I'm confused why NirSoft software is not open source. I've always seen open source as easier than doing all the work on your own.
Maybe he doesn't want all the pull requests, supporting other programmers has a cost.
NirSoft Freeware (2008)
171–180 of 241 posts
Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)
#172> While many software companies create a bloated installation package with size of 1 - 3 MB, the size of single utility in NirSoft is usually less than 100KB. The early 2000s were a different time. While as modern day electron apps are regularly 100+ MB.
"Things that Turbo Pascal is smaller than" - http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally I agree with you but for Electron we're talking about own-goals the developers inflict on themselves. No one outside of the HNosphere uses Electron apps.
Plenty of people outside of HN use Slack, Discord, Atom, VS Code, Skype and Twitch.
Right now I have Discord, VS2017, a Postgres IDE and a bunch of Chrome tabs open. Task manager reports for memory usage (descending order): Discord: 1168,4MB, VS2017: 463MB, Chrome tabs: about 300MB each, PostgresTool: 152MB and the rest below 100MB. If I dont include all the chrome tabs, Discord uses more memory than all the other apps together, and some of them are "big" apps.
So my 32GB RAM, high specs system, is able to run only up to ~ 30 instances of Discord, not counting even the OS.
Wtf. It feels like malware.
Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)
#174I find it particularly funny that he doesn't explain why his binaries are literally plagued with "false positives". I'm really curious. Does he use some arcane compression techniques which usually are found in virus signatures?
Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft?
And for some (stupid?) reason they weren't integrated into the OS so a lot of people don't know about them.
If they're integrated into the OS they have to be supported at the same level as the rest of the OS, which entails the same rigorous processes w.r.t. updates, bug fixes, etc...
By keeping them out-of-band, that support requirement doesn't apply, allowing the tools to be much more aggressively updated and released without the same degree of oversight. There's a reason they're licensed separately and effectively with no support or warranty. Doing so enables their rapid development without/less-of the usual bureaucracy.
Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately waste of users' computer resources is an externality and developers are more expensive than ever. Revealed preferences show that customers would rather buy more hardware resources than pay higher prices for efficient software (within reasonable limits).
Then perhaps OS vendor should start thinking about unifying their UI SDK using web engines, because having to support the finicky toolkit of every OS is a waste of engineering time.
That was Boot2Gecko aka FirefoxOS. I would not mind having that on a phone.
Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)
#177I've seen and used nirsoft products for years, never realized his name was Nir Sofer. What a great name for a software developer.
I agree. His marketing almost writes itself. My parents have been shortening my name to "Code" pretty much since I was born. My friends and coworkers tend get a kick out of it when they realize my name can be shortened that way.
Why, what's your full name?
Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)
#178> Each time that a popular AntiVirus software begins to detect one of my utilities as Virus or Trojan, my email is flooded with messages from worried people that think my Web site is infected with Viruses. Some of them even blame me that I spread Viruses through my Web site. I wonder if there is a defamation/libel type of lawsuit here. Anti virus vendors are making false accusations.
Malware authors often incorporate legitimate software into their malware - e.g. Nir Sofer's Mail PassView and Web PassView are used in Emotet spam bot to harvest user credentials. Usually such files are marked as "Potentially unsafe software" by analysts, or in some cases could be detected as part of a malware family by AV companies' automated detection tools.
Same for psexec and xexec for remote execution.
Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hope they someday integrate the tools into Windows considering how few megabytes they take up
I really hope they don't, because then their releases would be intertwined. Instead of getting the latest and greatest sysinternals tools all the time, I'd probably have to wait until the next Windows release.
That is not how it works these days, a lot of things can update separately from Windows itself, my current solution is to use Scoop an open source Windows CLI package manager which can update it whenever a new version comes out