You're right - charging more than the marginal cost for the reproduction of a song is a deadweight loss. However, we haven't explained how that song got there to begin with - it wasn't instantaneously created when you turned on your broadband connection, and you didn't create the value inherent in that song by firing up your P2P client.
What to charge for a copy of a song is the uninteresting case with an uninteresting answer - nothing. How to accurately gauge the value of the original is more difficult - especially within the framework of the pure, unadultered market forces everyone loves to hate, except when it suits their purposes.
But when idiots use the words "intellectual property" they think it means they have the right to own intellects or something...
Well, this is another great example of where you can derive meaning from context. Since you know I'm not an idiot, you know which definition of IP I was using.
I worked myself to death on a double major in econ and cs for the betterment of whichever firm takes me. I guess they're all stealing from me since I don't have a job yet.
Semantics, but you worked for the betterment of yourself - you of all people should know what an investment in one's human capital is.
yes there is. TPB, kazaa, and many other p2p projects do well enough to sustain themselves AND have full time staff. If they can do it free, anyone can.
\
But they don't produce what they "sell", do they? Without the works of others (you know, the original creators of all those files being shared) the value of these services would be significantly less. If the creators and employees of Kazaa had to create everything being shared themselves, would they be giving it away for free?
And you cut off the rest of my point that people snorting Prozac are still druggies, even if Prozac is an antidepressant. ^.^
You wouldn't call it immoral to refuse to pay someone who stopped working after their first week, so why should a singer be any different. Subjecting "artists" to the same rules everyone else must obey is the definition of "moral".
A very good point - but it's not the "cost" of something that determines the purchase price, it's the "value" of something. The "cost" of producing a song or a burger (i.e., the labor involved) maybe be similar, but the value of the end results are far different.
When I was a fast food greasemonkey, I wouldn't expect to get paid after after I clocked out and quit working - what I've done has long since ceased to be of any value.
But, certainly that song that's been traded 300 million times on the internet has somewhat more value - why would so many be interested in it if it weren't? Royalties to dead grandchildren is simply a sick result of a broken method of trying to properly recognize the value that intellectual property does or does not have.
A "Linux journalist" talking to a "publicist" was told to read the press release?
I, too, without RTFA, would think most any company would be wary about talking about a recent server breach.
But, it doesn't matter - it's all open source, you can look at the lines of code and verify for yourself that they're safe, right? Not like what you can('t) do with Windows.
Well, I think its silly to be an "adherent" to either definition. The first link is pretty much a jargon dictionary for computer scientists - if you were to speak computer science-ese, that would be the "correct" definition and the intended meaning.
Not sure if I replied to this elsewhere, but "copyright" is the "ownership of the exclusive right to make copies." It's a subset of "Intellectual Property" which, as far as I know, means anything someone with an ax to grind wants it to mean.
One's livelihood is just as valuable, if not more so, than one's property, no? If you work for the benefit of others, it's fair to expect your day's wage.
We quite simply do not have a good, economically sound way to pay the "creative" and "knowledge workers." It's not a "slur" against the youth of the nation, it's a very cold and descriptive legal term: music is copyrighted, and the violation thereof is "infringement." The denotations are quite clear, whereas your n-word is all about connotations.
And, we do generally call people on anti-depressants "druggies" - do they have a prescription? are they snorting the tablets to get high? and why aren't they sharing? etc. But that's a different issue entirely...
Our generation is also, generally, the first generation which actually understands the technology in question, and how our society interacts with it.
Perhaps our generation is simply the first to use such technology. I work at a help desk at my college, and the vast majority of the student body won't be able to tell you how the bittorrent protocol works, why it's hard on our limited bandwidth, etc. Nor will some be able to tell you where music comes from ("Music is written by people, potato chips come from the ground, etc." It seems to be something that "grows" on the internet.) Others won't be able to tell you why copyright infringement is currently illegal, for good or for ill. A lot don't even know that it is illegal.
