Even with a slow cpu, an ssd can make a machine feel a lot faster with more consistent behavior (fewer disk thrashing 'hangs').
With a crappy OS like Windows that swaps out the programs you're running in order to increase the size of the disk cache, perhaps. Not with a sane OS where it will only really improve program startup times (most obviously boot times) or loading large files from disk.
A tree data structure will use at least a couple pointers for each element unless it's a tree-in-a-vector.
Again, why would any sensible program be using a tree structure to process pixels?
The vast majority of RAM use on the average PC is not pointers. It's bitmaps and other data that is the same size regardless of whether you're running a 32-bit OS or a 64-bit OS.
You lose out on caches when pointer lengths double (Windows - they have pointers everywhere).
Pointers are an insignificant overhead in most applications that use a lot of RAM; if you're using that RAM you're probably dealing with video or images or filling up a big disk cache, so the pointer size is irrelevant to you.
Unless you're doing something really dumb like creating a new object for each pixel rather than storing the color values in an array.
I'm a firm believer in using the tax code to influence behavior. Tax the snot out of them.
I've been looking through the US Constitution and I'm struggling to find the part where it says Congress has the power to ban light bulbs or tax them until they're unaffordable.
I can promise you where nuclear waste is being stored now, where ever that is, is a lot less safe than it would be at Yucca Mountain.
But that's exactly why the anti-nuclear nutters oppose it; they love nuclear accidents because it helps them campaign to end nuclear power... the last things they want are safe reactors and safe waste disposal.
You must have gone to a government school, or you'd realise that if your two end points are both zero and somewhere in the middle is a value that isn't zero, then you don't have a straight line between them.
Or are you seriously claiming that the US government currently has no tax revenue?
My main point still holds: we tax work a lot more than wealth in this country
This is why I'm always amused when I see Lefties demanding increased income tax to 'soak the rich'. Income tax is one of the primary methods the rich use to ensure that the middle class can't become rich enough to threaten them, because most of their income isn't classed as 'income'.
The idiot left are literally voting to keep themselves poor while the rich just laugh at them. It's hilarious.
The Laffer curve is a miserable failure, as anyone with even the slightest knowledge of economic history can deduce.
The Laffer curve is common sense. At 0% tax rates the government has no revenue because there's no tax. At 100% tax rates the government has no revenue because no-one in their right mind will work to see everything they do stolen by the government. Hence revenues must peak somewhere between 0% and 100% tax rates.
Of course common sense is pretty rare after a century of compulsory schooling by government teachers.
Are these people really stupid enough to think this would somehow work?
Depends on what you mean by 'work'. If the Israeli government had just ignored them they'd have gone on a vacation, got a few articles in lefty newspapers and come home. Because the Israelis refused to let them in they now have global media coverage and didn't even have to go to Israel.
You DO realize that in order to enter the Supreme Court building, or the White House, or the Capitol, you are required to "show us your papers", right?
You DO realize that during the Cold War one of the propaganda points made by the US government was that US citizens could go just about anywhere in their country without some police state thug demanding 'your papers please?' right?
And how exactly is 'showing your papers' supposed to make those buildings secure?
Global warming is expected to create much more evaporation from the oceans and lead to more rain. (cf the flooded central US).
Except when it's expected to create droughts.
That's the great thing about 'Global Warming', with a few tweaks your model can produce any result you want. Hence the predictions from a few years ago about winters with no snow magically became predictions of increased snow when reality refused to obey the model last year.
This is not minority report type stuff. This stuff is more like: data shows an increase in vandalism in the vicinity of the sports stadium after a championship game.
So it's the kind of thing that a cop would have known from experience back in the bad old days when they walked the streets and talked to the people who lived there rather than driving from donut store to donut store waiting for a call on their radio?
It takes more faith to believe that God doesn't exist than it does to believe it. In the end you die and either nothing happens or you go to hell. The aftermath is irreversible
Uh, no. The Invisible Pink Unicorn sends all atheists to Invisible Pink Unicorn Heaven where they get free ponies and cake, while those who believe in some kind of god are sent to their religion's version of Hell.
Pascal's Wager was a silly idea when he first proposed it, I'm amazed that anyone would still try to use it centuries later.
Challenger happened mainly because of the Congress because they wanted to build the solid rocket boosters in a far far away state. Then the only was was to ship them by barge. To be able to do that, they had to be in segments. And hence they needed O-rings.It's all about poli-ticks.
To be fair, I don't believe anyone has built a one-piece solid rocket the size of the shuttle SRBs and there are some significant technical issues with large solid rockets. The usual failure mode seems to be a massive explosion rather than a leak.
I'd have to call bullshit on that. I have a file server that's going on it's 14th year of operation running a Via based board and processors. It was my desktop board when I was gaming with my Voodoo 5 and Pentium 3 back in the day. Now it keeps my information sorted.
