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Mozilla Chairman Speaks on Open Source/Microsoft
ChrisMDP writes "Tom's Hardware has an interesting interview with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation. They discuss, amongst other things, what it's like competing with Microsoft, and Firefox as an operating system." From the interview: "Pragmatically, I think we have to distinguish between a base set of extensions and everything else. It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solutions when there are nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings. There's a basic tension in principle that can never be completely resolved."
It's called bloat. It happened to Red Hat. It happened to SuSE and it happened to Opera. You have to have limited objectives to avoid bloat. This is the key for browsers like Lynx etc. I would say Slackware Linux is one of the few distros that has managed to avoid bloat whilst still being very modern and "full of possibilities"...
Microsoft has never intended to compete on a level playing field. Instead they have tipped the field to favor themselves, sacrificing product quality and user benefit over and over again.
This is a great quote. It explains partially how Microsoft got where they are today, and why their current size and monopoly is unsustainable. Unless they make a fundamental change in their business model, something's going to happen to them.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Q: how does it feel to spend 20 years being beaten^H^H^H^H competing with Microsoft?
A: Microsoft totally cheat. They don't play fair. OK, sometimes they can pull their socks up, like when they bought Spyglass and abandoned MSN version 1.
Q: Firefox is like... the new operating system?
A: Yes, and one day it may actually instal Flash support automatically. There's no end to what's possible?
Q: How's Chandler doing?
A: Who?
Q: You know, the open source thingy.
A: Ah, yes, very well. That's such a kind thing to ask. Any day now. There's no beating open source.
Q: so, since CPU's have passed 3Ghz, does it make sense to write better code?
A: better code is better code.
Sigh.
I love Firefox open source as much as the next righteous Slashdotter, and Kapor is a totally cool dude, but WTF? WTFF?
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
The challenge is changing the end-user more than anything. I have tried for the longest to get my company to convert to Firefox, but users have integrated, in their heads, that to use the web is to use IE, and they can tell they're firing up another browser they get nervous, blame all problems going forward on the new browser, and simply don't like change. Microsoft did something very powerful by link IE to Windows. IE has become saturated within the minds of users. The few users I have converted over I have to change the new browser icon to the big "E."
People also have a great amount of grace for microsoft, excusing their security holes, making such statements as, "well, if another browser gets as popular as IE then it'll have the same problems, etc." And I'm talking about IT professionals not just end users. I try to explain that, no, Microsoft has been uniquely bad at security....
No matter what the browser, it has an uphill climb against IE....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
somehow I always think that this premise might actually be somewhat true for our society:
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
Forgot where that is from (Spaceballs?), but sometimes I feel that evil does win out in the end. Companies that use evil tactics to get ahead may not win out in the long run, but really screw things up in the short timeframe.
Of course you could look at it this way, Firefox could be an example of Good winning in the long run because Microsoft was being evil 5-8 years ago. Wow, its been that long already?
Yes. It's a good thing we have a comercial product like Windows that is Bloat and Bug free.
No, it's called bloat when the nearly infinite possibilities are part of the default application - the base set.
That's why Mozilla and Firefox work with extensions. Users can personalise their application, add the missing features they need (or think they need). But without the overhead of the missing features they don't need.
That's particularly true for a light-weight browser as Firefox.
But because the fact that lots of extensions exists and lots of combinations of extensions are possible, the problem of the nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings is as real in such a customisable application with extensions as it is in a bloated application.
Had a hard time reading the article, with all the MS advertising in the page...
I hate it when people say "if firefox gets as popular as IE it will have the same problems". People who say that just don't get it... open source software is inherently more secure and any problems that do come up will be fixed quickly. Simply not the case with IE, nor will it ever be.
Meh.
Dang, it looks like mozilla is going the way of emacs... "What? You're exiting mozilla? Why? It has everything you'll ever need for your entire computing experience! It debugs itself too!"
Microsoft releases products for its customers, which is what it should do.
/.'ers more than anything else is that most people don't care about merit. They just use products that are there, and which do the job required. This is something which most geeks don't get.
However, the reason Microsoft is deemed evil by some is because it uses its power in order to capture marketshare. This is a huge faux pas in geekdom, which is traditionally a meritocracy.
What annoys
It's not evil. It's good strategy. I would love if Firefox would start playing dirty when it comes to advertising and everything while playing a game as clean as possible when it comes to the software itself.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
Whassat? Firefox as an operating system? You mean a program that was cut off from the "bigger" mozilla to be "just a browser"? Hm.... When a new Firefox's Firefox is due to fork out? :-)
He talks about it taking just a "few clicks" to get Flash, RP, and other plugins working. Obviously he's not talking about Firefox on Linux. Flash, sure. It's probably the single easiest plugin to get to work. Most other plugins cannot be installed with the "follow this link to install the plugin" option at all. If they do manage to install, they don't seem to be able to find your plugins directory. Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox (though those 1-2 second pauses are annoying) but there needs to be some type of search in the installer to find the plugins directories. Couple that with Real Player unable to give me video on half of the Real Player content I find and you wonder what's going on. Though, that wouldn't be a Firefox issue, I know.
The chairman of the Mozilla foundation is Mitchell Baker, not Mitch Kapor.
from Securityfocus.com: as of January 2005, SecurityFocus readers using Firefox (46%) eclipsed Internet Explorer users (44%) in our traffic logs for the first time ever. I just can't wait for similar numbers hitting msn.com -- I must be a zealot for bashing microsoft.
