You should work for hard drive manufacturers' marketing department. You'd do wonders for their capacity ratings.
If you go from 5 digits to 10 digits, you've still only doubled the capacity. Sure, you've exponentially increased the number of states that can be in, information content is not linearly proportional to the number of states. It's logarithmically proportional.
Maybe we need a different analogy. Suppose you have 5 quarters in a stack. Those can be in 32 states of "head vs. tails". Suppose I have 10 quarters. Sure, they can be in 1024 different states. Do I have twice as much money as you, or 32 times as much money as you?
If you're trying to key in a location, why not ask your phone? The tower already has a pretty good idea of where you're at. Business card with a VCard? Ok, that's pretty specialized. Why not have an OCR-able font for URLs instead? You say it's as easy as "File; Save-As", but only after you've acquired the requisite scanning device (which may or may not be a camera of some form) and software. A human-readable URL uses the scanner you were born with.
My point is if you're using these codes to look stuff up online, a few bytes is all you need. IPv4 addresses are only 4 bytes. UPCs are 12 decimal digits (though one of those is a check digit). Even w/ the check digit, the UPCs offer about 20x as many codes as IPv4 offers IP addresses. That's more than enough tags to index anything you might want to index. You don't even need to be hooked up to the Internet. POS machines typically aren't and they handle UPCs just fine. Product serial numbers can be handled in a similar manner.
Now, if you want to package a manifest with a product that can be read in isolation, that's a different story. Most people are talking about:CueCat type uses though. I'm not entirely sure I buy into the usefulness of "read in isolation." If you have a cell phone camera, you have a cell phone and you're not in isolation unless you don't get signal.
Cell phone cameras today are already high enough resolution to read regular barcodes. UPCs are, well, universal, as their acronym indicates. You could do all your product tie-ins with the UPC. This Microsoft technology sounds too much like a solution in search of a problem.
The numbers you used, approx 900/100, are also a special magic point on 32-bit CPUs under Linux. Above about 960MB, Linux uses "highmem" mode on x86, and that slows things down. A 32-bit x86 PC runs faster when you restrict it to 960MB instead of letting it use the full 1024MB.
For those of you who wonder how a computer could run faster w/ a little swap in RAM instead of just using all the RAM, the answer is complicated. Mainly, all the VM algorithms assume the existance of swap, and so when they get backed into a corner, they expect to be able to dump a bunch of stuff overboard into swap. They only start making the really hard choices once swap fills up. If you take away swap, then you hit the "out of swap" condition much more readily.
You might be thinking "ah, but it's all just a shell game! You'll still run out of swap at the same time, since your total memory is fixed!" Not true. The OS prioritizes disk buffers and other caches relative to the work it's doing and the RAM available to it. RAM dedicated to a RAM disk is not available for other purposes. Thus, a RAM-based swap partition dedicates some portion of RAM to only hold dirty program pages. No disk buffers, no network buffers, no inode information. Just dirty program pages. By forcing austerity on these other discretionary structures, you can compensate for the VM's inbuilt assumption it can just "dump things to swap", and that running out of swap occurs "almost never."
By default, Wine translates Win32 calls to something a POSIX operating system can handle. With a Win32-aware kernel, the translation layer is much thinner. Wine only has to handle the user-space portion of the call, and not the adaptation between one kernel-space and another.
If I followed correctly, the above computation gives the probability that there is at least one palindromic segment starting at a particular fixed digit position. The distinction is important because there are an infinite number of palindromic segments within pi if you consider all possible starting points for that segment. (I'm thinking in terms of "What is the likelihood that a substring of pi starting at x and ending at y is a palindrome, for all y > x?")
I lean Democratic because I agree with the vast majority of the party's positions, and I disagree with the vast majority of the Republican party's positions and actions. That's all there is to it, plain and simple. Do I think the Democrats are great? Not particularly. Would I like to see a better system than winner-take-all at the polls? Most definitely.
I think we're getting a bit off topic here though.
My question is, how are the 4200 hours divvied up? If that's 4200 hours / year / station, that's almost 12 hours a day. If it's 4200 hours total across 4 major networks spread across 3 years, that's less than 1 hour a day. Enquiring minds want to know!
I lean Democrat but I hate the DMCA. While I support the Dems in Congress on many things, this isn't one of them. The Dems do tend to lean towards big entertainment. Fritz Hollings ("the Senator from Disney") and Diane Feinstein, among others, seem particularly outspoken on this crap. At least Fritz isn't in Congress anymore. I can sorta understand Diane's position, coming from Hollywoodland, but still... I'm also not too thrilled w/ her position on the PATRIOT act either.:-P
Someone else pointed out that there's an option to make it work that way with window manager hints. This wasn't present in 1.2. (Or if it was, I can't find it.) It looks like it got added in 2.0. That option isn't set by default, though, when you build from source. Maybe your distro sets that flag for you.
