Interesting. Part of the problem is with blind links. You can mouse over the link, and be completely misinformed about what will happen when you click it. Javascript is misused on at least 50% of the web sites. I guess designers want to put another technology on their web site.
Definitely, I've experienced problems with the Java plugin. (For those not knowledgeable about this, there is NO connection between Java and Javascript, other than part of the name.)
However, I have experienced problems with the PDF plugin, also. I assume that the problem exists with all plugins.
You said, "Reading through the bug it seems as though the developers
asked (albeit rather rudely) for some detailed debugging help which was never
carried out."
I estimated that the debugging help they wanted would have taken me
perhaps 100 hours to perform because I don't know the tools they were
suggesting and they were not offering help. It was more than I could afford to
give. When I originally reported the bug, I spent perhaps 10 hours reproducing
it under both Windows and Linux, using more than one computer, and writing the
report.
Since the problem always occurs, it is not difficult to reproduce. But
it does take a while to open that many windows and tabs. I interpreted their
response to annoyance that I posted the bug rather than an actual need to have
me compile special versions of Firefox and run all those tools. The fact that
the commenter knew about those tools indicates that he was probably already
running them.
Note a funny thing about the comments on that bug report. I reported
that Firefox crashed Windows, but under Linux only crashed itself. Then, note
that two women posted comments, saying that they had the opposite result,
Firefox crashed Linux but Windows was fine. Weird. I suppose they were
Microsoft astroturfers.
The problem with Firefox making Windows XP unuseable (crashing it)
seems related to the fact that the bug begins causing Firefox to take more and
more CPU time, until that time is 97% or more. This Firefox bug seems to get
involved with a virtual memory allocation bug in Windows XP, and the two drag
each other down.
The Mozilla team's handling of this bug is an example of a common
partial failure in the development of Open Source software. If there is no
corporate participation, some bugs just don't get considered, because no one
wants to do the work.
Every big Open Source development effort requires that large users
contribute some real money to the effort, so people can be hired to fix the
bugs that would otherwise be ignored. Large corporations should not expect to
use Open Source software for free, even though that is legal.
Firefox and Mozilla have memory leaks somewhere. Their memory usage is often clearly out of control. I submitted a bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660 (Note that links directly to Bugzilla from Slashdot are blocked. It is necessary to put the URL into a new tab. Remember to take out the space that Slashdot puts into long strings.)
However, the bug report was ignored. I got suggestions like "Every app is going to cause a crash if it's opened enough times." My use of browsers was characterized as "ungodly". Someone eventually characterized the bug as "works for me", even though he did not disclose how he tested.
That bug report was for version Firefox version 0.8, but the same problem exists in the latest version, 1.0.1. The bug is difficult to characterize. It may be associated with use of plug-ins like the Adobe Acrobat plugin. The problem definitely depends on which pages are visited. The problem seems to be some insufficient allocation of memory which is used for the windows and tabs.
The memory leaks become greater and greater as Firefox is used, and then Firefox begins taking 10%, and eventually more than 90%, of the CPU cycles. Then Windows crashes. Usually, before that, Firefox crashes, crashing all Firefox windows and tabs, and losing all the information and web page positioning.
Firefox does not even render Slashdot pages well, many times!
It may be helpful to mention here that it is common that government agencies try to hide the way they do business. Partly that is for their own convenience. Partly the self-esteem of many government employees is somewhat dependent on the raw, unreasoned power of their agencies. Partly agency employees know the quality of their procedures is low, and don't want them challenged.
The Irony of Democracy is that few people in a democracy actually believe in democratic principles.
The 9/11 bombings gave power to some of the worst elements in the United States.
Yes. The amount of U.S. government intervention in the governments of other countries is so extensive that it is difficult to document it all. And that's just the intervention that has become known. The U.S. government has become one of inability to make effective relationships and secrecy and adversarial behavior.
Thanks! It was a typo. I totally missed what he was saying, that I had written 70s, and the CIA action was in 1953. I don't know how "70s" crept into what I wrote.
The U.S. government's CIA calls the problems caused by their involvement, "blowback". United States taxpayers pay for both the initial involvement and the blowback.
This is just part of the general corruption of the U.S. government.
