@allquixotic what happened to moto?

@Bob the feels for MicroSD happened :S

lol

also, I physically held both devices in my hands at the store and was like 'I love the feel of the backing of the Moto but that's not enough to keep me from having all the features of the Note 4 and the bigger screen"

What extra features

I thought you wanted battery life?

Blocking Mode, Emergency Mode, Ultra Power Saving mode, Private Mode, Car Mode, Touch Sensitivity... all things I use frequently that come with Samsung phones only

unless Lollipop makes them standard, at which point I'd rage...

Huh

well I don't use Emergency Mode frequently

but the others, sure

Didn't know about half of those

And I'm typing this on an S4 :P

also, the fingerprint reader is nice for certain things (I don't use it for unlocking the phone, but I use it for stuff like LastPass password reprompt and Softcard)

Hmm don't see an emergency mode

and this phone is so big that it completely obviates the need for a mini tablet, so I'll be selling or giving away my Nexus 7 (probably the latter; my mom's stuck with an aging ThinkPad Tablet slate running Android 4.0)

I think the Surface Pro 1 I have will suffice for the large tablet use case (mainly watching movies) for now, and later, the Surface Pro 4 (in all likelihood, anyway)

dat convergence

the Surface Pro 4 will also suffice for my laptop use cases, since the SP3 and up allow you to angle the screen for lap and small table usage

So many notification icons :P

so I'm really hopeful that going forward, a phablet, a desktop and a Surface Pro will be all I need in terms of high-tech electronics

no large laptop, no ultrabook, no mini tablet, no small smartphone, etc

and definitely no smart watch

Heh. I currently have nothing in the phone-laptop gap, but I don't feel the need for one either

What would I use it for?

Though replacing the laptop with something more portable would be nice

I still like the "detachable" form factor of the Surface Pro, since it has the potential to be a lighter weight and more portable replacement for a traditional laptop, while also removing the need to have something like a Galaxy Tab or an iPad (I'm not saying I'd get an iPad, just the form factor thereof) for lazy movie watching

@Bob Yep, you need three battery indicators

@HackToHell Heh. One's the system one, one's the app I use for measuring charge current and percentage display (I don't like the look of the system one), and one's the 100% charge notification.

The bed icon is a reminder to go to sleep :P

@Bob Root and mod the stock one ? :P

whoa. I zoomed in to 1:1 pixel ratio on the screenshot I took of my phone earlier. it's enormous on my laptop lol

@Bob ooh what app

@HackToHell Already rooted, but cbf modding

@HackToHell Sleep As Android

the font rendering is incredible, and the images are laughably low-res

Sleep cycle tracking and all that, but I always forget to turn it on

@allquixotic Gotta love vector graphics :P

@Bob Install Xposed and GB

wtf are we really making this a thing? target.com.au/p/pendo-pad-windows-8-tablet/56446876

One reboot and 2 app installs and viola :P

@Bob no please

Full Win8.1 with 1 GB of RAM... lots of those popping up

@allquixotic too late :S

@allquixotic I wonder how well it'll perform with that little RAM, actually.

Maybe I should test in a VM sometime :\

Especially with those $65 tablets.

> 8" 8GB Quad-core tablet

It has 16GB of disk space and 1GB of ram

What about that tablet is 8GB?!

@DarthAndroid They probably got confused

Huh. Apparently one of the reviewers was running Minecraft on it O_O

@Bob and using his NAND as RAM. :D

lol

@allquixotic I'm actually wondering what's different about my FF instance on Win8 that keeps its memory usage ~<1 GB, while it's routinely ~1-2+ GB on Win7 :S

But if it's actually due to the OS, heck, I could use one of those tablets for web browsing! :P

@Bob WDDM? HW accel? texture data?

graphics driver impl?

@allquixotic ...for FF? O_O

@Bob Nvidia's userspace component is infamous for spewing tons of crap into the VAS of any process that requests any API that touches the 3D portion of the chip

And I'm talking private working set/commit size here

for years it caused people with Nvidia cards to run out of VAS in strategy games while AMD and Intelers were fine

@allquixotic Eh... that might be it

any strategy game that ran remotely close to 2 GiB (or 3 with the LAA switch) would OOM on Nvidia cards

until they started designing them with a much lower peak memory usage

I'll have to test without hardware accel sometime. Maybe in the morning if I remember.

@allquixotic Guess what FF is doing for me :P

Some of it is tab usage, but I have similar usage patterns with similar (same?) addons on the laptop...

