My personal (own experiences) top 9 list!
on
Gnarly Error Messages
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· Score: 3, Funny
1. MS Excel: Cannot quit Microsoft Excel. [OK]
2. MS Outlook: The COM Transaction Integrator Resync TP service depends on the SnaBase service which failed to start because of the following error: The operation completed successfully.
3. Cannot copy 16SID_~1. The file exists.
4. MS FrontPage: Out of memory while attempting to allocate 0 byte.
5. MS Word: Cannot execute the command since Unknown is busy.
6. MS Windows Update: This update solves the security problem with an uncontrolled buffer in the SNMP service in Windows XP. You can find more information in MS Security Bulletin MS02-006. Download the problem now to stop malicious users from.... bla bla
7. The window Internet Explorer or the ActiveX-control on this page is busy. If you close this window there might be problems. Do you wish to close the window? [OK/Cancel]
8. Winsock Error: -10000. No Error.
9. Dreamweaver: An unnamed file contains an invalid path. [OK]
Hm... I stripped the code from stdio.h, replaced _TCHAR* with char* so the stdafx.h doesn't really do much at all. Then turned on size optimizations and turned off boundary checks etc in the compiler. Still exactly 20992 bytes. Huh?? Browsed the exe and there's full text messages like "ooh something corrupted the state of this program and it cannot safely continue". Which is actually a great addition by Microsoft, but can't you remove such things?:-)
But I guess the.NET compiler has its lower limits where bloat get called feature, just surprising that it seems to compile at the minimum size by default... Or perhaps it use some kind of silly padding so even if there's less code, the physical size isn't reduced.
> > Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled. > WTF?
The war Bugzilla vs Slashdot sadly had this unfortunate outcome. We will have to live with it. But I'm sure you'll find a way to circumvent the problem. But then again, you're circumventing Bugzilla's access protection and you'll surely be a DMCA case.
I really have to say that I find the recent development of Mozilla very inspiring as it brings completely new, unique features to the users. First came integrated popup and advertisement blocking. A simple but effective feature. Then came Type Ahead. Then came link prefetching. Now, in what time span?
I don't know about you, but at least my opinion is that the browser software has suffered from some serious stagnation during the past years. Since Internet Explorer 4.0 and its CSS and "DHTML" (mostly Javascript+CSS) support, I haven't seen much development in the browsers at all. Opera was innovative with mouse gestures, but I think the browser that truly turns this stagnation of browser features that's often limited to things like "slightly better CSS support", etc is Mozilla. I'm not even sure how it's possible for the team to bring so many new features in such a short time. Is it a side effect from being open source with browser enthusiasts working on it day and night? Is it "just" because a very flexible and well written code base? An efficient organization of the mozilla developers? A combination?
IMHO, the changes in Mozilla from a late version such as 1.0 are surely larger (at least more useful) than the changes since Internet Explorer 4.0. Each new version is right now bringing lots of new features. Perhaps that will change in the future, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts for sure.:-)
... provided the page is written for link prefetching explicitly. It doesn't mean you can go to a site like Google News and it will start loading the various articles in the background.
Perhaps that's good, although I'd like to see an option where you can choose to apply the feature to all links leading to HTML pages. This combined with a customizable maximum bandwidth restriction for the prefetching would be nice.
... as in 1.0? That would be a great way to celebrate the world's smallest browser!
"The Phoenix Team is proud to announce that we have finally shrunk the browser to the ultimate size: 0 bytes. Thanks to everyone supporting us in our quest to develop the smallest browser on earth."
Yeah, what I really like with Phoenix is that they both use the slick Orbit skin *and* have it use the standard Windows controls, giving it both a nice and standard look.:-)
Re:Here's why I won't use it
on
Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm using Phoenix 0.3 on Windows right now. Never touched any settings.
- Airmiles loads just fine, including front page. I browsed the site and everything looked to be in order.
- Don't know about Hotmail since I don't have a Hotmail account. Go figure...:-) But how does it not allow you to login? It gave me a friendly "please re-enter your password" when I typed in some bogus info. Does it do that for you, or does something else happen?
- You should tell IGN to see what's the problem with Mozilla-based browsers. Sounds like it wouldn't need a tremendous amount of effort to fix.
- I don't know the procedure, but you should send your employers self serve site to the Mozilla team (try posting it to an appropriate mozilla newsgroup on Google Groups for example - I think they have a public news server at news.mozilla.org as well) so they can look into it. Since the source view shows its almost entirely made of Javascript code, it wouldn't be surprising if they program IE-style with document.all and god knows what. But it could be something else like a bug in Mozilla's rendering engine. Why not notify them to help?
