I mentioned this because at the time it was not the norm. I regularly was in roaming, and would switch back easily (or at least quickly) when the home network was in range.
Now, along Route 1 on the coast, there was a stretch from about Bath to Rockland where I could NOT get service. After a particularly long session with AT&T (My T637 at the time), we found that my phone was indeed properly configured but no answer as to why I couldn't get service they said was available from 3 different roaming partners. After a few weeks, magic, it worked! I called back to the tech I was working with, and after a half-hour of finding who did it, turns out they had never properly configured the roaming arrangements, and had been paying for access and never using any minutes - no one could connect due to the software errors.
Amazing.
Now, the August carrier was a different breed of cat. When I called their customer service number and asked if they couldn't work out some roaming arrangement with AT&T, the first rep immediately became hostile. His response was that 'they don't want to work anything out. Call AT&T and tell them to get their head out of their ^&*". I called AT&T. A much more gracious supervisor reported that they had been 'unable' to work out an agreement. After 3 years of this B.S. I met a former network technician for the Augusta carrier. he told me, in confidence at the time, that his boss wanted an outrageous roaming plan, close to a dollar a minute, and no reciprocity. I thought this was pretty much baloney, but it turns out:
1. When AT&T first approached them, there was no service nearby, just this carrier. They had AT&T over a barrel, and asked for too much. No deal.
2. A year later, AT&T got permission to build in the area, but not in the neighborhood, go figure. The local carrier tried everything to stop them, and it was scorched earth after that.
3. The local carrier's policy was to blam AT&T. They may have been right, but no one I knew who had worked for them considered it a positive experience.
4. I heard from a buddy that the roaming thing is fixed in the phone configs now, and this carrier is limped along until TDMA died. I think they sold out to Verizon, since their towers would be the only asset worth a buck. And good riddance.
Cell service out in the hinterlands is an interesting experience. I once ran up a $1200 roaming bill in a month. About 450 minutes, IIRC,back in the old NAMPS days. I was the second-highest bill in the entire state of Maine that month. Woot!
It wasn't that long ago that in the Augusta, Maine area an AT&T or T-Mobile customer was confronted with a carrier that did not negotiate a roaming agreement. They just refused to. So if youmade a call, you got the recording telling you how to give your credit card number and the charges that would apply.
I suspect it had something to do with Augusta being the state capital, and legislators from all over coming into town for the current session. Bringing their phones from Fort Kent, Portland, Boothbay, Farmington, etc., and all the AT&T/TMob subscribers just thinking it would work.
Later on, AT&T and/or TMob got service in the area. This carrier, if it latched onto your phone, would not let it go, especially if you came into town from the North or West. You had to get downtown and power cycle your phone usually, and maybe do that three times.
This humored me when I had a Siemens S46, the dual-mode-phone-from-hell. This carrier kept me on TDMA at all costs, even when I could have gone to GSM and gotten T-Mobile.
But that's another story. Sometimes, roaming isn't so nice. It ought to be different, but then again so many things ought to be different.
Actually, information is something that does turn posession and ownership on its head. I don't have to deprive you of your information to 'take' it from you, or at least a completely functional copy.
Of course, when your money is really expressed as information somewhere and translated into actual cash on demand, I can take your information, turn it into cash, and I have indeed deprived you of something. You still have information, but of course, it no longer conveys value in dollars, but rather value in knowing you no longer can have those dollars...
Putting coffee grounds into Internet plumbing may result in clogged
plumbing, which would entail the services of an Internet Plumber
[PLUMB], who would, in turn, require an Internet Plumber's Helper."
I KNEW it! The Internet Is a bunch of tubes! He was right!
"The problem is thinking of software as a physical good rather than as information"
Interesting. I think of my e-mails as not just information but as property. They have value to me, they do actually exist as represented by the data bits on some media somewhere (I know of the precise location of only 2 or 3 copies of my readily accessible emails, my archives are on 2 CDs or DVDs, and my phone may or may not have a copy at any given time), and are indeed property in that were I to give the disk to someone, they would physically possess the data.
I think the problem is thinking that information cannot be a physical good. Perhaps you should use the term 'idea(s)' instead of 'information'.
