If your software still runs properly, and your machine runs perceptibly faster because the machine is dicking around less with the memory, I don't see how it's not a valid test case. The point of an operating system isn't to be cool, and it isn't to theoretically be most optimal, it's to run your software.
It seems to me that the fact that you used a baldly politically motivated movie which may or may not be based on facts or reality in any objective sense as your example sort of proves the point.
The facts in that picture are embellished and turned into unreal rhetoric. That makes it less real than real. A movie a generation ago about how people with black skin came from an inferior race, or a propoganda pamphlet from WWII about how Jews are destroying the fatherland, are these also real?
No, the only thing that is truly real is unobstructed, unaltered, unchanged objective reality, and the closeset way a human can percieve that is through their senses. They're obtaining flawed second-hand information (We hope the photons tell us everything correctly, but physics tells us that doesn't need to be the case), but it's the best we've got.
That said, the film that impressed me most with its vistas recently was The Sound of Music. I'd never seen it before this Christmas, but the shots taken in the mountains with everyone right there, and the fact that I knew full well that the scenes weren't filmed on some greenscreen blew me away.
If swapping is turned off, this will not be a problem. If it's turned on, prepare to wait a minute or two.
I'd say there's a pretty obvious and objective difference between the two. I think most people who experience it will agree with me. The caching strategy used in modern operating systems makes sense on a server rig, but on a desktop rig the amount of time spent dicking around with the hard drive because this or that is swapped in and out of active memory is much greater, than the amount of time to just wait a moment and let the data load normally.
As far as I'm concerned, when the benchmarks tell you that you can increase your applications by a huge margin on your 1000 dollar computer by spending another 50 bucks on memory, they're worthwhile, and that extra 50 bucks of memory is a 'sweet spot'.
Otherwise, this discussion is all moot anyway. You can just about anything you need on less than a gigahertz with only 256MB of memory if you're doing things conservatively and you don't care that much about getting as much performance as you possibly can.
Myself, I can objectively see the difference between 512MB and 1024MB. I was going to give my brother a bunch of memory for Christmas with a computer I built him, but I couldn't handle living on 512MB. I ended up grabbing him some cheapie RAM and everything worked out well anyway (Hey, he didn't even HAVE a computer before)
I'm not sure you understand the dynamics at work in the modern world. The average slashdotter makes a boatload of cash. The average slashdotter likely has his car paid off. The average slashdotter may even have his house paid off.
If you think it takes much more than that to be attractive to the opposite gender, you're less cynical than I am.
Sir, I drive a 1985 Bronco II, and let me inform you that you are sadly mistaken.
Trying to stay on the highway at 100 with A 1985 Ford Bronco II is the ultimate driving adventure. Thus, a 1985 Ford Bronco II is the ultimate driving machine.
So have a policy where the secretary usergroup may only run the program they require to do their job.
Back when I was still studying IT stuff, we were taught that the only real security is 'deny any' security. If your information is deadly seriously and absolutely cannot be compromised, then you simply lock down the system involved for the user involved. Your doctors are one thing, given that they're highly paid, highly educated professionals and a computer is one of their tools, but secretaries are quite another. They're lucky to be where they are, and usually don't have any special qualifications or skills that would justify giving them access to their PCs beyond the job they're hired to do.
That said, I've got a lot of leeway where I work, which works out for well sometimes and not so well other times. When I first got on my new workstation, the virus scanner didn't work, the machine was loaded with spyware, and it wasn't even patched to Service Pack 2 (this was last year). I ended up spending about a day getting it despyware'd, patched up, (None of the applications I use at work have any problems with a properly patched version of windows), and otherwise brought back up to snuff so I wasn't wasting as much time waiting for things to happen. On the other hand, there's no issue with my USB drive filled with MP3s.
I was forced to use AOL for a few months because I moved south and stayed with a relative while going to college. It was pretty bad having to have their shitty client open just to be able to use the internet.
You use what's available. If you're too high and mighty to deal with it, maybe you're not hardcore enough.:P
Most of my family runs Dell Dimensions, and they're quite computer literate. Depending on what you're looking for, Dell actually puts out pretty reasonable hardware for a pretty reasonable price. If what you want to do isn't gaming, then they're perfect for the job. They also run Linux terrifically, depending on the model. My Dimension 2400 I went through school with had sound, network, and 3d accelerated OpenGL in Linux.