Maybe a plugin, but I have most of them disabled

@Bob that is one nice price. is it cheap because people realised when they have a folder it will be full of Pendofiles :-)

And there's a definite memory leak somewhere. I can open and close tabls and the mem usage stays a bit higher than it should have been.

@Bob yeah, loading up D3D or D2D or DirectWrite or OpenGL or OpenCL (and probably others I'm missing; CUDA?) causes the .dll components that get loaded underneath the graphics stack implementation, provided by Nvidia, to use the process's own VAS for lots of stuff.

and remember all the compositing that FF does with all the layers and animations and stuff...

that's all the 3d stack

it's not demanding, but it causes textures to be created and destroyed

Hm.

I doubt Nvidia's leaking, but they request lots of space to do it in

Not much I can do about it if that's the case :\

Waterfox? :D

Just wait for 64-bit FF and then ignore it :P

gotta love that 2^64 address space

(technically smaller in Windows, but still faaaaar more than any process should ever need)

@allquixotic Eh, too far behind :\

I've considered doing my own builds, but never got around to setting that up

I can't disclose much of what I know from reading NDA'ed slides from AMD's Catalyst architecture (from being in the Linux private beta for years), but one thing I know is that rather than map all those textures into the process's VAS, AMD stores them in kernelspace.. which, on a 64-bit kernel, poses no problems of VAS exhaustion

context switching FTL, but 32-bit processes love it

@allquixotic ...and potentially leads to interesting issues like yours? :P

@Bob aye :D

yeah, I checked this morning, and even though my physical RAM was mostly cleared out, an insane amount of kernelspace "junk" seems to be dumped off onto the page file and is being called "Committed pages"

so once my page file fills up, what then? RAM starts to fill up again?

@MichaelFrank Dude, really? Did my formula not work?

@CanadianLuke It worked! Your time machine worked!

@allquixotic And once that happens, you get to see how well your programs react to failure to malloc :P

@allquixotic Well, yea... I made physics my bitch!

@Bob yeah, except that before I hit that situation, at around 91% memory pressure, Windows makes a modal popup letting me know that my game (SW:TOR) is eating up a lot of memory and should be closed to prevent system stability issues.

@allquixotic Isn't WDDM doing the whole user-mode driver thing?

at which point I usually end up killing a bunch of background daemons and continue to run my game, which is eating up less than 2 GiB of memory

@Bob the driver-specific implementation of the graphics stack sits on top of WDDM. WDDM has both kernel and userspace components.

Ah.

the DWM is entirely userspace

I thought part of the point of it is if a driver misbehaves, it's possible to reset it without a full restart.

but dwm.exe isn't eating up any excessive amount of memory

A massive memory leak kinda falls under misbehaving.

Are you still running a beta driver?

@Bob the point of WDDM, aside from performance, stability and to enable the DWM compositing, is to enable hardware fault tolerance by way of TDRs

basically, when WDDM realizes that the driver sent a command to the GPU and the GPU is literally braindead, WDDM pulls power on the PCIe lanes associated for a brief second, causing the GPU to restart

then it asks the driver to re-init the GPU from scratch

the GPU might hang if, for example, you send it a garbage command

@allquixotic Huh. That's far more low-level than I expected.

GPUs are programmed with "garbage in, garbage out" mentality: if you're speaking the native register API of a GPU, and you send it nonsense, it's going to crash, or possibly render nonsense to the screen

they are not designed at the firmware level to handle "stupid drivers doing wrong things"

so the OS has to handle that case

on GNU/Linux with the FOSS driver stack, the intention is, "well, we have full control over the driver since it's part of the kernel, so we'll just make damn sure that our driver doesn't do anything stupid... and if it still does, then god help you, a kernel panic or at least a display hang is coming your way"

@allquixotic You have some kind of elections going on over there?

they have a Command Stream Checker that vets everything before it gets sent to the GPU to make sure no invalid commands are being sent

there may or may not be a command stream checker in AMD Catalyst on Windows, but even if they disabled it and the driver had a bug and sent nonsense, the TDR mechanism would fail the GPU back to a sane state (usually)

UNLESS the driver corrupts system memory, at which point all bets are off

as in the case of Catalyst now, which appears to be leaving pages marked as pinned in the kernel when they ought to be freed

usually when the command stream checker would reject a command that violates the ISA spec, you'd get a userspace program crash (SIGSEGV or equivalent on Windows)

so I'm guessing there's no such thing in Catalyst or we'd see program crashes instead of TDRs

@allquixotic I finally get to use LINQ to SQL... with SQLite... inside an ASP.NET project... interacting with AD/ADFS. My head hurts.

