The Message Board Wild West

I was just checking up on who links here when I realised that message boards and newsletters are getting more of a wild west character each day. Or rather it's a case of the blind leading the blind.

It is for this reason that I have not posted anything on the PHP mailing lists for a long time. The PHP-General mailing list is populated by a bunch of idiots who believe it to be the 'General' mailing list. Old timers who have attempted to keep the posts on topic have been sharply rebuked by people who believe it's our job to help people who are too lazy to google or RTFM. As a result most of the replies are now made by these very people and not much needs to be said about the quality of the replies.

As for the message boards, I found a discussion on gilbc detected *** double free or corruption: 0x050ca9d0 *** The second post on that thread points to my post on jan 11 after that it gets pretty wild. Some even suggesting that these errors are caused by faulty hardware.

If your RAM is faulty or your CPU is toast, your machine simply will not boot. Period. If by some chance only a few transistors in the RAM are busted and your machine manages to boot up, the moment that area of RAM is written to your machine will go down like a ton of bricks. Those unfortunates on windows systems will see the notorius blue screen of death. The only hardware failures that ordinary desktop PC can handle well is a hard disk with bad sectors.

As Jason - a blogger who has linked here as pointed out, there are all sorts of people throwing darts in the darks pretending to know what they are talking about, more often than not it's just a matter of bluff. Jason was referring in particular to my post on SSHD.