In this day and age of net threats, who on earth is going to expose something to the internet, whereby all processes including the kernel run in a single memory address space (i.e. no concept of rings or protected mode)? It will be a potential security nightmare. I was quite impressed and excited until I saw that news about the memory map.:( We used an older version of vxWorks in my previous job that ran that same way, and just chasing bugs down (that crashed the system hard or even overwrote the onboard flash memory - due to infinite recursion) was a nightmare. I believe current versions of vxWorks have proper memory management/protection....
OS/2 well ahead of its time in 1995, not now.
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I used OS/2 1.3 - Warp between 1993 and 2000 both as a user and a developer with it as a target platform. Although at the top when I switched to Warp (1994), it was streets ahead of Windows (with the exception of NT 3.1/3.5 - but they had heavy resource consumption for the time!), there were still major problems:
1) The SIQ - Truly horrible - just as for Windows 3.0/3.1, it was just far too easy to get the whole system to lockup (basically all PM based apps used a single system input queue, thus if any blocked for long........) 2) Hardware support, though much improved with Warp was still very iffy, especially back in the days of OS/2 2.1, I remember setting up the netware drivers on my desktop - sheets of typed up A4, lots of config.sys hacking etc. 3) Even back then, the moment Windows 95 appeared (irrespective of it's technical merits), the GUI LOOKed ugly compared to Windows 95s.
It was fast and efficient though, I'll say that for it - a kernel written in assembler, rather than C, but that was probably the very same reason that it was inherently non portable apart from the briefly seen PowerPC version and the briefly living OS/2 2.1 SMP ("Special version"). I don't believe they even supported SMP on anything except that OS/2 2.1 build (i.e. they dropped it again for OS/2 Warp 3 and Warp 4 - maybe I'm wrong).
It's not even a case of "you get what you pay for" anymore:
Sadly even the rather good Nod32 (ESET) antivirus scanner that has consistently been shown to be one of the better AV's (fast, effective and light), is now beginning to give problems.
On Sunday I installed the latest (beta) version of "Free Download Manager", a well regarded, open source windows downloader that I've used for months now. Nod32 decided that the uninstaller was malware and deleted it, so if I want to remove it now, I won't be able to via control panel, since the uninstaller has been deleted!
To me it's beginning to look like the AV industry is now very close to having lost the war against malware. I'm seeing lots of false positives from other AV tools as well.
1) It doesn't let you choose where to install the app. 2) It doesn't install it under \Program Files - believe it or not it installs the binaries in the profile directory of the user who did the installation!
Item 2) of course means that for Windows users (like me) who have multiple Windows accounts are absolutely stuck - they can't run the browser except when logged on as that same user who did the installation. For me, because I run as a limited user but login as admin to install software, that means that the limited user account can't access the chrome files, which are stored in the admin profile directory!
Really stupid design mistakes - I've already reported them to Google - I hope they fix it pronto. With that kind of a bug it shouldn't have even made it to beta. Not only that but when you uninstall it - it _doesn't_ uninstall the google updater that it added during the installation process.
As of 18:33 (6:33pm) UK time, it's still down with the same notice - a photo of a yellow construction workers hat and that text.
" Repairs in Progress
The service you're looking for is unavailable at the moment. We'll be back up and running again before long, so please try again soon. Thanks for your patience! "
This has turned into a fiasco. What a shame that such a great piece of software has been so badly let down this way!
Itâ(TM)s just been a bad joke - and has backfired badly. Here at 6pm UK time, in theory the build should be out (since its now 10am in West Coast USA), but unsurprisingly the serverâ(TM)s are DOSâ(TM)ed and unreachable and much of the world that couldâ(TM)ve been downloading (i.e. East of the UK) are now asleep.
Really badly organised Mozilla. Why on earth didnâ(TM)t you publish what time (and time zone) itâ(TM)d be available in.
I've been using static analysis tools since 1993 now and I'm totally convinced of their merits. I've found no compiler that yet comes close to being as capable at finding problems as the best static analysis tools are now.