I never said it was final. I don't see a reason to treat this like an unstable version of a software made from scratch since it isn't. It's built from a now rather stable code base so I find that being a very different situtation than you have with the Mozilla milestones.
Re:Phoenix / Thunderbird (Minotaur)
on
Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
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· Score: 2, Funny
Thunderbird is the new name of the Minotaur project. Unlike what some said, they are thus one, and will fill the same function as Phoenix for the mail part.
Hmm... I wonder what IE would be if following this naming convention... Mammon?:-)
Re:Phoenix is cool and all...
on
Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
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· Score: 5, Insightful
- Phoenix is neither in alpha, nor beta stages AFAIK. Note it just says "Phoenix 0.3". I could be wrong here though if I missed anything saying it was alpha/beta.
- Phoenix doesn't follow the Microsoft/AOL-style version inflation. If it would, we would have version 3.0 final by now. Bug fixing and polish will start in the next version. See also the roadmap.
I'm greatly disturbed that this got modded 'Interesting'....
Yeah, he didn't even realize the potential of a Beowulf cluster of electro-shock machines. That'd be far more interesting to watch, don't you think?:-)
this could prove to be very interesting, and could help a lot in future gene therapy.
It could also help archaeologists understand the predecessors of Homo Sapiens better, if the research saying the "redhead gene" might come from neanderthals is true.
I mean, if redheads are slightly more sensitive to pain somehow, I think it is very likely that neanderthals were as well. And this is things we would never know from "common", material studies alone.
Besides, isn't it thought that blondes are making room for brunettes as well, for reasons similar to what you mention?
Now you made Google News post old news as well and we get this chain of Google News from Slashdot News from Earlier Slashdot News (which I'm sure got covered on Google News as well).
Hm... On the other hand... Let's just blame it all on Houston Chronicle which posted the old story first.:-)
dramatically increasing program execution speed several orders of magnitude
Where did you read this?
Also, even with the hardware bottlenecks the Anonymous Coward mentions?
You ask yourself "why not?"... I ask can only ask myself "how?":-) Sure, I see how it's supposed to work in theory with zero bottlenecks, but how it works in practice is a completely different thing.
It's interesting to hear "revolutionizing performance" in the same topic as instruction level fiddling. The only way to give truly "revolutionizing" performance is to do high level optimizations.
When you have your highly optimized C++ code or whatever, *then* you can get down to low-level and start polishing whatever routine/loop you have that's the bottleneck. The compilers of today also usually does a better job than humans at optimizing performance at this level and ordering the instructions in an optimized way. Especially if you consider the developing time costs you'd need if doing it by hand. It's a myth that assembly code is generally faster if manually written -- many modern compilers are real optimizing beasts.:-)
Anyway, I think one should always keep in mind that C++ code will only gain the greatest benefit from well optimized C++ code, not from new assembly level instructions, regardless if they unlock SSE registers for more general purpose or whatever. Oh, yeah, more registers won't revolutionize performance either. If they did, Intel and AMD would already have fixed that problem. I'm sure they're more than capable of doing it... More registers increase the amount of logic quite dramatically and I'm pretty sure it doesn't give good enough performance gains for the increased die cost, compared to increasing L2 cache size, improving branch prediction, etc.
How will they sell Palladium hardware? Easy. Market it to consumers as virus prevention.
I personally think word would spread very quickly whether Palladium actually does provide virus protection or not. It's as with Napster or anything else that touches on the subject of piracy. Suddenly, millions of people know about it.... and I haven't even figured out what the manufacturers earn by supporting Palladium? Must be some kind of Microsoft deal.:-)
An interesting newsgroup thread over at Google News.
It's a question I've been asking myself. I mean, how will Microsoft succeed with their plans? Which manufacturer wish to be the first to have a huge disadvantage by supplying the initial Palladium-supporting hardware? How can we be sure that the manufacturers are simply going to release hardware supporting Palladium? Won't it just work like in the past instead, where mp3 players made it easier for piracy and DVD players often can be made region free, by a simple flip of a jumper? Where CD-burners often support low-level duplication and overburning they don't *need* to support, but manufacturers *know* that they're more likely to sell if their drive support CloneCD and similar programs that's used in 9 cases out of 10 for piracy. They never admit it, but everyone knows it.
How will Palladium suddenly change this philosophy of the manufacters? Won't they be tempted to go the "dirty" path (of course not officially; they'll just "not include Palladium support") by looking into the enormous public interest that will arise in hardware not supporting hardware copy protections?
Slashdot Mirror
1. MS Excel: Cannot quit Microsoft Excel. [OK]
.... bla bla
2. MS Outlook: The COM Transaction Integrator Resync TP service depends on the SnaBase service which failed to start because of the following error: The operation completed successfully.
