Well there's a difference between running one app and running many. When I'm using Eclipse or Firefox I don't mind much if either is using all my resources, as long as it's going fast. The problem comes when I want to load up another app, or if I want to run both at the same time. What a moment ago was a good tradeoff that made things faster suddenly slows everything to a crawl as things are written to the hard disk.
That's very true. Much like I don't consider JUST light resource use (ram and disk and cpu) to be the only metric of a good app, I wouldn't consider an app that always used every skerrick of RAM (even if it was fastest because of it) to necessarily be awesome, if it sacrificed other processes I needed running on the machine. Not all the time anyway.
It's more complex than either two extremes, and falling in the middle somewhere is a whole range of different levels of usefulness to people. Perhaps there are some people out there who don't multitask very well, and would be happy to have Firefox use all available RAM and run like a rocket. Different folks, and all.
Using GIMP, did you ever look at the setting called "Tile cache size" in Preferences / Environment? This sets the maximum amount of RAM that GIMP can use before it starts to swap some parts of images (tiles) to disk.
We did, and had the same good advice from Gimp's mailing dev mailing list too. While they couldn't help us get it up to speed, apparently it's an issue that will be fixed with the move to GEGL.
No malice intended towards Gimp or its developers, but it's a very good practical example from my experience that demonstrates the big point - that the hardware is there to use, and ignoring performance (the real metric) for a potential indicator of performance (namely lightweight resource use) when judging an application is like buying a luxurious suede lounge that's oh-so-comfy to sit on, but always using it with a vinyl cover to protect it. It sort of misses the point...
I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible
I'll have to go out on a limb and say I dropped expectations of absolutely minimal HD and RAM space for EVERY app I use, after continually coming up against programs that would go all out in being light in resource use, but couldn't do their job because of it.
Some are just what the original poster ordered - vim is certainly one of the good cases, it's powerful and manages a light footprint, and there are plenty of other tools that do phenomenal work whether it's running on eight xeons, or a single low-end 386.
One of the opposite cases is some forms of image work when comparing apps like Gimp and Photoshop. In some areas, Gimp is WAY lighter on resource use. I'd perform work on 250MB image, and gimp would use little more RAM than that, no matter how it was configured for RAM use. This would normally be seen as a really good thing for Gimp.
What of Photoshop? It wanted 2GB of RAM to work at maximum speed. That might sound like serious bloat on photoshop's part, but when working on large images it meant two orders of magnitude difference in speed. Yes, where Gimp will use a mere 280MB on a 4GB system, and take 15-16 minutes to perform one filter over an image, Photoshop would chew through 2GB and take about 20 seconds doing the exact same thing.
(That doesn't mean PS was incapable when stuck with ONLY 256MB RAM. Then it'd bog down just like Gimp)
What I want are apps that use the resources I provide them *wisely*. There's more to that than just being totally frugal. Seen too many people running big-RAM systems and being proud of having their OS use just a hundred or two MB out of gigs. Why? Resources are free once they're installed, may as well use them when they genuinely can help you work.
After all these years of malware on Windows systems, I think it's high time someone took Microsoft to court and at least charged them with contributory negligence. After the Mellissa virus, they can't claim that they don't know the hazard.
One reason marketing likes the whole age/sex/race/income thing, is that they can derive from that some possible information about what you might be interested in, in order to market to you. It's not perfect, as not all 16 year old males with wealthy parents will be interested in buying insanely expensive gaming systems, and not all 85 year old women on a pension will want to just email photos of family around, but it works better than guessing.
So, what they're really after is what a specific person is interested in. What does a specific hypothetical user browse? what do they spend money on, what are they interested in, etc.
And now in a world where it's so easy to get that specific information on hundreds of thousands people, they want to use that specific information to derive less reliable demographic statistics, in order to derive what a particular person might be interested in...
I feel saddened by some of this, the community fighting, but then I wonder if perhaps I'm just emotional, being both a GPL and BSD license supporter. Sometimes I like to move things around, to see how it works.
The first. Let's pretend this was GPL code taken by Microsoft, not OpenBSD, for inclusion in Windows.