From the article: Free expression and First Amendment rights are the real target of this legislation," declared Rep. Bernie Sanders (Ind-Vt.) during the debate over the bill. "This is not what America is about."
A better description is that the real target is anyone who might say things that are not accepted by those who control the government.
Also, large fines for using negative words gets votes from those who think they are superior because of their religion. Such people and their anger are easily manipulated.
The government is being sold to anyone who has the money. Huge amounts of money are being borrowed and transferred to the pockets of those in power. The U.S. government is now far more in debt than ever before: Debt Clock. If you are a U.S.
citizen, you are expected to pay. Those who want corruption in the U.S.
government want the government to borrow. The corrupters find ways to
transfer the money to their pockets.
The origin of the present problems was in the 40s and 50s, when U.S. government leaders made two decisions. It is likely that those in power then did not understand that their decisions would eventually corrupt the entire government. At the time, the decisions seemed logical.
First, the government decided that it could act in other countries in secret. Second, the U.S. government decided it could act in secret to protect U.S. businesses in other countries.
What probably no one realized then was how much that would come to be a corrupting influence on the government. Probably no one realized then how much additional profit big multinational businesses could make by arranging, in secret, for U.S. taxpayers to pay for the security arrangements needed by U.S. multinational businesses.
Soon huge businesses were arguing that the U.S. government should subvert democratically elected leaders, as the government did in Iran in the 70s. Soon U.S. businesses would arrange unfair contracts with corrupt leaders, and when there was a protest, call for U.S. government intervention in the name of patriotism.
That's partly how we got to the present situation, where two men, whose family and business associates and friends have extensive investments in global oil businesses, are president and vice-president of the entire U.S. government, even though there is conflict of interest in such an arrangement.
From the linked article: "If a customer attempts to activate Windows XP
with an OEM key from a COA, they will be directed to call customer support
specialists to obtain an override code - provided they can prove that their
copy is legitimate by answering a series of questions."
Right now all those people who are night janitors for McDonald's are
happily saying to themselves, "There's someone who has a much worse job than
mine."
Maybe that is a way to rate business models, by the quality of the
jobs they create.
It's awesomely bad, when you think of it: Presuming that Microsoft
customers are pirates and making them prove they aren't by cross-examining
them. And, if someone doesn't answer the questions correctly, unfairly taking
away his rights to use what he bought.
Marketing people are often the least intelligent people in a company.
But this is a new low! R.I.P.
Microsoft? The rot is growing faster than Michael Malone predicted. If
some people are pirates, the solution is to abuse everyone?
Microsoft managers should be required to attend a class in social
skills. At least farting in public and chewing with your mouth open doesn't
hassle every customer.
Let me guess your position: 1) You are right. 2) But you didn't read any of the 35 books listed in the linked article because you don't need to, you are right. 3) The corruption of hiring someone known to be willing to do things adversarial to the common good has no connection with the corruption of two people with oil interests starting a war in which the major thing accomplished is to shift oil profits from people inside Iraq to people inside the United States.
Most citizens of the U.S. don't understand the violence of their government.
If you consider the history of the 24 wars since WW2 the U.S. has started, all of them have resulted in destabilization of the target countries. That destabilization has resulted in more deaths than the U.S. government killed directly.
The U.S. government has killed directly perhaps 3,000,000 people since the beginning of the Vietnam war. However, an informed person comes to the conclusion that the total number of deaths as a result of U.S. government action is perhaps 11,000,000.
The U.S. government is talking about the "end" of its war, but there will be a lot more killing in the next 2 decades that has its root in what is happening now.
"If Bush is so concerned about catching terrorists, why is bin Ladin still at large while Bush to taking an easy trip to Europe?"
Why did Bush's father have a business relationship with one of bin Laden's brothers? Why did Bush invade Iraq, when most of the attackers were Saudis, like the bin Laden family?
Conflict of Interest: Two men, whose family and business associates
and friends have extensive investments in global oil businesses, are president
and vice-president of the entire U.S. government.
Using dishonest means, these men convinced U.S. taxpayers to pay for
killing people in Iraq. What has been accomplished there? The killing under
Saddam was less than the killing under George Bush.
One thing that has been accomplished, however, is that the profit from
oil contracts involving Iraq has been shifted from Saddam to U.S. companies.
This was accomplished while minimizing the support for U.S. troops.