I develop medical software for cancer treatment professionally (which is keenly watched by the FDA) and thus am exceptionally keen to maintain bugfree code. While static analysis can't guarantee it, it can make a huge difference to code quality and reliability - and yes, to answer the original questioner, yes, they can catch stuff like buffer overruns, pointer abuse, memory leaks etc, and in some cases, resource/locking abuses etc. I will admit that gcc is very good these days, but even it isn't as good as these tools.
In particular I'm a very big fan of Gimpel's PC Lint - which is astonishingly good and astonishly inexpensive.
If you wish to try a demo of it, interactively, try their demo tool at:
Disclaimer: I don't work for any of these companies (Gimpel or Riverblade) but I'm a huge fan of both of their products - I believe they've made more difference to my development than any number of UML tools etc - I tend to dump tools that don't make a real difference to me, and these are the only tools that I've used year in year out...
(Gets off soapbox)
Seriously though - whatever you choose, do investigate static analysis - it really is worth it.
Speaking as a Windows developer, have.Net users not realised they are still "under the hood" indirectly calling Win32? What do they think.Net's framework is calling?
I was very impressed with FF 3 beta 3, but beta 4 seems much much faster even than beta 3. Firefox 3 looks like it'll be really great.
The only downside is as usual, a lot of extension authors need to bump their version checks again - a lot of my extensions that were working with FF 3 beta 3 don't work with beta 4 (due to the version check)
I've been using Visual C++ since 1998, and have tried all 4 compilers since then:
I have to largely agree with many comments.
VC++6, VS 2003, VS 2005, VS 2008.
VC++ 6 was fast and responsive, a pain at times (eg COM and ATL support was still half baked, debugging programs that used COM objects was a pain) but worked well most of the time with excellent help (for it's time anyway).
VC++ 2003 was noticeably slower but not unusably slow but in every other way (except the help system) was greatly better than VC++6 (eg the merged ATL/MFC CStrings etc were a big help!). We had some minor porting issues but nothing big.
VC++ 2005 was a wreck. How on earth they had the nerve to release this I don't know. Even on my quad CPU 2GB RAM system it's unusably slow. The high end features like the static analyser that cost big £'s were a poor shadow of 3rd party tools (eg Gimpel's PC Lint). Just dreadful. Even SP1 has barely helped. The warnings over deprecated unsafe functions were annoying but worthwhile.
VC++ 2008 looks and feels like VC++ 2005 SP2 - many of the original features promised for it have slipped again (just as Vista's killer features did) into the next coming version. It's a bit quicker than VC++ 2005, but nowhere near enough and feels like yet another stop gap.
In short if you've read between the lines, you'll figure I've stopped and use VC++ 2003 still, it seems to be the best compromise of all 4 versions, it's now quick enough on modern hardware to be emminently usable (tho VC++6 still flies) and by checking out many of the options you can turn on some of the compliance stuff (eg for scope, exception behaviour etc), combine that with the rather great WTL library and a great value static analyser (PC Lint) that is state of the art, and I reckon you've got the best MS based environment for native Win32 (C/C++) Windows developing these days.
Plus if any of you have tried Visual Studio Team System for SCM, you'll know it's a nightmare. It's been around since 2005, and only now have they boasted that in the 2008 version can you actually lock a file out for changes to prevent multiple changes to a file concurrently. When I saw that in the upcoming features in 2008, I couldn't help but laugh. Microsoft surely were having a joke... But no, I asked a workmate who uses the tool (against his better judgement) only to discover it's true - with the 2005 version multiple people can lock a checkout a file concurrently - predictably the source base he was working on, was a total mess at times..
Thanks for someone finally making a serious post, Steve. I've suffered Grand Mal epilepsy since 1987, and your comments are right on the money. Fortunately I rarely have seizures these days, but it has taken a long time for things to stabilise. They are truly debilitating.
Disclaimer - I have no connection with Gimpel (http://www.gimpel.com), but their tool PC-Lint is very good and quite cheap. I swear by it (not at it!). It's the best development tool I've bought, IMHO. The people at the forum are generally very handy. In case you're not aware it's a very powerful static analyser.
It can find a significant number of memory "abuses" in version 8 - if you get access to it/buy a copy, ensure you switch on at least the following warnings in your lint options file:
Also if you have the high end version of Visual Studio 2005 (Team Edition For Software Developers is the only one that has it), have a look at its/analyze command line option (aka PreFast). This provides vaguely lint like static analysis and might be of some help - although I've found it to be pretty poor compared to PC Lint.
