This all is a huge problem for Microsoft. On the one hand, it would hate to charge the very low license fees it would need to get anywhere in this new market, on the other hand it can hardly afford to ignore it.
The Microsoft problem is not just the price. Free software is hugely cross-platform, and a variety of ISAs should therefore help free software.
You cold not be more right. You probably already know this, but the situation in North Korea is so horrible that the average north korean male is 5.9cm shorter than the average south korean male, due to chronic famine. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/dec/05/northkorea The government, instead of fighting of famine (or simply accepting the foreign help), tries to stimulate people's growth with gymnastics (this isn't present in the link above; I read it on a newspaper and don't have a link right now).
When the "dirty energy" makes so much more economic sense
No it doesn't. It creates horrible pollution. It is not sustainable.
I see two extremes in the energy debate: 1) Mindless radical environmentalists, that oppose all current mainstream energy sources and want us to immediately move to solar power; the disastrous effects on the economy don't matter because "the Earth is more important than money". They actually harm the environment, because they greatly help the mass hysteria against nuclear power with the goal of making people use solar power, but since solar power is not viable, people use petroleum or coal instead.
2) People who don't care about energy production at all, and in particular don't care about energy-production-related pollution. Some of them have this stance because they see how irrational the radical environmentalists are, so they become the opposite. But this is *also irrational*.
Rational people sit in the middle. Let's build nuclear fission plants, hydroelectric plants (where it is economically and environmentally viable) and lets research alternate sources like nuclear fusion and solar power. Remember: if you do the opposite of Greenpeace just because they are mindless potheads, you too act irrationally. You should disregard them and think on your own. And by thinking on your own I believe you'll agree that the current situation is not sustainable. Regarding energy production, coal or petroleum based plants are both very dirty and use a resource that won't last too long. And petroleum is very important to the chemical industry, and it is a travesty that we burn this strategical resource for energy, instead of using nuclear and hydroelectric and saving the petroleum for situations where it is not easily replaceable.
Not to mention, every time you buy petroleum you help the world's worst governments (many of which are dictatorships).
People who actually program computers know that Y2K was about wrong dates.
Journalists claimed that elevators, pacemakers, and even nuclear missile launch systems would go wild.
A programmer (even if he hasn't programmed anything more complex than mergesort) would think "why in this lovely Blue Marble would a pacemaker or an elevator cease to work because of a wrong date?"), and a person with the common sense of a 5 year old knows that nuclear missile launch systems are not controlled via software, or at least not purely via software.
People with a minimum of knowledge knew that the problem would be mostly restricted to legacy systems, and that while some problems would not be fixed on time, the errors would be mostly obvious and would be found out and corrected, unlike the journalist panic that "EVERY BANK ACCOUNT WILL BECOME 1 MILLION NEGATIVE AND PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO WORK AS SLAVES FOR 30 YEARS TO PAY THE DEBT!!!"
I dunno about less exciting. Since it boosts the food supply from the bottom of the chain, it might be quite a helpful way to repair the damage to sea populations due to serious mismanagement in the past. A temporary boost to the food chain might be exactly what is required.
Isn't the following scenario likely? 1) Increase food supply for a being at the bottom of the food chain 2) Increase its population 3) Increase the population of its predators 4) The excess food is exhausted, and that original being now has a normal or even subnormal amount of food, but excess predators. Its population decreases, below normal levels 5) The phenomenon moves up the food chain (now the being's predators have overpopulation but a subnormal amount of food)
The population level of involved species being would be mathematically interesting (coupled differential equations), but possibly harmful to the environment.
Read the article. They don't merely divide performance per cost and proclaim the processor with the largest ratio as the best buy. They provide all the data, advise that the price of other computer parts should be accounted for, advise about the power consumption, and then pick *a set of* processors that seem particularly attractive.
I agree that buying based on "bang per buck" is irrational, and specially irrational when "bang" is a single metric that does not come close to measuring the real value. For example, a 400GB HD may have 5% better capacity/dollar than a 200GB HD, but since 200GB is enough for me, buying the 400GB would pretty much be overpaying by 90%. Not to mention that speed and reliability also count.
But the article does not advocate buying based on "bang per buck". Read it, or at least the first and final pages.
But, it doesn't matter. Overclocking is free anyways.