If so, then HP has not been a real business for a long time, but has been merely piggybacking on the ignorance of its customers. And that means that Carly Fiorina was not a businesswoman at all, but merely good at giving the appearance of competence. And that, in turn means that people who write for the business press are completely incompetent, too.
Slashdotters should have a mission in the world, to provide at least minimal education to their friends and family and neighbors and political representatives:
Don't buy anything from a spam email.
Buy ink refills from Costco and refill Canon cartridges. (See this comment: 54 cents per refill.)
To repeat, SP2 does a lot of good things, such as fixing multiple problems with USB.
We've had a lot of problems with Windows not working the first time we load SP2. Rerunning the same SP2 install program fixes the errors. Apparently SP2 expects files to exist on the target hard drive that are not always there.
The SP2 software firewall is weak, partly because it does not firewall outgoing connections. A commercial or free alternative should be used. Even the free firewalls are better than the Microsoft firewall. Install the latest version of the free firewall first, so that SP2 will detect it and (hopefully) not get confused.
I just looked at the nearest ethernet card. The transformer is obviously designed for high frequency, so normal power line noise is not a problem.
However, a Motorola electronics engineering handbook for power line devices that I read about 20 years ago told me to expect an "unusually high-energy spike" at least once a month. My understanding is that a spike could overload the common mode range of the ethernet interface, and possibly blow out the semiconductors that receive the signal.
This all depends on the capacitive coupling from the primary to the secondary of the transformer. If it is properly shielded, the capacitive coupling could be zero.
We are talking about unshielded twisted pairs (UTP) here. A shield connected on both sides, or even one side would likely have problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. Part of the problem is with blind links. You can mouse over the link, and be completely misinformed about what will happen when you click it. Javascript is misused on at least 50% of the web sites. I guess designers want to put another technology on their web site.
Definitely, I've experienced problems with the Java plugin. (For those not knowledgeable about this, there is NO connection between Java and Javascript, other than part of the name.)
However, I have experienced problems with the PDF plugin, also. I assume that the problem exists with all plugins.
You said, "Reading through the bug it seems as though the developers asked (albeit rather rudely) for some detailed debugging help which was never carried out."
I estimated that the debugging help they wanted would have taken me perhaps 100 hours to perform because I don't know the tools they were suggesting and they were not offering help. It was more than I could afford to give. When I originally reported the bug, I spent perhaps 10 hours reproducing it under both Windows and Linux, using more than one computer, and writing the report.
Since the problem always occurs, it is not difficult to reproduce. But it does take a while to open that many windows and tabs. I interpreted their response to annoyance that I posted the bug rather than an actual need to have me compile special versions of Firefox and run all those tools. The fact that the commenter knew about those tools indicates that he was probably already running them.
Note a funny thing about the comments on that bug report. I reported that Firefox crashed Windows, but under Linux only crashed itself. Then, note that two women posted comments, saying that they had the opposite result, Firefox crashed Linux but Windows was fine. Weird. I suppose they were Microsoft astroturfers.
The problem with Firefox making Windows XP unuseable (crashing it) seems related to the fact that the bug begins causing Firefox to take more and more CPU time, until that time is 97% or more. This Firefox bug seems to get involved with a virtual memory allocation bug in Windows XP, and the two drag each other down.
The Mozilla team's handling of this bug is an example of a common partial failure in the development of Open Source software. If there is no corporate participation, some bugs just don't get considered, because no one wants to do the work.
Every big Open Source development effort requires that large users contribute some real money to the effort, so people can be hired to fix the bugs that would otherwise be ignored. Large corporations should not expect to use Open Source software for free, even though that is legal.
Firefox and Mozilla have memory leaks somewhere. Their memory usage is often clearly out of control. I submitted a bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22
However, the bug report was ignored. I got suggestions like "Every app is going to cause a crash if it's opened enough times." My use of browsers was characterized as "ungodly". Someone eventually characterized the bug as "works for me", even though he did not disclose how he tested.
That bug report was for version Firefox version 0.8, but the same problem exists in the latest version, 1.0.1. The bug is difficult to characterize. It may be associated with use of plug-ins like the Adobe Acrobat plugin. The problem definitely depends on which pages are visited. The problem seems to be some insufficient allocation of memory which is used for the windows and tabs.
