[TheForge] Merry Christmas everybody!

[Andrew Vida]

Jerry Frost wrote:
> ANDY!
> 
> You rascal, where you been? No, don't tell me, I know, you've been 
> buried in books.

	Yes, books... and getting blinder by the day.  I survived finance. 
Sort of easy to learn, but not that easy to do.
> 
> It's good to see you posting, even if it is maybe(?) only for Christmas 
> break. So, how about a little synoopsis of what you've been up to?

	Finance, statistics, accounting, marketing, economics, and so forth. 
Learning a lot, and it has changed my view of much of the world in a 
profound way.  It's quite interesting.  I almost cannot recall what it 
was like to be a complete idiot, now that I'm only half an idiot. :)
> 
> Page file?

	The page file is part of your computer's virtual memory system, which 
allows you to run more programs than you have physical memory for.    If 
you have, e.g., 128M of core memory and load up 256M worth of programs, 
obviously the system cannot have it all in physical memory at once.  So 
as memory fills up, programs that are not executing at the moment get 
part of all of their memory image written to the page file, which is an 
area on the hard disk that acts analogously to core memory.  When the 
program is needed again, some other program's core image is written to 
the page file, then its image is read from disk and written to RAM and 
the program then executes.  This is nice from the standpoint of having a 
large memory, but not so nice from the standpoint of performance. 
Paging in and out takes a lot of time and slows things down.  If you 
have a very large RAM, you can do away with a paging file.  The only 
drawback there is that you cannot exceed the memory capacity, or the 
system will choke due to no place to page.  But if you don't get 
careless, this should be no problem.

Well, I hope Santa was good to everyone.

	-Andy