with my wife hating multitasking. She never closes a thing (tab, application, etc.) and invariably runs out of memory. Often, there are dozens of background processes. Her hard drive starts to thrash. Things grind to a halt. I get called.
I've tried to explain about things taking up memory, the problem of lots of background applications, the problem of never closing applications. She doesn't want to know what memory even IS. "Why is the computer so stupid," she wants to know, "that it can't figure out that I only care about what I'm working on RIGHT NOW?"
Did the people who marked parent insightful realize that the computer *does* realize the difference in foreground and background processes. Who among us here *does not* run dozens of processes in background ? And if you run out of physical memory... guess what.... the background processes get swapped out to disk. The foreground processes (the "Running" process... for I doubt his wife is running intensive data processing in background while using her browser in the foreground) take up as many physical pages as it requires.
Yes, swapping would be bad when you want to switch back to a process most of whose pages have been swapped out. But that's about as good or bad as shutting down the foreground application and starting the other application from the disk (with the added "feature" of having lost all state that you may have accumulated in the other application during past use).
Yes, there are other benefits to having exactly one application open at a time (mostly UI based), but memory management, in any reasonably modern OS (starting... oh say in the mid 80's), is probably not one of them.
I did a lot of research, so I thought I knew what I was getting into. To my surprise, one of the most important functions I wanted in a book reader was not there -- I could not import my own documents.
" One solution would be for "the people" to pay more taxes and create enough research scientist jobs to retain the non-superstar PhDs. A lot of scientific research would get done. But, as far as I can tell, it's not what "the people" in the USA want."
Er... that's only a "solution" if you define the problem as "Keep second tier Phd's in the country". What possible motivation would USA, as a society, would have to do that (assuming there actually was a body making decisions for the betterment of the society as a whole... Stop! don't even say the G word.). According to you, US universities keep the cream of the talent (at least among those who got their Phd's there), and cut the others loose to find their living the best they can. That's the very essence of a functioning, competitive market.
The real "solution" to the problem of concentration of the best and brightest minds in one place is for other places to make themselves more attractive. According to TFA, China is trying to do some of that. US security agencies are doing the rest putting the fear of god in any and all foreigners trying to travel to US for any reason. All power to them. The Chinese program seems to be to lure native Chinese scientists back home after their Phds. But if this or similar programs allow Euro/American born scientists a wider choice... there's nothing wrong with that either. Globalization in action and all that.
There's nothing wrong with moving out the US to find jobs. That's precisely the sort of large geographical moves that are routine for grad students from India and China that allow them to compete on a global stage. It's an entrepreneurial move. That's precisely what America is (was?) all about. No ?
"And if you're writing threaded code you can't really use the stl anyway"
Oh noooz... I must recall the thousands of lines of multhreaded code I wrote for various server appliances using all sorts of std library containers and algorithms (running on 100's of customer sites) right away. Why didn't you warn us about this menace before.
Seriously why would you so confidently spread blatant FUD ? Care to explain why "threaded code" (I presume you mean multithreaded programs) can't use the c++ standard library (yes... what used to be called STL is now almost completely subsumed in the standard library).
"I know, someone's going to mention proprietary versions of the stl that support finer-grained locking primitives, but even that's not anywhere near optimal"
So many questions about that statement: 1) what is "optimal" ? 2) why do you assume that "finer grained locking" would be more optimal (by whatever your definition of "optimal" is. 3) and finally, what benchamarks or data do you have to support your general dismissal of standard library containers in multithreaded code and your more specific claim 2 ?
It's not just your writing that sucks. Going by your response, your reading comprehension is not so hot either. I like your rant (which, your probably did get proofread ironically) but it was about *THE WRONG THING*. I'd leave it at that. Maybe you should spend some time on reflection rather than defending the indefensible.
If I have to pick one industry dominated by blood-sucking parasites of the lowest order, it'll have to be the big cell phone providers in the US. Someone on my family plan sends me an sms, it costs us 2 X 20c. Once for sending and once for recieving. The minimum "unlimited sms plan" is way more than what I would spend on sms normally so it's not worth it for me to buy that. I can not believe this form of highway robbery is being allowed to go on so rampantly in a purportedly civilized society.