The memory leaks become greater and greater as Firefox is used, and then Firefox begins taking 10%, and eventually more than 90%, of the CPU cycles. Then Windows crashes. Usually, before that, Firefox crashes, crashing all Firefox windows and tabs, and losing all the information and web page positioning.
Firefox does not even render Slashdot pages well, many times!
It's a case of denial.
It may be helpful to mention here that it is common that government agencies try to hide the way they do business. Partly that is for their own convenience. Partly the self-esteem of many government employees is somewhat dependent on the raw, unreasoned power of their agencies. Partly agency employees know the quality of their procedures is low, and don't want them challenged.
The Irony of Democracy is that few people in a democracy actually believe in democratic principles.
The 9/11 bombings gave power to some of the worst elements in the United States.
Yes. The amount of U.S. government intervention in the governments of other countries is so extensive that it is difficult to document it all. And that's just the intervention that has become known. The U.S. government has become one of inability to make effective relationships and secrecy and adversarial behavior.
Thanks! It was a typo. I totally missed what he was saying, that I had written 70s, and the CIA action was in 1953. I don't know how "70s" crept into what I wrote.
Exactly. That extreme disrespect for another government caused many of the problems that came later: History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories.
The U.S. government's CIA calls the problems caused by their involvement, "blowback". United States taxpayers pay for both the initial involvement and the blowback.
I was talking about the present especially strong corruption.
This is just part of the general corruption of the U.S. government.
From the article: Free expression and First Amendment rights are the real target of this legislation," declared Rep. Bernie Sanders (Ind-Vt.) during the debate over the bill. "This is not what America is about."
A better description is that the real target is anyone who might say things that are not accepted by those who control the government.
Also, large fines for using negative words gets votes from those who think they are superior because of their religion. Such people and their anger are easily manipulated.
The government is being sold to anyone who has the money. Huge amounts of money are being borrowed and transferred to the pockets of those in power. The U.S. government is now far more in debt than ever before: Debt Clock. If you are a U.S. citizen, you are expected to pay. Those who want corruption in the U.S. government want the government to borrow. The corrupters find ways to transfer the money to their pockets.
The origin of the present problems was in the 40s and 50s, when U.S. government leaders made two decisions. It is likely that those in power then did not understand that their decisions would eventually corrupt the entire government. At the time, the decisions seemed logical.
First, the government decided that it could act in other countries in secret. Second, the U.S. government decided it could act in secret to protect U.S. businesses in other countries.
What probably no one realized then was how much that would come to be a corrupting influence on the government. Probably no one realized then how much additional profit big multinational businesses could make by arranging, in secret, for U.S. taxpayers to pay for the security arrangements needed by U.S. multinational businesses.
Soon huge businesses were arguing that the U.S. government should subvert democratically elected leaders, as the government did in Iran in the 70s. Soon U.S. businesses would arrange unfair contracts with corrupt leaders, and when there was a protest, call for U.S. government intervention in the name of patriotism.
That's partly how we got to the present situation, where two men, whose family and business associates and friends have extensive investments in global oil businesses, are president and vice-president of the entire U.S. government, even though there is conflict of interest in such an arrangement.
From the linked article: "If a customer attempts to activate Windows XP with an OEM key from a COA, they will be directed to call customer support specialists to obtain an override code - provided they can prove that their copy is legitimate by answering a series of questions."
Right now all those people who are night janitors for McDonald's are happily saying to themselves, "There's someone who has a much worse job than mine."
Maybe that is a way to rate business models, by the quality of the jobs they create.
It's awesomely bad, when you think of it: Presuming that Microsoft customers are pirates and making them prove they aren't by cross-examining them. And, if someone doesn't answer the questions correctly, unfairly taking away his rights to use what he bought.
Marketing people are often the least intelligent people in a company. But this is a new low! R.I.P. Microsoft? The rot is growing faster than Michael Malone predicted. If some people are pirates, the solution is to abuse everyone?
Microsoft managers should be required to attend a class in social skills. At least farting in public and chewing with your mouth open doesn't hassle every customer.
