As someone else has already pointed out, it is not a competitor to USB.
As to the RAID box, well, something has to be first. But there are already three others I'm aware of:
There is already also a Sony laptop with a Thunderbolt connector to docking station which has an optical drive, a graphics chip, *and* USB 2.0 and 3.0 sockets. The newer Apple monitors, as well as the new iMacs, use it for USB and DisplayPort. The laptops with it can use a powered-down iMac as a monitor. You can't do a lot of that with USB.
As usual with technologies like this, as soon as it's integrated into chipsets and/or standard motherboards, the products will follow. Just the fact that Apple are selling hundreds of thousands of units with this integrated will help stimulate companies to produce more products that use it...
Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off.
I wish that was true - but unless I'm being misled, these drivers already don't support my 2-year-old card or the generation after it. Is there anything concrete to give me hope this will change, and the 6000 series they're now making great steps forward with will be supported for more than 10 minutes after the 7000 series is released?
Wise words. Al-Jazeera is broadcast here along with 4 or 5 other 24-hour news channels, and it is very good. Their live web stream works well too without any silly restrictions, unlike most of the others.
I am not an american, I don't support either of your two parties. I made no comment on Obama, or any of the other news outlets. None are perfect, and I didn't say any were. However, in my eyes, what thankfully little I see of Fox News is the worst example of biased shrill fearmongering bullshit which twists facts, ignores common sense, and generates maximum anger, fear and hate - and leads to rants like yours, which so beautifully illustrates the problems that are making the US political system so badly uncompromising, reactive and broken.
Whether you agree with Fox's agenda (and you cannot realistically deny they have one) or not, the fact is they fucked up on a matter of IT security here, and it takes down a peg or two, and I think that's a good thing, are enjoying it. I could hope that they might start to take themselves a little less seriously, but it's a little to much to ask.
Funny comment, but seriously, has any constitutional discussion ever involved (potentially) 2/3rds of the population before? OK, there are referendums to approve a new constitution or not, but to involve 2/3rds of the people in that discussion is *way* more than any other I'm aware of. Or to put it another way, why would you exclude a communication forum that 2/3rds of your population have access to?
Oh, and as the comment you replied to said, it's "most" of the discussion - not all of it.
All solid advice - but make sure when you get a fixed IP address it's not part of a residential block of IP addresses, or you will still be on the blocked lists. I fell foul of this last year, we had to switch our broadband to a 'business' account to get a clean IP address.
Also, the Messagelabs service is excellent, and surprisingly cheap, and removes the problem you have - recipients see emails arriving from trusted Messagelabs whatever your connection looks like. They also periodically check your email server and make recommendations.
My Dad had a new-ish 386 PC which he loved, he especially loved how fast it was. One weekend I played some games on it, one of which (maybe Level 42?) needed the turbo off, as it was way too fast to play at the full nosebleed-speed of 33 MHz. I then went away for the week.
When I came back that Saturday lunchtime, he was literally waiting on the driveway for em, purple with fury. He'd been struggling for the whole week with an unuseably slow PC, and he'd tried rebooting, and he'd tried lots of things, and it had ruined his week... basically he was ready to murder me, and woe betide me if I didn't fix it pronto.
I was in a panic - what the hell had broken to make it so slow? Was it something I'd got from a BBS with a virus? Was it some TSR causing an issue?
The panic ended when I walked into his study, and from across the room saw the Turbo light off. I walked over to it, pressed Turbo, and let him try again. Problem solved. It was years before he could laugh about it...
That reminds me, I shoudl dig out Level 42 and try it on my 3.4 GHz machine... maybe running it in DOS in Bochs would slow it down enough?
Thanks for pointing that out, it's not like the catholic church has any positions or beliefs that are in conflict with sanity, reason and common sense, is it?
Infallibility of the pope (until there's a new one) Randomly picking which bits of the bible are absolutely unquestionably the literal command of god, and which bits are just allegories Condoms and contraception in general (helping spread AIDS and other effects such as overpopulation) Celibacy of priests (and look where that has lead in terms of rampant child abuse and a complete lack of appropriate response) Decades or even centuries of fighting against scientific discoveries that eventually become part of 'accepted teaching'
and that's before we get to the whole imaginary-god-invented-to-control-people thing.
You have access to this thing called the Internet. Go to ark.intel.com - it's been there a long long time. It tells you *all* the details of every chip they sell.