I take a look at what I know, verses what I knew graduating college, and I know substantially more, and more practical knowledge, things that no MS piece of paper can show.
Does your extensive post-collegiage learning include constructing a multi-clause sentence in the English language (..and I wouldn't even mention the spelling error) ? Ordinarily I wouldn't be an asshole about this except you screwed up the exact sentence where you're bragging about your amazing skills, acquired over a long professional career. And whatever that career might be, writing a readable sentence in your main language is a basic skill (and I know you're an American from your other posts).
... wind powered ships. Maybe we could plant a huge wind turbine on the ship's deck and use the electricity thus generated to power the motors. I mean... there's lots of wind over the oceans. Somebody should definitely look at using wind to propel the ships.
"of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance : ordinary, so-so "
Despite the etymology involving the root "med", the generally accepted usage of the word "mediocre" in fact tends towards "inferior" rather than "mean" or "average".
I still have to explain what web browsers are to people, and some of them still don't understand it, because they just don't have a place in their mind labeled "web browser" the way we do, and having it explained to them once won't change that
Dude...
Have you considered that you might be living among the illiterate and the dumb ? That your sample is skewed towards mediocrity?
Great job moderator. It's an attempt to make a reasonable point with the help of a deliberately over-the-top analogy. You maynot agree with the point I'm trying to make (that much is obvious), or you may not agree with the applicability of my analogy (which, I humbly submit, is pretty close). That doesn't make it trolling.
...say no to the tyranny of... er.. English. Let's stick with the combination of grunts, squeals, crying and gesturing that has proven so effective for toddlers all over the globe for thousands of years. And if we surrendered the traditional languages that we are so irrationally attached to, who knows what revolutionary new communication scheme the next-generation kids will come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
with my wife hating multitasking. She never closes a thing (tab, application, etc.) and invariably runs out of memory. Often, there are dozens of background processes. Her hard drive starts to thrash. Things grind to a halt. I get called.
I've tried to explain about things taking up memory, the problem of lots of background applications, the problem of never closing applications. She doesn't want to know what memory even IS. "Why is the computer so stupid," she wants to know, "that it can't figure out that I only care about what I'm working on RIGHT NOW?"
Did the people who marked parent insightful realize that the computer *does* realize the difference in foreground and background processes. Who among us here *does not* run dozens of processes in background ? And if you run out of physical memory... guess what.... the background processes get swapped out to disk. The foreground processes (the "Running" process... for I doubt his wife is running intensive data processing in background while using her browser in the foreground) take up as many physical pages as it requires.
Yes, swapping would be bad when you want to switch back to a process most of whose pages have been swapped out. But that's about as good or bad as shutting down the foreground application and starting the other application from the disk (with the added "feature" of having lost all state that you may have accumulated in the other application during past use).
Yes, there are other benefits to having exactly one application open at a time (mostly UI based), but memory management, in any reasonably modern OS (starting... oh say in the mid 80's), is probably not one of them.
I did a lot of research, so I thought I knew what I was getting into. To my surprise, one of the most important functions I wanted in a book reader was not there -- I could not import my own documents.
What the heck are you talking about willis. There are a bunch of free (as in $0) and non-free apps out there that let you save and open any number of common file formats (pdf, txt, .doc, xls, various image formats etc) for iPhone and iTouch. e.g.
http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/iphone-software/wildeyes-new-iphone-document-viewer-app-from-databinge
You said you did thorough research. Did that include typing "iPod touch document reader" in google ?
Speaking of feminine reproductive system, "is late" would sound much worse than iPad... no ?
That old saw is the bike-shed effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_shed
Adobe flashes yo'tube. Issue.
Er... that's only a "solution" if you define the problem as "Keep second tier Phd's in the country". What possible motivation would USA, as a society, would have to do that (assuming there actually was a body making decisions for the betterment of the society as a whole... Stop! don't even say the G word.). According to you, US universities keep the cream of the talent (at least among those who got their Phd's there), and cut the others loose to find their living the best they can. That's the very essence of a functioning, competitive market.
The real "solution" to the problem of concentration of the best and brightest minds in one place is for other places to make themselves more attractive. According to TFA, China is trying to do some of that. US security agencies are doing the rest putting the fear of god in any and all foreigners trying to travel to US for any reason. All power to them. The Chinese program seems to be to lure native Chinese scientists back home after their Phds. But if this or similar programs allow Euro/American born scientists a wider choice... there's nothing wrong with that either. Globalization in action and all that.
