If I come into the comments from a notification email, the base site is "slashdot.org" and the comment box is wide. If I go to the article from the main page, though, I still have the narrow comment box if I right click and open the reply window in a new page. For those, the base website is "idle.slashdot.org".
Only for cash transactions. If you got rid of pennies, you'd have to round cash transactions to the nearest nickel after computing the total. Credit card and check transactions could still be to penny resolution.
I remember when I worked in retail in MI, back when its state sales tax was 4%, that they had a table that indicated the break points between 0 cents, 1 cent, 2 cents, 3 cents and 4 cents added to the transaction for the fractional part of a dollar. (Clearly, you would add 4 cents for each full dollar.) So, if the transaction ended with 00 to 12, you add 0, 13 to 38, you add 1, etc. In other words, official rounding tables.
So, in your example, an exact $1.00 transaction would get 6% added--$0.06--and then for a cash transaction, it'd get rounded to $1.05. A transaction for $1.03 would also see 6 cents tax, which would come to $1.09. That'd round up to $1.10.
Oh, and what stops transactions from occurring in units smaller than a penny today? Look at electric rates, gas prices and so on, with their fractional cents. Don't confuse the smallest unit of cash with the smallest unit you can do business with.
If I hit "Reply to This" within the page (left mouse click), it opens a nice, wide box. If I right click and open in a new tab, I get a very, very narrow box. Very odd.
I guess that explains why we have folks saying there's a problem and folks saying there isn't a problem.
I remember when I was in high school that it was cool to be bad at math. "You must be one of those math nerds," "I was never good at math" and "I was told there would be no math" are popular phrases I encountered growing up and still encounter today.
The thing is, the most basic math skills gets you soooo far, and most people still just don't get it. *sigh* Really, it's abdication of critical reasoning that's the big problem. The fact that math is front and center there is just a symptom.
Case in point: Four years ago, I bought a house and got a mortgage. I got a pretty decent rate on a 30yr mortgage. My rate was consistent with the 40+year low in long term interest rates. And yet my mortgage broker tried to get me to sign on to an even lower-rate ARM that would "adjust" in about 5 years. It doesn't take a deep thinker to realize that (a) my 30yr mortgage is the deal of a (working) lifetime, and (b) if we all buy low and try to sell high (e.g. bite on a cheap ARM and try to sell before it pops), that we'll all get screwed.
Part of it is a math argument, but all of it is a critical thinking argument.
But it's sooooo coool to not think about the math and just do it.
I said "How many bits per second peak can a 14.4kbps modem move?" and provided the answer "14,400." How is this inconsistent with "Actually, 14.4kbps means 14.4 k *bits* / second"? All I've done is multiply out to show "k = 1000" in this context, not 1024.
It's not like is said "kilobaud" anywhere, which is its own nest of confusion.
And it's fun to contrast: If you have an ADSL modem with an advertised 128kbps upstream, that's actually 131,072 bits per second.
(Someone pointed out that the end-to-end throughput on a ADSL connection is far lower due to network overhead, but that's non sequitur. It's not like PPP lacks overhead, for instance. This is a matter of the bandwidth on this section of the pipe, not what you're doing with that bandwidth.)
Oh, and speaking of journaling... You really should be using a flash-friendly filesystem, not one that concentrates writes in a journal. If you combine a flash-friendly filesystem with a swapfile (assuming that combination is supported, and admittedly I haven't checked), then you get wear leveling at a higher level.
Oh, I understand why many of these things ended up as they did. If you're aware of the history, then most of it seems far less arbitrary. My point was that it's still a mishmash, and hardly consistent.
A T1 line or a voice band modem is measured in power-of-10 megabit and kilobit. But, my last DSL modem was 6Mbit down and 1Mbit up. When I looked at its status page, I was informed that that meant 6144kbps down and 1024kbps up--power of 2, at least between the "M" and "k" steps. Apparently marketing was asleep at the wheel for the DSL folks?
Fortunately, most of the time it doesn't matter, and when it does, it's generally not hard to look up what was intended in a given situation. It's darn annoying though.