Let me guess your position: 1) You are right. 2) But you didn't read any of the 35 books listed in the linked article because you don't need to, you are right. 3) The corruption of hiring someone known to be willing to do things adversarial to the common good has no connection with the corruption of two people with oil interests starting a war in which the major thing accomplished is to shift oil profits from people inside Iraq to people inside the United States.
Most citizens of the U.S. don't understand the violence of their government.
If you consider the history of the 24 wars since WW2 the U.S. has started, all of them have resulted in destabilization of the target countries. That destabilization has resulted in more deaths than the U.S. government killed directly.
The U.S. government has killed directly perhaps 3,000,000 people since the beginning of the Vietnam war. However, an informed person comes to the conclusion that the total number of deaths as a result of U.S. government action is perhaps 11,000,000.
The U.S. government is talking about the "end" of its war, but there will be a lot more killing in the next 2 decades that has its root in what is happening now.
In a properly run government, even the appearance of conflict of interest would be avoided.
"If Bush is so concerned about catching terrorists, why is bin Ladin still at large while Bush to taking an easy trip to Europe?"
Why did Bush's father have a business relationship with one of bin Laden's brothers? Why did Bush invade Iraq, when most of the attackers were Saudis, like the bin Laden family?
Conflict of Interest: Two men, whose family and business associates and friends have extensive investments in global oil businesses, are president and vice-president of the entire U.S. government.
Using dishonest means, these men convinced U.S. taxpayers to pay for killing people in Iraq. What has been accomplished there? The killing under Saddam was less than the killing under George Bush.
One thing that has been accomplished, however, is that the profit from oil contracts involving Iraq has been shifted from Saddam to U.S. companies. This was accomplished while minimizing the support for U.S. troops.
More about the extreme conflict of interest in the U.S. government: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
What refill kit do you use?
Yes, but you don't have all the facts. It is HP, Lexmark, and Big Jim's used car lot that are merging.
"I guess now we know why printers are HP's last profitable division."
And, as soon as ink can no longer be sold for $8,000 per gallon (mostly cheap solvent, bought in tank car loads), HP will go out of business? (Also see this analysis about Epson ink: Comparison of ink in bulk to prefilled cartridges.)
If so, then HP has not been a real business for a long time, but has been merely piggybacking on the ignorance of its customers. And that means that Carly Fiorina was not a businesswoman at all, but merely good at giving the appearance of competence. And that, in turn means that people who write for the business press are completely incompetent, too.
Slashdotters should have a mission in the world, to provide at least minimal education to their friends and family and neighbors and political representatives:
Don't buy anything from a spam email.
Buy ink refills from Costco and refill Canon cartridges. (See this comment: 54 cents per refill.)
I read the paper and decided that the problems are quite hypothetical. The paper speaks of encrypting 2^32 files, for example.
Someone who exposes sensitive data to complete strangers should use WinZip AES, and then GnuPG to encrypt the WinZip file.
WinZip AES is secure enough for data on a computer to which there is limited access.
Is it this paper: Attacking and Repairing the WinZip Encryption Scheme?
Please provide a link, or post the paper as a comment.
What program do you recommend for compression and encryption?
WinZip now has AES encryption.
To repeat, SP2 does a lot of good things, such as fixing multiple problems with USB.
We've had a lot of problems with Windows not working the first time we load SP2. Rerunning the same SP2 install program fixes the errors. Apparently SP2 expects files to exist on the target hard drive that are not always there.
The SP2 software firewall is weak, partly because it does not firewall outgoing connections. A commercial or free alternative should be used. Even the free firewalls are better than the Microsoft firewall. Install the latest version of the free firewall first, so that SP2 will detect it and (hopefully) not get confused.
I just looked at the nearest ethernet card. The transformer is obviously designed for high frequency, so normal power line noise is not a problem.
However, a Motorola electronics engineering handbook for power line devices that I read about 20 years ago told me to expect an "unusually high-energy spike" at least once a month. My understanding is that a spike could overload the common mode range of the ethernet interface, and possibly blow out the semiconductors that receive the signal.
This all depends on the capacitive coupling from the primary to the secondary of the transformer. If it is properly shielded, the capacitive coupling could be zero.
We are talking about unshielded twisted pairs (UTP) here. A shield connected on both sides, or even one side would likely have problems.
Is what I've said here accurate? Any references?
Very interesting. Where did you get that information about spelling changes?