Don't you mean the "expriment"? The incredible number of typos in that article, starting with its first sentence, does not fill me with confidence about how well it has been reviewed by others.
I'm taking it as a challenge to try to back up the "3 second delay" remark with a link. Haven't found one yet.
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One thought I have, indirectly supported by this [PDF] link, is based on the fact that both the WAIT state, and time slicing, were invented in 1965. It is not hard to imagine the first systems with these commands implementing them in ways we would consider "bad form" today. Specifically, imagine a 100 terminal System/360 implementing time slicing by giving each terminal one hundredth of every 3 second "segment". In other words "hard" time slicing, not today's event-driven approach. This would not be an efficient use of the mainframe, to say the least, but it would cause regular 3 second delays in response "for the good of all".
Imagining how this seemingly bad idea would come about is pretty easy when you keep in mind that terminals were an upgrade from punch cards. With punch cards, queuing was unavoidable. With terminals, something different had to be done or else everyone would be waiting while one user held down the shift key (or whatever). Dividing things up "fairly" is probably the first thing they thought of...much like when the most powerful computers used to go to the top bosses who naturally thought they deserved them.
I think we forget how time sliced and inherently "laggy" computers used to be (or more likely most of us have never experienced it, having started computing with their own CPU). Mini computers were definitely time sliced and unimaginably RAM-limited. Swapping to slower things would have been an unavoidable and chronic issue. Putting a deliberate minimum delay would be a good solution for ancient times/constraints.
Next time you are stuck at a light, despite a lack of cross traffic, consider that you are supporting the notion of "delay is good for the system". Why? Because if the lights were totally responsive to the presence, then absence of side traffic, traffic lights would be less synchronized. Old school traffic lights were neither event nor interrupt driven. Modern traffic lights are interrupt driven, but only within an overall system of deliberate green (no delay) and red (deliberate delay) phases.
(1) For the same reason that IBM inserted a 3-second delay in their mainframe's response to user input. Make it instant and people will complain the moment it is not. Make it a 3+ second delay and people get used to waiting.
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(2) For decades Microsoft has been introducing deficiencies into their products so that the next version will fix some of them (while introducing some new ones). This is imperative if you want to get everyone on the upgrade treadmill. It has been subtle at times, but Vista's copy "bug" and the Metro interface are glaring examples of this deliberate ruining (serving exactly the same purpose as movie "trailers", aka spoilers).
(3) The real reason Windows is poor at power management is that no one is threatening them enough. If they were, Windows would magically improve.
As hard as it is for slashdot techies to imagine, Windows is like Usain Bolt...running with its laces untied because everyone else is running for second place.
Isn't most of the land in the Northern Hemisphere? When clouds are forced to go upward to pass over a land mass, they are more inclined to drop their rain load. Isn't that basically how it all works?
Yes, sure, it is all about not catching a break.
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How about this? No one wants to use an RT, even to test it. Sure it gets tested by QA people, but no one wants to use it all day every day, trying to get useful work done. So an update is sent out the door with little to no real world testing.
RT is clearly a brand of dog food no dog wants to eat.
Ads, just ads, would be an improvement. All I know is when the Ghostery pop-up window is long enough to hit the bottom of my x1200 display, I'm logging off the Internet for good.
The whole ZIP concept is wonderful. I would put it in my top 2 or 3 things that computers do that are almost magical. Without it I would have, literally, a million directories. For me there is no better backup program.
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I think programmer/left-brain/asperger types do use PKLite, hence the slight pause before they answer. We have a ten/hundred/thousand word answer for most things and have to parse the closest size to fit the time/attention span constraints of those we are talking to. Pre and post-processing...it is all there. Data would feel right at home with geeks -- I guess this is why he considered Geordi his closest friend.
FWIW, our dreams are probably the most boring of anyone's.
I recall SpinRite being ridiculously thorough (and slow). I would say it tried 20 or 50 times but I don't recall for sure.
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Ok, I just checked wiki's SpinRite page -- up to 2000 times it will try to save data. Mind-boggling, especially compared to DOS's "I tried a few times, can I quit now?"
I gave up running SpinRite decades ago, around the time when I realized that if there were SpinRite errors then the drive was dying. Still, I wouldn't mind watching a SpinRite video, for old times sake.
List was good. Also, QEdit. I was also a big fan of the PCMag utilities, the original.com ones you typed in by hand. Typically under 5k (which translated to 15,000 keystrokes for a single.com utility), they were quite brilliant and I still use 3 or 4 of them (on my 32-bit XP main machine) to this day. DR.com, their equivalent of Norton's NC.exe, was just 7k (at least after I PKLited it).