They do sell a huge array of chips with many subtle differences - it's not like the good old days when there were 4 speeds of 486 to choose between - bus speeds, chip speeds, integrated GPU, process node, cache sizes, VT-x extensions, SSE4.2, AES, power draw, number of cores, Hyper-threading, form factor, socket, lead-free, PCIe lanes, ebmbedded...
Many, many people don't care, and buy their PCs to a price, and based on how it looks. For those of us that do care, or need a particular feature, it's *really* easy to find out what's what.
What are *you* on about? 3kW is a lot, when it's 24x7x365. Add it up. The house you mention is very unlikely to add up to anywhere near 3kW constantly for the whole year. The comparison (and your other about the desktop PC) is insane, and here's why:
His is one rack, in a row of dozens, with (unless it's a very small datacentre) dozens of rows.
All the customers in all the racks are trying to maximise their utilisation of the rack (extra racks cost more), and the utilisaton of the systems in those racks (more computers cost more). Each of those hundreds of racks needs multiple kW (some more than 3, not many less than 2 or so), with huge reliability.
Now add nearly the same amount of power again to cool all those racks, to keep air passing over them all. As well as powering the chillers, and driving the air down many channels to get it to every intake fan in every rack, all of which needs to have very good filtering (usually HEPA), and add on dehumidifying on top.
Multiple feeds into the building from the grid, UPS protection, surge protection, switching between live feed 1, live feed 2, and UPS power all has to be seamless enough to not bother a nodern computer - it all adds up to a very hard job. Yes it's an established process, but that doesn't make it easy.
Your midrange desktop with 4 cores - you couldn't get more than around 20 of those in a single rack, and you would be drawing way more than 3 kW to drive them. To get 200 cores and storage (and presumably some network kit too) into a single rack is still impressive now - and for it to draw only 3 kW is impressive - they must be very efficient units.
Add in the hard drives, RAM, fans, lossy power supplies, chipsets, switches, etc.
Oh, and very few professionals would use 2 TB SATA drives in a datacentre setting. Most units nowadays use 2.5" drives, and in the SAS world that limits you to 300 GB fast ones or 450 GB slow ones - 600 GB has been announced but it takes a while to become actually used. You need more though, as you need RAID to protect against failures. That frequently means installing double what you need in terms of raw storage. Then, you throw in a few hot spares for good measure. It all adds up.
Really, it's not as bad as you make out. Firstly and most importantly, as you've already pointed out you *can* Google for it. 20 seconds on the wikipedia page for Intel's processors can tell you what you need to know about the model number in front of you.
You really think they haven't thought about how to differentiate their products and make things clear? In reality they have a lot of different product ranges to cover, from multi-socket servers down to netbooks and PDAs.
Then they have variables like number of cores, HT or not, VT or not, integrated graphics or not, 45 or 32 nm, which socket it's for, TDP, Speedstep, bus/QPI speeds, OEM or retail, which SSE/ANI extensions they have, L1 cache size(s), L2 cache size(s), L3 cache size, form factor... the list goes on.
Then remember the VAST majority of their customers don't give a flying fuck about *any* of that - they're buying a whole computer to a price point, and the reality is almost any modern CPU will do for them. A vanishingly small number of their sales are individual CPUs to geeks, and for those geeks the information is out there.
In summary, how would you suggest they do it? Is there an industry where such a complex product range is all simple, clear and straightforward? The car-analogy/. fetish gives an example of similar confusion - my BMW 323i is not a 2.3 litre engine as the model number implies, it's a 2.5, same as the 325i. All customers care about is that the 325i is MOAR - it's faster than a 323i. The 318i is a 2 litre, same as the 320i. But the bigger number is MOAR. If you have more money, you go for the bigger number. And that's the level of detail most people want.
I live in a big city (160,000 people) in England. There are just 59 cameras monitored by the local police, and they are monitored by one person. I live just over a mile from the city centre, and none of them are within a mile of where I live.
For 9 months they weren't even monitored at all on the night shift, as no-one could be found to fill the position. The locations are published.
I'm happy with that - most of the cameras are near the worse nightclubs that tend to have trouble outside some weekends, and taxi ranks where people might be waiting on their own late at night. They put them where people want them.