When I graduated I fulfilled a dream I've had since the first rumors of the Hammer achitecture and bought myself an Athlon 64 with some pretty decent specs, but the truth there is that it uses more power, makes more noise, and doesn't do a whole lot more than my old Dimension 2400 with a 2.6Ghz processor and 512MB of memory. which was bought for about 500 dollars CDN.
Rather, just keep CACHING for file reads and writes. My hard drive can read megabytes and megabytes per second. If I keep it optimized, I should be able to load any executable file in less time than it will take for me to care about how long it's taking. If that's the case, and I'm not swapping the programs I'm running in and out of memory to make room for more useless cache, I think the average speed will increase substantially.
Actual benchmarks prove both of you wrong. The sweet spot for memory in XP lies around 1GB. At 512MB in benchmarks, the increased disk activity causes substantial speed losses. At 2GB, the increases are negligible over 1GB.
I think the article was on Toms Hardware. If anyone cares, I'll dig it up.
Except for the hour and half at startup where Windows loads every application you've ever loved into memory, right?
Ever turn off swap in a modern Windows? All things considered, I'd like to disable executable caching, and just keep swapping for file reads and writes within programs. Not swapping out the programs you're actually using is a pretty damned good first step towards a zippy system, in my experience.
My dad bought a new Acer laptop with Vista pre-installed on it. He got rid of it within a week and threw XP on there because the performance was so awful.
I live a few thousand miles away so I didn't get to experience it myself, but considering he's the man who taught me everything I know about computers (Which is substantial), I'm going to take his word for it until I learn otherwise through empirical evidence.
If a worker was wasting my time and money by spending paid company time stirring shit about his politic instead of actually doing his job, I'd fire him for that too.
I'm not sure a lot of slashdotters understand the concept of 'a job'. You're not there because your employer thinks you're a wonderful person and wants to support you for life because of it, you're there because you've got a skill and you've agreed to do it in exchange for money. If you don't feel like doing that work, and instead you want to surf porn, then that means you've broken the agreement, and your employer is fully within their rights to get rid of you.
It's age discrimination when you don't fire someone for doing something like this just because they're old, too.
SCO has shat on the legal system, and there's no turning back. There's no stopping that SCO is pretty much dead when the music stops, since they'll have to face up to the criminal acts the company has perpetrated as well as penalties for the frivolous lawsuits. It's in their best interest to draw it out as much as possible, because this is their last dance.
You know, I'm not the most trusting person in the universe, but when the dichotomy is between a company that has verifyably lied in the past on the topic of linux to get support and visibility for a lawsuit that was hyped with much bravado as being about linux (and a blackmail 'licensing scheme' which is certain to have the company drawn and quartered when these lawsuits are over with) but in the end turned out to be about a nearly unrelated contract dispute tangentally related to linux IP, and a profitable corporation which is making money off of linux and already has ridiculous amounts of public support because they're on the 'positive' side of this lawsuit, the choice is more or less clear, unless something other than vague rhetoric comes out of a company which is already famous for vague rhetoric based on epic untruths.
Yes, but there are areas of high potential energy (just calling it that to avoid saying 'source') which lead to a net increase of energy in the system you care about. For example, solar panels might actually steal energy from the sun, which has less hydrogen to convert to helium as a result, but we don't care about the sun. It's got plenty of fuel, and there's no negative effect to leeching a bit that would have otherwise just flown off into space, so locally, it's an energy source. Using humans for energy, however, would be a terrible idea. Whether you want to accept it or not, reducing the efficiency of human movement would increase the energy they expend during a space-walk, increasing the energy use of that person. That person would then either lose weight or would have to consume an equal amount of energy in the form of food to make up for it(Also, that increased mass of food would require more energy to prepare). In either case, the additional weight being sent into space with the function of generating electricity would likely cost much more in terms of fuel cost (And oxygen+hydrogen can be thrown in a fuel cell for electricity) than would be converted into a useful form of energy by using human motion to power anything particularly massive. Thus, in a local sense, this wouldn't be an energy source as such, because for a one watt expenditure of existing energy in the system, you'd see a less than one watt of useful energy. For comparison, the O2 and H2 are obviously a source of energy in this system, because it manages to lift the entire shuttle and its own mass into space, then power the shuttle for whatever amount of time, then guide the shuttle back to earth.
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If your software still runs properly, and your machine runs perceptibly faster because the machine is dicking around less with the memory, I don't see how it's not a valid test case. The point of an operating system isn't to be cool, and it isn't to theoretically be most optimal, it's to run your software.
It seems to me that the fact that you used a baldly politically motivated movie which may or may not be based on facts or reality in any objective sense as your example sort of proves the point.
