hehe... well said. If I had mod points you'd be getting them for making me laugh.

This was of course compounded by the fact that they did not follow the languages own guidelines with regard to string concatenation. Nor did they demonstrate any clear understanding of how modern operating systems works. Sadly this was an all round a poor effort.

The research tells us that repeatedly concatenating strings together is a bad thing... WE ALREADY KNOW THIS!!! good grief, who taught these guys to code? The title of their paper "When In-Memory Computing is Slower than Heavy Disk Usage" implies heavy disk access where none exists. They actually go on to point out that it's the OS doing magic things that helps out. i.e. it's the OS using RAM to buffer the disk that keeps your app speedy. So erm... memory being used instead of disk then... the exact opposite of their claims

This sounds like a possible solution, but what about cooling? if you start using rack mounted kit, heat starts to build up pretty quick. Maybe something slightly less densely packed with some fans pulling air in from as clean a source as possible?

it was before this actually... Anglo-Burma wars and Anglo-Boer wars towards the end of the 1800s saw wristwatches become popular with the british millitary officers as they found it difficult to use a pocket watch from the saddle or while trying to shoot a pistol.

not to mention the ad-revenue from "Real Robot Wars" would be amazing... I can totally see the corporate sponsorship getting behind war...

maybe they'll save lives by "killing" the enemy's robots?

Yes but usually both sides regard territory (or people within it) as their own... otherwise they would not be fighting about it in the first place. War is stupid. It would be better to let robots duke it out to decide who wins rather than having people kill each other. Maybe it would be more of a game and less of a human tragedy if we followed this crazy path instead of the crazy path we're already on.

definition of robot...

A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer

landmines on the other hand only have a few simple states, "safe", "armed", "detonated", "dud" they are simple single purpose constructs. It's not right to call them robots in any technical sense.

yup, if you build a death-bot, you want indiscriminate violence... everything chicken-sized and bigger shredded for completeness sake.

probably more of a land-mine-layer than a mine itself... unless it's got a pretty gnarly self-destruct sequence and a really low total cost of ownership. Also, I would hope that robots would be equal opportunity killers, slaying all in their path irrespective of age, gender etc... it'd be much simpler code for the IFF module not having to distinguish between short adults and tall kids for example. I wonder what OS they'd run... Windows 11 Terminator edition? Robobuntu?

Yes I could do as you say, but that is besides the point. The point is that the system works and does so within the resources limitations of a single board ARM computer despite the fact it is running systemd.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a systemd advocate, I don't have it on any of my work servers yet, but equally where I have used it, it has been stable and simple enough and I have not noticed any particular "RAM bloatyness".

I remain open minded about the whole debate, I'll use whatever comes along next as long as it is stable, simple and it gets the job done. Systemd is different to sysvinit and it takes a bit of getting used to but it hasn't done anything evil to my system (yet).

I take a pragmatic approach to this sort of thing, If you don't like, don't use it. The guys building the main distros seem to like it however so you may end up having to use it if you are a Linux admin.

I'm running Arch Linux ARM on a Wandboard Quad single board computer. The system runs apache, dovecot, postfix and samba for a small network. Systemd is in use as it was the default when I installed the OS. The machine only uses 224M of RAM, it has 1.6G free. systemd-journald is the biggest RAM-muncher with 64M is use, but I don't mind this because it's configured to not batter the flash by keeping current logs in RAM only.

Alas windows is harder to keep running smoothly than either Linux or OS X. The windows 8 users on our network account for 90% of all support requests. Our linux and OS X users the rest. Now consider that around 50% of our users have windows, 40% linux and 10% OS X. These numbers only inlcude personal computers, not servers.

The windows users always seem to be reporting issues with performance, networking, printing, ms office being random etc etc, maybe they are lower calibre users but if that were true why do the support calls stop when we migrate them to Ubuntu or OS X?

I don't have to reproduce the big bang to know that all of the observable universe is moving away from us and everything else... the big bang is STILL banging dude. The universe is expanding, you just need to OBSERVE this to know it is happening. This is actual evidence that is tangible, measurable and undeniable. We KNOW the universe was smaller yesterday than it is today we can see it expanding. On the other hand their is NO tangible, measurable evidence for the existence of any divine being nor has their ever been. Truth is, scientists love to disprove each other and do so all the time, whereas the religious ask us to have faith in the total absence of any good reason to do so. Scientists encourage critical thinking, they don't just believe any old crap because it's in a "special magic" book.

Scientists don't simply assume anything, they constantly try to disprove that which is disprovable in order to learn and develop their understanding of reality. Religion on the other hand tries to "keep the faith", immobile idiocy based on superstitions crud. Get thee behind me fuck-wit.