So, I'd be hard pressed to say that we, as a generation, actually share a collective understanding so superior to anyone else's that we can say, by authority of our technical genius, that file sharing is entirely moral. Others may vilify what they don't understand, but most of "we" don't understand it either - we simply use it, and music comes out.
Maybe the "lie" is that a system is immoral because it seems to be artificial in the cold gaze of econ-101-style supply and demand? Maybe the "lie" is that file sharing is moral? Maybe the lie is that you exist? Maybe we're all just brains in a jar.
But, you can understand how I'd be biased. Working at a help desk ("Help! My internets don't work!") doesn't give one the most cheerful or optimistic appraisal of the human race. ^.^
Very well said, and very related to the post I originally tried to reply to!
There are a number of reasons why it may be hard to explain why file sharing will get you sued - either legally or morally. Not all of them are malicious, propaganda-laced threats of oppression, or entirely born out of unconscionable ignorance.
But, some are ^.^ I work at the help desk of a college pressed for bandwidth. (Incompetents at main hall and a 20Mbit symmetrical line divided up amongst a small city.) My coworker had the misfortune of trying to explain to some girl why A) the campus didn't permit P2P sharing of music over the Internet, that B) it was illegal anyways (for better or for worse). This lead to C) explaining that there were legal ways of getting music, even over the internet. ("Then how am I supposed to listen to music?!")
I didn't know Mr. Raymond was so influential in the wide, wonderful world of hacker activism.
But, "hacker" is another word that will have different meanings depending on its context. If you you see a//HACK: blah blah blah comment next to an important function, or your classmates in a compsci course talk about how they hacked together a program in a few nights, you know they're referring to programming tricks or kludges. (Definitely not axes.)
Whereas, if you read about how the Pentagon was "hacked" in the local newspaper, you also know that the reporter wasn't talking about Dick Cheney's new perl script. (Or axes. Or incompetent, unlicensed professionals. Or other denotation.)
There's no need to "reclaim" a word like hacker - different circles use it to mean different things, and each circle knows exactly what that means. It's called "jargon," I believe.
Of course there should be. Do you differentiate between "murder" and "homicide" in everyday, informal conversation between friends? Context is everything.
For example, "diction" is word choice and enunciation, usually in reference to one's oratory skill. But, despite a difference in usage versus actual, denoted meaning, I still managed to understand your point ^.^
It's one thing to call file sharing "theft" because "copyright infringement" is too many syllables and the minutiae aren't relevant in whatever casual conversation you were having; it's another thing to be truly ignorant of the differences and simply not know they exist. Vulgar speech isn't going to lead to a police state anytime soon.
I understand that a society's understanding of morality is, of course, built upon the social norms and mores of that society.
But, our generation is still a rather small part of society - it's kinda arrogant to say it's moral "because we say so," isn't it?
Also, the fact that what's "moral" is just a definition for "what the majority of people are doing" is kind of scary. But, that's off the beaten path from my original post of "Well, I can see where you would have a hard time explaining the difference between 'copyright infringement' and 'theft.'" ^.^
You're right about "to most people"... However, that just means that those most people need to be educated...
I agree entirely. However, there also needs to be "wiggle room" for the common vernacular to be (at least!) mildly different from legal jargon. See "hacker v. cracker" - another misappropriation of words that are "pretty close," but where anyone with enough brain cells and ego to care would be able to tell the intended meaning from the context.
dirty air thieves (people who live), dastardly noise thieves (people with ears), horrific light thieves (photographers)
if you don't pay for it it's a sin, viva extremist capitalism!
Except in this case, the dirty air thieves are at one of those hippy-dippy-trippy oxygen bar places, those dastardly noise thieves snuck into a concert, and those horrific light thieves were photographing your intellectual property in the nude.
Wow, I sure opened myself up to be flamed. You're right, information does want to be free - nobody can "own" it, it's just one of nature's creatures, for us all to enjoy. And speaking of logical fallacies, this is also entirely true because "299 out of every 300 people" say it is.
use of paper as "necrophilia" because paper is composed of the corpses of trees
I never said they were the same. In fact, the line you quote shows me explaining how they're "drastically different." ^^
To most people, theft is taking what you didn't pay for. That's exactly what file sharing someone else's IP is - you have something you didn't pay for, even if nobody else "lost" it as a consequence. That's how they're "pretty close", even though the presence of intangible, non-rival goods is significant.