@Bob yeah, state governors and the congress

@allquixotic You voting? Apparently you guys have it optional.

@Bob yeah, voting is definitely optional, less than half of the people vote for the President, and even fewer vote in this election

the President remains in office for another 2 years

since the congress/governor and Presidential elections are offset from each other by 2 years

so we'll be hearing about Obama until 2016

most people are either complacent or actively dislike the system and are hostile to government in general, so they don't vote

On the plus side: finally got it to load the SQLite assemblies, got DbLinq working. Took far too long to figure out DbLinq while .NET tried to talk MSSQL to SQLite - which it wasn't too happy about.

@Bob that sounds complicated @_@

@Bob lol

@allquixotic I know the feeling, about people not voting...

@allquixotic Mono has better SQLite support -_-

DbLinq is baked into the Mono System.Data.Linq assembly

I could've used raw SQL, but I wanted LINQ :P

Also, the LINQ feels much nicer

I like LINQ for "functionally" applying various operations (sorting, paring down, traversing, looking within, etc) to map or list-type data structures, but I have not really done much with Linq to SQL.

var reqs = db.GetTable<ResetRequest>();
return reqs.Where(r => r.token == resetToken).SingleOrDefault();

var req = new ResetRequest() {
	token = Util.CreateResetToken()
};
reqs.InsertOnSubmit(req);
db.SubmitChanges();

nice

@allquixotic It's mostly a helpful abstraction, so I don't have to think about the SQL.

I got major kudos from the customer today... for my goddamn VBscript thing I wrote ages ago >_< you know, the one with the cat typing that gets written to the registry to enable the cool file dialog? :D

apparently they're replacing their own installer with mine :D

they must have realized it's better. :P

or maybe they saw the leet codez of the cat typing and were like "damn, how can we possibly match this. APPROVED"

@allquixotic That was an installer? O_O

@Bob yes. lots of robocopy and some invocations of wzunzip32.exe >_>

also continuous status updates in Excel because no threads or GUIs in VBScript

seriously, don't even ask -- this is the Government

An installer that provides output via Excel? Wow...

open Excel -> write status updates as it's doing stuff (debug messages, successful file copies, start time and end time, etc) to successive rows in Excel, scrolling down as you go, letting the user see it and keeping it modal

yeah... this was the requested design

@allquixotic That was requested????

A reaaaaally dodgy workaround for stupid policies, yea... but someone came out and said "make an installer. oh, and we want the install log in Excel"?

@allquixotic ...I'm not sure if that's better or worse

I mean, at least with PowerShell you get access to .NET and WinForms (or WPF)

also, a code comment requirement is to document every single possible parameter to methods called that may contain optional argments, so I had fun writing the comment for Workbook.Open

"btw, 99% of these aren't used"

and I found a bug in VBScript's string concatenation; namely, that it simply doesn't work with strings containing arbitrary sets of characters, such as certain sequences involving backslashes; so my string concatenation function is Concat(Array("str1", "str2")) where Concat is a function that re-uses a global variable that's an instance of a .NET 1.1 String Builder called through COM Interop, by calling .Length = 0 then .Append_3

life is good though; I got paid for developing it

@allquixotic wat

I read that three times and I'm still lost.

Somewhere between global variable and COM Interop

@Bob instead of someString = var1 & "\blah" causing someString to contain the contents of var1 followed by "\blah", it just makes it contain the contents of var1.

sucks for path building

so Concat(Array(any, number, of, string, variables, or, constants)) takes a Variant Array of copies of each string, then stuffs them into the .NET 1.1 string builder instance that sits as a global variable at the top of the file.

each time I call Concat I clear out the string builder

No manual builder implementation? :P

!!no

much rather use as much of .NET as I can -- which is admittedly very little, because only the mscorlib assembly has linkage to COM, and only some of the methods are scriptable

@allquixotic ...norepro

dim foo
dim bar
foo = "C:\baz"
bar = foo & "\quux"
Wscript.Echo bar

output: C:\baz\quux

@Bob might depend on the contents of foo, not sure :/

I never truly got to the bottom of wtf was going on; instead, I resorted to what I know. .NET.

lol

O_O maybe it's a length limit

o.O

pretty sure you'd hit max path length long before vbscript max string length

vbscript max concat length though?