By the way, how's your lawn? Mine is people-free:-)
There's a blast from the past. Totally agree about how fast it was. Also the best looking while it worked. Reminded me of Spinrite -- certainly the most elegantly beautiful program ever coded in assembler.
I'm not sure I ever used v5, nor did I ever right-click on it, lol.
After I install my standard stuff on a new system, I download and run the free trial of Vopt. Then never both defragging it again.
Ok, I originally was going to write "longer than Windows 9.x", and probably should have. Anyway, I fired off an email to Golden Bow to ask them when they first came out with Vopt. The sun has barely come up in CA so "I'll be back".
Defragging has been around a lot longer than Windows. Wiki says Vopt is "one of the oldest" defraggers and cites a 1992 article. Vopt is from Golden Bow systems who have perhaps the most keep-off-my-lawn web site in the history of old craggy things. [I loved Vopt. You can get a free trial if ya want.]
Is the next microchip frontier something else entirely? Specifically I'm wondering if RAM will become more important as CPUs stop shrinking. It seems like RAM is 15 to 20 times slower than the CPU (for DDR3) at this time. Will this ever change? Will cache RAM grow by a greater factor than CPU transistor size will shrink? If, hypothetically, RAM became as fast as the CPU, we would have vastly increased performance. But how likely is this?
What about a supercapacitor / battery hybrid? Batteries charged at home (or work) for most use cases. Going on a long trip you get a supercapacitor bump every xx miles/rest stop.
Good points. It is a shame that 82.6% of Americans live in cities and have little chance of seeing much more than the Big Dipper, let alone moons on Jupiter. I'm sure this puts a pretty big damper on telescope tech talk on anything but a specialized forum. Still, talk away and I'll try to learn something.
Agreed. But there are a lot of things that enterprise techies should never have to do. Yes, Star Dock, Classic Shell (and Start Shell that I went for) all bring additional complexity.
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Your use of FireFox is like my use of Opera. I have it set up with a massive HOSTS file and JS disabled by default and enabled on a site-by-site basis. But would I set up the browser this way for other users I support? Not a chance.
What can be said but that "systems are complex" and we have to adapt or perish.
Alright. You got your +5. Now what do we actually talk about? The Saturn fly-by vimeo that someone linked to is 2 years old. Cool and all but what does one say? For me, a spacecraft flying past planets is about as interesting as the ISS going around and around and around the Earth.
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No, it's people who earn their living writing articles about MS systems. From their perspective, any new operating system is a great chance to sell page views. So of course MS can do no wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
My 42" TV is to the right of my computer. 4 feet away. Do I get the moron label, or will doofus suffice?
Good point. A little mind boggling how small the gain would be from defragging a floppy, but still.
I think you were trying for this.
Don't you mean the "expriment"? The incredible number of typos in that article, starting with its first sentence, does not fill me with confidence about how well it has been reviewed by others.
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One thought I have, indirectly supported by this [PDF] link, is based on the fact that both the WAIT state, and time slicing, were invented in 1965. It is not hard to imagine the first systems with these commands implementing them in ways we would consider "bad form" today. Specifically, imagine a 100 terminal System/360 implementing time slicing by giving each terminal one hundredth of every 3 second "segment". In other words "hard" time slicing, not today's event-driven approach. This would not be an efficient use of the mainframe, to say the least, but it would cause regular 3 second delays in response "for the good of all".
Imagining how this seemingly bad idea would come about is pretty easy when you keep in mind that terminals were an upgrade from punch cards. With punch cards, queuing was unavoidable. With terminals, something different had to be done or else everyone would be waiting while one user held down the shift key (or whatever). Dividing things up "fairly" is probably the first thing they thought of...much like when the most powerful computers used to go to the top bosses who naturally thought they deserved them.
I think we forget how time sliced and inherently "laggy" computers used to be (or more likely most of us have never experienced it, having started computing with their own CPU). Mini computers were definitely time sliced and unimaginably RAM-limited. Swapping to slower things would have been an unavoidable and chronic issue. Putting a deliberate minimum delay would be a good solution for ancient times/constraints.
Next time you are stuck at a light, despite a lack of cross traffic, consider that you are supporting the notion of "delay is good for the system". Why? Because if the lights were totally responsive to the presence, then absence of side traffic, traffic lights would be less synchronized. Old school traffic lights were neither event nor interrupt driven. Modern traffic lights are interrupt driven, but only within an overall system of deliberate green (no delay) and red (deliberate delay) phases.
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I thought I read this in "Programmers At Work", a 1989 tomb.