It still makes you sound like Mushmouth, speaking in Ubbi Dubbi.
(I didn't know the name for how he talks until I looked it up just now, but he's who I thought of when I first heard "mebibyte" and friends. I guess it's not an impediment as much as it is annoying and childish sounding.)
If the paging algorithm does its job well and the active working set stays stable in RAM, then the bulk of the writes to the swap file are for the dead weight inactive anonymous pages. Freeing up additional RAM for disk buffers could also prevent writes on other random files if they were short lived and deleted before ever getting written. This happens more often than you might think, and is one of the motivations (but not the only one) behind deferred allocation. (The other big one is multiple files opened for streaming writes in parallel.)
So, like all things, it's a tradeoff. When you're on an SSD, if your working set fits in RAM and you don't really thrash, then by all means turn swap off. If you find yourself thrashing a little, do yourself a favor and make a small swapfile and see if that stabilizes things, since at least some of that additional activity will be writes that could go away if you had more RAM--may as well let the VM throw out some deadweight pages to make room for transient pages that might live and die in RAM. If you're oversubscribing your RAM such that you need a truly huge swapfile, consider getting more RAM, because you're likely punishing your SSD.
It's base 2 when dealing with RAM and base 10 when dealing with disks. Pretty consistently. It's generally base 2 when dealing with throughput.
Pop quiz:
Throughput: How many bits per second peak can a 14.4kbps modem move? 1.544Mbps T1 line? 10Mbit Ethernet?
Disks: How many bytes are on a 1.44MB floppy? A 2.88MB floppy? A 650MB CD-ROM?
Answers:
Throughput: 14,400. 1,544,000. 10,000,000. Hmmm... so much for base-2 throughput numbers. And yet, when you see the "kB/sec" rate in your browser download dialog, that is most likely in a 1024 byte/sec quantities.
Disks: 1,473,560 (1440 * 1024, a mixture of base-10 and base-2), 2,949,120 (2880 * 1024, again a mixture), and 681,984,000 (purely base-2, derived from 333,000 sectors * 2048 bytes/sector / 1,048,576). And yet when you look at disk capacities from most computer software, it's reported as purely base-2 sizes.
So, what's consistent about this again? RAM seems to be the only thing that gets it right most of the time, though I do remember seeing plenty of adverts for Commodore 64s that listed them with 65K of memory back in the day.
And for the real brain bender: If we agree that bits should always use power-of-2 meanings and everything else should use power-of-10, what do we do when the two collide, such as when talking about areal density? (That's bits per square meter.)
That said, whoever came up with the names gibibytes, mebibytes and kibibytes must have wanted us all to sound like we have a speech impediment or something, as the pronunciation for these sounds worse than baby talk. I'll stick to saying gigabytes, megabytes and kilobytes and their understood power-of-2 meanings where it makes sense, knowing full well that it has deep flaws. It's just an unfortunate circumstance, but most of the time it thankfully doesn't matter.
Having a swap partition doesn't necessarily mean having a lot of swap traffic. Often what gets placed in swap are portions of the heap that got allocated, but won't be referred to for quite some time. It gives room for other types of pages (as I mention here).
That said, if what you're doing doesn't cause a lot of thrashing when there is no swap, don't add swap on your flash SSD.
Well, that doesn't mean it isn't swapping. If faced with memory pressure, the OS can throw away file backed pages instead, such as program executable pages, and then bring them in later. Those file backed pages will be scattered all around the partitions that hold your programs, though, not concentrated in the swap partition.
It also means that buffered writes will need to be pushed to disk sooner too, which reduces your disk buffering for anything that writes a lot of data will impose more pain on your system.
The bummer in all this is that you have nowhere to put anonymous pages. These are the pages associated with "malloc()" (or "new" if you prefer), as well as any other per-task writable structures such as the stack and global variables. These pages aren't backed by any file and could only go to swap. Without a swap file, they will always accumulate in RAM until unmapped, crowding out program pages and disk buffers. This includes pages that don't actually hold anything at the moment, but remain part of the process' malloc heap due to internal heap fragmentation.