It costs a lot of time during many "does this combination of voltage and frequency work?" tests, and then a lot of torture tests to "validate" the end result. Also, even after you "validate" the end result, your computer might still crash during a peculiar compilation, transcoding, number-crunching, gaming or whatever, sending time and data to/dev/null. There are *a lot* of ways a CPU can be stressed, and a simple torture test will never catch it. Remember that a computer is a general-purpose computation machine *designed* to operate on a nearly infinite input space. Properly testing a processor requires an engineering team (and as an Electronic Engineer I can tell you there is specialized theory on this), proper equipment, and a lot of time. Not to mention that torture tests often merely stress the CPU with a tight loop and see if it crashes or not - they don't even check that the small loop body is correctly computed, not to mention a more complex calculation. A computer that silently miscomputes data is far worse than a computer that loudly crashes.
The time you lose due to this probably negates the time you gained with your overclocking (remembering that even if you overclock your CPU by 30%, your computer doesn't become 30% faster - the HD, network and video card are still at the same speed, and often the memory is not overclocked as much as the CPU).
Also, increasing the frequency will probably increase power consumption at least linearly, and increasing voltage will probably increase power consumption quadratically (that is, 15% greater voltage means 32.25% more electrical power) - although I don't know how this works with today processors where frequency and sometimes even voltage changes with demand. And in any case the torture tests will be particularly expensive.
Also: the only CPU I have ever seen to be damaged was one I had overclocked (when I was a teen). Note, I didn't even increase voltage, only frequency, and the computer was stable. Even in this conditions the CPU was lost after some months (although it is not certain it was due to overclocking).
Also: if you don't plan for overclocking, you hardly get a good benefit like a 40% clock increase. But if you plan for it, you run the risk of paying a premium for an overclock-friendly processor, motherboard, heatsink/fan, a powerful PSU and then... it doesn't overclock nicely. You don't know how much it will overclock until you try it, but at this point, you already spent your money.
In summary: overclocking costs time, electricity dollars, stability, the risk of hardware damage, and probably money on overclock-friendly parts, without even knowing in advance if you will succeed.
The last point: I haven't heard of a server admin, number-crunching cientist, office computers admin or any other professional overclocking a computer. But I do see teenagers doing it, then bragging about.
AMD is the loveable underdog, but don't forget how expensive their X2s were when they were dominant. AMD isn't cheap because they're doing us a favor, they're cheap because they have to be.
The people who advocate AMD do not think that AMD would sell cheap processors even without competition. In a monopoly, they would most likely charge as much as the market could pay. The point is that AMD is a very positive force in the market, and I buy from them not only because their processors have better value/dollar (and ditto for the motherboards for these processors) than Intel's, but also because I and every other consumer would be in a much worse situation if not for the little competition that still exists in the x86 market*.
A second point is that Intel has used anti-competition practices, and should be punished for that.
* Then again, I would certainly prefer not to be obligated to buy x86 processors in the first place. I see ARM advancing, and I love it. I wonder that with ARM's advance, cross-platform will dominate, and this could allow even other architectures to compete, making me smile like a baby. Not to mention that Free Software is far better at cross-platform than proprietary software; Free Software helps underdog arches, and underdog arches help Free software, in a positive feedback loop of market competition.
I agree, me(and most other consumers) will buy whichever chip gives them the most GHz for their buck, it doesn't matter who makes it.
First, equating clock frequency with performance makes me cry (I'm an Electronic Engineer with an interest in computer architecture).
Second, you should consider value per buck and not just bang per buck.
For example, suppose that I could get 5% better capacity/dollar with a 400GB HD than with a 200GB HD. Since 200 GB is enough for me, buying the 400GB would basically mean paying 90% without enough benefit. Buying the 400GB is more bang per buck but less value per buck.
And the justification that I should buy the 400GB because "I will need it in the future" is just a shallow excuse for consumerism. When/if I need the additional 200GB, it will be cheaper, faster, and more reliable (due to being less used) than now.
Third, I also give importance to company behavior and not just to the final price. I prefer AMD not only because its processors usually offer better performance/dollar and because motherboards for AMD processors are often cheaper, but also because of the anti-competitive behavior of Intel.
Indeed, there is no business reason for Microsoft to shoot that bill down except ideology.
