I have an XPPro box that was set up in early 2002. At first it got flaky (didn't crash, just acted funny) if not restarted every couple weeks. But after a while this stopped... I hadn't done anything special to it, and it is NOT updated (no internet connection) nor has it had any service packs applied.
Since then its uptime is regularly measured in months. Last month I finally restarted it for the first time in 11.5 months, and then only because it was turned off during a major lightning storm.
Yes, I do defrag it regularly, and occasionally run a registry scrubber (ToniArts EasyCleaner) and nuke orphaned tempfiles. And it does Real Work, too (it's my multimedia processing system, and handles all the crashy/leaky/ill-mannered apps, like Dreamweaver).
Anyway... it occurs to me to wonder if the Strict Instructions have more to do with deficiencies in that control system than in XP itself. Maybe it piles up temp or memory garbage if the whole system isn't cleared out regularly?
My old Win95 box crashes seldom to never (it is now 9 years old, and over that span I could count its total crashes without taking off my shoes). For a while it dual-booted RedHat6 -- and RH6 crashed a LOT, usually during startup (so you can't blame the window manager or desktop, tho those crashed too).
Anyway, just a contrary example:) tho my observation has been that overall, Windows is a bit more fussy about quality of hardware than is linux.
But yeah, a lot of PSUs don't output what they claim to, and that does indeed cause mystery crashes in any OS. And a good PSU lasts much longer, too -- the one in the machine I'm using right now has run 24/7 for 12 YEARS, and it's supplying more than the average number of devices.
I never go to Myspace [g] but... what sort of problem does it generate?
I'd expect, given Myspace's HTML, that it tickles the old Mosaic bug where certain structures (notably links that display a lot of text in the link itself, and flash placeholders) *inside* table cells cause a resource leak -- sometimes drastic. [Also happens in some builds of Netscape, Mozilla, and yes, even IE]
Side note: I've documented this problem in several browsers, but still couldn't get anyone interested in fixing it.:(
That's very interesting, because Mozilla v1.00 is the only program that has ever caused a BSOD on my generally-bulletproof Win95 box; I no longer recall the details, but it was repeatable. Now I'm wondering if it was due to an incident such as you describe.
All software has bugs. How you react to evidence of said bugs says a lot about your integrity as a programmer.
Someone who really wants their software to be a great product is going to welcome the help.
Someone whose ego is tied up in how "perfect" their code is, is likely to get all pissy about it.
So... if they DON'T welcome this sort of analysis, it would be conclusive evidence that they're more interested in preserving their egos than in improving Firefox.
The problem you cite with Mesopotamia (and much of the Middle East) had little to do with deforestation and farming, and everything to do with Bedouins and goats.
Cattle just eat the top part of the grass.
Sheep eat the grass down to the ground, which damages the grass, but doesn't usually kill it off entirely, at least not if pasture rotation is practiced.
But goats pull up the roots, and that kills grass outright. (D'oh!)
And without ground cover (not necessarily trees -- grass is better for retaining topsoil and moisture), any dry region can be transformed into a desert in a very few years.
Yep, I remember... in fact that was just days after ELN got their first POP out in what was then the wilds of Santa Clarita. And except for the occasional boneheaded move (like today's adventure, and the horrid "new" webmail) they've been reliable, which is my #1 requirement.
At the time the only other local choice was SCV-Online, a teeny tiny ISP (fewer than 100 subscribers) that ran on a string of 486s in the guy's garage.
Who modded you Offtopic? shoulda been modded Informative. Doesn't anyone else remember using ANSI and a series of numbers to set screen and text colours in DOS? and holding down the ALT key and typing on the numpad to make smileys, box-drawing characters, etc?
WP5.1, YES!! still my word processor of choice for getting Real Work done, and it'll run on any piece of crap. I first used it on a 2-floppy XT (no hard disk) with DOS 3.2, mono screen, and 512k of RAM. More than sufficient!
Otherwise, I use DOS every time I test a machine, and every time I work on a hard disk, whether for partitioning, ghosting, or whatever. It's just so bloody much easier and more efficient than anything else. Doesn't even need a working CDROM drive or the ability to boot from CDROM -- things you can't count on when you're resurrecting older or donated hardware.
The guts of DOS, in ROM as an optional boot (Press F1 for CMOS Setup, Press F2 for ROM-DOS Boot) would indeed be a wonderful tool, with very little that can go wrong or be vulnerable to malware or stupidity (from the user or from other programs). Great place to start from if something is misbehaving in mysterious ways.
As to phones, I know someone who built voicemail systems using old PCs and DOS-based software. They were popular enough with businesses that he made a living at it.
Heh heh... I still use an "old but robust" DOS word processor (WordPerfect 5.1, which will run on a floppy-only system in a pinch), in part because it will indeed let me get work done on any piece of crap PC, in nearly any environment.
