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Re:Piracy != Open Source by The+Cisco+Kid · 2006-02-04 03:43 · Score: 1 · on 30th Anniversary of Gates' Letter to HCC

I dont think peterpi was suggesting that "Open Source" was piracy. I am an advocate of Free Software myself, and I also would not recommend pirating proprietary software. I'm also unsure how you got the impression that he was rich or used Windows.

(The point is that rather than stealing (*OR* buying) the closed-source crap, use software that actually encourages you to share it)

Re:Reselling? by HuguesT · 2006-02-03 22:35 · Score: 4, Insightful · on 30th Anniversary of Gates' Letter to HCC

Absolutely,

Even if it's labelled a crime it's not necessarily wrong. RMS keeps arguing this point over and over again, for example here, and as the parent is writing it was certainly a matter of debate at the time whether software could be copyrighted at all.

Simply put morality and the law are two separate issues. Even justice and the law are separate issues. Need I bring Martin Luther King Junior in here?

Re:compare with stallman... by happymedium · 2006-02-03 17:43 · Score: 0, Flamebait · on 30th Anniversary of Gates' Letter to HCC

Too bad Stallman still ain't done.

The right to piracy by amightywind · 2006-02-03 16:00 · Score: 0 · on 30th Anniversary of Gates' Letter to HCC

I prefer to use the term, copying prohibited in the United States, rather than the confusing term, piracy. Clearly, copying is a matter of local law and not universal right. Laws surrounding copying vary depending on where it occurs. In most countries copying software is not a crime. Gates and his ilk have managed to attach a stigma to copying in the United States and so it is illegal here. But he also tries to exercise undue influence on developing countries using, yes, bullying tactics. I find him loathsome.

Re:What is the significance of this letter? by mrchaotica · 2006-02-03 14:28 · Score: 1 · on 30th Anniversary of Gates' Letter to HCC

People still copy stuff but they don't pretend that this is the way the world is. They do it more sneakily.

No they don't! I, for example, am proud of my copying -- I don't just freely admit to it, I shout it from the rooftops (or, in this case, a Slashdot post):

I COPY SOFTWARE!!! HEAR THAT, GATES?! COME AND GET ME!

'Course, it might make a little difference that it's this software...

Re:Software radios a step towards real deregulatio by mesocyclone · 2006-02-03 13:01 · Score: 4, Insightful · on Software-Defined Radio Could Unify Wireless World

I find it sad that the first post rated "Informative" is almost all political.

Can't we look at this technology without the technology government bashing and utopian (and ignorant) libertarian rants?

SDR is not a new technology, but it is rapidly becoming a good way to do things, as the hardware (digital and analog) to enable it is being designed and built.

Cell phone companies are (or will soon be) using SDR to much more efficiently handle their multichannel cell sites. Instead of having a radio per conversation, or a radio per channel, they can have one or a few radios containing very high speed DSP SDR code. This saves cost and has the obvious flexibility of field upgradeability.

GNU ( http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/doc/exploring -gnuradio.html#software ) has had an SDR project going for quite a while (I do wish they would do APCO P-25 reception, since I don't have the time). Hams have been doing various forms of SDR also - for example, the very narrowband systems that use a PC to do the DSP for HF data communications.

Contrary to what some might think, SDR doesn't give magical powers to radios - the ability to operate on all frequencies at once. Radios have hardware filters in them for reasons that cannot be solved in software: to compensate for the non-linearities in the analog (or digital) software - which especially causes problems in high dynamic range situations. Radios may have to separate signals that differ in power by factors of 10^12 or more, which are relatively close in frequencies. Transmitters have to avoid emitting spurious signals at similar ratios to their output power.

More specifically, if you put two signals (assume sine waves for now) into a non-linear device, it is the equivalent of putting those time-domain functions into a polynomial of degree 2 or more. This means that those sine waves will be multiplied by each other and themselves (and a coefficient which you try to make as small as possible). The result is output at the sum and difference frequencies and the harmonics of the original signals. Non-linearity can crop up in surprising ways. The most common one seen in radio is receive and transmit amplifiers, which are *always* non-linear. In addition, parasitic devices (such as two wires touching each other somewhere nearby) can act as non-linear mixers, generating spurious signals. Anyone who has worked on systems at crowded radio sites knows the fun of tracking down "intermod" signals (which are the result of this process). SDR's do nothing to improve this situation. On the contrary, they may require wider bandwidth amplifiers, which increases the odds of spurious signals. Furthermore, the very process of sampling with non-infinite bit-width A/D's and D/A's is itself a non-linear process that generates mixing.

