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Showing posts from March, 2021

Task Manager’s CPU numbers are all but meaningless

 When Task Manager tells you that overall CPU is 100%, you’d be led to believe that the system is working as hard as it can and has no additional processing capacity available. And when Task Manager reports a process’ CPU at 40%, intuitively you believe that the process is consuming 40% of the system’s total available CPU capacity. Those were reasonably accurate interpretations through Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. But with its redesign first introduced in Windows 8, Task Manager’s Processes and Performance tabs now rely on different metrics and present numbers that are misleading and that without additional context are completely meaningless. Task Manager’s changes were intended to accommodate advances in chip technology. It is relatively straightforward to determine a processor’s utilization: how much time during a given interval that it spends busy vs. idle (*). Back when CPUs always used to operate at a fixed frequency, simple arithmetic told you how much work a CPU had per

Americans can gather inside without masks or social distancing in certain circumstances

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines Monday designed to ease restrictions for Americans who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The agency’s guidance says those who have received a full course of COVID-19 vaccine may get together with other fully vaccinated individuals in small groups inside their homes without masks or physical distancing. They can visit with unvaccinated people from one other household who are at low risk for severe disease. The guidelines say fully vaccinated people don’t need to quarantine or take a COVID-19 test if they’ve been exposed, unless they’re symptomatic. They should still monitor for symptoms for 14 days even if they're not in quarantine.  “You can visit your grandparents if you’ve been vaccinated and they have been, too,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a White House briefing Monday. “If grandparents have been vaccinated, they can visit their daughter and her family even if  they have not been vaccinated, so l