In fact my first requirement for any setup is "Will it run WP5.1?"
Maybe not a requirement anymore, but my feeling is since a BIOS flash is such a fundamentally critical operation, I don't want ANYTHING running that could possibly compromise that.
And even tho I would be the first to defend Windows' stability (I have WinMachines that have NEVER crashed, and I usually measure their uptime in months)... if only because Windows is so complex, it's just one more thing that could conceivably interfere or go wrong. So if I have any choice at all, I prefer to do operations like BIOS flashing from plain old DOS.
I can tell you from long experience, they don't pay any attention to feedback sent there.
However, sending a complaint to the network operations center DOES get a response. I once even got a phone call after complaining about a DNS screwup. (the obvious of noc@earthlink.net, I think, or possibly noc@corp.earthlink.net... I can't get any of the quickloading domain registrars to spit up Earthlink.net as a valid domain right now to check the contact address, ain't that poetic justice!)
As a Netscape user, I'm used to being able to omit the.COM part when I type in a domain name. So if I type "google", I arrive at google.com. This is how it's worked since I first came online.
NOW, about half the time (why half??) I find myself at this stupid search page instead.
Same thing as happens when Marketing gets hold of ANY company...
I noticed immediately when this stupid redirect thing was enabled, as I habitually type just the domain name for.COM domains, and in the normal course of events, typing "google" gets me "google.com". NOW, about half the time (why only half the time??) I get ELN's stupid search page, which wastes my time and pisses me off.
I've been an ELN subscriber for almost 10 years now, and because I'm so entrenched there and because ELN's email is the most reliable I've ever seen, I'd planned to keep the account even when/if I can get broadband. But this stupidity has me seriously rethinking whether I want to keep that subscription... it's THAT annoying.
Yeah, I could go back to typing the.COM part, like any IE user has to. But why should a company's greed impact MY life, when I'm already paying them good money??
And I think I'll call up ELN Sales tomorrow and bitch about it, in pretty much those words.
Another problem is that once such "laws" become acceptable, ANYTHING can be treated that way, and even the most trivial accusation can cause problems.
An example of the "trivial" type: Accused of speeding, you might find that you're now on a "reckless drivers" list, and your insurance rate goes up, even tho you received no ticket and were not convicted of speeding.
And of the more serious type: Say you're gay, and someone who disapproves of homosexuality decides to accuse you of sexual abuse (because in their view, ALL gay sex is "abuse"). And you consequently find yourself on a Sex Offenders list. Homosexuality is thereby rendered *effectively* illegal and punishable by what amounts to government-sanctioned "shunning", despite a complete lack of due process and an absence of laws against it.
There was a discussion here a couple months back about how modern folk are so much less mature for their age than our ancestors were, because in our secure modern lifestyles, we're far more coddled than they were.
Now, consider that kids want the world to be black or white, and can't see or deal with shades of grey. In fact, the ability to cope with greyscale is itself the single most definitive sign of a mind that has matured.
Whenever black and white decisions don't make sense, people who can't cope with grey find themselves *unable* to make decisions, and want to be TOLD what to do (or will make a decision by simply leaping off the first cliff they come to)... yet as you say, won't trust anyone else to make that decision (because they can't see that someone else might not have a problem doing so).
Now, throw all that at a Real World[tm] where most stuff IS in shades of grey, and the average legal adult's mindset is getting "younger" due to lack of selection pressure against it, and you get the common dithering (omighod a mistake could happen!) and occasional overkill (thought police) of the current legal climate.
That's an interesting way to look at it, and I think you're right, that's how the legal system has come to operate in some areas -- largely controlled by fear of being *perceived* as "too harsh" or "too soft"; or of having convicted on the basis of "labelling" or whatever is the P.C. term this week.
It's the flipside of the mindset that produced the McMartin Preschool witchhunt here in SoCal, where "think of the children!" got completely out of hand, and dragged on for years despite a total lack of evidence. A sane system would have said, "What, no evidence? then no crime!" and that would have been the end of it.
In short, fear of making a decision. After all, if you never make a decision, you can't be wrong!!:/
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I have an XPPro box that was set up in early 2002. At first it got flaky (didn't crash, just acted funny) if not restarted every couple weeks. But after a while this stopped... I hadn't done anything special to it, and it is NOT updated (no internet connection) nor has it had any service packs applied.
Since then its uptime is regularly measured in months. Last month I finally restarted it for the first time in 11.5 months, and then only because it was turned off during a major lightning storm.
Yes, I do defrag it regularly, and occasionally run a registry scrubber (ToniArts EasyCleaner) and nuke orphaned tempfiles. And it does Real Work, too (it's my multimedia processing system, and handles all the crashy/leaky/ill-mannered apps, like Dreamweaver).
