I have a small 32 GB SSD on this laptop (I keep the OS there) plus a 750 GB spinning disk (data). The swap space would have been on the HD (I think swapping to SSD is bad because of write amplification) so I could have made it as big as I wished. However I decided to go without swap and see what happened. After more than one year I didn't have any problem. Even if I didn't hit max memory once I'm pretty sure the OS would have swapped out some programs sometimes because it makes sense to move out inactive programs to make space for buffer cache (it's Linux and I saw it happen in the past) but with so much RAM I don't care about 1 GB less of buffer cache. I prefer to have programs respond quickly after a couple of days I don't use them. I was constantly hitting swap to some degree on the old 4 GB laptop and it wasn't pretty. Obviously I didn't leave programs around much. Firefox, Thunderbird, emacs, terminal always open, the other programs on demand.
I had that kind of problem until February 2014 (old Core Duo with 4 GB RAM) then I bought a new laptop with 16 GB upgradeable to 32 GB. No swap space configured. I keep leaving all sort of applications open (4 virtual desktops) and sometimes I got down to 3 GB free and started thinking about the extra 16 GB. Well, not until I'll really have to work with some VMs open all the time.
4 GB are not necessarily too little nowadays, but one should expect to be careful with the programs he runs. Like Android phones with half a GB of RAM.
Not on my Firefox 38 on Ubuntu. I copied the URL of this page, mid clicked on the new tab button and got an empty tab. I checked the preferences and I didn't find anything relevant (but I noticed that they are web pages now, not a dialog anymore - big surprise!). Maybe it's browser.newtablurl set to about:blank in about:config? No, it isn't that one because I don't get that behaviour with the default value too.
The workaround will be to proxy ads from the server. I bet that the ad networks will develop the technology for all the major frameworks. That will hurt servers' bandwidth, threads and CPU but it will make harder for ISPs to block ads because the URLs won't give away much. Unfortunately that will make the job harder for in-browser adblockers too so I don't welcome that move. I bet we'll end up with the same amount of ads and less ways of blocking them.
BTW, how are they going to deal with https? Are they going to block the IPs of the ad networks?
First, you should not use somebody's else computer, Internet shop included. Use your phone or tablet over https if possible.
If you really can't do that, use a local password manager like KeepassX on your phone and copy the password by hand on the computer. You compromised only that site. However this can be extremely painful if you use fully random password like g27rkuqhLJcM46G9YsxV4rlF9ACtveB1. These are 32 characters with only letters and digits to limit the typing errors (think about entering punctuation on a very foreign keyboard layout). According to KeepassX its strenght is 191 "quality bits" defined as the "equivalent size of a random symmetric key."
If you use an Internet password manager on an untrusted machine you run into the problem you described and all your accounts are compromised.
By the way, assuming that passwords are stored as SHA-2 (64 characters) should we use 64 characters passwords to minimize the risk of collisions?
I use Firefox on desktop with some privacy related extensions like NoScript, Self Destructing Cookies, AdBlock (also for decluttering pages). I use Opera on desktop for Google Docs and a few work-related sites (Opera has the same engine as the latest Chrome). Basically I'm using Opera as if it were Word: one window, one site.
I use Opera on my Android devices because Firefox still has problems rendering some sites. It's part fault of those sites and part fault of bad decisions on the side of Mozilla. Go try reading the comments thread on Hacker News and you'll see (pick one with many nested comments.) Slashdot used to suffer from the same problem.
A bad handling of text inflation could have lost mobile to Mozilla, and maybe all the company. Some sites must work well because the people there are the ones that tell other people which tools are cool and which are uncool.
Another SG2 here. I love the SD card, the plastic body, the replaceable battery. Plastic and the replaceable battery help the phone surviving drops because they discharge the kinetic energy (google bent corner iphone or mac). Because of that I won't buy the SG6 when my SG2 dies but hopefully that will happen many years in the future so Samsung have plenty of time to rethink their design.
Other things that I love: the relatively small size, which let me fit it inside my front pockets if I have to, the light weight (but now only 20 g less than the S6, large phones are getting slimmer) and that I can mount it as a disk over USB without going through the MTP madness. A not so nice thing: the SD card is hidden under the battery so I can't eject it without shutting down the phone. This is a bit limiting.