I've tried the betas and the release candidates as fresh installs on a 3GHz hyperthreaded Xeon with 160GB drive, Quadro workstation GPU and 2 GB RAM as fresh installs each time (i.e. in theory the optimal scenario) I'm massively underwhelmed. It's been so slow. The best performance rating I got was a 3 and the OS was painfully slow by comparison to XP Pro on the same hardware, really laggy.
Combine that with the fact that they've changed how you reach/do things (eg network setup etc) - more radically than anything since Windows 95 and it makes the whole process too much like hardwork.
The whole UAC thing is a nice idea but poorly implemented - as many have said, by running all accounts as limited users on XP Pro with antivirus and firewalls etc, you can get much the same effect - I know I do. The weakness with UAC though is the fact that before long people via social engineering get used to clicking Yes every time priviledge elevation is requested, and lo and behold the box is "owned" again. Why can't they do it ala Unix...
Having used Vista as a user and Win32 developer since beta 1, I'm very unimpressed. I've yet to meet more than a handful of people who've used it who are even slightly impressed by it.
I'm betaing Vista - have been since beta 1. I've not been impressed. I am a huge fan of Linux and have grown steadily to be impressed by XP in general (provided you set it up carefully - i.e. an anti virus, anti spyware and have all users run as Limited Users not admins etc). I beta'ed XP also - back in the summer of 2001, and was really impressed by it then - I had the urge to rush out and buy it the moment it was released.
The exact opposite has been the case with Vista - I've been massively underwhelmed and I suspect many others will be also.
- It's SLOOOOOOOOW - even on a 2GB RAM system with a Hyperthreaded 3 GHz Xeon. - They've moved everything around - the old places you used to go to change settings, change networks etc are completely changed. Parts of the maintenance/setup process have been reworked more than anything since Windows 95! This is just gonna cause a lot of wasted time as a lot of people have to relearn an OS they thought they knew well. - The UAC stuff is just a pain - I can imagine users quickly "getting used to it" and just clicking OK always - thus negating any security it provides - far better to stick with the old method - run everything as a limited user and then either log in as administrator or use a "runas" prompt to open an admin type shell to briefly run an admin level task (ala su etc in Unix).
I am (?have been until now?) a big Mandrake fan One of the great things about Mandrake for me has been how up to date it has been generally... SuSE also prides itself on being up to date. That said though, after the release of the 2005 Ltd Edition (i.e. what would have been Mandrake 10.2, as currently in beta/rc testing), there will then only be released builds annually? An awful lot happens in the Linux/GNU community in one year... This to me seems a big step backwards (yes I know you can keep up to dateish via web downloads - but it's not practical for all users). Potentially I can see Mandrake becoming very out of date... After all even Mandrake 10.2/2005 Ltd Ed is already out of date - KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.8..... and it's not even out yet... Sorry to sound negative, but I'm not convinced this is a good move... Mike
Slashdot Mirror
In this day and age of net threats, who on earth is going to expose something to the internet, whereby all processes including the kernel run in a single memory address space (i.e. no concept of rings or protected mode)? :(
It will be a potential security nightmare. I was quite impressed and excited until I saw that news about the memory map.
We used an older version of vxWorks in my previous job that ran that same way, and just chasing bugs down (that crashed the system hard or even overwrote the onboard flash memory - due to infinite recursion) was a nightmare. I believe current versions of vxWorks have proper memory management/protection....
I used OS/2 1.3 - Warp between 1993 and 2000 both as a user and a developer with it as a target platform. Although at the top when I switched to Warp (1994), it was streets ahead of Windows (with the exception of NT 3.1/3.5 - but they had heavy resource consumption for the time!), there were still major problems:
1) The SIQ - Truly horrible - just as for Windows 3.0/3.1, it was just far too easy to get the whole system to lockup (basically all PM based apps used a single system input queue, thus if any blocked for long........)
2) Hardware support, though much improved with Warp was still very iffy, especially back in the days of OS/2 2.1, I remember setting up the netware drivers on my desktop - sheets of typed up A4, lots of config.sys hacking etc.