Then you've come to the crux of FOSS. The idea is given away, as software. It need not be a new idea, but the expression of it may be something new and different from other expressions. And while you can pay for some of those expressions, you can get some for 'free', that is for no cost other than making it physically available to your use - downloading onto a disk, for instance, or even using it remotely via a web site...
We do have to think of how property and ideas are different. And how many people can keep an idea secret. And the futility of a secret idea.
I've been complaining about 'the softare' (in general) for 17 years. probably more. And i probable used Webcrawler at dirst to search for answers. in the beginning? I had to use the landline telephone
I have an old-fashioned reason for using POP - Easy to set up my home client to download/leave on server, and this gives me a reliable backup of my mail. I'm so trusting that I also use Yahoo! and Gmail the same way. If I were to delete a message on Yahoo! via IMAP, it would likely be gone from the original server too...
And I don't have much trouble with WiFi. It stays connected, reconnects cleanly, and other than the POP setup bug is fine. Even at a TMOB HotSpot. Maybe you should send back the rig?
K9 just needs to can the entire mailbox code, Which is nontrivial.
ps - K9 won't download from my IMAP server. I don't think it's the server, as it passes account setup, and squirrelmail on the server works fine which is IMAP also. I dunno. Maybe it's my month...
Just so's we're clear here, I ticked off the top 3 problems with the email client, known to the community as software bugs.
Your responses were to question my server and my connection.
I get impatient after 17 years of explaining why the software is buggy, when the software is KNOWN to be buggy, and a 15 second Google search would reveal it to an interested individual.
Android is just the lastest bit of software that I thought was buggy, found out I was not alone in thinking that, found also that it was acknowledged by the provider to be buggy, and then when I mention it in passing I reach someone who questioned the bugginess.
I'm sure you're a decent person, or you wouldn't have stumbled over the plainly marked tripwire.
Wait. I'm apologizing for what?
That can be a genuine question, btw. I would entertain a genuine answer and consider it before I get irritated again.
I use the IMAP server that also hosts my POP. It answers both protocols. T-Mobile BB, GMail, Yahoo!, and my Outlook clients all work fine. Android E-Mail is not so happy.
That's why I blame the client. All others are fine. It isn't the herd that's wrong in this case.
I don't choose between G3 and Edge, since I set the phone to use G3 and it does if it can. I spend a lot of time in marginal G3 areas (home and work, go figure), but even with a solid G3 signal I have these issues.
WiFi is more problematic. I could not set up an account over WiFi. Had to go to the TM network to do it successfully.
I am not mentioning anything unheard of in the community. The issues of failed accoutn setup over WiFi (SMTP bombs), Inbox not keeping recently downloaded emails (both POP & IMAP), limit on retrieving 25 msgs at a time (have to keep loading more messages), and connection errors (POP for sure, IMAP I haven't really tracked) are well known throughout the active user community. Not hard to look up.
I'm whinin' about the email thing, and K9 isn't a total solution. Read up, K9 is a 'fork', but retains most of the Android code. Like the Inbox thing.
And I moved from an old BB 7105. So this is very cool, though of course easy cut & paste, email that just works, etc are a disappointment. But it will get better.
I've already drunk the kool-aid. Write me when you find a cool email client, k?
Had you read my comment, you would have seen my reference to K9, and what i thought about it. you also would have seen that I had issues with IMAP as well.
"I've already bought a G1, and the software from Google rocks"
Uhuh.
The POP email client is dysfunctional; not retaining downloaded mail in the Inbox but making me reload it every time I launch the app. It does keep the 11 or so OLDEST messages, and will not delete them. Yahoo! Mail works great, and GMail of course also. So why not POP? Also, the POP client regularly shows a connection error despite my mail server being readily available to the rest of the Internet. K9 doesn't show connection errors, but handles the Inbox the same way. Even in IMAP.
Cut & paste is beyond difficult to use. Just ain't ready for primetime.
Browser has a wierd habit of not honoring a touch on some web page links, but requiring you to click the trackball instead. Go figure.
There are other rough edges. Lack of A2DP is probably temporary, but if it ends up being a failure, that might get me to send this back. We'll see if I can.
