@Tim Tim, I'll be honest, I think it's remarkable that you haven't been suspended from the network already; you're persistently unwilling to change anything about how you interact with it after very patient feedback that it's unproductive (including both in the questions that you post, and in this room where these complaints of moderator persecution keep coming up). As I've said before, I also think you do get a bad deal sometimes.
@Tim I understand that your life circumstances are difficult, particularly at the moment, but I encourage you again to make use of any services that are available for counselling in order to help you to adapt the way you respond to things that happen. There are online services and resources at least if in-person isn't available to you at the moment, and self-guided CBT is viable if not ideal.
@Tim I'm also happy to talk to you about options for planning an employment future, and we've had discussions about PL topics in the past. I know you're very focused on learning things that are in demand in industry. You clearly have skills that could be useful and it's a pity you don't get to apply them. I understand that you've done at least some graduate study in the past at well-known institutions, and I am also happy to discuss how to work with that to make the most of your experience.
@Tim But, the way that you respond to things at the moment is often detrimental to meeting your goals, and it leads into spirals where everything just gets worse because there's a ping-pong back and forth of escalating reactions between you and other people that leaves both of you upset. That's not good for anybody. Those are the things I think the counselling could help with; it also may be useful for holding a job, but that's severable from the more applied technical advice towards that.
@Tim In any case, please consider all of that. I think it's possible for some more focused study to lead into work, if that's the direction you want to go in, but it's not really getting there at the moment and getting shut off from some of those avenues of assistance preemptively would be a shame.
@AndrasDeak Mixing libraries from different releases isn't a good idea in general, but you already know that.
Upgrading or downgrading leaf packages is ok in general. Or even libraries that only support one or two programs. But tinkering with more general system stuff is problematic.
However, judging from the number of people who do this, it's possible Linux distributions (for example) could do a better job of communicating it to their users.
Well, folks, at least from my perspective, I guess I can call this the Cyclone that wasn't. But I expect it's caused (and will cause) damage elsewhere in Maharashtra. I'm just grateful we were spared. I had visions of losing internet and possibly power, which would really not have been fun. Especially since we've been stocking food in the fridge and (still) can't go out.
Tangently on-topic: does anyone know of a historical graph of RAM prices over a long period? Perhaps this is something that would be too complicated to make, considering how much change has happened in this area even just in the last 20 years.
I looked online but did not find much, except apparently memory prices has gone up around 2017-2018 and then had gone back down more recently. Not sure about the current situation.
I'm hoping to build a second computer soonish, so this is relevant.
@FaheemMitha it's probably hard to create an accurate and informative graph, due to the way that capacity grows very rapidly. There are plots for price/capacity such as hblok.net/storage_data/storage_memory_prices-2015-12.png, not sure how useful these are for your purposes
and also whatever currency they are using to quantify the cost will also vary with time...
A quick search suggests that RAM was SIMM but more recently is DIMM.
And SIMM doesn't seem to be present before 1990. At least that's where it starts being present on the graph.
And this graph terminates at 2015.
Going up one level, the server lets me lists the files. Which is normally a no-no for security reasons, but whatever. It looks like till 2017 is the most recent version available.
I'm missing a huge drop in that figure for HDDs (perhaps "small drive" means something else?). I was under the impression that the Nobel-worthy discovery of GMR used in spin valves led to a capacity jump for HDDs. Perhaps the price followed that...
I got my first computer in the summer of 1998. Right around the time that the SIMM to DIMM switch happened, though I didn't notice. And from that graph RAM was around USD 1 per MB. So it's dropped around 1000-fold since then.
@AndrasDeak Increasingly wastefully so.
@AndrasDeak Emacs usage, for example, has stayed around the same.
And TeX has not exploded. Though I believe that newer libraries like PGF/TikZ is much more resource-hungry than TeX used to be.
I'm happy with 16, though opening too many imgur posts in firefox will evantually eat several gigabytes. Nothing a firefox restart can't solve though... If I could "afford" it 32 would be perfect.
@FaheemMitha one thing I noticed a few years ago when I started watching Okeanos Explorer's live seafloor dives was that watching that stream ate up memory in firefox. Might be the same issue...
