Confessions of an Internet "Shock Jock" 194
An anonymous reader followed up on the Windows memory-leak fraud scandal, which is worth reading before you read the perpetrator's justification. "Randall C. Kennedy comes clean about his past, his relationship to Craig Barth and how it all came tumbling down. Includes an inside look at the politics of IDG and why you can never trust an IT publication that's as obsessed with page views as InfoWorld."
The downside of internet anonymity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The downside of internet anonymity (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no downside to internet anonymity, that would also exist without internet anonymity.
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It seems to encourage comma splices, too!
/ grammar nazi, sorry
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Is it any different than a Pen Name? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ben Franklin filled his paper with tons of his own writing.
RCK got it backwards. He should have written/blogged as another name. That would have protected his "first love" in a better manner.
I see it as confirmation that Blogging and the "Blogosphere" is an empty and thoughtless echo chamber.
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Wow. Your brush was so broad, you tarred yourself in the process. Nice.
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Flame or clever witicism? It could go either way.
Not going to read it (Score:5, Funny)
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Public falls from grace. We all love to watch them unfold. Whether it’s a golfer with libido issues, or some blowhard blogger getting his comeuppance, we just can’t get enough of it. The sordid details. The backroom double-dealings. The questionable motives.
I, of course, I fall into the latter category. I am Randall C. Kennedy, former internet “shock jock” blogger for InfoWorld and current holder of the title “Most Reviled Person on the Internet, 2010 Edition.” In the pas
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And implode it did. After publishing a particularly alarming set of findings - which I still stand behind while continuing to evaluate new data - the internet became engulfed in controversy.
Awesome. He continues to demonstrate that he's technically incompetent as well as being a fraud.
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Re:Not going to read it (Score:4, Informative)
The real question is -- why should we trust *this* column from him, when he's been caught lying in the past? "This time it's the truth, really!"
Because .... (Score:2)
He is a true Microsoft fanboy. Anyone who gushes so thoroughly about how good Microsoft and its products are is simply deluding himself and doesn't have any other experience to compare it with. And everyone knows Microsoft fanboys with no comparative experience are more honest than ... well, honest people.
He brags about the money he made when that has nothing to do with his excuse for a mea culpa. It looks more like begging for attention.
He pretends to show how innocent and naive and gullible he is, blogg
Here I'll help (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, it’s not as if I had trafficked in nuclear secrets or or stolen someone’s credit card information.
"Look guys it wasn't so bad, I was just foolin, no big deal!"
I merely tried to shield what was important to me from the fallout of the world that had been created for me.
"I'm the victim here, but I'm still a manly man, look at my sacrifice, I'm jumping on the grenade here! (as I throw everyone close at hand under the bus)"
And in the end, I failed miserably.
"Please feel sorry for me now that I've abused your trust for years and years."
It was a dumb move, born of frustration at feeling painted into a corner of my own making. I should have just walked away earlier – it’s just a blog in the end – but I lingered too long on the edge of the razor, and eventually it cut the heart out of everything I had tried to accomplish.
Wait is he trying to say that he almost got away with it, man he wishes he got away with it?
Fuck this asshole forever. As if what he's already done isn't enough, he tells his life story like anyone gives a shit. "Ohhh look how much money I made I am so awesome and knowledgable no wait feel sorry for me I'm just a man—a very manly man—protecting his family. But seriously, I'm rich and super smart, oh by the way buy my product you can trust me. I promise I won't create any more personas to review my own product and tell you how great it is."
Re:Here I'll help (Score:4, Insightful)
He still refuses to admit his performance tool doesn't take into account Superfetch, and therefore the story about Windows 7 computers unnecessarily swapping was complete trash. You should see the twisting of words required to keep his tool's numbers plausible--
I think in the latest iteration of crap-slinging he's claiming that Superfetch is a bad idea because the best computer will have a tiny cache which contains only what it needs. Which is true I suppose... for your magical mind-reading computer... but here in the real world, a larger cache is better since your computer has no idea which bit of data it will need next.
During this, it's also come out that the analytics data sent by his tool is sent un-encrypted over port 80, and can be linked to the individual computer that sent it.
Total scumbag.