If the G1 RC30 software 'rocks' for you, God bless you. It ain't rockin' my world.
And yet, I'm strangely attached to this device. My life as a happy BlackBerry user has evolved into a Linux phone struggle. Not-quite-right software, waiting for the next release, and of course the ever-helpful advice from the community.
If you make an all-Flash site, it won't show up on my G1. Mighty frustrating if you do this for a sports bar site I only look for when I'm scouting a place to see the game that has WiFi.
They didn't get my business today. Too bad for them.
Flash is the Web's PowerPoint, Which is the new Solitaire. Avoid for real work. Use sparingly, and where appropriate. Like cartoons, or intros intended to annoy people looking for information, not entertainment.
Except that movie theaters don't oversell their shows by a factor of 5. If they did, holders of tickets 251-1000 for a showing in a 250-seat room would be filling the lobby and thrashing the manager.
Do you suppose the studios would let the theaters keep the money from tickets sold beyond the room's capacity? Doubt it...
The reasons that ISPs don't get sued for oversubscribing is it is hard to prove both oversubscribing and the negative impact. But as BT, YouTube, etc get more and more users, eventually someone will either make a case that gets some traction, or the ISPs will make their contracts even less readable.
Either way, we just need choices. Two ISPs in a market is a functional monopoly. Maybe WiMax will do it, cause the only significant barrier to market entry metro areas is access to infrastructure, and in rural areas it is distance or density.
"particularly in a fleet of inhomogeneous platforms..."
You probably meant 'heterogenous', but being as this is the Intetrnet, ya gotta be careful with yer language...
"The nice thing about Linux however is that a very skillful and thoughtful person can plan out a very robust network and can mange the patches. But it takes effort, dicsipline and an above avegage IT guy. And if you lose that person, you are screwed. Even a new equally skilled guy probably can't get all the scripts and stuff the last guy used to manage to work."
My experience is that this is true of most every OS.
"With windows, you can take a balow average imbecile, get them through a certification course, and they become almost interchangable monkeys. you need a lot of them since you will constantly be fighting fires or hunting down the right driver for the given brand of computer, but they can do it and it will work."
Ya sure. The monkeys will do fine until something difficult comes up, and then they will cause the trouble you don't want. As for hunting down drivers, you haven't been around Linux for long, have you? fortunately, Apple doesn't inflict you with this. They just deny you much choice in hardware...
"Moreover, and this is the critical part, a manager who is not an expert can tell if his monkies are keeping up with patches. MS tells him what he need to do. With Linux you can't really tell if the IT guy is doing it all, or if your pants are around your ankles."
Ha. Almost funny. Again, really true of most any OS.
One thing you can be sure of. If you throw a loaded gun in monkey cage, something bad is going to happen.
This question evolved from what I thought was a pretty straightfoward one ("why use a paging file") to a convoluted discussion of virtual memory, addressing schemes, coding, blahblahblah.
Wasn't the OP asking why modern Windows PCs, with gobs of RAM, even need a page file anymore except in exceptional circumstances?
And that's a good question.
I had an NT server back when with a whopping at the time 512MB RAM. I turned off the paging file since it was strictly a file/print server. Norton Corporate Edition refused to load. I had to set a paging file, and I did - 10MB worth, IFIRC. Happy now, Norton loaded and the server was happy. I've run some XP machines without paging when I had time to fool with them.
I remember when NetWare started supporting paging files. The engineers I knew essentially told me that it was a holy war within Novell, with the paging gang winning for no technical reason. Sort of the holy war over the licensing model that got a lot of people riled up and changed nothing. Paging in NetWare, back in v5 days, changed nothing. Now NetWare on Linux, paging seems to be crucial, even when you have 8GB machines.
But back to my question, I don't see the answer yet. I couldn't bear to read through the minutiae of virtual/physical one more time.
Someone out there, right now, is thinking how they can explain that this won't affect DNS. After all, UDP is a 'best-effort' protocol, intended to survive packet loss, delays, etc. by trying again and again.
I'm much more interested in how many ISPs will use UDP manipulation to both hammer BT and possibly selectively deny or frustrate DNS to various services or hosts they find 'harmful'.
