Why chop off fingers or pluck eyeballs when "Scraped up my fingers this weekend in a bicycle accident, and the stupid scanner doesn't recognize me. Can you open the door for me?" or "'Contacts have been irritating my eyes lately so the damn machine won't validate, can you buzz me in?" work just as well?
Swapping the data you're trying to copy during a copy operation is idiotic, so I must be misinterpreting what you are trying to say.
If I copy a 600MB file from a cd onto a HD, here's what I think *should* happen: 1. Allocate the first page for the new file. Setup the destination file structures in the filesystem and mark the page as filesystem cache. 2. Start reading file from cd into the memory allocated for the file (this will mark that page as dirty). 3. After finishing that page, allocate another page and update the filesystem file structure accordingly. Continue reading. 4. Repeat 3 until entire file has been read. Note that allocating the new pages may cause some of the first pages to be written to disk (sync-ed not swapped), but in most cases should not cause any swapping since filesystem buffers are a lower priority than all but the oldest application pages. 5. When the entire file has been read into memory (as part of the filesystem cache), the copy is said to be complete. 6. After a certain period of time, or due to demand for more virtual memory or filesystem cache or a 'sync' system call, the file will be completely written to disk.
You probably meant something like what I said, though my system doesn't end up with the entire disk cached into memory. It also is less likely to swap out application data that will need to be swapped in once the copy completes. Swapping application data to perform a file copy is >2 times slower (2 writes and probably 1 read) than a cached write that I described.
That said, when I use the 'cp' command to copy a file on Linux, I'm not entirely sure what the kernel does. I know that 'cp' will open the source O_RDONLY and then open the destination O_WRONLY, and then reads from the source into its buffer and writes from its buffer to the destination (with some special cases for sparse files). I'm not sure if they do a special case optimization for this in the kernel or not, but if they don't, then it would read the source into the filesystem cache, and copy part of it into 'cp''s buffer, switch to usermode, execute a couple lines, copy part of 'cp''s buffer into a separate filesystem cache entry, and repeat until done. (this would strain the filesystem cache, and cause lots of context switching) Of course since moving and copying files is such a frequent activity, I would expect them to either special-case it out the wazoo (who knows?), or have a syscall specifically for copies and moves (which Linux doesn't).
Why would it need swap for that? The kernel pages aren't going to be dirty -- they're executable, read only. Good memory management doesn't write clean pages to swap. Since those pages haven't changed since they were pulled from disk, they can just as easily be pulled from disk as from swap. Also, good memory management only swaps when more space is needed by active applications than is currently available. If I have gobs of RAM to spare, it shouldn't swap at all.
I don't know what windows is compulsively swapping, but compared to linux on the same machine, windows seemed to swap constantly. I have a lot of RAM in there, so I turned off swapping in windows, and haven't had any problems (but then again, I only use it to play games...).
Even if XP embedded is as flexible as you say, it would not be a good choice for a comercial release of this particular project. XP embedded is not a real-time OS. It doesn't have the characteristics that you would need in a dependable real-time system. The processor and storage are also overkill for this application and would need to be reduced significantly to cut costs for comercial release.
That being said, I think I understand their reasoning behind using XP embedded and C#.NET for this project. Projects like this are just as much research as they are a learning experience for the students. In order for the students to be able to contribute and do the majority of the work, it is beneficial if they can work with an environment they are used to. I do not go to Cornell, but I can guess that they probably teach their programming courses in C# with Visual Studio. Projects like this provide an opportunity for the students to do something with the stuff they learned. Using XP embedded means that they can get started right away without having to learn assembly or C.
I see this sort of thing at the University I attend. Here they have a group of students working with a few faculty members designing a robot. The programming is Java. Why Java? Because that's all the CS department here teaches (lousy bastards dropped C...grr), and since the EE department has no say in this, they go with what they've got. That being said, their robot doesn't take a 800mhz crusoe and 1gb of storage....They're using a [rather beefy] java-based microcontroller (though I wonder if the crusoe was cheaper...).
In both cases the university chose what fit best in their particular academic setting. There's more to these decisions than the project at hand. A real engineer would understand that.
I'm sure if the founding fathers had thought that people should have a right for P2P, they would have had the foresight to put it in the constitution. After all, it was obvious in the 1790s that this problem would eventually crop up, so they must have intentionally left that right out of the constitution when they wrote it.
Or did they?
I seem to remember a certain amendment IX that might come into play here:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, unless the government specifically denies you certain rights, you have those rights. The Bill of Rights isn't a white-list of acceptable rights, but merely a guideline that specifies which rights absolutely must not be denied. What part of the law or constitution says that the people are denied the right for P2P?
What's the dual purpose of guns? They're designed to kill. Kill people. Kill animals. Kill stuff. Of course in patriotic god-blessed america its a worse offense to have certain plants in your garden than to kill people.
I don't see how GNU/Linux could possibly be both "ready for the desktop" and the kind of system I would want to use. I don't want something easy to use. I don't want something with shiny a fisher-price GUI and hardware deccelerated anti-aliasing. I want something fast and powerful. I want a system that stays out of my way, and does what I tell it to. There's no way this could even remotely resemble the system for Joe lUser's Desktop.
While I agree that Linux-based apps and libraries need to standardize, I think we need to be cautious as to what standards we decide to use. By using standards we lose the flexibility that makes Linux systems so good today. Standard API's are relatively harmless, but other standardizations are more bothersome. Standardizing on the UI means that you have to get the GNOME and KDE people to agree on which order the buttons go -- but which way is right? Picking one over the other would alienate a lot of users, and there's no clear right or wrong. It's easy to think that standards will solve all our problems, but a lot harder to think of reasonable standards that work.
1. X is not bloated. Have you run X, by itself, with no window manager to hamper it, or even with a "light" window manager? It flies. The only speed problem I've had with X was that when I'm dragging windows around, the other apps freeze (because X is single threaded). I'll admit X is hard to deal with, but in most modern distros it works right out of the box on most hardware, so you don't have to mess with it.