From: Michael Buesch <mb> Subject: Microsoft bcw: Possible GPL license violation issues Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel.wireless.general,
gmane.linux.drivers.bcm54xx.devel To: Marcus Glocker <mglocker>,
Jon Simola <jsimola>,
Theo de Raadt <deraadt>,
Stefano Brivio <stefano.brivio>,
Martin Langer <martin>,
Danny van Dyk <kugelfang>,
Andreas Jaggi <andreas.jaggi>,
Larry Finger <larry.finger>,
Quaker.Fang Cc: Johannes Berg <johannes>,
Joseph Jezak <josejx>,
John Linville <linville>,
Greg kh <greg>,
bcm43xx <list>,
linux-wireless <list>,
license-violation <list> Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 22:08:13 +0200 User-Agent: Outlook Express
I, Michael Buesch, am one of the maintainers of the GPL'd Linux wireless LAN driver for the Broadcom chip (bcm43xx). The Copyright holders of bcm43xx (which includes me) want to talk to you, developers of Microsoft Windows, about possible GPL license and therefore Copyright violations in your bcw driver.
To me, that looks like Mr Buesch is being decent.
Now let's switch to the opposite - Mr Buesch as a Windows developer, finding Microsoft code in OpenBSD
From: Michael Buesch <mb> Subject: OpenBSD bcw: Possible MS Windows license violation issues Newsgroups: windows.kernel.wireless.general,
windows.drivers.bcm54xx.devel To: Marcus Glocker <mglocker>,
Jon Simola <jsimola>,
Theo de Raadt <deraadt>,
Stefano Brivio <stefano.brivio>,
Martin Langer <martin>,
Danny van Dyk <kugelfang>,
Andreas Jaggi <andreas.jaggi>,
Larry Finger <larry.finger>,
Quaker.Fang Cc: Johannes Berg <johannes>,
Joseph Jezak <josejx>,
John Linville <linville>,
Greg kh <greg>,
bcm43xx <list>,
windows-wireless <list>,
license-violation <list> Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 22:08:13 +0200 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.5
I, Michael Buesch, am one of the Managers of the Microsoft Windows wireless LAN driver team for the Broadcom chip (bcm43xx). The Copyright holder of bcm43xx (Microsoft) wants to talk to you, OpenBSD bcw developers, about possible Microsoft Windows license and therefore Copyright violations in your bcw driver.
Again, a response like that if it were from Microsoft to the OpenBSD team would be considered highly decent.
'The report found that Microsoft Windows had the fewest number of patches and the shortest average patch development time of the five operating systems it monitored in the last six months of 2006.'
Cool. so if I write an OS that's chock FULL of holes, and only patch three of the simplest holes in six months, patch them within an hour of being alerted to their existence, and try to keep all the others under wraps, then my OS would have fewer patches than windows and a shorter patch development time. I win. Security by obscurity wins too.
Retarded. It relies on the trust that OS vendors always patch all holes they're alerted to, AND announces every one they've patched or been alerted to. Trust like that is the beginnings of security problems in the first place.
If it works fine with a bucket, why do you have to use an entire swimming pool?
By the look of the setup in the article, multiple CPUs are tapped into the line from the pool, potentially dozens all in the same room, all watercooled from the same water source. The bucket did well for just one, but not multiples.
Similar here. It'd be easier to count the number of relatives who *didn't* get iPods as christmas presents. That'd be me, my mother, and my two year old nephew. Everyone else closely related that I can think of has a new nano, shuffle or iPod, and they're anywhere from 8 to 71 years old.
I think it's primarily due to poor reading comprehension and poor reading speed.
If schools worldwide are anything like here, it's the former but not the latter. Kids are taught somewhere from 10-14 the basics of speed reading. If they manage to pick up a few points out of text they're given to speed-read, then they're marked high, pass, and end up learning to use the skill in all their schooling.
Which would be good if it were taught well, but it isn't. All too often the testing process involves little more than identifying a word or two in a document to see if it refers to what you need, but doesn't allow for any measure of true comprehension of what's being read, with the result that kids will read a paragraph (say an extract from a google search result) and see the words they think they're after, judge that as being acceptable, and go use it.
