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SoftRAM 95 (1996)

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Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)

#51

Post by cturner »

mrtksn wrote: post #48
Teknoman117 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's become my feeling as well. I've always looked at them making a ton of money without needing to start a company and become somewhat envious (none of what I actually enjoy working on seems to be startup material). Then I see two of my friends pursue careers in law after becoming attorneys, and wow, I now think my 9-5 job for a tech giant is a better gig. They're miserable.

Can you elaborate? What's so bad about being an attorney?

Their work life is an unending series of zero-sum games. One path to happiness is to set your life up to minimise your exposure to zero-sum games, this is unavailable to them.

Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)

#52

Post by A_Parr »

jacobush wrote: post #50
angry-sw-dev wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how fast capacity and pricing changed back then, and it still happens today. I remember my first PC clone in 1992 it was a white box with a 40MB hard disk and 2MB of RAM, within 6 months or so I spent $200 on two more 1MB 70ns SIMMs. Our high school had a small lab running Mac IIci's with 8MB of RAM and those things were probably $8K each with display, it was a big deal to get time on them. We had more p…

Onion?!

They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.

Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)

#53

Post by cesarb »

jacobush wrote: post #50
angry-sw-dev wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how fast capacity and pricing changed back then, and it still happens today. I remember my first PC clone in 1992 it was a white box with a 40MB hard disk and 2MB of RAM, within 6 months or so I spent $200 on two more 1MB 70ns SIMMs. Our high school had a small lab running Mac IIci's with 8MB of RAM and those things were probably $8K each with display, it was a big deal to get time on them. We had more p…

Onion?!

AFAIK, "I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time" is a Simpsons reference.

Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)

#54

Post by martin-adams »

I went to university with someone back in 2000 who wrote a piece of software that would do something like giving you faster ram by deliberately filling it up making the OS page out all the other stuff. No idea if it worked.

Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)

#55

Post by raverbashing »

gfosco wrote: post #10
owyn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia describes a bit of this saga [1], and the conclusion was that they were ordered to settle with the FTC and issue rebates and then: Syncronys eventually filed for bankruptcy in July 1998 after releasing other poorly received tools. A large number of its creditors were customers who had not received their rebates for SoftRAM. I wonder what the story was from the company perspective? Sounds like it just was a…

It was a great scam, and I have no doubt it was totally intentional. They still made money. It was a placebo, and yet people would call in to the QVC show and talk about how much faster their computer is after installing it.

Sounds like a lot of products promising "military encryption" (at least around the 90s/early 2000's)

Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)

#57

Post by pizza234 »

m0zg wrote: post #11

I wish someone would do a study like this on e.g. cosmetics which claim to do miraculous things, but in reality rarely do anything at all. In fact I strongly suspect it all comes from the same giant vat of petroleum byproducts and the only difference is the fragrance, color, and emulsifiers.

That may not necessarily cause a significant change.

I believe that for a significant share of the cosmetics users, just doing some gym and adjusting nutrition would improve looks significantly more than cosmetics.

However, gym and diet change take effort, so it's "natural" to look for silver bullets. And looking for silver bullets is not about effects, it's about deluding oneself.

I agree on the theory that cosmetics do little or nothing. I was reading about somebody who claimed that the the general cosmetics effect can be achieved by home-made hydrating cream, and that over the counter cosmetic can't have significant effect, otherwise they would be dangerous (e.g., large amounts of certain vitamins). However, I can't find any reference.

Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)

#58

Post by ygra »

raverbashing wrote: post #55
gfosco wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a great scam, and I have no doubt it was totally intentional. They still made money. It was a placebo, and yet people would call in to the QVC show and talk about how much faster their computer is after installing it.

Sounds like a lot of products promising "military encryption" (at least around the 90s/early 2000's)

Like Kryptochef ... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/the_doghouse_... :)

Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)

#59

Post by bhouston »

Utilities that "optimize" your device experience sell, then as now. Every device ailment you could have likely has an app claiming it is the solution to that problem.

There are currently a ton of Andriod apps that are similar. - Battery Extenders. - Memory Cleaners - Disk Cleaners - Bandwidth Enhancers - Virus Checkers

All of them promise the world with flashy graphics and many do absolutely nothing, or nothing the OS doesn't do automatically.

Storage Cleaners: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=cleaner&c=apps&hl=en

Memory Boosters: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=memory%20booster&c=ap...

Bandwidth Enhancers: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=bandwidth%20enhancer&...

Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)

#60

Post by seriesf »

irth wrote: post #49
seriesf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

squashfs is another linux feature that boils down to compressed swap.

it's a read only compressed file system so I am not so sure about that

It is, though. Under memory pressure the kernel will drop any page that's backed by a file, and then page it back in as needed. "swap" is just making _all_ memory be backed by files.
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