I grew a beard, started wearing only t-shirts and jeans, and developed a surly attitude. The group accepted me, and I've never worked a full day in my life since then.
Tog addresses this very concept: you think you're faster, but they found that people aren't faster with keyboard shortcuts. That was the study, that was the finding. End of fucking story.
People lie, the stopwatch doesn't. Dammit, when did ignorance become a point of view?
This was helpful, as was the long post below that had a fantastic overview of the process behind a VM. Even if it wasn't correct, it helped me form a mental picture of what was happening.
It sounds, though, that the major source of complication is the multi-purpose nature of the kernel: scalability problems, for want of a better term. A database server is different from a desktop from a mainframe from a PocketPC.
Is it worth the effort to modularize the VM subsystem? If not completely modularized, enough parameters moved to configurable settings in/proc files where these decisions can be made more sanely for different environments? (this may be the case now -- I have no idea, since my customization needs have never met that level of granularity)
Thus, RedHat Server has a different VM than RedHat Desktop, and Debian users can apt-get a configuration for their database server.
If a VM is hard to engineer because of the different ways it is used, then engineer it to be flexible for different uses. Not many bridges are built to support pedestrian, automobile and train traffic all at the same time (and still meet community standards for visual appeal).
It's not simply the physical motion that affects the speed: it is the mental interruption where the brain has to stop it's current task, retrieve the key-commands, then return to the previous mental task that causes the users to slow down.
I've measured my programming speed between Emacs and BBEdit: it's very close, but BBEdit comes out on top (for most things -- there are some tasks that Emacs is so obviously superior it's not even funny). But please don't hold up Emacs command keys as a good example -- Emacs without a mouse is horribly, horribly slow.
I believe that, for a commercial UNIX, if you need swap, then you didn't put in enough RAM. If you could buy the system in the first place, you can afford more RAM. If the OS doesn't support enough RAM, get a version that does.
This I agree with. It was different 5-10 years ago, when 128 megs of RAM would buy you a pretty nice Honda. Now that you get RAM with your Happy Meals, it's quite different.
Following your logic, a VM will mostly be used in a workstation or desktop situation -- server applications aren't a real focal point. The scheduling is fundamentally different between a workstation (say, a hacker's main axe from which he runs Emacs and gdb, or a 3D animator's bench that runs nothing but Maya) and a desktop that is likely to have 4 or 5 apps open at once with constant switching between them.
Isn't this another argument for modularity of the VM, or at least the scheduler? Or am I missing something more fundamental?
Also, the VM underlies a host of other bits of the OS, and as they change, so the VM has to change to accomodate them - for example, Linux's zero-copy unix domain sockets, or Linux's VFS layer.
In short, no, VM design is not 100% solved.
That's interesting. I'm operating on my simplistic, naive notion that a VM is "the hard drive, where you dump pages when you're short on RAM or they get really stale". Thus, in my simple little world, the VM subsystem is affected the most by tweaks to the scheduler that swaps out pages. Is that where the major differences between the two VM schemes lie?
If so, wouldn't it be a worthwhile effort to modularize that part out? (suddenly I see kernel hackers turning white as a sheet, gripping their chair arms in a fit of white-knuckled fear and loathing)
Quite often I get the feeling that Linux and BSD are doing quite a bit of "me-too"-isms in an attempt to catch up with the mainstream OSes--including MS, Apple and commercial Unixen.
I read this story and wonder if I should still be getting the same feeling -- isn't a VM subsystem mostly a solved problem? Or am I reading this wrong, and this is merely tweaking and specialization?
Since I'm no Alan Cox (I'm closer to Alan Thicke), I can't see the truth of the matter, but I get the feeling that we're doing a lot of walking in a tight circle on the path, while others have already left the forest.
Funny, I had the impression that the large piece of the former Mexican territory was either stolen or forcefully acquired from Mexico 150 years ago or something.
I read once that Mexico was mad at America, because we stole half of their country; and not only that, we stole the half with all the roads.
History isn't written by the winners or the losers, it's written by Comparative Lit majors who didn't have the alcohol tolerance to be inscrutable authors.
It's not neccessarily a fog safety device. It's used extensively down here to bring attention to stoplights, especially ones that are as you described -- on a lonely road with few stoplights.
They are quite annoying late at night, when you're going home after a long day of staring at a computer screen and there's this damn seizure inducing halogen light going blink blink blink at you...
There are specialty security camera/VCR combinations that are built to handle this kind of storage.
If you are willing to sacrifice full 30fps, you can use these. The way VHS is laid down on the tape is the data is written diagonally across the width of the tape. Look at your VCR heads -- see how they're cockeyed? that's intentional.
