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Messages - Robert Deed

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136
When firefox hangs majorly solid and requires the double CTRL-ALT-DEL it has nothing to do with the Input Queue..  it has to do with Innotek's font engine running out of system resources (basically just killing the whole graphics subsystem ).  Obviously this is why IBM never was big on anyone hooking the graphics subsystem in this way.  I've noticed that this happens more or less after long periods of uptime especially if I am reading and writing in alot of large forums (some coding forums I use, along with technical assistance sites I participate in).  I'm not saying you thought that this had anything to do with the SIQ but I can say I am 99% sure of this, since when I removed the font engine it stopped occuring.  Of course I reinstalled it because I would take a crash every month or two over unreadable small fonts on my 20" 1600x1200 display =)  (I'm sure my large display size also increases the frequency of this problem).

My only remaining problem is with Firefox - usually during shutdown (and usually if gMail is open on a tab). Firefox hangs (someplace) during shutdown, and nothing responds on the machine (WPS, xWP, etc)... a few CTRL-ESC or ALT-ESC makes the SIQ workaround notice and take action (in 5-10 seconds - but I have the "Focus Change Sensitivity" set to 5 or less - not the default 20)... once the SIQ worker notices, it will prompt me with thread 192 (or whichever) has stopped responding, do you want to end it?" - at which time I get the "OK" and often no cancel choice. Selecting "OK" kills it, and the remnants of Firefox, (and usually frees a ton of memory - often more than is normally deallocated when Firefox shuts down normally) and all is well.

Occassionally, nothing seems to kill Firefox when it hangs... but for me, that is rare... in the instances where Firefox does hang, the kill/unkillable (requires reboot) ratio is probably 10:1.

On the rare instances Firefox is not killable, I have found that I *need* to hit C-A-D (twice1 because I have cadh installed - and it doesnt come up at all even tho the first CAD thinks it switched to it) to reboot and need to do it before I keep clicking on other things (either with the keyboard or mouse) or the system will not respond to the C-A-D keys and just beep when they are pressed, forcing a hard-power-off situation (or CTRL-ALT-NUMLOCK-NUMLOCK - which has always worked for me in every lockup situation - and is easier than reaching for the power switch...)



As an interesting side note, if you do get the "Process/Thread" (whatever) has stopped responding..." message and no cancel button - but for whatever reason want to hit cancel (ie: it is a resouce/GUI hungry process that you dont want to kill, or the SIQ worker has identified the wrong app, etc), then (assuming that window has focus) simply hit the escape key. Doing so seems to do the same thing as hitting the cancel button (when it is on the dialog box).

I am kinda curious why sometimes there is - and sometimes there isn't - a cancel button... but since the escape key seems to work the same, it's not really a big deal to me...



-Rob

Note 1: When trying to bypass CADH by double pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL, I find I need to hold CTRL-ALT, then press DEL, then release ALL of them and repeat to actually reboot. Oddly, holding CTRL-ALT, and hitting DEL twice (without letting go of CRTL and ALT) will not reboot any of my systems...



137
Article Discussions / Re: Open Office for eCS-OS/2 2.4 Beta1
« on: 2008.03.20, 06:33:58 »
All valid suggestions.  I believe it even recommends installing OO on JFS in the read me files.  In my experience the OS/2 port of OO are on par for any of the 3rd party ports, infact performance is much better then on Mac OS X (even though they basically just recompiled the linux build for mac X11.. I am starting to think that making a decent up to date hoblink/exceed PM x11 would be a great way to get apps quickly to OS/2 and then add OS/2 specific code in as time allows).  It is INCREDIBLY slow on Mac OS (I've tried both PPC and Intel versions on various macs, not to mention that mac is alot less hardware dependent then OS/2).  Obviously for any large graphical app you're going to want a video card which is supported ACCELERATED by SNAP.  Some people out here might like PANORAMA however panorama while being a great choice for a video card completely unsupported by snap is significantly slower then a full accelerated driver.  (I've tested between panorama on a ATI X1650 GT 512mb and a ATI Radeon Pro 9700 64mb.. and the 9700 is MUCH faster then the X1650 which would smoke a 9700 if it was accelerated). 