3. Cannot copy 16SID_~1. The file exists.
4. MS FrontPage: Out of memory while attempting to allocate 0 byte.
5. MS Word: Cannot execute the command since Unknown is busy.
6. MS Windows Update: This update solves the security problem with an uncontrolled buffer in the SNMP service in Windows XP. You can find more information in MS Security Bulletin MS02-006. Download the problem now to stop malicious users from
7. The window Internet Explorer or the ActiveX-control on this page is busy. If you close this window there might be problems. Do you wish to close the window? [OK/Cancel]
8. Winsock Error: -10000. No Error.
9. Dreamweaver: An unnamed file contains an invalid path. [OK]
Hm... I stripped the code from stdio.h, replaced _TCHAR* with char* so the stdafx.h doesn't really do much at all. Then turned on size optimizations and turned off boundary checks etc in the compiler. Still exactly 20992 bytes. Huh?? Browsed the exe and there's full text messages like "ooh something corrupted the state of this program and it cannot safely continue". Which is actually a great addition by Microsoft, but can't you remove such things? :-)
.NET compiler has its lower limits where bloat get called feature, just surprising that it seems to compile at the minimum size by default... Or perhaps it use some kind of silly padding so even if there's less code, the physical size isn't reduced.
But I guess the
To be compared with the non-optimized gcc version at 3,998 bytes.
I wonder how small you can make a Windows EXE..
It is small, but Flash memory is even smaller. Let's say the drive will be commercially available in 1 year (and then I think I'm being optimistic.)
They quote a technician who says it will be available in not one, but two years. And then he is likely optimistic.
And then it will only be available with 1 Gb discs at first.
(Im not paying £70/gig,
:-)
It's £70 per drive.
First versions of the disc will be:
a) Ready for sale in two years.
b) Store only 1 Gb.
c) Expected to cost £70 / drive.
> > Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.
> WTF?
The war Bugzilla vs Slashdot sadly had this unfortunate outcome. We will have to live with it. But I'm sure you'll find a way to circumvent the problem. But then again, you're circumventing Bugzilla's access protection and you'll surely be a DMCA case.
I really have to say that I find the recent development of Mozilla very inspiring as it brings completely new, unique features to the users. First came integrated popup and advertisement blocking. A simple but effective feature. Then came Type Ahead. Then came link prefetching. Now, in what time span?
:-)
I don't know about you, but at least my opinion is that the browser software has suffered from some serious stagnation during the past years. Since Internet Explorer 4.0 and its CSS and "DHTML" (mostly Javascript+CSS) support, I haven't seen much development in the browsers at all. Opera was innovative with mouse gestures, but I think the browser that truly turns this stagnation of browser features that's often limited to things like "slightly better CSS support", etc is Mozilla. I'm not even sure how it's possible for the team to bring so many new features in such a short time. Is it a side effect from being open source with browser enthusiasts working on it day and night? Is it "just" because a very flexible and well written code base? An efficient organization of the mozilla developers? A combination?
IMHO, the changes in Mozilla from a late version such as 1.0 are surely larger (at least more useful) than the changes since Internet Explorer 4.0. Each new version is right now bringing lots of new features. Perhaps that will change in the future, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts for sure.
... provided the page is written for link prefetching explicitly. It doesn't mean you can go to a site like Google News and it will start loading the various articles in the background.
Perhaps that's good, although I'd like to see an option where you can choose to apply the feature to all links leading to HTML pages. This combined with a customizable maximum bandwidth restriction for the prefetching would be nice.
Hey, he can probably even run Quake 1 with a decent framerate on minimum window size.
I did.
... as in 1.0? That would be a great way to celebrate the world's smallest browser!
"The Phoenix Team is proud to announce that we have finally shrunk the browser to the ultimate size: 0 bytes. Thanks to everyone supporting us in our quest to develop the smallest browser on earth."
Yeah, what I really like with Phoenix is that they both use the slick Orbit skin *and* have it use the standard Windows controls, giving it both a nice and standard look. :-)
I'm using Phoenix 0.3 on Windows right now. Never touched any settings.
:-) But how does it not allow you to login? It gave me a friendly "please re-enter your password" when I typed in some bogus info. Does it do that for you, or does something else happen?
- Airmiles loads just fine, including front page. I browsed the site and everything looked to be in order.
- Don't know about Hotmail since I don't have a Hotmail account. Go figure...
- You should tell IGN to see what's the problem with Mozilla-based browsers. Sounds like it wouldn't need a tremendous amount of effort to fix.
- I don't know the procedure, but you should send your employers self serve site to the Mozilla team (try posting it to an appropriate mozilla newsgroup on Google Groups for example - I think they have a public news server at news.mozilla.org as well) so they can look into it. Since the source view shows its almost entirely made of Javascript code, it wouldn't be surprising if they program IE-style with document.all and god knows what. But it could be something else like a bug in Mozilla's rendering engine. Why not notify them to help?
