Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Firefox 14.01

<< < (6/6)

IainB:
...
-I didn't understand this. As far as I know, https is only possible if the site's author has enabled it. So, if a site wants to be malicious, it would of course not support https in the first place. Then what is the point of this "https almost everywhere" feature?
Feel free to explain Https for dummies, please :tellme:
-Curt (July 22, 2012, 08:53 AM)
--- End quote ---
I didn't understand it at first either, but the discussion in the thread I linked do helped to clarify things. Follow any links and discover!
EFF's "HTTPS Everywhere" (Firefox/Chrome add-on) - quick review

IainB:
Fat Firefox (RAM usage)
-rgdot (July 22, 2012, 06:09 PM)
--- End quote ---
So where is the F in Chrome which eats more RAM than Firefox?
-Tuxman (July 22, 2012, 07:17 PM)
--- End quote ---
The "F" apparently makes up part of an important hexadecimal address (location) in RAM, for an array used to store certain data which has a corrupted index address. This is the location of the WOR ("Wordsworth's Overflow Register"). The WOR is an array which can be dynamically expanded to accommodate overflowed data.

Interestingly, the WOR was named in memory of the poet Wordsworth, as a tribute to his poem "Ode to the Number 27", where he wrote (from memory):
...something, something...
Then insert the middle digit
Where the midget
Fears to tread.

--- End quote ---

Wordsworth ascribed certain dark mystical properties to the number 27, which, as you may know,  is the first odd perfect cube, apart from 1 - which makes it a uniquely interesting number.
It is a little-known fact that Wordsworth was not only a great poet but also a a great mathematician (he was a polymath) and invented the hexadecimal system which he wrote down on the back of an envelope (and which after his death was discovered as a bookmark in his diary) to pass the time whilst waiting for an overdue coach at the old Warwick coach stop (now part of the Historical Places Trust). I think he had been on his way to Tintern Abbey at the time, intent on having a good hike when he got there.

Yet there is no "middle digit" in 27 - so it seems that Wordsworth had deliberately left a curious mathematical riddle for posterity to solve.
In fact, it was only many years later, after computers had been invented, that mathematicians were finally able to understand what Wordsworth had been on about and solve his riddle.
The "fears to tread" bit is presumed to relate to the "dark mystical properties" that W ascribed to the number 27 - an apt reference for the WOR, because we often do not fully understand how the data gets into the WOR in the first place.

Not a lot of people know that.

Tuxman:
Uhm. Well played, sir!  :Thmbsup:

rgdot:
I was going to add another F to blame flash but yes what Iain said  ;)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page