The facts in that picture are embellished and turned into unreal rhetoric. That makes it less real than real. A movie a generation ago about how people with black skin came from an inferior race, or a propoganda pamphlet from WWII about how Jews are destroying the fatherland, are these also real?
No, the only thing that is truly real is unobstructed, unaltered, unchanged objective reality, and the closeset way a human can percieve that is through their senses. They're obtaining flawed second-hand information (We hope the photons tell us everything correctly, but physics tells us that doesn't need to be the case), but it's the best we've got.
That said, the film that impressed me most with its vistas recently was The Sound of Music. I'd never seen it before this Christmas, but the shots taken in the mountains with everyone right there, and the fact that I knew full well that the scenes weren't filmed on some greenscreen blew me away.
Start your computer. Click on the start menu.
If swapping is turned off, this will not be a problem. If it's turned on, prepare to wait a minute or two.
I'd say there's a pretty obvious and objective difference between the two. I think most people who experience it will agree with me. The caching strategy used in modern operating systems makes sense on a server rig, but on a desktop rig the amount of time spent dicking around with the hard drive because this or that is swapped in and out of active memory is much greater, than the amount of time to just wait a moment and let the data load normally.
As far as I'm concerned, when the benchmarks tell you that you can increase your applications by a huge margin on your 1000 dollar computer by spending another 50 bucks on memory, they're worthwhile, and that extra 50 bucks of memory is a 'sweet spot'.
Otherwise, this discussion is all moot anyway. You can just about anything you need on less than a gigahertz with only 256MB of memory if you're doing things conservatively and you don't care that much about getting as much performance as you possibly can.
Myself, I can objectively see the difference between 512MB and 1024MB. I was going to give my brother a bunch of memory for Christmas with a computer I built him, but I couldn't handle living on 512MB. I ended up grabbing him some cheapie RAM and everything worked out well anyway (Hey, he didn't even HAVE a computer before)
Turn off swapping and do a bit of clicking around. If you can still tell me I'm wrong, you'll have a point.
What makes you think the 'regular joes' aren't whiney and self-important as well?
Lefty.............Wanted to feel pretty.
Is that so wrong?!
I'm not sure you understand the dynamics at work in the modern world. The average slashdotter makes a boatload of cash. The average slashdotter likely has his car paid off. The average slashdotter may even have his house paid off.
If you think it takes much more than that to be attractive to the opposite gender, you're less cynical than I am.
It's all about making the 18 year old look older in the 'before' shot.
QUICK! Someone draw a beard on her face! That'll make here look way older!
Sir, I drive a 1985 Bronco II, and let me inform you that you are sadly mistaken.
Trying to stay on the highway at 100 with A 1985 Ford Bronco II is the ultimate driving adventure. Thus, a 1985 Ford Bronco II is the ultimate driving machine.
So have a policy where the secretary usergroup may only run the program they require to do their job.
Back when I was still studying IT stuff, we were taught that the only real security is 'deny any' security. If your information is deadly seriously and absolutely cannot be compromised, then you simply lock down the system involved for the user involved. Your doctors are one thing, given that they're highly paid, highly educated professionals and a computer is one of their tools, but secretaries are quite another. They're lucky to be where they are, and usually don't have any special qualifications or skills that would justify giving them access to their PCs beyond the job they're hired to do.
That said, I've got a lot of leeway where I work, which works out for well sometimes and not so well other times. When I first got on my new workstation, the virus scanner didn't work, the machine was loaded with spyware, and it wasn't even patched to Service Pack 2 (this was last year). I ended up spending about a day getting it despyware'd, patched up, (None of the applications I use at work have any problems with a properly patched version of windows), and otherwise brought back up to snuff so I wasn't wasting as much time waiting for things to happen. On the other hand, there's no issue with my USB drive filled with MP3s.
I was forced to use AOL for a few months because I moved south and stayed with a relative while going to college. It was pretty bad having to have their shitty client open just to be able to use the internet.
:P
You use what's available. If you're too high and mighty to deal with it, maybe you're not hardcore enough.
Most of my family runs Dell Dimensions, and they're quite computer literate. Depending on what you're looking for, Dell actually puts out pretty reasonable hardware for a pretty reasonable price. If what you want to do isn't gaming, then they're perfect for the job. They also run Linux terrifically, depending on the model. My Dimension 2400 I went through school with had sound, network, and 3d accelerated OpenGL in Linux.