To break your metaphor, it's more like the difference between "violently stealing the trophy from the clutches of the first place contestant" and "taking it from the display case ahead of time."
but less bloated then opening up a new process (or more than one!) for every single web page loaded
Well, as others have said, that's a feature of Chrome, not Webkit.
But, multiple processes makes things less bloated, not more so. The obvious case is on multicore processors - each core can render a tab, and multiple tabs can be rendered simultaneously. It's faster, and makes better use of your CPU.
Less obvious is how multiple processes fare better even on a single core. Depending on how the browser is written, a bloated^W "Web 2.0" page laden with graphics and animation can be death to a slow processor. But, if the lagging tab is in its own process, it doesn't affect the rendering of your other tabs. By taking advantage of how your operating system schedules processes, you've kept your browser responsive and made better use of your single core.
Now, it's not like there aren't other ways to do this - multiple processes is just a very elegant way. (It would have been better if Google did multiple threads, but that probably would've made it harder to port to operating systems that don't support them. *Squinty eyes*).
It's also not like multiple processes don't have overhead - context switching is expensive in a multitasking operating system, and multiple processes (but not so much multiple threads) will eat memory quicker.
But, I doubt they're trying to put Google Chrome on embedded devices anyways. And, it's not like the memory difference is that astronomical - I've had 3 tabs open, and 3 chrome.exe processes. They totaled 68MB of memory used, but one process released most of it's memory as I was writing this rant (!) and those same 3 tabs now only occupy 50 MB of memory. The same three tabs in Internet Explorer are using 57MB, and those tabs in Firefox are using 55MB. Not that that's a scientific measurement, and it's not like the memory used isn't fluctuating by several megabytes even as the other browsers sit, but the "bloat" just isn't there.
It's a better programming method, it has negligible memory overhead when done right, and it's much, much faster. I was happily using a combination of Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 (and recently IE8 beta 2), but Chrome was just so much faster than even Firefox that it made me switch.
You may have had a hard time explaining why file-sharing isn't theft because the two are pretty close.
It's true that file-sharing involves intangible goods with no loss to the other party. However, in both cases you get something you didn't pay for that belonged (or still belongs!) to someone else. The results for the "thief" are the same even if the means (and their side effects) are drastically different.
But, you know that. And, evidently, most people don't. But, I wouldn't trust those same people to teach others how to think critically.
RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There is no Redundant part in aid 0. You can ofcourse have multiple aid 0s in mirrored configuration so you have raid instead of aids.
Anyone else find it ironic that this post got modded -1, Redundant?
Besides, the "Redundant" part in RAID 0 comes from the repeated attempts to explain why it's not redundant at all. And, therefore, "bad."
Growth in food generation is linear - add another acre, get another x bushel.
Growth in human population is quadratic - 2 rabbits make 4 rabbits make 8 rabbits. Over 3 generations we have 8x the population, but adding acreage at the same rate yields only 3x the food (if we started with 2 humans tilling 1 acre.)
The solution is for everyone to eat their children. It simultaneously solves the food problem and the population growth problem. Or I think that's how it goes. Depending no your latrine design, it may be a carbon sink!
I work for tech support at the college I attend, and they hate bittorrent and most P2P stuff. Through some special "deal", they only have a 20Mb/s symmetrical line for the entire campus.
So, they have extensive bandwidth rationing and quotas. Every MAC address must be registered to its owner - unknown MAC addresses are assigned an IP in a special subnet, and get redirected to a registration form. Machines registered to students are capped at 113KB/s (they probably decided everyone would get an even 1000Kb/s.)
So, amongst other things, my college has banned P2P. They figure: A) 99% of the time it's copyright infringement, but more importantly B) it eats the bandwidth that's barely adequate for web surfing to begin with. Even with every student capped at comcastic speeds, a few of them running a torrent client (and using their cap) 24/7 means less bandwidth for lab machines (and faculty.)
