What kind of reformatting are you trying to do? Can you give an example?
My software indents two spaces to get text off the left margin to make it easier to read. It right justifies in column 70 to prevent line wrap in most readers. This works well for the first reply to a post.
Each news client handles quoted replies differently. Some are better than others, but quoted text will eventually get garbled after several passes. There is little I can do to prevent this.
Some clients have an option to reformat badly-wrapped text. XNews will handle moderately-garbled replies, but it fails on very poor examples. I have to rely on my own software to fix the problem, especially when several prior posts are included.
I notice that your reply has extra spaces between the ">" delimiters, which adds to the line wrap problem. My software removes these extra spaces to help minimize the problem.
Unfortunately, we have little control over the formatting on news posts. Perhaps the best solution is to find an editor that understands bad formatting and can fix it.
That sounds as if everything's fine as long as you don't try to use it for anything. If you leave you car in the garage, you won't have failures on the road.
Actually, not everyone has problems with Windows crashing... I might see Windows die a couple times per *year* these days? It's pretty uncommon... I have a Windows SBS 2003 machine that serves primarily as a file server and Exchange server, and the only time it *ever* gets rebooted is after Windows updates installs security patches; it's been up for 2 years straight otherwise.
I grant you that many people's machines do seem to crash routinely, but I've yet to see a case where it wasn't due to having all sort of Internet-downloaded/co-worker shared crapware installed on them.
That being said, Linux is certainly pretty stable these days to; I certainly haven't seen it crash lately either.
I can personally vouch for destroying a hard drive's controller by doing that once... it slid a little, the metal case shorted some of the pins on the ICs on the controller PCB, and -- poof! -- one newly minted brick.
Luckily, swapping controllers brought it back to life; no data was lost.
What makes you think it was necessarily the memory that was bad?
I don't think ECC is going to help a machine that's so broken that it blue screens within 5 minutes (it'll most likely hit a non-recoverable error within
15 and roll over ayway), other than to indicate that's where the problem lies rather than in some other piece of hardware.
A lot of machines with frequent crashes have failing electrolytics on the motherboard's CPU SMPS. They run fine, but crash when hit with a heavy load. $10 of new low ESR caps make a lot of computers rock solid again. A computer full of spyware running in the background adds to the CPUs workload, and can cause an already failing system to crash.
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Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
An uncaught memory error can corrupt the object code you are running, resulting in just that symptom. Once the object code has been fouled by the memory error (for example during a disk packing operation) it remains fouled until reloaded from the original media. The only insurance available is to always have ECC memory, which reduces the error chances to a negligible level. Remember that such errors can be due to cosmic rays, and be non-repeatable.
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Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
Look at almost any of my articles in c.a.e and c.l.c. I refrained above and before to illustrate the sort of problems your formatting caused. KISS applies. Reformatting blindly is especially deadly to code examples.
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Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
I never said anything about putting the drive on top of the case.
I said I place the slave drive on top of the power supply. There is a nice space there that cradles the drive so it can't go anywhere.
I also mount the master hard drive in a separate enclosure and cool it with a fan. It sits on top of the CD player right next to the slave drive, so it's easy to connect the interface cable.
Most hard drive installations provide little or no cooling, so the drive fails early due to heat buildup.
Blowing air past the drive cools it to room temperature and solves the problem.
I also remove all the cases and discard them. This prevents heat buildup from drying the electrolytics on the motherboard, so the electronics lasts longer and is more reliable.
I do have one computer that is sensitive to heat in the summer and crashes more often than normal. A simple fan salvaged from a refrigerator freezer solves the problem. These fans are designed to run very quietly, so they add little noise to the system.
I believe the point where you are heading to is that the operating system should be invisible. It really shouldn't be obvious until you stop and think about it that ther even is an OS involved, it certainly shouldn't be obvious which one it is.
Robert
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Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
I have heard many complaints about LeCroy's user interface, i have not found it to be all that difficult. Then again, i can live with "typical" "IBM TSO" interfaces, which while not comfortable, is functional.
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JosephKK
Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.
--Schiller
Hi Dave, not all have been blessed with an MK2 or MK3 or with such a beautiful wife like you have... :) If you don't have anything else than a Lecroy then you'll use it without complains (like wifes, who must love you first and then looking good)). The ugly part with Lecroy is you have to save your configuration else it's lost and takes a few minutes to get it back if someone else has change it to it's own favorite. The spectrum analyzer function is a mess, and there is no span function prior to the time base function. So the time base is changing the span too. I don't know if others scopes are doing the same, but I use quite much the spectrum analyzer function for noise measurements.
This is a true horror, some managers and executives at LeCroy direly need to be gruesomly executed in a Friday the 13th type style for this. I still find it hardly believable that anyone manufacturing anything even faintly realtime could possibly select any MS windoes variation for an OS.
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JosephKK
Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.
--Schiller
A few years ago, my pc was crashing out, but the problem was fixed when I cleaned the heatsink of all the dust build-up. The fan on the heatsink was working, but dust had eventually gathered in the areas where was effectively no air movement.
That's another reason why I leave the covers off my computers. You can see when dust and lint is starting to collect in the cpu heatsink and around the inlet slots to the power supply. Then you can schedule time for a good cleaning.
You just looking for an excuse to fire up an air compressor with a blow-off nozzle. I know how much fun those are! :-) (And it really is amazing how much dust comes out of old PCs...)
I don't have any paperclips. The screwdrivers are on another bench (also with a computer with the case removed.) There is no solder near the computers. I put my coffee cup on the left side of the monitor, the tower is on the right.
Like most users, it is a tower. If anything falls near the computer, it will hit the bottom panel. Most of the cards are removed except the video and modem. The motherboard is vertical, and hard for anything to reach back there. So the computer is mostly empty and not really at risk for anything falling in.
The only thing at risk is the keyboard, and I'm getting very good a removing the key switches and cleaning out the coffee and other grunge.
My biggest problem is radiation from the monitor that sometimes clobbers a distant classical music station when I'm running DOS. I hear blip-blips when scrolling through a page. Can't do much about that except install an outdoor antenna and use shielded coax. The landlord would have a fit.
Anyway, I just switched to a 5/8 wave vertical mounted on the radio stand. That seems to have improved the noise problem quite a bit.
Which doesn't make any sense, of course. If the antenna picks up more signal, the IF stage should go deeper in saturation. But the noise from the monitor is also increased, so it should make the same amount of noise when scrolling.
Maybe the station boosted their power, or changed the antenna radiation pattern.
The master drive is bolted down in its own cooling box. The slave sits on top of the power supply, and the sides of the case keep it from going anywhere.
I lubricate the connectors with ordinary vaseline. This provides a true metal-to-metal contact which reduces the contact resistance by an order of magnitude and also stabilizes it. The connectors last a very long time. If one starts giving problem, it shows up while booting. Reseating the connector usually fixes it. When the cable finally wears out, I have dozens of spares from other junked computers.
I usually swap drives several times per day, and more often when I'm bringing up another computer. I've been doing this for years on the same cable and it hasn't degraded.
Maybe. What about removing the covers to improve cooling, make it easy to switch pcb's and drives, and monitor lint buildup on the cpu heat sink and power supply inlets?
I love your exit. Simple, to the point, and effective.
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