Interesting... I'd be curious to see the details of what it's running (CPU, Kernel info, etc). I'm really surprised there isn't more info on this out there.
How do you know his name wasn't "Bill"? Because he had an accent? India was the "property" of the British Empire for a very long time. Many of the Indians to whom I listen (I'm a medical transcriptionist) have distinctly English accents. And, yes, several with more pronounced Indian accents have names like "David" or "Thomas."
I find it fairly doubtful that the guys in the Indian call centers really have names like "Bill".
Having said that, as another poster indicated, it is common for companies to train their workers to work using pseudonyms that are common American names. The reasons are exactly those given, familiarity, ease of pronunciation, and (hopefully) slightly decreased bigotry.
An awfull lot of real printers (not crappy winprinters) use hard disks to store the temporary data while printing the pages. My HP PSC1310 actually is running some form of Linux on an internal hard disk... I found this out cos when installing Debian the other day, I had the printer connected and switched on and the debian installer saw the ext2 partitioned disc via USB and gave me the option to install Debian to it...
Er, what? How exactly did you jump from seeing that it had storage, to deciding that it contained a hard drive and was running Linux?
Last I checked, Ubuntu developers were worrying about reducing their several-minutes-long boot sequence. I'm not even going to mention hibernation because I know that doesn't work properly in Linux.
My Ubuntu boot times are very comparable to the XP times on the same box. Oh, and both suspend and hibernate worked flawlessly right out of the box.
Microsoft actually advises pretty strongly against using managed code for extensions to Windows explorer due to issues with language version binding that can cause problems in some cases.
It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that they aren't really using it so much themselves as a result of that.
Virtually every db needs some sort of index maintenance from time to time. The issue with Postgres is that it was a little harder and heavier weight than it should have been.
These days about 99% of Postgres installations can get by with the autovacuum daemon in the database, which is a cinch.
Perhaps the protection of minorities makes you think that Canada is lacking in freedom of speech. Whatever. Want to know what else Canada lacks? Race riots. Crosses being burned on people lawns. Lynchings. People being denied their democratic right to vote based on the colour of their skin.
Where do those things happen? Please tell me that you don't think they are common in the US...
More anecdotes... I tried Ubuntu on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000 w/ ATI) and it installed cleanly, and handled all suspend modes perfectly, right out of the box! Sound worked, the wireless (Intel) worked, and the display was quite nice (albeit with no 3D acceleration).
The only real issue was the 5.10 didn't handle ALPS Touchpads well at all. It was almost unusable as a result.:(
Fortunately, the Dapper betas have fixed that, and Ubuntu really is the most usable easy distribution for this box. OpenSuSe and Fedora both had significantly greater issues (either with suspend or the touchpad, or both).
I agree... a TiVo like package would be really nice. I've just been using Windows scheduler and batch files so far. That works, but obviously it's a little awkward.
The latest 1.4.2 still freezes the entire VM. I support a Java application for a living -- keep your evangelism to newbies...
I support several. Keep your falsehoods to Ruby fans.;)
May be, 1.5 will bring some wonderful improvements in this area, but so far it, apparently, has not -- see another response to your posting.
"Will"? You do realize that 1.5 was released well over a year ago, right? Anyway, the best VM on the market for Java right now is BEA JRockit, which is very stable with the concurrent garbage collector turned on.
Of course, anything GC does is triggered by the application, and some apps are better than others with resource management.
True, but if these apps are hanging completely it is VERY unlikely to be the garbage collector (unless they are simply being given too much RAM and are trashing during GC very badly).
But the "you need not worry about memory management" was one of the top items in Java evangelism, and now the 'net is full of advice on how to manage memory in Java to avoid GC-related problems. Oops.
Anyone who thinks that they don't need to think about resource management at all in any language is incredibly naive.
Ok, I'll answer this... here are my most recent experiences with Norton:
1. Receive new PC w/ Norton 2. Wonder why the system feels super sluggish 3. Wonder why some basic windows update operations are taking 30 minutes plus 4. Wonder why my ipconfig command in a DOS prompt is never completing 5. Turn off NAV 6. Notice IPconfig instantly ran again and that the machine felt like a speed demon 7. Uninstall anything with the name "Norton" in the title:)
Seriously, some Norton installs are so bad that you don't need "quantitative" numbers to back up the claims. Turning it off was literally an order of magnitude faster for some common operations.
