So if I go and sign up for web hosting and a domain name LetsWatchThisKidGetBullied.com from GoDaddy (analogous to creating the YouTube account), and then upload a single file to this domain that is a video of some kid getting bullied, you're arguing that GoDaddy is culpable for my action? They should have reviewed the video before it was allowed to be "published"?
If not, what do you think is the difference? Is it because my video isn't searchable? (Google might find it eventually if people linked to it) Is it because I paid for the domain hosting, but YouTube accounts are free? If YouTube required a $8 annual fee, would that absolve them from responsibility?
I honestly see exactly zero difference between these two scenarios. A hosting company is providing content delivery on behalf of its (paid or not) users. I don't think there is any reasonable rationale that they should be held accountable for their users' content. This, in effect, makes it impossible to have *any* type of internet hosting company whatsoever. Even forums/blogs would be a huge liability under this decision.
I'm just going to put this bluntly: you do not understand how memory works in a modern OS.
An application has no responsibility for things that happen with the swap/page file and disk cache. That's entirely up to the OS. Applications gain their benefits/drawbacks by simply running on the OS.
Disclaimer: I also have 8GB of RAM, with 64 bit Win7. I also have swap enabled.
At any given time, I generally have Opera, Firefox, and IE all open, usually with at least a dozen tabs open (one Hulu tab is always open for the Daily Show). I also have Visual Studio open, my IM client, a virtual machine or two, and at least a few other applications open. I run WoW with all of this stuff in the background. I have a dual monitor setup, and frequently do stuff on the secondary monitor with WoW open on the main one.
I never have any of the issues you seem to have. I see no swap partition utilization, and no performance issues when switching between applications. And no, this isn't a case of me not knowing how slow my system really is because I don't know what to look for; I know what a slow system feels like and what a fast one feels like.
Yes, you are correct that none of the operations you list benefit from disk caching. I copied a 10GB VM image between drives last night, and it had zero impact on the rest of my system's performance.
Disabling swap *might* gain you a tiny bit of performance in some cases. In most cases, it really won't. And in many cases, having no ability to swap will be a big limitation on what your system can do for such a small benefit.
I don't know about you but my first instinct when someone disagrees with me (and prevents me from doing something) is to knock him/her out of the way. If that leads to any reaction other than submission my instinct is to beat the crap out of the asshole.
Seriously? Your instincts compel you to violence over a disagreement?
Thankfully, I suspect that you are not representative of the norm.
We take all the folks that feel like you do, put you on a nice big piece of land that has been completely stripped of all taxpayer-provided amenities, put a big fucking concrete wall around it to protect you from the scary commies, and leave you be?
You forgot to give them all assault rifles as well.
Easy: A significant percentage of home schooled kids have parents who care about education and/or spend a lot of time with their kids to make sure they understand the material.
If we suddenly abolished public schools and had everyone homeschool, guess what would happen to those statistics? Do you think that kids with a mom and dad who don't give a shit are going to miraculously get a better education? Note that I have absolutely no problem with home schooling -- I just don't think that it's a valid solution in a vast majority of cases.
Did you never actually think about what those statistics might mean? It's easy to point at a number like, "inner-city kids are 50% more likely to end up in prison" and claim that, well, inner city kids have more criminal tendencies. The statistic itself doesn't answer the biggest question though, which is *why* it is the way it is. And I'd also argue that 33% of homeschoolers doing so for religious reasons is an extremely large number. If we extrapolated that to the entire population, that would mean that not only would 1 in 3 people not necessarily believe in evolution -- they may have never even been exposed to it at all.
Since you like to draw conclusions that aren't available from the numbers you present, I'll throw out an equally invalid one. You assume that because homeschoolers across the board did better on science entry exams, the 33% of religious homeschoolers did better on science entry exams. I'm instead going to assume that the 67% secular did 50% better than public schooled kids, and the 33% religious did 50% worse. Now, as a whole, they still come out ahead, which makes the numbers work -- and before you claim that the numbers don't support my assumption, I'm going to point out that they don't support yours for the exact same reason.
Similar to this situation, 30-40 years ago, people who went to college for further education were generally highly motivated people that were willing to put in more work to improve their education; that meant that, as an employer, if you found someone with a college degree, that person was more likely to be a good hire.
Now, everyone gets a college degree, and in most cases it only means that you at least attended classes for 4 or 5 years and didn't do anything egregious enough to flunk out.
There are any number of utilities that will give you multiple virtual desktops on Windows, while retaining Windows' native multi-display features.
In fact, one comes from Sysinternals, which is now part of Microsoft itself. It's called Desktops. It only does 4 virtual desktops though, so if that's not enough, you'll have to look elsewhere.