Of course you don't realise that half the drivers on that system are saying 'Oh crap, a VIA board, I'm going to disable all these features because they just don't work'.
I know when I was developing GPU drivers on Windows one of the first things the driver did was check for a VIA chipset and then drop the AGP bus down to PCI-33 because they had so many problems talking to our AGP cards and trying to make it work wasn't worth the time.
How can people on Slashdot bitch about software patents, and then complain about Chinese theft of software?
That's known as double standard mixed with scapegoating.
Only if you don't know the difference between software patents and stealing a company's internal software and giving it to their competitors. They're such different concepts that I can hardly see how anyone could confuse the two.
But with hindsight McCarthy seems to have _under_estimated the USSR's penetration of the US government. He may have been crazy, but it would seem that he wasn't paranoid enough.
I think the point is to do away with NAT entirely.
The question is why that's considered to be a good thing. I like the fact that random web site can't tell which device in my house is connecting to it becuase they all have the router's IP address.
The trick is finding a way to make this happen securely and without configuration. On the face of it, this seems like a challenging task.
Philip
I believe you mis-spelt 'impossible'.
Somehow you need to configure your thermostat to tell it which devices to accept connections from, or you have to open it up to everyone. Otherwise you're expecting magic.
And the last thing I want is random IPV6 devices opening holes in my firewall by themselves; UPnP is a security disaster zone.
Isn't it a common complaint on/. that the PTO is understaffed and underfunded, hence all of the bogus patents that get granted?
No.
The complaint is that the PTO is being funded, hence all of the bogus patents that get granted. You'd see celebrations here if the funding was cut to zero.
Last time I checked taxes were raised in the 90s and the economy boomed and then taxes were cut under Bush and the economy went into the great depression 2.
Hint: correlation is not causation.
If you really think that raising taxes improves the economy, you should just increase tax rates to 100% because then the economy would really be booming.
Slashdot Mirror
Even with a slow cpu, an ssd can make a machine feel a lot faster with more consistent behavior (fewer disk thrashing 'hangs').
With a crappy OS like Windows that swaps out the programs you're running in order to increase the size of the disk cache, perhaps. Not with a sane OS where it will only really improve program startup times (most obviously boot times) or loading large files from disk.
A tree data structure will use at least a couple pointers for each element unless it's a tree-in-a-vector.
Again, why would any sensible program be using a tree structure to process pixels?
The vast majority of RAM use on the average PC is not pointers. It's bitmaps and other data that is the same size regardless of whether you're running a 32-bit OS or a 64-bit OS.
If I had been MS I honestly would have taken the opportunity to start again with Windows – call it something new, make it their OS X.
Why would anyone buy Windows if it didn't run all their old Windows apps?
You lose out on caches when pointer lengths double (Windows - they have pointers everywhere).
Pointers are an insignificant overhead in most applications that use a lot of RAM; if you're using that RAM you're probably dealing with video or images or filling up a big disk cache, so the pointer size is irrelevant to you.
Unless you're doing something really dumb like creating a new object for each pixel rather than storing the color values in an array.
I'm a firm believer in using the tax code to influence behavior. Tax the snot out of them.
I've been looking through the US Constitution and I'm struggling to find the part where it says Congress has the power to ban light bulbs or tax them until they're unaffordable.
I can promise you where nuclear waste is being stored now, where ever that is, is a lot less safe than it would be at Yucca Mountain.
But that's exactly why the anti-nuclear nutters oppose it; they love nuclear accidents because it helps them campaign to end nuclear power... the last things they want are safe reactors and safe waste disposal.
Two points don't make a curve.
You must have gone to a government school, or you'd realise that if your two end points are both zero and somewhere in the middle is a value that isn't zero, then you don't have a straight line between them.
Or are you seriously claiming that the US government currently has no tax revenue?
My main point still holds: we tax work a lot more than wealth in this country
This is why I'm always amused when I see Lefties demanding increased income tax to 'soak the rich'. Income tax is one of the primary methods the rich use to ensure that the middle class can't become rich enough to threaten them, because most of their income isn't classed as 'income'.
The idiot left are literally voting to keep themselves poor while the rich just laugh at them. It's hilarious.
Why do you hate your grandparents?
Because they spent decades partying as they built up huge debts that they now expect their grandchildren to pay?
The Laffer curve is a miserable failure, as anyone with even the slightest knowledge of economic history can deduce.
The Laffer curve is common sense. At 0% tax rates the government has no revenue because there's no tax. At 100% tax rates the government has no revenue because no-one in their right mind will work to see everything they do stolen by the government. Hence revenues must peak somewhere between 0% and 100% tax rates.