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Interesting... I'd be curious to see the details of what it's running (CPU, Kernel info, etc). I'm really surprised there isn't more info on this out there.
Details? I'd be really curious to know the per kw/hr rate for this area, and if it that is just a peak or a constant rate.
It seems to me that you'd need a pretty large house to consistently consume that much energy.
I find it fairly doubtful that the guys in the Indian call centers really have names like "Bill".
Having said that, as another poster indicated, it is common for companies to train their workers to work using pseudonyms that are common American names. The reasons are exactly those given, familiarity, ease of pronunciation, and (hopefully) slightly decreased bigotry.
Er, what? How exactly did you jump from seeing that it had storage, to deciding that it contained a hard drive and was running Linux?
My Ubuntu boot times are very comparable to the XP times on the same box. Oh, and both suspend and hibernate worked flawlessly right out of the box.
No, it's not.
Indeed, that practice is surprisingly common.
Microsoft actually advises pretty strongly against using managed code for extensions to Windows explorer due to issues with language version binding that can cause problems in some cases.
It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that they aren't really using it so much themselves as a result of that.
Depends on what you mean by "still an issue". :)
Virtually every db needs some sort of index maintenance from time to time. The issue with Postgres is that it was a little harder and heavier weight than it should have been.
These days about 99% of Postgres installations can get by with the autovacuum daemon in the database, which is a cinch.
I suspect that number is completely bogus. Sources? As far as I know it was closer to $30 about 10 years ago...
Where do those things happen? Please tell me that you don't think they are common in the US...
More anecdotes... I tried Ubuntu on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000 w/ ATI) and it installed cleanly, and handled all suspend modes perfectly, right out of the box! Sound worked, the wireless (Intel) worked, and the display was quite nice (albeit with no 3D acceleration).
:(
The only real issue was the 5.10 didn't handle ALPS Touchpads well at all. It was almost unusable as a result.
Fortunately, the Dapper betas have fixed that, and Ubuntu really is the most usable easy distribution for this box. OpenSuSe and Fedora both had significantly greater issues (either with suspend or the touchpad, or both).
In the past that was mostly true. It's going to become a lot less true with the next generation of x86_64 CPUs, though.
I agree... a TiVo like package would be really nice. I've just been using Windows scheduler and batch files so far. That works, but obviously it's a little awkward.
Of course, you can always schedule streamripper to grab cartalk off of one of the _MANY_ NPR shoutcasts that are available. :)
Rotax does not make rotary engines.
Actually, "using winelib" is almost exactly the same as running with the wine "emulator".
And boycott Skype for being so foolish as to go along with this foolishness.
I support several. Keep your falsehoods to Ruby fans.
"Will"? You do realize that 1.5 was released well over a year ago, right? Anyway, the best VM on the market for Java right now is BEA JRockit, which is very stable with the concurrent garbage collector turned on.
True, but if these apps are hanging completely it is VERY unlikely to be the garbage collector (unless they are simply being given too much RAM and are trashing during GC very badly).
Anyone who thinks that they don't need to think about resource management at all in any language is incredibly naive.
Ok, I'll answer this... here are my most recent experiences with Norton:
:)
1. Receive new PC w/ Norton
2. Wonder why the system feels super sluggish
3. Wonder why some basic windows update operations are taking 30 minutes plus
4. Wonder why my ipconfig command in a DOS prompt is never completing
5. Turn off NAV
6. Notice IPconfig instantly ran again and that the machine felt like a speed demon
7. Uninstall anything with the name "Norton" in the title
Seriously, some Norton installs are so bad that you don't need "quantitative" numbers to back up the claims. Turning it off was literally an order of magnitude faster for some common operations.
While your looking, you might as well look at "Avast" as well. They have a free personal version that has been very fast and effective here.
Your Java numbers are not quite accurate. Here are some Hello Worl numbers:
:)
$ time java -cp . Test
Hello world!
real 0m1.408s
user 0m0.015s
sys 0m0.031s
As you can see, that's 3 hundreths of a second, not 1 tenth.
Also, the heap was only about 12 megs vs. your estimate of 50.
Yes, but Hibernate actually is. :)
Do you know of any financial applications with no "hacks"?
Agreed...
It would be nice of they'd open source their Perl.Net implementation, for example.