3. Almost all configuration changes can be made with a text editor. Click Click.
4. What isn't there a GUI version of? I mean, you can't really do one for 'sh', 'less', 'more', and 'cd', and I think all the other ones have been covered.
5. I personally am not waiting for the world to change. I will use what I want. If other people find Linux-based systems useful, more power to them. The only reason I might want more people to use Linux is for more hardware support, and since I consider that a pretty selfish reason, I don't think about it. Here you say 'OS' when you mean 'Desktop Environment'. Don't confuse the two. The 'Desktop Environment' should provide a basic interface. Without some amazing AI, any attempts to actively help the user would be clippy all over again. It's better for the 'Desktop Environment' to be a passive entity that the user manipulates. I'm not saying that you should know TCP/IP before using a web browser (you don't even need to know that to use lynx), so this is a strawman. Secondly, no one "expects" people to learn the CLI to organize their pictures and.swx files. There are a bazillion file manager utilities out there, and I'm sure they can click click all they want until they finish. If they really want to leverage the benefits of running a *nix environment and get it all done in a single 200 character long command, however, they're going to have to use the CLI. There's no way around that. I dare you to design a GUI with as much flexibility of the CLI: 1. Automatically recognize new unfamiliar commands and their arguments, and integrate it into the GUI in a rational way. 2. Support the combination of innumerable unspecified commands and their arguments to perform an unspecified task (this may require a new paradigm, because pipes don't make much sense in the GUI world...) 3. Support basic programming constructs such as iteration and conditions, without alienating basic users. 3. Be fast and small. Do all that and the Linux environment would become the most accessible system around, with all the power accessible to those without mad CLI skillz.
Myself, I don't think it's possible, so I'd rather stick with my shell scripts and 7331 645H 5K1775, and avoid the bloated, slow GUI stuff.
What do you think the Dutch East India *Companies* were, a branch of the armed service?
The colonies were originally comercial ventures, which, when they failed to payoff, were nationalized.
The future space model is not likely to be any different:
At first you will see comercial businesses creating colonies and factories or mines somewhere.
Then you will see each of these businesses fail in turn, leaving the colonists stranded.
The major world powers will then fight over the scraps that are left as a demonstration of their power and sovereignty.
With the colonists in the hands of the government (any government), pressure from citizens/leaders on earth to offload the burden of supporting the colony onto the colonists will result in the "exploitation" of the colonists. Logistical problems will result in the defacto disenfranchisement of the colonists (it's easy to ignore a representatives if they're 20 light-minutes, or a 2 year journey distant). These two factors combined with a timely global surge in interest in "natural rights" will result in an inevitable revolution.
Re:People still use a shell for Linux?
on
Bash 3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Say I have 10000 files in 1000 folders (sorted neatly by date category and type). Can you convert all those files without disrupting my perfect organization?
for item in `find -iname \*.jpg`; do convert $item `echo $item | sed 's/jpg/png/'`; done
My problems with your energy theory is first that you need to describe the type of energy you're talking about.
If you're talking about electromagnetic radiation, then it would rely on surrounding material for rebroadcast (presumably through spontaneous emission), and generally follows a fixed set of laws. It can't really do much to the world around it, and since it travels at the speed of light, it would die before it ever existed (clocks traveling at the speed of light run infinitely slow). There's not a lot that this kind of energy can do in the way of being alive.
If you're talking about kinetic energy or electrical energy then I'm not sure what you could argue.
If you're talking about the kind of glowing orb things you see on star trek when they talk about energy beings, then that's rather difficult to describe physically.
If you're talking about an energy being formed by different interacting form of energy, they'd need a piece of matter (or body, if you will) to act as a medium for exchange. The characteristics of this medium would have to be relatively specific to the organism, and be capable or being altered dynamically, through electromagnetic or chemical pumps. And that would be indistinguishable from organic life as we know it.
As for the sequence of life, the only part I haven't heard filled in sensibly, is step 2.
1. billions of years The universe crashes on the scene and energy and matter flies everywhere. Eventually graviational forces force the matter to clump together in sufficient quantities to form galaxies, solar systems, stars, and eventually planets. 2. ??? 3. life (prokaryotic) 4 + 5. millions of years: Two of the prokaryotic lifeforms eventually develop a symbiotic relationship on a cellular level, resulting in early eukaryotic organisms containing primitive mitochondria. A few eukaryotic organisms form colonies. The colonies develop primitive intercellular communication, and start to act more as a group. Eventually more rapid communication becomes advantageous and some parts of the colony become the conduits for the communication. About the same time, the new communication was used to cause specific cells in the colony to change shape, generating movement. From this the first multicellular organisms developed. They developed specialized sensing apparatus and new shapes and other cells to become more specialized. Then animals developed. They initially floated in the sea, but then became more active as they started to consume other multicellular organisms. As these organisms became bigger and more complex it became difficult for the decentralized communication cells to control the organism. Clusters of such cells begain to appear in organisms. Also with increased size, came logistical problems of transferring nutrients around the colony. This caused the development of cardiovascular organs. Predator-Prey competitino resulted in the advances of shells and bones. Some organisms begin to escape predators by leaving the water. Then they start to live entirely out of the water. Life on land was more demanding and required an even more complicated brain. Predator-prey pressures probably induced groups of individuals to band together. The difficulties of organizing independent individuals required more brain power. The smarter ones were more able to take advantage of the less crafty ones, and so the smart kind proliferated. Eventually one of these animals decided throwing a rock at an enemy was a good idea, or sticking a stick in an ants nest made it easier to get the ants out. From this these animals developed the use of tools. They eventually came to use other tools. They noticed that plants come from seeds, and a few start to farm. Farming is more efficient than gathering, so a few were able to find other endeavors, resulting in more tools. Eventually tools saved these creatures so much difficulty, that they were able to apply themselves to finding new tools. They also discovered advanced communications systems (language) and other useful
Common usage for the term democracy means republic. You ask people if america is a democracy, they say "yes". You ask people if america is a republic, they say "yes". In common usage the terms are interchangeable.