So SDR still has to deal with the issues at the antenna that analog radios deal with.

Where it gets cool is at the baseband - in other words, at the modulation=baseband level (or in the case of multi-channel receivers/transmitters, at an intermediate level). This is where you take the information you want to send/receive, and convert it into/from the RF representation of that information. A simple example is FM modulation (used in most older land mobile radios - police, fire, cell phones, ham repeaters, etc, and in TV and FM radio broadcast). Here the SDR will take the modulation (voice or music or whatever), and use it to generate the signal equivalent to having it quickly alter the frequency of a carrier wave. Depending on the system, it may literally output a sine wave modulated this way. In other systems, it may generate some intermediate representation that then goes to the radio.

But a far more interesting system might be a trunked narrow-band digital public service radio system (which US public safety organizations are converting to at FCC insistence). These systems are designed for improved flexibility (

A plug for GNU Radio by InterruptDescriptorT · 2006-02-03 11:09 · Score: 5, Informative · on Software-Defined Radio Could Unify Wireless World

Since we're talking about Software Defined Radio, I urge everyone with an interest in the subject to look at the GNU Radio project. They have designed a front end board using generic cable TV tuners feeding an FPGA to perform some initial processing, such as decimation and filtering. The data is then transferred over USB to the host, whose software performs the demodulation and decoding. It's a fascinating project and a great stepping stone into the field.

To really get started on SDR, check out the Ten-Tec RX320D shortwave receiver. It outputs a 12 kHz-wide IF signal from the front end to an audio jack, which can then be fed to a PC soundcard. There are a number of packages that can take this data and demodulate it, including DREAM, an open source DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) decoder which allows you to listen to the new digital shortwave transmission standard that many of the world's broadcasters are beginning to experiment with.

GNU Radio by mukund · 2006-02-03 11:07 · Score: 2, Informative · on Software-Defined Radio Could Unify Wireless World

Perhaps GNU Radio is of a worthy mention here.

Ah, a member of Stallman's clone army by petrus4 · 2006-02-03 09:29 · Score: 1 · on Torvalds Explains Dislike For GPLv3

The issue with Freedom 0 http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html is that IF I can run any "free" software that I want then I can run it for any purpose.

Yes, but if you actually knew how to think for yourself, chances are you wouldn't want Stallman (or anyone else, for that matter) defining freedom for you. Those of us who *are* capable of using our own brains prefer to reach our own definition. I'm guessing Linus specifically wanted copyleft himself in order to ensure that downstream developers/companies couldn't lock up his work; however I also suspect that he actually would have thought it through. He might have even looked at some of the other licenses in existence at the time (including non-copyleft ones - *horrors!*) before deciding on the GPL. I'm curious...how much do you know about the other OSS licenses that exist?

The other issue is, Linus *wasn't* off the mark with DRM...what he was concerned about was how the term DRM is defined, which is something that the draft does not elaborate very much on. His point was that some of the things which could conceivably be defined as DRM (he gives encryption as one example) can actually be extremely beneficial in some circumstances.

DRM is a war being waged on consumers, developing such systems COSTS money that gets passed on to you but provides NO benefit you YOU as consumer.

Right. That's exactly why what you're defining here as DRM is failing, and will ultimately fail. Capitalist economic theory 101: Corporations ultimately exist for (and profit from) the purpose of meeting public needs. If they don't do that, eventually they cease to exist. I'm not claiming that that happens overnight, and I'm also not claiming that they don't do a hell of a lot of damage in the process, (environmental damage probably being the best example) but eventually it happens. Someone else comes along who not only more efficiently meets the original need, but who also figures out ways of solving the problems that the original corporation created. It's happening to an extent with Linux and Microsoft, even though Linux is not the domain of a single corporation.

