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Firefox vulnerablility in 3.5! It is apparently with the new JIT javascript engine. Turn it off by going to about:config and changing javascript.options.jit.content to false. Javascript will be slow again. Hopefully they will fix this soon. The web shouldn't even be using javascript (or any other types of scripting) except for limited exceptions, such as validating forms.
This "Web 2.0" bullshit of trying to make a web page work like a program is crap. If you want your users to be able to run a program remotely, you should use X or even something like picogui. Though Java (real java which has nothing to do with javascript) can do this client side. Perhaps there needs to be a communications protocol which allows code execution on both server and client/terminal machines and has a proper security model so the client can't attack the server and the server can't attack the client.
Web browsers are useful in a limited context. Making them do things out of their scope is a bad idea. Various forces have pushed the situation where most hosting services are geared to only provide access to http, and most users want to / think they have to do everything with a web browser--even email. Then you lose features (webmail has never been as easy to use as a real email client), and you end up with bandwidth and CPU hogging javascript "applications". Total bollocks.
Been trying to get DOSemu to work. I got DOS running after I found the tip to change vm.mmap_min_addr to zero. ( echo -n 0 > /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr ) The games don't work yet--maybe a problem with the CD drive. I'm not sure if DOSemu is set properly to use the CD. It will read the mounted files, but I'm not sure if it can access the drive directly. I think the problem is probably with copy protection. That always needs to access the drive directly so they can check the weird tracks they make. I know at least some things are working, since I can view the Day of the Tentacle demo. Video and sound work fine.
Sound is a bit choppy, probably because it still uses the ancient OSS interface. I would think it would work better if it was upgraded to ALSA. It also still buffers the video and copies it to the screen. This is probably why it uses so much processing time: 75-100% on my 1.8 GHz machine when in graphics mode. At least it suspends itself when it isn't focused.
I should see if any of the settings will fix this. Though the update is 4 times / sec, and the best video interface it uses is MIT SHM, which is faster than manually drawing each pixel, but it is still somewhat slow. I would think XVideo should be the way to go. I wonder if this is something I could add myself?
The default has a really fast blinking cursor, which I hate. So I slowed it down. I wonder if I should just try to put FreeDOS on a flash card or something. Then I could boot directly to DOS and not have to worry about problems with compatibility.
In post #28611697 on slashdot, this poster complains about how when his kid runs into a puzzle in Runescape, he just finds a cheat site and follows the walkthrough. It seems pretty obvious to me this is because of the way the public schools run things today. With the "Discovery Math" thing, they are supposedly taught how to think for themselves. In reality, the teachers never really define the goal very well or they change it midstream-- probably because they don't understand it either, so the kids rarely ever get the "right" answer. In fact, if the kid gets the correct answer to the math problem, they are told they are doing it wrong! With "No Child Left Behind", the teachers need to get as many kids to pass the tests, so they drill kids with carefully constructed instructions of how to solve the problems on the test. Essentially the same thing as a walkthrough on the above cheat sites. So when given a problem, the kids don't want to find their own solution because they have been constantly frustrated in the past doing this, and they like just following a carefully written set of directions becase this is what they have "succeded" at and is what they know.
In my day, this was the opposite. The directions were always wrong or poorly written, and the goal was to get the math problem correct, though the teacher would want us to use the methods just taught. I remember a friend complaining about how he was marked down because he didn't use the method they just learned to solve a test problem. Not just that, most teachers didn't seem to like anyone to do anything beyond their coursework. Probably because they didn't want to be shown up. Way too prideful. So I guess they still taught everyone to not think for themselves.
This is probably one of the reasons American innovation is going down the tubes. The government schools are making everyone afraid to do so. But then all bureaucracies are like this.
This appears to be the blog of a rather prolific programmer. Stories of working for Atari and Apple in their early days.