Re:Here I'll help (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh and if you haven't been following, the main cause of problems was (partially) that their tool was comparing committed bytes against physical bytes. The problem is that memory is committed against the pagefile, not physical memory... therefore it's quite possible for my computer to have:
4 GB total physical RAM
4 GB committed
3 GB available physical RAM
Via his tool, my computer would show up as memory 100% full, paging like mad. In reality, it's not paging at all. The only reasonable conclusion you can draw from that data is that my pagefile is at least 7 GB large.
Their tool was also measuring Page Ins as a stat, without realizing that memory-mapped files will trigger Page Ins even if they're already in memory. As happens with, for example, every .exe file you run, since Windows memory-maps those first thing.
The guy claims to love Windows NT, but he sure loves to slander it... oh well.
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Rough, guess, I'll RTFA now. But he is just that kind of guy...
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having RTFA, you're pretty much correct. he talks a whole lot about things "that happened to him" and takes very little responsibility for the fact that he brought most of it on himself. he seems to blame infoworld for the damage caused to his reputation as the result of his writing an intentionally inflammatory and salacious blog, and uses that as justification of his creation of an 'alter ego'. and honestly, all that would have been fine if he hadn't then gone on to shill his pseudonym's product using
No Choice at This Point (Score:5, Interesting)
And implode it did. After publishing a particularly alarming set of findings – which I still stand behind while continuing to evaluate new data – the internet became engulfed in controversy. As the furor grew, and as more and more media outlets questioned just who this Craig Barth fellow really was and what made DMS tick, the house of cards came crumbling down. The persona of Craig Barth was exposed as one Randall C. Kennedy, and the entire web of half-truths and misdirection was exposed as the ruse that it was.
(Emphasis mine.) It seems like he has a reasonably technical background. What has he found that cannot be explained by SuperFetch (high memory usage) and Native Command Queuing (backlogged disk I/O queue)? Those were the two big percentage differences and apparently explainable if not desirable for the average user.
So, what next? For starters, neither the exo.performance.network or Devil Mountain Software, Inc., are going anywhere anytime soon.
Surely he must realize that open sourcing everything about exo.performance.network is the only thing he can do at this point. I mean, no one's going to trust him again if he has any way to manipulate the data/results without subject to complete inspection. The only option I see is to open source the software client and post the raw data alongside his own analysis. Without that I'm not stupid enough to trust an adoption rate quoted from this guy let alone average disk I/O queue on Windows 7. Without this kind of auditing, I'm sure those numbers will turn up to be just enough to make my eyes widen and my finger click his link. I am saddened that people will probably continue to run his client without knowing this whole story of how they were manipulated by a particularly crafty scam artist.
Re:No Choice at This Point (Score:5, Insightful)
(Emphasis mine.) It seems like he has a reasonably technical background. What has he found that cannot be explained by SuperFetch (high memory usage) and Native Command Queuing (backlogged disk I/O queue)? Those were the two big percentage differences and apparently explainable if not desirable for the average user.
Slashdot has people with most likely even more technical backgrounds. It tells something that he never tells what he has found (with his "reasonably technical background"), and that he acknowledged "XPnet's data couldn't determine whether the memory usage was by the operating system itself, or an increased number of applications". He didn't mention what kind of RAM usage is full, never said anything about SuperFetch or anything else. He practically knew nothing but just shout out bullshit. He even says it himself:
"The persona of Craig Barth was exposed as one Randall C. Kennedy, and the entire web of half-truths and misdirection was exposed as the ruse that it was."
This guy is still full of $hit (Score:5, Insightful)
Balancing the two worlds had become almost impossible, and I longed to escape from the "shock jock" persona that had been created for me...
I merely tried to shield what was important to me from the fallout of the world that had been created for me.
Sounds to me like this guy still is incapable of accepting responsibility for his own actions. If he can't accept responsibility for what HE created and what HE did, how is he ever going to have any measure of integrity?
-Rick
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It seems like he has a reasonably technical background. What has he found that cannot be explained by SuperFetch (high memory usage) and Native Command Queuing (backlogged disk I/O queue)? Those were the two big percentage differences and apparently explainable if not desirable for the average user.