Of course there is business reason. If the government uses ODF, there is a truly level playing field. If the government uses.doc or.docx in the other hand, Microsoft is favored.
Oh, the poor USish - they don't have their own language or even a word to describe people from their country.
If you want to feel pity about the US, feel pity about them using the "Enlgish" units, while even England has joined *the whole rest of the world except Liberia, Myanmar and USA* in using the metric system.
I use it every time I write solely for myself, but when I write to others, I up to now have restricted it to filenames (e.g. rent-2009-02-10.pdf), and to this date everyone has understood them. I will start using it more now.
I love logical standards.
I would love to see the USA using the metric system and the whole word speaking the same language.
Don't mix the concepts. There are three relevant concepts 1) That of the immensely knowledgeable Unix wizard, with a big beard (the Unix beard); positive connotation 2) That of the socially inadequate geek-in-the-basement which sleeps in a bizarre and unhealthy (lack of) schedule, has a horribly unhealthy eating habit (eats junk food over the keyboard), and sometimes misses shower; has a negative connotation, specially if the geek devotes most of his time to something useless such as Star Trek fandom, instead of something important like free software development 3) That of the hippie ; *very* negative connotation
The image of free software developer invokes, to different people, a different mix of the three concepts (and to other people, none of the three).
You seem to think that 1 and 2 are always connected.
Are you trolling? I don't use Mandriva myself (I use Gentoo, and advocate Debian and Ubuntu), but I know that Synaptic was invented by Conectiva, who merged with Mandrake to form Mandriva.
Oh, and what the hell is a pagefile in a ramdisk? Unless by "ramdisk" you mean one of those RAM-drive devices that have volatile memory, backup storage and a battery. But I have a very hard time imagining which situation would justify putting a pagefile in such a device (if you really need so much virtual memory, it would be more practical to buy a motherboard that supports several gibibytes of main memory). Please clarify
* The bottleneck is disk I/O, and my HD capacity is 80GB and hdparm reports 53MB/s buffered disk reads. Your fancy raid should be several times faster.
I have never seen, on any machine, anything close to your claims. There is something wrong with your system. You should debug it. On my modest system, Firefox takes 9s to start immediately after login, and 2.1s for subsequent starts. This huge difference heavily suggests that disk I/O is the bottleneck, and my HD is almost certainly slower than yours (see below). Ergo, there is something wrong with your system. My system: Athlon XP 2600+ (cpu family 6, model 8, 2166MHz, 256 KB L2 cache, 128KB L1 cache, 133MHz FSB) with 1 GB of DDR RAM at 266MHz (some 140MB of which are inaccessible due to kernel configuration); the HD is 80GB (cfdisk reports 80060424192 bytes), and hdparm -tT run 6 times at runlevel 1 results in (output edited to show average and error margin):
Timing cached reads: 610 +- 34 MB in 2 seconds = 300 +- 13 MB/s
Timing buffered disk reads: 160 MB in 3.02 seconds = 53 +- 0.02 MB/s
The filesystem is reiserfs, at least 3 years old, probably fragmented (specially because its usage was 98%+ in the past, and actually filled at least twice). Nowadays its usage is 7% and it is mounted with relatime, notail
Software: Stable Gentoo system gcc-4.1.2, glibc-2.6.1-r0, linux 2.6.27.19 mozilla-firefox-3.0.6, xulrunner-1.9.0.6, LXDE, xdm-1.1.6, gkrellm-2.3.2 (which was running when the test was performed, as it starts at login) CFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon-xp -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
Immediately after login, opening an rxvt and issuing free reports that 20MB of RAM is used (plus 39MB of buffers/cache).
I don't really care about the speed. It's already fast enough. I just wish they'd sort out the RAM consumption issue
Oh, don't exaggerate. Firefox is considerably slow. There is much gain to be made in the performance area. Why can't they match the speed of Opera (which I would use if it weren't proprietary)? RAM usage is also important, and certainly should be addressed, but in my opinion performance should have slightly more priority than RAM usage, and both should have considerably more priority than shiny new features (except standards support, which should be first priority).
Well, you seem to dispute the information from http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-221999. Since I have no other background on either you or ireport.com, I think I cannot have a strong opinion on this matter.