Otherwise like I've said, I have used many different versions of OO, Windows, Linux, OS/2, MacOS and the OS/2 builds on my machine (AMD Athlon X2 4000+, 2gb ram, 1tb Hitachi HD, JFS, ecs 2.0 RC4, ATI Radeon 9700 w/ Snap)  are on par with any other version I have used.  Infact the writer actually opens up faster on my OS/2 machine with quickstart off then it does on my wifes windows machine (same hardware except an x1650 gt) with quickstart on. 

No, I have it off in Windows XP, and it still starts about 2x as fast. I've posted the time comparisons here before in another thread. Also, I'm taking about the use of the program's GUI as well once it has finally decided that it wishes to load.


Hmmm....

  • What file system is it installed on? (HPFS/JFS/HPFS386?)
  • What type of video card (nVidia/ATI/other) and what video driver (SNAP/Panorama) are you using?
  • Is the XP version a GA version or a beta? (the OS/2 beta's presumably have lotsa debug code loaded, which will slow them down noticeably).


I have not compared it to Windows (and havent tried the latest beta), but the things I can tell you that I have noticed are:

  • OO on nVidia or Intel 845 chipsets (with SNAP - havent tried Panorama) is horrendously slow for any drawing, scrolling, updating (my PII 300 runs it faster than a 2GHz machine and nVidia card) - it's not OO, it's OO's reliance on crappy nVidia support by SNAP.

  • For OO (and Ceres Sound Studio - and presumably various other apps), there is a very noticeable speed increase when running on JFS.

    As an example my speed comparisons were with Ceres on HPFS386 (with a couple hundred megs of cache) and Ceres on JFS (with 64MB cache). Ceres, when editing audio, writes the Undo and processing buffers (entire copies of the current memory sets) to disk (unless you have gigs of RAM and tell it to use RAM - but the default is disk). JFS outperformed HPFS386 by a factor of almost 10.

    I'm guessing (especially from such hints that came with various versions of OO/2) that OO will also benefit from a noticeable speed increase from going to JFS... and in 99% of the OS/2 users case out there, it will be far more noticeable than mine (HPFS386 is definitely faster than HPFS - and I'd guess 99% of the OS/2 users are running plain HPFS).

  • Another odd thing I noticed is that it goes a little slower (loading) if Firefox (v2s) is also running - but that could simply be because this machine doesnt have much memory - and the two use large amounts requiring OS/2 to juggle memory around to provide contiguous segments or who knows what - (making that part up - but it sounded good and might explain that behavior)


138
I really don't think hydrogen is a viable alternative.  It is energy intensive to create, hard to store, dangerous and think about the cumulative effect of the worlds cars expelling that much water on a daily basis. 

I also dislike the environmental argument of the limited supply of fossil fuels. If the "experts" were right we would have run out of fuel (and natural gas) almost 40 years ago.  Ben made a good point about the fact that this keeps coming back every few decades. 

Robert, like you, I dislike hybrids. However, going straight out hydrogen (the only viable course in my eyes) is years off, necssitating a complete rework of the fuel and energy infrastrucutre of the US. Hybrids serve as a good stop-gap measure and a means to slowly get people accomodated to the differences that hybrid/alt fuel vehicles will bring. Still, they are a stop-gap, a way to ease the transition. We can not get complacent and not progress to alt-fuel, this must be a transition period only, no more.

139
OS/2 ATM machines were very rarely externally accessible, most were not even communicating on TCP/IP.  When they started switching them over to tcpip they usually used something similar to injoy firewall in order to keep them secure.

Hi,

well... reading through this article I must admit that what they call "hacked" does not exactly match what we think about when someone says "hack"... you see: Breaking up the cash compartment -even if by simple means- has nothing to do with OS security.
Sniffing on the traffic with whatever device does not mean "hacking" to me either - moreover, it has nothing to do with this-OS-is-better-than-that... they are all just as good as you make them. If the traffic is not encrypted, even "hacking" an OS/2 ATM is simple to put it that way.

