Well there is an epic battle that came to a quiet end, after extended periods of time and much insanity:
While usually every little thing is advertised, the much needed options to prevent everyone from seeing what… everyone is playing, came without the smallest notice. I have no idea how long they are already available, since I simply stumbled onto them. But it’s a nice reminder, which value these important options still take in development processes today.
After receiving a mail 2 days ago, which needed answering, that’s exactly what I tried to do. For reasons I’m incapable to comprehend, my mail client suddenly didn’t work anymore. It wasn’t sending AND receiving data. Step by step I learned what had gone whack. While exploring this, my IRC client disconnected. ‘Cause this is really nothing that happens rarely, it didn’t concern me in the least - at first. The more pissed I was, to find out it was no longer able to connect to a server too. The only regular piece of (online-) software I use like air, that was completely unaffected, was my browser.
From here on in I started to check everything that came to my mind, diagnose options in Outlook, sfc /scannow, any strange behavior of other machines behind the same router - things like that. Having in mind, that my initial task, of doing nothing but sending a simple mail, turned into an unsuccessful 3 hour session of searching the cause of this, didn’t really improve my mood.
Finally, I settled with restoring an earlier backup from the same day which “solved” it. Everything I could recall doing, during that period of time, was that I installed an update for UltraEdit. But since it’s just a text editor, it’s completely beyond me, how this could have influenced my network. Maybe my windows installation is just way too old. It’s a real blessing, when everything is just working the way it’s supposed to.
It’s still undecided if I will apply the editor update again, just to know for sure.
//Edit
The changelog of my FW “might” hold some answers…
[...](6.5.2358.316.0607)
Release date 15 July 2008
The following issues are resolved (only significant ones are listed):* Connections were blocked on sending attachments through POP3[...]
I would rather think it would make more sense to just restructure the way in which most current browser caches work. The times of full static pages are long gone. So why use gears to speed up pages like WordPress, when it would make much more sense to redo the caches themselves? This is really the wrong way around again. Gears doesn’t work everywhere, supports only some specific sites and has also not the feeling of a native extension. Sure, Firefox lists it as one, but it doesn’t come as an xpi, but as a webinstaller exe, that downloads the actual stuff, sets up a google updater process as an always running service even, completely parallel to the actual browser… and thus circumvents all the usual Firefox features. Just imagine the horror if every smallest piece of software would do that. Dozens of additional services running no matter if they were of any use whatsoever to the User. Either a process is of some current use, or it shouldn’t be running in the first place. The next step would probably be something like starting every installed software at system startup automatically…
Make a standard, so that all browser developers can make their engines compatible with it, so that all users on all platforms can use it with all websites. _That’s_ a real progress.
If used (with WP), gears downloads 212 files, which are 1,22 MB in size.
As if I shouldn’t have known better by now, I bought GW:RE on Steam, after listening to this. I welcome every opportunity to bring out my gamepad.
The first thing I did, the first thing I do in all games, was to check out the menu, to alter everything to my liking. My first deed was to switch the resolution up a little. Every time I tried this, the game crashed back to the desktop, the crashed process was still open and a black square was visible in the upper left of the screen. Same result every time, so playing in default resolution seems mandatory. 
I found people with the same problem, but no solution and no patch.
The game itself is still great, as one can see here.
2 days ago, I noticed that my network was getting slower and slower, surfing was almost stuck completely, IRC only gave “full buffer” messages when simply trying to connect to a server… A view in my firewall exposed µtorrent as the source of the trouble. For some reason it had thousands of connections and was still growing fast. As a further result, the firewall threads were drawing more and more CPU power to them, burying not only the network, but affecting system performance in general. I suspected 1.8 RC1 might have something to do with it, but switching back to 1.7.7 didn’t help a bit. Updating the firewall was also non-effective. Having red about trouble with a Windows patch (DNS) from the recent patchday, I had a new best bet. While I was about to deinstall it, checking the half open limit came to my mind. And bingo - the DNS patch hadn’t introduced any bugs at all, the system was just down to 10 again. Since I usually patch it immediately, I wasn’t aware of the result of this mixture. But now I know, having more half open connections set in the torrent client, than allowed in the system itself, stacks up connections without end, every single time it exceeds the tcpip.sys limit.