We are well on our way to a seriously degraded Internet, if U.S. ISPs continue to modify traffic for *whatever* reason.
This is getting to the crux of Internet service as a utility. Imagine some power generators, say the TVA or similar, denying other providers from using their grids to deliver power from one region to another. Not helpful to the overall grid, and could end up in a retaliatory environment with bad consequences.
Then again, the Internet based on NAPs and peering in the U.S. is a mess already and we sort of don't know it. See the Sprint/Cogent tiff for an example of how fun it can be.
Whne the ISPs start BGP poisoning, then we will have to sanction them somehow.
There's no way out of this without pain. Either the ISPs fix their interconnects so they can actually provide the bandwidth they claim to sell, or be honest and tell you that you will be throttled to a fraction of that when you saturate your link, or perhaps they fix the problem and make some form of hi-speed file transfer work. Since, after all, much of what we call 'Broadband' is intended to be, you know, 'high-speed'.
Be aware that most if not all ISPs are trying to monetize their business by selling us lots of data, such as video. They see other large data providers suchg as BT as competitors. YouTube, if it nails HDTV, will also be a competitor, and Apple of course if iTunes does video right will also be their 'enemy'.
Then we will be ready for an agnostic ISP. And none are on the horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
People say this stuff, but the truth is that Novell doesn't love Microsoft, they just see a business opportunity and a legal wrangle.
If Microsoft wanted to take on Novell again, they'd need a chair. AND a gun. AND a dog.
If I wanted to use SUSE, I would without fear. It's not Microsoft that I'm afraid of. It's Google. M$ is in decline. Google is not.
There you go, breaking everything. I suppose property is a real thing, but ownership of property is an idea? Hmm... Down the path we go.
I mentioned this because at the time it was not the norm. I regularly was in roaming, and would switch back easily (or at least quickly) when the home network was in range.
Now, along Route 1 on the coast, there was a stretch from about Bath to Rockland where I could NOT get service. After a particularly long session with AT&T (My T637 at the time), we found that my phone was indeed properly configured but no answer as to why I couldn't get service they said was available from 3 different roaming partners. After a few weeks, magic, it worked! I called back to the tech I was working with, and after a half-hour of finding who did it, turns out they had never properly configured the roaming arrangements, and had been paying for access and never using any minutes - no one could connect due to the software errors.
Amazing.
Now, the August carrier was a different breed of cat. When I called their customer service number and asked if they couldn't work out some roaming arrangement with AT&T, the first rep immediately became hostile. His response was that 'they don't want to work anything out. Call AT&T and tell them to get their head out of their ^&*". I called AT&T. A much more gracious supervisor reported that they had been 'unable' to work out an agreement. After 3 years of this B.S. I met a former network technician for the Augusta carrier. he told me, in confidence at the time, that his boss wanted an outrageous roaming plan, close to a dollar a minute, and no reciprocity. I thought this was pretty much baloney, but it turns out:
1. When AT&T first approached them, there was no service nearby, just this carrier. They had AT&T over a barrel, and asked for too much. No deal.
2. A year later, AT&T got permission to build in the area, but not in the neighborhood, go figure. The local carrier tried everything to stop them, and it was scorched earth after that.
3. The local carrier's policy was to blam AT&T. They may have been right, but no one I knew who had worked for them considered it a positive experience.
4. I heard from a buddy that the roaming thing is fixed in the phone configs now, and this carrier is limped along until TDMA died. I think they sold out to Verizon, since their towers would be the only asset worth a buck. And good riddance.
Cell service out in the hinterlands is an interesting experience. I once ran up a $1200 roaming bill in a month. About 450 minutes, IIRC,back in the old NAMPS days. I was the second-highest bill in the entire state of Maine that month. Woot!
It wasn't that long ago that in the Augusta, Maine area an AT&T or T-Mobile customer was confronted with a carrier that did not negotiate a roaming agreement. They just refused to. So if youmade a call, you got the recording telling you how to give your credit card number and the charges that would apply.
I suspect it had something to do with Augusta being the state capital, and legislators from all over coming into town for the current session. Bringing their phones from Fort Kent, Portland, Boothbay, Farmington, etc., and all the AT&T/TMob subscribers just thinking it would work.