I also don't understand why people want to handcuff themselves with gadgets. It's been 22 years for me since I freed myself but I understand that everybody makes his own rules:-)
Great things don't have to be secret weapons nobody else can have. Word processors and spreadsheets used to be great things before being given from granted. They fuelled the computer revolution in the 80s (with video games.) Many companies sold them, MS being the most successful in the long run. Same with machine learning frameworks. We'll see how it plays out.
That is obviously better. I didn't know RFID could do that kind of computations. Do they need an internal battery or the power they get from induction current is enough?
To prevent replay attacks you should beam a different signal to the RFID each time, and each RFID should reply with a different answer to the same signal. The receiver looks up the answer into a table of expected answers and identifies the wearer. Is this how they work or is there a smarter way?
I'm also a Firefox user, with AdBlock. I disabled the acceptable ads checkbox so I don't see any ad (I would have noticed). If AdBlock makes any money out of the ads companies, good for them. If they force acceptable ads to everybody, I'll move to something else. uBlock seems to be as good. There will always be something to block all ads. At worst the hosts file.
You also have to defend the land you grab. UK, Spain and France grabbed vast expanses of North America and lost it in wars and rebellions. They were lucky to have sold part of it. Of course they already made a profit by exploitating the resources of those territories but (among the others) you have Lousiana and Quebec as part of the USA and Canada now, not as France Occidentale. I think you got the idea.
Any land grab on the moon will have the fortunate outcome of starting a new space era with the launch of many manned missions to there from any country who'll be able to do it, plus the unfortunate consequence of the first killings in space, where countries won't agree on borders, and some more down here (launch prevention, retaliations, etc). I'll be careful about starting it. Furthermore, opening up new territories is risky for who's ruling the world: history tells that new powers arise and old powers set.
I just looked at https://github.com/torvalds/li... (picked almost at random.) There are some funny things in there but in general it's pretty readable. I realized that C starts looking as alien to me as assembly looked to me when I was writing C and Pascal at university. Not that I couldn't write in assembly but wow, it's so time consuming that it's only for when there are no alternatives.
Well, do something in a Ruby block end didn't do any harm to that language. The form { something between braces } exists but it's used idiomatically only for one liners, so I don't think that Pascal has been haunted by it's verbosity (OK, probably do... end is the only verbose part of Ruby.)
I believe that it succumbed to the competition of other languages that people felt to be better suited to the tasks that had to be solved in the 90s and 00s. Every language has its niches. Even C++ is mostly irrilevant on the web. Objective-C had to wait to be mandated for developing on the iPhone to become relevant. Pascal was eaten alive by C (with and without the ++) and VisualBasic on the desktop and never made its way to the web.
Why people liked VisualBasic more than Pascal, that's an interesting question. Maybe the feeling it was a language for the first year of CS courses, maybe the tooling (VisualStudio vs Delphi), maybe the costs? Unfortunately I can't remember how Delphi was sold 20 years ago and how it compared to VisualBasic for building Windows desktop apps, which was almost all it mattered at the time.
As I wrote, it was 40 years ago and it was already almost replaced by English. Anyway, this short paragraph is worth reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
SI has a French name because France has been main driver beyond its adoption for centuries. France was the main cultural and scientific driver in Europe in the '700 and '800, on par with the UK. Why French was adopted more than English... I don't think the UK was a lesser bully (they built up an empire after all) but maybe the French were more interested in setting up international organizations, whilst the UK was more insular. Maybe it was only a matter of geography: one country on the continent, the other one an island. The USA moved past the regional power stage only in the '900. Given their size their language got all the world quickly. Russian got important for a while in the mid of the last century but the USSR didn't have the same cultural and scientific impact of the USA.
Yes, Pinyin. I forgot about that. It could be the only way to make Chinese mainstream quickly. However we shouln't overlook the power of generational changes: adults die off in a few decades (more or less the time English took to replace French) and children learn whatever language is thrown at them. Anyway I'm sorry for the burden of all those characters. I sincerely hope they'll be replaced by a phonetic alphabet.