My theory is that someone (who had a point to make or an axe to grind) counted all the CCTV cameras in a particular small area - general security cameras on/in offices, in hotel receptions, in shops, cameras that just measure average traffic speeds for GPS congestion avoidance, car parks and so on. They then took that number, multiplied it by the area of the country, and ignored the fact that 99%+ are nothing to do with government or police, to make whatever point they were trying to make. No doubt some imbecile published it (Daily Mail I wouldn't be surprised to hear) and made it out to be a fact and a huge problem, people repeated it and so it became an urban legend.
I'm curious, where is it that you get the impression the UK has vastly more CCTV than anywhere else, aside from reading it on Slashdot?
Amen, wish I had a mod point for you. 300 per block, WTF? +5 Insightful, WTFF?
I live in a city of 160,000 people in England, there are just 59 cameras monitored by the local government, and they are monitored by one person. I live 1.5 miles outside the centre, and none of them are within a mile of where I live.
For 9 months they weren't even monitored at all on the night shift, as no-one could be found to fill the position. The locations are even published.
I'm happy with that - most of the cameras are near the worse nightclubs that tend to have trouble outside some weekends, and taxi ranks where people might be waiting on their own late at night. They put them where people want them.
My theory is, someone counted all the CCTV cameras - general security cameras on/in offices, in hotel receptions, in shops, cameras that just measure average traffic speeds for GPS congestion avoidance, car parks and so on. They then used that vastly-bigger number to make whatever point they were trying to make, and it sounds like a big problem, people repeated it and so it became a false meme.
A fair point, and when doing any new server software I always do testing before going live, naturally. As I already pointed out there will be exceptions to the rule, but it's not a theoretical discussion, I've done it.
I was head systems manager in a setup of over 280 servers and 3,500 clients for a few years, and from 2003 until I left in 2009, only one of those 3,800 machines (a legacy AIX processing box) needed 'normal' amounts of swap. There was one version of AutoCAD which whinged without swap, so the 2-3 machines that ran on got 16 MB (the minimum non-zero amount Windows will allow), and with that they were fine.
Except that assumption has proved not to be true in my wide experience... Windows (XP, Server 2000, 2003, 2008, Vista, 7) is quite happy without swap, and it is an allowed setting, Linux (from 2.4 onwards) you can either simply not mount any swap, or if you want to get really anal about it (I never have needed to) compile the kernel without swap support.
There was one app which REQUIRED swap to be present, and on those couple of machines a fixed-size 16 MB (the minimum allowed above zero in Windows) has solved it. That was an old version of AutoCAD on Windows XP.
Try it, you'll see. You certainly don't need to spend significant money to have something you almost certainly don't need, spend the money on more RAM and a fast CPU instead!
I've not used swap on any desktop, laptop or server for several years now, and not had a problem. Domain controllers, Exchange servers, SMTP relays, file servers, web servers, database servers. Windows, Linux. 32 bit and 64 bit. All fine, and some with uptimes over a year. I agree there will be outliers who need it, but most people and most situation's don't.
Provide enough RAM for what you need and switch swap off!
On a desktop/laptop, towards the end of a busy day with lots of apps open, see how much you're using and most importantly what the peak utilisation was. If it was more than your RAM, you need more RAM. If it's comfortably below the RAM you have, you can switch off swap and get a free significant performance boost.
The performance gains alone should make it worthwhile, let alone your reduced hard drive wear and tear, and power savings (hard drives can go to sleep much more frequently and for longer) on top of that...
Oh, and as someone else has correctly pointed out, RAM that's in use for caching is not being wasted, the RAM that's sitting there not being used that's being wasted.
For a start, it's very good printer. I have one. Edge-to-edge printing, CDR printing, and 6-colour photo printing to a very high quality. Second, it's a good flatbed scanner too - so it can do photocopying without the host PC being on. Third, it can print straight from files on USB sticks and flash cards.
Now I'm not saying you're using all those features, but frankly you seem to be bitching about the cost of a full set of carts for it. There are two other options: el cheapo cartridges as others have pointed out are a lot cheaper than originals, or you can buy individual ones - and I find it hard to believe you've run out of all 6.
For me, it's not a problem. The cartridges last a long time, the photos it produces are wonderful and (so far) are fade-free, and it's a very quick copier/printer for other documents. The scanner's great too.
In summary, the cheapo replacement printer will NOT BE AS GOOD, unless you're only using it for printing, and only printing documents, not display-quality photos. In which case, she bought the wrong thing to start with.
