Whether I free() my memory or not, the operating system has the exact same job at the end of a process's life. This *can't* be an application problem
It certainly can be. I realize that any good OS has its memory protected, but there are still many apps that allocate memory outside of their designated heap. Perhaps the OS SHOULD be cleaning this up, but the damn app shouldn't be so messy in the first place. Call me old fashoned, but I remember programming for 64k RAM (well really 38911 BASIC Bytes Free is the term I will never forget off the C64) and if you had even a small leak in that bad boy you were toast pretty damn quick. Granted stuff does a HELL of a lot more than it used to, but still. Careful and tight coding is still a must.
Ok, I can see your point with the clueless users. But as far as my comment goes, I couldn't care less if the reviewer was man, woman or somewhere inbetween.:-P
As far as fragmentation goes, that was more of a joke than anything else.
Am I out of the loop or does linux support swap files (as opposed to partitions) now?
Yes, you are way out of the loop. But he is still full of it. Even on an NT box it is still best to make a seperate partition for your swap space. It tends to run faster that way. Same thing goes for linux. Plus, the swap partition is designed for well... swapping.:-) In other words, no need for the file to be subjected to all the stuff that it would be if it were on a normal ext2/ext3 partition.
But as far as "can it be done" goes, yes it can. It has been an option now for as long as I can remember. Since the 2.x kernel at least. I remember doing it in Slackware 4.0. (And that came out years and years ago).
The solution here is to simply auto partition your drive. Do it all in the background. If someone wants to do it all themselves.. then that distro wouldn't be for them.. have them use RedHat.:-)
And as far as "fragmenting" their hard drives... I am confused.. am I out of the loop here? I thought a fragmented drive was when files were not stored on concurrent parts of the drive. Silly me.:-P
Fixing the memory leaks in mozilla will not change anything about what happens after mozilla exits
I beg to differ there. And this goes to the other two people who replied and who said that any "good" OS will have everything totally cleaned up after an app exits. This is simply not true. They are better about it now, but not by any means flawless. I couldn't care less about malloc commands. All I know is that when I run X, run a few apps... exit those apps, and exit X.. i STILL have less total memory free than I started with. Normally not by much, but still. Especially when you throw X into the picture (I've not tested this with 4.x) but when you run a poorly coded app that memory never gets freed until you reboot. It is a fact of life.
Also, on the Windows side of things.. I have a TV card which when I run the tuner it eats up resources like mad (it is a crappy tuner card). When you move or resize the window it never frees anything.. it just allocates more and more memory. When you exit the program only about 1/2 the memory used is then freed again. (I have since stopped using that card because of this)
Perhaps we are talking about two very different things, I don't know. But I do know that my original statement is quite correct. And somehow I think if I had just said that Windows sucks and left Linux out of it that nobody would have challenged it.
Actually, the beowulf comment MIGHT actually be applicable this time. Because that is what clustering is all about. So really... a beowulf cluster of digital machines is an attempt at making one huge DNA machine.
Now if only they could stop making the damn DNA computer morph into Bill Gates. And I thought sheep were baaaad.
When an application ends, the memory it consumed is freed. That's the operating system's job, and all of the modern operating systems (NT, 200, XP, Linux, OS X) do a fine job of that.
That they do, but leave it to buggy code to make sure that not all memory is freed properly. Memory leaks plauge every single OS, not just pre Win98 OSes.
Hell, even the unsinkable Linux still has issues with memory leaks. It is not an OS thing (mostly) it is just bad coding. And hell, sometimes it is just the compilier.
Bottom line: software, OSes, hardware, etc... they all have one thing in common... they are made by humans, so yes... they can be flawed, no matter what the brand name is.
What do you mean, "remember the day when...." I still play my atari 2600, with a whole box of games my brother somehow "acquired" for me.
Well hell, I still run the 2600 emulator on my PC now. Plus I have over 500 roms (I think every single Atari game ever made if I'm not mistaken.) hehehe. So I mean.. sure the 2600 will never die, but it sure as hell isn't selling anymore!:-P
I think a lot of Nintendo's decline is a result of losing SquareSoft's contributions.
