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Comment Re:If you don't want to upgrade your box (Score 1) 100

That's actually why I decided to use it. Faster compile times.

OS X hits the disk so often, that I moved my user environment on to the RAM drive.

Even with 1066 MHz RAM, I would get instant build times as the swap files were now in RAM.

That when compared to 30 second build times are a trade off I'm willing to make.

And losing my contents? That's what rsync is for. And that's what back up batteries are for. My RAM drive is rsynched to an SSD partition. Happens in the background every 5 mins. I never see the impact.

So, yeah. Swap files on the RAM Disk. Insane speed as a result. Disk backed up to an SSD. Battery backup (laptops have batteries too, don't they?) Never a problem.

Comment Re:If you don't want to upgrade your box (Score 3, Interesting) 100

Well, shame on me. I've been doing it for 3 years on a daily basis.

I have my RAM drive rsynched to an SSD partition that is the same-ish size.

And here's one area where you're incorrect. Safari loads web pages. Each page loads javascript. Many of these leak over time or simply never purge their contents. I often end up with 8 GB used in Safari. Safari alone is a citizen that doesn't play by these rules because each page that loads is a prisoner of the javascript that loads and often doesn't handle memory freeing properly.

When I use my RAM as a drive, I get near INSTANT builds on OS X.

This matters to me more than your claims of "all modern operating systems taking full advantage of the RAM". If the operating system takes full advantage of the RAM, it may not be to my best benefit.

For example, Apple apps now by default do not quit when you close the last document. They merely stay in memory, hide the UI and then need to be relaunched to enable the UI again. Why does this matter? For TextEdit, if I want to open a document form the open menu if I close the last document and click elsewhere, this forces me to reopen the app because the OS fake closes the app (really only hiding the UI) while the rest of the app stays memory resident.

So, I have to relaunch the app. This takes more time and ONLY just renables the UI. How much memory does this save on my 32 GB machine? 1 MB. Now, that's certainly not taking full advantage of the RAM. It's a case of the OS designers thinking that "he wanted to quit the app, so we'll do it for him". But I didn't want to quit the app. The computer is not taking full advantage of the RAM in this case. That's not what I wanted it to do.

Maybe I have apps in the background that are doing stuff, but I want them to pause completely if another app is running in the foreground. Maybe I want ALL Safari pages to suspend their javascript when in the background, but the app still can still process downloads as if it's running at normal priority.

See, there are many cases where the computer's OS will not take proper advantage of the RAM and the processing power since it can not mirror the user's intentions. Even in cases where it tries to, it often gets them wrong. And in some cases where it does (Safari javascript), the computer ends up eating processing power and RAM for tasks that the user doesn't want it to be placing priority on. And in some of these cases, it can't allocate RAM and processing power properly, because it can't if it relies on other programmers writing their javascript competently and acting as good citizens.

I can cordon off a small chunk of my computer's RAM (since I have way more than enough) and direct it to do pretty damn much just want I want it to do.

That's why I bought it. I don't want the OS to prioritize things the way it wants to. I want to tell (parts of) the OS to prioritize things the way I want it to.

Cheers.

Comment If you don't want to upgrade your box (Score 2, Interesting) 100

Then max out the RAM and create a RAM drive.

On my 2010 iMac, I have a 16 GB RAM drive that gets between 3 and 4 GB/s and still have 16 GB of RAM available for my apps.

Check this terminal command out before entering it just to be safe.

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'RAM Disk' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://33554432`

Under Mac OS 10.6.8, and 10.9 the above creates a 17 GB RAM disk.

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'RAM Disk' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://8388608`

This creates a 4.27 GB RAM disk. Enjoy the speed.

Submission + - Omnidirectional Underwater Robot Inspired by the Cuttlefish (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Cuttlefish are fascinating animals, in that they use a pair of undulating fins to move forward and backward, turn on the spot, or hover in place. If you wanted to make an underwater robot that was highly maneuverable yet quiet and immune to tangled propellers, then the cuttlefish would be a good creature to copy. Well, a group of mechanical engineering students from Switzerland's ETH Zurich have done just that – plus they gave it an extra set of fins, allowing it to also move straight up and down.