So something only counts as causing a problem if it's making bigger holes, but being the most significant thing slowing down the recovery is fine? Great logic. If the US budget deficit was falling at $1/year would you say "it's falling, problem solved. No further action should be required"? Thought not.
since 1776 and there is a post on Memorial Day about a fucking holiday celebrating the fucking towel?
Yes. And if your 'Memorial Day' is really so massively important to you, you woldn't be a) reading Slashdot, b) reading the article about Towel Day and c) taking the time to write your post.
Don't be shocked that a world-wide community (remember only 5% or so of people are American) which focuses on geek/tech culture doesn't follow what you think is important.
If there's something you think would interest the world's geeks about your Memorial Day, please submit away!
In fact, ditching Gnome for KDE will likely fix your printer problems too.
Battery life and suspend/resume are a bit more esoteric. You'll never improve those on your own unless you're willing to hack and compile a kernel. It's certainly possible, but hardware support lags for obvious reasons.
And it's answers like yours that explain why Linux still isn't ready for the desktop. None of what you say is within the realms of the average user, and unfortunately for Linux, there are already at least two choices for the desktop that do work with these things - Windows and Apple - and that gives people expectations that these things can work cleanly, reliably and consistently.
Why should people 'ditch Gnome for KDE', when their netbook came with Gnome? How would a normal user get his wifi connection up without the network manager applet? And I certainly don't want to have to waste my time hacking kernels to get things working that other OSes have working out of the box.
Yes, it's a chicken-and-egg situation where more market demand would generate a reason to develop better drivers (I have to assume that's your 'obvious reasons') - but the world at large doesn't care about that, people just want to buy stuff that works.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone else has already pointed out, it is not a competitor to USB.
As to the RAID box, well, something has to be first. But there are already three others I'm aware of:
There is already also a Sony laptop with a Thunderbolt connector to docking station which has an optical drive, a graphics chip, *and* USB 2.0 and 3.0 sockets. The newer Apple monitors, as well as the new iMacs, use it for USB and DisplayPort. The laptops with it can use a powered-down iMac as a monitor. You can't do a lot of that with USB.
As usual with technologies like this, as soon as it's integrated into chipsets and/or standard motherboards, the products will follow. Just the fact that Apple are selling hundreds of thousands of units with this integrated will help stimulate companies to produce more products that use it...
Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off.
I wish that was true - but unless I'm being misled, these drivers already don't support my 2-year-old card or the generation after it. Is there anything concrete to give me hope this will change, and the 6000 series they're now making great steps forward with will be supported for more than 10 minutes after the 7000 series is released?
Wise words. Al-Jazeera is broadcast here along with 4 or 5 other 24-hour news channels, and it is very good. Their live web stream works well too without any silly restrictions, unlike most of the others.
Take a breath, man, Jesus.
I am not an american, I don't support either of your two parties. I made no comment on Obama, or any of the other news outlets. None are perfect, and I didn't say any were. However, in my eyes, what thankfully little I see of Fox News is the worst example of biased shrill fearmongering bullshit which twists facts, ignores common sense, and generates maximum anger, fear and hate - and leads to rants like yours, which so beautifully illustrates the problems that are making the US political system so badly uncompromising, reactive and broken.
Whether you agree with Fox's agenda (and you cannot realistically deny they have one) or not, the fact is they fucked up on a matter of IT security here, and it takes down a peg or two, and I think that's a good thing, are enjoying it. I could hope that they might start to take themselves a little less seriously, but it's a little to much to ask.
This is your corporate account. How does this happen?
I suggest it didn't. They just had to really quickly gin up a "hacker group" to cover their sick joke
It's sad, but what you said rings more true than anything that so-called news organisation comes out with....
Funny comment, but seriously, has any constitutional discussion ever involved (potentially) 2/3rds of the population before? OK, there are referendums to approve a new constitution or not, but to involve 2/3rds of the people in that discussion is *way* more than any other I'm aware of. Or to put it another way, why would you exclude a communication forum that 2/3rds of your population have access to?
Oh, and as the comment you replied to said, it's "most" of the discussion - not all of it.
All solid advice - but make sure when you get a fixed IP address it's not part of a residential block of IP addresses, or you will still be on the blocked lists.
I fell foul of this last year, we had to switch our broadband to a 'business' account to get a clean IP address.