What I would have expected from the headline is that somebody was able to load a spyware of keylogger piece of software onto the ATM or hack it via its IP adress over the network, injecting pieces of data and make it dispense dollar bills. THAT's what I call "hacking an ATM". And that was not done.

regards,
Thomas

140
My issue is that hybrid is not "going green"  They only make a considerable reduction in emissions if they are used on open roads, in traffic they are no better then any other car.  Not to mention that battery technology is very poor.  My car has 152,000 miles on it, if it was a hybrid the batteries would have failed quite some time ago and I would be getting worse mileage simply because my car would be dragging around heavy batteries and generators.

Not to mention the environmental impact that disposal of the batteries create. 

The most important thing we could do is work on alternate forms of power, and at the same time reduce the amount of fuel consumed until a viable alternative is found.  Hybrid is more or less trying to accomplish that, however it is quite possible to have less enviromental impact even with standard fuels (VW TDI engines get the same if not better mileage without the batteries and with the 2008+ emission systems have less emissions then a toyota prius) Not to mention that these cars could be modified (no official words on if it is usable on this fuel without modification yet) to run on biodiesel which is mostly used cooking oil from fast food restaurants.  The only adverse effect from this is a strange "mcdonalds fry" odor which the cars tend to make. 

I acknowledge we are making an impact on the enviroment, however I do believe alot of the facts are misrepresented to serve a particular sides arguments.. the thing which stands true is that the average American would benefit greatly from American energy independence. 

I apologize if I had insinuated anything that might be contrived as insulting. It was not my purpose. I just wanted to point out that while the USA is big on pollution there are those in the USA who are working to solve it.

Car companies need to sell vehicle that people want to buy. If they can make 'going green' desirable, there will be more people that would be interested in it. There is also a need for car companies to make cars safe but that safety adds weight to the vehicle which means lower fuel economy. Not evey one needs or can use a small vehicle so it is not always the answer. Car companies have to balance what the customer wants, want the DOT requires and what is good for the enviroment. There are some small companies that are also doing their best to help the ecology with hybrid, ev or high mpg vehicles; making them three wheels instead of four so there are less saftey restrictions.
http://www.rqriley.com/xr.htm   http://www.ravencar.com A couple of examples.

141
SSD is a bit pointless right now, atleast until the long term reliability of the drives are addressed. Solid state memory only has a certain amount of write cycles available over the life of the memory unit.

142
If Microsoft makes it, probably wouldn't work anyway.. =)

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Microsoft-wants-to-your-Big-Brother/ "It's not science-fiction. It's a real technology and it cannot be allowed to happen or privacy will vanish. "  Here is another reason to use a non-Win OS?  ???     

 8)

143
General Discussion / Re: OpenJDK port for Haiku
« on: 2008.01.24, 18:07:21 »
I agree. We know IBM will not open source OS/2. We should support the effort to clone OS/2; Voyager, OSFree or a port of K42.  8)

While I agree Voyager is intriguing..  OSFree is basically dead in the water..   Even if we were to start cloning OS/2 it is a very mature and complete operating system (unlike BeOS) and their are plenty of parts of the system which may be of use for someone attempting to clone it.

Basically comes down to this.. the WPS which is the main reason people want OS/2.  The ability to redefine classes in the interface, to add and subtract features is the hardest part of the system to clone.  Without this you would just have yet another "alternative OS" with no reason to switch to it.  It is the reason BeOS failed in the first place.. an OS with a quirky yet non-functional GUI is useless no matter how "pretty" it is without applications. 

Although in a way this is true of OS/2 as well we have years of applications which to fall back on as long as full compatibility can be assured.  We also need to give people a reason to use Voyager.

I really however disagree with making voyager a "personality" to linux..  I don't think in the long run this would be beneficial.  Even if time would have to be devoted to converting linux apps to voyager I would say it would be important in order to keep consistancy between all the components and not fall into the same pitfall many linux wm's have.

