Still fails badly though, because the task manager will show lots of available memory when lot of caching is being done, depending on how the system is tuned. (sometimes known as swappiness in Linux, I'm not entirely sure where to find the tuning parameters in Windows). It's not very hard to find systems that consider more than 30% memory available, but are considerably slowed down by swap activity. Of course, the only way to really prove that is with some kind of swap monitor that looks for excessive swap usage (in particular, watch for systems that need to swap out at the same time as they swap in.) But without keeping a hawk eye on minute by minute page faults, I always find the commit charge to be a very reliable eyeballs estimate. If you have a system with 2 GB of memory and 3GB of commit, it's almost always a given you will soon suffer from memory starvation.
Both articles miss some very big and important points. Back in the day of Windows 2000 and XP, the Task Manager chart reported the memory comit charge. Basically, that was the amount of memory applications (and Windows) requested allocated. This does not mean that much memory was actually used, but with the exception of very badly written/buggy programs, it should be close. As a rule of thumb, if you look at that and see that your commit is significantly larger than your RAM, you know you're probably in trouble and will be very reliant on swap.
Windows Vista and 7 report something completely different. The chart shows ram memory used minus cache, an almost useless metric, but it does not indicate how much 'total' memory, real and virtual, is allocated. If you look at the screenshot in the ars aritcle, you will see that the commit charge is over 3GB. That's a lot of memory, and doesn't include cache!.
At the end of the day, however, a bare bones Windows XP would require about 120MB of memory, whereas Windows 7 is around 1GB. That sounds like a big difference, but we are talking several years of new features and eye candy. Ultimately, when you drill it down, it means that Windows 7 requires $20 more worth of memory. An insignificant issue, so long as you keep that in mind when designing a system for Vista / Windows 7. (ie, make sure that any computer or device destined for those OS's have at least 2GB of ram)
Well, close. Firefox will be unable to include the decoding of h264 right into the browser. But there is already work underway to simply hand over the video to an underlaying OS system, (Gstreamer for Linux, as example.). It will then be up to the user to aquire the required codecs and what not, which can't legally be distributed in North America as entirely free software, (but in practice, patents have never stopped free software before, only creates annoying red tape.) Gstream and ffmpeg have been able to handle h264 for longer than I remember, and I don't expect that to change at all. It's probably a good thing that Firefox will use existing software rather than creating yet another decoder to deal with.
Insightful? Office has been able to customize Button Bars *and* menus since 95, at least! And I'll tell you, whoever invented the damned thing never worked a day of phone support in his life. "Click edit menu, and Undo" (Yes I know this is a bad example because of the standard keyboard shortcut). Pretty simple to explain to someone. Now you have to either describe the icon, or have the poor slob over mouse over each icon to read the quick tip!! ARRRGh
Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces
Anyone else get the feeling Dean hasn't really been keeping up with recent developments? If that's IE's general manager, it explains much.
I think you are confusing the terminology used by google in this report. If you have specific machines or DIMMS causing problems, those are classified by google as hard errors (ie, an error that is caused by poorly performing or outright deffective hardware.). The so called soft errors are errors that can randomly 'just happen' anywhere.
A terminal error, in google terms, is called an Uncorrectable error, and they make no effort to determine if it's soft or hard, the machine is simply removed and the affected DIMM replaced.
Memtest would catch the errors that occur on it's watch (if the same error were to happen on non-ecc, and therefore not be corrected by the hardware before memtest even sees it).. However, memtest does not detect the errors that happen when it's not running, which should be the point of of ECC, think of it as an always on memtest that keeps your pc going even in the face of failures.
What I see here that I find odd, however, is that Google (and presumably other large data centre's) were operating under the presumption that memory errors are just normal and to keep on going so long as the ECC was able to correct them. That's what I find hard for my small system mindset to comprehend. In my world, when hardware looks like it's unreliable, I schedule a replacement.
