I don't particularly like split-screen. It especially ruins fps type games when people just cheat and look at your screen, amoung other things. PCs don't split screen because everybody is usually on their own unit, as it should be for those types of games. Multiplayer console games are best when you all share one screen, or take turns, or some other non-split arragement. Standard TV is 480i which is 720x240 @ 60fps. (The f technically stands for fields, not frames then, but that hardly matters.) Whenever you see the little "i" instead of a "p", divide the height by 2, its much easier to compare then. Many regular TVs have a hard time doing more then 400x300 overall though (400x150 after you take into consideration interlacing). So many people are effectively playing Halo at around 200x75 @ 60fps per-player, but its aliased down from 360x120.
Really though, HDTV will be a big step forward, but the big factor is the TV price, not if the console supports it. Right now almost all of my Gamecube games support 480p (720x480) which is a huge improvement from 480i (720x240) but the cost of a EDTV with progressive scan support is out of my range still when the console cost me $99 and games cost $10-$20 typically.
Of course, once you throw in the other 3 players on any game, you are down to 640x360 or less, depending on if your TV really supports 1280x720 (many LCD/Plasma TVs seem to actually have only 1024 pixels across) And 1080i only gets you to 960x270 @ 60fps. We're really going to need to get TVs up to about 1440p or so, and have the TVs be affordable too, before 4-player games really start to look good.
Yeah, I don't really see how this "exploit" is really an exploit at all. If you whitelist a site, that means you can already install an XPI from that site. Extensions can easily to "bad" things of one sort or another (delete bookmarks or hide all the GUI widgets or something). You have to go add a site to the whitelist, it isn't like it can add itself somehow. This "exploit" does not really seem it should be labeled as "critical" because its NOT the type of exploit where you can get malware installed with NO user interaction simply by visiting any old random site.
Again, though, what I am saying is that physical RAM usage is not important compared to the VM Size. I don't particularly care what portion of the programs memory is actually in RAM and what portion is swapped out. I care how much memory it has allocated total (VM Size).
Another example of why people should be looking at VM Size instead of Mem Usage is that many people run a program, open something then close it, and repeat a few times, and expect that each matching close operation should bring the Mem Usage back to the value it was before the open operation, otherwise they get all fussy and claim the program has a memory leak. The VM Size will typically settle after a few iterations, while the Mem Usage will not. If the VM Size grows after each iteration and can grow continuously, you might just have a memory leak, but if the VM Size remains relatively constant and the Mem Usage increases after each iteration, it means nothing! Just minimize the application and all of a sudden the Mem Usage is back to normal.
The important point here is that under windows task manager specifically, Mem Usage is NOT the same as RSS, because it is possible for Mem Usage to be higher than VM Size. If Mem Usage reported a number that was always smaller than VM Size, and meant what RSS is supposed to mean, you could use it as a real measurement. You can easily get Firefox to show 90M for Mem Usage and 10M for VM Size, simply because that 80M of freed memory hasn't been put to any other use yet. It's not technically being used by Firefox anymore, but thats where it still currently belongs. Minimize Firefox and its Mem Usage may jump from 90M to 8M, and THEN, you can use that 8M figure as a guess to the RSS, but not really, because other working pages may have been paged out, Restore Firefox and the 8M may jump to 9M. So again, it's really futile to try to get anything meaningful from Mem Usage.
You are just making that up. Look at the commit charge on the performance tab, which corresponds to the memory graph. Commit charge is the sum of all processes VM Size, not memory usage. VM Size is the amount of memory the process has allocated in memory and swap combined. Mem Usage is like RSS (resident set size) under top/ps, which is the amount of physical RAM being used, which is meaningless because of the fact that the amount of RAM being used is NOT the amount of memory the process has allocated, because it depends greatly on how the OS manages memory behind the scenes.
Even the Task Manager help file is pretty clear here:
Memory Usage: In Task Manager, the current working set of a process, in kilobytes. The current working set is the number of pages currently resident in memory.
Virtual Memory: In Task Manager, the amount of virtual memory, or address space, committed to a process.
Again, the amount of memory allocated (committed), is the number anybody cares about. Whether or not the OS has decided to swap some of the memory to the paging file or not is completely useless when all you care about is the amount of memory the program has gobbled up.
Normally, one might think that the RSS/Mem Usage should never be higher than the VM Size, because a process should never have more RAM being used than it has total memory being allocated, and I believe under Linux this is true, but under Windows, Task Manager will frequently show the Mem Usage as being higher simply because it hasn't subtracted freed memory yet, because the OS hasn't used those pages for anything else yet.
