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New Way To Grade Decay of Computer Installations
skojt writes: "I saw this link in Dr Dobb's Journal (the paper edition) about the
behaviour of a slowly decaying computer installation. It refers to a Windows installation, but as the author writes, 'But there will shortly be ports to Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unices; we are confident these OSes are just as prone.'"
I see BSOD's on Win2k all the time, Win2k Pro and Win2k Server/ Advanced Server. There are a couple of easy ways to do it if you search on Google, but when I see it, it is because of my own doing (i.e. not following directions).
I have seen Win2k BSOD when explorer froze, when I plugged in 75 hard disks at once (JBODs), and when working the IO really hard as well.
Still, it is better than NT, but still not perfect.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sure it will have it's problems, but right now it does not. More users and more bad or poorly written apps will cause bloat and decay.
/opt/whatever, then add the /opt/whatever/lib path to ld.so.conf. This way I can check out new apps, and if they don't make the grade, I just rm -rf the whole directory. My whole system has stayed pretty clean this way.
I agree; which is part of the reason I quit using Mandrake and rolled my own LFS system. Anything I'm not sure about I make install to
--Jon
Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
ls -ld ~/.* | wc -l
Dot files. Loads of them. Four from RealPlayer, six from Gnome, five from Pine, three from Sawfish, and three NFS lock files, among a total of 140 entries.
Good thing Linux doesn't have a registry. It might get cluttered.
--Patrick
On my XP box Real One put "eventsvc.exe" in the run key of my registry, I removed it. Every time I run Real One it puts it back. This thing is even more anoying than the start center, it just sits in the background until another app steals one of it's file associations. It then pops up a little box saying "this app has stolen my media type". The box has two options, "OK" and "remind me later", there isn't even an X in the corner to close it, you have to use alt + F4. If you don't say OK and this stupid thing is running it will pester you again every 15 minutes or so. You have to kill the process and then remove it from the registry (or use msconfig).
This IMO is the worst kind of cruft. Maybe I want to use Winamp for MPEG 1 audio! Please fuck off!
This piece of junk just sits in the background sucking up a couple megs of ram and using some cpu time when it needs to check that nothing else is moving in on it's turff. The fact that I am playing WC3 when it decides to do this, isn't relevant, Real must protect thier position as the number one most anoying piece of shit in existence. God only know how many memory leaks and all round crappy code is contained in this thing.
Real guys, last time I checked it was still My Computer. Leave your bullshit at the door.
MacOS X in theory is easier still than MacOS 9, with its application "packages" containing all you need to throw away. Plus maybe some files in the Preferences folder, but they're harmless. With Carbon apps (esp. games) that support MacOS 9 it's a little more complicated.
The extensions management you mention is a little more difficult than you imply, but it's not nigh-impossible to do by hand like the Windows Registry is. A trick you didn't mention is to use the MacOS file labels (colors) on known-good extensions, which makes it easier to find newly inserted or modified items.
Techtool is an excellent utility for zapping the PRAM (a trick you missed) as well as for rebuilding the desktop. DiskWarrior cleans up cruft in your directory structure (HFS/HFS+).
When I was stuck using Windows machines at work, I made frequent use of RegClean, Norton Utilities, and scanreg /fix to keep things livable. Often the same registry errors would return over and over again. Like a mold.
To sum up, I preferred MacOS 9 when I was using it, but MacOS X is so much better still.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
The utter dependence on the registry for all things COM is what makes Windows more fragile than most other systems. After several months or years of installing, uninstalling and updating software, the registry is full of dangling CLSIDs, type libraries, ProgIDs etc. Worse, the versioning system can get completely screwed up with several generations of ActiveX DLLs co-existing and periodically getting re-registered by their respective parent apps. VB developers have a particularly nasty experience, since by default VB re-generates all the CLSIDs of COM objects each time a project is built, without usually bothering to clean up the previous ones. So over time the CLSID subtree is littered with orphaned COM class debris.
.NET architecture promises to eliminate much of this mess, since class installation and activation is FS based like Java, and not registry-based like COM. Only time will tell if it turns out being any better, though.
Right now my work system (W2K) most of the time takes forever to pop up the context menu on files in Windows Explorer. It didn't always do it, but I can't really identify a major change to the system that precipitated that. No doubt some of the shell extensions that are being activated each time are looking for "stuff" that they're either not finding, are being slowed down by other components that they're relying on, or experiencing some other type of timeout. The menu can take 30 seconds or more to pop up. Similarly, some types of file operations take equally long: deleting a file from within Windows Explorer can take over half a minute, half of that time waiting for the confirmation dialog, the other half waiting for the "deleting file" animation dialog to quit. These are all most likely COM related problems that could probably easily be fixed--if you know what you're looking for. Unfortunately, a trace on registry operations during a context menu popup generates so much output as to be virtually useless.
Things like these all add up to make the Windows user experience increasingly frustrating with advancing time, particularly because of the seeming intractability of the problems. The new
Doing this with software such as Quicktime is also rebellious, as it sends the word to Apple that *hey your software is worthwhile to me*. It states that *I don't succumb to predatory bundle-it-with-the-OS techniques* and most importantly *I support capitalism and the free market*.
Do you get to do that by playing with the calendar?
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
Three differnet Linux distros I tried to get to liking. Each and every time, "portinstall" on FreeBSD keeps me going back to it.
I really am glad to see Gentoo starting to implement a similar system. Having that ports tree enables me to keep my system up to date, without lingering dependencies, and without having to go racing out to buy the latest CD.
Personally, I think the distros like the fact that RPM is such a piece of crap as it ensures that buying a new CD is FAR easier than just upgrading what you have from the Net.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.