I never said it was final. I don't see a reason to treat this like an unstable version of a software made from scratch since it isn't. It's built from a now rather stable code base so I find that being a very different situtation than you have with the Mozilla milestones.
Thunderbird is the new name of the Minotaur project. Unlike what some said, they are thus one, and will fill the same function as Phoenix for the mail part.
:-)
Hmm... I wonder what IE would be if following this naming convention... Mammon?
- Phoenix is neither in alpha, nor beta stages AFAIK. Note it just says "Phoenix 0.3". I could be wrong here though if I missed anything saying it was alpha/beta.
- Phoenix doesn't follow the Microsoft/AOL-style version inflation. If it would, we would have version 3.0 final by now. Bug fixing and polish will start in the next version. See also the roadmap.
I'm greatly disturbed that this got modded 'Interesting'....
:-)
Yeah, he didn't even realize the potential of a Beowulf cluster of electro-shock machines.
That'd be far more interesting to watch, don't you think?
this could prove to be very interesting, and could help a lot in future gene therapy.
It could also help archaeologists understand the predecessors of Homo Sapiens better, if the research saying the "redhead gene" might come from neanderthals is true.
I mean, if redheads are slightly more sensitive to pain somehow, I think it is very likely that neanderthals were as well. And this is things we would never know from "common", material studies alone.
Besides, isn't it thought that blondes are making room for brunettes as well, for reasons similar to what you mention?
I'd say it would sound more like
"All your UV are belong to us"
Look what you did!
:-)
Now you made Google News post old news as well and we get this chain of Google News from Slashdot News from Earlier Slashdot News (which I'm sure got covered on Google News as well).
Hm... On the other hand... Let's just blame it all on Houston Chronicle which posted the old story first.
dramatically increasing program execution speed several orders of magnitude
:-) Sure, I see how it's supposed to work in theory with zero bottlenecks, but how it works in practice is a completely different thing.
Where did you read this?
Also, even with the hardware bottlenecks the Anonymous Coward mentions?
You ask yourself "why not?"... I ask can only ask myself "how?"
It's interesting to hear "revolutionizing performance" in the same topic as instruction level fiddling. The only way to give truly "revolutionizing" performance is to do high level optimizations.
:-)
When you have your highly optimized C++ code or whatever, *then* you can get down to low-level and start polishing whatever routine/loop you have that's the bottleneck. The compilers of today also usually does a better job than humans at optimizing performance at this level and ordering the instructions in an optimized way. Especially if you consider the developing time costs you'd need if doing it by hand. It's a myth that assembly code is generally faster if manually written -- many modern compilers are real optimizing beasts.
Anyway, I think one should always keep in mind that C++ code will only gain the greatest benefit from well optimized C++ code, not from new assembly level instructions, regardless if they unlock SSE registers for more general purpose or whatever. Oh, yeah, more registers won't revolutionize performance either. If they did, Intel and AMD would already have fixed that problem. I'm sure they're more than capable of doing it... More registers increase the amount of logic quite dramatically and I'm pretty sure it doesn't give good enough performance gains for the increased die cost, compared to increasing L2 cache size, improving branch prediction, etc.
How will they sell Palladium hardware? Easy.
... and I haven't even figured out what the manufacturers earn by supporting Palladium? Must be some kind of Microsoft deal. :-)
Market it to consumers as virus prevention.
I personally think word would spread very quickly whether Palladium actually does provide virus protection or not. It's as with Napster or anything else that touches on the subject of piracy. Suddenly, millions of people know about it.
Will the market really tolerate Palladium?
An interesting newsgroup thread over at Google News.
It's a question I've been asking myself. I mean, how will Microsoft succeed with their plans? Which manufacturer wish to be the first to have a huge disadvantage by supplying the initial Palladium-supporting hardware? How can we be sure that the manufacturers are simply going to release hardware supporting Palladium? Won't it just work like in the past instead, where mp3 players made it easier for piracy and DVD players often can be made region free, by a simple flip of a jumper? Where CD-burners often support low-level duplication and overburning they don't *need* to support, but manufacturers *know* that they're more likely to sell if their drive support CloneCD and similar programs that's used in 9 cases out of 10 for piracy. They never admit it, but everyone knows it.
How will Palladium suddenly change this philosophy of the manufacters? Won't they be tempted to go the "dirty" path (of course not officially; they'll just "not include Palladium support") by looking into the enormous public interest that will arise in hardware not supporting hardware copy protections?
I doubt I'll switch from MS' ClearType technology since it's excellent even on my CRT! Crisp and still smooth.