Later on, AT&T and/or TMob got service in the area. This carrier, if it latched onto your phone, would not let it go, especially if you came into town from the North or West. You had to get downtown and power cycle your phone usually, and maybe do that three times.
This humored me when I had a Siemens S46, the dual-mode-phone-from-hell. This carrier kept me on TDMA at all costs, even when I could have gone to GSM and gotten T-Mobile.
But that's another story. Sometimes, roaming isn't so nice. It ought to be different, but then again so many things ought to be different.
Actually, information is something that does turn posession and ownership on its head. I don't have to deprive you of your information to 'take' it from you, or at least a completely functional copy.
Of course, when your money is really expressed as information somewhere and translated into actual cash on demand, I can take your information, turn it into cash, and I have indeed deprived you of something. You still have information, but of course, it no longer conveys value in dollars, but rather value in knowing you no longer can have those dollars...
"RFC 2324 HTCPCP/1.0 1 April 1998
Putting coffee grounds into Internet plumbing may result in clogged
plumbing, which would entail the services of an Internet Plumber
[PLUMB], who would, in turn, require an Internet Plumber's Helper."
I KNEW it! The Internet Is a bunch of tubes! He was right!
OMG! WFT! The bastards!
i'm thinking of an example of nonphysical information that could be taken by force.
a phone conversation? not a taking maybe, but tap the line.
email? sniff the packets.
my deposits in a bank? steal my password , transfer the funds.
i know l'm proposing a different way of looking at this. i may be wrong. but for what reason?
THEY got their LHC running just fine, thank you. CERN can't get it done, or we'd have our own galaxy by now and phooey on the Milky Way thing.
I tell ya, if ya want something done right...
"The problem is thinking of software as a physical good rather than as information"
Interesting. I think of my e-mails as not just information but as property. They have value to me, they do actually exist as represented by the data bits on some media somewhere (I know of the precise location of only 2 or 3 copies of my readily accessible emails, my archives are on 2 CDs or DVDs, and my phone may or may not have a copy at any given time), and are indeed property in that were I to give the disk to someone, they would physically possess the data.
I think the problem is thinking that information cannot be a physical good. Perhaps you should use the term 'idea(s)' instead of 'information'.
Then you've come to the crux of FOSS. The idea is given away, as software. It need not be a new idea, but the expression of it may be something new and different from other expressions. And while you can pay for some of those expressions, you can get some for 'free', that is for no cost other than making it physically available to your use - downloading onto a disk, for instance, or even using it remotely via a web site...
We do have to think of how property and ideas are different. And how many people can keep an idea secret. And the futility of a secret idea.
Considering that they alls tarted life with no more than ONE ball, losing that one was always a threat, and of course having only one to start with...
No wonder they got jumpy...
I've been complaining about 'the softare' (in general) for 17 years. probably more. And i probable used Webcrawler at dirst to search for answers. in the beginning? I had to use the landline telephone
Gaa! Not the phone!
nice try tho
I have an old-fashioned reason for using POP - Easy to set up my home client to download/leave on server, and this gives me a reliable backup of my mail. I'm so trusting that I also use Yahoo! and Gmail the same way. If I were to delete a message on Yahoo! via IMAP, it would likely be gone from the original server too...
And I don't have much trouble with WiFi. It stays connected, reconnects cleanly, and other than the POP setup bug is fine. Even at a TMOB HotSpot. Maybe you should send back the rig?
K9 just needs to can the entire mailbox code, Which is nontrivial.
ps - K9 won't download from my IMAP server. I don't think it's the server, as it passes account setup, and squirrelmail on the server works fine which is IMAP also. I dunno. Maybe it's my month...
Just so's we're clear here, I ticked off the top 3 problems with the email client, known to the community as software bugs.
Your responses were to question my server and my connection.
I get impatient after 17 years of explaining why the software is buggy, when the software is KNOWN to be buggy, and a 15 second Google search would reveal it to an interested individual.
Android is just the lastest bit of software that I thought was buggy, found out I was not alone in thinking that, found also that it was acknowledged by the provider to be buggy, and then when I mention it in passing I reach someone who questioned the bugginess.