Well, if you mean virtual desktops, SAY virtual desktops. Don't confuse the issue by conflating it with an unrelated feature.
Virtual desktops aren't a complete solution, though I do agree they can be powerful. As I mentioned, I've been using them for about 15 years. 14 years for sure w/ UNIX and Linux (I installed SLS 1.03 back in Nov '93), and even some time in Win 3.1 with a virtual desktop program there (that just added to the crashiness of Win 3.1).
I find myself opening GIMP on the same virtual desktop as something else I'm doing, whether it be chatting or waiting for email to come in. There is value to seeing more than one application at once. Virtual desktops are an ad hoc kludge to the window-grouping problem that solve it at the expense of seeing more than one application at once if you use it as you suggest. I tend to go for a hybrid desktop usage myself. Desktop 1: shells, IM, etc. Primary workspace. Desktop 2: Web browser windows. Desktop 3: Remote connections. (e.g. ssh connections to other machines.) Desktop 4: Emergency overflow.
Someone else pointed out that GIMP does have a means now for configuring the window manager hints. This is news to me, but welcome news.
I do, and have been doing so for about 15 years now. How is that relevant to "When another window *gets focus* GIMP's extra windows disappear"? Hint: There's a lot of ways for another window to *get focus* than switching virtual desktops.
GIMP doesn't work that way by default on Linux. At least, no version of GIMP I've used (and that includes 1.0, 1.2, 2.0 and 2.2) with no window manager I use. I *do* remember seeing some sort of patch to add a child-parent relationship between GIMP windows that works with some window managers, but it isn't part of GIMP by default.
I realize that the cliff was due to delayed updates. Everybody does now. Still, to a trader who's spent 40+ years on the floor, seeing that 200 point drop in a matter of seconds without knowing what's going on would do far more than give one pause. It might even require a change of pants afterwards.
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What else would get all us /.'ers whinging?
You should work for hard drive manufacturers' marketing department. You'd do wonders for their capacity ratings.
If you go from 5 digits to 10 digits, you've still only doubled the capacity. Sure, you've exponentially increased the number of states that can be in, information content is not linearly proportional to the number of states. It's logarithmically proportional.
Maybe we need a different analogy. Suppose you have 5 quarters in a stack. Those can be in 32 states of "head vs. tails". Suppose I have 10 quarters. Sure, they can be in 1024 different states. Do I have twice as much money as you, or 32 times as much money as you?
--JoeIf you're trying to key in a location, why not ask your phone? The tower already has a pretty good idea of where you're at. Business card with a VCard? Ok, that's pretty specialized. Why not have an OCR-able font for URLs instead? You say it's as easy as "File; Save-As", but only after you've acquired the requisite scanning device (which may or may not be a camera of some form) and software. A human-readable URL uses the scanner you were born with.
--JoeThere's already a site like that. I tried a couple UPCs and Google found them...
--JoeMy point is if you're using these codes to look stuff up online, a few bytes is all you need. IPv4 addresses are only 4 bytes. UPCs are 12 decimal digits (though one of those is a check digit). Even w/ the check digit, the UPCs offer about 20x as many codes as IPv4 offers IP addresses. That's more than enough tags to index anything you might want to index. You don't even need to be hooked up to the Internet. POS machines typically aren't and they handle UPCs just fine. Product serial numbers can be handled in a similar manner.
Now, if you want to package a manifest with a product that can be read in isolation, that's a different story. Most people are talking about :CueCat type uses though. I'm not entirely sure I buy into the usefulness of "read in isolation." If you have a cell phone camera, you have a cell phone and you're not in isolation unless you don't get signal.
--JoeCell phone cameras today are already high enough resolution to read regular barcodes. UPCs are, well, universal, as their acronym indicates. You could do all your product tie-ins with the UPC. This Microsoft technology sounds too much like a solution in search of a problem.
Ok, so you went from 5 bits of storage to 10. Explain again how that's not double the information content?
Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!
Someone who's never taken a typing class? Annoys me, too.
The numbers you used, approx 900/100, are also a special magic point on 32-bit CPUs under Linux. Above about 960MB, Linux uses "highmem" mode on x86, and that slows things down. A 32-bit x86 PC runs faster when you restrict it to 960MB instead of letting it use the full 1024MB.
For those of you who wonder how a computer could run faster w/ a little swap in RAM instead of just using all the RAM, the answer is complicated. Mainly, all the VM algorithms assume the existance of swap, and so when they get backed into a corner, they expect to be able to dump a bunch of stuff overboard into swap. They only start making the really hard choices once swap fills up. If you take away swap, then you hit the "out of swap" condition much more readily.