So, that's where the increasing thrashiness comes from on a swapless system. If you get under enough memory pressure from anonymous pages, then it's hard to keep enough program pages and disk buffers around to make real progress. And when you do need those other kinds of pages, they're spread all over the disk so you suffer from tons of seeking penalty, unless you're on an SSD.
And just what percentage of actual pot-related assets become seized assets? And at what cost were those assets seized? I don't think the operation is even close to being break even.
If you were to legalize just pot, as the GP suggests, then I imagine a few things happen: The supply rises as does the demand. The supply will rise more than the demand (since smoking pot is already not that much of a stigma, so those that would probably already do), and so the cost goes down. Tax revenue will become more predictable, and the enforcement and incarceration expenditures related to it will largely evaporate.
That's excepting the DUI/DWI related costs for nabbing folks for driving while high, but if you accept my argument that the number of potheads wouldn't increase dramatically, then that's just a term in the equation that doesn't change much. All the other cases associated with manufacturing, dealing or simple possession would go away due to legalization.
Not counted in this analysis are any healthcare burdens or other economic losses due to lost productivity. That said, I don't think the number of users (at least for pot) would shift much. At any rate, I think those costs are dwarfed by the often expensive enforcement measures that are out there and the incarceration costs for those who are made into petty criminals that get caught up in this mess.
I'm not trying to get all NORML on you. I'm just looking at the numbers.
That's true now that they've taken our proper decongestants away. If they made it legal, folks wouldn't be stealing Sudafed to cook their next fix.
(I'm not weighing in on either side of the legalization argument. I'm just pointing out that there's a market distortion here, and meth-fighting laws aimed at source materials haven't stopped usage, they've just outsourced production.)
Slashdot Mirror
If I come into the comments from a notification email, the base site is "slashdot.org" and the comment box is wide. If I go to the article from the main page, though, I still have the narrow comment box if I right click and open the reply window in a new page. For those, the base website is "idle.slashdot.org".
Only for cash transactions. If you got rid of pennies, you'd have to round cash transactions to the nearest nickel after computing the total. Credit card and check transactions could still be to penny resolution.
I remember when I worked in retail in MI, back when its state sales tax was 4%, that they had a table that indicated the break points between 0 cents, 1 cent, 2 cents, 3 cents and 4 cents added to the transaction for the fractional part of a dollar. (Clearly, you would add 4 cents for each full dollar.) So, if the transaction ended with 00 to 12, you add 0, 13 to 38, you add 1, etc. In other words, official rounding tables.
So, in your example, an exact $1.00 transaction would get 6% added--$0.06--and then for a cash transaction, it'd get rounded to $1.05. A transaction for $1.03 would also see 6 cents tax, which would come to $1.09. That'd round up to $1.10.
I get much happier. That's what.
Oh, and what stops transactions from occurring in units smaller than a penny today? Look at electric rates, gas prices and so on, with their fractional cents. Don't confuse the smallest unit of cash with the smallest unit you can do business with.
They're right here.
You didn't get the memo.
Because, you know, you're being forced to read these posts against your will.
Mr. Magillicuddy, the accountabilibuddy!
If I hit "Reply to This" within the page (left mouse click), it opens a nice, wide box. If I right click and open in a new tab, I get a very, very narrow box. Very odd.
I guess that explains why we have folks saying there's a problem and folks saying there isn't a problem.
How about "less than 10,000 and prime"?
I remember when I was in high school that it was cool to be bad at math. "You must be one of those math nerds," "I was never good at math" and "I was told there would be no math" are popular phrases I encountered growing up and still encounter today.
The thing is, the most basic math skills gets you soooo far, and most people still just don't get it. *sigh* Really, it's abdication of critical reasoning that's the big problem. The fact that math is front and center there is just a symptom.
Case in point: Four years ago, I bought a house and got a mortgage. I got a pretty decent rate on a 30yr mortgage. My rate was consistent with the 40+year low in long term interest rates. And yet my mortgage broker tried to get me to sign on to an even lower-rate ARM that would "adjust" in about 5 years. It doesn't take a deep thinker to realize that (a) my 30yr mortgage is the deal of a (working) lifetime, and (b) if we all buy low and try to sell high (e.g. bite on a cheap ARM and try to sell before it pops), that we'll all get screwed.