3) Even back then, the moment Windows 95 appeared (irrespective of it's technical merits), the GUI LOOKed ugly compared to Windows 95s.
It was fast and efficient though, I'll say that for it - a kernel written in assembler, rather than C, but that was probably the very same reason that it was inherently non portable apart from the briefly seen PowerPC version and the briefly living OS/2 2.1 SMP ("Special version"). I don't believe they even supported SMP on anything except that OS/2 2.1 build (i.e. they dropped it again for OS/2 Warp 3 and Warp 4 - maybe I'm wrong).
It's not even a case of "you get what you pay for" anymore:
Sadly even the rather good Nod32 (ESET) antivirus scanner that has consistently been shown to be one of the better AV's (fast, effective and light), is now beginning to give problems.
On Sunday I installed the latest (beta) version of "Free Download Manager", a well regarded, open source windows downloader that I've used for months now. Nod32 decided that the uninstaller was malware and deleted it, so if I want to remove it now, I won't be able to via control panel, since the uninstaller has been deleted!
To me it's beginning to look like the AV industry is now very close to having lost the war against malware. I'm seeing lots of false positives from other AV tools as well.
Mike
I was underwhelmed myself...
They've done a BAD job of the installer:
1) It doesn't let you choose where to install the app.
2) It doesn't install it under \Program Files - believe it or not it installs the binaries in the profile directory of the user who did the installation!
Item 2) of course means that for Windows users (like me) who have multiple Windows accounts are absolutely stuck - they can't run the browser except when logged on as that same user who did the installation. For me, because I run as a limited user but login as admin to install software, that means that the limited user account can't access the chrome files, which are stored in the admin profile directory!
Really stupid design mistakes - I've already reported them to Google - I hope they fix it pronto. With that kind of a bug it shouldn't have even made it to beta.
Not only that but when you uninstall it - it _doesn't_ uninstall the google updater that it added during the installation process.
Not impressed.
Mike
After all the PC keyboard and hardware are IBMs design. How can Microsoft possibly thus patent that?
Mike
As of 18:33 (6:33pm) UK time, it's still down with the same notice - a photo of a yellow construction workers hat and that text.
"
Repairs in Progress
The service you're looking for is unavailable at the moment. We'll be back up and running again before long, so please try again soon. Thanks for your patience!
"
This has turned into a fiasco. What a shame that such a great piece of software has been so badly let down this way!
Mike
Itâ(TM)s just been a bad joke - and has backfired badly. Here at 6pm UK time, in theory the build should be out (since its now 10am in West Coast USA), but unsurprisingly the serverâ(TM)s are DOSâ(TM)ed and unreachable and much of the world that couldâ(TM)ve been downloading (i.e. East of the UK) are now asleep.
Really badly organised Mozilla. Why on earth didnâ(TM)t you publish what time (and time zone) itâ(TM)d be available in.
Mike
I've been using static analysis tools since 1993 now and I'm totally convinced of their merits. I've found no compiler that yet comes close to being as capable at finding problems as the best static analysis tools are now.
I develop medical software for cancer treatment professionally (which is keenly watched by the FDA) and thus am exceptionally keen to maintain bugfree code. While static analysis can't guarantee it, it can make a huge difference to code quality and reliability - and yes, to answer the original questioner, yes, they can catch stuff like buffer overruns, pointer abuse, memory leaks etc, and in some cases, resource/locking abuses etc. I will admit that gcc is very good these days, but even it isn't as good as these tools.
In particular I'm a very big fan of Gimpel's PC Lint - which is astonishingly good and astonishly inexpensive.
If you wish to try a demo of it, interactively, try their demo tool at:
http://www.gimpel-online.com/OnlineTesting.html
Also, they do a monthly "bug of the month" in a code sample - see whether your compiler can spot the issue/potential issue:
http://www.gimpel.com/html/bugs.htm
For anyone integrating it into Visual C++ (PC Lint is a command line tool), take a look at Riverblade's Visual Lint also:
http://www.riverblade.co.uk/
Disclaimer: I don't work for any of these companies (Gimpel or Riverblade) but I'm a huge fan of both of their products - I believe they've made more difference to my development than any number of UML tools etc - I tend to dump tools that don't make a real difference to me, and these are the only tools that I've used year in year out...