These specialty camera/VCR combos lay down the data from each camera on successive stripes, and can display 9 different cameras at once on a regular TV screen. You can choose a single camera to fill the screen, but at a reduced framerate.
This will reduce your storage needs by a factor of 9, but at the cost of framerate. This wil not be able to be digitized, unless there are specialty capture cards that can handle this.
From your description, it sounds like you're setting this solution up for a casino, or something very similar. If that's the case, you NEED the full framerate.
You are at the fork in the road -- fast, cheap, reliable: pick any two.
Instead of spending *even more money* on our prison population turning a trip to the cooler into a semi-vaction where society's thugs and hoodlums can hang out, pump iron, and chill with their friends, we make them work for their food and take away their TV.
After a long, back-breaking day in the fields growing their corn and beans, if they want entertainment, we can set up a lending program with the nearest library (since we're paying for the library anyway).
I'm quite curious where this idea of "rehabilitation" comes from, when the entire point of prison is to punish criminals and keep them segragated from society.
If recidivism is your worry, we can cure it. Chop the hands off thieves and castrate sexual predators. How's that?
For your first l33t hacking job on this onerous and invasive abortion of an idea, I recommend cloning Larry Ellison's ID card.
Imagine the ease with which we can catch all terrorists and thugs since they'll all be named "Larry". What a great concept!
Thanks for your assistance in this matter.
See, if all you chuckleheads had spent gobs of time and money on bassing out your car as a teenager, you could be deaf like me and think a 96kbps MP3 sounds just fine.
It's a superior cultural advantage, because I can fit more stolen music on smaller hard drives than the rest of you.
The biggest use of RAM drives on Macs were for Powerbook users. With a lightweight word processor (Word 5 *cough*) and a lightweight System folder, you could spin down your hard drive, dim the screen, and get gobs of battery time out of those old machines, and Oh! the blissful silence!
You'd just want to save your files to the hard drive every now and then to prevent Murphy from visiting.
I'm not sure I understand. Why should a relational database -- a hugely complex and complicated program that is used to do complex and complicated things, in an environment that can be set up into hundreds of different configurations -- be easy to install?
When I make the decision to use something other than a flat-file and go with a relational database, I usually have a larger window than 5 minutes to setup, install, make structural and architectural decisions. The difference between 5 minutes and a day is irrelevant when you're talking about a development time of weeks or months.
I've never used MySQL. I've found that anything that I don't need transactions and stored procedures for, I can accomplish quite well with simple flat files.
If you're looking to run a party, it's not as much of a party as it is for the party goers.
The people who set up and organize it will probably not be playing as many games, nor having as much fun as the guests because they'll be ironing out problems, setting out food, crimping another network cable, etc.
If this article helps them get things better organized beforehand, they then have the opportunity to play more and have more fun themselves... and thus be more likely to run another in the future.
Lot's of improvements (i.e. you can edit files via FTP!)
Ye gods -- BBEdit has been able to do that for YEARS! On Emacs, I routinely open files by tunnelling from my laptop, to my server, to another server and open the files remotely that way -- tunnelling through ssh, telnet, or a combination of the two -- (check out TRAMP -- a lovely bit of wonderfullness).
But now that VIM has it?!?! It's a freakin' BREAKTHROUGH!
If your boss (the guy you answer to 90% of the time) isn't comfortable with telecommuting, you'll never get the idea to fly.
A previous boss of mine wasn't super-comfortable with technology period -- he would never go for telecommuting. Now I'm my own boss -- and I'm all for telecommuting! As far as I'm concerned, you don't even have to be here for meetings, as long as you can use IRC.
If your immediate boss is comfortable with the idea (or can be made comfortable), offer a trial period of (say) 30-60 days. Do this before you buy a house 2-hours away. At the end of the trial period, if your boss is on-board with the idea, he can champion the idea to the higher-ups (if neccessary).
You may have to dangle a carrot -- a cut in pay or perks. This is your last card to play -- the company will save money with you not being there automatically (less electricity, less water, not buying your drinks/coffee/etc.) -- you sacrificing more is asking quite a bit. But, if you really want to telecommute, it is something that you can put on the table.
But definitely try it before you commit -- you may find that it sucks terribly to make your home an extension of your work. Some people do. They find it oppressive, like they can never truly leave work. Try it, and if you and your boss likes it, it should be smooth sailing.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew a beard, started wearing only t-shirts and jeans, and developed a surly attitude. The group accepted me, and I've never worked a full day in my life since then.
Tog addresses this very concept: you think you're faster, but they found that people aren't faster with keyboard shortcuts. That was the study, that was the finding. End of fucking story.
People lie, the stopwatch doesn't. Dammit, when did ignorance become a point of view?
Somewhat apropos...