There and back again: With that many programs starting to really utilize MC platforms, the times where programs only use up one CPU core and therefore leave others free to still guarantee full system speed, as if doing nothing, are coming to a close.
Similar to TrueCrypt, this version of the Spybot brings MC support.
Every time after a major version change they do an a. 
However, the major change in this release is support of multi-core platforms. Even on my rather old machine AES now makes up to 200 MB/s, something my drives are far from reaching. So the bottle neck is now somewhere else. Good for me. On a rather fast machine, it’s really attractive to use it now, the performance shouldn’t decline very noticeable any longer.
My old Blade Runner CDs just fell into my hands, so I used this opportunity to install the game. It’s now 10 years old and I wanted to re-play it for quite some time. I even installed the ominous (no changes known whatsoever; available for CD and DVD versions of the game) patch this time. The graphics don’t even look that old. That really tells something about what kind of an achievement this atmospheric masterpiece was back then. Though it’s ancient now, the (largest possible) installation was quite uneventful, no weird problems at all. Same goes for the gameplay, it’s awesome even now. I even figured out how to successfully finish a Voight-Kampff test every time! My sole problem with the game manifested itself, after I tried to save my progress. Just an error message. After some frustration (attention, here comes the important part), I found out, that a folder named “save” is needed inside the game directory, which (sometimes?) isn’t automatically created by the installer. Unfortunetly, the game can be finished in just two days - but at least the multiple endings offer some replayability.
Through the entire Firefox 3 beta phase I experienced severe problems with GMail, which made this service almost unusable to me.
Basically every time I clicked on simple options like “all mail” or “sent mail”, the service timed out or reloaded into a page showing everything twice - just to time out again. The only thing that helped was switching to basic HTML fast enough, when everything was still working. Therefore it was great, that Gmail added a function to make HTML the default mode a while ago.
Since FF3 was still beta, I naturally assumed this was the problem and it would probably disappear with the final, but it didn’t.
Recently I experienced the problem on another PC, which buried the theory, that my profile was the most likely cause. Thanks to this, I started looking into extensions, which were installed on both machines. After ruling out adblock, the reason was found - CustomizeGoogle’s option “remove ads and related pages” needs to be unchecked. Not that the HTML only mode was bad or anything, but some of the options are easier accessible in standard mode. I’m really glad, that it turned out to be yet another case, where an old profile wasn’t the reason, but only a simple setting.
//Update
Turns out it was good that I didn’t write it to this dude. False Alarm. The prob surfaced once again. Ugly. With manually typing this link, it seems to be better, I usually click on this extension, so I can’t really say if it’s the same or a different link. All I can do is to keep an eye on it. Searching for the error message (Oops… the system encountered a problem (#103)) didn’t turn up much useful stuff.
Application: Firefox 3.0 (2008052906)
- Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4
http://adblockplus.org/
- CustomizeGoogle 0.72
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
- Delicious Bookmarks 2.0.58
http://delicious.com
- Deutsches Wörterbuch 1.0.1
- DownloadHelper 3.0.4
http://www.downloadhelper.net
- Extension List Dumper 1.14.1
http://sogame.awardspace.com/
- Fasterfox 2.0.0
http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/
- Firebug 1.05
http://www.getfirebug.com/
- FlashGot 1.0.3
http://flashgot.net
- Gmail Manager 0.5.5
http://www.longfocus.com/firefox/gmanager/
- Java Console 6.0.06
- Leet Key 1.4.1
http://leetkey.mozdev.org
- Linkification 1.3.3
http://yellow5.us/firefox/linkification/
- Live HTTP headers 0.14
- Menu Editor 1.2.6
http://menueditor.mozdev.org/
- Modify Headers 0.6.4
http://www.garethhunt.com/
- Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.2
http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/nightly
- NoScript 1.6.9.3
http://noscript.net
- POW 0.1.8
http://davidkellogg.com/wiki/Main_Page
- Resurrect Pages 2.0.2
http://trac.arantius.com/wiki/Extensions/Resurrect
- ScrapBook 1.3.3.5
http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/
- Secure Login 0.9.2.2
https://blueimp.net/mozilla/
- StumbleUpon 3.18
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
- Tamper Data 10.0.4
http://tamperdata.mozdev.org
- United States English Dictionary 3.0.3
http://www.blogzilla.info/spellchecker/
- User Agent Switcher 0.6.11
http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/
- Web Developer 1.1.6
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