Speed reading is a valuable skill to skim through a document and find points you're interested in, but it takes true thought to understand much writing, more thought than most people with poor training do in the five or ten seconds they may use to read over a page. Perhaps with some exceptionally clear writing this would work, but the world is full of writing anywhere from atrocious to functional to exceptional, and without spending time to critically analyse what's being said, everything gets dumped in the "omg did you read this one?" basket.
When their driver stops working with newer kernels and they patch it to work again, isn't that patch "derived" from the linux kernel, otherwise where esle would the patch be derived from?
I don't see that makes it derived from the kernel, rather that it's compatible with it. If that definition truly made it derivative, then any app that runs in Linux that depends on features of the kernel may be seen as a derivative.
Since there is a fully functional BSD variant under the hood, is it possible (using X11.app, darwinports, and/or Fink) to boot to a command line and simply startx? Would it use less RAM to bypass Aqua?"
Yes, it's possible. At least, it was a few years ago, when I first installed KDE via fink then logged in at the login prompt as user ">console" (with no password) and performed a startx. I didn't use it for a terribly long time as a KDE-only box, and it was more an experiment to see what was possible - but it worked just like any other KDE setup. I didn't use Apple's own X11, but had XDarwin installed instead.
A note too - Aqua is only the default theme with OSX, and just describes the look of the OSX GUI. Quartz is the engine underneath that performance depends on. There was no noticeable difference in speed with XDarwin over Quartz, but perhaps that could be improved with more work on XDarwin.
Beige can still be beautiful.
on
When Beige Won't Do
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Beige is OK, if the rest of a computer is designed well. The "beige box" is something that's often berated not because of its color, but because of the flimsy components, cheap design, tacky add-ons and crap fit & finish that often went with it. The fading out of the beige box isn't all because of a shift in case color, but the realisation from designers after colorful computers appeared that it was OK to be different in all manner of other ways.
A friend has a well-preserved collection of old beige machines ( http://www.danaquarium.com/gallery/beige/ ), and the photos show to me that a tidy appealing design isn't dependent on just color.
This warning only appears when you double click a document file that triggers the opening of an application for the first time. On a default out-of-the-box OSX install (which I've set up just this morning, and I'm still adding apps to) there is no such warning when double clicking a random executable itself.
So they've ordered his execution because he allegedly ordered the executions of others. Are they not then guilty of the same crime as he?
Two weeks ago we an arson hit in a forest a few miles behind my house. The firefighters burned off some land in order to contain the spread of the fire. Are the firefighters not also guilty of the same crime as the original arsonists?
Just as bad as people's ability to rate risk badly is our ability to read what we WANT to read, instead of what's written. The question wasn't to do with remembering what happened, rather when.
If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened
The date is the important part. Who remembers the date flight 800 came down, the date the iraq war started, the date of the loma prieta quake, the date Katrina hit NOL, the date of the tsunami that killed 100 times the people killed in the WTC attacks, the date mt pinatubo went up, the date lockerbie was hit by a plane, the date of the recent pakistan quake?.
What's in it for a the more experienced Linux user (but not a mad bash hacking pro)?
Only speaking for myself and others like me (which may not be much different to yourself judging by your description) ubuntu comes with a lot less fucking-about-with-inanities than other distros.
I like that I installed dapper and everything worked. I don't mean "it booted to a desktop and I needed minimal fiddling to get my camera working, oh and sometimes sound drops out but I got that fixed in half an hour... and I can't use my music player yet cos it won't mount", I mean I can install it and there's everything working and working well.
Don't get me wrong, I do like to jump down into the OS and screw about with things from time to time. I figure if I want to do things unique to myself that's what I'm going to have to do, and any linux distro will give me that. It's just the core simple things that I feel any OS should do well out of the box that many other distros have missed. They've come mighty close, but don't QUITE get there fully. Like installing SuSE and not having sound working like it should. Like installing debian and having an endless argument with fonts. Like installing fedora and finding it plays downloaded movies fine, but the ones from my camera are missing audio... even if they play audio fine on linspire but the video skips frames. It's those little core things that are so braindead simple they should always work first go, that when they don't they make me really feel like I'm working for the other distros when I have to screw around to get them working, instead of the distro working for me.
