The Design and Implementation of laffer1

 Caryn went to bed a few hours ago.  I decided to stream a movie on netflix.  Oddly enough, I chose to watch Swing Vote.  Like most people, I thought the movie looked stupid from the previews.  I had every intention of stopping the film twenty minutes into it.  I was just curious how bad it was.  A few minutes ago, I finished the movie.  The premise was flawed, but it was still entertaining.  The movie was just as much about the main characters relationship with his daughter as it was about the vote.  I suppose the movie was interesting to me as my father was rather disconnected during parts of my life.   I don't think that movie would appeal to everyone.  

One thing about the film I didn't like was that they never explained who he voted for.  I'm sure it was supposed to be a grand point about the process and that votes matter. I just found it to be a movie... and as such a conclusion is nice.  I think the family story had a conclusion. 

I noticed a rather interesting bug today.  I got an out of memory error while streaming television shows in netflix.  I watched a movie that was just under 2 hours long.  It worked perfectly.  Then I started to stream a tv show.  About five minutes into the stream, it stopped with the error and told me to reboot.  I observed over 66% memory usage at that point for the system.  I restarted IE and found memory usage was back down to 27%.  I was then able to stream the show.  At the end of the episode, I observed 48% memory usage.

Since netflix uses silverlight, i can only assume there's a memory leak in silverlight or in the controls for the page.  However, as it gets worse during the stream it makes sense that it's silverlight.  Other interesting bits are that it does not seem to happen on my mac, although there are streaming problems at times.  This is the first time I've seen this error, but I don't typically stream a lot.  The other possible explanation is the new configuration in my computer is related to the problem.  I had an ATI X1900 and now two 4550s in crossfirex.  It could be something to do with the hardware acceleration or the crossfire configuration wasting extra memory.  I noticed some odd lines in the video for the show but not in the movie.  That could be the encoding too.  It was a british tv show. 

While I'd like to squarely blame microsoft or netflix, I'm not sure what the exact problem is.  Futher research on the web shows that many other people have reported problems.  Most people say that it doesn't occur on the mac, only vista boxes.  Others reported a correlation to amd cpus.  There wasn't enough feedback to verify that.  Macs do have intel cpus.. if there is a different path in the decoder for amd chips, it's certainly possible a leak exists.  For instance, maybe they use some amd specific instructions (incorrectly).