...and describing it as such is just yet more "puffery" intended to get people to look at THAT guide instead of others, thus driving up ad revenue.
Most of the tips are common sense or obvious to people who have used eBay a few times, to both buy and sell.
Indeed. The slashdot submission sounds like it was written by the author himself. That's the sort of thing that all of those "IBM Whitepaper" authors do.
So basically, based upon a superficial, second-hand interaction with the system, you're boosting it.
I would greatly appreciate people actually installing it and then saying why its no good after they have something to back-it-up with.
Maybe you're speaking a bit too soon?
If Microsoft subscribed to more of an Apple model (at least the recent history model), releasing steady improvements at regular intervals, people would be saying "ooh, look, shiny! Oh look, now the fugly is dockable!". Instead Microsoft still has the terrible habit of trying to reinvent, but they're often running to stand still (or more likely running towards the wrong goalpost). So many times they've rewritten something, in the process ruining what they had.
Vista, for instance, has been promised as a complete overhaul of everything. Geez, I remember 6 years ago reading FUD about how we had to start getting ready for WinFS (I can't even remember what they called it then) because it was going to change everything. Same for XAML (geez, is that even around anymore?) and so on. So for half a decade+ Microsoft has been running on fumes.
You've made a lot of great points that can't really be debated.
While it doesn't undermine or refute your points in the slightest, I think the critical point here is the sort of application under debate: Of course for an embedded controlling system, a system kernel, or anything else of criticality, such oversights would be heinous. For a web browser, however, the worst outcome is really just a nuisance.
You obviously have no experience with real-world software.
Way more than you.
A segfault caused by something as stupid as not checking the success of a memory allocation can be disasterous.
What are we talking about again? Oh, right, a fucking web browser. Get some context you weirdo. Hyperbole appears to be your strong suit, however.
They alert a system operator to the lack of memory, and the operator can remedy the problem (if possible), and then allow for the execution to continue from where it left off.
I'm sorry, did we start talking about mainframe programming? Oh, no, we didn't, nor are we talking about a banking application, or a database.
Down here in the real world -- you might want to visit some time -- the operating system raises warnings when memory gets low, and will start slogging slower and slower. Here's the funny thing: When memory is actually completely exhausted the system is basically hosed. I know I know -- it's us unprofessional people that are to blame. Or maybe...just maybe...operations actually desperately required that memory, causing a cascading fault that is unrecoverable.
blah blah blah...blah blah blah...blah blah blah
Maybe you should meet up with the real world some day.
I hope that you are not allowed to perform any programming tasks, as you obviously lack the skills necessary to develop software in a safe, secure manner.
And I hope that pulsing vein throbbing away on your forehead, and your unjustified sense of righteousness, doesn't give you an early stroke. Maybe next time you're talking about a, ermm, fucking web browser you could keep just the smallest amount of perspective.
OMG! Firefox crashes along with the rest of the system, taking down the heart pump!
And remarkably I said a simple statement of fact that said nothing about whether it was a good idea or not.
Any web browser developer who thinks that making "adaptive" use of gobs if memory is a good idea is a complete moron. Any kind of substantial RAM based web cache is just a bad fucking idea.
You're right. I was indeed being a little sloppy in my terminology, no doubt because little of my current development takes place in the C(*) ecosystem.
No, those are not "irrelevant bugs". They're examples of very sloppy coding
Getting hysterical about not checking allocation results is seriously warped. In this case the end result of not checking allocation results is, at worst, that you then try to access a null location, causing your app to GPF. Whoop dee doo.
With there being many reports of a single Firefox instance consuming over 700 MB after some fairly normal browsing sessions, a 1.5 GB limit is awfully close.
You do realize, don't you, that Firefox consumes that much because so much is available, right? There seems to be a general confusion out there about adaptive software that makes use of riches of memory.
There is no reason for any code to be contributed to any open source project that doesn't perform such basic checks.
Simply checking if the results are null is nowhere near a complete solution -- in complex code with many allocations, you then have to "unwind" - if such an action is possible at all - which can be enormously complex.
hen perhaps it is time for them to transition away from C++, to a language that offers automated memory management. Say, Haskell or OCaml.
How do you think GC'd languages deal with an out-of-memory condition? Why they throw an exception in most cases, which in most languages walks right up the stack until the entire application fails (because, as you know, if you can't actually do anything with the exception, you aren't supposed to catch it). In other words, the end result is exactly the same as accessing a null reference.
When I posted the prior comment, I just KNEW that it would draw the ire of the armchair purist, so I came so close to checking off the anonymous box.