My takeaway from this paper is that maybe google should hire more technicians who are experienced with non-ecc ram systems. They even believed, prior to this study, that soft errors were the most common error state. I could have told you from the start that was bunk. In over 15 years of burn-in tests as part of pc maintenance, the number of soft-errors observed is... 0. Either the hardware can make it through the test with no error, or there is a DIMM that will produce several errors over a 24 hour test. This doesn't mean that random soft errors never happen when I'm not looking/testing, but the 'conventional wisdom' that soft errors are the predominant memory error doesn't even pass the laugh test.
From looking at the numbers on this report, I get the feeling that hardware vendors are using ECC as an excuse to overlook flaws on flaky hardware. I would now be really interested in a study that compares the real world reliability of ECC vs non-ECC hardware that has been properly QC'd. I'll wager the results would be very interesting, even of ECC still proves itself worth the extra money.
You do realize that plastic is made from (drum roll) oil! It's a petroleum product in the first place.. this is simply reclaiming some of that after the plastic has served its' purposed.
It's not an issue exactly, but I can't off the top of my head recall a time that MS has released an out of schedule patch that wasn't to fix a problem already well known and being actively exploited.
Common misconception,,, the 3 to 10 years is is the expected lifespan of RW media. R media, barring defects, should last over 25 years under normal storage. (Should definitely outlast our ability to find readers for them, in any case.)
Linux software raid will read both drives independently, but only 1 drive per process. So if you have two processes reading different data files sequentially, your total throughput will be twice the max of the individual hard drives, (whereas if you tried this on 1 drive, your throughput would be less than half max thanks to head seek movements as the drive switches between files.)
No, you aren't a dumb ass at all... Ubuntu switched networking configuration to a total mess with the so called network manager, and configuring a static IP with that is infamously error prone. The most common advise is to remove network manager and replace it with either WICD or gnome-network-admin, depending on your needs.
Sorry, but that is just entirely false. If you download something from the net, even if you got it for free, you do not automatically have the 'right' to give it to someone else, and you will most certainly get spanked by any judge if you try "selling" to someone else.
The plaintif doesn't even have to prove damages. Copyright infringement carries a stipulative minimum damage in North America.
Dude, keep up with the news. It's not in production yet, and I doubt it will float, (does that figure of speech work? after all, turds float), but some dudes at MS are seriously proposing a future version of windows that rents at $1.50 / hour as an alternative on sub $300 computers. (so the cost of Windows doesn't double the retail price of netbooks.)
That seems the best info on the program I can find on the program with a quick google search. There is a ton of people, like librarians and teachers, saying that the nonjudgmental attitude of the dogs helps the kids with confidence to practice more and therefore get better, but that seems to be more op-ed than anything.
And yet, we now have programs at libraries where children read to dogs. To *dogs* because the dogs do not criticize or correct the child, and as a result, the child's reading comprehension level shoots upwards by a few years worth.
I'm not saying I agree with all these new educational reforms, but I sure as hell would want to know what the positive results (if any) have been before whining about how bad it is. If dogs are better at teaching literacy to our kids than traditional education, maybe we should try to learn something from that.
If you provided your changes upstream, obviously you weren't skirting the gpl, in fact or spirit. But complaining that AGPL forces everyone to play by the same rule is just the BSD license whining all over again.. yes, I get it, BSD is *really* free, as in no strings, and GPL/AGPL has strings attached. We all know what those strings are, and those who adopted the GPL license like the share and share alike strings. So please, if you must ride the Whahhhbulance, at least don't do so by sreadding lies like "properties of a EULA in that you can't modify it as you see fit."
The poster has it backwards. AGPL doesn't mean you can't modify.. but it does mean you have to make your modifications available, even if you don't distribute a binary. AGPL is GPL for application providers (who otherwise would be able to skirt gpl entirely by never distributing a binary executable)
Slashdot Mirror
Still fails badly though, because the task manager will show lots of available memory when lot of caching is being done, depending on how the system is tuned. (sometimes known as swappiness in Linux, I'm not entirely sure where to find the tuning parameters in Windows). It's not very hard to find systems that consider more than 30% memory available, but are considerably slowed down by swap activity. Of course, the only way to really prove that is with some kind of swap monitor that looks for excessive swap usage (in particular, watch for systems that need to swap out at the same time as they swap in.) But without keeping a hawk eye on minute by minute page faults, I always find the commit charge to be a very reliable eyeballs estimate. If you have a system with 2 GB of memory and 3GB of commit, it's almost always a given you will soon suffer from memory starvation.