I think you either didn't read my post, or you are just trolling for Opera here, but a quick test of just launching Firefox (nightly) and Opera 8 shows "Mem Usage" of 14M for Opera and 18M for Firefox, but a "VM Size" of 11M for Opera and 10M for Firefox. Clearly, Firefox uses 1 whole less Megabyte of RAM when it just starts and renders nothing, because "Mem Usage" simply does not matter, and is a completely and totally useless statistic that reflects nothing particularly interesting about how much memory a program is actually using.
While it's true that the "Mem Usage" in task manager can easily show much more memory than the program is actually using, an minimizing a program will make this number drop, the number it drops to is still not the accurate memory usage figure. You really want to go to View/Select Columns and look at VM Size, not Mem Usage. VM Size is the actual amount of memory the program thinks it has, between whats swapped out and what is actually being used. Mem Usage can be higher than VM Size if memory was freed but not yet flushed by the OS, or it can be lower than VM Size if some memory hasn't been touched in a while and is swapped out to disk. Minimizing an application just gives Windows a hint that it should flush freed memory and swap out pages that have not been touched recently, which is why the Mem Usage figure drops when you do that.
Might be related to http pipelining being enabled or disabled on one of your installs. It makes a HUGE difference in the speed all those little tiles load for me.
Why doesn't Craigslist expand and obsolete MLS then? I'm moving soon to a city not listed there and a tool like this would be very useful for driving around and looking at houses.
You have WAY too much crap running. 54 is a LOT of processes. I have Firefox, Thunderbird, Notepad, Visual Studio, VNC, ICQ, and Task manager open right now, among other things, and my total number of processes is 26. Generally I tell people (that I know in person, and ask why their computer is slow) that if they have 30 or more processes when they first turn on their computer, they have too much junk and/or spyware and need to disable a lot of it.
You're pretty close. A 32" 16:9 is the same height as a 26.1" 4:3, and I would say that same height means same size, since if you are watching 4:3 content on a 16:9 screen, and want it to display the same size, you are going to have vertical bars on the left and right side, wasting part of the width, and thus, you want the height to be the same. A 32" 16:9 screen has dimensions 27.9x15.7 while a 4:3 would have 25.6x19.2.
A 32" 4:3 (25.6x19.2) would need a 39.1" 16:9 screen (34.1x19.2) to get the same height.
I think a good way to compare, if you have a calculator handy, is to divide the 16:9 diagonal measurement by about 1.22 or 1.23 to get its "comparable" measurement against 4:3 diagonals, if what you want to know is really how the heights of the screens compare.
Pretty much all stamp machines give dollar coins as change. Every Meijer store seems to have a stamp machine in it, and they all do the same thing. Insert a $20, buy a book of stamps, and it spits out 12 $1 coins, along with 2 quaters and a dime. I havn't really found it ever hard to spend the coins when you can give them to people, but I hate that other machines (candy, pop, toll booths, etc) never accept them.
Virtual PC | 2004 | Microsoft | 32-bit | http://www.microsoft.com | When you run a Windows XP SP2-based virtual machine, it will perform slowly compared to a Windows XP SP1-based virtual machine.
Is on the list, but VMWare is not. I'm sure they planned that.
Really? My 2wire firewall/router/wireless/dsl combo I got for free from SBC has a single checkbox, to allow H.323. It seems to do some smart state checking with TCP port 1720 and allows TCP port 1503 as well, just like the FTP server checkbox does some smart state checking with TCP port 21 so it can open up other ports as needed.
I agree that installation can be troublesome if you've had a previous version installed. Upgrading doesn't always work, and I have had the flash just completely disabled, but uninstalling flashblock, and removing the one line from the usercontent.css file, then restarting firefox and reinstalling the latest flashblock has always seemed to work for me. I don't know why they must insert a line into the usercontent.css. Perhaps the extension abilities don't allow something that is crucial to extensions like flashblock working otherwise. I would like to see FF 1.1 fix this problem so flashblock can do whatever it needs to do to work right without the hassles caused by having to have an extension add lines to that file.
Apparently I am still using 1.2.6 and I DO have this option, and it works well. Somewhere they broke support for nightlies, which is why I think I can't use 1.2.7+ or 1.3.x yet.
Slashdot Mirror
My power went out last night for ~3 hours (2-5am or so) for no particular reason I knew of.
I don't particularly like split-screen. It especially ruins fps type games when people just cheat and look at your screen, amoung other things. PCs don't split screen because everybody is usually on their own unit, as it should be for those types of games. Multiplayer console games are best when you all share one screen, or take turns, or some other non-split arragement.