Then I just hope you are honest. Please think carefully before sending these letters to people. And maybe some of the little guys who "made up a few things to get out of trouble" did this because they were desperate, due to excessive pressure (an aggressive and threatening letter, demanding confidentiality and urgency)? I'm not saying that pressure justifies an illegal action, but maybe if you apply less pressure, it could be better for both parties (assuming you are honest and want a fair outcome). I don't know, I am not familiar with the situation.
I mean, I just hope that you are honest. And please think carefully before each cease and desist letter, and try not to make innocent people settle because it is cheaper than litigating - that is unfair, and that is why we don't like RIAA. Also, don't do something immoral just because there is a legislation loophole that says it is legal. For example, some commenters have claimed that some of your images are too generic, so someone could very well have created their own image but, since it is similar to yours, technically infringes on your copyright. I don't have the expertise and time to investigate this allegation, so I can only ask you to be fair.
What sounds *very* fishy is that you go after individual embroidery companies, who may bot be able to afford lawyers and thus choose to settle even if honest. Hence the comparison with RIAA. The threats and the claims of confidentiality and urgency add to this. It is *very* unfair that a person chooses to settle, while believing he/she is innocent, because settling is cheaper than litigating.
Why don't you go after clipart.com? If you don't answer this, I find it very hard to believe you have good faith.
Its their compiler, they are damn well allowed to do what they want - call me when AMD pour that kind of resource into having their own compiler.
This sort of "a company can do anything it wants with its own products" comments appear almost every time someone mentions anti-competitive behavior, and then people explain that no, a company should not be allowed to leverage a monopoly position to further entrench itself. Should the government allow practices like, e.g., dumping, the market would be dominated by a very small number of mega-corporations, ruining the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
This all is a huge problem for Microsoft. On the one hand, it would hate to charge the very low license fees it would need to get anywhere in this new market, on the other hand it can hardly afford to ignore it.
The Microsoft problem is not just the price. Free software is hugely cross-platform, and a variety of ISAs should therefore help free software.
You cold not be more right.
You probably already know this, but the situation in North Korea is so
horrible that the average north korean male is 5.9cm shorter than
the average south korean male, due to chronic famine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/dec/05/northkorea
The government, instead of fighting of famine (or simply accepting the
foreign help), tries to stimulate people's growth with gymnastics
(this isn't present in the link above; I read it on a newspaper and
don't have a link right now).
North Korea is both metaphorically and literally on the Dark.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.htm
Its leader, however, is a buffoon that lives with comfort, luxuries
and ostensible wealth.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/noticias/2009/03/090316_coreiadonorte_pizza_cq.shtml
(the above link is in Portuguese, sorry)
When the "dirty energy" makes so much more economic sense
No it doesn't. It creates horrible pollution. It is not sustainable.
I see two extremes in the energy debate:
1) Mindless radical environmentalists, that oppose all current mainstream energy
sources and want us to immediately move to solar power; the disastrous effects
on the economy don't matter because "the Earth is more important than money".
They actually harm the environment, because they greatly help the mass hysteria
against nuclear power with the goal of making people use solar power,
but since solar power is not viable, people use petroleum or coal instead.
2) People who don't care about energy production at all, and in particular don't
care about energy-production-related pollution. Some of them have this stance
because they see how irrational the radical environmentalists are, so they become
the opposite. But this is *also irrational*.
Rational people sit in the middle. Let's build nuclear fission plants, hydroelectric
plants (where it is economically and environmentally viable) and lets research
alternate sources like nuclear fusion and solar power.
Remember: if you do the opposite of Greenpeace just because they are mindless
potheads, you too act irrationally. You should disregard them and think on your
own. And by thinking on your own I believe you'll agree that the current situation
is not sustainable.
Regarding energy production, coal or petroleum based plants are both very dirty
and use a resource that won't last too long. And petroleum is very important to
the chemical industry, and it is a travesty that we burn this strategical
resource for energy, instead of using nuclear and hydroelectric and saving the
petroleum for situations where it is not easily replaceable.
Not to mention, every time you buy petroleum you help the world's worst
governments (many of which are dictatorships).
Oh, for the love of Jesus, Y2K? On Slashdot?
People who actually program computers know that Y2K was about wrong dates.
Journalists claimed that elevators, pacemakers, and even nuclear missile launch systems would go wild.