There's one point I keep raising and haven't seen an answer to. Win7 will use the page file to swap out running applications in favor of cache/superfetch. I see it regularly when I don't use an app for a while but leave it running; or minimize it to the task bar -- and have confirmed it with perfmon. So while technically it can be "explained" as a result of SuperFetch and caching, that doesn't invalidate the point that Windows is using memory to the exclusion of applications. Presumably it is trying to
His definition of "shock jock" (Score:5, Insightful)
His definition of internet "shock jock" appears to be closer to my definition of "unethical sack of shit," but why quibble over semantics.
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I enjoyed the part where he frames the story as his 'fall from grace' and then goes on to detail how he got caught deceiving people.
Or "troll" (Score:2)
Actually, maybe it's just me, but it sounded to me like an euphemism for "troll". I mean, that's what we used to call the people who posted something shocking or inflamatory, to get attention.
Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
I've never seen a CV written in a format like that before.
Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Includes an inside look at the politics of IDG and why you can never trust an IT publication that's as obsessed with page views as InfoWorld."
Or, say, Slashdot, which got InfoWorld half those hits by regurgitating it's bullshit in the first place?
Come on Slashdot editors- you can't post that quote, almost as if you're pretending that you're somehow innocent of this. You may been unwitting pawns in the InfoWorld hits game certainly, but you posted a FUD article about Android fragmentation just a day after InfoWorld had been outed as guilty of this and untrustworthy and that suggests that perhaps you enjoy leeching hits off their FUD as much as they enjoy generating them. So why pretend that Slashdot too doesn't use shock articles sometimes to try and increase hits?
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Slashdot articles else I wouldn't come here, but it's pretty obvious that some of them are inflammatory FUD (hell Slashdot posted the original article in question) and that others of them are Slashvertisments.
Slashdot's credibility absolutely has decreased over the years because of this, and so it may want to read the above quoted sentence and take some lessons from it itself to ensure it avoids ever heading the same way. I suspect that the editors play the biggest role in this by you know, doing some actual editing and checking the authenticity of the article they're about to post.
Re:Uh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot's credibility absolutely has decreased over the years because of this,
Credibility? You must be new here. Slashdot isn't about credibility, it's about discussion. Individual slashdot posters have or don't have credibility. Slashdot editors have never earned their titles.
I suspect that the editors play the biggest role in this by you know, doing some actual editing and checking the authenticity of the article they're about to post.
Again, YMBNH. They have never done this. Why start now? If anything has harmed slashdot's "credibility" it's the obvious slashvertisements.
Re:Uh... (Score:4, Interesting)
So why pretend that Slashdot too doesn't use shock articles sometimes to try and increase hits?
InfoWorld writes and generates news. Slashdot merely links to it and provides a discussion forum. Infoworld asks you to assume that it has credibility; Slashdot asks you to assume nothing except "this link might be interesting to technically-minded people."
You're right that Slashdot linked to the original article [slashdot.org] in this sorry mess. Infoworld claimed its conclusions were correct. Slashdot did not; it merely said, "Hey, look what Infoworld says" -- and then enabled a lengthy discussion of the merits and problems of the Infoworld article. Much of that discussion questioned Infoworld's results. Frankly, that's exactly what Slashdot is for. It actually is innocent in this.
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Inasmuch as Infoworld puts software and hardware through tests, then yeah, maybe they ARE generating news by going out and crashing cars. (or servers, or something).
Re:Uh... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Frankly, that's exactly what Slashdot is for. It actually is innocent in this."
Well no, last time I checked, that's what Digg was about. Slashdot was about selecting wortwhile articles, that are actually worth reading, and weren't just FUD/advertisments.
Slashdot specifically selects articles, it filters articles, and it's the quality of that selection and filtering that I am questioning.
People come to Slashdot because they do not expect to have to deal with the turd that Digg churns out. Otherwise, if there is no filtering, and as you say, it's just about publishing any old thing and saying this might or might not be of interest, then they might as well just replace the front page with firehose and not bother wasting time having editors in the first place.
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Otherwise, if there is no filtering, and as you say, it's just about publishing any old thing and saying this might or might not be of interest
I didn't say "any old thing". I think the original article's claim about Windows memory usage was very relevant to a lot of Slashdot readers. It wasn't up to Slashdot editors to decide if Infoworld conclusions were right; it was up to them to decide if Infoworld's conclusions were worthy of discussion.
But we may be talking past each other here.
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I dunno... personally, I come to /. for the entertainment that comments provide, not so much for the stories themselves - there are plenty other places where I can read the news alone, usually long before they even hit the front page here.