I can agree and disagree with that. The way I see it though is that Atari once had supreme control over the console market (waaayyy back in the day). Then Nintendo and Sega came out with their original consoles. Nintendo beat out Sega and since then Nintendo has been the giant in the console industry. They beat out the Genisis, the Jaguar and a bunch of others I cannot remember. Hell, they even beat out the GameGear (sega) which was TONS better (in my opinion) than the GameBoy ever thought about being.
All that started to change right around the time that Sony released the PS-One. The tides are turning again and I think that Nintendo is about to take Atari's place in the "wow, i remember the days when.." department.
It all tends to happen to companies when they get too comfortable at the top. This is probably the only reason why MS hasn't fallen yet... they've never been comfortable. They typically don't ignore the little guys. They just crush them.:-) hehehe
So THATS what I felt last night. Could have sworn someone shoved a network switch up my ass... but everyone thought I was crazy... until I linked their computers together.
The original PC came with a choice of 3 operating systems, CPM/86, Windoze (a cheap knockoff of CPM) and UCSD P system. It was _not_ 'designed' to Microsofts specs.
Hate to nitpick here... but Windows has very little to do with CPM and it wasn't anywhere near available (Xerox had just started work on its stuff if I remember correctly) when the original IBM PC came out. MS-DOS on the other hand... well... a cheap knock-off of CPM. WHICH by the way... CPM would have gotten the contract had its creator decided to pospone his sky diving the day IBM wanted to meet with him.
Can you actually think of any good reasons to avoid sending revenue to AOL other than you just don't want to? I mean come on. Being different for the sake of being different is just as bad as conformity. The only difference is that if you conform you don't annoy nearly as many people. Go for the products you like. Go for the movies you think look good. (and for the MS thing) go for the software that can get the job done the best. Sometimes it is Linux, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes a good movie that I want to watch comes from AOL-TW (or one of their 10,000,000 baby companies) and sometimes it comes from someone else. That is the reality of our day. I think it is time we all grew up and delt with it instead of complaining about it.
I just think it is very funny to see comments such as the parent get modded as insightful.:-) Anyone think Taco may have had something to do with that? hehehe
I've still got the magazine, in mint condition.
Well, you DID have it in mint condition until someone wrote on it! Seriously though... the magazine is only worth as much as the sig on it now. Not that it would really matter with a mag... but i know for comics and sportscards that stuff is important. Oh well... too late.. rambling too much.. goodnight.
today however, chicken pox is something or a rite of passage fFor 6-8 all year olds
You know... I never got chicken pox... and I took care of all my sibblings when they got it. And I was hanging around my friends when they had it. Hell... I even kissed my girlfriend a lot when SHE had it........ does this mean I am genetically superior?:-P
To a certain extent it does depend on how you determine "safety", but by the measure of deaths per passenger mile you are 10-50 times safer (depending on the year) traveling by plane than car.
Deaths per passenger mile... still not the stats i was referring to. At the risk of being TOTALLY offtopic.......
If you take passenger miles..... why do most people fly? Because it is too far to drive. So you add a bunch of miles for one person. Then it is still taking into account every single driver and every single plane and not scaling them so the numbers could start the same. Not accurate stats. Those are the kind of stats to lie to you. So those stats are out the window.
Basically stats will never tell the true story unless you find a common denominator. This is just like saying a city with 1,000,000 people that has had 10 homocides is more dangerous than a city of 10,000 having 5. I mean.. your chances of survival are not as good living in the smaller town.
It's very easy to say that car acidents happen more often then plain crashes. Anyone cares to count the casualities ? Well, I'm not sure this is a good example, once car acidents casuality numbers are, AFAIK, higher, but I think you get what I mean.
I agree totally, but a better way to look at that same analogy is to think of the amount of people who fly and get killed compared to the amount of people who drive and get killed. Obviously with the 100's of millions of drivers (in the US alone) the percentage of people killed is far greater in plane crashes.
Bad thing is though, this seems to have the opposite effect on MS vs Linux. MS is deployed on way too many systems (my way of saying they control the market) And they still have the most security breeches per capita. One could argue that the hackers aren't the ones with Windows, and hackers hate Windows and love Linux which is why they never hack Linux systems... And while this is true to an extent this doesn't explain everything. The truest power of Linux over Windows is that Linux patches its stuff very quickly. Also GOOD Linux admins will actually get the patches and put them on. (After evaluating them to make sure they are effected by the security breech and making sure they won't effect anything else in production etc etc etc) I know the service packs for NT were very badly conceived. (Anyone remember SP6... then a week later SP6a?)