(Gets off soapbox)
Seriously though - whatever you choose, do investigate static analysis - it really is worth it.
Speaking as a Windows developer, have .Net users not realised they are still "under the hood" indirectly calling Win32? .Net's framework is calling?
What do they think
Trust me as someone who suffers from it, it's no act.
I'd like to say a big f**k you to whoever did this.
Seizures are horrible and I wouldn't wish one on my worst enemy.
I was very impressed with FF 3 beta 3, but beta 4 seems much much faster even than beta 3. Firefox 3 looks like it'll be really great.
The only downside is as usual, a lot of extension authors need to bump their version checks again - a lot of my extensions that were working with FF 3 beta 3 don't work with beta 4 (due to the version check)
Mike
I've been using Visual C++ since 1998, and have tried all 4 compilers since then:
I have to largely agree with many comments.
VC++6, VS 2003, VS 2005, VS 2008.
VC++ 6 was fast and responsive, a pain at times (eg COM and ATL support was still half baked, debugging programs that used COM objects was a pain) but worked well most of the time with excellent help (for it's time anyway).
VC++ 2003 was noticeably slower but not unusably slow but in every other way (except the help system) was greatly better than VC++6 (eg the merged ATL/MFC CStrings etc were a big help!). We had some minor porting issues but nothing big.
VC++ 2005 was a wreck. How on earth they had the nerve to release this I don't know. Even on my quad CPU 2GB RAM system it's unusably slow. The high end features like the static analyser that cost big £'s were a poor shadow of 3rd party tools (eg Gimpel's PC Lint). Just dreadful. Even SP1 has barely helped. The warnings over deprecated unsafe functions were annoying but worthwhile.
VC++ 2008 looks and feels like VC++ 2005 SP2 - many of the original features promised for it have slipped again (just as Vista's killer features did) into the next coming version. It's a bit quicker than VC++ 2005, but nowhere near enough and feels like yet another stop gap.
In short if you've read between the lines, you'll figure I've stopped and use VC++ 2003 still, it seems to be the best compromise of all 4 versions, it's now quick enough on modern hardware to be emminently usable (tho VC++6 still flies) and by checking out many of the options you can turn on some of the compliance stuff (eg for scope, exception behaviour etc), combine that with the rather great WTL library and a great value static analyser (PC Lint) that is state of the art, and I reckon you've got the best MS based environment for native Win32 (C/C++) Windows developing these days.
Plus if any of you have tried Visual Studio Team System for SCM, you'll know it's a nightmare. It's been around since 2005, and only now have they boasted that in the 2008 version can you actually lock a file out for changes to prevent multiple changes to a file concurrently.
When I saw that in the upcoming features in 2008, I couldn't help but laugh. Microsoft surely were having a joke... But no, I asked a workmate who uses the tool (against his better judgement) only to discover it's true - with the 2005 version multiple people can lock a checkout a file concurrently - predictably the source base he was working on, was a total mess at times..
Great stuff linker3000 - I'm in West Sussex and it's pleasing to hear of such things!
Did he not give a s**t about the risk of killing people on route.
Fuck him.
Check your facts - I installed this on Saturday. The service pack doesn't upgrade IE to IE7, nor does it upgrade the version of media player.
That is so in beta 1 - whether it may change in the final release I don't know
Mike
Thanks for someone finally making a serious post, Steve. I've suffered Grand Mal epilepsy since 1987, and your comments are right on the money. Fortunately I rarely have seizures these days, but it has taken a long time for things to stabilise. They are truly debilitating.
Mike
Disclaimer - I have no connection with Gimpel (http://www.gimpel.com), but their tool PC-Lint is very good and quite cheap. I swear by it (not at it!). It's the best development tool I've bought, IMHO. The people at the forum are generally very handy. In case you're not aware it's a very powerful static analyser.
/analyze command line option (aka PreFast). This provides vaguely lint like static analysis and might be of some help - although I've found it to be pretty poor compared to PC Lint.