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(2) For decades Microsoft has been introducing deficiencies into their products so that the next version will fix some of them (while introducing some new ones). This is imperative if you want to get everyone on the upgrade treadmill. It has been subtle at times, but Vista's copy "bug" and the Metro interface are glaring examples of this deliberate ruining (serving exactly the same purpose as movie "trailers", aka spoilers).
(3) The real reason Windows is poor at power management is that no one is threatening them enough. If they were, Windows would magically improve.
As hard as it is for slashdot techies to imagine, Windows is like Usain Bolt...running with its laces untied because everyone else is running for second place.
How would spell cheque have helped? Lost and Lots are both in the dictionary. This is won of the reasons I never use spell cheque.
The Southern Hemisphere's oceans are very soggy. That's what you meant, right?
Isn't most of the land in the Northern Hemisphere? When clouds are forced to go upward to pass over a land mass, they are more inclined to drop their rain load. Isn't that basically how it all works?
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How about this? No one wants to use an RT, even to test it. Sure it gets tested by QA people, but no one wants to use it all day every day, trying to get useful work done. So an update is sent out the door with little to no real world testing.
RT is clearly a brand of dog food no dog wants to eat.
Ads, just ads, would be an improvement. All I know is when the Ghostery pop-up window is long enough to hit the bottom of my x1200 display, I'm logging off the Internet for good.
.
I think programmer/left-brain/asperger types do use PKLite, hence the slight pause before they answer. We have a ten/hundred/thousand word answer for most things and have to parse the closest size to fit the time/attention span constraints of those we are talking to. Pre and post-processing...it is all there. Data would feel right at home with geeks -- I guess this is why he considered Geordi his closest friend.
FWIW, our dreams are probably the most boring of anyone's.
.
Ok, I just checked wiki's SpinRite page -- up to 2000 times it will try to save data. Mind-boggling, especially compared to DOS's "I tried a few times, can I quit now?"
I gave up running SpinRite decades ago, around the time when I realized that if there were SpinRite errors then the drive was dying. Still, I wouldn't mind watching a SpinRite video, for old times sake.
List was good. Also, QEdit. I was also a big fan of the PCMag utilities, the original .com ones you typed in by hand. Typically under 5k (which translated to 15,000 keystrokes for a single .com utility), they were quite brilliant and I still use 3 or 4 of them (on my 32-bit XP main machine) to this day. DR.com, their equivalent of Norton's NC.exe, was just 7k (at least after I PKLited it).
By the way, how's your lawn? Mine is people-free :-)
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There's a blast from the past. Totally agree about how fast it was. Also the best looking while it worked. Reminded me of Spinrite -- certainly the most elegantly beautiful program ever coded in assembler.
I'm not sure I ever used v5, nor did I ever right-click on it, lol.
After I install my standard stuff on a new system, I download and run the free trial of Vopt. Then never both defragging it again.
I just heard back from Golden Bow. Vopt first appeared in January, 1986.
Ok, I originally was going to write "longer than Windows 9.x", and probably should have. Anyway, I fired off an email to Golden Bow to ask them when they first came out with Vopt. The sun has barely come up in CA so "I'll be back".
Defragging has been around a lot longer than Windows. Wiki says Vopt is "one of the oldest" defraggers and cites a 1992 article. Vopt is from Golden Bow systems who have perhaps the most keep-off-my-lawn web site in the history of old craggy things. [I loved Vopt. You can get a free trial if ya want.]
How is this different from being a light sleeper?
Is the next microchip frontier something else entirely? Specifically I'm wondering if RAM will become more important as CPUs stop shrinking. It seems like RAM is 15 to 20 times slower than the CPU (for DDR3) at this time. Will this ever change? Will cache RAM grow by a greater factor than CPU transistor size will shrink? If, hypothetically, RAM became as fast as the CPU, we would have vastly increased performance. But how likely is this?
What about a supercapacitor / battery hybrid? Batteries charged at home (or work) for most use cases. Going on a long trip you get a supercapacitor bump every xx miles/rest stop.
Good points. It is a shame that 82.6% of Americans live in cities and have little chance of seeing much more than the Big Dipper, let alone moons on Jupiter. I'm sure this puts a pretty big damper on telescope tech talk on anything but a specialized forum. Still, talk away and I'll try to learn something.
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Your use of FireFox is like my use of Opera. I have it set up with a massive HOSTS file and JS disabled by default and enabled on a site-by-site basis. But would I set up the browser this way for other users I support? Not a chance.
What can be said but that "systems are complex" and we have to adapt or perish.
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Personally, I'm interested in trying to define what gravity is. And to resolve some of the greatest problems in physics. Anyone else wanting to discuss this?
No, it's people who earn their living writing articles about MS systems. From their perspective, any new operating system is a great chance to sell page views. So of course MS can do no wrong.