A Swedish government official, in praise of Sweden's socialist government, said to Milton Friedman, "In Scandanavia, we have no poverty."
Milton Friedman replied, "That's good. In America, among Scandanavians, we have no poverty either."
It all depends on the color of the glass through which you look.
This was helpful, as was the long post below that had a fantastic overview of the process behind a VM. Even if it wasn't correct, it helped me form a mental picture of what was happening.
It sounds, though, that the major source of complication is the multi-purpose nature of the kernel: scalability problems, for want of a better term. A database server is different from a desktop from a mainframe from a PocketPC.
Is it worth the effort to modularize the VM subsystem? If not completely modularized, enough parameters moved to configurable settings in /proc files where these decisions can be made more sanely for different environments? (this may be the case now -- I have no idea, since my customization needs have never met that level of granularity)
Thus, RedHat Server has a different VM than RedHat Desktop, and Debian users can apt-get a configuration for their database server.
If a VM is hard to engineer because of the different ways it is used, then engineer it to be flexible for different uses. Not many bridges are built to support pedestrian, automobile and train traffic all at the same time (and still meet community standards for visual appeal).
Did you read the linked articles?
It's not simply the physical motion that affects the speed: it is the mental interruption where the brain has to stop it's current task, retrieve the key-commands, then return to the previous mental task that causes the users to slow down.
I've measured my programming speed between Emacs and BBEdit: it's very close, but BBEdit comes out on top (for most things -- there are some tasks that Emacs is so obviously superior it's not even funny). But please don't hold up Emacs command keys as a good example -- Emacs without a mouse is horribly, horribly slow.
But believe what you want.
This I agree with. It was different 5-10 years ago, when 128 megs of RAM would buy you a pretty nice Honda. Now that you get RAM with your Happy Meals, it's quite different.
Following your logic, a VM will mostly be used in a workstation or desktop situation -- server applications aren't a real focal point. The scheduling is fundamentally different between a workstation (say, a hacker's main axe from which he runs Emacs and gdb, or a 3D animator's bench that runs nothing but Maya) and a desktop that is likely to have 4 or 5 apps open at once with constant switching between them.
Isn't this another argument for modularity of the VM, or at least the scheduler? Or am I missing something more fundamental?
That's interesting. I'm operating on my simplistic, naive notion that a VM is "the hard drive, where you dump pages when you're short on RAM or they get really stale". Thus, in my simple little world, the VM subsystem is affected the most by tweaks to the scheduler that swaps out pages. Is that where the major differences between the two VM schemes lie?
If so, wouldn't it be a worthwhile effort to modularize that part out? (suddenly I see kernel hackers turning white as a sheet, gripping their chair arms in a fit of white-knuckled fear and loathing)
I'm just a twink asking dumb questions...
That makes sense, but it still sounds to me that the bickering between Rik and Andrea's VM is more fundamental.
(which means little, since I only understand one word in three in a technical comparison between the two)
Quite often I get the feeling that Linux and BSD are doing quite a bit of "me-too"-isms in an attempt to catch up with the mainstream OSes--including MS, Apple and commercial Unixen.
I read this story and wonder if I should still be getting the same feeling -- isn't a VM subsystem mostly a solved problem? Or am I reading this wrong, and this is merely tweaking and specialization?
Since I'm no Alan Cox (I'm closer to Alan Thicke), I can't see the truth of the matter, but I get the feeling that we're doing a lot of walking in a tight circle on the path, while others have already left the forest.
I read once that Mexico was mad at America, because we stole half of their country; and not only that, we stole the half with all the roads.
History isn't written by the winners or the losers, it's written by Comparative Lit majors who didn't have the alcohol tolerance to be inscrutable authors.
It's not neccessarily a fog safety device. It's used extensively down here to bring attention to stoplights, especially ones that are as you described -- on a lonely road with few stoplights.
They are quite annoying late at night, when you're going home after a long day of staring at a computer screen and there's this damn seizure inducing halogen light going blink blink blink at you...
It's horrible, I tell you, _horrible_
If you are willing to sacrifice full 30fps, you can use these. The way VHS is laid down on the tape is the data is written diagonally across the width of the tape. Look at your VCR heads -- see how they're cockeyed? that's intentional.
These specialty camera/VCR combos lay down the data from each camera on successive stripes, and can display 9 different cameras at once on a regular TV screen. You can choose a single camera to fill the screen, but at a reduced framerate.
This will reduce your storage needs by a factor of 9, but at the cost of framerate. This wil not be able to be digitized, unless there are specialty capture cards that can handle this.
From your description, it sounds like you're setting this solution up for a casino, or something very similar. If that's the case, you NEED the full framerate.
You are at the fork in the road -- fast, cheap, reliable: pick any two.
