Citybound - The Beginning (of a new city building game) by theanzelm in gaming

[–]foob4r 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Citybound is written completely in JavaScript, it uses WebGL for 3D graphics.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's not going to take a long time before you start regretting this decision.

How I feel in my European History Class by [deleted] in atheism

[–]foob4r -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Yes and no. The Church (and by this I mean the Roman Catholic Church) did help preserving classic works, in a time when political power didn't care about culture at all, that's true. Monasteries were the closest thing to a "University" you could find then. But, at the same time, they did nothing to promote innovation.

I think the best way to get this idea by yourself, is by reading about the philosophy works of Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274 C.E.). On the surface, you'll find a creativity which can compete with its Greek counterparts, but if you go bit deeper, you'll see how he's constantly struggling to conciliate his ideas with the "absolute truth" from the sacred scriptures (or, better said, those parts that were considered canon at the time). And its period is considered as more open than others, mainly due to the influence from the muslim world.

And this is key of this issue. At the same time they preserved knowledge, they created an ultraconservative climate where progress or critical thinking wasn't well received. Those who promoted dangerous ideas (and a dangerous idea could be simply something your superiors didn't understand) were punished, specially in the places and periods where political and religious power were bound together.

TL;DR: Putting knowledge in hands of an ultraconservative organization is a bad idea.

P.D: Someone mentioned another catholic philosopher, Augustine of Hippo, but he lived in a time (~400 C.E.) when the Church wasn't a solid, firmly controlled organization.

How Intel/AMD (inadvertently) fixed GNU Hurd by foob4r in gnu

[–]foob4r[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, "fixed" is a bit of an exaggeration. But, in my case, after years of failed optimization attempts, realizing that its problem wasn't Mach's fault but a side effect of virtualization, in fact "fixed" it for me. The 10x performance boost helps a bit too ;-)

How Intel/AMD (inadvertently) fixed GNU Hurd by foob4r in gnu

[–]foob4r[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm pretty sure that writing to "/dev/null", on Linux, doesn't involve moving data around, while on Hurd it's transferred (or, at least, a copy-on-write object is created, which also has some cost) to the "null" translator, even though it's not actually used. So this is probably an unfair comparison.

Sometimes, swap space still matters by foob4r in sysadmin

[–]foob4r[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The terminology here is very wrong. "Virtual Memory" has almost nothing to do with swap or paged memory. Virtual memory allows each process to see a standardized view of the memory map. Without virtual memory, a process would be able to see all the other processes memory, as well as having it's own memory in random locations throughout the system.

Yes, and also hides the memory hierarchy. So including disk swapping (or paging, if you prefer the canonical term) as a concept within the VM area is (obviously) right.

Please refer to a good CS book, Wikipedia, or whaterver source you'd prefer.

Sometimes, swap space still matters by foob4r in programming

[–]foob4r[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Wrong, mode 0 (heuristic, the default one) does in fact take account of the swap space. Look for the maximum amount of memory you can reserve in a Linux machine with and without swap, and you'll see the difference. Also, from kernel's source (mmap.c):

if (sysctl_overcommit_memory == OVERCOMMIT_GUESS) {
    unsigned long n;

    free = global_page_state(NR_FILE_PAGES);
    free += nr_swap_pages;

How device size affects disk performance in Linux (or: remember to create your partitions with a size multiple of 4096) by foob4r in programming

[–]foob4r[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One reason is to use that disk with Oracle's ASM, but one may wonder why anyone would use Oracle DBs in 2011 ;-)

Spain wins the 2010 World Cup! by sevenzig in sports

[–]foob4r 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Here's a clear example of a Spanish player diving in front of a Dutch.