French was still more lingua franca in western Europe than English, when I was a child 40 years ago. That role still echoes in the name of many international organizations, especially in sports. Check the title at http://www.fifa.com/ and the name of http://www.fia.com/ The languages at http://www.olympic.org/ and at http://www.uci.ch/ are English and French (the original ones for the Comité international olympique and Union Cycliste Internationale). And wonder why http://www.fiba.com/ is FIBA and not IBF despite the title of the page is International Basketball Association. It used to be Fédération Internationale de Basket-ball Amateur. All of them were born at a time when French (the people) were internationally as active as English speakers are now, and English speaking countries where more centered on themselves than they are now. Ultimately the language follows the power and dinamism of countries: if you have to know a language to make money, you learn it. Chinese could be the next one but it's severely handicapped by the writing system. Nobody really wants to learn by heart thousands of characters unless you're born there and have to. I expect a very bumpy transition, if it will ever happen, and a lot of resistence. A Chinese written with latin alphabet would have more chances. Given the attitude of Chinese rulers maybe I'll see them mandating a switch to latin characters, and don't dare to protest. After all they already use qwerty to write Chinese.
OK that's a possibility, but how could it possibly work? I mean, one goes to a mall and buys a PC for $500 now. That's it. Windows is included and it's supported until EOL for free. That could change to buying the PC for $500 and paying $5 per month for Windows. It's an obvious bad deal and somebody will discover that they don't really need Windows after all, and will install some Linux distro to stop paying. Who cares if they must use Open/Libre Office or Google Docs. They work good enough for most use cases and they have a PS4 or an XBOX for videogames. That would be suicidal for Microsoft. So... how about renting the whole PC? Suppose the average lifetime is 3 years. 500/36 = 13.88, round up to 15, round up more to 20, many wouldn't do the math. $20 per month for a PC with Windows included? Maybe people will like it, but would manufacturers? After 3 years the cashflow would be the same as usual but the transition could kill some of them. Is MS going to build their own PCs? Or: Windows is free (as in beer), copy it, torrent it, install it, but you pay for updates and if you don't you know you're at the mercy of virus and trojans. That won't work well because people feel Windows to be gratis right now: they pay for the PC and don't think about the share that goes to MS.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a small 32 GB SSD on this laptop (I keep the OS there) plus a 750 GB spinning disk (data). The swap space would have been on the HD (I think swapping to SSD is bad because of write amplification) so I could have made it as big as I wished. However I decided to go without swap and see what happened. After more than one year I didn't have any problem. Even if I didn't hit max memory once I'm pretty sure the OS would have swapped out some programs sometimes because it makes sense to move out inactive programs to make space for buffer cache (it's Linux and I saw it happen in the past) but with so much RAM I don't care about 1 GB less of buffer cache. I prefer to have programs respond quickly after a couple of days I don't use them. I was constantly hitting swap to some degree on the old 4 GB laptop and it wasn't pretty. Obviously I didn't leave programs around much. Firefox, Thunderbird, emacs, terminal always open, the other programs on demand.
Sorry, I must have seen Firefox in the top post of the thread and misunderstood the point.
Multi process, not multi threaded unless you refer to the two threads inside each process https://www.chromium.org/devel... (2011) but if that's the case then Firefox is multi threaded too, just single process https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... (2007)
I had that kind of problem until February 2014 (old Core Duo with 4 GB RAM) then I bought a new laptop with 16 GB upgradeable to 32 GB. No swap space configured. I keep leaving all sort of applications open (4 virtual desktops) and sometimes I got down to 3 GB free and started thinking about the extra 16 GB. Well, not until I'll really have to work with some VMs open all the time.
4 GB are not necessarily too little nowadays, but one should expect to be careful with the programs he runs. Like Android phones with half a GB of RAM.
Not on my Firefox 38 on Ubuntu. I copied the URL of this page, mid clicked on the new tab button and got an empty tab. I checked the preferences and I didn't find anything relevant (but I noticed that they are web pages now, not a dialog anymore - big surprise!). Maybe it's browser.newtablurl set to about:blank in about:config? No, it isn't that one because I don't get that behaviour with the default value too.
The workaround will be to proxy ads from the server. I bet that the ad networks will develop the technology for all the major frameworks. That will hurt servers' bandwidth, threads and CPU but it will make harder for ISPs to block ads because the URLs won't give away much. Unfortunately that will make the job harder for in-browser adblockers too so I don't welcome that move. I bet we'll end up with the same amount of ads and less ways of blocking them.