A programmer (even if he hasn't programmed anything more complex than mergesort) would think "why in this lovely Blue Marble would a pacemaker or an elevator cease to work because of a wrong date?"), and a person with the common sense of a 5 year old knows that nuclear missile launch systems are not controlled via software, or at least not purely via software.
People with a minimum of knowledge knew that the problem would be mostly restricted to legacy systems, and that while some problems would not be fixed on time, the errors would be mostly obvious and would be found out and corrected, unlike the journalist panic that "EVERY BANK ACCOUNT WILL BECOME 1 MILLION NEGATIVE AND PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO WORK AS SLAVES FOR 30 YEARS TO PAY THE DEBT!!!"
I dunno about less exciting. Since it boosts the food supply from the bottom of the chain, it might be quite a helpful way to repair the damage to sea populations due to serious mismanagement in the past. A temporary boost to the food chain might be exactly what is required.
Isn't the following scenario likely?
1) Increase food supply for a being at the bottom of the food chain
2) Increase its population
3) Increase the population of its predators
4) The excess food is exhausted, and that original being now has a normal or even subnormal amount of food, but excess predators. Its population decreases, below normal levels
5) The phenomenon moves up the food chain (now the being's predators have overpopulation but a subnormal amount of food)
The population level of involved species being would be mathematically interesting (coupled differential equations), but possibly harmful to the environment.
I've rarely had freezes on Windows since switching to the 2000/XP line, in fact, I can't remember the last time.
Glad you don't use Vista.
what i find even more astounding is this action was endorsed by a GROUP of adults.
Groupthink.
Read the article. They don't merely divide performance per cost and proclaim the processor with the largest ratio as the best buy. They provide all the data, advise that the price of other computer parts should be accounted for, advise about the power consumption, and then pick *a set of* processors that seem particularly attractive.
I agree that buying based on "bang per buck" is irrational, and specially irrational when "bang" is a single metric that does not come close to measuring the real value. For example, a 400GB HD may have 5% better capacity/dollar than a 200GB HD, but since 200GB is enough for me, buying the 400GB would pretty much be overpaying by 90%. Not to mention that speed and reliability also count.
But the article does not advocate buying based on "bang per buck". Read it, or at least the first and final pages.
But, it doesn't matter. Overclocking is free anyways.
It costs a lot of time during many "does this combination of voltage and frequency work?" tests, and then a lot of torture tests to "validate" the end result. Also, even after you "validate" the end result, your computer might still crash during a peculiar compilation, transcoding, number-crunching, gaming or whatever, sending time and data to /dev/null. There are *a lot* of ways a CPU can be stressed, and a simple torture test will never catch it. Remember that a computer is a general-purpose computation machine *designed* to operate on a nearly infinite input space. Properly testing a processor requires an engineering team (and as an Electronic Engineer I can tell you there is specialized theory on this), proper equipment, and a lot of time.
Not to mention that torture tests often merely stress the CPU with a tight loop and see if it crashes or not - they don't even check that the small loop body is correctly computed, not to mention a more complex calculation. A computer that silently miscomputes data is far worse than a computer that loudly crashes.
The time you lose due to this probably negates the time you gained with your overclocking (remembering that even if you overclock your CPU by 30%, your computer doesn't become 30% faster - the HD, network and video card are still at the same speed, and often the memory is not overclocked as much as the CPU).
Also, increasing the frequency will probably increase power consumption at least linearly, and increasing voltage will probably increase power consumption quadratically (that is, 15% greater voltage means 32.25% more electrical power) - although I don't know how this works with today processors where frequency and sometimes even voltage changes with demand.
And in any case the torture tests will be particularly expensive.
Also: the only CPU I have ever seen to be damaged was one I had overclocked (when I was a teen). Note, I didn't even increase voltage, only frequency, and the computer was stable. Even in this conditions the CPU was lost after some months (although it is not certain it was due to overclocking).
Also: if you don't plan for overclocking, you hardly get a good benefit like a 40% clock increase. But if you plan for it, you run the risk of paying a premium for an overclock-friendly processor, motherboard, heatsink/fan, a powerful PSU and then... it doesn't overclock nicely. You don't know how much it will overclock until you try it, but at this point, you already spent your money.
In summary: overclocking costs time, electricity dollars, stability, the risk of hardware damage, and probably money on overclock-friendly parts, without even knowing in advance if you will succeed.
