Yes, Chrome has always done this. Apparently it saves on the support budget to have a single version of chrome for all users (just like pretty much every other google product).

The DAB bitrate is variable, giving talk radio lesser bitrates, and classical music larger bitrates.

It works because you are using a fraction of the applied power to create a counter force to your source of power.

Remember your old toy, the yoyo? Put it on the floor with the string extended to it's entirety, now pull the string until it's in your hand.

How far did your hand travel? how far did the yoyo travel?

Wrong.

It has to be enabled by an administrator, though.

Even better: get a display with an ambient light sensor.

Slashdot crashes for a day, then upgrades the user id field to a bigint.

at least, that's what happened when comment id (24 bit unsigned) hit the ceiling.

Because coax was so unreliable it would make network admins cry.

In the good ole lan party days, the network would be disrupted every time someone needed to connect or disconnect a pc. Sometimes you had T piece that was a bit faulty and that also nuked the network. And when you had 12 machines on the network, finding the source of the error was even harder.

Performance was only a secondary reason for it's demise.

So they are called Junk characters because they are used to portrait a naked mans penis? What a coincidence :)

"You obviously don't understand memory access design. It's all about feeding the CPU. There are two sorts of relationships we can use to make this work: temporal and sequential.

Hard drives are the largest-capacity storage (well unless you want to go to tape). But they're slow. Even the fastest high-RPM SCSI or SATA drives are SLOW compared to what's above them. This is mitigated, somewhat, by putting some cache memory on the drive's controller board itself. Still, having to hit the hard drive for information is, as you say, a slowdown. Same goes for external storage (Optical media, USB media, etc).

So you try to keep as much information as possible in RAM (next step up). Hitting RAM is less expensive than hitting the H/D in terms of a performance hit. In the original days of computing (up until the 486DX line for Intel CPUs), RAM and CPU operated on a 1:1 clock speed match, so that was that.

Once you factor in the clock multiplier of later CPU's, even the fastest RAM available today can't keep from starving the CPU. So we add in cache - L3, L2, and L1. the 486 implemented 8KB (yeah a whole 8K, wow!) in order to keep itself from starving. L3 is the slowest, but largest, L2 is faster still but smaller, and L1's the smallest of all, but the fastest because it is literally on the same die as the CPU. That distinction is important, and in general you'll find that a slower CPU with more L1 Cache will benchmark better than a faster CPU with less.

The CPU looks for what it wants as follows:
- I want something. Is it in L1? Nope.
- Is it in L2? Nope.
- Is it in L3? Nope.
- Is it in RAM? Nope.
- Is it in the H/D Cache? (helps avoid spin-up and seek times) Nope.
- Crap, it's on the H/D. Big performance hit.

Everything except for the L1 check, technically, was a performance it. The reason for pre-caching things (based on temporal and sequential relationships) is all about predicting and getting what will be needed next into the fastest available place.

Yes, I suppose you can run an entire system where it all goes into RAM, and you'll see it as more responsive simply because you never have to touch the hard drive. But turning off HDD caching is a BAD idea. It makes cache misses that much more expensive because then, instead of having even the chance of finding what you needed in RAM or in the HD's onboard cache, you have to wait for the H/D to spin up and seek to the right sector."

FTFY :)

My current* windows 7 stats say:
Total: 2046MB
Used: 1.26GB
Cache: 634MB
Available: 743MB
Free: 132MB

So used RAM does not include cache. And 'available' is a nice way of telling grandma that RAM used for cache is actually available to apps.

* not a snapshot, i can't type that fast :)

Are you by any chance related to any of these guys? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8fbrUjjivw

Most games on the Quake 3 engine have that. 125 fps was the sweet spot.

All the parking ticket dispensers in copenhagen also bugged out. http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.berlingske.dk%2Fkoebenhavn%2Fparkeringsautomater-afviser-dankort&sl=da&tl=en

I got mod points, but I couldn't find +1 disturbing.

The mods agree. That's not even remotely plausible, this being slashdot and all.