On a PC environment when you've got multiple browser windows open, IRC, email client, etc. getting constrained for IOPS is easier than expected.
An off-the-shelf SATA 840 EVO SDD hits 98,000 read IOPS, and all those tasks you mention added together wouldn't hit more than 1% of that. They're the very definition of network bound operations. The average email in my IMAP spool right now is 43KB and would take 11 4KB operations to completely read from or write to storage. Browsers site there idle 99.9% of the time. IRC? Not that I've ever seen.
Do it in a real world environment, and I'm willing to bet PCIe will show it's worth. I don't think that games will run any faster than the baseline results of no load, but I'm willing to guess it'll do better than the SATA equivalents.
I haven't bothered to look at their methodology but I tentatively agree with their conclusion: almost no desktop users would be able to tell the difference. I mean, even a HDD benching at 103 read IOPS seems spritely for most use cases. A SATA SSD working 950 times faster is as close to instantaneous as most desktop uses could ever hope for.
A guy named Amdahl had something to say on the subject. SSDs excel at IOPS, but that buys you little if you're not IOPS-constrained.
Examples of things that eat operations as fast as you can throw them at 'em: databases, compilation, most server daemons.
Examples of things that couldn't care less: streaming large assets that are decompressed in realtime, like audio or video files. Loading a word processing document. Downloading a game patch. Encoding a DVD. Playing RAM-resident video games.
It should be a shock to roughly no one that buffing an underused part won't make the whole system faster. I couldn't mow my lawn any faster if the push mower had a big block V8, nor would overclocking my laptop make it show movies any faster.
TL;DR non-IO-bound things don't benefit from more IO.
...unless you're a smoker and have highly depressed CO2 overload sensations due to your constant saturation.
FWIW, I think those are perfectly plausible explanations. I mainly meant wanted to frame the GP's own opinion as a formal test case; that's a copy-and-paste of what he wrote.
If your charity is providing shelter for the homeless, but they have to pay 10 bucks per night for the bunk-bed, you are not non-profit.
That test fails. What if it costs $50 per night for the bunk-bed and the rest is subsidized through external donations?
If your mega-church is providing "healing for the sick", but they have to pay $200 to enter, you are not a non-profit.
And if that $200 turns into renting clinic space and buying supplies to provide free medical care to poor children?
My point is that the answer to these questions is never simple, and if you think you've found a simple definition that neatly covers everything, it suggests you're likely missing something.
How else do you explain WindowsME and Vista?
I don't, and neither can anyone else.
but if a megachurch can afford a huge all-glass cathedral, $ multi-million salaries for the charismatic preacher begging for more donations, and toys like private jets and limos, nope, that's a for-profit enterprise, even if you cook the books so there's no money left over at the end of the day.
I'm not disagreeing with you, because I think that stuff is disgusting. But. As a programmer, how would you write a function that returns a boolean value: "is this church a legitimate non-profit?" Because that's ultimately what you're asking, and I'm having a hard time formulating such a thing.
Test cases:
* A small-town church with a pastor who has four different congregations: True
* A huge all-glass cathedral, $ multi-million salaries for the charismatic preacher begging for more donations, and toys like private jets and limos: False
* A small local all-volunteer charity that feeds the homeless: True
* A small, all-volunteer, poorly run charity who means well but sucks at their mission: True
* A large national charity with a well-paid CEO who effectively uses their resources to do amazing things: True
* A large national charity with a well-paid CEO who isn't very effective, but everyone agrees means well: True?
* A large national charity with a well-paid CEO who doesn't effectively uses their resources: Um...
Step one: agree on the test cases. Step two: specific the input parameters that lets you distinguish between outcomes. Step three: non-profit?
Why oh why would you put the parsing of HTTP at the kernel level?
They probably saw that FreeBSD has been doing it for 15 years and thought it might be a good idea.
This is the kind of stuff which needs to be in userspace, not the friggin OS.
Apparently not everyone agrees with that.
I'm in no way a Microsoft apologist, but it's not like a senior engineer rolled out of bed one morning, smoked some crack, and yelled "hey, let's break some crap today!" Lots of stuff is done in kernel mode in Linux and the BSDs - like all kinds of graphical mischief - and MS probably does the same things for the same reasons.
That guy is going to be pissed when we don't get cold supercomputers with billions of times more power than the brain using reversible computing.
Kurzweil may or may not be nuts, but the data seems to be going his way so far.
"We are assured that rapid progress will soon bring self-driving electric cars,
hypersonic airplanes,
individually tailored cancer cures,
and instant three-dimensional printing of hearts and kidneys.
We are even told it will pave the world's transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies,"
Could there have been worse examples of "LOL those crazy promises!"?
A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren't broken.