@allquixotic considering max path length is 255?

@Bob it what? no, I don't think so?

@allquixotic 260

> In the Windows API (with some exceptions discussed in the following paragraphs), the maximum length for a path is MAX_PATH, which is defined as 260 characters.

I just created a string over 300 chars with concat

ok, I have no idea then, unless it's something to do with memory allocation, like, getting a string back from COM being handled differently than a "native" VB String

don't keep trying things @_@ I really have no clue

the code was last touched in July and I hope it stays that way

@Bob That's fine if you're not using the win32 apis

@DarthAndroid hm?

If you're not using Win32 APIs, maximum path length is 32768

oh, yeah, that too

you can bypass the shell and just tell NTFS to do what you want :D

this has been a major source of headache for us

...I know that, and it's kinda irrelevant to this, since you really don't want to be writing an installer that goes over that length

which means that Windows Explorer won't let you delete the file mwahahaha

because node/npm recurses well past 260 chars :(

I just brought up the 260 max length as a limit I could test within

that was a guess on possible vbscript string/concat length limits

ah

@Bob and after dissing the S Pen, I actually like it O_O

keeps screen from getting smudgy :D

the bezel around the Note 4 is 100% better than the Galaxy S5's.

the S5's seemed really cheaply made and it was an absolute dirt magnet because it had little crevices where finger oils and dust would accumulate

the Note 4's is a solid, straight piece of metal

@Bob Hm. It would also seem (from about 3 hours of listening to music through my same Meelec bluetooth headset) that the Note 4 finally fixed the continuous bluetooth dropouts in the music that I was getting on the Droid Maxx and the S5.

It's running 4.4.4 just like the others, but maybe Sammy did a quick little patch in the Android sources just to ship this device without it sucking

Does anyone know if there is any reason Samba 3 requires being restarted every couple weeks to fix random glitches?

@CanadianLuke too many possibilities without searching the relevant bug trackers (for Samba upstream and for your distro), ideally looking for keywords that appear in dmesg or syslog or samba's own log

bug trackers are the best way to find other people with a similar problem with FOSS

They're just so random... Certain shares stopped being accessible by only some people, then other small hiccups of other shares not accessible by other users... It's annoying! I guess I'll check on Samba's website

or make sure you're using the latest stable upstream release of Samba 3 (and definitely at least the latest packages from your distro), or upgrade to Samba 4

or try a different distro to see if it's the kernel

or read dmesg to see if it's failing due to a lower level issue like FS or HDD

or ..........................

could be as simple as a tiny coding error in the version you have that's fixed in the next version (or some other later version; possibly even fixed by a distro-specific patch); could be as complex as silent FS corruption due to a critical bug in the FS in the kernel you're using.... or even worse than that

the symptom is too broad. need to find some actual evidence you can sink your teeth into. error messages in logs really help

I know, but the error logs aren't helping (so far, only checked the Samba ones). I'll check the syslog and dmesg though

also consider that the client may not be giving the end-user enough information to properly understand what's going on

if Windows Explorer says a share is "not accessible", that could possibly be entirely unrelated to Samba; if the user hasn't attempted to ensure that they have a route to the server and there's no or low packet loss, then it's possible the networking is dropping out between the user and the server

a great proof of concept would be to watch a continuous ICMP ping and measure packet loss to the server while the user is unable to access their share

Well, I'm on the mailing list now... Interesting bugs I can find there! Thanks, @allquixotic

@CanadianLuke This sounds like normal share behaviour under any system. ;P

@MichaelFrank Almost. I think I'm going to experiment with Samba 4 over the next few weeks

@CanadianLuke Our server project at work has been put on the backburner :(

That sucks... I'm still gonna try though

Gonna have to ninja one of them home so I can play around with it there.

But they recommend having two servers, one for the DC, one for the file server. So, I'm going to try virtualizing them :)

That sounds fun!

I'll post in my blog when I get results, but I need dedicated time to do it. Probably next week

@allquixotic that's odd

Why is my robocopy not doing anything? :/

ROBOCOPY "C:\NotBackedUp\robocopy test\source" "C:\NotBackedUp\robocopy test\destination" /COPY:DATO /DCOPY:T /R:1 /W:5 /LOG+:"C:\NotBackedUp\robocopy test\log.txt"

The log says it can see one folder but doesn't copy it.

@MichaelFrank ...specify recursive copying?

/s, /e or /mir

it's like running cp source dest

you'd need a -r

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh

Thanks. :)