One of the main purposes of a hash function is to generate a completely unpredictable, but reproducible, key from an input, and to try to avoid collisions as much as possible. So even two similar passwords with only a few differing bits should produce completely different hashes if the system is doing its job.
Unfortunately, the last 8 years of listening to people saying things like that in all seriousness has thrown everyone's sarcasm meters out of calibration.
Then I have one of the Resident evil games. This one is fun enough, but the graphics suck balls so much it's unbelievable - mostly due to the low resolution.
This, to me, is hilarious. The RE remakes and RE4 for the Gamecube were, and still are, incredibly pretty games. I might go so far as to say that the Gamecube RE4 was the most graphically impressive game of last generation.
The Wii RE games look as good as or better than the Gamecube ones, but somehow their graphics "suck balls."
IMO, and I've been playing video games since shortly after Pong, last generation the hardware got good enough for any competent art director to make his vision come to life in a video game. Since then, the good looking games have been far more dependent on art than they have on hardware. The N64/PS1 era wasn't quite there, and even the PS2 was somewhat lacking due to poor texturing (yes, PS2 fanboys, your system was the least powerful, despite what Sony marketing says. Sorry.), but the XBox and Gamecube were both capable enough that any improvements are really just incremental -- and HD resolution is very much just an incremental improvement.
Oh, and for game recommendations? I have about 20 Wii games, all of which I consider to be worth owning, and there are several titles that I would like, but haven't had time to play. I'm not going to bother listing them, because I suspect that we have substantially different tastes in games. The fact that you spend time paying attention to the resolution suggests to me that my approach of actually, you know, playing the game and finding fun ones won't work for you.
- If its broken, you have to wait for a patch. - If it lacks features, you have to wait for the next version, and pray that it supports your operating system. - If the performance sucks, you have to deal with it.
None of this has to do with an open vs. closed standard. You, as a random programmer, may be able to fix a bug in whatever OpenGL implementation you're using, and that's fine. But the complaints that people have (including John Carmack) are not with the implementations -- they're with the OpenGL standard itself; and no, you cannot, as a random programmer, do a single thing about shortcomings of the standard.
New jobs will be created by those unemployed people.
Maybe at the rate of 1 in 100 jobs to unemployed people.
If you think that a significant percentage unemployed people will spontaneously create new jobs with all their newly-found free time, you're delusional.
Somebody needs to teach you what the insurance racket actually is. Its legalized gambling, and might soon to be required-be-law gambling. Fuck you are all your asshat liberal friends who want to force me to place wagers.
No, what the 'liberals' want is a single-payer system, which is the cheapest and most effective option, and the only real solution to getting rid of the insurance racket.
Unfortunately, because of all the foot dragging by the Republican party (seriously, they contributed *nothing* to the debate -- it was like watching a toddler scream at his parents "I don't wanna!"), demonization of government-run health care, and the corrupting influence of insurance lobbyists, we're going to get a bill that's, in all honesty, the worst of all options.
You seem to acknowledge that the insurance industry isn't the way to go. What's your solution? Everyone pay out of pocket?
If your devs had access to make changes to the production servers, then the failure was not with them -- the failure was on the system administrator.
As a developer, I try to have *no* access to any production system. If you're connected to the prod database server to, say, look something up for a customer (which shouldn't happen -- you should have tools for this -- but it does), it's far too easy to forget that you're connected to prod when you go back to dev-related tasks and accidentally wipe out a table.
I hate having to be extra-careful to make sure that I'm not in prod. I'd much rather just know that I have no access to production so that I couldn't make changes, intentional or otherwise, at all.
I think it costs more and produces FAR MORE pollution to hire a contractor to go out and knock snow off the light than it does to put the old lamps back in and let them melt the snow with "waste" heat.
Tip: Use of the bolded phrase implies that everything that follows it is either an opinion or "facts" made up on the spot and may be disregarded.
To everyone who thinks that this case really is about her 'blog' (I hesitate to call it a blog -- it's really just a poor homepage that looks like it was ripped out of the 90s) or the use of 'my': you fail. You did exactly what Fox News wanted, you took their word for granted without question and didn't dig any further to find the real story. You will keep repeating the misrepresented version of the story until it becomes "truth" to enough people that the actual truth doesn't matter.
Please, take a look at yourself in the mirror and realize, "yes, I am part of the problem."
