Unutterably Silly So what are you doing RIGHT NOW?

[phenomshel]

If your answers to any of the above are less than one minute, please tell me what magic spell you used. Did you burn the manual on the altar with the sheep guts?

Dennis, I think I'd have noticed if he'd done that... LOL!! Sorry, but I was reading along, catching up, and BAM that caught my eye. So I'm over here laughing my head off and Chris is looking at me like I've lost my mind.

re: shopping (too many posts to quote) The only reason that post showed up here is because it's HIGHLY unusual for me to not only WANT to shop, but to WANT to shop and then be able to find stuff that FITS without me getting frustrated enough to burst into tears and say "forget it, I'm going home now!"
I can't even tell you how many shopping trips have ended that way (the frustrated and bursting into tears part).
So yesterday was one of those days that got posted about simply because it NEVER happens, LOL! Most of the time I hate shopping, too.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by phenomshel

.....
re: shopping (too many posts to quote) The only reason that post showed up here is because it's HIGHLY unusual for me to not only WANT to shop, but to WANT to shop and then be able to find stuff that FITS ......

Congrats!

[recluse]

My mom is the exact opposite.
She will find something, no matter how long it takes.
She's 75, has had major back surgery and can't stand or walk for more than 20 minutes, but she can shop for 6 straight hours!

How are you doing, Shel?

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I guess it depends on what you're willing to settle for.

XP technically "runs" in 256MB of RAM, for suitable values of "run". If you're willing to wait for several minutes for operations to complete, it might be OK.

In the installs you mention, how long did it take XP to boot from a cold start? How long did it take in invoke, say Word (or Open Office Writer). How long did it take to load Firefox, and what was it like once up?

If your answers to any of the above are less than one minute, please tell me what magic spell you used. Did you burn the manual on the altar with the sheep guts?

I sacrificed a command-line virgin.

As you can probably guess I didn't stopwatch the event and was only paying attention to cold-boot because I didn't want anything happening which would make the machines unsaleable (they weren't mine in the first place; I was asked to "just throw Windows on them so I can get rid of them"). Neither one took more than a minute from BIOS to desktop. The first run of Firefox couldn't have been more than 15 seconds and the first run of IE (in order to get Firefox) was about the same; I consider that a long time on any other machine. I didn't install Office or anything else; obviously if I got ambitious I could make either one of them choke but I've locked up a Win7 box with 2GB also. On the other end, I've gotten XP to boot and run in as little as 64MB RAM, on a 2GB hard drive no less, but it was similar to the results you describe. I saved that hard drive for posterity and still have it here someplace. In the middle, my aforementioned Gateway Celeron box from several years ago required a fair amount of multitasking before redraw from the onboard video became noticeable. Anything's possible if you try hard enough.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

For a 128MB RAM box, I'd install Linux, make sure I gave it a swap partition twice the size of RAM, and have low expectations of what it would do. (On my notebook, for example, I don't even try to access YouTube - I see a slideshow of still pictures, not video.)

My first Linux install was on a P4 with 128 and swap set up as you describe because I didn't know any better and that's what Anaconda told me to do. I didn't have to lower my expectations because I didn't have any in the first place. It was even running Gnome. Performed well.

Now, before you get the impression that we have different levels of acceptable performance, my main rig is a 4-core Xeon OCed to 4.09GHz watercooled (that's 24/7, not a one-off suicide run...I've actually benched it at 4.5), with 8 GB DDR2-800 OCed to 1140-something MHz, and an Nvidia 9600GT OCed to 700/1100 (which I consider woefully behind the times) pushing twin 20" Acer widescreens. I'm looking into a method for running Quadro drivers for the vid card but all things considered I rank this setup as out-of-date.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

There was a poster on the Puppy forums who detailed how he got Puppy up an a machine with 16MB RAM. It involved stripping out everything he could remove that would still permit a GUI using JWM, and he had to build the actual image on a more powerful machine and trasfer it to the target box when it was ready.

I was told, without any detail, that Puppy would run on 16MB. It requires 128 for the ramdisk even though it doesn't necessarily need that much to run, however, leading to the build-and-transfer thing you describe. I won't say that's too much like work because something deliberately made that small would most likely be used on an embedded device anyway. At my site I reviewed Puppy alongside Damn Small Linux, which actually will run on the build target with 16MB if given the appropriate boot parameters.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Which is why more RAM to provide a larger and more effective cache is the first performance enhancement I recommend. PCs are I/O bound, not compute bound, and spend most of their time waiting for something, like a read or write to complete. As the pundit once said "All machines wait at the same speed".

Still can't find who said that. Doesn't make it any less true, just saying.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Gnome may use GTK, but the converse is not true. Wiping the Xubuntu install and installing from MinimalCD gave me a system that was usable, with a choice of XFCE or LXDE as the GUI when I boot into it. (I prefer XFCE, and use it under Puppy as well, in place fo the default JWM.)

I like XFCE as well; it's one of several DE/WMs I have installed. As of version 4.6, however, it's still GTK-based. Therefore in some distributions installing XFCE will pull in some Gnome deps, especially if said distros are Gnome-based in the first place.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by recluse

My mom is the exact opposite.
She will find something, no matter how long it takes.
She's 75, has had major back surgery and can't stand or walk for more than 20 minutes, but she can shop for 6 straight hours!

How are you doing, Shel?

It's the XX-Factor!

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by recluse

My mom is the exact opposite.
She will find something, no matter how long it takes.
She's 75, has had major back surgery and can't stand or walk for more than 20 minutes, but she can shop for 6 straight hours!

How are you doing, Shel?

