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So basically it took how many years for MS to re-implement grep ?

Not as many as you're implying. (Okay, I don't when findstr showed up, but that's 'find' in an installation of MS-DOS 6.22. That's as far back as I have media for.)

It's not installed by default on either WinXP or Vista.

What default installation are you using? I just did a default installation of XP (based on a CD image with SP2 included) -- not that there was really anything in the installation that lets you choose components -- and I have find and findstr (opening the command prompt, running find and findstr, and taking that screenshot were the first things I did when I got to the desktop).

So basically it took how many years for MS to re-implement grep ?

Not as many as you're implying. (Okay, I don't when findstr showed up, but that's 'find' in an installation of MS-DOS 6.22. That's as far back as I have media for.)

It's not installed by default on either WinXP or Vista.

What default installation are you using? I just did a default installation of XP (based on a CD image with SP2 included) -- not that there was really anything in the installation that lets you choose components -- and I have find and findstr (opening the command prompt, running find and findstr, and taking that screenshot were the first things I did when I got to the desktop).

I don't know what it is, but Firefox memory use seems to vary dramatically between people.

This is a fun screenshot of my task manager back in the days of either Firefox 1 or 1.5, of me closing Firefox and my virtual memory use dropping about a gigabyte. (This was a time when I only had 512 MB of RAM.) At the time, I regularly had to restart Firefox (maybe once a day, maybe once every couple days, it's been a while) because its absurd memory demands would slow it to a crawl.

Things have improved dramatically, but I would still say FF uses 300 MB+ typically for me.

At the risk of being sued by Viacom and/or having my hosting plan overrun... Stephen Colbert did an amusing segment on that awful packaging and, yes, the people who have injured themselves. (5.6 MB XviD download; sorry the audio and video are ever so slightly out of sync.)

So is your hyperbole. I've had FF -- with 20 extensions -- running for about 6 hours now, and currently have 5 tabs open.

I have 10 tabs open in one window now (I've had a lot more open) and FF running for a while with 8 extensions with 2 disabled.

Windows task manager reports 390 MB of "mem usage". The "VM size" is 953 MB.

I took a screenshot a couple summers ago when I was getting really frustrated with FF mem usage before I found out about some setting in about:config that reduces mem usage by quite a bit. At the time I had less RAM, and my system was pretty swappy, and FF was by far the biggest offender; about once a day I'd have to exit and open it back up. Even if I had exactly the same tabs open, the memory use would be a fraction of what it was before exiting. Keeping in mind that this was at least one and possibly two major releases behind (so either 1.0 or 1.5), this screenshot shows the Windows task manager's performance tab after a fairly typical session of FF. At the point in the graph marked, I quit Firefox. 55 seconds later the process finally had exited, and my page file usage had dropped by about 1.3 GB.

It's not hyperbole.

Don't verb that adjective! It bad's the language.

I think it weirds.

(BTW, no apostrophe. That bads the language. ;-))

Haven't we been sending rockets up into space for quite some time now. I'd think the fundementals should be down pretty pat now, the time for spectacular failures has past.

11 years ago we had been sending rockets up for quite some time too, and yet there was still the little Ariane 5 thing. I have seen two suborbital rocket launches; the second one disintegrated at T+9. (There was another even smaller rocket that I saw go up too; that one failed as well. That makes 2/3 failures.)

Rocket science is still a tricky business.

Another rendering bug: lists are indented so that the numbers stick out to the left. This alone isn't a bad thing, but to do it you need to indent non-lists more (with respect to, say, the green headings). Currently this causes problems. One instance is in the comments display, where the indentation is already very bad, the numbers sticking out into negative padding further decreases intelligability. It also looks pretty bad IMO. A second place where this causes obvious problems is this help page (screenshot). Stuff like that just makes this look unprofessional in my opinion.

Damn it, I screwed up the second link there. That should link to .

Which brings up another possible suggestion. When you put a link in a replay, /. could automatically add the http:/// at the beginning. I pasted in just evanparity.com/..., which /. took as literal and just fed back to the browser (you'll see if you view source). If it had added http:/// that wouldn't have happened.

I don't know if that's the right behavior or not. Maybe a poll, I dunno.

(It also brings up another idea, which is what happens if you put in a www before the address? Let's see: link. *previews* Okay, /. adds the http:/// then. I dunno what the right thing to do is... maybe see if it matches [a-zA-Z0-9].["com"|"org"|"edu"...]? (In some sort of regular expression syntax))

Damn it, I screwed up the second link there. That should link to .

Which brings up another possible suggestion. When you put a link in a replay, /. could automatically add the http:/// at the beginning. I pasted in just evanparity.com/..., which /. took as literal and just fed back to the browser (you'll see if you view source). If it had added http:/// that wouldn't have happened.

I don't know if that's the right behavior or not. Maybe a poll, I dunno.

(It also brings up another idea, which is what happens if you put in a www before the address? Let's see: link. *previews* Okay, /. adds the http:/// then. I dunno what the right thing to do is... maybe see if it matches [a-zA-Z0-9].["com"|"org"|"edu"...]? (In some sort of regular expression syntax))

After using it more, I have a couple other suggestions (or complaints, depending on what tone you want to read it in):

* If you are on a page that doesn't have much content (e.g. the page with *just* this post until someone replies to it) the footer rides too far up, at least running with a height of 1200. (Looks like it'd be the same in 1280x1024 by my estimation.) There should be more vertical space added so that there isn't a couple inches of black at the bottom of the screen; it's distracting.

* No "parent" link when you're replying to a post. I'm pretty sure there used to be one 'cause I went for it instanctively. (So if you wanted to see the parent of the post you're replying to you could get to it with one link, as opposed to two (opening the comment you're replying to directly via the #15469727 link, then parent).)

* Another poster mentions that if you click the sidebar links too fast then the arrows can get out sync with whether the menus are up or down. Minor issue I think, but one someone should take a look at eventually.

* Did there used to be ads above the header? I never noticed them before if so. They'll probably fade from consciousness though. (When I used Opera I would go for a couple months without realizing there were ads. I'd then notice them, be like "oh yeah!" then forget about them the next day for another couple months.)

* I agree with the other posters that the score for comments being right-aligned makes browsing harder. (This *might* be a 'get used to it' thing.)

* There's what I consider an indentation bug. If a comment with a score above the current threshold for showing the full comment is a parent to a comment with a score below the threshold, the indentation is almost non-existant. I posted a screenshot of such a configuration. (I don't want to link to one because moderations can change.) I don't think this is a "get used to it" change.

* I also don't like the spacing between comments. (Assume that all comments in this aren't displayed; you just see the title.) If a top level comment has children, there's a significant space following the last child. But if it doesn't, there's no space. Again, a screenshot (and hastily added and barely-readable comments) shows what I mean. At a glance, it looks like that chunk of four comments in the middle are all part of the same thread. I don't think this is a "get used to it" change.

I don't want to sound too negative, because I think the change is okay overall, but it's harder to find nitpicks than it is things that are good. Though I can say I like the arrows that appear over the links on hover in the nav bar to the left.