Richard Stallman is a Marxist fanatic in the truest and most literal sense of the word. I will agree with anyone who claims that big business causes a lot of problems. Yes, many large corporations *are* run by rapacious moral degenerates, and yes, they can do a tremendous amount of damage, but just because that happens in some or even most cases does not mean it happens in *every* case. The economic system in a contemporary sense also may have metastasized into something undesirable and dangerous, (which does, I concede, now need to at least be partly replaced) but for a long time, and in ways smaller than those which are currently most visible, it has served as a valid and even positive framework for solving human problems.

Stallman sold Emacs tapes himself during the 80s for $1,500 US apiece, and the "Deluxe distribution package," is being sold for $5,000 US. I'm aware that the conventional Marxist justification for this would be to claim to be "using the system in order to bring it down," however a more accurate term for it would simply be rank hypocrisy. He has stated on more than one occasion that he wants to see an end to people being able to earn money from software, and yet he himself has done so in the past, and his foundation currently obviously has no qualms whatsoever about doing so.

I suspect that you, like many of his other followers, simply focus on how wonderful his philosophy looks on the surface, and don't bother digging any deeper than that. For those of us who have been looking, however, the gnu costume has never been able to entirely conceal Stallman's Red underwear.

Your take on RMS is remarkably incorrect. by jbn-o · 2006-02-03 06:05 · Score: 4, Insightful · on Torvalds Explains Dislike For GPLv3

Because we all know RMS is a crusader trying to press his beliefs onto others.

I think this says a lot less than you think it does. Everyone who tries to convince others of the weight of their argument is "trying to press [their] beliefs onto others". This does not address whether those beliefs are wise or valuable.

I think the creators of the GPL are trying to be much more influencial than Linus ever was.

They already are much more influential, but influence isn't that important without understanding what the influence is trying to get you to do. The GNU GPL is almost 20 years old and is the most popular license in the Free Software community. GNU is a remarkably popular OS. Linus Torvalds has not written any license, nor has he assembled a social movement, nor has he put together an operating system. The Linux kernel was originally his work, but now there are many forks of the Linux kernel and Torvalds' fork is one (and this fork has many contributors, Torvalds no longer writes Linux alone). People draw inspiration and code from his fork of the kernel, but plenty of people in the community don't use the Linux kernel at all, yet they still use some GNU programs (such as GCC). Even some proprietary software projects use GNU programs to build their systems (again, GCC among them). The GNU project aims to bring people software freedom—the freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share programs—freedoms which Torvalds sometimes works against (his chastising Andrew Tridgell for working on a program to allow users to copy data from Bitkeeper repos comes to mind).

RMS wants complete reform (or removal) of IP laws.

Please cite a source to back this up; I know of nowhere RMS says that he would like all patent, trademark, copyright, and other laws to disappear. RMS presents a clear understanding of why we should not use the term "intellectual property" (which is what you mean by "IP" here), and has come up with a clever use of copyright law to create and maintain a legally defensible commons. Someone who is utterly opposed to copyright law would not do this. They would probably reject copyright law entirely for copyrightable works, place their copyrightable works into the public domain and encourage others to do the same. Yet in his explanation of "copyleft", RMS says why he doesn't place his copyrightable work into the public domain (but would be fine with his copyrighted works entering the public domain through systematic copyright expiration, in fact during the recent GPLv3 conference Eben Moglen said that RMS would be more comfortable with a copyright regime from long ago instead of the one we have now).

Your post is vastly overvalued in its moderation. It is not interesting nor does it deserve a +5.

Re:The real question by dzfoo · 2006-02-03 04:58 · Score: 4, Insightful · on Torvalds Explains Dislike For GPLv3

>> That's it. The GPL grants you the further rights to take that modified code and change it any way you like. But it does not grant you the right to install that modified software back on that same machine.

It might not grant you that right expressly, we have discovered, but this was always the intention of the GPL: to allow you access to execute your modified version.

(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)

So in essence, some hardware manufacturers have discovered a loophole. And so the GPL is been modified to compensate for this.

This means that if TiVo, Cisco, Sony, Apple, or any hardware manufacturer wants to lock their boxes up with DRM that prevents anybody from modifying their code, fine, they are within their rights -- as long as they write their own software, from scratch, or license or buy it from a third party who accepts such terms. They will not be able to use GPLv3'd software for this.