To bring these ramblings to a close... Things tend to be quite different in a real world situation than they are in a controled lab. And enough money can control a lab to make sure it brings out the results wanted.
I don't know too much about the Amiga (I wish I had the chance to own one but I didn't) But I do know that a lot of lower end production companies still use Amigas for their video editing. (Yes, the Amiga was THAT good that people have decided NOT to go with Adobe Premiere) Also, Commodore systems have always had graphics that were way ahead of their time. (Hell the C64 had 320x200x16 back in 1979, PCs at best had CGA (320x200x4)) So as best I can see this is where Amiga shined the most just because this is where people still use them for real tasks everyday TODAY.
Why doesn't AOL want strong encryption in their IM product???
Well.. this is an easy one. If you use 128 bit encryption rather than plain text you are using about 16 bytes (give or take) to represent ONE character. Whereas it is normally one byte per character (after you put in the headers). So if lots of people use the secure stuff then it would put about 16 times the load on their connections. Not a good thing for them when you couple that with the fact that they aren't getting ad revenues.
Think about it... 1,000,000 trillian customers potentially equals 1,000,000 people connected to AIM who don't see the ads (and so AOL doesn't get paid) and those 1,000,000 people COULD end up putting the stress of 16,000,000 people on the network. Not a good thing. (Unless you can only do a secure connect after a direct connect. That might be a good idea).
Anyway... with all that said. I use Trillian, and I hope that Trillian wins this.:-)
It's the VB runtime, which is different from an interpreter. Learn the facts
Ummm.. ok.. lets look at what the VB runtime is. It is the native code for all the stuff found in an EXE created by VB. The EXE calls upon this DLL to do even the most basic funtions... (like evaluating an expression). This might be more like a virtual machine, but personally I think Virtual Machines are nothing more than beefed up interpreters.
If it ain't native code then it is intrepreted.
On a side note: I was simply pointing out that this practice exists. I wasn't totally faulting anyone for using it. Personally I think every tool has its place, and only the fanatical idiots will deny that. (Except the PC Jr. that was just a dumb idea altogether)
People have been doing something similar to this for years. The original versions of Quick Basic (not QBasic) did just this.
Better yet... up until I believe VB5 (maybe 4 or 6) you HAD to have that vbrunxxx.dll. What do you think THAT was? It was the BASIC intrepreter. I have never liked this and I personally probably never will. But to each his own.
Java could still turn out to be a great platform... but I don't think that by taking away Java's key functionality it will achieve that. If you want something to be compilied natively use C++, or even *gasp* Pascal. C, C++ are close enough (if you use ANSI compliant) to where porting isn't too difficult, and the speed is much better. Java is for the people who NEED to have one app run on any platform. It has its use... it does very well with it. So if it ain't broke......
By the way... I heard rumors a couple years back of a Java OS. Anyone heard anything more about it?
And what's worse? I can't believe Yahoo! of all places started using those things! I mean come on... Yahoo! is one of the originals. Been my home page for more years than I can count on one hand.
Oh well, I guess it is time to go to Google or HotBot. *sigh* I fear change. hehehe
Certainly, I agree completely. But I still think that CSS is your friend, you just need to be careful, and BGCOLOR is Evil[tm]. In this particular example, using BODY {background : #fff} in a stylesheet will have no negative effect on any browsers (but you should define a foreground color too). BGCOLOR, OTOH, has a negative effect, because AFAIK, I know of no browser where you can turn it off.
That is quite untrue. In any browser I've used you can decide if you want to use the colors given to you by the site or your own custom colors. Been like that since the early days. Just poke around in the Internet Tools section of Internet Exploder. (I don't know if Netscape 6+ has it still or not, but I know anything prior to it does).
Oh... and by the way... Flash is good! It all depends on if you use it intellegently or not.
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Whether I free() my memory or not, the operating system has the exact same job at the end of a process's life. This *can't* be an application problem
It certainly can be. I realize that any good OS has its memory protected, but there are still many apps that allocate memory outside of their designated heap. Perhaps the OS SHOULD be cleaning this up, but the damn app shouldn't be so messy in the first place. Call me old fashoned, but I remember programming for 64k RAM (well really 38911 BASIC Bytes Free is the term I will never forget off the C64) and if you had even a small leak in that bad boy you were toast pretty damn quick. Granted stuff does a HELL of a lot more than it used to, but still. Careful and tight coding is still a must.