Found 700 bugs in a quick analysis? Wow, I want those people debugging my sourceforge projects too!!! Someone care to explain this FUD, I'm too lazy to RTFA.
It sounds like the majority of the bugs were not checking if a memory allocation failed (e.g. new returned null). In the era of seemingly limitless virtual memory -- not to mention that a failure to acquire memory is usually unrecoverable anyways -- that's (unfortunately) a completely normal development practice. Those are pretty much irrelevant bugs.
Ummm, so you say that an 'annoying percentage' of time your computer fails to come out of hibernation
Hibernation is a special "power saving" mode where it spools the state of the entire computer to the hard disk, turning the PC entirely off (I'm not talking about standby mode). It is very much an edge condition, and on this particular configuration of hardware it stalls on the recovery. This is the use of an advanced feature, and the feature -- at least on this particular combination of hardware -- doesn't work with complete reliability. There is no operating system for which every feature works in every situation, on any combination of hardware.
Nonetheless, it has nothing to do with the operating system crashing. At that point in the recovery process, the extraordinarily stable kernel hadn't even been handed control yet.
You must never run any programs. Adobe Reader 7, Canon Printer Drivers and Mozilla crash my W2K-SP4 box (1GB of RAM) almost every day.
You have a hardware problem, or you're confusing an application crashing (which happens on all platforms) with the operating system crashing. I run virtually everything on my boxes, around the clock, and I only have a few limited complaints.
Very rarely a misbehaving application will start hogging the message queue and saturate the CPU. Pulling up the task manager to kill it can sometimes take upwards of a minute, which is ridiculous: The task manager should have godly priority over all resources (strangely the Windows Security box does, but once you launch to the task manager all bets are off). If you're really impatient this might lead you to reset your box, but it will eventually come up.
I use Hibernation, and an annoying percentage of times it fails to recover. I think this is related to my nforce/AMD combo, as my Wintel Dell laptop has never had a problem restoring.
Otherwise I honestly cannot remember XP, or Server 2003, ever crashing. Ever. The stability bugaboo is definitely a thing of the past.
If you get your HD from digi cable or dish (which 90% of HDTV owners do)
Only 90%? Seems more likely to be 100%. About the only uncompressed source of HDMI material will be a PC digital output -- so your Vista Aero Glass experience will be marred by compression artifacts!
Then again, this thing is just adding in another compress/decompress cycle - not good IMO.
Exactly. This wouldn't be too terrible if it relayed a source compressed format (e.g. the original MPEG-4 stream straight from the cable provider), but if it's decompressing and then recompressing to some new constraint, then the results will be terrible. Already compression artifacts are the bane of digital gear, so we don't need to exascerbate the problem.
Obviously people relying on screen readers would generally be stonewalled by the standard visual type.
That's why CAPTCHA images should contain ALT attributes containing the solution, allowing readers to dictate it to the visually impaired.
Seriously, though, some newer implementations also have an audio option, allowing users to choose to listen to an "audio CAPTCHA". Still a terrible solution though. Indeed, in general the CAPTCHA solution is far worse than the disease - Slashdot, for instance, has never had a problem with spam that I've known about. Apparently CAPTCHAs here were implemented purely to stop GNAA crapflooding, but why not just text analyzing and rejecting (or quietly deleting) any post referencing any of the normal troll material? (Yeah, it's a moving target, and would probably turn into a bit of a game for the crapflooders, but simple heuristics and bayesian filtering should make easier work of it).
Ultimately what we need is a central, trusted authentication system (e.g. like Passport, but with less evil), with accumulated "karma".
The Apple Store also says its 128. Even though they may now come with 256, it seems the ones Apple are using still have 128.
The highest card you're seeing in the "preconfigured" bundles is the 7300GT with 128MB, however select that and update the details -- you'll now have the option of choosing the 256MB 7600GT.
These are amazing prices for extraordinary levels of power. While I still need my Windows box (and no I wouldn't get a Mac as a Windows box), this would definitely serve as a very useful second PC. I think it's time that I'll take the plunge, maybe writing it off for "cross platform testing".
It's just a personal opinion, and it's the sort of experience that anyone proactively browsing with scripting disabled with experience. I'm not going to lose sleep over it.
Anyhow I think the point of the tiddly wiki was
... I realize what the goal is, but I think the execution is terrible. And in any case you can't have a "wiki" without having somewhere centralized to contribute changes, hence a server. Or in this case you're basically sharing an HTML file -> So why not just edit an actual HTML file, minus all of the convoluted nonsense?