>> The answer is purely economic -- don't buy a trusted platform based machine. Don't buy an OS that supports trusted platforms (Vista.) Don't allow friends, families or your business to buy trusted platform machines. If you're in a position to purchase hardware, get "no hardware enforcement of digital signatures" written as a requirement into your RFQs.

But why is the onus on the user or developer -- possibly even the guy who originally licensed the software? Consider reversing the roles in your statement: The answer, to hardware manufacturers, is purely economic -- write your own code, or if you must use software licensed under the GPLv3 (because you are lazy, because it is easier, because it is better, because it offers faster time to market, etc.), do not impose DRM on the users of your product.

This sounds pretty radical, but it is just as radical as saying that you can only use GPLv2'd software in your commercial applications if you distribute your software under the GPL license. The user/distributor of the GPL'd software has a right to do virtually *anything* he wants with it -- except limiting the rights of those who use his derivative work. This, according to the GPLv3, includes hardware manufacturers.

The bottom line is that nobody has a God-given right to use software that is not their own -- not developers, not hardware manufacturers, not users. And those who use licensed software, must abide by the license's stipulations, or not use such software at all. This goes the same for open source licenses like the GPL, as for potentially more restrictive ones like, say, Microsoft's.

-dZ.

Linus does not "get" it, probably never has... by pennystinker · 2006-02-03 04:55 · Score: 1 · on Torvalds Explains Dislike For GPLv3

The issue with Freedom 0 http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html is that IF I can run any "free" software that I want then I can run it for any purpose. Additionally, The other freedoms that the GPL is trying to preserve come into play: I start with the ability to run "free" program X. Because it is "free" (as in GPLv3) I can modify it (Freedom 1) and still retain FREEDOM 0! If DRM gets in the way of this then by definition some or all of my freedoms have been taken away.

So, does this mean I can tell hardware manufacturers what to do, or for that matter can I tell other software vendors that I have to interact with via my "free" program what to do. Yes and no. I can certainly TELL them anything I want, try to stop me. But they are not obligated to do as I tell them. In the case of hardware vendors I WILL NOT BUY THEIR HARDWARE! Get enough people to follow suit, and you bet I can tell them what to do. Same is true for software.

Now what the GPLv3 is basically saying is that you can write DRM code protected under GPLv3, you can even DRM the code itself. But such measures are academic as you cannot use such encumbrances to take away any freedoms. So, you are still free to write anything you want, modify anything you want, run anything you want. You are NOT free to take such rights away from others.

I stand firmly on my point: Linus does not get it (there appears to be evidence that he never got it) and he is off the mark by a wide margin on the GPLv3.

Now for those who construe value in the various DRM initiatives, that can see value for those OTHER than the publishers of DRM-encumbered stuff. I truly and sadly pity you. Think of the world 5-10 years hence. How may DRM schemes will be out there? 50? 100? 200? 1000? All of them will eventually be defeated. You and I pay for all of this wasted effort. To what end? Corporations and other businesses make their money off of you and I, dear reader, you would be surprised that you can make a difference by insisting such nonsense (DRM) not be tolerated, it certainly serves YOU no purpose. DRM is a war being waged on consumers, developing such systems COSTS money that gets passed on to you but provides NO benefit you YOU as consumer. Please, I beg you you, dear reader, if you are drawing any other conclusion then you are delusional to the point of needing professional help. Don't accept DRM because big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Intel, etc. say you have to so get used to the idea. Resist this stupid, ill-conceived idea that provides no practical benefit to you, makes using a computer a hassle, takes away control of hardware you own outright, and in the end will cost a fortune to produce and maintain only to be eventually defeated.

RSMedia Bot by goofyheadedpunk · 2006-02-03 01:39 · Score: 3, Funny · on Mark Tilden, Robosapiens Inventor Interviewed

Okay, I know I'm not the only one. How many of you read "RSMedia Bot" as RMSedia Bot" and thought, "Oh no, some crazy bastard has done it. Some crazy bastard has made the Free Software Foundation an army of RMSedia Bots to stomp out the use of proprietary software the world over. They'll be unstoppable! Wait... Oh God no! It has a subwuffer! We'll be forced to listen to the Free Software Song as well? The humanity!"

Re:Now if they can get their cpu use down... by Fred_A · 2006-02-02 20:18 · Score: 1 · on Symantec's Genesis to Usher in a New Age of Trust?

ed.