Anyway... it occurs to me to wonder if the Strict Instructions have more to do with deficiencies in that control system than in XP itself. Maybe it piles up temp or memory garbage if the whole system isn't cleared out regularly?
My old Win95 box crashes seldom to never (it is now 9 years old, and over that span I could count its total crashes without taking off my shoes). For a while it dual-booted RedHat6 -- and RH6 crashed a LOT, usually during startup (so you can't blame the window manager or desktop, tho those crashed too).
:) tho my observation has been that overall, Windows is a bit more fussy about quality of hardware than is linux.
Anyway, just a contrary example
But yeah, a lot of PSUs don't output what they claim to, and that does indeed cause mystery crashes in any OS. And a good PSU lasts much longer, too -- the one in the machine I'm using right now has run 24/7 for 12 YEARS, and it's supplying more than the average number of devices.
And this points at places for those eyes to look, where otherwise maybe no one would have bothered.
I never go to Myspace [g] but... what sort of problem does it generate?
:(
I'd expect, given Myspace's HTML, that it tickles the old Mosaic bug where certain structures (notably links that display a lot of text in the link itself, and flash placeholders) *inside* table cells cause a resource leak -- sometimes drastic. [Also happens in some builds of Netscape, Mozilla, and yes, even IE]
Side note: I've documented this problem in several browsers, but still couldn't get anyone interested in fixing it.
That's very interesting, because Mozilla v1.00 is the only program that has ever caused a BSOD on my generally-bulletproof Win95 box; I no longer recall the details, but it was repeatable. Now I'm wondering if it was due to an incident such as you describe.
All software has bugs. How you react to evidence of said bugs says a lot about your integrity as a programmer.
Someone who really wants their software to be a great product is going to welcome the help.
Someone whose ego is tied up in how "perfect" their code is, is likely to get all pissy about it.
So... if they DON'T welcome this sort of analysis, it would be conclusive evidence that they're more interested in preserving their egos than in improving Firefox.
The problem you cite with Mesopotamia (and much of the Middle East) had little to do with deforestation and farming, and everything to do with Bedouins and goats.
Cattle just eat the top part of the grass.
Sheep eat the grass down to the ground, which damages the grass, but doesn't usually kill it off entirely, at least not if pasture rotation is practiced.
But goats pull up the roots, and that kills grass outright. (D'oh!)
And without ground cover (not necessarily trees -- grass is better for retaining topsoil and moisture), any dry region can be transformed into a desert in a very few years.
Never heard of that one (cool to know, tho, thanks!) but yeah, I expect a lot of what DOS ANSI knew must have inherited from terminals.
Yep, I remember ... in fact that was just days after ELN got their first POP out in what was then the wilds of Santa Clarita. And except for the occasional boneheaded move (like today's adventure, and the horrid "new" webmail) they've been reliable, which is my #1 requirement.
At the time the only other local choice was SCV-Online, a teeny tiny ISP (fewer than 100 subscribers) that ran on a string of 486s in the guy's garage.
Who modded you Offtopic? shoulda been modded Informative. Doesn't anyone else remember using ANSI and a series of numbers to set screen and text colours in DOS? and holding down the ALT key and typing on the numpad to make smileys, box-drawing characters, etc?
Wildcat 4.x could do multiple nodes in DOS. It also plays nice with Netware linking DOS machines as separate nodes (which is nice for performance).
:)
As to who'd still do such a thing... visit http://eqcity.com/bbs.htm
See also http://fdisk.com/doslynx/
I've used NetTamer, Arachne, and WebSpyder in DOS, all worked fine. NetTamer has a version that will run perfectly well on an XT.
WP5.1, YES!! still my word processor of choice for getting Real Work done, and it'll run on any piece of crap. I first used it on a 2-floppy XT (no hard disk) with DOS 3.2, mono screen, and 512k of RAM. More than sufficient!
Otherwise, I use DOS every time I test a machine, and every time I work on a hard disk, whether for partitioning, ghosting, or whatever. It's just so bloody much easier and more efficient than anything else. Doesn't even need a working CDROM drive or the ability to boot from CDROM -- things you can't count on when you're resurrecting older or donated hardware.
The guts of DOS, in ROM as an optional boot (Press F1 for CMOS Setup, Press F2 for ROM-DOS Boot) would indeed be a wonderful tool, with very little that can go wrong or be vulnerable to malware or stupidity (from the user or from other programs). Great place to start from if something is misbehaving in mysterious ways.
As to phones, I know someone who built voicemail systems using old PCs and DOS-based software. They were popular enough with businesses that he made a living at it.
Heh heh... I still use an "old but robust" DOS word processor (WordPerfect 5.1, which will run on a floppy-only system in a pinch), in part because it will indeed let me get work done on any piece of crap PC, in nearly any environment.