Recent Ubuntus have been the only ones that are fuss-free for what I consider those core elements of a desktop machine. Other people might have different core wants of course, and different hardware that other distros handle better - but meh, I'm not those other people. Works for me.
Slashdot Mirror
"OS 5 is ahead of schedule, and we will be making public announcements concerning the product in the 4th quarter of this year."
This is the man who claimed OS4 was on schedule to be released in 1999.
The release date was eventually December 2006, just days after the last licensee allowed to produce Amiga hardware lost their license.
Anyone else up for another 7 years of "It's nearly ready, really! No, we're serious this time..."
Makes Vista seem positively normal, and makes Leopard's delays look like an overnight shipping glitch.
Well there's a difference between running one app and running many. When I'm using Eclipse or Firefox I don't mind much if either is using all my resources, as long as it's going fast. The problem comes when I want to load up another app, or if I want to run both at the same time. What a moment ago was a good tradeoff that made things faster suddenly slows everything to a crawl as things are written to the hard disk.
That's very true. Much like I don't consider JUST light resource use (ram and disk and cpu) to be the only metric of a good app, I wouldn't consider an app that always used every skerrick of RAM (even if it was fastest because of it) to necessarily be awesome, if it sacrificed other processes I needed running on the machine. Not all the time anyway.
It's more complex than either two extremes, and falling in the middle somewhere is a whole range of different levels of usefulness to people. Perhaps there are some people out there who don't multitask very well, and would be happy to have Firefox use all available RAM and run like a rocket. Different folks, and all.
Using GIMP, did you ever look at the setting called "Tile cache size" in Preferences / Environment? This sets the maximum amount of RAM that GIMP can use before it starts to swap some parts of images (tiles) to disk.
We did, and had the same good advice from Gimp's mailing dev mailing list too. While they couldn't help us get it up to speed, apparently it's an issue that will be fixed with the move to GEGL.
No malice intended towards Gimp or its developers, but it's a very good practical example from my experience that demonstrates the big point - that the hardware is there to use, and ignoring performance (the real metric) for a potential indicator of performance (namely lightweight resource use) when judging an application is like buying a luxurious suede lounge that's oh-so-comfy to sit on, but always using it with a vinyl cover to protect it. It sort of misses the point...
I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible
I'll have to go out on a limb and say I dropped expectations of absolutely minimal HD and RAM space for EVERY app I use, after continually coming up against programs that would go all out in being light in resource use, but couldn't do their job because of it.
Some are just what the original poster ordered - vim is certainly one of the good cases, it's powerful and manages a light footprint, and there are plenty of other tools that do phenomenal work whether it's running on eight xeons, or a single low-end 386.
One of the opposite cases is some forms of image work when comparing apps like Gimp and Photoshop. In some areas, Gimp is WAY lighter on resource use. I'd perform work on 250MB image, and gimp would use little more RAM than that, no matter how it was configured for RAM use. This would normally be seen as a really good thing for Gimp.
What of Photoshop? It wanted 2GB of RAM to work at maximum speed. That might sound like serious bloat on photoshop's part, but when working on large images it meant two orders of magnitude difference in speed. Yes, where Gimp will use a mere 280MB on a 4GB system, and take 15-16 minutes to perform one filter over an image, Photoshop would chew through 2GB and take about 20 seconds doing the exact same thing.
(That doesn't mean PS was incapable when stuck with ONLY 256MB RAM. Then it'd bog down just like Gimp)
What I want are apps that use the resources I provide them *wisely*. There's more to that than just being totally frugal. Seen too many people running big-RAM systems and being proud of having their OS use just a hundred or two MB out of gigs. Why? Resources are free once they're installed, may as well use them when they genuinely can help you work.
Yes but Windows predates the Mac II :P
Most. Irrelevant.Reply. Ever.
Dear Darl,
We told you so.
Sincerely,
Internet full of geeks with a clue.
It's called Australia throughout North America.