Also, the Messagelabs service is excellent, and surprisingly cheap, and removes the problem you have - recipients see emails arriving from trusted Messagelabs whatever your connection looks like. They also periodically check your email server and make recommendations.
One device and one OS? Apple insists you need at least two of each, one for your pocket and another to activate and manage the first...
As exciting as this is, I would take this news... ... with a grain of salt.
Ugh. If you ever said that to me in person I'd likely be charged with a salt and battery.
At which point you'd be put in a cell.
Until you were discharged.
Reminds me of a story too...
My Dad had a new-ish 386 PC which he loved, he especially loved how fast it was. One weekend I played some games on it, one of which (maybe Level 42?) needed the turbo off, as it was way too fast to play at the full nosebleed-speed of 33 MHz. I then went away for the week.
When I came back that Saturday lunchtime, he was literally waiting on the driveway for em, purple with fury. He'd been struggling for the whole week with an unuseably slow PC, and he'd tried rebooting, and he'd tried lots of things, and it had ruined his week... basically he was ready to murder me, and woe betide me if I didn't fix it pronto.
I was in a panic - what the hell had broken to make it so slow? Was it something I'd got from a BBS with a virus? Was it some TSR causing an issue?
The panic ended when I walked into his study, and from across the room saw the Turbo light off. I walked over to it, pressed Turbo, and let him try again. Problem solved. It was years before he could laugh about it...
That reminds me, I shoudl dig out Level 42 and try it on my 3.4 GHz machine... maybe running it in DOS in Bochs would slow it down enough?
Thanks for pointing that out, it's not like the catholic church has any positions or beliefs that are in conflict with sanity, reason and common sense, is it?
Infallibility of the pope (until there's a new one)
Randomly picking which bits of the bible are absolutely unquestionably the literal command of god, and which bits are just allegories
Condoms and contraception in general (helping spread AIDS and other effects such as overpopulation)
Celibacy of priests (and look where that has lead in terms of rampant child abuse and a complete lack of appropriate response)
Decades or even centuries of fighting against scientific discoveries that eventually become part of 'accepted teaching'
and that's before we get to the whole imaginary-god-invented-to-control-people thing.
You have access to this thing called the Internet. Go to ark.intel.com - it's been there a long long time. It tells you *all* the details of every chip they sell.
They do sell a huge array of chips with many subtle differences - it's not like the good old days when there were 4 speeds of 486 to choose between - bus speeds, chip speeds, integrated GPU, process node, cache sizes, VT-x extensions, SSE4.2, AES, power draw, number of cores, Hyper-threading, form factor, socket, lead-free, PCIe lanes, ebmbedded...
Many, many people don't care, and buy their PCs to a price, and based on how it looks. For those of us that do care, or need a particular feature, it's *really* easy to find out what's what.
Nice one, I didn't know about the 50% thing - probably because where I live 50% humidity is abnormally dry.
What are *you* on about? 3kW is a lot, when it's 24x7x365. Add it up. The house you mention is very unlikely to add up to anywhere near 3kW constantly for the whole year. The comparison (and your other about the desktop PC) is insane, and here's why:
His is one rack, in a row of dozens, with (unless it's a very small datacentre) dozens of rows.
All the customers in all the racks are trying to maximise their utilisation of the rack (extra racks cost more), and the utilisaton of the systems in those racks (more computers cost more). Each of those hundreds of racks needs multiple kW (some more than 3, not many less than 2 or so), with huge reliability.
Now add nearly the same amount of power again to cool all those racks, to keep air passing over them all. As well as powering the chillers, and driving the air down many channels to get it to every intake fan in every rack, all of which needs to have very good filtering (usually HEPA), and add on dehumidifying on top.
Multiple feeds into the building from the grid, UPS protection, surge protection, switching between live feed 1, live feed 2, and UPS power all has to be seamless enough to not bother a nodern computer - it all adds up to a very hard job. Yes it's an established process, but that doesn't make it easy.
Your midrange desktop with 4 cores - you couldn't get more than around 20 of those in a single rack, and you would be drawing way more than 3 kW to drive them. To get 200 cores and storage (and presumably some network kit too) into a single rack is still impressive now - and for it to draw only 3 kW is impressive - they must be very efficient units.
Add in the hard drives, RAM, fans, lossy power supplies, chipsets, switches, etc.
