Doug,
Ah! Now this is the sort of topic we used to discuss: when does
complexity lead to stability and when does it lead to chaos?
One of the remarkable things we discovered in the EVO DEVO group that
met a couple of years back is how the genome has been designed to be
stable under change. It's a bit mysterious to imagine how such a
design might have come about through natural selection. A bit like
wondering how the air traffic control system could have come about
through competition among airlines. It was apparently accomplished
more than a billion years ago because the basic structure of the
genome is very ancient. If I were an "intelligent design" freak,
this would be my candidate for evidence.
But please don't bend my Resource Monitor thread. I am learning a
heluva lot, and I am very happy with it.
Nick
*From:*Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Douglas
Roberts
*Sent:* Thursday, February 07, 2013 8:31 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Windows Resource Monitor
You say that like complexity is a bad thing.
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Owen Densmore <o...@backspaces.net
<mailto:o...@backspaces.net>> wrote:
Just an observation: Things are Getting More Complicated .. when it
comes to computing.
I have two friends, both quite bright in terms of computing. One a
PC, the other a Mac user. Both have what I call Rotten System Syndrom
(RSS). It is NOT a PC vs Mac issue. Its just that things are getting
way too complex. The cloud, backups, sluggish systems, how to
uninstall apps, knowing what's on the computer, knowing whether or not
there is a problem. It goes on and on. The same for Linux, Mac,
Windows.
I'd love to say: Oh, just get a Mac. Or Ubuntu. Or Windows 8.
Nope. It all boils down to systems being so complicated that even
experts have problems.
My solution has been along the lines I mentioned to Nick earlier: in a
phrase -- System Hygiene.
So how do you keep your system clean and nice .. and not even need to
do a clean install?
There are several things that contribute to your system being healthy.
The most important is: know what is on your system and being able to
remove it when no longer needed. Nick hit one one right away: a
system utility like the Task/System monitor he found. So rather than
being a noob, Nick turned out to hit on the right issue right away.
On my system, I always have the "Activity Monitor" running, and yes,
as Josh mentioned, run "purge" often. So I can see visually what's up
with the system. All the Big 3 have these, just look for performance
monitor etc and you'll find it.
Next: after understanding how your system is running, look at your
disk. Again, all the Big 3 have something like Omni Disk Sweeper for
the Mac: a program that lets you see, by size, where everything is on
your disk. I had to scrape my Mini clean recently so that Time
Machine (the incremental backup system) wouldn't fill up immediately.
I found over (blush) 40GB! that I no longer needed! That's a lot of
cruft. And I'm supposed to be hip. But no, cruft happens.
So after (2 days believe it or not) of figuring out what needed to be
done, I applied yet another tool available on all of the Big 3: an
un-installer programmer. There were several available. I deleted a
large amount of the 40GB blush that way. Amazing just how much TeX
takes up on legacy systems.
What next? Well, I still had WAY too much on my system to have a sane
backup/TimeMachine strategy. DiskSweeper again. Man did I have a LOT
of stuff I no longer needed. What to do? I chose a mixed strategy:
- All working docs were put in the cloud. How? Dropbox for a lot of
it. Music? Both Google Drive and iTunes Match. Again available for
the B3. Whew, that was a lot. I had over 80GB music, and now it's
all in the cloud, multiply backed up. Next photos. As mentioned
earlier, Arc and Amazon storage helps there. Mail: IMAP/gmail ..
that's solved (and now with 2-factor authentication). Movies? again,
not too difficult. A larger dropbox might help but I decided on
simply finding .torrent files, so that I can get lost movies in a few
hours if needed, the rest on local storage (redundant, via a NAS, but
really not needed)
- Loose a lot of apps I really don't use. AppZapper was seriously
busy for quite a while. And even then, I had to find out how to keep
my /usr/local clean due to the mixed strategies of Linux/Unix systems
for package management.
So, no Nick, you are not odd having to figure out what to do. And you
hit almost immediately on the important issue: how to monitor your
system. What's running now and what's it doing? Check the net for
what causes these odd daemons/services running. See if you can get by
without that option. Find the cruft. Buy a disk or two for backup
and pushing data not needed 24/7.
It really is that simple: Things have gotten really complex as my two
friends, Mac & PC know. Decide on a strategy. Don't worry if its the
best. It just has to satisfy your requirements. Follow a plan after
deciding on the strategy. Don't be in a hurry, its not easy nor
obvious. Do NOT think you are odd, noob, ignorant, weird, and so on.
As I say, my two friends are very intelligent yet still struggling
with their two systems.
My recommendation is to think out a Machine Hygiene strategy first,
then a plan that implements it. You will have to haunt Best Buy for a
couple of disks, and sign up for Dropbox and/or similar systems.
Decide what data is really, really important, likely using a Disk
Sweeper to find out just what you DO have on your system. Then just
devote a taks a day for a couple of weeks and you'll be fat, dumb and
happy! And not dumb at all.
-- Owen
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Nicholas Thompson
<nickthomp...@earthlink.net <mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
>
> My Dell Studio (yeah, yeah, save the Mac cracks) has been cranky of
late,
> particularly when streaming stuff, and since I am reluctant to put out a
> couple of hundred dollars to have it "tuned up", I have been trying
to see
> what I can do on my own. This has led me to the resource monitor, a
truly
> fascinating little gizmo, a couple of levels down in the Task Manager.
> The help files that are attached to it are pretty lean, and I was
wondering
> if someone knew of a "Resource Monitor for Idiots" source.
>
>
>
> One thing that I immediately learned which was STUNNING was that mac
I-tunes
> has a chum that it loads called AppleRemoteDevicesManager.exe which
grabs 25
> percent of your resources off the top and doesn't let go unless you
whack it
> over the head with a brick. It's purpose is to manage your relationship
> with your mobile devices, but relentlessly demands resources even
though you
> don't have any mobile devices. I think of it as essentially an Apple
> Trojan. (Ok, now, you can make Mac-cracks).
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>
> http://www.cusf.org
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