If the IT people go over the bandwidth logs and find some bandwidth sink, and that bandwidth sink is making hundreds of simultaneous connections to random IPs on different ports, they're cut off. The student in question has to ask nicely and fill out an apology form to get their room's ethernet jack turned back on. I guess it makes sense, but it's a pain in the but from my point of view. (I want to watch cartoons!)
So, the relevant part of my post: At my college, bittorrent is deleted (or gets deleted by the guys staffing the help desk if the students who are too dumb to fill out a web form have us do it for them) as a preventive measure. They bought too little bandwidth, and the powers that be can't be moved to change it, so no file sharing regardless of content. It's not really an "education" thing at my campus, at least - although that couldn't hurt. (One chick couldn't fathom that A) downloading copyright music is, for better or for worse, illegal and B) that there were other ways to listen to music. Like CDs, or online stores, or internet radio, or something.)
I guess ignorance works both ways: "OMG I have to delete it 'cuz its illegal for anything!" versus "The powers that be gave you dial-up, so be thankful" versus "Huh? Nobody got paid for that terabyte of music I got from limewire?"
Now, a school my friends go to (a public university, even!) have wired all of the dorms and most of the buildings with gigabit ethernet. Their idea of bandwidth saving is "share all the files you want locally; just don't tell anyone." But, most of the buildings on my campus are lucky to even be cat5 - it's a pain to work in the buildings that still have cat3. Some are rumored to have (long-darkened) coax. But, for your computer, not for the TV. Some old guy mumbling about BNCs and whatnot...
I guess the point of my rambling is that where I attend school, there's the same stuff happening - no P2P, remove your clients! - but from a "scarce commodity" standpoint rather than a "legal ignorance" thing. (Although there's plenty of that, too.)
I found your post informative, and it seems that a lot of what I took for granted who knows how long ago is inaccurate. However, there's a bit more that I found.
User mode applications may only get 2 GB of physical memory by default, but driver resources are mapped from the upper 2 GB (or 1 GB) of kernel space. This is evidently why shrinking that space with the/3GB switch can cause problems if you have a 512MB video card.
Then again, if you have integrated graphics or other devices that leech off of mainboard memory, I don't think they would be stealing the same memory mappings as physical memory would. But then again, it doesn't matter - integrated chips are stealing the memory itself in that case.
The other thing I noticed is that the BIOS mapping memory is somewhat independent of addressable space - all the HP desktops at my college report 8 MB of RAM "missing" - 760MB instead of 768MB - because of how the motherboard wants to work.
Last I checked, doing calculations on 200 MB of memory as fast as possible takes time that doing it with 25 MB usage doesn't take.
Maybe. But blitting a 200MB bitmap to the screen will be faster and smoother than (re-)decompressing every JPEG every time the page is scrolled. IIRC, leaving uncompressed images around for performance reasons was supposedly a big part of the old Firefox back-button memory leak.
Memory versus speed is an old trade-off. It's entirely possible that wasting 175MB is just bloat, but if it draws the page faster, go for it. Memory is cheaper than ever, and most new computers seem to be coming with at least 2 GB.
I just downloaded and installed Chrome. Both it and IE7 are rendering the slashdot main page right now - chrome's processes are using about 32MB of memory, and Internet explorer 7 is using 86 MB. (And it does seem very fast.) Opening a bunch of tabs in both browsers brings their memory footprints back into line, though.
Now, I wonder why they didn't make Chrome multithreaded instead of multiprocess. Threads can share memory within a process, meaning there's far less overhead from both a scheduling standpoint and a memory standpoint. But, doing things properly on Windows would probably make it harder to port anywhere else (Linux still seems to have little love for threads, although my only tinkering with UNIX processes was on an old Solaris box.)
Slashdot Mirror
You're right - charging more than the marginal cost for the reproduction of a song is a deadweight loss. However, we haven't explained how that song got there to begin with - it wasn't instantaneously created when you turned on your broadband connection, and you didn't create the value inherent in that song by firing up your P2P client.