Ok, I can see your point with the clueless users. But as far as my comment goes, I couldn't care less if the reviewer was man, woman or somewhere inbetween. :-P
As far as fragmentation goes, that was more of a joke than anything else.
Am I out of the loop or does linux support swap files (as opposed to partitions) now?
:-) In other words, no need for the file to be subjected to all the stuff that it would be if it were on a normal ext2/ext3 partition.
:-)
:-P
Yes, you are way out of the loop. But he is still full of it. Even on an NT box it is still best to make a seperate partition for your swap space. It tends to run faster that way. Same thing goes for linux. Plus, the swap partition is designed for well... swapping.
But as far as "can it be done" goes, yes it can. It has been an option now for as long as I can remember. Since the 2.x kernel at least. I remember doing it in Slackware 4.0. (And that came out years and years ago).
The solution here is to simply auto partition your drive. Do it all in the background. If someone wants to do it all themselves.. then that distro wouldn't be for them.. have them use RedHat.
And as far as "fragmenting" their hard drives... I am confused.. am I out of the loop here? I thought a fragmented drive was when files were not stored on concurrent parts of the drive. Silly me.
Fixing the memory leaks in mozilla will not change anything about what happens after mozilla exits
I beg to differ there. And this goes to the other two people who replied and who said that any "good" OS will have everything totally cleaned up after an app exits. This is simply not true. They are better about it now, but not by any means flawless. I couldn't care less about malloc commands. All I know is that when I run X, run a few apps... exit those apps, and exit X.. i STILL have less total memory free than I started with. Normally not by much, but still. Especially when you throw X into the picture (I've not tested this with 4.x) but when you run a poorly coded app that memory never gets freed until you reboot. It is a fact of life.
Also, on the Windows side of things.. I have a TV card which when I run the tuner it eats up resources like mad (it is a crappy tuner card). When you move or resize the window it never frees anything.. it just allocates more and more memory. When you exit the program only about 1/2 the memory used is then freed again. (I have since stopped using that card because of this)
Perhaps we are talking about two very different things, I don't know. But I do know that my original statement is quite correct. And somehow I think if I had just said that Windows sucks and left Linux out of it that nobody would have challenged it.
Just my $0.02
Actually, the beowulf comment MIGHT actually be applicable this time. Because that is what clustering is all about. So really... a beowulf cluster of digital machines is an attempt at making one huge DNA machine.
Now if only they could stop making the damn DNA computer morph into Bill Gates. And I thought sheep were baaaad.
When an application ends, the memory it consumed is freed. That's the operating system's job, and all of the modern operating systems (NT, 200, XP, Linux, OS X) do a fine job of that.
That they do, but leave it to buggy code to make sure that not all memory is freed properly. Memory leaks plauge every single OS, not just pre Win98 OSes.
Hell, even the unsinkable Linux still has issues with memory leaks. It is not an OS thing (mostly) it is just bad coding. And hell, sometimes it is just the compilier.
Bottom line: software, OSes, hardware, etc... they all have one thing in common... they are made by humans, so yes... they can be flawed, no matter what the brand name is.
What do you mean, "remember the day when...." I still play my atari 2600, with a whole box of games my brother somehow "acquired" for me.
:-P
Well hell, I still run the 2600 emulator on my PC now. Plus I have over 500 roms (I think every single Atari game ever made if I'm not mistaken.) hehehe. So I mean.. sure the 2600 will never die, but it sure as hell isn't selling anymore!
I think a lot of Nintendo's decline is a result of losing SquareSoft's contributions.
:-) hehehe
:-P
I can agree and disagree with that. The way I see it though is that Atari once had supreme control over the console market (waaayyy back in the day). Then Nintendo and Sega came out with their original consoles. Nintendo beat out Sega and since then Nintendo has been the giant in the console industry. They beat out the Genisis, the Jaguar and a bunch of others I cannot remember. Hell, they even beat out the GameGear (sega) which was TONS better (in my opinion) than the GameBoy ever thought about being.