You might be thinking "ah, but it's all just a shell game! You'll still run out of swap at the same time, since your total memory is fixed!" Not true. The OS prioritizes disk buffers and other caches relative to the work it's doing and the RAM available to it. RAM dedicated to a RAM disk is not available for other purposes. Thus, a RAM-based swap partition dedicates some portion of RAM to only hold dirty program pages. No disk buffers, no network buffers, no inode information. Just dirty program pages. By forcing austerity on these other discretionary structures, you can compensate for the VM's inbuilt assumption it can just "dump things to swap", and that running out of swap occurs "almost never."
--JoeExcept in the field of computer forensics, is there a market for page/swap file recovery?
By default, Wine translates Win32 calls to something a POSIX operating system can handle. With a Win32-aware kernel, the translation layer is much thinner. Wine only has to handle the user-space portion of the call, and not the adaptation between one kernel-space and another.
--JoeHint: That "login page" was really a phishing page.
If I followed correctly, the above computation gives the probability that there is at least one palindromic segment starting at a particular fixed digit position. The distinction is important because there are an infinite number of palindromic segments within pi if you consider all possible starting points for that segment. (I'm thinking in terms of "What is the likelihood that a substring of pi starting at x and ending at y is a palindrome, for all y > x?")
--JoeI lean Democratic because I agree with the vast majority of the party's positions, and I disagree with the vast majority of the Republican party's positions and actions. That's all there is to it, plain and simple. Do I think the Democrats are great? Not particularly. Would I like to see a better system than winner-take-all at the polls? Most definitely.
I think we're getting a bit off topic here though.
--JoeMy question is, how are the 4200 hours divvied up? If that's 4200 hours / year / station, that's almost 12 hours a day. If it's 4200 hours total across 4 major networks spread across 3 years, that's less than 1 hour a day. Enquiring minds want to know!
I lean Democrat but I hate the DMCA. While I support the Dems in Congress on many things, this isn't one of them. The Dems do tend to lean towards big entertainment. Fritz Hollings ("the Senator from Disney") and Diane Feinstein, among others, seem particularly outspoken on this crap. At least Fritz isn't in Congress anymore. I can sorta understand Diane's position, coming from Hollywoodland, but still... I'm also not too thrilled w/ her position on the PATRIOT act either. :-P
"And now, let's bring home the bacon with [insert crappy song name here]"
"And [insert crappy band here] keeps the lights on for us with [insert song name]"
And always a favorite, the guy speaking in hushed tones at 375 MPH...
"Thefollowingisapaidpresentationof[insert megalabel here]"
It seems they added this around 2.0 and I'm out of date. ::wipes egg from face::
--JoeSomeone else pointed out that there's an option to make it work that way with window manager hints. This wasn't present in 1.2. (Or if it was, I can't find it.) It looks like it got added in 2.0. That option isn't set by default, though, when you build from source. Maybe your distro sets that flag for you.
--JoeWell, if you mean virtual desktops, SAY virtual desktops. Don't confuse the issue by conflating it with an unrelated feature.
Virtual desktops aren't a complete solution, though I do agree they can be powerful. As I mentioned, I've been using them for about 15 years. 14 years for sure w/ UNIX and Linux (I installed SLS 1.03 back in Nov '93), and even some time in Win 3.1 with a virtual desktop program there (that just added to the crashiness of Win 3.1).
I find myself opening GIMP on the same virtual desktop as something else I'm doing, whether it be chatting or waiting for email to come in. There is value to seeing more than one application at once. Virtual desktops are an ad hoc kludge to the window-grouping problem that solve it at the expense of seeing more than one application at once if you use it as you suggest. I tend to go for a hybrid desktop usage myself. Desktop 1: shells, IM, etc. Primary workspace. Desktop 2: Web browser windows. Desktop 3: Remote connections. (e.g. ssh connections to other machines.) Desktop 4: Emergency overflow.
Someone else pointed out that GIMP does have a means now for configuring the window manager hints. This is news to me, but welcome news.
--JoeI do, and have been doing so for about 15 years now. How is that relevant to "When another window *gets focus* GIMP's extra windows disappear"? Hint: There's a lot of ways for another window to *get focus* than switching virtual desktops.
--JoeGIMP doesn't work that way by default on Linux. At least, no version of GIMP I've used (and that includes 1.0, 1.2, 2.0 and 2.2) with no window manager I use. I *do* remember seeing some sort of patch to add a child-parent relationship between GIMP windows that works with some window managers, but it isn't part of GIMP by default.
"I am Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce /etc '/etc'". ;-)
I realize that the cliff was due to delayed updates. Everybody does now. Still, to a trader who's spent 40+ years on the floor, seeing that 200 point drop in a matter of seconds without knowing what's going on would do far more than give one pause. It might even require a change of pants afterwards.
I think he was referring to the ginormous cliff that happened at almost precisely 3PM. Take a look.