Part of it is a math argument, but all of it is a critical thinking argument.
But it's sooooo coool to not think about the math and just do it.
--Joe
The TV show had its moments, but that's about it.
Imagine if you tried to predict that 20 or so years ago.
Nice try.
Nice try. What happens when you want to cancel the prefixes out so you have one prefix for the whole result? Doesn't work out so well does it?
Ah, that's enough troll feeding for one day.
I said "How many bits per second peak can a 14.4kbps modem move?" and provided the answer "14,400." How is this inconsistent with "Actually, 14.4kbps means 14.4 k *bits* / second"? All I've done is multiply out to show "k = 1000" in this context, not 1024.
It's not like is said "kilobaud" anywhere, which is its own nest of confusion.
And it's fun to contrast: If you have an ADSL modem with an advertised 128kbps upstream, that's actually 131,072 bits per second.
(Someone pointed out that the end-to-end throughput on a ADSL connection is far lower due to network overhead, but that's non sequitur. It's not like PPP lacks overhead, for instance. This is a matter of the bandwidth on this section of the pipe, not what you're doing with that bandwidth.)
Oh, and speaking of journaling... You really should be using a flash-friendly filesystem, not one that concentrates writes in a journal. If you combine a flash-friendly filesystem with a swapfile (assuming that combination is supported, and admittedly I haven't checked), then you get wear leveling at a higher level.
Oh, I understand why many of these things ended up as they did. If you're aware of the history, then most of it seems far less arbitrary. My point was that it's still a mishmash, and hardly consistent.
A T1 line or a voice band modem is measured in power-of-10 megabit and kilobit. But, my last DSL modem was 6Mbit down and 1Mbit up. When I looked at its status page, I was informed that that meant 6144kbps down and 1024kbps up--power of 2, at least between the "M" and "k" steps. Apparently marketing was asleep at the wheel for the DSL folks?
Fortunately, most of the time it doesn't matter, and when it does, it's generally not hard to look up what was intended in a given situation. It's darn annoying though.
Change of address, maybe?
The date of issue as seen in this photo looks to be 6 JUL 2007, which was about two months before he disappeared.
They sure didn't do a great job of blurring out the certificate number, did they? (Zoom in to read the print.)
It still makes you sound like Mushmouth, speaking in Ubbi Dubbi.
(I didn't know the name for how he talks until I looked it up just now, but he's who I thought of when I first heard "mebibyte" and friends. I guess it's not an impediment as much as it is annoying and childish sounding.)
If the paging algorithm does its job well and the active working set stays stable in RAM, then the bulk of the writes to the swap file are for the dead weight inactive anonymous pages. Freeing up additional RAM for disk buffers could also prevent writes on other random files if they were short lived and deleted before ever getting written. This happens more often than you might think, and is one of the motivations (but not the only one) behind deferred allocation. (The other big one is multiple files opened for streaming writes in parallel.)
So, like all things, it's a tradeoff. When you're on an SSD, if your working set fits in RAM and you don't really thrash, then by all means turn swap off. If you find yourself thrashing a little, do yourself a favor and make a small swapfile and see if that stabilizes things, since at least some of that additional activity will be writes that could go away if you had more RAM--may as well let the VM throw out some deadweight pages to make room for transient pages that might live and die in RAM. If you're oversubscribing your RAM such that you need a truly huge swapfile, consider getting more RAM, because you're likely punishing your SSD.
Pop quiz:
Throughput: How many bits per second peak can a 14.4kbps modem move? 1.544Mbps T1 line? 10Mbit Ethernet?
Disks: How many bytes are on a 1.44MB floppy? A 2.88MB floppy? A 650MB CD-ROM?
Answers:
Throughput: 14,400. 1,544,000. 10,000,000. Hmmm... so much for base-2 throughput numbers. And yet, when you see the "kB/sec" rate in your browser download dialog, that is most likely in a 1024 byte/sec quantities.