All that started to change right around the time that Sony released the PS-One. The tides are turning again and I think that Nintendo is about to take Atari's place in the "wow, i remember the days when.." department.
It all tends to happen to companies when they get too comfortable at the top. This is probably the only reason why MS hasn't fallen yet... they've never been comfortable. They typically don't ignore the little guys. They just crush them.
Linux rules!
So THATS what I felt last night. Could have sworn someone shoved a network switch up my ass... but everyone thought I was crazy... until I linked their computers together.
Humor note: see "Name" above.
The original PC came with a choice of 3 operating systems, CPM/86, Windoze (a cheap knockoff of CPM) and UCSD P system. It was _not_ 'designed' to Microsofts specs.
Hate to nitpick here... but Windows has very little to do with CPM and it wasn't anywhere near available (Xerox had just started work on its stuff if I remember correctly) when the original IBM PC came out. MS-DOS on the other hand... well... a cheap knock-off of CPM. WHICH by the way... CPM would have gotten the contract had its creator decided to pospone his sky diving the day IBM wanted to meet with him.
Ahh yes... geek history.. gotta love it.
Can you actually think of any good reasons to avoid sending revenue to AOL other than you just don't want to? I mean come on. Being different for the sake of being different is just as bad as conformity. The only difference is that if you conform you don't annoy nearly as many people. Go for the products you like. Go for the movies you think look good. (and for the MS thing) go for the software that can get the job done the best. Sometimes it is Linux, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes a good movie that I want to watch comes from AOL-TW (or one of their 10,000,000 baby companies) and sometimes it comes from someone else. That is the reality of our day. I think it is time we all grew up and delt with it instead of complaining about it.
Just my $0.02.
ummmm... why don't you two share with eachother privately... perhaps exchange phone numbers. :-P
I just think it is very funny to see comments such as the parent get modded as insightful. :-) Anyone think Taco may have had something to do with that? hehehe
I've still got the magazine, in mint condition.
Well, you DID have it in mint condition until someone wrote on it! Seriously though... the magazine is only worth as much as the sig on it now. Not that it would really matter with a mag... but i know for comics and sportscards that stuff is important. Oh well... too late.. rambling too much.. goodnight.
today however, chicken pox is something or a rite of passage fFor 6-8 all year olds
:-P
You know... I never got chicken pox... and I took care of all my sibblings when they got it. And I was hanging around my friends when they had it. Hell... I even kissed my girlfriend a lot when SHE had it........ does this mean I am genetically superior?
To a certain extent it does depend on how you determine "safety", but by the measure of deaths per passenger mile you are 10-50 times safer (depending on the year) traveling by plane than car.
Deaths per passenger mile... still not the stats i was referring to. At the risk of being TOTALLY offtopic.......
If you take passenger miles..... why do most people fly? Because it is too far to drive. So you add a bunch of miles for one person. Then it is still taking into account every single driver and every single plane and not scaling them so the numbers could start the same. Not accurate stats. Those are the kind of stats to lie to you. So those stats are out the window.
Basically stats will never tell the true story unless you find a common denominator. This is just like saying a city with 1,000,000 people that has had 10 homocides is more dangerous than a city of 10,000 having 5. I mean.. your chances of survival are not as good living in the smaller town.
Just my $0.03.
It's very easy to say that car acidents happen more often then plain crashes. Anyone cares to count the casualities ? Well, I'm not sure this is a good example, once car acidents casuality numbers are, AFAIK, higher, but I think you get what I mean.
:-P
I agree totally, but a better way to look at that same analogy is to think of the amount of people who fly and get killed compared to the amount of people who drive and get killed. Obviously with the 100's of millions of drivers (in the US alone) the percentage of people killed is far greater in plane crashes.
Bad thing is though, this seems to have the opposite effect on MS vs Linux. MS is deployed on way too many systems (my way of saying they control the market) And they still have the most security breeches per capita. One could argue that the hackers aren't the ones with Windows, and hackers hate Windows and love Linux which is why they never hack Linux systems... And while this is true to an extent this doesn't explain everything. The truest power of Linux over Windows is that Linux patches its stuff very quickly. Also GOOD Linux admins will actually get the patches and put them on. (After evaluating them to make sure they are effected by the security breech and making sure they won't effect anything else in production etc etc etc) I know the service packs for NT were very badly conceived. (Anyone remember SP6... then a week later SP6a?)