Standard TV is 480i which is 720x240 @ 60fps. (The f technically stands for fields, not frames then, but that hardly matters.) Whenever you see the little "i" instead of a "p", divide the height by 2, its much easier to compare then. Many regular TVs have a hard time doing more then 400x300 overall though (400x150 after you take into consideration interlacing). So many people are effectively playing Halo at around 200x75 @ 60fps per-player, but its aliased down from 360x120.
Really though, HDTV will be a big step forward, but the big factor is the TV price, not if the console supports it. Right now almost all of my Gamecube games support 480p (720x480) which is a huge improvement from 480i (720x240) but the cost of a EDTV with progressive scan support is out of my range still when the console cost me $99 and games cost $10-$20 typically.
Of course, once you throw in the other 3 players on any game, you are down to 640x360 or less, depending on if your TV really supports 1280x720 (many LCD/Plasma TVs seem to actually have only 1024 pixels across)
And 1080i only gets you to 960x270 @ 60fps.
We're really going to need to get TVs up to about 1440p or so, and have the TVs be affordable too, before 4-player games really start to look good.
Yeah, I don't really see how this "exploit" is really an exploit at all. If you whitelist a site, that means you can already install an XPI from that site. Extensions can easily to "bad" things of one sort or another (delete bookmarks or hide all the GUI widgets or something). You have to go add a site to the whitelist, it isn't like it can add itself somehow. This "exploit" does not really seem it should be labeled as "critical" because its NOT the type of exploit where you can get malware installed with NO user interaction simply by visiting any old random site.
Again, though, what I am saying is that physical RAM usage is not important compared to the VM Size. I don't particularly care what portion of the programs memory is actually in RAM and what portion is swapped out. I care how much memory it has allocated total (VM Size).
Another example of why people should be looking at VM Size instead of Mem Usage is that many people run a program, open something then close it, and repeat a few times, and expect that each matching close operation should bring the Mem Usage back to the value it was before the open operation, otherwise they get all fussy and claim the program has a memory leak. The VM Size will typically settle after a few iterations, while the Mem Usage will not. If the VM Size grows after each iteration and can grow continuously, you might just have a memory leak, but if the VM Size remains relatively constant and the Mem Usage increases after each iteration, it means nothing! Just minimize the application and all of a sudden the Mem Usage is back to normal.
The important point here is that under windows task manager specifically, Mem Usage is NOT the same as RSS, because it is possible for Mem Usage to be higher than VM Size. If Mem Usage reported a number that was always smaller than VM Size, and meant what RSS is supposed to mean, you could use it as a real measurement. You can easily get Firefox to show 90M for Mem Usage and 10M for VM Size, simply because that 80M of freed memory hasn't been put to any other use yet. It's not technically being used by Firefox anymore, but thats where it still currently belongs. Minimize Firefox and its Mem Usage may jump from 90M to 8M, and THEN, you can use that 8M figure as a guess to the RSS, but not really, because other working pages may have been paged out, Restore Firefox and the 8M may jump to 9M. So again, it's really futile to try to get anything meaningful from Mem Usage.
You are just making that up. Look at the commit charge on the performance tab, which corresponds to the memory graph. Commit charge is the sum of all processes VM Size, not memory usage. VM Size is the amount of memory the process has allocated in memory and swap combined. Mem Usage is like RSS (resident set size) under top/ps, which is the amount of physical RAM being used, which is meaningless because of the fact that the amount of RAM being used is NOT the amount of memory the process has allocated, because it depends greatly on how the OS manages memory behind the scenes.
Even the Task Manager help file is pretty clear here:
Memory Usage: In Task Manager, the current working set of a process, in kilobytes. The current working set is the number of pages currently resident in memory.
Virtual Memory: In Task Manager, the amount of virtual memory, or address space, committed to a process.
Again, the amount of memory allocated (committed), is the number anybody cares about. Whether or not the OS has decided to swap some of the memory to the paging file or not is completely useless when all you care about is the amount of memory the program has gobbled up.
Normally, one might think that the RSS/Mem Usage should never be higher than the VM Size, because a process should never have more RAM being used than it has total memory being allocated, and I believe under Linux this is true, but under Windows, Task Manager will frequently show the Mem Usage as being higher simply because it hasn't subtracted freed memory yet, because the OS hasn't used those pages for anything else yet.