It can find a significant number of memory "abuses" in version 8 - if you get access to it/buy a copy, ensure you switch on at least the following warnings in your lint options file:
415
416
419
420
421
423
429
433
661
662
669
670
672
796
797
803
804
449
Also if you have the high end version of Visual Studio 2005 (Team Edition For Software Developers is the only one that has it), have a look at its
Mike
You say you need to 2GB to use it well?
On the kit I tried (very high end) - it didn't even run well in 2GB!
I've tried the betas and the release candidates as fresh installs on a 3GHz hyperthreaded Xeon with 160GB drive, Quadro workstation GPU and 2 GB RAM as fresh installs each time (i.e. in theory the optimal scenario)
I'm massively underwhelmed. It's been so slow. The best performance rating I got was a 3 and the OS was painfully slow by comparison to XP Pro on the same hardware, really laggy.
Combine that with the fact that they've changed how you reach/do things (eg network setup etc) - more radically than anything since Windows 95 and it makes the whole process too much like hardwork.
The whole UAC thing is a nice idea but poorly implemented - as many have said, by running all accounts as limited users on XP Pro with antivirus and firewalls etc, you can get much the same effect - I know I do. The weakness with UAC though is the fact that before long people via social engineering get used to clicking Yes every time priviledge elevation is requested, and lo and behold the box is "owned" again.
Why can't they do it ala Unix...
Mike
Having used Vista as a user and Win32 developer since beta 1, I'm very unimpressed. I've yet to meet more than a handful of people who've used it who are even slightly impressed by it.
Mike
I'm betaing Vista - have been since beta 1. I've not been impressed. I am a huge fan of Linux and have grown steadily to be impressed by XP in general (provided you set it up carefully - i.e. an anti virus, anti spyware and have all users run as Limited Users not admins etc). I beta'ed XP also - back in the summer of 2001, and was really impressed by it then - I had the urge to rush out and buy it the moment it was released.
The exact opposite has been the case with Vista - I've been massively underwhelmed and I suspect many others will be also.
- It's SLOOOOOOOOW - even on a 2GB RAM system with a Hyperthreaded 3 GHz Xeon.
- They've moved everything around - the old places you used to go to change settings, change networks etc are completely changed. Parts of the maintenance/setup process have been reworked more than anything since Windows 95! This is just gonna cause a lot of wasted time as a lot of people have to relearn an OS they thought they knew well.
- The UAC stuff is just a pain - I can imagine users quickly "getting used to it" and just clicking OK always - thus negating any security it provides - far better to stick with the old method - run everything as a limited user and then either log in as administrator or use a "runas" prompt to open an admin type shell to briefly run an admin level task (ala su etc in Unix).
I am (?have been until now?) a big Mandrake fan
One of the great things about Mandrake for me has been how up to date it has been generally...
SuSE also prides itself on being up to date. That said though, after the release of the 2005 Ltd Edition (i.e. what would have been Mandrake 10.2,
as currently in beta/rc testing), there will then only be released builds annually? An awful lot
happens in the Linux/GNU community in one year...
This to me seems a big step backwards (yes I know you can keep up to dateish via web downloads - but it's not practical for all users).
Potentially I can see Mandrake becoming very out of date...
After all even Mandrake 10.2/2005 Ltd Ed is already out of date - KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.8..... and it's not even out yet...
Sorry to sound negative, but I'm not convinced this is a good move...
Mike
One I forgot:
k .h tml
A free version of a bounds checker type tool for Win32 (ala Electric fence) - which checks read and writes on array bounds via hardware:
HeapCheck
http://www.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/HeapChec
For DOS/Windows/OS2 etc:
h tm)
Gimpel Software's:
PC Lint (cheapish)
Flexelint (pricier)
Freeware (checks GDI leaks)
bear.exe (http://www.geocities.com/the_real_sz/misc/bear_.
gdiobj.exe (http://www.fengyuan.com)
Linux:
Electric Fence (free)
Valgrind (free)
Splint (free)
Books:
John Robbins books on debugging. Concentrates on Win 32 but useful ideas wise for any x86 platform.
And now the gags...
Tools I've not found helpful.....
Rational Rose!
Microsoft's beloved COM!