:)
It was called Australia when I went to school in Canada, and it's called Australia in Washington, DC.
It's also called Australia in Australia
I hadn't read the computerworld article before posting the above comment. Sadly, now I have, I notice it doesn't mention which OS the trojan runs on.
If I weren't so tired atm I'd have something deep and witty to say about that, but all I can do is shake my head.
After all these years of malware on Windows systems, I think it's high time someone took Microsoft to court and at least charged them with contributory negligence. After the Mellissa virus, they can't claim that they don't know the hazard.
Who said it's Windows malware?
(yeah, OK, I was trying to be funny...)
It sounds obvious, but also stupid.
One reason marketing likes the whole age/sex/race/income thing, is that they can derive from that some possible information about what you might be interested in, in order to market to you. It's not perfect, as not all 16 year old males with wealthy parents will be interested in buying insanely expensive gaming systems, and not all 85 year old women on a pension will want to just email photos of family around, but it works better than guessing.
So, what they're really after is what a specific person is interested in. What does a specific hypothetical user browse? what do they spend money on, what are they interested in, etc.
And now in a world where it's so easy to get that specific information on hundreds of thousands people, they want to use that specific information to derive less reliable demographic statistics, in order to derive what a particular person might be interested in...
Nuts.
Below are two edits to the piece here.
The first. Let's pretend this was GPL code taken by Microsoft, not OpenBSD, for inclusion in Windows. To me, that looks like Mr Buesch is being decent.
Now let's switch to the opposite - Mr Buesch as a Windows developer, finding Microsoft code in OpenBSD Again, a response like that if it were from Microsoft to the OpenBSD team would be considered highly decent.
I think Michael Buesch did well
That was exactly my thought.
'The report found that Microsoft Windows had the fewest number of patches and the shortest average patch development time of the five operating systems it monitored in the last six months of 2006.'
Cool. so if I write an OS that's chock FULL of holes, and only patch three of the simplest holes in six months, patch them within an hour of being alerted to their existence, and try to keep all the others under wraps, then my OS would have fewer patches than windows and a shorter patch development time. I win. Security by obscurity wins too.
Retarded. It relies on the trust that OS vendors always patch all holes they're alerted to, AND announces every one they've patched or been alerted to. Trust like that is the beginnings of security problems in the first place.
If it works fine with a bucket, why do you have to use an entire swimming pool?
By the look of the setup in the article, multiple CPUs are tapped into the line from the pool, potentially dozens all in the same room, all watercooled from the same water source. The bucket did well for just one, but not multiples.
Similar here. It'd be easier to count the number of relatives who *didn't* get iPods as christmas presents. That'd be me, my mother, and my two year old nephew. Everyone else closely related that I can think of has a new nano, shuffle or iPod, and they're anywhere from 8 to 71 years old.
Can you play Eve-Online on that iMac?
Yes
Then it's not a great gaming platform, sorry.
Oh. so it's not good if it does play games? Odd thinking.
I think it's primarily due to poor reading comprehension and poor reading speed.
If schools worldwide are anything like here, it's the former but not the latter. Kids are taught somewhere from 10-14 the basics of speed reading. If they manage to pick up a few points out of text they're given to speed-read, then they're marked high, pass, and end up learning to use the skill in all their schooling.
Which would be good if it were taught well, but it isn't. All too often the testing process involves little more than identifying a word or two in a document to see if it refers to what you need, but doesn't allow for any measure of true comprehension of what's being read, with the result that kids will read a paragraph (say an extract from a google search result) and see the words they think they're after, judge that as being acceptable, and go use it.
Speed reading is a valuable skill to skim through a document and find points you're interested in, but it takes true thought to understand much writing, more thought than most people with poor training do in the five or ten seconds they may use to read over a page. Perhaps with some exceptionally clear writing this would work, but the world is full of writing anywhere from atrocious to functional to exceptional, and without spending time to critically analyse what's being said, everything gets dumped in the "omg did you read this one?" basket.
When their driver stops working with newer kernels and they patch it to work again, isn't that patch "derived" from the linux kernel, otherwise where esle would the patch be derived from?