Oh, and very few professionals would use 2 TB SATA drives in a datacentre setting. Most units nowadays use 2.5" drives, and in the SAS world that limits you to 300 GB fast ones or 450 GB slow ones - 600 GB has been announced but it takes a while to become actually used. You need more though, as you need RAID to protect against failures. That frequently means installing double what you need in terms of raw storage. Then, you throw in a few hot spares for good measure. It all adds up.
Really, it's not as bad as you make out. Firstly and most importantly, as you've already pointed out you *can* Google for it. 20 seconds on the wikipedia page for Intel's processors can tell you what you need to know about the model number in front of you.
You really think they haven't thought about how to differentiate their products and make things clear? In reality they have a lot of different product ranges to cover, from multi-socket servers down to netbooks and PDAs.
Then they have variables like number of cores, HT or not, VT or not, integrated graphics or not, 45 or 32 nm, which socket it's for, TDP, Speedstep, bus/QPI speeds, OEM or retail, which SSE/ANI extensions they have, L1 cache size(s), L2 cache size(s), L3 cache size, form factor... the list goes on.
Then remember the VAST majority of their customers don't give a flying fuck about *any* of that - they're buying a whole computer to a price point, and the reality is almost any modern CPU will do for them. A vanishingly small number of their sales are individual CPUs to geeks, and for those geeks the information is out there.
In summary, how would you suggest they do it? Is there an industry where such a complex product range is all simple, clear and straightforward? The car-analogy /. fetish gives an example of similar confusion - my BMW 323i is not a 2.3 litre engine as the model number implies, it's a 2.5, same as the 325i. All customers care about is that the 325i is MOAR - it's faster than a 323i. The 318i is a 2 litre, same as the 320i. But the bigger number is MOAR. If you have more money, you go for the bigger number. And that's the level of detail most people want.
300 per block, WTF? +5 Insightful, WTFF?
I live in a big city (160,000 people) in England. There are just 59 cameras monitored by the local police, and they are monitored by one person. I live just over a mile from the city centre, and none of them are within a mile of where I live.
For 9 months they weren't even monitored at all on the night shift, as no-one could be found to fill the position. The locations are published.
I'm happy with that - most of the cameras are near the worse nightclubs that tend to have trouble outside some weekends, and taxi ranks where people might be waiting on their own late at night. They put them where people want them.
My theory is that someone (who had a point to make or an axe to grind) counted all the CCTV cameras in a particular small area - general security cameras on/in offices, in hotel receptions, in shops, cameras that just measure average traffic speeds for GPS congestion avoidance, car parks and so on. They then took that number, multiplied it by the area of the country, and ignored the fact that 99%+ are nothing to do with government or police, to make whatever point they were trying to make. No doubt some imbecile published it (Daily Mail I wouldn't be surprised to hear) and made it out to be a fact and a huge problem, people repeated it and so it became an urban legend.
I'm curious, where is it that you get the impression the UK has vastly more CCTV than anywhere else, aside from reading it on Slashdot?
Amen, wish I had a mod point for you. 300 per block, WTF? +5 Insightful, WTFF?
I live in a city of 160,000 people in England, there are just 59 cameras monitored by the local government, and they are monitored by one person. I live 1.5 miles outside the centre, and none of them are within a mile of where I live.
For 9 months they weren't even monitored at all on the night shift, as no-one could be found to fill the position. The locations are even published.
I'm happy with that - most of the cameras are near the worse nightclubs that tend to have trouble outside some weekends, and taxi ranks where people might be waiting on their own late at night. They put them where people want them.
My theory is, someone counted all the CCTV cameras - general security cameras on/in offices, in hotel receptions, in shops, cameras that just measure average traffic speeds for GPS congestion avoidance, car parks and so on. They then used that vastly-bigger number to make whatever point they were trying to make, and it sounds like a big problem, people repeated it and so it became a false meme.
A fair point, and when doing any new server software I always do testing before going live, naturally. As I already pointed out there will be exceptions to the rule, but it's not a theoretical discussion, I've done it.
I was head systems manager in a setup of over 280 servers and 3,500 clients for a few years, and from 2003 until I left in 2009, only one of those 3,800 machines (a legacy AIX processing box) needed 'normal' amounts of swap. There was one version of AutoCAD which whinged without swap, so the 2-3 machines that ran on got 16 MB (the minimum non-zero amount Windows will allow), and with that they were fine.