Of course common sense is pretty rare after a century of compulsory schooling by government teachers.
Are these people really stupid enough to think this would somehow work?
Depends on what you mean by 'work'. If the Israeli government had just ignored them they'd have gone on a vacation, got a few articles in lefty newspapers and come home. Because the Israelis refused to let them in they now have global media coverage and didn't even have to go to Israel.
You DO realize that in order to enter the Supreme Court building, or the White House, or the Capitol, you are required to "show us your papers", right?
You DO realize that during the Cold War one of the propaganda points made by the US government was that US citizens could go just about anywhere in their country without some police state thug demanding 'your papers please?' right?
And how exactly is 'showing your papers' supposed to make those buildings secure?
Global warming is expected to create much more evaporation from the oceans and lead to more rain. (cf the flooded central US).
Except when it's expected to create droughts.
That's the great thing about 'Global Warming', with a few tweaks your model can produce any result you want. Hence the predictions from a few years ago about winters with no snow magically became predictions of increased snow when reality refused to obey the model last year.
Somebody mod parent up. One of the best ways to reduce crime is to reduce the inequalities between the very rich and the very poor.
True. When everyone is equally poor, no-one has anything worth stealing.
This is not minority report type stuff. This stuff is more like: data shows an increase in vandalism in the vicinity of the sports stadium after a championship game.
So it's the kind of thing that a cop would have known from experience back in the bad old days when they walked the streets and talked to the people who lived there rather than driving from donut store to donut store waiting for a call on their radio?
It takes more faith to believe that God doesn't exist than it does to believe it. In the end you die and either nothing happens or you go to hell. The aftermath is irreversible
Uh, no. The Invisible Pink Unicorn sends all atheists to Invisible Pink Unicorn Heaven where they get free ponies and cake, while those who believe in some kind of god are sent to their religion's version of Hell.
Pascal's Wager was a silly idea when he first proposed it, I'm amazed that anyone would still try to use it centuries later.
Challenger happened mainly because of the Congress because they wanted to build the solid rocket boosters in a far far away state. Then the only was was to ship them by barge. To be able to do that, they had to be in segments. And hence they needed O-rings.It's all about poli-ticks.
To be fair, I don't believe anyone has built a one-piece solid rocket the size of the shuttle SRBs and there are some significant technical issues with large solid rockets. The usual failure mode seems to be a massive explosion rather than a leak.
I'd have to call bullshit on that. I have a file server that's going on it's 14th year of operation running a Via based board and processors. It was my desktop board when I was gaming with my Voodoo 5 and Pentium 3 back in the day. Now it keeps my information sorted.
Of course you don't realise that half the drivers on that system are saying 'Oh crap, a VIA board, I'm going to disable all these features because they just don't work'.
I know when I was developing GPU drivers on Windows one of the first things the driver did was check for a VIA chipset and then drop the AGP bus down to PCI-33 because they had so many problems talking to our AGP cards and trying to make it work wasn't worth the time.
Like web sites have any trouble doing that today with fingerprinting and (flash) cookies.
Yeah, because that's so much easier than just looking at the IP address.
Nor will they have a great deal of luck when all the computers in the hosue run the same OS and clear flash crap every time they reboot.
Well said, wish I have mod points.
How can people on Slashdot bitch about software patents, and then complain about Chinese theft of software?
That's known as double standard mixed with scapegoating.
Only if you don't know the difference between software patents and stealing a company's internal software and giving it to their competitors. They're such different concepts that I can hardly see how anyone could confuse the two.
But with hindsight McCarthy seems to have _under_estimated the USSR's penetration of the US government. He may have been crazy, but it would seem that he wasn't paranoid enough.
I think the point is to do away with NAT entirely.
The question is why that's considered to be a good thing. I like the fact that random web site can't tell which device in my house is connecting to it becuase they all have the router's IP address.
The trick is finding a way to make this happen securely and without configuration. On the face of it, this seems like a challenging task.
Philip
I believe you mis-spelt 'impossible'.
Somehow you need to configure your thermostat to tell it which devices to accept connections from, or you have to open it up to everyone. Otherwise you're expecting magic.
And the last thing I want is random IPV6 devices opening holes in my firewall by themselves; UPnP is a security disaster zone.
Isn't it a common complaint on /. that the PTO is understaffed and underfunded, hence all of the bogus patents that get granted?
No.
The complaint is that the PTO is being funded, hence all of the bogus patents that get granted. You'd see celebrations here if the funding was cut to zero.
Last time I checked taxes were raised in the 90s and the economy boomed and then taxes were cut under Bush and the economy went into the great depression 2.
Hint: correlation is not causation.
If you really think that raising taxes improves the economy, you should just increase tax rates to 100% because then the economy would really be booming.