You knew what the poster was saying. You knew he was talking about "one of the forms of governance where the people have a voice in goverment". Sure if you were writing a political science paper you would be more specific and not use republic and democracy interchangeably.
But you just had to give us a history lesson. *sigh*
Anyway, the problem isn't democracy vs republic (given the population size a democracy is out of the question). The problem is federalism. Originally the "United States" was an aggregation of confederated states. Since then our government's center of mass has risen like a hot-air balloon. Once again, the problem isn't the majority making decisions against the minority, it's the uninvolved majority making decisions against a concerned minority. In our system people in Hawaii have equal say as Alabama in the way schools are run (not explicitly, but if they want federal funding...). People always want to take their problems to the top. In a de^H^Hrepresentative government deciding at the top means that uninvolved sides tell you what to do. A bottom-up approach to government insures that only the people involved have a say. (This is not exactly the same as "state's rights". A bottom-up approach begins with the individual: I decide what I do, we decide what we do, the city decides what the city does, the county decides...the nation decides what the nation does [and *only* what the nation does])
So where to next once America's a dictatorship? What bastion of democracy is safe from american peacekeeping? UK is their lapdog. Canada is moving in that direction as well. Mainland Europe might be okay for a while, but France isn't really safe from the US right now, and the EU is a puppet government vested in american interests (thought not nearly as bad as the UN..). We're running out of democratic societies to turn to. There's Australia, but they have crappy internet access. </cynicism>
The huge thing is that the reader has access to the versioning. This means that as a reader, you can look at the previous versions, or the diff with previous versions and read the comments of the editors as to why they changed things. This makes fraud pretty obvious (especially since I wouldn't use information from there unless I checked back a few months to make sure it's stable).
This means that articles can *never* disappear while you're reading it, because it's always available. Just click on history and choose the version you were looking at. Exact same version.
This is far better than a rating system. This lets the reader interpret and decide the truth, or level certainty they require. Rating systems don't determine truth. They determine popularity. Popularity among who? All the users or unique IPs? There's nothing stopping me from obtaining 1000 blog accounts and rating what I want rated positively. But even if I had the entire ipv6 range I couldn't kill wiki. This is because wiki doesn't need anti-user quality control. It's implicit in the system -- completely taken care of by the versioning system, administrators, and editors.
Also, in my experience, most of the articles in wiki are by people that know their stuff. I've read quite a few pages in subjects I am studying, and the articles are very consistent with the textbooks and information from other websites.
Do you file your income taxe receipts under 'R' for receipts, 'T' for taxes, 'M' for money, 'F' for finances, 'N' for 'ncome, 'E' for expense, 'W' for wait till april, or 'B' for blow off?
If you study economics, you will hear about the Laffer Curve.
Basically it works like this:
If taxes are too low, the government is only getting a really small percentage of the money in the economy, so they don't get that much revenue.
If taxes are too high, the taxes start to smother the economy. More and more people decide that holding a second job, or getting a higher paying job that requires more work isn't really worth it. So at this point the government is getting a large percent of a small number, and so they don't get that much revenue.
Somewhere in the middle, the government revenue peaks.
So you can't really say that lowering taxes during a shortage is a bad idea (especially if the economy is in recession). Maybe the people who want to lower taxes are using this model to try to increase revenue.
The problem isn't corporatism, or "Big Government".
The problem is that our government has become overly centralized: the federal government has too much power.
If you study US History you notice that the federal government has continually usurped power from local governments. Originally the federal government had limited power and could not really interfere with the affairs of states. In fact its only real power over local government was the power to regulate interstate commerce and the extremely vague "necessary and proper" clause (US Constitution - Article I, Section 8).
From that, (and a few amendments such as income tax) the federal government has blossomed into the chimera we know today. As the federal government expanded its power, the states were slowly mushed together, and with the states no longer having any real meaning, all commerce becomes interstate commerce. And since then the federal government has yoked america with the purse strings.
How does it feel to know that a group of strangers thousands of miles away is dictating the way you live your life? The vast majority of people making decisions about you don't even represent you, and even those that do feel your interests dilluted by those of millions of others.
A strong national government is a farcical democracy -- it's just King George all over again.
How about we go back to america the way it was originally intended.
Local power means that your vote counts -- 1 in a few thousand, not one in a few billion.
Let the federal government handle national defense and foreign policy, but let the decisions that most affect our lives be made by those who most represent us.
Asimov wasn't talking about software systems.
In a couple of the stories it was implied that the 3 laws were implemented in hardware. It's likely that Asimov's robots were all analog computers (he talked in terms of "potentials" and at least gave me the impression that they weren't discrete at all -- leading me to conclude they were analog).
What makes us think we can all the sudden implement three very high order rules in a manner which is completely foolproof?
The argument the story makes is that the three laws are so intrinsically integrated in the design that they are failsafe -- that is, if they break, the robot becomes nonfunctional. This is a lot more convincing in an analog computer (where the three laws would almost have to be the center piece of decision-making part. If it fails, it can't decide to do anything, so it goes limp).
Note: Of course by now this explaination is probably redundant since after writing this the slashdot server became unavailable, so I waited 8 hours (read slept) before trying again. But I like my explanation, and I do have a few karma points stored away, so Mod away...
A 'stable' system was pressed out of its stability region today, prompting panic among scientists.
"The system is proven stable", CEO of Megacorp Inc. told reporters today. "No matter how much you upset a stable system, the system will return to normal. This is just a natural correction".
Others have expressed doubts. "W'RALL GUNNA DAI!" ex-hippie and hobo Jimmy was recorded as saying.
Leading scientists were unable to be reached for comment.