Except that assumption has proved not to be true in my wide experience... Windows (XP, Server 2000, 2003, 2008, Vista, 7) is quite happy without swap, and it is an allowed setting, Linux (from 2.4 onwards) you can either simply not mount any swap, or if you want to get really anal about it (I never have needed to) compile the kernel without swap support.
There was one app which REQUIRED swap to be present, and on those couple of machines a fixed-size 16 MB (the minimum allowed above zero in Windows) has solved it. That was an old version of AutoCAD on Windows XP.
Try it, you'll see. You certainly don't need to spend significant money to have something you almost certainly don't need, spend the money on more RAM and a fast CPU instead!
...is anyone in the know still using swap?
I've not used swap on any desktop, laptop or server for several years now, and not had a problem. Domain controllers, Exchange servers, SMTP relays, file servers, web servers, database servers. Windows, Linux. 32 bit and 64 bit. All fine, and some with uptimes over a year. I agree there will be outliers who need it, but most people and most situation's don't.
Provide enough RAM for what you need and switch swap off!
On a desktop/laptop, towards the end of a busy day with lots of apps open, see how much you're using and most importantly what the peak utilisation was. If it was more than your RAM, you need more RAM. If it's comfortably below the RAM you have, you can switch off swap and get a free significant performance boost.
The performance gains alone should make it worthwhile, let alone your reduced hard drive wear and tear, and power savings (hard drives can go to sleep much more frequently and for longer) on top of that...
Oh, and as someone else has correctly pointed out, RAM that's in use for caching is not being wasted, the RAM that's sitting there not being used that's being wasted.
For a start, it's very good printer. I have one. Edge-to-edge printing, CDR printing, and 6-colour photo printing to a very high quality. Second, it's a good flatbed scanner too - so it can do photocopying without the host PC being on. Third, it can print straight from files on USB sticks and flash cards.
Now I'm not saying you're using all those features, but frankly you seem to be bitching about the cost of a full set of carts for it. There are two other options: el cheapo cartridges as others have pointed out are a lot cheaper than originals, or you can buy individual ones - and I find it hard to believe you've run out of all 6.
For me, it's not a problem. The cartridges last a long time, the photos it produces are wonderful and (so far) are fade-free, and it's a very quick copier/printer for other documents. The scanner's great too.
In summary, the cheapo replacement printer will NOT BE AS GOOD, unless you're only using it for printing, and only printing documents, not display-quality photos. In which case, she bought the wrong thing to start with.
So something only counts as causing a problem if it's making bigger holes, but being the most significant thing slowing down the recovery is fine? Great logic. If the US budget deficit was falling at $1/year would you say "it's falling, problem solved. No further action should be required"? Thought not.
And I thought Australia was 12 hours ahead of us!
since 1776 and there is a post on Memorial Day about a fucking holiday celebrating the fucking towel?
Yes. And if your 'Memorial Day' is really so massively important to you, you woldn't be a) reading Slashdot, b) reading the article about Towel Day and c) taking the time to write your post.
Don't be shocked that a world-wide community (remember only 5% or so of people are American) which focuses on geek/tech culture doesn't follow what you think is important.
If there's something you think would interest the world's geeks about your Memorial Day, please submit away!
Wifi connectivity -- Disable that stupid fucking Gnome network manager applet. It's braindead.
In fact, ditching Gnome for KDE will likely fix your printer problems too.
Battery life and suspend/resume are a bit more esoteric. You'll never improve those on your own unless you're willing to hack and compile a kernel. It's certainly possible, but hardware support lags for obvious reasons.
And it's answers like yours that explain why Linux still isn't ready for the desktop. None of what you say is within the realms of the average user, and unfortunately for Linux, there are already at least two choices for the desktop that do work with these things - Windows and Apple - and that gives people expectations that these things can work cleanly, reliably and consistently.
Why should people 'ditch Gnome for KDE', when their netbook came with Gnome? How would a normal user get his wifi connection up without the network manager applet? And I certainly don't want to have to waste my time hacking kernels to get things working that other OSes have working out of the box.
Yes, it's a chicken-and-egg situation where more market demand would generate a reason to develop better drivers (I have to assume that's your 'obvious reasons') - but the world at large doesn't care about that, people just want to buy stuff that works.