Both articles miss some very big and important points. Back in the day of Windows 2000 and XP, the Task Manager chart reported the memory comit charge. Basically, that was the amount of memory applications (and Windows) requested allocated. This does not mean that much memory was actually used, but with the exception of very badly written/buggy programs, it should be close. As a rule of thumb, if you look at that and see that your commit is significantly larger than your RAM, you know you're probably in trouble and will be very reliant on swap.
Windows Vista and 7 report something completely different. The chart shows ram memory used minus cache, an almost useless metric, but it does not indicate how much 'total' memory, real and virtual, is allocated. If you look at the screenshot in the ars aritcle, you will see that the commit charge is over 3GB. That's a lot of memory, and doesn't include cache!.
At the end of the day, however, a bare bones Windows XP would require about 120MB of memory, whereas Windows 7 is around 1GB. That sounds like a big difference, but we are talking several years of new features and eye candy. Ultimately, when you drill it down, it means that Windows 7 requires $20 more worth of memory. An insignificant issue, so long as you keep that in mind when designing a system for Vista / Windows 7. (ie, make sure that any computer or device destined for those OS's have at least 2GB of ram)
your news is more current than mine, but hardly matters. If Firefox wants to martyr itself, a new and better fork will be up in less than a day.
Well, close. Firefox will be unable to include the decoding of h264 right into the browser. But there is already work underway to simply hand over the video to an underlaying OS system, (Gstreamer for Linux, as example.). It will then be up to the user to aquire the required codecs and what not, which can't legally be distributed in North America as entirely free software, (but in practice, patents have never stopped free software before, only creates annoying red tape.) Gstream and ffmpeg have been able to handle h264 for longer than I remember, and I don't expect that to change at all. It's probably a good thing that Firefox will use existing software rather than creating yet another decoder to deal with.
Insightful? Office has been able to customize Button Bars *and* menus since 95, at least!
And I'll tell you, whoever invented the damned thing never worked a day of phone support in his life. "Click edit menu, and Undo" (Yes I know this is a bad example because of the standard keyboard shortcut). Pretty simple to explain to someone. Now you have to either describe the icon, or have the poor slob over mouse over each icon to read the quick tip!! ARRRGh
Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces
Anyone else get the feeling Dean hasn't really been keeping up with recent developments? If that's IE's general manager, it explains much.
I think you are confusing the terminology used by google in this report. If you have specific machines or DIMMS causing problems, those are classified by google as hard errors (ie, an error that is caused by poorly performing or outright deffective hardware.). The so called soft errors are errors that can randomly 'just happen' anywhere.
A terminal error, in google terms, is called an Uncorrectable error, and they make no effort to determine if it's soft or hard, the machine is simply removed and the affected DIMM replaced.
Memtest would catch the errors that occur on it's watch (if the same error were to happen on non-ecc, and therefore not be corrected by the hardware before memtest even sees it).. However, memtest does not detect the errors that happen when it's not running, which should be the point of of ECC, think of it as an always on memtest that keeps your pc going even in the face of failures.
What I see here that I find odd, however, is that Google (and presumably other large data centre's) were operating under the presumption that memory errors are just normal and to keep on going so long as the ECC was able to correct them. That's what I find hard for my small system mindset to comprehend. In my world, when hardware looks like it's unreliable, I schedule a replacement.
My takeaway from this paper is that maybe google should hire more technicians who are experienced with non-ecc ram systems. They even believed, prior to this study, that soft errors were the most common error state. I could have told you from the start that was bunk. In over 15 years of burn-in tests as part of pc maintenance, the number of soft-errors observed is... 0. Either the hardware can make it through the test with no error, or there is a DIMM that will produce several errors over a 24 hour test. This doesn't mean that random soft errors never happen when I'm not looking/testing, but the 'conventional wisdom' that soft errors are the predominant memory error doesn't even pass the laugh test.