That's not it either. 'Who are you?' 'What does being yourself mean?' How many of those people that are worrying about how to behave could answer those questions? I don't mean in a sort of bland 'I am me' and 'doing whatever the hell I want' sort of answer, but a real tangible answer. Someone who has a firm grasp of the answers to these questions doesn't have trouble socializing.
The problem is that socialization requires man to view himself in relation to others. Is a person still a jerk if they're alone annoying no one? Is a man trapped on an island a reclusive hermit or is he 'the life of the party'? All the social qualities that people identify themselves with are based on their relation to others in society.
If a person is withdrawn from society their self-perception becomes fuzzy, and they begin to lose a sense of their place in society. This makes it stressful for them to act in social situtations because their social position is uncertain. They unconsciously or even consciously worry about whether what they're doing is proper. This is not because they 'just can't be themselves', but because they don't know who they are. This questioning is ultimately positive because it effectively forces them to define their identity.
The only real way to find insight into oneself is through socialization of others. You can't know if you're insensitive or annoying or arrogant without interacting with other people. Iz like quote from olde country: 'A man can sit on a stump thinking for eternity and never know his own ass'.
And then once you know yourself, you can improve your flaws. This is a lot better than people who excuse their behavior by saying that they're 'just being theirselves'.
Basically it boils down to: You have to learn who you are before you can be yourself.
If you look at history, the US political scheme has been like this since the 1800s.
[I haven't ever studied poli sci, but] I think this reflects a flaw inherent in our governmental structure: People are forced to make one decision based on all their views. This tends to polarize the populous as they become entrenched in the ideals of a party they initially supported based on a few issues (and then later through cognitive dissonance).
My [bold/naive/incomplete/intractable/new] theory of governance: A government structure that could potentially minimize this effect would allow people to make separate decisions about issues, without resorting to democracy. In essence it would be like electing the presidential cabinet. This executive body (directorship) should be composed of no more than 7 members. Each director would be in charge of their departments with absolute authority (they are not required to report to anyone else in the executive branch). A president shall exist (gotta give the populous a figurehead), whose role shall be facilitating the networking between directors, and Congress (sort of a "Team Leader" -- with no real executive power). The president shall also have veto power over the bills from Congress (under the advisement of the directors).
Additional options for government:
1. Prevent Congressional micro-management (ie. Congress can say "do x", but not specify "how to do x" -- this prevents pork barrelling and restores the power of implementation back to the executive [which is the entire point of the executive branch]) Problems with this: Unclear how to precisely limit Congressional authority. Implementation may remove Congressional check on executive power.
2. Restructure congress into two houses, one of which serves as the origin of bills to be Law, and the other to serve as the origin of bills for managing government (ie. budgets). The bills will still have to pass both houses and be signed by the President to become law. I have yet to determine other characteristics for this legislative body.
"Arranging dates" is one thing, but asking someone out or any kind of heavily emotional conversation is best done in person (or *maybe* over the phone).
And I disagree with your assertion that success with girls is all about what you say. In my experience, what I say is practically irrelevant. The most important aspect is body language: relax, look them in the eye, be attentive, have a non-threatening posture. If you master body language then it doesn't really matter what you say, because the mark will interpret what you say positively (subconsciously drawing context from your posture). This even carries a bit over the phone since your voice sounds slightly different depending on your posture and mood.
IM conversations are more tricky, because the person will fill in the missing context from the environment around them (Well, that assumes they already know you. If they don't know you at all [or are really desperate], they're more likely to be optimistic). This makes it rather difficult to predict the responses even with a lengthy calibration conversation.
Of course this is only true for the short term. The long term effects are more dependent on what you say (but that's outside of my area of expertise).
"2. Include some objectional material such as underage sex."
Does anyone else here find it particularly funny that despite the amount of "objectionable material" in their media, the actual culture is *significantly* more traditional.
I mean I get the impression that if any of these things actually happened (for example: *gasp* an unwed couple living together), those involved would be run out of town faster than a Southern Babtist preacher can say "Praise the Lord".
Admittedly, my analysis of Japanese culture *may be* rather flawed (seeing as how I've never actually *been* to Japan), and my *entire* analysis is based on the anime I have watched. But I still think I'm right about this. The traditionalism and fear of society present in the realistic animes, and the flaunted violation of societal norms in other animes paint an almost perfect portrait of a repressive society.
The problem with the benchmark:
They were running Windows XP.
Any pre-emptive OS will give you terribly innaccurate results for low-level hardware testing.
If you want real results, don't run tests from an operating system--run them from the bootloader (with interupts disabled). Myself, I would probably modify something like Memtest86, and have it time the tests. This would reduce problems due to chipset differences and chance. Any test that can't be exactly repeated with the same results is marketing fodder.
The reviewers otherwise appear to have done a good job. The two test rigs used very similar hardware. They even thought to disable unneccessary peripherials in the bios. They probably even ran each of their tests after a fresh Windows install.
This doesn't mean that their results are wrong, in fact their results are about what I would expect (after having poked around the internet looking for technical information on DDR1 and DDR2). Their presentation is a bit misleading: They test the DDR1 memory with tighter timings than the DDR2. Since these timings reflect how much the memory can get done in a clock, is it suprising that DDR2 requiring 4 clocks for an operation running at 667MHz is equal to DDR1 requiring 2.5 clocks for an operation running at 500 MHz? (For the math impaired this means that with their setup the DDR2 can do 166 million ops per second, and the DDR1 can do 200 million ops per second). I suspect that the reason they tested this way is that the DDR2 chips don't quite have the timing of their DDR1 counterparts yet. Even so, if you claim to be comparing two different technologies, wouldn't you at least run one test with them set up equally?
Not really. I leave that sort of moaning for business majors. Call me naive, but I only really worry about finances if I'm running short. It's more important to me that I can live the sort of life I want (ie. one where I *don't* spend all my time worried about money) than to be constantly on the look out for people trying to rip me off.
Don't pretend we all worship money like you. Maybe some of us realize that money(/profit) is not what makes the world go round (it's rotational inertia = I * alpha^2).