BTW, how are they going to deal with https? Are they going to block the IPs of the ad networks?
First, you should not use somebody's else computer, Internet shop included. Use your phone or tablet over https if possible.
If you really can't do that, use a local password manager like KeepassX on your phone and copy the password by hand on the computer. You compromised only that site. However this can be extremely painful if you use fully random password like g27rkuqhLJcM46G9YsxV4rlF9ACtveB1. These are 32 characters with only letters and digits to limit the typing errors (think about entering punctuation on a very foreign keyboard layout). According to KeepassX its strenght is 191 "quality bits" defined as the "equivalent size of a random symmetric key."
If you use an Internet password manager on an untrusted machine you run into the problem you described and all your accounts are compromised.
By the way, assuming that passwords are stored as SHA-2 (64 characters) should we use 64 characters passwords to minimize the risk of collisions?
I use Firefox on desktop with some privacy related extensions like NoScript, Self Destructing Cookies, AdBlock (also for decluttering pages). I use Opera on desktop for Google Docs and a few work-related sites (Opera has the same engine as the latest Chrome). Basically I'm using Opera as if it were Word: one window, one site.
I use Opera on my Android devices because Firefox still has problems rendering some sites. It's part fault of those sites and part fault of bad decisions on the side of Mozilla. Go try reading the comments thread on Hacker News and you'll see (pick one with many nested comments.) Slashdot used to suffer from the same problem.
A bad handling of text inflation could have lost mobile to Mozilla, and maybe all the company. Some sites must work well because the people there are the ones that tell other people which tools are cool and which are uncool.
Another SG2 here. I love the SD card, the plastic body, the replaceable battery. Plastic and the replaceable battery help the phone surviving drops because they discharge the kinetic energy (google bent corner iphone or mac). Because of that I won't buy the SG6 when my SG2 dies but hopefully that will happen many years in the future so Samsung have plenty of time to rethink their design.
Other things that I love: the relatively small size, which let me fit it inside my front pockets if I have to, the light weight (but now only 20 g less than the S6, large phones are getting slimmer) and that I can mount it as a disk over USB without going through the MTP madness. A not so nice thing: the SD card is hidden under the battery so I can't eject it without shutting down the phone. This is a bit limiting.
I also don't understand why people want to handcuff themselves with gadgets. It's been 22 years for me since I freed myself but I understand that everybody makes his own rules :-)
Great things don't have to be secret weapons nobody else can have. Word processors and spreadsheets used to be great things before being given from granted. They fuelled the computer revolution in the 80s (with video games.) Many companies sold them, MS being the most successful in the long run. Same with machine learning frameworks. We'll see how it plays out.
That is obviously better. I didn't know RFID could do that kind of computations. Do they need an internal battery or the power they get from induction current is enough?
To prevent replay attacks you should beam a different signal to the RFID each time, and each RFID should reply with a different answer to the same signal. The receiver looks up the answer into a table of expected answers and identifies the wearer. Is this how they work or is there a smarter way?
I trust only myself and it's not easy. Local storage won't survive a fire and remote backup of locally-encrypted data is always a little too painful.
"Did we hit it?"
"Target missed Sir."
On the radio. "ISS, can you hear me?"
I'm also a Firefox user, with AdBlock. I disabled the acceptable ads checkbox so I don't see any ad (I would have noticed). If AdBlock makes any money out of the ads companies, good for them. If they force acceptable ads to everybody, I'll move to something else. uBlock seems to be as good. There will always be something to block all ads. At worst the hosts file.
You also have to defend the land you grab. UK, Spain and France grabbed vast expanses of North America and lost it in wars and rebellions. They were lucky to have sold part of it. Of course they already made a profit by exploitating the resources of those territories but (among the others) you have Lousiana and Quebec as part of the USA and Canada now, not as France Occidentale. I think you got the idea.
Any land grab on the moon will have the fortunate outcome of starting a new space era with the launch of many manned missions to there from any country who'll be able to do it, plus the unfortunate consequence of the first killings in space, where countries won't agree on borders, and some more down here (launch prevention, retaliations, etc). I'll be careful about starting it. Furthermore, opening up new territories is risky for who's ruling the world: history tells that new powers arise and old powers set.