To those who went a little further and think it's a free speech issue: I'm with you 100% on the whole free speech thing, but this isn't the issue here. Lose the knee-jerk reactions and calls for impeachment. IMHO, If someone is going to organize a PAC whose stated goal and only reason for existence is to influence an election, they'd damn well better follow the exact letter of the law. I'd much rather this wasn't used to go after some 2-bit organization like Langley's, but it's too dangerous of a precedent to set to *not* go after this sort of clear electoral fraud.
Seriously, I have been applauding Grayson for the most part, but take a dim view of people grasping at technicalities to silence opposition and debate.
I'm in 100% agreement about the importance of political debate. I don't have much sympathy for Langley's site though, because there's none to be found. The entirety of the site seems to be a list of links to news stores from other websites, and a front page with an appeal to free speech and an "Obama & Grayson national debt" (somehow that debt, the vast majority of which was run up during the Reagan and Bush presidencies, must be somehow attributable to Obama and Grayson) ticker.
That's not debate. That's not even an attempt at a debate. I don't know what her position is. I don't know why she's against Greyson. I don't know what ideas she has that she would rather see put in action. All I know is that she thinks Greyson is childish and leftist. It's sad that this is what political 'discussion' has come to in this country. It's even worse that, for some reason, she actually got TV coverage for this site that is completely void of any useful political discourse.
Yep. I mean, something like comparing opposition to a bill to being in favor of slavery. A Democrat would NEVER do something like that.
It's called an analogy, and the analogy was that the conservative forces in the US have historically opposed many things that, in hindsight, turned out to be good. (IIRC, it was actually the democratic party that opposed banning slavery, with democrats being the "conservatives" of the time and the republicans being the agents of change)
How is it that the entire conservative base seems to have so much trouble understanding analogies? Are you one of those morons that also thought that "lipstick on a pig" was insinuating that Palin was the pig?
How is a professor to know who is "just ranting" and who might be mentally unbalanced? I say, a prudent move by the prof.
Here's a radical, idealistic idea: how about if the professors actually get to know their students? And not just the ones that get spots to help them on their research?
There might have been a 100 other universities that cautioned individual students quietly that didn't make news.
That's precisely the point that GP was trying to make.
If 100 other universities ignored similar posts, and nobody ended up stabbed in the throat, then odds are good that this case wouldn't have ended in a throat stabbing either.
That said, I can hardly fault the university, but not because I think they're protecting their students. This is simply a CYA move by them to hopefully save themselves from litigation for the 1/1,000,000 student that *does* go on a throat stabbing spree -- now the victims families can't look at Facebook and say, "You knew! You should have done something!"
Slashdot Mirror
So if I go and sign up for web hosting and a domain name LetsWatchThisKidGetBullied.com from GoDaddy (analogous to creating the YouTube account), and then upload a single file to this domain that is a video of some kid getting bullied, you're arguing that GoDaddy is culpable for my action? They should have reviewed the video before it was allowed to be "published"?
If not, what do you think is the difference? Is it because my video isn't searchable? (Google might find it eventually if people linked to it) Is it because I paid for the domain hosting, but YouTube accounts are free? If YouTube required a $8 annual fee, would that absolve them from responsibility?
I honestly see exactly zero difference between these two scenarios. A hosting company is providing content delivery on behalf of its (paid or not) users. I don't think there is any reasonable rationale that they should be held accountable for their users' content. This, in effect, makes it impossible to have *any* type of internet hosting company whatsoever. Even forums/blogs would be a huge liability under this decision.
--Jeremy
Oh, so "turn the other cheek" just means that you pretend to roll over, while secretly plotting your revenge?
That definitely sounds Jesus-like.
--Jeremy
I'm just going to put this bluntly: you do not understand how memory works in a modern OS.
An application has no responsibility for things that happen with the swap/page file and disk cache. That's entirely up to the OS. Applications gain their benefits/drawbacks by simply running on the OS.
--Jeremy
Disclaimer: I also have 8GB of RAM, with 64 bit Win7. I also have swap enabled.
At any given time, I generally have Opera, Firefox, and IE all open, usually with at least a dozen tabs open (one Hulu tab is always open for the Daily Show). I also have Visual Studio open, my IM client, a virtual machine or two, and at least a few other applications open. I run WoW with all of this stuff in the background. I have a dual monitor setup, and frequently do stuff on the secondary monitor with WoW open on the main one.
I never have any of the issues you seem to have. I see no swap partition utilization, and no performance issues when switching between applications. And no, this isn't a case of me not knowing how slow my system really is because I don't know what to look for; I know what a slow system feels like and what a fast one feels like.
Yes, you are correct that none of the operations you list benefit from disk caching. I copied a 10GB VM image between drives last night, and it had zero impact on the rest of my system's performance.
