The popular interpretation of Moore’s Law is that computing power doubles every 18 months-ish. Happily, RAM and hard drive speeds and capacities follow a similar exponential curve. Yay tech-for-tech’s-sake!
Sometimes — okay, rarely — advancements in computing power are dedicated to making the computing experience suck less (see the giant leap to the GUI, and a few other hops here and there). Mostly, additional resources go toward making computers suck in the same way that they always have, only faster.
Restoring a bit of my faith in humanity, along comes DieHard. The dry summary is that DieHard:
- Prevents some kinds of memory-related errors outright
- Reduces the chances that other kinds of memory-related errors will cause problems
- Makes it nearly impossible for malware to know where vulnerable bits of data live, in turn thwarting a variety of attacks
Nothing’s free, of course, and using DieHard means trading resources for reliability. With DieHard, protected apps will use 50-75% more RAM. However, DieHard won’t noticeably hurt the performance of most apps unless you’re RAM-starved.
On Windows, the initial release of DieHard only works with Firefox. Let’s hope it’s extended to support other popular apps soon, and enhanced to give users an easy way to run it automatically on startup. Get it, install it, use it, and give Mr. Berger some love.