@ThomasPornin ahh if I try in real IE I get the Java pop-up

so it's a real IE thing

that's weird

@AJHenderson Yeah but I chose to avoid it since the situation is all good.

@ThomasPornin IE? Explain yourself.

@ThomasPornin from a quick look at the page load, my guess is mw.EmbedPlayerJava is the relevant bit

a media player fallback to Java from HTML5

and I hate modern HTML where everything is a massive unparseable Javascript thing that is loaded up and makes working out what is going on nigh on impossible

</grumpyoldperson>

@Simon cool, just wanted to make sure you'd seen it and all was right in the world

@RоryMcCune And it pretty much kills older Web browsers and smaller machines.

I have a laptop with a 1.6 GHz monocore CPU and 1 GB of RAM; it has trouble running Firefox or Chrome with more than 5 or 6 tabs.

Did someone here actually do the Security+ cert?

For some reason, both Chrome and Firefox spend inordinate amounts of time reading file from disk (in my case, a quite old and slow SSD)

(old and slow because IDE, not SATA)

@RоryMcCune Makes sense.

@ThomasPornin yeah the modern web isn't really very forgiving of older kit. I suppose these days when phones are shipping with Quad-core multi GHz ARM chips it doesn't cross their minds!

@RоryMcCune It is a well-known vicious circle. It is general throughout the IT industry.

Developers add features; then they optimize things so that they run at a tolerable pace.

That is, a tolerable speed on the developer's machine, which is often quite powerful.

This forces end users to upgrade their machines as well.

Which makes CPU cheaper and promotes development of even faster machines, that developers buy.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, individual machines were more long-lived, and there was a long-standing Tradition of improving efficiency over time.

@ThomasPornin yeah it does make an argument for making developers run on slow machines, although not one I think most devs would appreciate :)

An Atari developer considered that he had not worked well if his new version did not run faster, while using less RAM, on the same hardware than previously.

Advent of interchangeable PC completely destroyed that traditional landscape.

With Atari and Amiga machines, you could not say "I'll buy a bigger Atari/Amiga" because there was none.

While with PC, there is always one that is 10% faster; or there will be one in two months.

Same with smartphones.

@ThomasPornin yeah in the UK in the 80's a lot of devs cut their teeth on writing cool games that ran on the spectrum which had 48k of RAM, which made for some good practice at writing tight code

these days a lot of webpages are more than that!

@RоryMcCune Which is why good developers for smart cards tend to be about 40 years old: these are the people who began programming on machines from the 1980s.

@ThomasPornin good point..

In all honesty we must admit that the vicious circle that makes software always fatter and slow is also the thing that allows us to obtain CPU in the gigahertz range.

@RоryMcCune you can make my computer run slow for debugging, just make sure that it compiles on the power

then I wouldn't have a problem

Without that phenomenon, chances are that computers would be much slower (and would run without cooling fans, too).

I think we are reaching a point of diminishing power req. now for "ordinary" desktop/laptop users. I've got systems that are 2-3 years old now that aren't showing any strain at all

whereas in the past that was my usual thinking about upgrade point

@RоryMcCune yeah, my 6 year old computer can run new games at max settings at acceptible frame rates with only one graphics card update 3 years ago

You guys are like my grumpy 'in my day' alter ego :-)

@RoryAlsop :op

things are stabilizing and parallel processing and size/efficiency are becoming important again

BTW got a chance to try an oculus rift last week

most things in tech pendulum

still a bit low res. to be really cool

but i can see the potential

@RоryMcCune too bad they are owned by Facebook

@AJHenderson yeah that is a shame, but their existence is spurring lots of development in that arena

so I'm sure there'll be choices

yeah

that's a tech that has moved depressingly little in 25 years

I remember playing Mech Warrior 2 on a pair of IGlasses 640by480 stereo displays using DOS4GW for the rendering

with head tracking

on a similar cost of hardware

I'd guess that either this "holiday season" or the next at the latest we'll see some really good VR stuff

I saved for like 3 years of birthdays and christmases before giving up on saving enough for a pair of IGlasses

@RоryMcCune there is a good alternative I may get to play with. If I do get the beta kit I'll need to have you round

@Simon No, but why do you ask?

@RоryMcCune I once knew a web developer who strenuously argued for using ancient machines as web servers in dev/test, to ensure that the apps would perform well in production on modern machines. I don't know that he got a lot of traction in the community at large, but it's hard to argue that it wouldn't work. It certainly did for him.

@Xander I'm wondering if it's worth it and if it's doable if you study with books instead of a class.

@Simon So, my experience is limited, but I've taken a few of the practice sets of questions I've found here and there, and am thoroughly confident that I could pass it without either a book or a class. So yes, I'd say that it's entirely possibly to pass with a book alone. Whether it's worth it or not, I would say depends on what field of infosec you're leaning toward. If you want to do enterprise security, I think it'd probably be a good way to help get a foot in the door.

@Simon If you're looking to do something else, like pen-testing or application security, not as much, from what I've seen.

@Xander Oh, good to know, thanks.