There's nothing wrong with moving out the US to find jobs. That's precisely the sort of large geographical moves that are routine for grad students from India and China that allow them to compete on a global stage. It's an entrepreneurial move. That's precisely what America is (was?) all about. No ?
"And if you're writing threaded code you can't really use the stl anyway"
Oh noooz... I must recall the thousands of lines of multhreaded code I wrote for various server appliances using all sorts of std library containers and algorithms (running on 100's of customer sites) right away. Why didn't you warn us about this menace before.
Seriously why would you so confidently spread blatant FUD ? Care to explain why "threaded code" (I presume you mean multithreaded programs) can't use the c++ standard library (yes... what used to be called STL is now almost completely subsumed in the standard library).
"I know, someone's going to mention proprietary versions of the stl that support finer-grained locking primitives, but even that's not anywhere near optimal"
So many questions about that statement:
1) what is "optimal" ?
2) why do you assume that "finer grained locking" would be more optimal (by whatever your definition of "optimal" is.
3) and finally, what benchamarks or data do you have to support your general dismissal of standard library containers in multithreaded code and your more specific claim 2 ?
Where are my mod points when I need them. Someone please mod parent Funny (or Hilarious if that's an option).
...with frickin laser beams on their heads.
... welcome our radioactive, unicellular overlords.
And more often than not, highly qualified bosoms.
It's not just your writing that sucks. Going by your response, your reading comprehension is not so hot either. I like your rant (which, your probably did get proofread ironically) but it was about *THE WRONG THING*. I'd leave it at that. Maybe you should spend some time on reflection rather than defending the indefensible.
If I have to pick one industry dominated by blood-sucking parasites of the lowest order, it'll have to be the big cell phone providers in the US. Someone on my family plan sends me an sms, it costs us 2 X 20c. Once for sending and once for recieving. The minimum "unlimited sms plan" is way more than what I would spend on sms normally so it's not worth it for me to buy that. I can not believe this form of highway robbery is being allowed to go on so rampantly in a purportedly civilized society.
I take a look at what I know, verses what I knew graduating college, and I know substantially more, and more practical knowledge, things that no MS piece of paper can show.
Does your extensive post-collegiage learning include constructing a multi-clause sentence in the English language (..and I wouldn't even mention the spelling error) ? Ordinarily I wouldn't be an asshole about this except you screwed up the exact sentence where you're bragging about your amazing skills, acquired over a long professional career. And whatever that career might be, writing a readable sentence in your main language is a basic skill (and I know you're an American from your other posts).
Could it really be someone who's teaching programming at a major US university doesn't know about source control systems ??
... wind powered ships. Maybe we could plant a huge wind turbine on the ship's deck and use the electricity thus generated to power the motors. I mean... there's lots of wind over the oceans. Somebody should definitely look at using wind to propel the ships.
Shouldn't have checked his email from Mexico.
Any balanced sample of the population would be skewed towards mediocrity, that's kind of what mediocre means.
(sorry for being prissy and didactic but I can honestly say you started it)
look here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?q=mediocre
1. of only ordinary or moderate quality; neither good nor bad; barely adequate.
2. rather poor or inferior.
Also look here:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mediocre
"of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance : ordinary, so-so "
Despite the etymology involving the root "med", the generally accepted usage of the word "mediocre" in fact tends towards "inferior" rather than "mean" or "average".
Dude... Have you considered that you might be living among the illiterate and the dumb ? That your sample is skewed towards mediocrity?
.... you know the rest....
Great job moderator. It's an attempt to make a reasonable point with the help of a deliberately over-the-top analogy. You maynot agree with the point I'm trying to make (that much is obvious), or you may not agree with the applicability of my analogy (which, I humbly submit, is pretty close). That doesn't make it trolling.
...say no to the tyranny of... er.. English. Let's stick with the combination of grunts, squeals, crying and gesturing that has proven so effective for toddlers all over the globe for thousands of years. And if we surrendered the traditional languages that we are so irrationally attached to, who knows what revolutionary new communication scheme the next-generation kids will come up with.