Does that make us better, or more noble? No, not really, we just have different ambitions than owning the next <Brand Name Item> or driving <Sporty Car>.
Slashdot Mirror
Why chop off fingers or pluck eyeballs when
"Scraped up my fingers this weekend in a bicycle accident, and the stupid scanner doesn't recognize me. Can you open the door for me?"
or
"'Contacts have been irritating my eyes lately so the damn machine won't validate, can you buzz me in?"
work just as well?
Swapping the data you're trying to copy during a copy operation is idiotic, so I must be misinterpreting what you are trying to say.
If I copy a 600MB file from a cd onto a HD, here's what I think *should* happen:
1. Allocate the first page for the new file. Setup the destination file structures in the filesystem and mark the page as filesystem cache.
2. Start reading file from cd into the memory allocated for the file (this will mark that page as dirty).
3. After finishing that page, allocate another page and update the filesystem file structure accordingly. Continue reading.
4. Repeat 3 until entire file has been read. Note that allocating the new pages may cause some of the first pages to be written to disk (sync-ed not swapped), but in most cases should not cause any swapping since filesystem buffers are a lower priority than all but the oldest application pages.
5. When the entire file has been read into memory (as part of the filesystem cache), the copy is said to be complete.
6. After a certain period of time, or due to demand for more virtual memory or filesystem cache or a 'sync' system call, the file will be completely written to disk.
You probably meant something like what I said, though my system doesn't end up with the entire disk cached into memory. It also is less likely to swap out application data that will need to be swapped in once the copy completes. Swapping application data to perform a file copy is >2 times slower (2 writes and probably 1 read) than a cached write that I described.
That said, when I use the 'cp' command to copy a file on Linux, I'm not entirely sure what the kernel does. I know that 'cp' will open the source O_RDONLY and then open the destination O_WRONLY, and then reads from the source into its buffer and writes from its buffer to the destination (with some special cases for sparse files).
I'm not sure if they do a special case optimization for this in the kernel or not, but if they don't, then it would read the source into the filesystem cache, and copy part of it into 'cp''s buffer, switch to usermode, execute a couple lines, copy part of 'cp''s buffer into a separate filesystem cache entry, and repeat until done. (this would strain the filesystem cache, and cause lots of context switching)
Of course since moving and copying files is such a frequent activity, I would expect them to either special-case it out the wazoo (who knows?), or have a syscall specifically for copies and moves (which Linux doesn't).
Why would it need swap for that? The kernel pages aren't going to be dirty -- they're executable, read only.
Good memory management doesn't write clean pages to swap. Since those pages haven't changed since they were pulled from disk, they can just as easily be pulled from disk as from swap.
Also, good memory management only swaps when more space is needed by active applications than is currently available. If I have gobs of RAM to spare, it shouldn't swap at all.
I don't know what windows is compulsively swapping, but compared to linux on the same machine, windows seemed to swap constantly. I have a lot of RAM in there, so I turned off swapping in windows, and haven't had any problems (but then again, I only use it to play games...).
+1 Funny?
More like +4 informative
Even if XP embedded is as flexible as you say, it would not be a good choice for a comercial release of this particular project. XP embedded is not a real-time OS. It doesn't have the characteristics that you would need in a dependable real-time system. The processor and storage are also overkill for this application and would need to be reduced significantly to cut costs for comercial release.
.NET for this project. Projects like this are just as much research as they are a learning experience for the students. In order for the students to be able to contribute and do the majority of the work, it is beneficial if they can work with an environment they are used to. I do not go to Cornell, but I can guess that they probably teach their programming courses in C# with Visual Studio. Projects like this provide an opportunity for the students to do something with the stuff they learned. Using XP embedded means that they can get started right away without having to learn assembly or C.
That being said, I think I understand their reasoning behind using XP embedded and C#
I see this sort of thing at the University I attend. Here they have a group of students working with a few faculty members designing a robot. The programming is Java. Why Java? Because that's all the CS department here teaches (lousy bastards dropped C...grr), and since the EE department has no say in this, they go with what they've got. That being said, their robot doesn't take a 800mhz crusoe and 1gb of storage....They're using a [rather beefy] java-based microcontroller (though I wonder if the crusoe was cheaper...).
In both cases the university chose what fit best in their particular academic setting. There's more to these decisions than the project at hand. A real engineer would understand that.
Or did they?
I seem to remember a certain amendment IX that might come into play here: In other words, unless the government specifically denies you certain rights, you have those rights. The Bill of Rights isn't a white-list of acceptable rights, but merely a guideline that specifies which rights absolutely must not be denied. What part of the law or constitution says that the people are denied the right for P2P?
What's the dual purpose of guns? They're designed to kill. Kill people. Kill animals. Kill stuff. Of course in patriotic god-blessed america its a worse offense to have certain plants in your garden than to kill people.
I don't see how GNU/Linux could possibly be both "ready for the desktop" and the kind of system I would want to use. I don't want something easy to use. I don't want something with shiny a fisher-price GUI and hardware deccelerated anti-aliasing. I want something fast and powerful. I want a system that stays out of my way, and does what I tell it to. There's no way this could even remotely resemble the system for Joe lUser's Desktop.
.swx files. There are a bazillion file manager utilities out there, and I'm sure they can click click all they want until they finish. If they really want to leverage the benefits of running a *nix environment and get it all done in a single 200 character long command, however, they're going to have to use the CLI. There's no way around that.
While I agree that Linux-based apps and libraries need to standardize, I think we need to be cautious as to what standards we decide to use. By using standards we lose the flexibility that makes Linux systems so good today. Standard API's are relatively harmless, but other standardizations are more bothersome. Standardizing on the UI means that you have to get the GNOME and KDE people to agree on which order the buttons go -- but which way is right? Picking one over the other would alienate a lot of users, and there's no clear right or wrong. It's easy to think that standards will solve all our problems, but a lot harder to think of reasonable standards that work.