Submission + - On the Futility of Climate Models: A Perfect Storm (wattsupwiththat.com) 1

Submitted by TheRealHocusLocus
TheRealHocusLocus writes: There are two main fronts in the CO2-drives-climate debate today. The first is an empirical measure of average global temperature, which is either rising by a few hundredths of a degree per year — or less, depending on how available data sources are combined and who you ask. But it is primarily based on a series of climate models that attempt to describe the planet we live on to a reasonable (and actionable) degree of accuracy.

Leo Smith offers a reality check and warning on the perils of using models. His own essay is brief and direct, but it has elicited a flood of responses — a perfect storm — such as I have rarely seen. An excellent read. For example, one point raised in a comment, "...climate models are all utter garbage. They cannot do CFD in the vertical dimension. The whole point is to model energy flow to and from the surface, and the models can’t do it. They rely on parametrisations for the primary energy transports away from the surface, convection and evaporation. They show warming because they are programmed to show warming. Radiative subsidence is a critical component of tropospheric convective circulation. Tropospheric convective circulation would stall and the atmosphere would heat were it not for radiative gases. What do the useless models you defend do? They hold the speed of tropospheric convective circulation constant for increasing radiative gas concentrations so they can fraudulently show near surface warming." Perhaps most thought provoking is a note added by the author as the storm of comments raged: "I am not sure I wanted that post to become an article. I don't want to be someone else’s received wisdom. I want the buggers to start thinking for themselves. If that means studying control theory systems analysis and chaos mathematics then do it. And form your own opinions."

Submission + - 30 Chinese tombs, 28 chariots and 98 horses dating back 2,800 years found (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: Archaeologists from Peking University have discovered a group of 30 tombs, 28 chariots and 49 pairs of horse skeletons dating back 2,800 years in Zaoyang city, Hubei Province in China.

The tombs are believed to belong to high-ranking Chinese nobility and date back to the Spring and Autumn Period in Chinese history (770-476BC). Also discovered are some of the earliest music instruments ever found in China.

All the tombs have been found on the same piece of land, with a separate "mass grave" of at least 28 wooden chariots buried together on their sides in a pit that measures 33m long by 4m wide.

Submission + - mathematical universe and the hard problem of consciousness (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the beautiful words of David Chalmers – consciousness poses the most baffling problem in science. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.

I am sorry — the article is not very short, so please go to the source http://theproblemofconsciousne...

Submission + - Scientist Says Curiosity May Have Found Fossils on Mars (viralglobalnews.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: A scientist named Nora Noffke says she thinks that the Curiosity rover may have found fossils on Mars. Noffke’s findings have been published in the journal Astrobiology. The study theorizes that certain rocks on Mars might have been formed by microbes, Discovery reports.

To create her hypothesis, Noffke closely examined photographs taken by Curiosity and compared them to rocks on Earth that have definitely been formed by living organisms. She says the pictures returned by the rover look extremely similar to microbe-created rocks on our own planet. The specific photos Noffke studied were taken in Gale Crater, specifically in the Yellowknife Bay area which houses the Gillespie Lake outcrop. The bottom of the lake and bay, which once contained water, consists of sedimentary sandstone.

While there have been previous papers theorizing that certain rocks prove life on Mars due to the presence of fossils, those have often been debunked. Noffke’s work has been so thorough, though, that even NASA is impressed.

NASA spokesperson Chris McKay explained, “I’ve seen many papers that say ‘Look, here’s a pile of dirt on Mars, and here’s a pile of dirt on Earth. And because they look the same, the same mechanism must have made each pile on the two planets. That’s an easy argument to make, and it’s typically not very convincing. However, Noffke’s paper is the most carefully done analysis of the sort that I’ve seen, which is why it’s the first of its kind published in Astrobiology.”

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