The last point: I haven't heard of a server admin, number-crunching cientist, office computers admin or any other professional overclocking a computer. But I do see teenagers doing it, then bragging about.
AMD is the loveable underdog, but don't forget how expensive their X2s were when they were dominant. AMD isn't cheap because they're doing us a favor, they're cheap because they have to be.
The people who advocate AMD do not think that AMD would sell cheap processors even without competition. In a monopoly, they would most likely charge as much as the market could pay.
The point is that AMD is a very positive force in the market, and I buy from them not only because their processors have better value/dollar (and ditto for the motherboards for these processors) than Intel's, but also because I and every other consumer would be in a much worse situation if not for the little competition that still exists in the x86 market*.
A second point is that Intel has used anti-competition practices, and should be punished for that.
* Then again, I would certainly prefer not to be obligated to buy x86 processors in the first place. I see ARM advancing, and I love it. I wonder that with ARM's advance, cross-platform will dominate, and this could allow even other architectures to compete, making me smile like a baby. Not to mention that Free Software is far better at cross-platform than proprietary software; Free Software helps underdog arches, and underdog arches help Free software, in a positive feedback loop of market competition.
I agree, me(and most other consumers) will buy whichever chip gives them the most GHz for their buck, it doesn't matter who
makes it.
First, equating clock frequency with performance makes me cry (I'm an Electronic Engineer with an interest in computer architecture).
Second, you should consider value per buck and not just bang per buck.
For example, suppose that I could get 5% better capacity/dollar with a 400GB HD than with a 200GB HD. Since 200 GB is enough for me, buying the 400GB would basically mean paying 90% without enough benefit. Buying the 400GB is more bang per buck but less value per buck.
And the justification that I should buy the 400GB because "I will need it in the future" is just a shallow excuse for consumerism. When/if I need the additional 200GB, it will be cheaper, faster, and more reliable (due to being less used) than now.
Third, I also give importance to company behavior and not just to the final price. I prefer AMD not only because its processors usually offer better performance/dollar and because motherboards for AMD processors are often cheaper, but also because of the anti-competitive behavior of Intel.
Indeed, there is no business reason for Microsoft to shoot that bill down except ideology.
Of course there is business reason. .doc or .docx in the other hand, Microsoft is favored.
If the government uses ODF, there is a truly level playing field.
If the government uses
He is currently at 0, Troll. This is clearly mod abuse.
Give him at least a 1, underrated to undo the abuse.
Oh, the poor USish - they don't have their own language or even a word to describe people from their country.
If you want to feel pity about the US, feel pity about them using the "Enlgish" units, while even England has joined *the whole rest of the world except Liberia, Myanmar and USA* in using the metric system.
I use it every time I write solely for myself, but when I write to others, I up to now have restricted it to filenames (e.g. rent-2009-02-10.pdf), and to this date everyone has understood them. I will start using it more now.
I love logical standards.
I would love to see the USA using the metric system and the whole word speaking the same language.
Don't mix the concepts.
There are three relevant concepts
1) That of the immensely knowledgeable Unix wizard, with a big beard (the Unix beard); positive connotation
2) That of the socially inadequate geek-in-the-basement which sleeps in a bizarre and unhealthy (lack of) schedule, has a horribly unhealthy eating habit (eats junk food over the keyboard), and sometimes misses shower; has a negative connotation, specially if the geek devotes most of his time to something useless such as Star Trek fandom, instead of something important like free software development
3) That of the hippie ; *very* negative connotation
The image of free software developer invokes, to different people, a different mix of the three concepts (and to other people, none of the three).
You seem to think that 1 and 2 are always connected.
Are you trolling? I don't use Mandriva myself (I use Gentoo, and advocate Debian and Ubuntu), but I know that Synaptic was invented by Conectiva, who merged with Mandrake to form Mandriva.
In my modest* system it takes 9s. See my post at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1150259&cid=27088465.
Oh, and what the hell is a pagefile in a ramdisk? Unless by "ramdisk" you mean one of those RAM-drive devices that have volatile memory, backup storage and a battery. But I have a very hard time imagining which situation would justify putting a pagefile in such a device (if you really need so much virtual memory, it would be more practical to buy a motherboard that supports several gibibytes of main memory). Please clarify
* The bottleneck is disk I/O, and my HD capacity is 80GB and hdparm reports 53MB/s buffered disk reads. Your fancy raid should be several times faster.