I think you either didn't read my post, or you are just trolling for Opera here, but a quick test of just launching Firefox (nightly) and Opera 8 shows "Mem Usage" of 14M for Opera and 18M for Firefox, but a "VM Size" of 11M for Opera and 10M for Firefox. Clearly, Firefox uses 1 whole less Megabyte of RAM when it just starts and renders nothing, because "Mem Usage" simply does not matter, and is a completely and totally useless statistic that reflects nothing particularly interesting about how much memory a program is actually using.
I think the web developer toolbar has a shortcut key that does image scaling just like that somehow.
While it's true that the "Mem Usage" in task manager can easily show much more memory than the program is actually using, an minimizing a program will make this number drop, the number it drops to is still not the accurate memory usage figure. You really want to go to View/Select Columns and look at VM Size, not Mem Usage.
VM Size is the actual amount of memory the program thinks it has, between whats swapped out and what is actually being used. Mem Usage can be higher than VM Size if memory was freed but not yet flushed by the OS, or it can be lower than VM Size if some memory hasn't been touched in a while and is swapped out to disk. Minimizing an application just gives Windows a hint that it should flush freed memory and swap out pages that have not been touched recently, which is why the Mem Usage figure drops when you do that.
Might be related to http pipelining being enabled or disabled on one of your installs. It makes a HUGE difference in the speed all those little tiles load for me.
And back/forward can cache the rendered layout instead of having to re-render everything: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=
Um... SkiFree
Why doesn't Craigslist expand and obsolete MLS then? I'm moving soon to a city not listed there and a tool like this would be very useful for driving around and looking at houses.
Here, I guess
Wow! That is a very great idea. Why does it only have certain cities though? They should tie in MLS listings and let you search by any city.
You have WAY too much crap running. 54 is a LOT of processes. I have Firefox, Thunderbird, Notepad, Visual Studio, VNC, ICQ, and Task manager open right now, among other things, and my total number of processes is 26.
Generally I tell people (that I know in person, and ask why their computer is slow) that if they have 30 or more processes when they first turn on their computer, they have too much junk and/or spyware and need to disable a lot of it.
You're pretty close. A 32" 16:9 is the same height as a 26.1" 4:3, and I would say that same height means same size, since if you are watching 4:3 content on a 16:9 screen, and want it to display the same size, you are going to have vertical bars on the left and right side, wasting part of the width, and thus, you want the height to be the same.
A 32" 16:9 screen has dimensions 27.9x15.7 while a 4:3 would have 25.6x19.2.
A 32" 4:3 (25.6x19.2) would need a 39.1" 16:9 screen (34.1x19.2) to get the same height.
I think a good way to compare, if you have a calculator handy, is to divide the 16:9 diagonal measurement by about 1.22 or 1.23 to get its "comparable" measurement against 4:3 diagonals, if what you want to know is really how the heights of the screens compare.
Pretty much all stamp machines give dollar coins as change. Every Meijer store seems to have a stamp machine in it, and they all do the same thing. Insert a $20, buy a book of stamps, and it spits out 12 $1 coins, along with 2 quaters and a dime. I havn't really found it ever hard to spend the coins when you can give them to people, but I hate that other machines (candy, pop, toll booths, etc) never accept them.
Yeah, because:
Virtual PC | 2004 | Microsoft | 32-bit | http://www.microsoft.com | When you run a Windows XP SP2-based virtual machine, it will perform slowly compared to a Windows XP SP1-based virtual machine.
Is on the list, but VMWare is not. I'm sure they planned that.
http://ark42.com/google/map.php
http://ark42.com/google/gmapcache/
Really? My 2wire firewall/router/wireless/dsl combo I got for free from SBC has a single checkbox, to allow H.323. It seems to do some smart state checking with TCP port 1720 and allows TCP port 1503 as well, just like the FTP server checkbox does some smart state checking with TCP port 21 so it can open up other ports as needed.
I agree that installation can be troublesome if you've had a previous version installed. Upgrading doesn't always work, and I have had the flash just completely disabled, but uninstalling flashblock, and removing the one line from the usercontent.css file, then restarting firefox and reinstalling the latest flashblock has always seemed to work for me.
I don't know why they must insert a line into the usercontent.css. Perhaps the extension abilities don't allow something that is crucial to extensions like flashblock working otherwise. I would like to see FF 1.1 fix this problem so flashblock can do whatever it needs to do to work right without the hassles caused by having to have an extension add lines to that file.
Apparently I am still using 1.2.6 and I DO have this option, and it works well.
Somewhere they broke support for nightlies, which is why I think I can't use 1.2.7+ or 1.3.x yet.
You mean rightclick -> allow flash from this site?