What to charge for a copy of a song is the uninteresting case with an uninteresting answer - nothing. How to accurately gauge the value of the original is more difficult - especially within the framework of the pure, unadultered market forces everyone loves to hate, except when it suits their purposes.
But when idiots use the words "intellectual property" they think it means they have the right to own intellects or something...
Well, this is another great example of where you can derive meaning from context. Since you know I'm not an idiot, you know which definition of IP I was using.
Right? ;-)
I worked myself to death on a double major in econ and cs for the betterment of whichever firm takes me. I guess they're all stealing from me since I don't have a job yet.
Semantics, but you worked for the betterment of yourself - you of all people should know what an investment in one's human capital is.
yes there is. TPB, kazaa, and many other p2p projects do well enough to sustain themselves AND have full time staff. If they can do it free, anyone can.
\
But they don't produce what they "sell", do they? Without the works of others (you know, the original creators of all those files being shared) the value of these services would be significantly less. If the creators and employees of Kazaa had to create everything being shared themselves, would they be giving it away for free?
And you cut off the rest of my point that people snorting Prozac are still druggies, even if Prozac is an antidepressant. ^.^
You wouldn't call it immoral to refuse to pay someone who stopped working after their first week, so why should a singer be any different. Subjecting "artists" to the same rules everyone else must obey is the definition of "moral".
A very good point - but it's not the "cost" of something that determines the purchase price, it's the "value" of something. The "cost" of producing a song or a burger (i.e., the labor involved) maybe be similar, but the value of the end results are far different.
When I was a fast food greasemonkey, I wouldn't expect to get paid after after I clocked out and quit working - what I've done has long since ceased to be of any value.
But, certainly that song that's been traded 300 million times on the internet has somewhat more value - why would so many be interested in it if it weren't? Royalties to dead grandchildren is simply a sick result of a broken method of trying to properly recognize the value that intellectual property does or does not have.
A "Linux journalist" talking to a "publicist" was told to read the press release?
I, too, without RTFA, would think most any company would be wary about talking about a recent server breach.
But, it doesn't matter - it's all open source, you can look at the lines of code and verify for yourself that they're safe, right? Not like what you can('t) do with Windows.
Well, I think its silly to be an "adherent" to either definition. The first link is pretty much a jargon dictionary for computer scientists - if you were to speak computer science-ese, that would be the "correct" definition and the intended meaning.
The second link is very eloquent ^.^
Not sure if I replied to this elsewhere, but "copyright" is the "ownership of the exclusive right to make copies." It's a subset of "Intellectual Property" which, as far as I know, means anything someone with an ax to grind wants it to mean.
One's livelihood is just as valuable, if not more so, than one's property, no? If you work for the benefit of others, it's fair to expect your day's wage.
We quite simply do not have a good, economically sound way to pay the "creative" and "knowledge workers." It's not a "slur" against the youth of the nation, it's a very cold and descriptive legal term: music is copyrighted, and the violation thereof is "infringement." The denotations are quite clear, whereas your n-word is all about connotations.
And, we do generally call people on anti-depressants "druggies" - do they have a prescription? are they snorting the tablets to get high? and why aren't they sharing? etc. But that's a different issue entirely...
Our generation is also, generally, the first generation which actually understands the technology in question, and how our society interacts with it.
Perhaps our generation is simply the first to use such technology. I work at a help desk at my college, and the vast majority of the student body won't be able to tell you how the bittorrent protocol works, why it's hard on our limited bandwidth, etc. Nor will some be able to tell you where music comes from ("Music is written by people, potato chips come from the ground, etc." It seems to be something that "grows" on the internet.) Others won't be able to tell you why copyright infringement is currently illegal, for good or for ill. A lot don't even know that it is illegal.
So, I'd be hard pressed to say that we, as a generation, actually share a collective understanding so superior to anyone else's that we can say, by authority of our technical genius, that file sharing is entirely moral. Others may vilify what they don't understand, but most of "we" don't understand it either - we simply use it, and music comes out.