Disks: 1,473,560 (1440 * 1024, a mixture of base-10 and base-2), 2,949,120 (2880 * 1024, again a mixture), and 681,984,000 (purely base-2, derived from 333,000 sectors * 2048 bytes/sector / 1,048,576). And yet when you look at disk capacities from most computer software, it's reported as purely base-2 sizes.
So, what's consistent about this again? RAM seems to be the only thing that gets it right most of the time, though I do remember seeing plenty of adverts for Commodore 64s that listed them with 65K of memory back in the day.
And for the real brain bender: If we agree that bits should always use power-of-2 meanings and everything else should use power-of-10, what do we do when the two collide, such as when talking about areal density? (That's bits per square meter.)
That said, whoever came up with the names gibibytes, mebibytes and kibibytes must have wanted us all to sound like we have a speech impediment or something, as the pronunciation for these sounds worse than baby talk. I'll stick to saying gigabytes, megabytes and kilobytes and their understood power-of-2 meanings where it makes sense, knowing full well that it has deep flaws. It's just an unfortunate circumstance, but most of the time it thankfully doesn't matter.
--Joe
Having a swap partition doesn't necessarily mean having a lot of swap traffic. Often what gets placed in swap are portions of the heap that got allocated, but won't be referred to for quite some time. It gives room for other types of pages (as I mention here).
That said, if what you're doing doesn't cause a lot of thrashing when there is no swap, don't add swap on your flash SSD.
Well, that doesn't mean it isn't swapping. If faced with memory pressure, the OS can throw away file backed pages instead, such as program executable pages, and then bring them in later. Those file backed pages will be scattered all around the partitions that hold your programs, though, not concentrated in the swap partition.
It also means that buffered writes will need to be pushed to disk sooner too, which reduces your disk buffering for anything that writes a lot of data will impose more pain on your system.
The bummer in all this is that you have nowhere to put anonymous pages. These are the pages associated with "malloc()" (or "new" if you prefer), as well as any other per-task writable structures such as the stack and global variables. These pages aren't backed by any file and could only go to swap. Without a swap file, they will always accumulate in RAM until unmapped, crowding out program pages and disk buffers. This includes pages that don't actually hold anything at the moment, but remain part of the process' malloc heap due to internal heap fragmentation.
So, that's where the increasing thrashiness comes from on a swapless system. If you get under enough memory pressure from anonymous pages, then it's hard to keep enough program pages and disk buffers around to make real progress. And when you do need those other kinds of pages, they're spread all over the disk so you suffer from tons of seeking penalty, unless you're on an SSD.
--Joe
*blink*
Ok, how about panache then?
And just what percentage of actual pot-related assets become seized assets? And at what cost were those assets seized? I don't think the operation is even close to being break even.
If you were to legalize just pot, as the GP suggests, then I imagine a few things happen: The supply rises as does the demand. The supply will rise more than the demand (since smoking pot is already not that much of a stigma, so those that would probably already do), and so the cost goes down. Tax revenue will become more predictable, and the enforcement and incarceration expenditures related to it will largely evaporate.
That's excepting the DUI/DWI related costs for nabbing folks for driving while high, but if you accept my argument that the number of potheads wouldn't increase dramatically, then that's just a term in the equation that doesn't change much. All the other cases associated with manufacturing, dealing or simple possession would go away due to legalization.
Not counted in this analysis are any healthcare burdens or other economic losses due to lost productivity. That said, I don't think the number of users (at least for pot) would shift much. At any rate, I think those costs are dwarfed by the often expensive enforcement measures that are out there and the incarceration costs for those who are made into petty criminals that get caught up in this mess.
I'm not trying to get all NORML on you. I'm just looking at the numbers.
That's true now that they've taken our proper decongestants away. If they made it legal, folks wouldn't be stealing Sudafed to cook their next fix.
(I'm not weighing in on either side of the legalization argument. I'm just pointing out that there's a market distortion here, and meth-fighting laws aimed at source materials haven't stopped usage, they've just outsourced production.)