144
OS2 Petition / Re: IBM`s response to the 2nd petition letter
« on: 2008.01.22, 06:59:54 »
Then it is time to start taking names for the 2008 petition.. =)

145
The only problem I have with gimp is the os/2 port is very outdated and hoblink is getting long in the tooth when dealing with color matching. Hoblink has a bit of a glitch when it comes to color matching, exceed was better but I no longer have exceed :(  I guess running straight xfree issnt a bad choice, though I still only have an old version of gimp.

Doubt that would be useful to a photographer however, I need to be able to do accurate color profiles and such which really requires Photoshop (pixel had support for them as well).

How about GIMP under hoblink x11? Does it fullfill your demands?

146
Like I said I had photoshop working in Odin but the last which was fully functional was 5.0 anything newer has some issues.

Does Paint.net not use color profiles? I dont know, I only use it for image manipulations and adjustments that cant be easily done in MS Paint.

I cant get Photoshop (7) or Imageready to load properly under Odin, its still failing with the can not load alert resource. I've no ideas :? Can one of you guys (who have success with Odin) try it out and let me know how it goes?

147
Marketplace / Re: SimCity 2000
« on: 2008.01.17, 20:03:36 »
Would be cool.. get a FTP together, and make it 20 bucks per iso and then send the money to the original developers.. lol.. wish we had enough users willing to do that to send a good deal of cash to them and make them feel stupid for not supporting products which were already complete...

Really never understood it.. you spend the money you write the software you have it all working, then you take the product off the market.. which removes any (slight) possibility of having a return on your investment.  If stardock kept with the entrepreneur engine they could have made slight modifications and additions to the game and kept selling that product for years.

148
Doubt that would be useful to a photographer however, I need to be able to do accurate color profiles and such which really requires Photoshop (pixel had support for them as well).  I have always been happy with the calibration of printed colors with OS/2 especially with the older epson drivers (which i hacked to make work with my newer printers).  However it is obvious that I am going to be doing my work in OS/2 it is going to be within an XP VM..  (good thing I have 4gigs of ram =)

Well, if the Mono work ever gets off the ground, there is always the Paint.Net program which I think is pretty amazing. Its free, its FAST, and its proven to be ROCK solid. Plus, its updated like, every week, and its capabilities are extensible through the use of plugin dll files. Its a dream, yes, but it could happen one day.

149
I had photoshop 5 working in OS/2 however 7 had too many components which made use of advanced windows functions. Unfortuantly which makes it useless for advanced photo editing.

Would love to see a pm version of gimp but I doubt that is ever going to happen.

hey guys, This is old (I havnt checked there in a while!) but I think I will try what these guys suggested and see if I cant get Photoshop to install properly under OS/2 again. Photoshop 7 is a great app, a little dated now IMO, but would not be a bad tool to have under OS/2.

Here is the Odin GMANE posting. I will post any further developments later tonight after I give it another shot.
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.netlabs.odin.user/1736

Here's to hoping I can figure this one out -_-

150
I am a registered Pixel owner, I am also a photographer who would like to edit in OS/2 instead of Windows.  I had high hopes for pixel but after delay after delay I have given up.  There is more wrong with this app then SDL problems.  If pavel was serious about getting multiplatform versions he would release a platform specific framework that other ppl could convert for multiple operating systems and thus he could make native versions for all OS with very little work himself.  Anyway.. it's been well over 2 years since I bought it, with 1 minor update release which broke more then it fixed.

 
  Hello guys!

  Yesterday I received an e-mail of an old friend and he told me Pixel had been
ported to eComStation/OS/2!
  Today I downloaded it and play with it for a while... and besides some minor
redraw glitches (SDL/2 limitations) it is superb! IMHO, way better than Gimp!
It is worth trying, it is very small and fast... and it is in promotional price while
in beta (US$ 38,00), which grants access up to 2.0 version.
  It works like a charm on OS/2 and eCS. The only (temporary?) drawback
is the fact it needs SDL, and therefore do not work under Panorama drivers.

  This is Pixel website: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/

  Regards,

  Daniel Caetano
  daniel@caetano.eng.br

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