Maybe the "lie" is that a system is immoral because it seems to be artificial in the cold gaze of econ-101-style supply and demand? Maybe the "lie" is that file sharing is moral? Maybe the lie is that you exist? Maybe we're all just brains in a jar.
But, you can understand how I'd be biased. Working at a help desk ("Help! My internets don't work!") doesn't give one the most cheerful or optimistic appraisal of the human race. ^.^
Very well said, and very related to the post I originally tried to reply to!
There are a number of reasons why it may be hard to explain why file sharing will get you sued - either legally or morally. Not all of them are malicious, propaganda-laced threats of oppression, or entirely born out of unconscionable ignorance.
But, some are ^.^ I work at the help desk of a college pressed for bandwidth. (Incompetents at main hall and a 20Mbit symmetrical line divided up amongst a small city.) My coworker had the misfortune of trying to explain to some girl why A) the campus didn't permit P2P sharing of music over the Internet, that B) it was illegal anyways (for better or for worse). This lead to C) explaining that there were legal ways of getting music, even over the internet. ("Then how am I supposed to listen to music?!")
I didn't know Mr. Raymond was so influential in the wide, wonderful world of hacker activism.
But, "hacker" is another word that will have different meanings depending on its context. If you you see a //HACK: blah blah blah comment next to an important function, or your classmates in a compsci course talk about how they hacked together a program in a few nights, you know they're referring to programming tricks or kludges. (Definitely not axes.)
Whereas, if you read about how the Pentagon was "hacked" in the local newspaper, you also know that the reporter wasn't talking about Dick Cheney's new perl script. (Or axes. Or incompetent, unlicensed professionals. Or other denotation.)
There's no need to "reclaim" a word like hacker - different circles use it to mean different things, and each circle knows exactly what that means. It's called "jargon," I believe.
Of course there should be. Do you differentiate between "murder" and "homicide" in everyday, informal conversation between friends? Context is everything.
For example, "diction" is word choice and enunciation, usually in reference to one's oratory skill. But, despite a difference in usage versus actual, denoted meaning, I still managed to understand your point ^.^
It's one thing to call file sharing "theft" because "copyright infringement" is too many syllables and the minutiae aren't relevant in whatever casual conversation you were having; it's another thing to be truly ignorant of the differences and simply not know they exist. Vulgar speech isn't going to lead to a police state anytime soon.
I understand that a society's understanding of morality is, of course, built upon the social norms and mores of that society.
But, our generation is still a rather small part of society - it's kinda arrogant to say it's moral "because we say so," isn't it?
Also, the fact that what's "moral" is just a definition for "what the majority of people are doing" is kind of scary. But, that's off the beaten path from my original post of "Well, I can see where you would have a hard time explaining the difference between 'copyright infringement' and 'theft.'" ^.^
You're right about "to most people"... However, that just means that those most people need to be educated...
I agree entirely. However, there also needs to be "wiggle room" for the common vernacular to be (at least!) mildly different from legal jargon. See "hacker v. cracker" - another misappropriation of words that are "pretty close," but where anyone with enough brain cells and ego to care would be able to tell the intended meaning from the context.
dirty air thieves (people who live), dastardly noise thieves (people with ears), horrific light thieves (photographers) if you don't pay for it it's a sin, viva extremist capitalism!
Except in this case, the dirty air thieves are at one of those hippy-dippy-trippy oxygen bar places, those dastardly noise thieves snuck into a concert, and those horrific light thieves were photographing your intellectual property in the nude.
Wow, I sure opened myself up to be flamed. You're right, information does want to be free - nobody can "own" it, it's just one of nature's creatures, for us all to enjoy. And speaking of logical fallacies, this is also entirely true because "299 out of every 300 people" say it is.
use of paper as "necrophilia" because paper is composed of the corpses of trees
You got it.
I never said they were the same. In fact, the line you quote shows me explaining how they're "drastically different." ^^
To most people, theft is taking what you didn't pay for. That's exactly what file sharing someone else's IP is - you have something you didn't pay for, even if nobody else "lost" it as a consequence. That's how they're "pretty close", even though the presence of intangible, non-rival goods is significant.