Other than dreading the midterm I have to take today, I'm fine, Jon. Thanks for asking

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Actually I kind of enjoy buying things off the Internet ... unless it's for something my wife has asked me to buy. Then she sits over my shoulder and constantly asks me to click on some link she has spotted which usually has little to do with what she's trying to make up her mind about. When I shop, I usually know exactly what I plan to buy ahead of time. When she shops, whether it's in a brick and mortar store or on the Internet, the shopping process is as much a tiresome fact-finding tour as anything else. When I hit that "buy now" button for myself, I feel a sense of exhilaration and expectation. When I shop with her, after checking every possible make and model, nine times out of ten she decides to wait until later before committing herself to buying and I feel drained afterward. As a sport, I think shopping's generally a female thing. It must be something in their genes. There's something about having two X chromosomes that makes them see shopping as enjoyable, in a similar manner to how it screws with their ability to enjoy the humor of The Three Stooges.

I don't like shopping OR the 3 stooges. (except for specialty foods... that I love shopping for!)

Originally Posted by phenomshel

Dennis, I think I'd have noticed if he'd done that... LOL!! Sorry, but I was reading along, catching up, and BAM that caught my eye. So I'm over here laughing my head off and Chris is looking at me like I've lost my mind.

re: shopping (too many posts to quote) The only reason that post showed up here is because it's HIGHLY unusual for me to not only WANT to shop, but to WANT to shop and then be able to find stuff that FITS without me getting frustrated enough to burst into tears and say "forget it, I'm going home now!"
I can't even tell you how many shopping trips have ended that way (the frustrated and bursting into tears part).
So yesterday was one of those days that got posted about simply because it NEVER happens, LOL! Most of the time I hate shopping, too.

in your list of stuff you posted that you got, there was something that started with an R. what was that?

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

I don't like shopping OR the 3 stooges.

Killjoy.

j/k

[phenomshel]

KK, that's a ruana. It's a cross between a shawl and a scarf. Think a big piece of rectangular fabric, split on one short side to the middle. Like a poncho, only rectangular instead of round, and split all the way, instead of only partway. You can wear them a bunch of different ways and they're made out of everything from crepe to sweater knit these days it seems. I love drapey things, so they're wonderful for me.

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

You and me both, bro! That, and talking on the phone.

And I find it especially irritating to see people who are doing both at the same time.

What if I'm on the phone while my wife's shopping; does that count?



Actually I rarely talk on the phone while shopping; I do look a lot of things up e.g. directions, store hours, sales, etc.

I was in a JCPenney with Shel a couple months ago; while she was looking at some things I got a call about something else and I had my Bluetooth earpiece in. Apparently I scared the salesperson (who my wife informed me wasn't all that nice in the first place).

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by phenomshel

KK, that's a ruana. It's a cross between a shawl and a scarf. Think a big piece of rectangular fabric, split on one short side to the middle. Like a poncho, only rectangular instead of round, and split all the way, instead of only partway. You can wear them a bunch of different ways and they're made out of everything from crepe to sweater knit these days it seems. I love drapey things, so they're wonderful for me.

oh I have one! I didn't know that's what it was called!

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

What if I'm on the phone while my wife's shopping; does that count?



Actually I rarely talk on the phone while shopping; I do look a lot of things up e.g. directions, store hours, sales, etc.

I was in a JCPenney with Shel a couple months ago; while she was looking at some things I got a call about something else and I had my Bluetooth earpiece in. Apparently I scared the salesperson (who my wife informed me wasn't all that nice in the first place).

when I had my first blue tooth I was lead on a telecomm crew that was exceptionally inexperienced and unqualified. I had to be hands on at every stage of the game instead of doing a lot of the other things I was supposed to be doing as lead. I ended up on my cellphone so much that I finally broke down and got a bluetooth. one of my good friends walked in when I was on about my zillionth call that day and un-f*cking a completely f*cked cable run. I was sitting on the top of a 12 foot ladder with my head and arms in the ceiling talking to someone. my friend paused and worried about disturbing me. he thought that this particular job had driven me around the bend and I was talking to myself in the celing . maybe ya' had to have been there...

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

oh I have one! I didn't know that's what it was called!

That's ok, I can spell it, but I still don't know how to pronounce it!

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

when I had my first blue tooth I was lead on a telecomm crew that was exceptionally inexperienced and unqualified. I had to be hands on at every stage of the game instead of doing a lot of the other things I was supposed to be doing as lead. I ended up on my cellphone so much that I finally broke down and got a bluetooth. one of my good friends walked in when I was on about my zillionth call that day and un-f*cking a completely f*cked cable run. I was sitting on the top of a 12 foot ladder with my head and arms in the ceiling talking to someone. my friend paused and worried about disturbing me. he thought that this particular job had driven me around the bend and I was talking to myself in the celing . maybe ya' had to have been there...

No, but if it happened only recently then you were better off handling it all yourself.

Actually I think I'd rather have a crew that just followed instructions verbatim; though I've never done specifically what you mentioned, when I'm doing a job I want to do everything but don't have enough hands/can't be in 2 places at once.

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

No, but if it happened only recently then you were better off handling it all yourself.

Actually I think I'd rather have a crew that just followed instructions verbatim; though I've never done specifically what you mentioned, when I'm doing a job I want to do everything but don't have enough hands/can't be in 2 places at once.

this was about 5 years ago. you simply can't run cable in 15 foot ceilings by yourself. the only way to come even close on something like that is to use a hydraulic lift, and this project wouldn't have allowed for one.

[recluse]

I'm a New Yorker, so if I see someone talking to themself, they are automatically insane. Even more so if they have a cell phone/bluetooth.