And in terms of comments, that story was certainly an interesting one.
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For once this story isn't about windows. It's about some guy who flat out lied to get a few more page impressions.
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This whole affair started with this article: http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=story&sid=10/02/18/0429258 [slashdot.org]
Which most certainly was anti-Microsoft tripe of the sort Slashdot loves to post. The headline in the Slashdot article is the lie this guy told, which sadly worked.
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The story was one guy willing to say anything just to get more people looking at a site. There are loads of people like that but somehow this one got noticed.
At least it makes a change from the pro-Microsoft tripe that appears in so many comments on Slashdot.
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Most of us did pick up that it was rubbish. We do prefer our anti-M$ rants to be based on facts.
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Yes, it's right there in the Preferences.
Dynamic Index -> Exclusions
or
Classic Index -> Authors
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I'm pretty sure there is, I think I've seen it before somewhere in the options, but whilst some editors are worse than others, there's no real consistency. Sometimes even the better editors post shite and every once in a while the shite editors post good stories.
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I've never understood why anyone 'trusts' any company that gives them something for free. Their main goal is -always- to earn as much money as possible. Most of the time, that means being ethical because if they aren't, -this- kind of things will happen and destroy them. But some companies aren't that smart. And the ones that are smarter get away with little lies constantly.
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Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't trust them, but that's exactly why I get annoyed- because to me, the slashvertisments and FUD articles are so blindingly obvious that it's annoying having to wade through them at all.
I do not trust The Register for the same reason, they heavily moderate and regularly don't allow publication of comments that give a counter-point to the original author on certain topics (global warming, file sharing) and certain authors don't accept comments on their articles at all (i.e.
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Slashdot's credibility absolutely has decreased over the years because of this, and so it may want to read the above quoted sentence and take some lessons from it itself to ensure it avoids ever heading the same way.
Slashdot never had any credibility to lose. Editors are chosen based on some completely random factor I haven't yet determined (in kdawson's case, it was foaming-mouth hatred of Microsoft combined with willingness to spread lies, for example.) It's not like they're coming from the New York Times
Where's the "downfall" part? (Score:5, Insightful)
After the 96th paragraph about how "Major IT firm X comes knocking at my door", I realized this guy is your usual narcissistic fuck and stopped reading. The choice of phrases like "comes knocking at my door" tells me everything about this guy: he wants to clone himself so he can finally fuck someone worthy of his love.
Seriously. I did not need a thousand word sub-essay on Dvorak, Windows NT and NetWare. What a fucking retard.
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Where's the "downfall" part?
You mean the part where Hitler starts yelling at his officers for listening to internet Shock Jocks and complaining about how much money he lost on this scandal? I bet it should be up in youtube by now.
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...The choice of phrases like "comes knocking at my door" tells me everything about this guy: he wants to clone himself so he can finally fuck someone worthy of his love.
Boy, every now and then someone on Slashdot brings teh awesome. Hilarious!
Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
"“Most Reviled Person on the Internet, 2010 Edition.”", "while the future may see my name relegated to the role of punch line for a crude party joke". Sounds like this guy has a vastly overinflated sense of self-importance. Or maybe I don't spend enough time on the internet to know who the Most Reviled Person was and will be doomed to laughing uncomfortably trying to blend in at parties when people start busting out the Randall Kennedy jokes.
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After publishing a particularly alarming set of findings – which I still stand behind while continuing to evaluate new data – the internet became engulfed in controversy
An over-inflated sense of self-importance, or a woeful ignorance of the scope of the interwebs. Then again, maybe we're just jealous because we haven't made a enough to make sure that "we never have to work again". Yes, I'm sure that's it... disregard my post, it was just my envy speaking.
Meanwhile... (Score:3, Interesting)
Robert Enderle still gets playtime on NPR.
Maybe it's better to just be an asshole than to be an asshole and try to hide behind a nom de plume.
--
BMO
Vista hatred was role-playing, flame-fanning (Score:2)
"I realized that I was now regularly espousing opinions and viewpoints that had almost nothing to do with what I truly believed. Rather, they were simply extensions of the RCK persona. I became the "Microsoft basher" when, at heart, I held the company in the highest regard. I became the "Vista basher" and the "Windows 7 basher" when, in truth, I used both every day and found them to be excellent products (yes, even Vista). "
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Did anybody tell him there is all sorts of stuff between black and white? I means, compared to him even slashdots frontpage is full of nuance.
