/opt is kind of cool if you've got LOTS of non-managed software, IMHO. Each package gets its own subdir in/opt, for example,/opt/oracle. Not wanting to start a flamewar by any means, in fact I use/usr/local on my systems, but/opt seems to be the way it goes on a lot of packages for Solaris, and I'm a/path/of/least/resistance kind of guy.
He didn't give the filesize in sectors, who does? He gave it in BYTES (both Mega- and Mebi- bytes). While I hate the name "Mebi" as much as you do, it doesn't change the fact that we're not interested in the filesize in blocks. Our ISP will tariff using SI units, and just because our disk is broken into 512 or 1024 or whatever blocks doesn't mean we're interested in how many.
Like you, I used to think disk manufacturers were behind this for the purpose of deception, but it turns out they've been correct all along (with a few exceptions, but we won't go into that here.)
When we enquire of a filesize, it's often to calculate how long it will take to travel a certain data link. Base 2 math is entirely irrelevant there, and it makes pure sense to treat Mega as meaning "one million, +/- zero".
Please don't fight it. It's important we make the distinction consistently so we can get out of this mess for once and for all.
Regards, Ben.
Meh, I can't understand why you'd only put 256 of real memory in if you knew you needed 512 on most occasions. I've always had swap, but hardly used it. It's more of a "rainy day" memory for me. Even if the swap was on real disk, the machine would be unusable because of only having half as much RAM as it needs.
Open source coders are good, but they're not Godlike. If the specs aren't open they get practically nowhere sometimes, and if they are - they'll still take as long to iron out the bugs and get it stable than anybody else.
Likewise, I only live a short jump from my exchange, so my DSL modem reports the link very favourably, and my ISP offers me 1Mb, 2Mb or 3.5Mb. Now 3.5 is nice, but I only get that between midnight and 6AM. I just go for the cheapest deal since there's no point in having all that bandwidth that I'll have to considerably out of my way to actually get/
I concur. At work we had a few Acer P4s with them in, all the same vintage. One day, a Maxtor in one of them started failing, and I swapped it out. Two others failed in the next month. I didn't give a fourth one the chance. I think they lasted three years.
Well done Slashdot. By using one of the last timezones to see the sun, on top of your ordinarily late news posts, most of the world have already gone to bed or even woken up on the next day.
Oh, and please don't call it a BIOS - that term is specifically for kludgy short sighted implementations that aren't written to any particular standard, use completely different badly worded and gratuitious interfaces which probably won't work the next generation of disk/card/CPU.
On any machine worth a dime, you can call it 'firmware' and keep a straight face.
You're not wrong - it's on the chips, and the mac will make that noise before the disk has spun up, letalone retrieve anything from it. In theory you could flash the OpenProm / EFI ROM and change it to whatever you like though.
And at least the Mac bootup sound has always been a simple, usually beautiful single instrument chord, not some crappy jingle a la Windows that often comes out sounding choppy as the bloodbath of all the startup services cause your IDE throughput to be floppy-like.
Mind you, the Windows tunes are nowhere near as horrifying or embarrasing as anything with the opensource desktops like KDE and Gnome. Fortunately, nobody had the gall to ship with them being played by default. Can't wait to read serious reasoning why Microsoft are doing this - it's pretty obvious a lot of people are going to be asking for this to fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I'd seen some pathetic Ask Slashdots, but this is an all-new low.
Yeah. Or put a more intelligent way, like the other guys:
No, your employer can not deny you your lawfully expected duty.
/opt is kind of cool if you've got LOTS of non-managed software, IMHO. Each package gets its own subdir in /opt, for example, /opt/oracle. Not wanting to start a flamewar by any means, in fact I use /usr/local on my systems, but /opt seems to be the way it goes on a lot of packages for Solaris, and I'm a /path/of/least/resistance kind of guy.
And he should comment out "* Go to bed / work *" since the asterisks will expand to every file in the current directory.
Neither. 2 048 000.
Like you, I used to think disk manufacturers were behind this for the purpose of deception, but it turns out they've been correct all along (with a few exceptions, but we won't go into that here.)
When we enquire of a filesize, it's often to calculate how long it will take to travel a certain data link. Base 2 math is entirely irrelevant there, and it makes pure sense to treat Mega as meaning "one million, +/- zero".
Please don't fight it. It's important we make the distinction consistently so we can get out of this mess for once and for all. Regards, Ben.
A MEGA-anything is a million. It has nothing to do with RAM manufacture, a filesize has no reason to be measured in power-of-two quantities.
I hear you in your next two paragraphs. Regards.
Open source coders are good, but they're not Godlike. If the specs aren't open they get practically nowhere sometimes, and if they are - they'll still take as long to iron out the bugs and get it stable than anybody else.
Exactly - I can't believe how long the "limited r/w cycles" arguments have persisted in spite of this issue being worked around years ago.
Thanks for carefully explaining that to us all.
They're not going to be using anything shortly.
Likewise, I only live a short jump from my exchange, so my DSL modem reports the link very favourably, and my ISP offers me 1Mb, 2Mb or 3.5Mb. Now 3.5 is nice, but I only get that between midnight and 6AM. I just go for the cheapest deal since there's no point in having all that bandwidth that I'll have to considerably out of my way to actually get/
Aren't you going to at least pop in for the April 2 jokes?
I concur. At work we had a few Acer P4s with them in, all the same vintage. One day, a Maxtor in one of them started failing, and I swapped it out. Two others failed in the next month. I didn't give a fourth one the chance. I think they lasted three years.
You're thinking of capacitance. Impedance bothers every signal, low or high frequency.
Well done Slashdot. By using one of the last timezones to see the sun, on top of your ordinarily late news posts, most of the world have already gone to bed or even woken up on the next day.
"... at the current rate of growth, it is estimated that by 2010, 'toss' will have as many as 16,000 meanings"
Doesn't saying "'banana' is taken, choose another" not make the passwords public?
Use the mute button tip, earlier up the page. If you MUST protect yourself from the bootup sound, use a system feature rather than a kludge.
Me to. My only motivation, however, was that I liked the "Boooo!" sample much more than the "yaaay!" one.
Fixed that for you.
On any machine worth a dime, you can call it 'firmware' and keep a straight face.
And at least the Mac bootup sound has always been a simple, usually beautiful single instrument chord, not some crappy jingle a la Windows that often comes out sounding choppy as the bloodbath of all the startup services cause your IDE throughput to be floppy-like.
Mind you, the Windows tunes are nowhere near as horrifying or embarrasing as anything with the opensource desktops like KDE and Gnome. Fortunately, nobody had the gall to ship with them being played by default. Can't wait to read serious reasoning why Microsoft are doing this - it's pretty obvious a lot of people are going to be asking for this to fixed.
For people liking digital lighting conditions that's fine. However, I'm more a fan of analog light controls...
You look really intelligent using words like that instead of 'switch' and 'dimmer'. Truly a cut above the rest of us.Seriously, folks like you are what makes being intelligent and informed so uncool.