I got an idea...
Instead of spending *even more money* on our prison population turning a trip to the cooler into a semi-vaction where society's thugs and hoodlums can hang out, pump iron, and chill with their friends, we make them work for their food and take away their TV.
After a long, back-breaking day in the fields growing their corn and beans, if they want entertainment, we can set up a lending program with the nearest library (since we're paying for the library anyway).
I'm quite curious where this idea of "rehabilitation" comes from, when the entire point of prison is to punish criminals and keep them segragated from society.
If recidivism is your worry, we can cure it. Chop the hands off thieves and castrate sexual predators. How's that?
Read Slashdot in "light" mode. It is wonderful. It's like I wish every web log was. It's almost, dare I say, perfect.
Trust me on this -- once you eliminate the awful HTML-hackery that makes Slashdot such a dog's breakfast, you'll never go back.
I know quite a few electricians whose natural skin resistance is such that they can grab 120V lines with their bare hands and not be shocked.
I've never heard of ANYONE who'd test it with their mouth. I think they should test some 277V mains the same way and become Darwin Award nominees.
For your first l33t hacking job on this onerous and invasive abortion of an idea, I recommend cloning Larry Ellison's ID card.
Imagine the ease with which we can catch all terrorists and thugs since they'll all be named "Larry". What a great concept! Thanks for your assistance in this matter.
See, if all you chuckleheads had spent gobs of time and money on bassing out your car as a teenager, you could be deaf like me and think a 96kbps MP3 sounds just fine.
It's a superior cultural advantage, because I can fit more stolen music on smaller hard drives than the rest of you.
The biggest use of RAM drives on Macs were for Powerbook users. With a lightweight word processor (Word 5 *cough*) and a lightweight System folder, you could spin down your hard drive, dim the screen, and get gobs of battery time out of those old machines, and Oh! the blissful silence!
You'd just want to save your files to the hard drive every now and then to prevent Murphy from visiting.
I'm not sure I understand. Why should a relational database -- a hugely complex and complicated program that is used to do complex and complicated things, in an environment that can be set up into hundreds of different configurations -- be easy to install?
When I make the decision to use something other than a flat-file and go with a relational database, I usually have a larger window than 5 minutes to setup, install, make structural and architectural decisions. The difference between 5 minutes and a day is irrelevant when you're talking about a development time of weeks or months.
I've never used MySQL. I've found that anything that I don't need transactions and stored procedures for, I can accomplish quite well with simple flat files.
If you're looking to run a party, it's not as much of a party as it is for the party goers.
The people who set up and organize it will probably not be playing as many games, nor having as much fun as the guests because they'll be ironing out problems, setting out food, crimping another network cable, etc.
If this article helps them get things better organized beforehand, they then have the opportunity to play more and have more fun themselves... and thus be more likely to run another in the future.
So stick a sock in it, buddy.
Ye gods -- BBEdit has been able to do that for YEARS! On Emacs, I routinely open files by tunnelling from my laptop, to my server, to another server and open the files remotely that way -- tunnelling through ssh, telnet, or a combination of the two -- (check out TRAMP -- a lovely bit of wonderfullness).
But now that VIM has it?!?! It's a freakin' BREAKTHROUGH!
I guess most people don't get sarcasm anymore, either....
Casting pearls before swine...
Dear Slashdot editors,
I read one of your stories today. It wasn't very good, I didn't find it interesting, and it was filled with grammatical errors.
I don't think I'll be reading your little site anymore.
Love,
A Reader
I'd like to see Quake running on this turdly P-133 I've typing on right now. Now THAT would impress me.
If your boss (the guy you answer to 90% of the time) isn't comfortable with telecommuting, you'll never get the idea to fly.
A previous boss of mine wasn't super-comfortable with technology period -- he would never go for telecommuting. Now I'm my own boss -- and I'm all for telecommuting! As far as I'm concerned, you don't even have to be here for meetings, as long as you can use IRC.
If your immediate boss is comfortable with the idea (or can be made comfortable), offer a trial period of (say) 30-60 days. Do this before you buy a house 2-hours away. At the end of the trial period, if your boss is on-board with the idea, he can champion the idea to the higher-ups (if neccessary).
You may have to dangle a carrot -- a cut in pay or perks. This is your last card to play -- the company will save money with you not being there automatically (less electricity, less water, not buying your drinks/coffee/etc.) -- you sacrificing more is asking quite a bit. But, if you really want to telecommute, it is something that you can put on the table.
But definitely try it before you commit -- you may find that it sucks terribly to make your home an extension of your work. Some people do. They find it oppressive, like they can never truly leave work. Try it, and if you and your boss likes it, it should be smooth sailing.