Web Excursions 2021-07-26
The importance of journalism in disasters; how to decipher the output of `free` command; what’s the work load of DistroWatch like.
灾难报道的意义
对于灾区里面的人来说,媒体报道的意义是什么。
第一,是提高受灾人群的可见度(visibility)
接下来发生在其他县城、乡镇、农村的水灾,可见度就要差很多,而发生在那些地方的灾难并不比郑州轻微。
《南方周末》、《三联生活周刊》、《凤凰周刊》、《时尚先生》等媒体都有不错的报道出街,对于平衡城乡受灾人口在可见度方面的差距很有帮助
第二,是解释原因:到底发生了什么?为什么会遭受这样的灾难
在这方面,《新京报》对“千年一遇”的解释,红星新闻和《南方周末》对红色预警与“三停”措施的报道,澎湃新闻对京广路隧道救援情况的采访,都是重要的文章。
但是,当这些追问会碰触到具体的责任问题时,机构媒体会面临实际的限制。
第三,是持续关注救援和灾后重建。
监督暴雨红色预警之后的措施是否能够被执行,地铁停运机制是否有改进,京广隧道是否有调整,等等。
对于灾区之外的人来说,媒体的报道意味着什么。
第一,是提供及时更新的信息,回应人们的关切
避免灾难在其他的地方重演。
引出一个更深层气候变化。
此次《财经》和澎湃新闻的报道都有专文涉及此话题,但总体来说,这个话题在中国媒体上的能见度还很低。
“气候正义”:造成气候变化的人,却不一定是最直接受到气候变化影响的人;而那些在气候灾害中处境最惨的人,可能其实并没有对气候变化产生太多的影响。
2012年,北京暴雨的5天后,政府公布了遇难者名单,央视主播曾经逐个在新闻中念出那些名字。这一次,我们能等到同样的播报吗?
Questions and answers: Making sense of memory statistics in Linux
When the system reports it is using 2GB of memory this indicates that
the operating system and its applications are currently taking up 2GB of RAM which cannot be used for anything else.
The operating system, and any applications you hope to run, can see and consume all of the remaining memory.
You do not need to do anything to help this process.
Running the command
free --human --giga
from the command line will display information on memory consumption and availability in a relatively easy to read format.total: This is the physical amount of RAM the OS can see.
used: indicates how much of memory is currently being used.
This used memory cannot be used for anything else, it is effectively "locked in".
free: the amount of RAM not being used for anything at all.
It is entirely empty and can be gobbled up by a new program at a moment's notice.
shared: not particularly interesting to us.
It's usually an indication of how much memory is used by services like temporary filesystems.
We can typically ignore the shared field for all practical purposes.
buff/cache: hows how much memory is holding copies of files which are also stored elsewhere, such as on the disk drive.
In the event we open an application which needs more memory than is currently free, Linux will replace files it has in the cache with the new application's data.
available: how much data can be consumed right now by an application which needs more memory.
The difference between free and available.
When memory is free there effectively isn't anything in it; the RAM isn't being used for anything at all. There is no program data and there are no copies of files in free memory.
Memory which is available may have something in it, like a cached file, but cached files can be dropped and the space can be used for something else at any time.
An Interview With Jesse Smith of DistroWatch
It can take an hour to process and publish a single new release.
We usually do about two of those a day, on average.
Plus writing articles, answering questions, and adding new projects to our database.
We can get a few dozen to a few hundred e-mails and notifications a day, almost every day.
People interested in making a DistroWatch-like website usually aren't prepared for that kind of time commitment.
As a result we tend not to see many websites trying to do the same thing.