1. X is not bloated. Have you run X, by itself, with no window manager to hamper it, or even with a "light" window manager? It flies. The only speed problem I've had with X was that when I'm dragging windows around, the other apps freeze (because X is single threaded). I'll admit X is hard to deal with, but in most modern distros it works right out of the box on most hardware, so you don't have to mess with it.
2. Standardizing Window Management
There already is a standard:http://freedesktop.org/Standards/wm-spec
3. Almost all configuration changes can be made with a text editor. Click Click.
4. What isn't there a GUI version of? I mean, you can't really do one for 'sh', 'less', 'more', and 'cd', and I think all the other ones have been covered.
5. I personally am not waiting for the world to change. I will use what I want. If other people find Linux-based systems useful, more power to them. The only reason I might want more people to use Linux is for more hardware support, and since I consider that a pretty selfish reason, I don't think about it.
Here you say 'OS' when you mean 'Desktop Environment'. Don't confuse the two. The 'Desktop Environment' should provide a basic interface. Without some amazing AI, any attempts to actively help the user would be clippy all over again. It's better for the 'Desktop Environment' to be a passive entity that the user manipulates.
I'm not saying that you should know TCP/IP before using a web browser (you don't even need to know that to use lynx), so this is a strawman.
Secondly, no one "expects" people to learn the CLI to organize their pictures and
I dare you to design a GUI with as much flexibility of the CLI:
1. Automatically recognize new unfamiliar commands and their arguments, and integrate it into the GUI in a rational way.
2. Support the combination of innumerable unspecified commands and their arguments to perform an unspecified task (this may require a new paradigm, because pipes don't make much sense in the GUI world...)
3. Support basic programming constructs such as iteration and conditions, without alienating basic users.
3. Be fast and small.
Do all that and the Linux environment would become the most accessible system around, with all the power accessible to those without mad CLI skillz.
Myself, I don't think it's possible, so I'd rather stick with my shell scripts and 7331 645H 5K1775, and avoid the bloated, slow GUI stuff.
What do you think the Dutch East India *Companies* were, a branch of the armed service?
The colonies were originally comercial ventures, which, when they failed to payoff, were nationalized.
The future space model is not likely to be any different:
At first you will see comercial businesses creating colonies and factories or mines somewhere.
Then you will see each of these businesses fail in turn, leaving the colonists stranded.
The major world powers will then fight over the scraps that are left as a demonstration of their power and sovereignty.
With the colonists in the hands of the government (any government), pressure from citizens/leaders on earth to offload the burden of supporting the colony onto the colonists will result in the "exploitation" of the colonists. Logistical problems will result in the defacto disenfranchisement of the colonists (it's easy to ignore a representatives if they're 20 light-minutes, or a 2 year journey distant). These two factors combined with a timely global surge in interest in "natural rights" will result in an inevitable revolution.
My problems with your energy theory is first that you need to describe the type of energy you're talking about.
If you're talking about electromagnetic radiation, then it would rely on surrounding material for rebroadcast (presumably through spontaneous emission), and generally follows a fixed set of laws. It can't really do much to the world around it, and since it travels at the speed of light, it would die before it ever existed (clocks traveling at the speed of light run infinitely slow). There's not a lot that this kind of energy can do in the way of being alive.
If you're talking about kinetic energy or electrical energy then I'm not sure what you could argue.
If you're talking about the kind of glowing orb things you see on star trek when they talk about energy beings, then that's rather difficult to describe physically.
If you're talking about an energy being formed by different interacting form of energy, they'd need a piece of matter (or body, if you will) to act as a medium for exchange. The characteristics of this medium would have to be relatively specific to the organism, and be capable or being altered dynamically, through electromagnetic or chemical pumps. And that would be indistinguishable from organic life as we know it.
As for the sequence of life, the only part I haven't heard filled in sensibly, is step 2.
1. billions of years
The universe crashes on the scene and energy and matter flies everywhere. Eventually graviational forces force the matter to clump together in sufficient quantities to form galaxies, solar systems, stars, and eventually planets.
2. ???
3. life (prokaryotic)
4 + 5. millions of years:
Two of the prokaryotic lifeforms eventually develop a symbiotic relationship on a cellular level, resulting in early eukaryotic organisms containing primitive mitochondria. A few eukaryotic organisms form colonies. The colonies develop primitive intercellular communication, and start to act more as a group. Eventually more rapid communication becomes advantageous and some parts of the colony become the conduits for the communication. About the same time, the new communication was used to cause specific cells in the colony to change shape, generating movement. From this the first multicellular organisms developed. They developed specialized sensing apparatus and new shapes and other cells to become more specialized. Then animals developed. They initially floated in the sea, but then became more active as they started to consume other multicellular organisms. As these organisms became bigger and more complex it became difficult for the decentralized communication cells to control the organism. Clusters of such cells begain to appear in organisms. Also with increased size, came logistical problems of transferring nutrients around the colony. This caused the development of cardiovascular organs. Predator-Prey competitino resulted in the advances of shells and bones. Some organisms begin to escape predators by leaving the water. Then they start to live entirely out of the water. Life on land was more demanding and required an even more complicated brain. Predator-prey pressures probably induced groups of individuals to band together. The difficulties of organizing independent individuals required more brain power. The smarter ones were more able to take advantage of the less crafty ones, and so the smart kind proliferated. Eventually one of these animals decided throwing a rock at an enemy was a good idea, or sticking a stick in an ants nest made it easier to get the ants out. From this these animals developed the use of tools. They eventually came to use other tools. They noticed that plants come from seeds, and a few start to farm. Farming is more efficient than gathering, so a few were able to find other endeavors, resulting in more tools. Eventually tools saved these creatures so much difficulty, that they were able to apply themselves to finding new tools. They also discovered advanced communications systems (language) and other useful
This is windows we're talking about:
"I see you are trying to install a screw. Please select the appropriate size hammer.
Common usage for the term democracy means republic.