Stop the engine when crossing that invisible fence? A U turn? Holding position?
I just looked at https://github.com/torvalds/li... (picked almost at random.) There are some funny things in there but in general it's pretty readable. I realized that C starts looking as alien to me as assembly looked to me when I was writing C and Pascal at university. Not that I couldn't write in assembly but wow, it's so time consuming that it's only for when there are no alternatives.
Well, do something in a Ruby block end didn't do any harm to that language. The form { something between braces } exists but it's used idiomatically only for one liners, so I don't think that Pascal has been haunted by it's verbosity (OK, probably do ... end is the only verbose part of Ruby.)
I believe that it succumbed to the competition of other languages that people felt to be better suited to the tasks that had to be solved in the 90s and 00s. Every language has its niches. Even C++ is mostly irrilevant on the web. Objective-C had to wait to be mandated for developing on the iPhone to become relevant. Pascal was eaten alive by C (with and without the ++) and VisualBasic on the desktop and never made its way to the web.
Why people liked VisualBasic more than Pascal, that's an interesting question. Maybe the feeling it was a language for the first year of CS courses, maybe the tooling (VisualStudio vs Delphi), maybe the costs? Unfortunately I can't remember how Delphi was sold 20 years ago and how it compared to VisualBasic for building Windows desktop apps, which was almost all it mattered at the time.
As I wrote, it was 40 years ago and it was already almost replaced by English. Anyway, this short paragraph is worth reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Yes, Pinyin. I forgot about that. It could be the only way to make Chinese mainstream quickly. However we shouln't overlook the power of generational changes: adults die off in a few decades (more or less the time English took to replace French) and children learn whatever language is thrown at them. Anyway I'm sorry for the burden of all those characters. I sincerely hope they'll be replaced by a phonetic alphabet.
French was still more lingua franca in western Europe than English, when I was a child 40 years ago. That role still echoes in the name of many international organizations, especially in sports. Check the title at http://www.fifa.com/ and the name of http://www.fia.com/ The languages at http://www.olympic.org/ and at http://www.uci.ch/ are English and French (the original ones for the Comité international olympique and Union Cycliste Internationale). And wonder why http://www.fiba.com/ is FIBA and not IBF despite the title of the page is International Basketball Association. It used to be Fédération Internationale de Basket-ball Amateur. All of them were born at a time when French (the people) were internationally as active as English speakers are now, and English speaking countries where more centered on themselves than they are now. Ultimately the language follows the power and dinamism of countries: if you have to know a language to make money, you learn it. Chinese could be the next one but it's severely handicapped by the writing system. Nobody really wants to learn by heart thousands of characters unless you're born there and have to. I expect a very bumpy transition, if it will ever happen, and a lot of resistence. A Chinese written with latin alphabet would have more chances. Given the attitude of Chinese rulers maybe I'll see them mandating a switch to latin characters, and don't dare to protest. After all they already use qwerty to write Chinese.
OK that's a possibility, but how could it possibly work? I mean, one goes to a mall and buys a PC for $500 now. That's it. Windows is included and it's supported until EOL for free. That could change to buying the PC for $500 and paying $5 per month for Windows. It's an obvious bad deal and somebody will discover that they don't really need Windows after all, and will install some Linux distro to stop paying. Who cares if they must use Open/Libre Office or Google Docs. They work good enough for most use cases and they have a PS4 or an XBOX for videogames. That would be suicidal for Microsoft. So... how about renting the whole PC? Suppose the average lifetime is 3 years. 500/36 = 13.88, round up to 15, round up more to 20, many wouldn't do the math. $20 per month for a PC with Windows included? Maybe people will like it, but would manufacturers? After 3 years the cashflow would be the same as usual but the transition could kill some of them. Is MS going to build their own PCs? Or: Windows is free (as in beer), copy it, torrent it, install it, but you pay for updates and if you don't you know you're at the mercy of virus and trojans. That won't work well because people feel Windows to be gratis right now: they pay for the PC and don't think about the share that goes to MS.
And that's what worries me. Cats are hunters but they are at the mercy of smarter hunters, no matter what they are thinking.