I don't think it had taken any bloat at all in all these years.
Which is why ed remains to this day the standard text editor.

Re:Isn't Lazslo the competition here? by hritcu · 2006-02-02 02:16 · Score: 1 · on Adobe Releases Flex 2.0 Beta

What does this have to do with what the parent asked?
The answer is yes: OpenLaszlo is the direct competitor to Flex, and rather than being totally trashed by Macromedia (now Adobe) they decided to open source their product. I don't know about you, but I would rather be using a GPL-incompatible open source product than a commercial one. But maybe this is just me ... licence purists can still wait for projects like GplFlash or Gnash to catch up. However I doubt this will happen anytime soon.

Re:my guess would be .... by SnowZero · 2006-02-01 17:10 · Score: 4, Funny · on Linux Powers Military UGV

Would they have to include source code in the warhead?

No, it would suffice to include with the warhead a written offer, good for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than the cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code.

(see the GPL, section 3b)

Re:Release it from another country by RLiegh · 2006-02-01 13:11 · Score: 1 · on ReactOS Code Audit

>You wouldn't have an agenda to push Open Solaris now would you?

Open Solaris has what to do with ReactOS, apart from the fact they are both Free operating systems?

Re:Lisp not accessible by cheesybagel · 2006-02-01 12:03 · Score: 1 · on Beyond Java

I loved learning LISP. It is wonderfully flexible. However I had some major gripes with it:

The syntax, which you can adapt to, given a good editor with auto-indent and syntax highlight.
The fact the standard libraries, despite providing a wealth of datastructures, are lame or non-existant for doing anything actually useful (heavy duty I/O, sockets, GUI, etc). Compare this with C, where nothing is standard per ANSI C, but there are libraries which do everything for free bundled in the OS.
There is no really good free and multi-platform implementation. For C you have GCC. It works on basically everything you may care about (from ARM PDAs to s390 Mainframes). For Java you have Sun's JDK, which despite not really being open source, is a free (as in beer) download and allows you to develop payware without paying a dime to Sun. The following is a couple years old info, but I am guessing things have not changed much yet: Emacs LISP isn't does not compile into native binaries and is not Common LISP compatible. CLISP does not compile into native binaries and is not 100% Common LISP compatible (almost). CMUCL is buggy, used to have an incredibly lame garbage collector which made you twiddle your thumbs every 5 minutes, and a had poor user interface to boot, GCL is not Common LISP compliant by a longshot. The good tools are payola like Allegro. Contrast this with Sun Java JDK + Eclipse. There is no contest... Even Microsoft is handing out at the moment Visual C# Express for $0 which can be used for commercial use.

Re:Lisp not accessible by cheesybagel · 2006-02-01 12:03 · Score: 1 · on Beyond Java

I loved learning LISP. It is wonderfully flexible. However I had some major gripes with it:

The syntax, which you can adapt to, given a good editor with auto-indent and syntax highlight.
The fact the standard libraries, despite providing a wealth of datastructures, are lame or non-existant for doing anything actually useful (heavy duty I/O, sockets, GUI, etc). Compare this with C, where nothing is standard per ANSI C, but there are libraries which do everything for free bundled in the OS.
There is no really good free and multi-platform implementation. For C you have GCC. It works on basically everything you may care about (from ARM PDAs to s390 Mainframes). For Java you have Sun's JDK, which despite not really being open source, is a free (as in beer) download and allows you to develop payware without paying a dime to Sun. The following is a couple years old info, but I am guessing things have not changed much yet: Emacs LISP isn't does not compile into native binaries and is not Common LISP compatible. CLISP does not compile into native binaries and is not 100% Common LISP compatible (almost). CMUCL is buggy, used to have an incredibly lame garbage collector which made you twiddle your thumbs every 5 minutes, and a had poor user interface to boot, GCL is not Common LISP compliant by a longshot. The good tools are payola like Allegro. Contrast this with Sun Java JDK + Eclipse. There is no contest... Even Microsoft is handing out at the moment Visual C# Express for $0 which can be used for commercial use.