You ask people if america is a democracy, they say "yes". You ask people if america is a republic, they say "yes". In common usage the terms are interchangeable.
You knew what the poster was saying. You knew he was talking about "one of the forms of governance where the people have a voice in goverment". Sure if you were writing a political science paper you would be more specific and not use republic and democracy interchangeably.
But you just had to give us a history lesson. *sigh*
Anyway, the problem isn't democracy vs republic (given the population size a democracy is out of the question). The problem is federalism. Originally the "United States" was an aggregation of confederated states. Since then our government's center of mass has risen like a hot-air balloon. Once again, the problem isn't the majority making decisions against the minority, it's the uninvolved majority making decisions against a concerned minority. In our system people in Hawaii have equal say as Alabama in the way schools are run (not explicitly, but if they want federal funding...). People always want to take their problems to the top. In a de^H^Hrepresentative government deciding at the top means that uninvolved sides tell you what to do.
A bottom-up approach to government insures that only the people involved have a say. (This is not exactly the same as "state's rights". A bottom-up approach begins with the individual: I decide what I do, we decide what we do, the city decides what the city does, the county decides...the nation decides what the nation does [and *only* what the nation does])
So where to next once America's a dictatorship? What bastion of democracy is safe from american peacekeeping?
UK is their lapdog. Canada is moving in that direction as well. Mainland Europe might be okay for a while, but France isn't really safe from the US right now, and the EU is a puppet government vested in american interests (thought not nearly as bad as the UN..).
We're running out of democratic societies to turn to. There's Australia, but they have crappy internet access.
</cynicism>
The huge thing is that the reader has access to the versioning. This means that as a reader, you can look at the previous versions, or the diff with previous versions and read the comments of the editors as to why they changed things. This makes fraud pretty obvious (especially since I wouldn't use information from there unless I checked back a few months to make sure it's stable).
This means that articles can *never* disappear while you're reading it, because it's always available. Just click on history and choose the version you were looking at. Exact same version.
This is far better than a rating system. This lets the reader interpret and decide the truth, or level certainty they require. Rating systems don't determine truth. They determine popularity. Popularity among who? All the users or unique IPs? There's nothing stopping me from obtaining 1000 blog accounts and rating what I want rated positively. But even if I had the entire ipv6 range I couldn't kill wiki.
This is because wiki doesn't need anti-user quality control. It's implicit in the system -- completely taken care of by the versioning system, administrators, and editors.
Also, in my experience, most of the articles in wiki are by people that know their stuff. I've read quite a few pages in subjects I am studying, and the articles are very consistent with the textbooks and information from other websites.
If you study economics, you will hear about the Laffer Curve.
Basically it works like this:
If taxes are too low, the government is only getting a really small percentage of the money in the economy, so they don't get that much revenue.
If taxes are too high, the taxes start to smother the economy. More and more people decide that holding a second job, or getting a higher paying job that requires more work isn't really worth it. So at this point the government is getting a large percent of a small number, and so they don't get that much revenue.
Somewhere in the middle, the government revenue peaks.
So you can't really say that lowering taxes during a shortage is a bad idea (especially if the economy is in recession). Maybe the people who want to lower taxes are using this model to try to increase revenue.
The problem isn't corporatism, or "Big Government".
The problem is that our government has become overly centralized: the federal government has too much power.
If you study US History you notice that the federal government has continually usurped power from local governments. Originally the federal government had limited power and could not really interfere with the affairs of states. In fact its only real power over local government was the power to regulate interstate commerce and the extremely vague "necessary and proper" clause (US Constitution - Article I, Section 8).
From that, (and a few amendments such as income tax) the federal government has blossomed into the chimera we know today. As the federal government expanded its power, the states were slowly mushed together, and with the states no longer having any real meaning, all commerce becomes interstate commerce. And since then the federal government has yoked america with the purse strings.
How does it feel to know that a group of strangers thousands of miles away is dictating the way you live your life? The vast majority of people making decisions about you don't even represent you, and even those that do feel your interests dilluted by those of millions of others.
A strong national government is a farcical democracy -- it's just King George all over again.
How about we go back to america the way it was originally intended.
Local power means that your vote counts -- 1 in a few thousand, not one in a few billion.
Let the federal government handle national defense and foreign policy, but let the decisions that most affect our lives be made by those who most represent us.
Asimov wasn't talking about software systems.
In a couple of the stories it was implied that the 3 laws were implemented in hardware. It's likely that Asimov's robots were all analog computers (he talked in terms of "potentials" and at least gave me the impression that they weren't discrete at all -- leading me to conclude they were analog).
Don't forget that I, Robot was released in 1950. The transistor appeared in Bell labs in 1947. You can't possibly expect Asimove to predict the rise of digital programmable computers 3 years after the transistor was invented!
The argument the story makes is that the three laws are so intrinsically integrated in the design that they are failsafe -- that is, if they break, the robot becomes nonfunctional. This is a lot more convincing in an analog computer (where the three laws would almost have to be the center piece of decision-making part. If it fails, it can't decide to do anything, so it goes limp).
Note: Of course by now this explaination is probably redundant since after writing this the slashdot server became unavailable, so I waited 8 hours (read slept) before trying again. But I like my explanation, and I do have a few karma points stored away, so Mod away...
A 'stable' system was pressed out of its stability region today, prompting panic among scientists.
"The system is proven stable", CEO of Megacorp Inc. told reporters today. "No matter how much you upset a stable system, the system will return to normal. This is just a natural correction".
Others have expressed doubts. "W'RALL GUNNA DAI!" ex-hippie and hobo Jimmy was recorded as saying.
Leading scientists were unable to be reached for comment.
This has been a Fox News special report.
That's not it either.
'Who are you?'
'What does being yourself mean?'
How many of those people that are worrying about how to behave could answer those questions? I don't mean in a sort of bland 'I am me' and 'doing whatever the hell I want' sort of answer, but a real tangible answer. Someone who has a firm grasp of the answers to these questions doesn't have trouble socializing.