I have never seen, on any machine, anything close to your claims. There is something wrong with your system. You should debug it.
On my modest system, Firefox takes 9s to start immediately after login, and 2.1s for subsequent starts.
This huge difference heavily suggests that disk I/O is the bottleneck, and my HD is almost certainly slower than yours (see below). Ergo, there is something wrong with your system.
My system:
Athlon XP 2600+ (cpu family 6, model 8, 2166MHz, 256 KB L2 cache, 128KB L1 cache, 133MHz FSB) with 1 GB of DDR RAM at 266MHz (some 140MB of which are inaccessible due to kernel configuration); the HD is 80GB (cfdisk reports 80060424192 bytes), and hdparm -tT run 6 times at runlevel 1 results in (output edited to show average and error margin):
Timing cached reads: 610 +- 34 MB in 2 seconds = 300 +- 13 MB/s
Timing buffered disk reads: 160 MB in 3.02 seconds = 53 +- 0.02 MB/s
The filesystem is reiserfs, at least 3 years old, probably fragmented (specially because its usage was 98%+ in the past, and actually filled at least twice). Nowadays its usage is 7% and it is mounted with relatime, notail
Software:
Stable Gentoo system
gcc-4.1.2, glibc-2.6.1-r0, linux 2.6.27.19
mozilla-firefox-3.0.6, xulrunner-1.9.0.6, LXDE, xdm-1.1.6, gkrellm-2.3.2 (which was running when the test was performed, as it starts at login)
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon-xp -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
Immediately after login, opening an rxvt and issuing free reports that 20MB of RAM is used (plus 39MB of buffers/cache).
I have never seen anything close to this on any machine. There is something wrong with your system.
I enjoy "awesome bar" too, although I wouldn't call it the best thing to happen to FF. I agree with you that it shouldn't be dismissed as a hindrance.
I don't really care about the speed. It's already fast enough. I just wish they'd sort out the RAM consumption issue
Oh, don't exaggerate. Firefox is considerably slow. There is much gain to be made in the performance area. Why can't they match the speed of Opera (which I would use if it weren't proprietary)? RAM usage is also important, and certainly should be addressed, but in my opinion performance should have slightly more priority than RAM usage, and both should have considerably more priority than shiny new features (except standards support, which should be first priority).
Well, you seem to dispute the information from http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-221999. Since I have no other background on either you or ireport.com, I think I cannot have a strong opinion on this matter.
Then I just hope you are honest. Please think carefully before sending these letters to people. And maybe some of the little guys who "made up a few things to get out of trouble" did this because they were desperate, due to excessive pressure (an aggressive and threatening letter, demanding confidentiality and urgency)? I'm not saying that pressure justifies an illegal action, but maybe if you apply less pressure, it could be better for both parties (assuming you are honest and want a fair outcome). I don't know, I am not familiar with the situation.
I mean, I just hope that you are honest. And please think carefully before each cease and desist letter, and try not to make innocent people settle because it is cheaper than litigating - that is unfair, and that is why we don't like RIAA.
Also, don't do something immoral just because there is a legislation loophole that says it is legal. For example, some commenters have claimed that some of your images are too generic, so someone could very well have created their own image but, since it is similar to yours, technically infringes on your copyright. I don't have the expertise and time to investigate this allegation, so I can only ask you to be fair.
Cheers and good luck
What sounds *very* fishy is that you go after individual embroidery companies, who may bot be able to afford lawyers and thus choose to settle even if honest. Hence the comparison with RIAA. The threats and the claims of confidentiality and urgency add to this.
It is *very* unfair that a person chooses to settle, while believing he/she is innocent, because settling is cheaper than litigating.
Why don't you go after clipart.com?
If you don't answer this, I find it very hard to believe you have good faith.
Its their compiler, they are damn well allowed to do what they want - call me when AMD pour that kind of resource into having their own compiler.
This sort of "a company can do anything it wants with its own products" comments appear almost every time someone mentions anti-competitive behavior, and then people explain that no, a company should not be allowed to leverage a monopoly position to further entrench itself. Should the government allow practices like, e.g., dumping, the market would be dominated by a very small number of mega-corporations, ruining the economy.
Seriously, are you a troll?