company site B, and vice versa. The Internet and VPNs are wonderful things. With a fast connection, your cluster (whether FS level or application level) can be spread out among multiple physical locations in the first place.
You need to actually get out and campaign for someone you can trust. Everyone wants change, but it doesn't just happen. I used to, before moving, have a US House member who responded with very specific wording to the issues I brought up. Well, it was likely a staff member of his, but the wording was still very specific to what I wrote about. I can be confident it wasn't a form letter. Unfortunately, he and I still differed on what the policy of Congress should be on some things I wrote to him about.
The biggest difference was that the US Postal Service can make marketing agreements with companies like AOL to put their marketing materials in local post offices nationwide at the detriment to smaller, more local ISP businesses. The advertising was exclusive among ISPs, so the competition couldn't even breach those walls. Yes, this was some time ago. I was against this as an abusive monopoly in advertising space within federally funded and owned facilities. Representative Shimkus saw no problem with it, despite having several independent local and regional ISPs in his district at the time.
It's likely that since we as a country continue allowing public funds and the "independent" media to reinforce the two-party oligarchic system, the two parties will keep electing themselves to power.
So long as that is the case, not very many many quality candidates with differing viewpoints will run. Of those who run, only those who manage to be backed by the two main parties in spite of their differences from the party line will get any airtime. Ross Perot opened a major window of opportunity in this country, but his campaign wasn't as slick and polished as the people are used to seeing. Still, there are strong pockets of his party and a few other parties in state races in some states. We can always hope someone will catch the national media's attention as more than a bumbling curiosity outside the Democrat/Republican dynasty.
The constitution of Missouri guarantees the right to a "free" public education. Whether the taxes being paid and mismanaged is better than an unfunded mandate to send your kids to school and lower taxes remains to be seen.
Idiocracy?