441. Links to two good articles on windows, piracy and linux.

I don't like the idea of simply posting links to other blogs, but in this case I'll make an exception due to the quality of the articles.

These two articles from 2008 discuss the lack of adoption of linux based on the notion that windows is de facto free (gratis) to most people:
http://autotelic.com/windows_is_free
http://autotelic.com/no_really_-_windows_is_free

I find them well-written and well-reasoned.

And they address the basis of one of the more disparaging (although to some extent true) remarks by people who don't see what the fuss over linux is all about: That we can't get people to use Linux even by giving it away for free.

Anyway.From a more personal POV:

* Having lived in China I definitely agree with the idea that piracy of windows is one biggest problems when it comes to the adoption of free software in the developing world. Not only windows of course -- I could even buy SPSS, Origin and Matlab in my local computer software street stall or my local DVD store (all pirated, of course).

* Having lived in the developing world I also agree that Windows is free in the sense that you can hardly buy a computer without getting a copy of a recent windows version included (whether you want it or not).

* Working at a university -- and having worked at five in total -- I also agree that it's easy enough to get free access to most pieces of proprietary software and since the distinction between Home and Work is a bit fluid in academia, for all intents and purposes I have free access to Office, Windows, Photoshop, SPSS etc.

* And finally, having bought my first computer in as a teenager in 1993 (a 1.8 MHz 386SX, 2 Mb RAM, 28 Mb HDD -- second hand) I also grew up swapping floppies with windows (3.11 FTW!), DOS (the box had 5.0, but got DOS 6 from a class mate), and various pieces of free/shareware that we ordered via mailorder...(or bbs -- but anything over 100 kb took forever). I don't think teens of today look at things much differently from how we did back then.

438. Very briefly: Freeing up RAM (sort of)

After having played around with two virtual machines simultaneous which at some point caused me to use/reserve all of my ram plus a small amount of swap (419 Mb), my desktop has been a bit slower. I don't see any real evidence that it's swapping to and from disk, but the system is much less responsive, e.g. when switching applications.

Note that when you RAM usage goes up, not all of the RAM is actually used in an active sense -- some may be reserved. Another factor to take into account is that you actually DO want to use as much RAM as possible as long as it improves performance, and this is done via caching. What's shown here is simply how to clean that cache. 

So is cleaning that cache a good thing? Well, sometimes. Empirically, it seems like dropping the caches can help if you've been doing something that caused a lot of ram to be used, but which is no longer running. Such as something heavily graphical (e.g. using VMD and rendering something) or a virtual machine.

See e.g. here for a discussion with comments: http://catalin-festila.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/myth-of-dropcaches.html

Anyway.

At the beginning this is how it looked (free -m):

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7991       7488        503          0       1097        379
-/+ buffers/cache:       6011       1980
Swap:        15257        419      14838

To free up the ram cache, do

me@beryllium:~$ sudo su

[sudo] password for me:
root@beryllium:/home/me# sync
root@beryllium:/home/me# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

And when we're done it looks like this:

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7991       3503       4488          0         47        147
-/+ buffers/cache:       3308       4683
Swap:        15257        419      14838

Our swap usage hasn't changed, but the apparent free RAM has increased significantly. And my computer feels snappier.

Often the need to free up RAM is precipitated by the presence of memory leaks though, since these are often manifested by the slow increase in the amount of RAM a program is using. Older versions of gnome-shell (including the one presently used in Wheezy) are known culprits, and ECCE has a tendency to eat up RAM like there's no tomorrow when running for too long (still working on getting hard numbers for it).