Geesh, sorry about that abuse of commenting I just posted -- That's what I get for getting interrupted several times, and then posting without a preview. Doh!
Anyhow i'd genuinely like to know what you see as the problem since you seem to be the exception, not the rule.
I browse unknown sites with scripting disabled (e.g. via NoScript) - not only to avoid 0-day vulnerabilities, but quite simply because I want to know if the site has any merit before enabling what is often a Weapon Mass Annoyance. Normally most websites are 95% usable with zero scripting, including some quite a few Web 2.0 sites. They degrade gracefully. This particular travesty is hilarious when scripting is disabled. Not just a bit, but totally.
This abuse of internet standards, utilizes an enormous array of client-side JavaScript (included inline - not even included as a nicely linked import) to do what should be done on the server. Now if it was an all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world type website, heralding the beginning of Web 3.0, then maybe I'd sit back and admire it. Yet instead after all of that...it ends up being a fairly crapular website, or the sort that would normally exist as a couple of static HTML pages.
Anyone seriously into wireless security / hacking probably has 20+ wireless cards. It is common knowledge that a wireless card can be identified by its traffic, so why not just buy one of each vendor's cards and use the relevent one during each hack?
If you RTFA, you would have seen that manufacturing variations yield differences even among the exact make and model -- e.g. that minor circuitry, amplifiers and antenna variations differences yield a unique signature.
Try viewing it without JavaScript (e.g. like those of us with NoScript). Look at the source -- OMG.
That now qualifies as the most atrocious use of JavaScript I've ever seen - Jesus, render this garbage on the server. Feeding some oddball marked up nonsense to the browser, yielding a circa-1997 page, seems a little...unnecessary.
Can't spammers use this thing to break CAPTCHAs on sites like Slashdot and many other internet forums?CATCHAs have been very effective in stopping spammers in the past
While Slashdot has always been a target for trolls and miscreants, I don't ever remember it being a spammers destination (note 4-digit UID). Even back in those crazy, hazy days when we didn't have to try to interpret some bizarro text -- AKA the vast bulk of Slashdot's existence - somehow spammers were thwarted in their evil quest. Was Slashdot just feeling a bit left out, and just had to stick a CAPTCHA in there to be just like everyone else ("See!? Spammers like us too!").
CAPTCHAs should be replaced by forcing answers to submitted homework questions - kids get their homework done for them on a distributed network, and it somewhat proves that there's a human on the other end (no machine could interpret most homework questions).
a company can use the vast library of GPL software to short-cut their development process and then make profits without having to financially recognise the contribution from the legions of people who have contributed.
This sort of pathetic, "if I can't profit then neither can you!" green-with-envy description of GPL motivation is terribly wrong, yet somehow it keeps getting repeated.
And why target just developers? If Major Corporation replaces all of their desktops with Linux, Open Office, GIMP, and so on, reducing their payments into the software development industry by millions per year, what payback do they have the give? What about the overwhelming majority of open source users who will never contribute back, much less know how to program in the first place?
In any case, one of the greatest successes of open source, Apache, is basically BSD licensed (a derivative, but it shares most characteristics. Certainly it's less onerous than the GPL). Anyone can "plunder" the code, yet there Apache is, sitting strong, and evolving quickly.
Yes, my subject contradicts (oops!). I know both AMD and Intel guys. I believe it was the Intel guy who mentioned this.
Right...
Or perhaps you were so lazy in your attempt to appeal to "insider info" (a ridiculous common technique around these parts nowadays) that you couldn't even get your lies straight.
The submission is almost certainly fiction. Not only does it sound manufactured, but quite a few of us, err, "old folks" (I'm 33) can hear 16Khz noises. I have no trouble hearing the mosquito buzzer, as can many other people who didn't abuse their hearing in their youth.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. The slashdot submission sounds like it was written by the author himself. That's the sort of thing that all of those "IBM Whitepaper" authors do.
So basically, based upon a superficial, second-hand interaction with the system, you're boosting it.
Maybe you're speaking a bit too soon?
If Microsoft subscribed to more of an Apple model (at least the recent history model), releasing steady improvements at regular intervals, people would be saying "ooh, look, shiny! Oh look, now the fugly is dockable!". Instead Microsoft still has the terrible habit of trying to reinvent, but they're often running to stand still (or more likely running towards the wrong goalpost). So many times they've rewritten something, in the process ruining what they had.
Vista, for instance, has been promised as a complete overhaul of everything. Geez, I remember 6 years ago reading FUD about how we had to start getting ready for WinFS (I can't even remember what they called it then) because it was going to change everything. Same for XAML (geez, is that even around anymore?) and so on. So for half a decade+ Microsoft has been running on fumes.
