I'm a professor at a community college in Silicon Valley, and my students use online textbooks. I try to use Creative Commons or other libre textbooks, but sometimes I use paid textbooks when they are heads-and-shoulders better than their libre alternatives. Some e-textbooks can be accessed on a subscription basis. I admit I prefer non-subscription materials, but a colleague advised me that often the book that students learn from is different from a good reference book that students can use once they've already learned the material. For example, my colleagues and I have had great success with an online, interactive textbook for discrete math. While the subscription is unfortunately only valid for the duration of the course, once students have learned discrete math, they could buy a used copy of Rosen's discrete math textbook as a reference.
The nice thing about e-textbooks is not needing to carry around a bunch of heavy books. I remember the tomes I had in my college days, such as Stewart's Calculus.
FreeBSD didn’t have memory overcommit and instead used strict swap reservation - each allocated anonymous memory page was supposed to have a corresponding swap page. This required 2x RAM swap space, otherwise you would get “out of swap” when forking a large process. FreeBSD implemented memory overcommit around 2000.
Oh, so that's where that old nugget of wisdom came from! I've heard the rule about making your swap at least 2x your RAM for ages and thought it was just some old rule of thumb from the 80s. I didn't know there used to be a legitimate reason for it.
I remember how NetBSD promoted itself as running on many more
toasters than Linux once.
Then some NetBSD dev wrote on their mailing list that this is
no longer true. Linux runs on more toasters now. (And also top 500 supercomputers, but toasters are the real metal to the petal test.)
It's an interesting piece of history too. I kind of evaluate it a
bit differently, e. g. my summary is "momentum beats academic
perfection". Which is not completely what it is about, but it is
my own imperfect TL;DR summary.
This basically fits my stereotype of BSD being a little bit more hardcore while Linux is a little more accessible… when the question was “can you install an OS on a toaster,” BSD had an advantage. Now that normal engineers have to make IOT toasters (for some reason) Linux should have the advantage, right?
Seems like at a glance that website if it sees a referral from ycombinator, it redirects to that image.... In a private window it loads the 'intended' page.....
If you like this kind of post, you might like this “http explained” post.
https://peteris.rocks/blog/htop/
htop explained*
I was looking forward for web protocol, but alas...
Great job on getting the fixes merged!
Thank you for such a quality post.
the end struck me - a picture of an os book. I wonder if students these days retain their books after college, or do they get returned as a rental?
I'm a professor at a community college in Silicon Valley, and my students use online textbooks. I try to use Creative Commons or other libre textbooks, but sometimes I use paid textbooks when they are heads-and-shoulders better than their libre alternatives. Some e-textbooks can be accessed on a subscription basis. I admit I prefer non-subscription materials, but a colleague advised me that often the book that students learn from is different from a good reference book that students can use once they've already learned the material. For example, my colleagues and I have had great success with an online, interactive textbook for discrete math. While the subscription is unfortunately only valid for the duration of the course, once students have learned discrete math, they could buy a used copy of Rosen's discrete math textbook as a reference.
The nice thing about e-textbooks is not needing to carry around a bunch of heavy books. I remember the tomes I had in my college days, such as Stewart's Calculus.
just hint students towards anna's archive and then sky's the limit
I bought as few textbooks as I could, but the few that I did buy are sitting in my parents' basement bookshelves somewhere.
Interesting post, it made me wonder. At one time FreeBSD swap usage/logic was far better than what Linux did. Is that still the case ?
FreeBSD didn’t have memory overcommit and instead used strict swap reservation - each allocated anonymous memory page was supposed to have a corresponding swap page. This required 2x RAM swap space, otherwise you would get “out of swap” when forking a large process. FreeBSD implemented memory overcommit around 2000.
Oh, so that's where that old nugget of wisdom came from! I've heard the rule about making your swap at least 2x your RAM for ages and thought it was just some old rule of thumb from the 80s. I didn't know there used to be a legitimate reason for it.
See this retrocomputing.SE question https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/32492/ori...
Yes, It's just not every tool is aware of ZFS ARC. Which is what this post is about. Author just describes in an odd way.
I remember how NetBSD promoted itself as running on many more toasters than Linux once.
Then some NetBSD dev wrote on their mailing list that this is no longer true. Linux runs on more toasters now. (And also top 500 supercomputers, but toasters are the real metal to the petal test.)
These fights always remind me of:
https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
It's an interesting piece of history too. I kind of evaluate it a bit differently, e. g. my summary is "momentum beats academic perfection". Which is not completely what it is about, but it is my own imperfect TL;DR summary.
This basically fits my stereotype of BSD being a little bit more hardcore while Linux is a little more accessible… when the question was “can you install an OS on a toaster,” BSD had an advantage. Now that normal engineers have to make IOT toasters (for some reason) Linux should have the advantage, right?
Normal engineers don't do that either.
why did that url point me to a scrotum in an egg cup
Seems like at a glance that website if it sees a referral from ycombinator, it redirects to that image.... In a private window it loads the 'intended' page.....
ZFS cache. The end.
User installs an unfamiliar server OS with an enterprise filesystem and is stunned when it works differently. I fail to see a teachable moment here.
I've noticed that the various tools report different amounts of free memory. I appreciate finally having an explanation for why.
Sure, but also some tools needed fixing.
This is why I use Linux. :>
Poor FreeBSD folks though. After so many years trying to present themselves as better alternative, the road just got steeper ...
No ZFS no problem :)
The OS Crusades are over man