From looking at the numbers on this report, I get the feeling that hardware vendors are using ECC as an excuse to overlook flaws on flaky hardware. I would now be really interested in a study that compares the real world reliability of ECC vs non-ECC hardware that has been properly QC'd. I'll wager the results would be very interesting, even of ECC still proves itself worth the extra money.
You do realize that plastic is made from (drum roll) oil! It's a petroleum product in the first place.. this is simply reclaiming some of that after the plastic has served its' purposed.
Oh god yes,, I've wanted this feature for *years*... I'm surprised it took this long to even get officially proposed.
I've seen ccbill used often:
http://www.ccbill.com/
It's not an issue exactly, but I can't off the top of my head recall a time that MS has released an out of schedule patch that wasn't to fix a problem already well known and being actively exploited.
Common misconception,,, the 3 to 10 years is is the expected lifespan of RW media. R media, barring defects, should last over 25 years under normal storage. (Should definitely outlast our ability to find readers for them, in any case.)
Linux software raid will read both drives independently, but only 1 drive per process. So if you have two processes reading different data files sequentially, your total throughput will be twice the max of the individual hard drives, (whereas if you tried this on 1 drive, your throughput would be less than half max thanks to head seek movements as the drive switches between files.)
In Japan? Look outside your box once in a while, it's a big world. That bottle was uncorked when computers first achieved 16 color palettes.
No, you aren't a dumb ass at all... Ubuntu switched networking configuration to a total mess with the so called network manager, and configuring a static IP with that is infamously error prone. The most common advise is to remove network manager and replace it with either WICD or gnome-network-admin, depending on your needs.
That thing can shake my whole apartment. Is anyone testing what effect this thing has on my hard drives when listening to music/playing a game?
Sorry, but that is just entirely false. If you download something from the net, even if you got it for free, you do not automatically have the 'right' to give it to someone else, and you will most certainly get spanked by any judge if you try "selling" to someone else.
The plaintif doesn't even have to prove damages. Copyright infringement carries a stipulative minimum damage in North America.
Dude, keep up with the news. It's not in production yet, and I doubt it will float, (does that figure of speech work? after all, turds float), but some dudes at MS are seriously proposing a future version of windows that rents at $1.50 / hour as an alternative on sub $300 computers. (so the cost of Windows doesn't double the retail price of netbooks.)
Clicky
That seems the best info on the program I can find on the program with a quick google search. There is a ton of people, like librarians and teachers, saying that the nonjudgmental attitude of the dogs helps the kids with confidence to practice more and therefore get better, but that seems to be more op-ed than anything.
And yet, we now have programs at libraries where children read to dogs. To *dogs* because the dogs do not criticize or correct the child, and as a result, the child's reading comprehension level shoots upwards by a few years worth.
I'm not saying I agree with all these new educational reforms, but I sure as hell would want to know what the positive results (if any) have been before whining about how bad it is. If dogs are better at teaching literacy to our kids than traditional education, maybe we should try to learn something from that.
If you provided your changes upstream, obviously you weren't skirting the gpl, in fact or spirit. But complaining that AGPL forces everyone to play by the same rule is just the BSD license whining all over again.. yes, I get it, BSD is *really* free, as in no strings, and GPL/AGPL has strings attached. We all know what those strings are, and those who adopted the GPL license like the share and share alike strings. So please, if you must ride the Whahhhbulance, at least don't do so by sreadding lies like "properties of a EULA in that you can't modify it as you see fit."
The poster has it backwards. AGPL doesn't mean you can't modify.. but it does mean you have to make your modifications available, even if you don't distribute a binary. AGPL is GPL for application providers (who otherwise would be able to skirt gpl entirely by never distributing a binary executable)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
This wasn't a spoof, but an honest banner ad at ign.com this morning that linked back to MS campaign site.
MS advert