Who cares? (Score:2, Funny)
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*I* don't.
Journalists report shock (Score:3, Insightful)
Journalists report shock not stories. They have always been willing to bend the truth to get more readers.
The wise man will always judge for himself.
Making things worse (Score:2)
PCs are increasingly complex and there are lots and lots of things that can go wrong with them. Users are desperate for explanations for why their particular machine doesn't seem to run as well as it used to or is supposed to. Snake oil salesman like this doofus make a living selling simple explanations to complex problems that seem logical but are often wrong. Sometimes not just wrong but maliciously wrong. Instead of helping they're just making things worse. And rags like InfoWorld are just as bad, overlo
Brevity (Score:2)
TLDR
And even scanning the text nearly bored me to sleep.
Geez! (Score:2)
Is an extra semi-colon also too long for you? It's "TL;DR" you short sighted sap.
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TL;DRPTFBP
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TLDR [wiktionary.org]
What a piece of work (Score:4, Interesting)
He's got more name-drops than an Oscar speech (Score:2)
This guy's rambling post reminds me of every last name-dropping, frat-boy, asshole I've ever worked with. He drops more names, completely at random, than your stereotypical Hollywood Agent. He must have had some really good editors throughout the years, because I can't imagine reading an entire book by this clown. Maybe this is what passes for journalism in the perpetually retarded, and wrong, "IT Analyst" industry.
SirWired
danville (Score:2)
Never heard of him until today? (Score:2)
Judging from the content and length of his article I can see why, if I had run across anything he'd written in the past I'd stop reading it two paragraphs in.
Most importantly, *DONKDONK* Law & Order, were you lying then? or lying now? I'm guessing both.
Controversy Sells: Personal Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Boom! 300 page views that month. A dozen comments. Flamewars and fans.
If I'd been earning money from that blog, you bet I'd have taken a hint and continued to write things about how Obama is a commie, Glenn Beck should head an armed invasion of those baby-eating godless socialists in Europe, minorities are shifty, oil companies are conspiring against hamsters, and gays are actively plotting against our way of life every time they go Satan-worshipping on moonlit nights. Real me wouldn't stand for any of those, but real me - the regular guy who lives and lets live - doesn't sell as well.
Fox and MSNBC are more attractive investments than middle-o'-the-road CNN. The New York Times is doing all it can to survive, while the Sun and the National Enquirer sell on like it's 1970. Trash sells. I blame the man, but I also pity him. Only human, and as LotR says, the hearts of men are easily corrupted.
what difference does it make. DATA MATTERS (Score:2)
so he was barking with randal c kennedy persona to sell the data he produced legitimately with his real, craig barth identity.
what the fuck does it matter in regard to data, whether he was putting out a second, fake persona to advertise it ? the data wont change with the nature of advertisement, its still data. if the data is solid, it means it is valid. if the data is supported by similar findings from other sources, then noone can question the data.
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Delusions of a Dickhead (Score:2, Interesting)
Just like George Costanza couldn't pick his own nickname ("T-Bone"), YOU cannot decide who the most "notorious shock jock" is. Until I heard about your lying bullshit, I had ne
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Agreed. And we all know that Dvorak is infinitely more famous for writing complete BS for the sole purpose of getting people riled up to increase his page views.
Automated Blocks? (Score:2)
From what I understand, the slashdot submission process could be modified to include an automatic filter for blacklisted sites. Couldn't news aggregator (such as Slashdot) ban Infoworld? While you are at it, block that website that posts biased game reviews.
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Wouldn't that be ALL of them? Well, at least all those that have advertisement paid by game publishers and developers.
tl;dr (Score:2)
Actually I did skim it, and it looks like the relevant pieces start 2 paragraphs prior to the "A Slippery Slope" section, halfway into the novella. At least they didn't paginate...
What a jackass (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you strip away the self-important tone of TFA, it boils down to this:
A guy with a technical background discovered the rush of trolling a large audience. The major difference between this and a large segment of /. readers is, he did it under a journalistic guise - which makes him an unethical asshat whereas the /. trolls are merely run-of-the-mill asshats.