To break your metaphor, it's more like the difference between "violently stealing the trophy from the clutches of the first place contestant" and "taking it from the display case ahead of time."
but less bloated then opening up a new process (or more than one!) for every single web page loaded
Well, as others have said, that's a feature of Chrome, not Webkit.
But, multiple processes makes things less bloated, not more so. The obvious case is on multicore processors - each core can render a tab, and multiple tabs can be rendered simultaneously. It's faster, and makes better use of your CPU.
Less obvious is how multiple processes fare better even on a single core. Depending on how the browser is written, a bloated^W "Web 2.0" page laden with graphics and animation can be death to a slow processor. But, if the lagging tab is in its own process, it doesn't affect the rendering of your other tabs. By taking advantage of how your operating system schedules processes, you've kept your browser responsive and made better use of your single core.
Now, it's not like there aren't other ways to do this - multiple processes is just a very elegant way. (It would have been better if Google did multiple threads, but that probably would've made it harder to port to operating systems that don't support them. *Squinty eyes*).
It's also not like multiple processes don't have overhead - context switching is expensive in a multitasking operating system, and multiple processes (but not so much multiple threads) will eat memory quicker.
But, I doubt they're trying to put Google Chrome on embedded devices anyways. And, it's not like the memory difference is that astronomical - I've had 3 tabs open, and 3 chrome.exe processes. They totaled 68MB of memory used, but one process released most of it's memory as I was writing this rant (!) and those same 3 tabs now only occupy 50 MB of memory. The same three tabs in Internet Explorer are using 57MB, and those tabs in Firefox are using 55MB. Not that that's a scientific measurement, and it's not like the memory used isn't fluctuating by several megabytes even as the other browsers sit, but the "bloat" just isn't there.
It's a better programming method, it has negligible memory overhead when done right, and it's much, much faster. I was happily using a combination of Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 (and recently IE8 beta 2), but Chrome was just so much faster than even Firefox that it made me switch.
Join the dark side?!
You may have had a hard time explaining why file-sharing isn't theft because the two are pretty close.
It's true that file-sharing involves intangible goods with no loss to the other party. However, in both cases you get something you didn't pay for that belonged (or still belongs!) to someone else. The results for the "thief" are the same even if the means (and their side effects) are drastically different.
But, you know that. And, evidently, most people don't. But, I wouldn't trust those same people to teach others how to think critically.
RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There is no Redundant part in aid 0. You can ofcourse have multiple aid 0s in mirrored configuration so you have raid instead of aids.
Anyone else find it ironic that this post got modded -1, Redundant?
Besides, the "Redundant" part in RAID 0 comes from the repeated attempts to explain why it's not redundant at all. And, therefore, "bad."
I have a "Modest Proposal."
Growth in food generation is linear - add another acre, get another x bushel.
Growth in human population is quadratic - 2 rabbits make 4 rabbits make 8 rabbits. Over 3 generations we have 8x the population, but adding acreage at the same rate yields only 3x the food (if we started with 2 humans tilling 1 acre.)
The solution is for everyone to eat their children. It simultaneously solves the food problem and the population growth problem. Or I think that's how it goes. Depending no your latrine design, it may be a carbon sink!
wow, you didn't educate them?
I work for tech support at the college I attend, and they hate bittorrent and most P2P stuff. Through some special "deal", they only have a 20Mb/s symmetrical line for the entire campus.
So, they have extensive bandwidth rationing and quotas. Every MAC address must be registered to its owner - unknown MAC addresses are assigned an IP in a special subnet, and get redirected to a registration form. Machines registered to students are capped at 113KB/s (they probably decided everyone would get an even 1000Kb/s.)
So, amongst other things, my college has banned P2P. They figure: A) 99% of the time it's copyright infringement, but more importantly B) it eats the bandwidth that's barely adequate for web surfing to begin with. Even with every student capped at comcastic speeds, a few of them running a torrent client (and using their cap) 24/7 means less bandwidth for lab machines (and faculty.)