I'm sure you're a decent person, or you wouldn't have stumbled over the plainly marked tripwire.
Wait. I'm apologizing for what?
That can be a genuine question, btw. I would entertain a genuine answer and consider it before I get irritated again.
and?
Now this is just funny.
I use the IMAP server that also hosts my POP. It answers both protocols. T-Mobile BB, GMail, Yahoo!, and my Outlook clients all work fine. Android E-Mail is not so happy.
That's why I blame the client. All others are fine. It isn't the herd that's wrong in this case.
I don't choose between G3 and Edge, since I set the phone to use G3 and it does if it can. I spend a lot of time in marginal G3 areas (home and work, go figure), but even with a solid G3 signal I have these issues.
WiFi is more problematic. I could not set up an account over WiFi. Had to go to the TM network to do it successfully.
I am not mentioning anything unheard of in the community. The issues of failed accoutn setup over WiFi (SMTP bombs), Inbox not keeping recently downloaded emails (both POP & IMAP), limit on retrieving 25 msgs at a time (have to keep loading more messages), and connection errors (POP for sure, IMAP I haven't really tracked) are well known throughout the active user community. Not hard to look up.
It's really not me. Do I look that stupid to you?
Ok, OK. I get it.
I'm whinin' about the email thing, and K9 isn't a total solution. Read up, K9 is a 'fork', but retains most of the Android code. Like the Inbox thing.
And I moved from an old BB 7105. So this is very cool, though of course easy cut & paste, email that just works, etc are a disappointment. But it will get better.
I've already drunk the kool-aid. Write me when you find a cool email client, k?
Had you read my comment, you would have seen my reference to K9, and what i thought about it. you also would have seen that I had issues with IMAP as well.
Any more helpful advice?
"I've already bought a G1, and the software from Google rocks"
Uhuh.
The POP email client is dysfunctional; not retaining downloaded mail in the Inbox but making me reload it every time I launch the app. It does keep the 11 or so OLDEST messages, and will not delete them. Yahoo! Mail works great, and GMail of course also. So why not POP? Also, the POP client regularly shows a connection error despite my mail server being readily available to the rest of the Internet. K9 doesn't show connection errors, but handles the Inbox the same way. Even in IMAP.
Cut & paste is beyond difficult to use. Just ain't ready for primetime.
Browser has a wierd habit of not honoring a touch on some web page links, but requiring you to click the trackball instead. Go figure.
There are other rough edges. Lack of A2DP is probably temporary, but if it ends up being a failure, that might get me to send this back. We'll see if I can.
If the G1 RC30 software 'rocks' for you, God bless you. It ain't rockin' my world.
And yet, I'm strangely attached to this device. My life as a happy BlackBerry user has evolved into a Linux phone struggle. Not-quite-right software, waiting for the next release, and of course the ever-helpful advice from the community.
It's my fault. I admit it. Step One.
If you make an all-Flash site, it won't show up on my G1. Mighty frustrating if you do this for a sports bar site I only look for when I'm scouting a place to see the game that has WiFi.
They didn't get my business today. Too bad for them.
Flash is the Web's PowerPoint, Which is the new Solitaire. Avoid for real work. Use sparingly, and where appropriate. Like cartoons, or intros intended to annoy people looking for information, not entertainment.
Except that movie theaters don't oversell their shows by a factor of 5. If they did, holders of tickets 251-1000 for a showing in a 250-seat room would be filling the lobby and thrashing the manager.
Do you suppose the studios would let the theaters keep the money from tickets sold beyond the room's capacity? Doubt it...
The reasons that ISPs don't get sued for oversubscribing is it is hard to prove both oversubscribing and the negative impact. But as BT, YouTube, etc get more and more users, eventually someone will either make a case that gets some traction, or the ISPs will make their contracts even less readable.
Either way, we just need choices. Two ISPs in a market is a functional monopoly. Maybe WiMax will do it, cause the only significant barrier to market entry metro areas is access to infrastructure, and in rural areas it is distance or density.
We'll see.
"particularly in a fleet of inhomogeneous platforms..."
You probably meant 'heterogenous', but being as this is the Intetrnet, ya gotta be careful with yer language...