I don't see that makes it derived from the kernel, rather that it's compatible with it. If that definition truly made it derivative, then any app that runs in Linux that depends on features of the kernel may be seen as a derivative.
Darl is looking pretty rough these days. I wonder what could be weighing him down so much.
His conscience, maybe?
Since there is a fully functional BSD variant under the hood, is it possible (using X11.app, darwinports, and/or Fink) to boot to a command line and simply startx? Would it use less RAM to bypass Aqua?"
Yes, it's possible. At least, it was a few years ago, when I first installed KDE via fink then logged in at the login prompt as user ">console" (with no password) and performed a startx. I didn't use it for a terribly long time as a KDE-only box, and it was more an experiment to see what was possible - but it worked just like any other KDE setup. I didn't use Apple's own X11, but had XDarwin installed instead.
A note too - Aqua is only the default theme with OSX, and just describes the look of the OSX GUI. Quartz is the engine underneath that performance depends on. There was no noticeable difference in speed with XDarwin over Quartz, but perhaps that could be improved with more work on XDarwin.
Beige is OK, if the rest of a computer is designed well. The "beige box" is something that's often berated not because of its color, but because of the flimsy components, cheap design, tacky add-ons and crap fit & finish that often went with it. The fading out of the beige box isn't all because of a shift in case color, but the realisation from designers after colorful computers appeared that it was OK to be different in all manner of other ways.
A friend has a well-preserved collection of old beige machines ( http://www.danaquarium.com/gallery/beige/ ), and the photos show to me that a tidy appealing design isn't dependent on just color.
Given the hideous mess he made of LOTR, I'm relatively pleased that he won't be butchering The Hobbit in the same way.
:)
I hear it's Uwe Boll doing The Hobbit, so it definitely won't be butchered in the same way.
This warning only appears when you double click a document file that triggers the opening of an application for the first time. On a default out-of-the-box OSX install (which I've set up just this morning, and I'm still adding apps to) there is no such warning when double clicking a random executable itself.
So they've ordered his execution because he allegedly ordered the executions of others. Are they not then guilty of the same crime as he?
Two weeks ago we an arson hit in a forest a few miles behind my house. The firefighters burned off some land in order to contain the spread of the fire. Are the firefighters not also guilty of the same crime as the original arsonists?
Just as bad as people's ability to rate risk badly is our ability to read what we WANT to read, instead of what's written. The question wasn't to do with remembering what happened, rather when.
If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened
The date is the important part. Who remembers the date flight 800 came down, the date the iraq war started, the date of the loma prieta quake, the date Katrina hit NOL, the date of the tsunami that killed 100 times the people killed in the WTC attacks, the date mt pinatubo went up, the date lockerbie was hit by a plane, the date of the recent pakistan quake?.
What's in it for a the more experienced Linux user (but not a mad bash hacking pro)?
Only speaking for myself and others like me (which may not be much different to yourself judging by your description) ubuntu comes with a lot less fucking-about-with-inanities than other distros.
I like that I installed dapper and everything worked. I don't mean "it booted to a desktop and I needed minimal fiddling to get my camera working, oh and sometimes sound drops out but I got that fixed in half an hour... and I can't use my music player yet cos it won't mount", I mean I can install it and there's everything working and working well.
Don't get me wrong, I do like to jump down into the OS and screw about with things from time to time. I figure if I want to do things unique to myself that's what I'm going to have to do, and any linux distro will give me that. It's just the core simple things that I feel any OS should do well out of the box that many other distros have missed. They've come mighty close, but don't QUITE get there fully. Like installing SuSE and not having sound working like it should. Like installing debian and having an endless argument with fonts. Like installing fedora and finding it plays downloaded movies fine, but the ones from my camera are missing audio... even if they play audio fine on linspire but the video skips frames. It's those little core things that are so braindead simple they should always work first go, that when they don't they make me really feel like I'm working for the other distros when I have to screw around to get them working, instead of the distro working for me.
Recent Ubuntus have been the only ones that are fuss-free for what I consider those core elements of a desktop machine. Other people might have different core wants of course, and different hardware that other distros handle better - but meh, I'm not those other people. Works for me.