So then he tried to have his cake and eat it too: he wanted to enjoy the respect of his peers in technical endeavors while still having his fun as an asshat blogger. So, big surprise, it backfired and now he's lost the respect of his peers.
As for the Windows 7 RAM usage data - he may well have reported that in good faith, but it doesn't matter because of who he'd chosen to become. (As much as he tries to sound like he was drawn into his situation, ultimately he chose to be what he was and is; this article really just shows that while he may be resigned to the consequences, he hasn't truly accepted responsibility.) Maybe he really has reason to believe his findings, or maybe the desire to save face is coloring his view. (He certainly wants some measure of justification; I guess it's easier to feel that it's all unfair if the story that gets you caught was a case where you were factually correct.)
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I disagree. I may be a run-of-the-mill or even outright shitty troll here on slashdot, but lets face it, we have a slightly higher than normal troll quality level here, so my shitty slashdot troll is a gold medal winner on most of the rest of the Internet :)
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Well, if you strip away the self-important tone of TFA, it boils down to this:
The confession and semi-apology wouldn't exist if he had not been outed.
In other words (Score:2)
Dear internet: YHBT.
And what's the number one rule for dealing with trolls? Don't feed them.
tl;dr (Score:2)
There. I just saved you 20 minutes of wading through his long winded e-wanking.
-B
Time to move on... (Score:2)
I think some people are being a bit harsh. Self important? Definitely. Made bad decisions? Definitely...
The guy came right out and admitted what he did, and people make mistakes. It's very difficult to understand a situation unless you have been in that person's shoes.
He's gotta deal with the fallout over what he did, professionally and in public - and IMO, that's enough.
I guarantee that there are worse assholes posting less credible information all over the place. The moral of the story is that if you buy
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The guy came right out and admitted what he did
No he didn't. He got caught and outed after carrying out a professional deception for years on end, and to his financial benefit. That's not "people make mistakes", that's being a grifter. The fact that his accomplices (the editors at Infoworld) aided and abetted him does nothing to excuse him.
I call BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Randall Kennedy writes for a trade publication that presents itself as an authority in their space. I've read several of his posts in the past and wasn't shocked by his outrageous attitude, but by the poor thinking and conclusions he presented. That's shocking all right, but not in a good way. I unsubscribed from Infoworld after realizing they cared more about their click through rate then the quality of their "journalism."
Howard Stern is, for arguments sake, the original shock jock. Expresses his personal opinion on a radio show that is clearly identified as an entertainment program, no more, no less. His opinion of dwarves is not going to affect someones purchasing decision.
Frankly, I lay the blame at the feet of InfoWorlds editor. Read the comments on any of Kennedy's articles and you realize that the editor must have clearly known the audience found Kennedy's opinion's suspect. Clearly the page views were more important to them then the quality of their offerings.
I'd blame Darrel and Ron (Score:2)
"...It was there that I cut my teeth on technologies like NetWare, LAN Manager and SCO UNIX. ..."
Ah, so you can't blame the guy; he's been working for two of the biggest FUD factories of the past 10 years.
Where's the punchline? (Score:2)
I hope this article is a joke; it's the thing that would make this story interesting.
Screw him (Score:4, Insightful)
1.) He knew what he was doing was scummy.
2.) He continued to do it anyway.
3.) It ruined his reputation.
4.) He wished he hadn't done it.
5.) Instead of eating shit for doing something stupid, he whips up a new name and used it to be 'reputable'; except he is not reputable. And he instead further proved how disreputable he is.
I'm not familiar with him, his blog, or much anything else to do with this story, but this is what you get when you behave poorly. So take your smug ass and your piles of cash, fuck off, and go away.
No one trusts you anymore, nor should they.
You rate right up there with every loser CEO who thinks he can do wtf he wants because he has piles of money and need not regard anyone around him.
Bastard.
Re:Can you malloc(0x200000000) ? (Score:4, Insightful)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx [microsoft.com]
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Just malloc'd 5GB on my 6GB Windows x64 machine, worked fine.
Here's the program, which I compiled with Visual C++ 2008:
#include "stdio.h"
#include "tchar.h"
#include "malloc.h"
int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) // in GB
{
__int64 allocsize = 5;
void* pMallocated = malloc(allocsize * 0x40000000);
if (pMallocated)
{
_tprintf(_T("Successfully all
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On an unrelated note, a hint: since you're using VC++2008 anyway, use "long long" and "%LLd" printf specifier instead. It's been supported since at least VC++2005, and is much more portable (being in C99 and C++0x, and all).