"The nice thing about Linux however is that a very skillful and thoughtful person can plan out a very robust network and can mange the patches. But it takes effort, dicsipline and an above avegage IT guy. And if you lose that person, you are screwed. Even a new equally skilled guy probably can't get all the scripts and stuff the last guy used to manage to work."
My experience is that this is true of most every OS.
"With windows, you can take a balow average imbecile, get them through a certification course, and they become almost interchangable monkeys. you need a lot of them since you will constantly be fighting fires or hunting down the right driver for the given brand of computer, but they can do it and it will work."
Ya sure. The monkeys will do fine until something difficult comes up, and then they will cause the trouble you don't want. As for hunting down drivers, you haven't been around Linux for long, have you? fortunately, Apple doesn't inflict you with this. They just deny you much choice in hardware...
"Moreover, and this is the critical part, a manager who is not an expert can tell if his monkies are keeping up with patches. MS tells him what he need to do. With Linux you can't really tell if the IT guy is doing it all, or if your pants are around your ankles."
Ha. Almost funny. Again, really true of most any OS.
One thing you can be sure of. If you throw a loaded gun in monkey cage, something bad is going to happen.
...cause I sure would like one.
This question evolved from what I thought was a pretty straightfoward one ("why use a paging file") to a convoluted discussion of virtual memory, addressing schemes, coding, blahblahblah.
Wasn't the OP asking why modern Windows PCs, with gobs of RAM, even need a page file anymore except in exceptional circumstances?
And that's a good question.
I had an NT server back when with a whopping at the time 512MB RAM. I turned off the paging file since it was strictly a file/print server. Norton Corporate Edition refused to load. I had to set a paging file, and I did - 10MB worth, IFIRC. Happy now, Norton loaded and the server was happy. I've run some XP machines without paging when I had time to fool with them.
I remember when NetWare started supporting paging files. The engineers I knew essentially told me that it was a holy war within Novell, with the paging gang winning for no technical reason. Sort of the holy war over the licensing model that got a lot of people riled up and changed nothing. Paging in NetWare, back in v5 days, changed nothing. Now NetWare on Linux, paging seems to be crucial, even when you have 8GB machines.
But back to my question, I don't see the answer yet. I couldn't bear to read through the minutiae of virtual/physical one more time.
Reminds me of LIM/EMS memory. Ack! It hurts!
Someone out there, right now, is thinking how they can explain that this won't affect DNS. After all, UDP is a 'best-effort' protocol, intended to survive packet loss, delays, etc. by trying again and again.
I'm much more interested in how many ISPs will use UDP manipulation to both hammer BT and possibly selectively deny or frustrate DNS to various services or hosts they find 'harmful'.
We are well on our way to a seriously degraded Internet, if U.S. ISPs continue to modify traffic for *whatever* reason.
This is getting to the crux of Internet service as a utility. Imagine some power generators, say the TVA or similar, denying other providers from using their grids to deliver power from one region to another. Not helpful to the overall grid, and could end up in a retaliatory environment with bad consequences.
Then again, the Internet based on NAPs and peering in the U.S. is a mess already and we sort of don't know it. See the Sprint/Cogent tiff for an example of how fun it can be.
Whne the ISPs start BGP poisoning, then we will have to sanction them somehow.
Yeah, right.
How would this 'deprioritizing UDP' affect DNS?
There's no way out of this without pain. Either the ISPs fix their interconnects so they can actually provide the bandwidth they claim to sell, or be honest and tell you that you will be throttled to a fraction of that when you saturate your link, or perhaps they fix the problem and make some form of hi-speed file transfer work. Since, after all, much of what we call 'Broadband' is intended to be, you know, 'high-speed'.
Be aware that most if not all ISPs are trying to monetize their business by selling us lots of data, such as video. They see other large data providers suchg as BT as competitors. YouTube, if it nails HDTV, will also be a competitor, and Apple of course if iTunes does video right will also be their 'enemy'.
Then we will be ready for an agnostic ISP. And none are on the horizon.
feh.
Documentation
Everything else is secondary. Well, most everything. But without usable documentation, all else is futile.
Oh, and would someone do some work on documentation?
Thanks!