The problem is that socialization requires man to view himself in relation to others.
Is a person still a jerk if they're alone annoying no one?
Is a man trapped on an island a reclusive hermit or is he 'the life of the party'?
All the social qualities that people identify themselves with are based on their relation to others in society.
If a person is withdrawn from society their self-perception becomes fuzzy, and they begin to lose a sense of their place in society. This makes it stressful for them to act in social situtations because their social position is uncertain. They unconsciously or even consciously worry about whether what they're doing is proper. This is not because they 'just can't be themselves', but because they don't know who they are. This questioning is ultimately positive because it effectively forces them to define their identity.
The only real way to find insight into oneself is through socialization of others. You can't know if you're insensitive or annoying or arrogant without interacting with other people. Iz like quote from olde country: 'A man can sit on a stump thinking for eternity and never know his own ass'.
And then once you know yourself, you can improve your flaws. This is a lot better than people who excuse their behavior by saying that they're 'just being theirselves'.
Basically it boils down to: You have to learn who you are before you can be yourself.
If you look at history, the US political scheme has been like this since the 1800s.
[I haven't ever studied poli sci, but] I think this reflects a flaw inherent in our governmental structure: People are forced to make one decision based on all their views. This tends to polarize the populous as they become entrenched in the ideals of a party they initially supported based on a few issues (and then later through cognitive dissonance).
My [bold/naive/incomplete/intractable/new] theory of governance:
A government structure that could potentially minimize this effect would allow people to make separate decisions about issues, without resorting to democracy.
In essence it would be like electing the presidential cabinet.
This executive body (directorship) should be composed of no more than 7 members. Each director would be in charge of their departments with absolute authority (they are not required to report to anyone else in the executive branch). A president shall exist (gotta give the populous a figurehead), whose role shall be facilitating the networking between directors, and Congress (sort of a "Team Leader" -- with no real executive power). The president shall also have veto power over the bills from Congress (under the advisement of the directors).
Additional options for government:
1. Prevent Congressional micro-management (ie. Congress can say "do x", but not specify "how to do x" -- this prevents pork barrelling and restores the power of implementation back to the executive [which is the entire point of the executive branch])
Problems with this:
Unclear how to precisely limit Congressional authority.
Implementation may remove Congressional check on executive power.
2. Restructure congress into two houses, one of which serves as the origin of bills to be Law, and the other to serve as the origin of bills for managing government (ie. budgets). The bills will still have to pass both houses and be signed by the President to become law. I have yet to determine other characteristics for this legislative body.
"Arranging dates" is one thing, but asking someone out or any kind of heavily emotional conversation is best done in person (or *maybe* over the phone).
And I disagree with your assertion that success with girls is all about what you say. In my experience, what I say is practically irrelevant. The most important aspect is body language: relax, look them in the eye, be attentive, have a non-threatening posture. If you master body language then it doesn't really matter what you say, because the mark will interpret what you say positively (subconsciously drawing context from your posture). This even carries a bit over the phone since your voice sounds slightly different depending on your posture and mood.
IM conversations are more tricky, because the person will fill in the missing context from the environment around them (Well, that assumes they already know you. If they don't know you at all [or are really desperate], they're more likely to be optimistic). This makes it rather difficult to predict the responses even with a lengthy calibration conversation.
Of course this is only true for the short term. The long term effects are more dependent on what you say (but that's outside of my area of expertise).
"2. Include some objectional material such as underage sex."
Does anyone else here find it particularly funny that despite the amount of "objectionable material" in their media, the actual culture is *significantly* more traditional.
I mean I get the impression that if any of these things actually happened (for example: *gasp* an unwed couple living together), those involved would be run out of town faster than a Southern Babtist preacher can say "Praise the Lord".
Admittedly, my analysis of Japanese culture *may be* rather flawed (seeing as how I've never actually *been* to Japan), and my *entire* analysis is based on the anime I have watched. But I still think I'm right about this. The traditionalism and fear of society present in the realistic animes, and the flaunted violation of societal norms in other animes paint an almost perfect portrait of a repressive society.
The problem with the benchmark:
They were running Windows XP.
Any pre-emptive OS will give you terribly innaccurate results for low-level hardware testing.
If you want real results, don't run tests from an operating system--run them from the bootloader (with interupts disabled). Myself, I would probably modify something like Memtest86, and have it time the tests. This would reduce problems due to chipset differences and chance. Any test that can't be exactly repeated with the same results is marketing fodder.
The reviewers otherwise appear to have done a good job. The two test rigs used very similar hardware. They even thought to disable unneccessary peripherials in the bios. They probably even ran each of their tests after a fresh Windows install.
This doesn't mean that their results are wrong, in fact their results are about what I would expect (after having poked around the internet looking for technical information on DDR1 and DDR2). Their presentation is a bit misleading: They test the DDR1 memory with tighter timings than the DDR2. Since these timings reflect how much the memory can get done in a clock, is it suprising that DDR2 requiring 4 clocks for an operation running at 667MHz is equal to DDR1 requiring 2.5 clocks for an operation running at 500 MHz? (For the math impaired this means that with their setup the DDR2 can do 166 million ops per second, and the DDR1 can do 200 million ops per second). I suspect that the reason they tested this way is that the DDR2 chips don't quite have the timing of their DDR1 counterparts yet. Even so, if you claim to be comparing two different technologies, wouldn't you at least run one test with them set up equally?
Not really. I leave that sort of moaning for business majors. Call me naive, but I only really worry about finances if I'm running short. It's more important to me that I can live the sort of life I want (ie. one where I *don't* spend all my time worried about money) than to be constantly on the look out for people trying to rip me off.
Don't pretend we all worship money like you.
Maybe some of us realize that money(/profit) is not what makes the world go round (it's rotational inertia = I * alpha^2).
Does that make us better, or more noble? No, not really, we just have different ambitions than owning the next <Brand Name Item> or driving <Sporty Car>.