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Not guaranteed to be 64 bits though. No stock C++ types are guaranteed to be any size, which is actually horrible for cross-platform code.
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No he isn't, God is cruel and heartless. If he was "just" no-one would fight wars, he would just smite the "bad" side. Instead he allows people to die by the millions.
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Of course 64-bit Windows and Linux can malloc() more than 4GB. Why else compile an application for 64-bit? Even better, unlike LoseThos they can malloc all your free ram as if it was one contiguous block, because they actually support Virtual Memory.
LoseThos seems to trash any and all attempts at process separation made in modern CPUs and OSs. Any process run on the machine can crash the whole system, or even trash the system files, making it unbootable. It's just not practical for a desktop OS. It's ok if
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Yes, you can. Well maybe. I'm not positive about a single alloc request of that size, but Windows and FreeBSD will be happy to allocate more than 4 gigs to a single process via multiple allocs. I can't recall ever preallocating that much, but I'd be surprised if it didn't work.
I've done so with both FreeBSD and Windows, and both will even go so far as to overcommit and allow the alloc to succeed even though they don't have 4 gigs of ram in the machine, just 64 bit kernels.
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Interestingly enough, in OS X, you can use a 32 bit kernel and still run 64 bit apps that use more than 4G of ram, even though the kernel can't.
Not sure WHY they went this route, perhaps it saves a little ram on pointers, its neat either way though.
Some Friendly Advice to Make Slashdot Enjoyable (Score:5, Insightful)
to comment (4 or 5 months ago) that IDG news is a biased, paid up, propagandist, political mouthpiece. I was modded as a troll, back then.
I'll bite. I skimmed through your comments looking for this -1, Troll claim that you have made and was unable to find it. According to Google (not an authoritative source) I can only find one comment in which you name IDG [slashdot.org] and it's not modded Troll, it's modded Offtopic. Nor does it rest at -1, merely at 0. There's an important difference between the two. You may have had a legitimate point it just had no place on that article for Slashdot. I suspect that if you had compiled a list of examples that would conclusively lead the reader to agree with you, you might have even gotten a +2 Interesting.
... but who should be the ones laughing in those situations? Probably the people who are employed.
I've noticed unfortunately that, when you do cite sources, it appears as though you're trying to pound a square block into a round hole [slashdot.org]. Be careful not to look for things to prove you're right but instead to read many things about the subject before concluding that there is evidence from reliable sources or maybe your viewpoint needs adjustment.
I have several friends from India, they have never complained of the media [slashdot.org] bashing [slashdot.org] India. I cannot say I've noticed this beyond jokes about outsourcing and telemarketing
On top of that, you throw out the sporadic groundless conspiracy [slashdot.org] which can hurt your message:
No popular Indian newspaper reported anything like that. I'm pretty sure that this news has been created by the manipulation wing of CIA and published by its media partners. Those filthy bastards don't like to be idle. Now that they've exhausted all the crap they can publish about China, they've turned towards India. Please don't believe them.
Listen, if you have a message to get out, that's fine. But a short post with such large conspiracy claim is often outright dismissed.
Your comments are often curt and therefore don't have a lot of content. This results in you lashing out at your reader [slashdot.org] which violates the know-your-audience rule of writing and often brings nothing new to the discussion [slashdot.org].
My biggest advice to you is to add more meat to your comments and don't get in little pissing matches with long back-and-forths between you and another poster. People don't enjoy reading ping-pong matches. Think out your argument or claim ahead of time and account for all viewpoints from the get-go. That's my advice. You rarely see me post more than one or two comments per article and it's not because I don't read the responses, it's because I come here to say something, I say it and then I'm done. Anything I missed was an error on my part and I deserve the valid rebuttal.
I know this post looks like a direct criticism or attack on you but it's not. It's meant to be constructive criticism because you have some real gems in your posts but every so often get really careless or resort to name calling or make outrageous claims with no proof. If someone had convinced me that this Randall C. Kennedy guy was a complete bullshitter months ago, I would have loved to have known ahead of time.
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Wow, you should sell Slashdot posting evaluations.