When I graduated I fulfilled a dream I've had since the first rumors of the Hammer achitecture and bought myself an Athlon 64 with some pretty decent specs, but the truth there is that it uses more power, makes more noise, and doesn't do a whole lot more than my old Dimension 2400 with a 2.6Ghz processor and 512MB of memory. which was bought for about 500 dollars CDN.
Rather, just keep CACHING for file reads and writes. My hard drive can read megabytes and megabytes per second. If I keep it optimized, I should be able to load any executable file in less time than it will take for me to care about how long it's taking. If that's the case, and I'm not swapping the programs I'm running in and out of memory to make room for more useless cache, I think the average speed will increase substantially.
Actual benchmarks prove both of you wrong. The sweet spot for memory in XP lies around 1GB. At 512MB in benchmarks, the increased disk activity causes substantial speed losses. At 2GB, the increases are negligible over 1GB.
I think the article was on Toms Hardware. If anyone cares, I'll dig it up.
Except for the hour and half at startup where Windows loads every application you've ever loved into memory, right?
Ever turn off swap in a modern Windows? All things considered, I'd like to disable executable caching, and just keep swapping for file reads and writes within programs. Not swapping out the programs you're actually using is a pretty damned good first step towards a zippy system, in my experience.
My dad bought a new Acer laptop with Vista pre-installed on it. He got rid of it within a week and threw XP on there because the performance was so awful.
I live a few thousand miles away so I didn't get to experience it myself, but considering he's the man who taught me everything I know about computers (Which is substantial), I'm going to take his word for it until I learn otherwise through empirical evidence.
I don't have public performance rights for the novel.
The most wonderful irony is that when i quote Orwell to illustrate my opinion of what this means, *I'm* the criminal.
And I heard about this episode on the internet, so it MUST be true!
I'm autosexual, you insensitive clod!
If a worker was wasting my time and money by spending paid company time stirring shit about his politic instead of actually doing his job, I'd fire him for that too.
I'm not sure a lot of slashdotters understand the concept of 'a job'. You're not there because your employer thinks you're a wonderful person and wants to support you for life because of it, you're there because you've got a skill and you've agreed to do it in exchange for money. If you don't feel like doing that work, and instead you want to surf porn, then that means you've broken the agreement, and your employer is fully within their rights to get rid of you.
It's age discrimination when you don't fire someone for doing something like this just because they're old, too.
SCO has shat on the legal system, and there's no turning back. There's no stopping that SCO is pretty much dead when the music stops, since they'll have to face up to the criminal acts the company has perpetrated as well as penalties for the frivolous lawsuits. It's in their best interest to draw it out as much as possible, because this is their last dance.
You know, I'm not the most trusting person in the universe, but when the dichotomy is between a company that has verifyably lied in the past on the topic of linux to get support and visibility for a lawsuit that was hyped with much bravado as being about linux (and a blackmail 'licensing scheme' which is certain to have the company drawn and quartered when these lawsuits are over with) but in the end turned out to be about a nearly unrelated contract dispute tangentally related to linux IP, and a profitable corporation which is making money off of linux and already has ridiculous amounts of public support because they're on the 'positive' side of this lawsuit, the choice is more or less clear, unless something other than vague rhetoric comes out of a company which is already famous for vague rhetoric based on epic untruths.
Yes, but there are areas of high potential energy (just calling it that to avoid saying 'source') which lead to a net increase of energy in the system you care about. For example, solar panels might actually steal energy from the sun, which has less hydrogen to convert to helium as a result, but we don't care about the sun. It's got plenty of fuel, and there's no negative effect to leeching a bit that would have otherwise just flown off into space, so locally, it's an energy source. Using humans for energy, however, would be a terrible idea. Whether you want to accept it or not, reducing the efficiency of human movement would increase the energy they expend during a space-walk, increasing the energy use of that person. That person would then either lose weight or would have to consume an equal amount of energy in the form of food to make up for it(Also, that increased mass of food would require more energy to prepare). In either case, the additional weight being sent into space with the function of generating electricity would likely cost much more in terms of fuel cost (And oxygen+hydrogen can be thrown in a fuel cell for electricity) than would be converted into a useful form of energy by using human motion to power anything particularly massive. Thus, in a local sense, this wouldn't be an energy source as such, because for a one watt expenditure of existing energy in the system, you'd see a less than one watt of useful energy. For comparison, the O2 and H2 are obviously a source of energy in this system, because it manages to lift the entire shuttle and its own mass into space, then power the shuttle for whatever amount of time, then guide the shuttle back to earth.
At least, that's my view of the situation.