@FaheemMitha that's what I meant, sorry
But I had to replace 2x4 with 2x8 so it was pretty much a switch
@FaheemMitha I have absolutely no idea. Netflix doesn't seem to trouble my firefox at all. And "Chromium isn't working for Prime Video" sounds like a red flag. I wouldn't be surprised if it only half-worked for firefox, causing memory issues...
@MichaelHomer your notes above were perceptive, thoughtful, and helpful. Thank you for taking the time to write it up. Makes me proud to be part of this community.
I don't know if it's the website or the browser's responsibility to handle buffering, but if half an HD video gets pushed through to your end it could easily eat up memory.
@AndrasDeak Hmm. Does Netflix reliably work on all of Chromium, Chrome and Firefox in Debian, then?
@StephenKitt Oh, there are no problems as such. I'm just referring to memory usage. If you have swap enabled, it might make a difference. I don't know.
I also use something called Hotstar, which Disney now owns, I think. It also has Disney+.
It's got a surprisingly bad user interface.
Yes in 2017, that item was Rs. 14,400.00. Now its successor, the 860 EVO, is listed as 7,199. About half.
@StephenKitt Hmm. Well, maybe swap makes a difference. Though I think that ideally it shouldn't be such a critical part of memory usage. Especially with a lot of RAM.
16GB is supercomputer levels of memory, by historical standards.
I asked a question on the help-bash list, found out new stuff about the shell that I didn't know before, and got help from Greg. Might do a Q/A from it later unless it's a dupe here or someone else does it first. lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-bash/2020-06/msg00007.html
What I said are real. I don't really have mental problems. I don't act in reality, the way on the Internet. Thanks for saying nice about some thing that was tangentially related. Yes, I have to focus. @MichaelHomer
Can someone help me with some questions on setting up Linux mint please?
user435118
I'm trying to install mint on my old computer, can I confirm that installing mint will not wipe the Windows installation (and files on the Windows OS) from my computer?
@Daniil I don't know about Mint in particular, but if the installer offers a choice about where to install, take note of the disks & partitions that you have for Windows, and avoid those :)
choices like "use all my disks" should be avoided
user435118
I'll back up just in case, is there something specific I need to do to have both Windows and Linux dual-boot?
@Daniil you should make backups before installing a new operating system...
user435118
Yeah, I will
user435118
@StephenKitt If I follow this:
user435118
> Also create a swap partition. This partition is used for hibernation and as a safety buffer in case your computer runs out of RAM. Give this partition a size equal to the amount of RAM in your computer.
user435118
Then won't I have no RAM left since I allocated all of it to the swap partition?
Heh, gedit confused me for a good two minutes. I tried editing a file, and I accidentally mashed some keys, saw some popup blink for a nanosecond, and then I couldn't edit the file anymore. It somehow turned read-only. No setting I could find to change it. No useful hits in google (duckduckgo). Closed the file's tab, reopened it, same thing...
permissions show file's fine and editable
I had to restart gedit and try editing again to see a banner that tells me the file is already open in another gedit window (on the next desktop), and the default action for the banner is to open read-only :D
What confused me the most is the "things are frozen in read-only". I've only seen that yet from libreoffice and I hate it.
The worst UX I see these days is opening a csv or similar from the command line with libreoffice, waiting minutes for it to load (it's never fast), only to realize that there's a popup waiting in an existing libreoffice window asking be about how it should import data from the file...
Interesting. I missed the timing of some change. Custom close vote reasons aren't generating comments any more? For example - has 4 close votes with custom text, but no comments.
belay that, slightly. There's a deleted comment that seems to be the source of the close votes.
@AndrasDeak thanks! I'm always prepared to be surprised by SE changes, but this appears to be just new user behavior: VTC with custom reason, then delete "your own" comment on the Q
apparently that leaves the Q in the close-review queue with that custom reason as an option
@Tim The internet is part of reality, and you're still you either way. If what you're saying is that you're always just trolling, well, ok, that has a swifter solution, but otherwise it's not about "problems", it's about modifying behaviours that are holding you back from what you want (even if we think the behaviours are right and reasonable, other people's reactions to them have an impact on us; for example, preventing you from posting on a site). All the offers still stand, in any case.
I don't know that it's worse. You get a fractional time back, that's all. In the source code, it's quite clear that the integer SECONDS value is just the floating point value truncated.
At least it's not ticking with the system clock.
Well, Chet says he's changing it for the next release anyway, so that hopefully means it's getting fixed.