If the IT people go over the bandwidth logs and find some bandwidth sink, and that bandwidth sink is making hundreds of simultaneous connections to random IPs on different ports, they're cut off. The student in question has to ask nicely and fill out an apology form to get their room's ethernet jack turned back on. I guess it makes sense, but it's a pain in the but from my point of view. (I want to watch cartoons!)
So, the relevant part of my post: At my college, bittorrent is deleted (or gets deleted by the guys staffing the help desk if the students who are too dumb to fill out a web form have us do it for them) as a preventive measure. They bought too little bandwidth, and the powers that be can't be moved to change it, so no file sharing regardless of content. It's not really an "education" thing at my campus, at least - although that couldn't hurt. (One chick couldn't fathom that A) downloading copyright music is, for better or for worse, illegal and B) that there were other ways to listen to music. Like CDs, or online stores, or internet radio, or something.)
I guess ignorance works both ways: "OMG I have to delete it 'cuz its illegal for anything!" versus "The powers that be gave you dial-up, so be thankful" versus "Huh? Nobody got paid for that terabyte of music I got from limewire?"
Now, a school my friends go to (a public university, even!) have wired all of the dorms and most of the buildings with gigabit ethernet. Their idea of bandwidth saving is "share all the files you want locally; just don't tell anyone." But, most of the buildings on my campus are lucky to even be cat5 - it's a pain to work in the buildings that still have cat3. Some are rumored to have (long-darkened) coax. But, for your computer, not for the TV. Some old guy mumbling about BNCs and whatnot...
I guess the point of my rambling is that where I attend school, there's the same stuff happening - no P2P, remove your clients! - but from a "scarce commodity" standpoint rather than a "legal ignorance" thing. (Although there's plenty of that, too.)
Wish us luck!
bad publicity can often still make profit-driven corporations do the 'right thing'.
Because the "right thing" never happens on its own because someone is "profit driven."
I know that I, being profit-driven and therefore working a full-time job, ran over 3 orphans on my commute this morning.
I found your post informative, and it seems that a lot of what I took for granted who knows how long ago is inaccurate. However, there's a bit more that I found.
User mode applications may only get 2 GB of physical memory by default, but driver resources are mapped from the upper 2 GB (or 1 GB) of kernel space. This is evidently why shrinking that space with the /3GB switch can cause problems if you have a 512MB video card.
Then again, if you have integrated graphics or other devices that leech off of mainboard memory, I don't think they would be stealing the same memory mappings as physical memory would. But then again, it doesn't matter - integrated chips are stealing the memory itself in that case.
The other thing I noticed is that the BIOS mapping memory is somewhat independent of addressable space - all the HP desktops at my college report 8 MB of RAM "missing" - 760MB instead of 768MB - because of how the motherboard wants to work.
Thanks for the corrections
Last I checked, doing calculations on 200 MB of memory as fast as possible takes time that doing it with 25 MB usage doesn't take.
Maybe. But blitting a 200MB bitmap to the screen will be faster and smoother than (re-)decompressing every JPEG every time the page is scrolled. IIRC, leaving uncompressed images around for performance reasons was supposedly a big part of the old Firefox back-button memory leak.
Memory versus speed is an old trade-off. It's entirely possible that wasting 175MB is just bloat, but if it draws the page faster, go for it. Memory is cheaper than ever, and most new computers seem to be coming with at least 2 GB.
I just downloaded and installed Chrome. Both it and IE7 are rendering the slashdot main page right now - chrome's processes are using about 32MB of memory, and Internet explorer 7 is using 86 MB. (And it does seem very fast.) Opening a bunch of tabs in both browsers brings their memory footprints back into line, though.
Now, I wonder why they didn't make Chrome multithreaded instead of multiprocess. Threads can share memory within a process, meaning there's far less overhead from both a scheduling standpoint and a memory standpoint. But, doing things properly on Windows would probably make it harder to port anywhere else (Linux still seems to have little love for threads, although my only tinkering with UNIX processes was on an old Solaris box.)