You've made a lot of great points that can't really be debated.
While it doesn't undermine or refute your points in the slightest, I think the critical point here is the sort of application under debate: Of course for an embedded controlling system, a system kernel, or anything else of criticality, such oversights would be heinous. For a web browser, however, the worst outcome is really just a nuisance.
...And reading my name FROM THE EMAIL LISTED ABOVE is pure super techno fu. You must be some sort of elite hacker!
Way more than you.
What are we talking about again? Oh, right, a fucking web browser. Get some context you weirdo. Hyperbole appears to be your strong suit, however.
I'm sorry, did we start talking about mainframe programming? Oh, no, we didn't, nor are we talking about a banking application, or a database.
Down here in the real world -- you might want to visit some time -- the operating system raises warnings when memory gets low, and will start slogging slower and slower. Here's the funny thing: When memory is actually completely exhausted the system is basically hosed. I know I know -- it's us unprofessional people that are to blame. Or maybe...just maybe...operations actually desperately required that memory, causing a cascading fault that is unrecoverable.
Maybe you should meet up with the real world some day.
And I hope that pulsing vein throbbing away on your forehead, and your unjustified sense of righteousness, doesn't give you an early stroke. Maybe next time you're talking about a, ermm, fucking web browser you could keep just the smallest amount of perspective.
OMG! Firefox crashes along with the rest of the system, taking down the heart pump!
And remarkably I said a simple statement of fact that said nothing about whether it was a good idea or not.
What an incredibly stupid thing to say.
new != malloc
You're right. I was indeed being a little sloppy in my terminology, no doubt because little of my current development takes place in the C(*) ecosystem.
Getting hysterical about not checking allocation results is seriously warped. In this case the end result of not checking allocation results is, at worst, that you then try to access a null location, causing your app to GPF. Whoop dee doo.
You do realize, don't you, that Firefox consumes that much because so much is available, right? There seems to be a general confusion out there about adaptive software that makes use of riches of memory.
Simply checking if the results are null is nowhere near a complete solution -- in complex code with many allocations, you then have to "unwind" - if such an action is possible at all - which can be enormously complex.
How do you think GC'd languages deal with an out-of-memory condition? Why they throw an exception in most cases, which in most languages walks right up the stack until the entire application fails (because, as you know, if you can't actually do anything with the exception, you aren't supposed to catch it). In other words, the end result is exactly the same as accessing a null reference.
When I posted the prior comment, I just KNEW that it would draw the ire of the armchair purist, so I came so close to checking off the anonymous box.
It sounds like the majority of the bugs were not checking if a memory allocation failed (e.g. new returned null). In the era of seemingly limitless virtual memory -- not to mention that a failure to acquire memory is usually unrecoverable anyways -- that's (unfortunately) a completely normal development practice. Those are pretty much irrelevant bugs.
Hibernation is a special "power saving" mode where it spools the state of the entire computer to the hard disk, turning the PC entirely off (I'm not talking about standby mode). It is very much an edge condition, and on this particular configuration of hardware it stalls on the recovery. This is the use of an advanced feature, and the feature -- at least on this particular combination of hardware -- doesn't work with complete reliability. There is no operating system for which every feature works in every situation, on any combination of hardware.
Nonetheless, it has nothing to do with the operating system crashing. At that point in the recovery process, the extraordinarily stable kernel hadn't even been handed control yet.
You have a hardware problem, or you're confusing an application crashing (which happens on all platforms) with the operating system crashing. I run virtually everything on my boxes, around the clock, and I only have a few limited complaints.
Otherwise I honestly cannot remember XP, or Server 2003, ever crashing. Ever. The stability bugaboo is definitely a thing of the past.
I was just joking.
Only 90%? Seems more likely to be 100%. About the only uncompressed source of HDMI material will be a PC digital output -- so your Vista Aero Glass experience will be marred by compression artifacts!
Exactly. This wouldn't be too terrible if it relayed a source compressed format (e.g. the original MPEG-4 stream straight from the cable provider), but if it's decompressing and then recompressing to some new constraint, then the results will be terrible. Already compression artifacts are the bane of digital gear, so we don't need to exascerbate the problem.
That's why CAPTCHA images should contain ALT attributes containing the solution, allowing readers to dictate it to the visually impaired.