Re:Lisp not accessible by cheesybagel · 2006-02-01 12:03 · Score: 1 · on Beyond Java

I loved learning LISP. It is wonderfully flexible. However I had some major gripes with it:

The syntax, which you can adapt to, given a good editor with auto-indent and syntax highlight.
The fact the standard libraries, despite providing a wealth of datastructures, are lame or non-existant for doing anything actually useful (heavy duty I/O, sockets, GUI, etc). Compare this with C, where nothing is standard per ANSI C, but there are libraries which do everything for free bundled in the OS.
There is no really good free and multi-platform implementation. For C you have GCC. It works on basically everything you may care about (from ARM PDAs to s390 Mainframes). For Java you have Sun's JDK, which despite not really being open source, is a free (as in beer) download and allows you to develop payware without paying a dime to Sun. The following is a couple years old info, but I am guessing things have not changed much yet: Emacs LISP isn't does not compile into native binaries and is not Common LISP compatible. CLISP does not compile into native binaries and is not 100% Common LISP compatible (almost). CMUCL is buggy, used to have an incredibly lame garbage collector which made you twiddle your thumbs every 5 minutes, and a had poor user interface to boot, GCL is not Common LISP compliant by a longshot. The good tools are payola like Allegro. Contrast this with Sun Java JDK + Eclipse. There is no contest... Even Microsoft is handing out at the moment Visual C# Express for $0 which can be used for commercial use.

Software is winner-take-all by JBMesserly · 2006-01-31 18:10 · Score: 2, Insightful · on Firefox Slides, IE Gains?

Software tends to be winner-take-all: whoever has the most market share ultimately wins. That's why people care so much about these statistics.

For proprietary software, this tends to be because whoever has the most users has the most profit, since development costs are fixed (economists call this "sunk costs"). Therefore, the market share leader can invest in more marketing and product development, getting more users (virtuous circle) and eventually edge out the competition, winning the market.

Sometimes network effects play a role, too: it makes sense to use what everyone else is using, because then your software will be compatible with theirs. The more people that use it, the more value it has to you--which, incidently, is why people often advocate the software that they use. Advocating your favorite piece of software may be a completely rational thing to do!

I'm not entirely sure how this works for Free software that is distributed gratis, like Firefox. But I can guess. Assume some percentage of the total number of users will be contributers to the project: bug writers, documentation contributers, software developers, artists, philanthropists, corportate sponsors, etc. Then, it follows that having more users will lead to more contributors, and ultimately a higher quality product. Thus, Free software is also winner-take-all.

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use by Futurepower(R) · 2006-01-31 12:21 · Score: 5, Informative · on Firefox Slides, IE Gains?

It's an ugly fact, but Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. For me, that's ugly because it is my favorite browser. Perhaps people get tired of the crashing and CPU hogging, and have moved to Opera, which has no stability problems that I'm able to detect.

The CPU and memory hogging bug in Firefox 1.5 is well known. In two extensive articles, Information Week reports that opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs causes crashes and CPU and memory hogging. That kind of heavy user often sees Firefox consuming 99% CPU while idle and/or more than 400 Megabytes. See Firefox 1.5: Not Ready For Prime Time? and Firefox 1.5 Stability Problems? Readers And Mozilla Respond.

The bug seems to be due to insufficient allocation of resources inside Firefox, such as inadequate stack space. Those who use a browser to do extensive research, for example, are likely to have more windows and tabs open than the average user. Apparently Firefox developers did not plan for that.

The bug has been reported to Bugzilla, and is very easy to reproduce (see below), but Firefox developers have marked it invalid because there is not enough specific information! The bug has existed in Firefox for more than 2 years, and several people report that it is worse in Firefox 1.5. Firefox's Bugzilla does not allow direct links from Slashdot, so copy and paste Bugzilla URLs into a new tab. Remove the space: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131 456 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660

See comments #48 and #49 of bug 222660 for an example of the symptoms under Windows XP. A typical Windows Task Manager screen shot attached to comment #49 shows the "I/O Other Bytes" increasing by 20K/second with no program activity. At that point, the bug was not yet showing the worst symptoms.

The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use or more with no activity, normally occur after opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs, as happens when researching something on the internet over a period of hours or days. The bug symptoms are worse after putting the computer on standby or after hibernating. My experience has been that the memory and CPU hogging always occur together, so they appear to be the same bug. However, the CPU hogging symptom takes longer to appear. If the computer has perhaps 256 Megabytes of memory, the most obvious symptom at the beginning is hard disk thrashing.