To bring these ramblings to a close... Things tend to be quite different in a real world situation than they are in a controled lab. And enough money can control a lab to make sure it brings out the results wanted.
Damnit, I want modded up on this.
I don't know too much about the Amiga (I wish I had the chance to own one but I didn't) But I do know that a lot of lower end production companies still use Amigas for their video editing. (Yes, the Amiga was THAT good that people have decided NOT to go with Adobe Premiere) Also, Commodore systems have always had graphics that were way ahead of their time. (Hell the C64 had 320x200x16 back in 1979, PCs at best had CGA (320x200x4)) So as best I can see this is where Amiga shined the most just because this is where people still use them for real tasks everyday TODAY.
Maybe I am wrong, if so let me know.
There's always someone with the beowulf comment. :-) But actually... in this case, mass reboot and see how long you can keep all the games running. ;-)
Why doesn't AOL want strong encryption in their IM product???
:-)
Well.. this is an easy one. If you use 128 bit encryption rather than plain text you are using about 16 bytes (give or take) to represent ONE character. Whereas it is normally one byte per character (after you put in the headers). So if lots of people use the secure stuff then it would put about 16 times the load on their connections. Not a good thing for them when you couple that with the fact that they aren't getting ad revenues.
Think about it... 1,000,000 trillian customers potentially equals 1,000,000 people connected to AIM who don't see the ads (and so AOL doesn't get paid) and those 1,000,000 people COULD end up putting the stress of 16,000,000 people on the network. Not a good thing. (Unless you can only do a secure connect after a direct connect. That might be a good idea).
Anyway... with all that said. I use Trillian, and I hope that Trillian wins this.
It's the VB runtime, which is different from an interpreter. Learn the facts
Ummm.. ok.. lets look at what the VB runtime is. It is the native code for all the stuff found in an EXE created by VB. The EXE calls upon this DLL to do even the most basic funtions... (like evaluating an expression). This might be more like a virtual machine, but personally I think Virtual Machines are nothing more than beefed up interpreters.
If it ain't native code then it is intrepreted.
On a side note: I was simply pointing out that this practice exists. I wasn't totally faulting anyone for using it. Personally I think every tool has its place, and only the fanatical idiots will deny that. (Except the PC Jr. that was just a dumb idea altogether)
People have been doing something similar to this for years. The original versions of Quick Basic (not QBasic) did just this.
Better yet... up until I believe VB5 (maybe 4 or 6) you HAD to have that vbrunxxx.dll. What do you think THAT was? It was the BASIC intrepreter. I have never liked this and I personally probably never will. But to each his own.
Java could still turn out to be a great platform... but I don't think that by taking away Java's key functionality it will achieve that. If you want something to be compilied natively use C++, or even *gasp* Pascal. C, C++ are close enough (if you use ANSI compliant) to where porting isn't too difficult, and the speed is much better. Java is for the people who NEED to have one app run on any platform. It has its use... it does very well with it. So if it ain't broke......
By the way... I heard rumors a couple years back of a Java OS. Anyone heard anything more about it?
And what's worse? I can't believe Yahoo! of all places started using those things! I mean come on... Yahoo! is one of the originals. Been my home page for more years than I can count on one hand.
Oh well, I guess it is time to go to Google or HotBot. *sigh* I fear change. hehehe
Certainly, I agree completely. But I still think that CSS is your friend, you just need to be careful, and BGCOLOR is Evil[tm]. In this particular example, using BODY {background : #fff} in a stylesheet will have no negative effect on any browsers (but you should define a foreground color too). BGCOLOR, OTOH, has a negative effect, because AFAIK, I know of no browser where you can turn it off.
That is quite untrue. In any browser I've used you can decide if you want to use the colors given to you by the site or your own custom colors. Been like that since the early days. Just poke around in the Internet Tools section of Internet Exploder. (I don't know if Netscape 6+ has it still or not, but I know anything prior to it does).
Oh... and by the way... Flash is good! It all depends on if you use it intellegently or not.
A word of warning for this link. Two words: Gay Porn.
Lots of windows opened, almost killed my poor Win98 box. (Linux could've handeled it!) hehehe