Disabling swap *might* gain you a tiny bit of performance in some cases. In most cases, it really won't. And in many cases, having no ability to swap will be a big limitation on what your system can do for such a small benefit.
--Jeremy
Oh, AC, what happened before the god you imply exists? Who made him? Who gave him the power to make the rules?
It's a stupid argument and has no answers, so most rational people don't bother with it and instead focus on what we *can* know.
--Jeremy
You used the wrong one.
--Jeremy
Seriously? Your instincts compel you to violence over a disagreement?
Thankfully, I suspect that you are not representative of the norm.
--Jeremy
You forgot to give them all assault rifles as well.
--Jeremy
Easy: A significant percentage of home schooled kids have parents who care about education and/or spend a lot of time with their kids to make sure they understand the material.
If we suddenly abolished public schools and had everyone homeschool, guess what would happen to those statistics? Do you think that kids with a mom and dad who don't give a shit are going to miraculously get a better education? Note that I have absolutely no problem with home schooling -- I just don't think that it's a valid solution in a vast majority of cases.
Did you never actually think about what those statistics might mean? It's easy to point at a number like, "inner-city kids are 50% more likely to end up in prison" and claim that, well, inner city kids have more criminal tendencies. The statistic itself doesn't answer the biggest question though, which is *why* it is the way it is. And I'd also argue that 33% of homeschoolers doing so for religious reasons is an extremely large number. If we extrapolated that to the entire population, that would mean that not only would 1 in 3 people not necessarily believe in evolution -- they may have never even been exposed to it at all.
Since you like to draw conclusions that aren't available from the numbers you present, I'll throw out an equally invalid one. You assume that because homeschoolers across the board did better on science entry exams, the 33% of religious homeschoolers did better on science entry exams. I'm instead going to assume that the 67% secular did 50% better than public schooled kids, and the 33% religious did 50% worse. Now, as a whole, they still come out ahead, which makes the numbers work -- and before you claim that the numbers don't support my assumption, I'm going to point out that they don't support yours for the exact same reason.
Similar to this situation, 30-40 years ago, people who went to college for further education were generally highly motivated people that were willing to put in more work to improve their education; that meant that, as an employer, if you found someone with a college degree, that person was more likely to be a good hire.
Now, everyone gets a college degree, and in most cases it only means that you at least attended classes for 4 or 5 years and didn't do anything egregious enough to flunk out.
--Jeremy
There are any number of utilities that will give you multiple virtual desktops on Windows, while retaining Windows' native multi-display features.
In fact, one comes from Sysinternals, which is now part of Microsoft itself. It's called Desktops. It only does 4 virtual desktops though, so if that's not enough, you'll have to look elsewhere.
--Jeremy
One of the main purposes of a hash function is to generate a completely unpredictable, but reproducible, key from an input, and to try to avoid collisions as much as possible. So even two similar passwords with only a few differing bits should produce completely different hashes if the system is doing its job.
--Jeremy
This may be difficult for you to understand, but for many people, money is not a primary motivator.
--Jeremy
Unfortunately, the last 8 years of listening to people saying things like that in all seriousness has thrown everyone's sarcasm meters out of calibration.
--Jeremy
This, to me, is hilarious. The RE remakes and RE4 for the Gamecube were, and still are, incredibly pretty games. I might go so far as to say that the Gamecube RE4 was the most graphically impressive game of last generation.
The Wii RE games look as good as or better than the Gamecube ones, but somehow their graphics "suck balls."
IMO, and I've been playing video games since shortly after Pong, last generation the hardware got good enough for any competent art director to make his vision come to life in a video game. Since then, the good looking games have been far more dependent on art than they have on hardware. The N64/PS1 era wasn't quite there, and even the PS2 was somewhat lacking due to poor texturing (yes, PS2 fanboys, your system was the least powerful, despite what Sony marketing says. Sorry.), but the XBox and Gamecube were both capable enough that any improvements are really just incremental -- and HD resolution is very much just an incremental improvement.
Oh, and for game recommendations? I have about 20 Wii games, all of which I consider to be worth owning, and there are several titles that I would like, but haven't had time to play. I'm not going to bother listing them, because I suspect that we have substantially different tastes in games. The fact that you spend time paying attention to the resolution suggests to me that my approach of actually, you know, playing the game and finding fun ones won't work for you.
--Jeremy
None of this has to do with an open vs. closed standard. You, as a random programmer, may be able to fix a bug in whatever OpenGL implementation you're using, and that's fine. But the complaints that people have (including John Carmack) are not with the implementations -- they're with the OpenGL standard itself; and no, you cannot, as a random programmer, do a single thing about shortcomings of the standard.