You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html. To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of big occuring in normal use, since that web page is huge.

Maybe the only solution is for a developer who knows the code to reproduce the problem and see what causes it. It is not clear to me why they are unwilling to do so. This bug seems especially interesting to me. It is likely that fixing this bug will fix other issues. It is likely that fixing this bug will make it easier to work on the Firefox code.

The bug has often been reported on Slashdot. Here are a few examples:
" >http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169676&cid=14 143632
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62671

Use hard links, rsync, big redundant disk array. by Medievalist · 2006-01-31 05:35 · Score: 1 · on Petabyte Storage Array

I keep a lot more than 50 days worth on line. And I get effectively more than 90% compression. And individual users can do their own restores from their own desktops.

Look at how dirvish works. Or rsnap, or rsync-incr, or rsnapshot, or ribs-backup, or indeed any tool based on Mike Rubel's basic idea.

I use a homebrew variation that is suited to my employer's unique needs and infrastructure. You may find it expedient to do the same. I don't save any metadata other than the snapshot date for each tree, and I use data mining techniques (well, actually I use find and gawk from command line) if I want to determine what's going on or how the system is doing.

It has run for years with no maintenance other than periodic OS patches. It is not our primary backup system because it does not support off-site archival, but it's well worth the investment for rapid restore of user-deleted files. I'll consider this array (I'm currently using linux soft raid 1+0 on two physically separate busses) when I need more disk eventually.

Use hard links, rsync, big redundant disk array. by Medievalist · 2006-01-31 05:35 · Score: 1 · on Petabyte Storage Array

I keep a lot more than 50 days worth on line. And I get effectively more than 90% compression. And individual users can do their own restores from their own desktops.

Look at how dirvish works. Or rsnap, or rsync-incr, or rsnapshot, or ribs-backup, or indeed any tool based on Mike Rubel's basic idea.

I use a homebrew variation that is suited to my employer's unique needs and infrastructure. You may find it expedient to do the same. I don't save any metadata other than the snapshot date for each tree, and I use data mining techniques (well, actually I use find and gawk from command line) if I want to determine what's going on or how the system is doing.

It has run for years with no maintenance other than periodic OS patches. It is not our primary backup system because it does not support off-site archival, but it's well worth the investment for rapid restore of user-deleted files. I'll consider this array (I'm currently using linux soft raid 1+0 on two physically separate busses) when I need more disk eventually.

Re:Janus is as good as it gets - and it's pretty g by MostlyHarmless · 2006-01-30 16:43 · Score: 1 · on Unlimited Legal Music Downloads for $3.95 a Month?

Take once per day until desire for DRM subsides, and weekly thereafter.

DRM scares me.

Re:Summary makes no sense by ChunderDownunder · 2006-01-30 12:29 · Score: 1 · on Sun Considers dual-sourcing Solaris Under GPL3

I am looking forward to a Fully Open Source Java (granted, I do appreciate that alternatives from other vendors are available nevertheless).

There are no alternatives. Vendors such as IBM, Apple, blackdown etc ALL license Java code from Sun and hence are subject to RMS's Java Trap.

The only contender is a 'free' runtime based on the GNU classpath class libraries.

Despite claims to implementing 98% of the code base, there is still work to be done - e.g. the reality is that one can't take a Swing application and expect it to work trouble free. And as much as SWT advocates would wish otherwise, Swing is still the dominant toolkit.

But the day is drawing closer. The hope is that this time next year RedHat (or perhaps IBM) will have licensed the Technology Compatibility Kit on classpath's behalf.

The main benefit being that any X11-based OS[1] will automagically be able to run a fully Java compliant JRE, including those platforms or architectures for which Sun hasn't ported their implementation. From a commercial point of view this widens the number of java supported environments for deployment. From a free software perspective, the inclusion of a 100% compatible JRE means that distributions will start integrating Java software into their releases on technical merit - no longer omitted due to an inability to license Sun's Java.

Would the situation be helped if Sun licensed Java under GPLv3? Definitely, but let's not hold our breath...

[1] Any OS with their own UI layers as Windows, OSX, haiku etc would need to implement their own AWT peers. But 'mainstream' alternatives such as the BSDs and unsupported CPU architectures such as XScale (I'm thinking handheld linux here) should just work.