Seriously, though, some newer implementations also have an audio option, allowing users to choose to listen to an "audio CAPTCHA". Still a terrible solution though. Indeed, in general the CAPTCHA solution is far worse than the disease - Slashdot, for instance, has never had a problem with spam that I've known about. Apparently CAPTCHAs here were implemented purely to stop GNAA crapflooding, but why not just text analyzing and rejecting (or quietly deleting) any post referencing any of the normal troll material? (Yeah, it's a moving target, and would probably turn into a bit of a game for the crapflooders, but simple heuristics and bayesian filtering should make easier work of it).
Ultimately what we need is a central, trusted authentication system (e.g. like Passport, but with less evil), with accumulated "karma".
The highest card you're seeing in the "preconfigured" bundles is the 7300GT with 128MB, however select that and update the details -- you'll now have the option of choosing the 256MB 7600GT.
These are amazing prices for extraordinary levels of power. While I still need my Windows box (and no I wouldn't get a Mac as a Windows box), this would definitely serve as a very useful second PC. I think it's time that I'll take the plunge, maybe writing it off for "cross platform testing".
It's just a personal opinion, and it's the sort of experience that anyone proactively browsing with scripting disabled with experience. I'm not going to lose sleep over it.
...
I realize what the goal is, but I think the execution is terrible. And in any case you can't have a "wiki" without having somewhere centralized to contribute changes, hence a server. Or in this case you're basically sharing an HTML file -> So why not just edit an actual HTML file, minus all of the convoluted nonsense?
Geesh, sorry about that abuse of commenting I just posted -- That's what I get for getting interrupted several times, and then posting without a preview. Doh!
I browse unknown sites with scripting disabled (e.g. via NoScript) - not only to avoid 0-day vulnerabilities, but quite simply because I want to know if the site has any merit before enabling what is often a Weapon Mass Annoyance. Normally most websites are 95% usable with zero scripting, including some quite a few Web 2.0 sites. They degrade gracefully. This particular travesty is hilarious when scripting is disabled. Not just a bit, but totally.
This abuse of internet standards, utilizes an enormous array of client-side JavaScript (included inline - not even included as a nicely linked import) to do what should be done on the server. Now if it was an all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world type website, heralding the beginning of Web 3.0, then maybe I'd sit back and admire it. Yet instead after all of that...it ends up being a fairly crapular website, or the sort that would normally exist as a couple of static HTML pages.
If you RTFA, you would have seen that manufacturing variations yield differences even among the exact make and model -- e.g. that minor circuitry, amplifiers and antenna variations differences yield a unique signature.
Try viewing it without JavaScript (e.g. like those of us with NoScript). Look at the source -- OMG.
That now qualifies as the most atrocious use of JavaScript I've ever seen - Jesus, render this garbage on the server. Feeding some oddball marked up nonsense to the browser, yielding a circa-1997 page, seems a little...unnecessary.
Aren't those edits how you're getting your voice heard? Or were you more concerned with gaining credibility among the Wikipedia inner cicle?
While Slashdot has always been a target for trolls and miscreants, I don't ever remember it being a spammers destination (note 4-digit UID). Even back in those crazy, hazy days when we didn't have to try to interpret some bizarro text -- AKA the vast bulk of Slashdot's existence - somehow spammers were thwarted in their evil quest. Was Slashdot just feeling a bit left out, and just had to stick a CAPTCHA in there to be just like everyone else ("See!? Spammers like us too!").
CAPTCHAs should be replaced by forcing answers to submitted homework questions - kids get their homework done for them on a distributed network, and it somewhat proves that there's a human on the other end (no machine could interpret most homework questions).
This sort of pathetic, "if I can't profit then neither can you!" green-with-envy description of GPL motivation is terribly wrong, yet somehow it keeps getting repeated.
And why target just developers? If Major Corporation replaces all of their desktops with Linux, Open Office, GIMP, and so on, reducing their payments into the software development industry by millions per year, what payback do they have the give? What about the overwhelming majority of open source users who will never contribute back, much less know how to program in the first place?
In any case, one of the greatest successes of open source, Apache, is basically BSD licensed (a derivative, but it shares most characteristics. Certainly it's less onerous than the GPL). Anyone can "plunder" the code, yet there Apache is, sitting strong, and evolving quickly.
Right...
Or perhaps you were so lazy in your attempt to appeal to "insider info" (a ridiculous common technique around these parts nowadays) that you couldn't even get your lies straight.
Seriously, how hard can it be....?
The submission is almost certainly fiction. Not only does it sound manufactured, but quite a few of us, err, "old folks" (I'm 33) can hear 16Khz noises. I have no trouble hearing the mosquito buzzer, as can many other people who didn't abuse their hearing in their youth.