--Jeremy
I'll bet it will be overturned just like all those state cigarette taxes have been overturned.
--Jeremy
Maybe at the rate of 1 in 100 jobs to unemployed people.
If you think that a significant percentage unemployed people will spontaneously create new jobs with all their newly-found free time, you're delusional.
--Jeremy
No, what the 'liberals' want is a single-payer system, which is the cheapest and most effective option, and the only real solution to getting rid of the insurance racket.
Unfortunately, because of all the foot dragging by the Republican party (seriously, they contributed *nothing* to the debate -- it was like watching a toddler scream at his parents "I don't wanna!"), demonization of government-run health care, and the corrupting influence of insurance lobbyists, we're going to get a bill that's, in all honesty, the worst of all options.
You seem to acknowledge that the insurance industry isn't the way to go. What's your solution? Everyone pay out of pocket?
--Jeremy
If your devs had access to make changes to the production servers, then the failure was not with them -- the failure was on the system administrator.
As a developer, I try to have *no* access to any production system. If you're connected to the prod database server to, say, look something up for a customer (which shouldn't happen -- you should have tools for this -- but it does), it's far too easy to forget that you're connected to prod when you go back to dev-related tasks and accidentally wipe out a table.
I hate having to be extra-careful to make sure that I'm not in prod. I'd much rather just know that I have no access to production so that I couldn't make changes, intentional or otherwise, at all.
--Jeremy
Tip: Use of the bolded phrase implies that everything that follows it is either an opinion or "facts" made up on the spot and may be disregarded.
--Jeremy
To everyone who thinks that this case really is about her 'blog' (I hesitate to call it a blog -- it's really just a poor homepage that looks like it was ripped out of the 90s) or the use of 'my': you fail. You did exactly what Fox News wanted, you took their word for granted without question and didn't dig any further to find the real story. You will keep repeating the misrepresented version of the story until it becomes "truth" to enough people that the actual truth doesn't matter.
Please, take a look at yourself in the mirror and realize, "yes, I am part of the problem."
To those who went a little further and think it's a free speech issue: I'm with you 100% on the whole free speech thing, but this isn't the issue here. Lose the knee-jerk reactions and calls for impeachment. IMHO, If someone is going to organize a PAC whose stated goal and only reason for existence is to influence an election, they'd damn well better follow the exact letter of the law. I'd much rather this wasn't used to go after some 2-bit organization like Langley's, but it's too dangerous of a precedent to set to *not* go after this sort of clear electoral fraud.
--Jeremy
Seriously, I have been applauding Grayson for the most part, but take a dim view of people grasping at technicalities to silence opposition and debate.
I'm in 100% agreement about the importance of political debate. I don't have much sympathy for Langley's site though, because there's none to be found. The entirety of the site seems to be a list of links to news stores from other websites, and a front page with an appeal to free speech and an "Obama & Grayson national debt" (somehow that debt, the vast majority of which was run up during the Reagan and Bush presidencies, must be somehow attributable to Obama and Grayson) ticker.
That's not debate. That's not even an attempt at a debate. I don't know what her position is. I don't know why she's against Greyson. I don't know what ideas she has that she would rather see put in action. All I know is that she thinks Greyson is childish and leftist. It's sad that this is what political 'discussion' has come to in this country. It's even worse that, for some reason, she actually got TV coverage for this site that is completely void of any useful political discourse.
--Jeremy
Yep. I mean, something like comparing opposition to a bill to being in favor of slavery. A Democrat would NEVER do something like that.
It's called an analogy, and the analogy was that the conservative forces in the US have historically opposed many things that, in hindsight, turned out to be good. (IIRC, it was actually the democratic party that opposed banning slavery, with democrats being the "conservatives" of the time and the republicans being the agents of change)
How is it that the entire conservative base seems to have so much trouble understanding analogies? Are you one of those morons that also thought that "lipstick on a pig" was insinuating that Palin was the pig?
--Jeremy
Here's a radical, idealistic idea: how about if the professors actually get to know their students? And not just the ones that get spots to help them on their research?
--Jeremy
That's precisely the point that GP was trying to make.
If 100 other universities ignored similar posts, and nobody ended up stabbed in the throat, then odds are good that this case wouldn't have ended in a throat stabbing either.
That said, I can hardly fault the university, but not because I think they're protecting their students. This is simply a CYA move by them to hopefully save themselves from litigation for the 1/1,000,000 student that *does* go on a throat stabbing spree -- now the victims families can't look at Facebook and say, "You knew! You should have done something!"
--Jeremy