:)
In fact my first requirement for any setup is "Will it run WP5.1?"
And my second is... "Will it run DOOM?"
Maybe not a requirement anymore, but my feeling is since a BIOS flash is such a fundamentally critical operation, I don't want ANYTHING running that could possibly compromise that.
... if only because Windows is so complex, it's just one more thing that could conceivably interfere or go wrong. So if I have any choice at all, I prefer to do operations like BIOS flashing from plain old DOS.
And even tho I would be the first to defend Windows' stability (I have WinMachines that have NEVER crashed, and I usually measure their uptime in months)
I can tell you from long experience, they don't pay any attention to feedback sent there.
... I can't get any of the quickloading domain registrars to spit up Earthlink.net as a valid domain right now to check the contact address, ain't that poetic justice!)
However, sending a complaint to the network operations center DOES get a response. I once even got a phone call after complaining about a DNS screwup. (the obvious of noc@earthlink.net, I think, or possibly noc@corp.earthlink.net
As I bitched about up above, I had the same issue with typing "google" (redirected) vs "google.com" (worked).
Also, I'm finding that since this change, some valid domains don't resolve at all (time out), or resolve VERY slowly.
I just sent an annoyed-user-complaint to NOC and to a corp contact that I happen to know goes to a Real Person.
Just as a point of interest to your post, Earthlink runs primarily on Solaris v8.
Last I heard, Solaris was still considered a *NIX.
As a fellow pissed-off ELN user... what DNS server would you suggest?
[10-year Earthlink subscriber speaking]
.COM part when I type in a domain name. So if I type "google", I arrive at google.com. This is how it's worked since I first came online.
As a Netscape user, I'm used to being able to omit the
NOW, about half the time (why half??) I find myself at this stupid search page instead.
Which wastes my time and pisses me off.
Same thing as happens when Marketing gets hold of ANY company...
.COM domains, and in the normal course of events, typing "google" gets me "google.com". NOW, about half the time (why only half the time??) I get ELN's stupid search page, which wastes my time and pisses me off.
... it's THAT annoying.
.COM part, like any IE user has to. But why should a company's greed impact MY life, when I'm already paying them good money??
I noticed immediately when this stupid redirect thing was enabled, as I habitually type just the domain name for
I've been an ELN subscriber for almost 10 years now, and because I'm so entrenched there and because ELN's email is the most reliable I've ever seen, I'd planned to keep the account even when/if I can get broadband. But this stupidity has me seriously rethinking whether I want to keep that subscription
Yeah, I could go back to typing the
And I think I'll call up ELN Sales tomorrow and bitch about it, in pretty much those words.
Another problem is that once such "laws" become acceptable, ANYTHING can be treated that way, and even the most trivial accusation can cause problems.
An example of the "trivial" type: Accused of speeding, you might find that you're now on a "reckless drivers" list, and your insurance rate goes up, even tho you received no ticket and were not convicted of speeding.
And of the more serious type: Say you're gay, and someone who disapproves of homosexuality decides to accuse you of sexual abuse (because in their view, ALL gay sex is "abuse"). And you consequently find yourself on a Sex Offenders list. Homosexuality is thereby rendered *effectively* illegal and punishable by what amounts to government-sanctioned "shunning", despite a complete lack of due process and an absence of laws against it.
Exactly so...
... yet as you say, won't trust anyone else to make that decision (because they can't see that someone else might not have a problem doing so).
There was a discussion here a couple months back about how modern folk are so much less mature for their age than our ancestors were, because in our secure modern lifestyles, we're far more coddled than they were.
Now, consider that kids want the world to be black or white, and can't see or deal with shades of grey. In fact, the ability to cope with greyscale is itself the single most definitive sign of a mind that has matured.
Whenever black and white decisions don't make sense, people who can't cope with grey find themselves *unable* to make decisions, and want to be TOLD what to do (or will make a decision by simply leaping off the first cliff they come to)
Now, throw all that at a Real World[tm] where most stuff IS in shades of grey, and the average legal adult's mindset is getting "younger" due to lack of selection pressure against it, and you get the common dithering (omighod a mistake could happen!) and occasional overkill (thought police) of the current legal climate.
That's an interesting way to look at it, and I think you're right, that's how the legal system has come to operate in some areas -- largely controlled by fear of being *perceived* as "too harsh" or "too soft"; or of having convicted on the basis of "labelling" or whatever is the P.C. term this week.
:/
It's the flipside of the mindset that produced the McMartin Preschool witchhunt here in SoCal, where "think of the children!" got completely out of hand, and dragged on for years despite a total lack of evidence. A sane system would have said, "What, no evidence? then no crime!" and that would have been the end of it.
In short, fear of making a decision. After all, if you never make a decision, you can't be wrong!!
LOL!! good one.