Mitch oughta know this by now. Product is just the wrapper for the business plan. Product is just a carton you put on a shelf to aim your markeing at. Product really doesn't matter all that much. If it did then Firefox and Openoffice would have been able to charge $5 for their product and make billions doing it. And Bill knows this too because the great genius of Bill Gates is understanding that if you talk to your competitors about 'product' it will distract them from looking at your business plan. And without a credible bizplan, products like Mozilla are essentially interesting experiments that demonstrate how close you can come to MS's product. In other words they are triumphs of reverse engineering. But as I said, 'product' really doesn't matter so those organizations have spent all their time and effort to replicate a wrapper, a box without having anything to put in the box.
What annoys /.'ers more than anything else is that most people don't care about merit. They just use products that are there, and which do the job required. This is something which most geeks don't get.
/.'s drive crap cars to work. One narrow segment of /.'s lives is "all about the quality, no matter what!" and yet everything else in their life is devoid of any and all quality. Crappy cars, crappy diets, crappy furniture, crappy apartments, etc.
/.'s are never able to understand why John Q. Public won't spend hours and hours screwing with their computer.
And the irony is most
Yet
Back in the day of good old DOS, the Un*x and Vax guys reminded all the DOS guys, that DOS was just a program loader and not a true operating system.
Doesn't this apply to browsers as well?
I just don't see how refering to these application's as "operating systems" helps any cause they are working twards, and it would seem to add a stigma that is perhaps not necessary.
Firstly I don't understand your problem with the interview (I get that it's a little thin, but so what)...
I mean, "better code is better code" - that's not really a paraphrase of what he said, is it? He said that speed wasn't the only issue, maintainability is a biggy, which is a good answer to a rather dull question.
Second I don't understand why someone has moderated your comment funny. It wasn't supposed to be was it?
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Owwch.
"and Firefox as an operating system."
Doesn't Mitch know that it's almost exactly that statement that caused Microsoft to launch its slaughterfest against Netscape when Marc Andreesen said it?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Now give me a ide and some documentation so that I can create xul apps. The biggest push should be to get a xul ide together to help extend and push the platform. I don't care if it is written in xul or python or whatever, don't point me to xul maker either it looks like ass and is being developed way to slowly. I love firefox now make it damn easy for me to build cool xul apps.
Got Code?
Wouldn't it be interesting if the future of real competition to MS consisted of Vietnamese programmers working for pennies on open source code which is then thrown over the wall to Bangalore who staffs the help desks to support it? Wouldn't it be interesting if the only credible response to MS's dominance was to cut the cost of development and support to near-zero and pray that no one makes a breakout development. In other words, what if the only way to fight MS is to completely destroy all innovation and fight purely on crappy service and low cost?
No really, they have. They sacrifice proper quality to get 'first to market' time and again. Then they build on that with marketing or freebies till they are the de facto standard. That's called lock in, and it doesn't benefit consumers at all.
Have you ever used a MS product that didn't piss you off in some subtle way? Apart from the MS keyboard, which is a lovely piece of kit.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Why does there have to be a business plan?
Why can't things just be done to add good things to the commons?
Why do some people see everything in fucking dollar signs?
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
That's particularly true for a light-weight browser as Firefox.
I don't know what exactly is your criteria for calling a browser a light-weight, but as for the memory footprint firefox is surprisingly similar to IE
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
Firefox probably loads the whole redering engine into memory. Do you really want to wait for lots of disk I/O every time you load a web page?
That said, wouldn't it be better if Firefox came bundled with a Flash player, etc., or its installer detected a need for customary extensions and could install at the same time? There's no technical reason why it couldn't happen.
please, leave it on a menu somewhere and off by default, I don't even want a flash player auto-compiled in the package or downloaded during browser install unless I ask it to.
thanks
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Remember java as a "platform" that ran anywhere making which OS you were running irrelevant. That got MS notice real quick. MS went from bundling java to creating j++ to not including it at all.
People forget Microsoft can sometimes can be absolutely devestating to competetion. (The Mono developers should be carefull).
MS is deemed evil because of practices deemed illegal. Those practices were deemed illegal because they went counter to the accepted ideals of our society.
/.'s is more the unfairness than anything else. If MS had reached its position legally, through hard work, and had "innovated" or "invented" anything worth a crap, I bet they would have a different opinion of MS.
One of those ideals is that if you build something, people should be able to select it over competing products. MS violated that ideal numerous times, by manipulating the market with one product to encroach in another.
What annoys
I respectfully disagree. They release a product that will enter the market and is "good enough". Sometimes they miss this mark (3rd times the charm!) and sometimes they exceed this mark. For example, they were the first company with a suite of products that were bundeled together called office. And it was priced at a point that was below what it cost to get the pieces from a competitor. We can argue all day as to which product was technically better, but what cannot be argued is that the combination of price/features hit the mark. Hence Office dominating its market.
They realized that the user experience created a high barried to entry for new products, and a high barrier to exit for the user.
Bottom line, people care about what gets them most of the way there at a price that most can afford. MS hit that mark.
Yes, most MS products piss me off many times is not so subtle ways. But they get the job done. I can't think of any SW that doesn't piss me off in subtle ways (open source or otherwise).
Don't forget that Mozilla is descended from Netscape, and is anything but a "me too" IE clone.
If Firefox were reverse engineered from IE, we wouldn't be using it.
OK?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I have noticed that the teacher's computers where I am attending are loaded with spyware. They were all using Internet Explorer. A few switched over to Firefox right after I told them MSIE lets spyware in. But most couldn't care less. Finally, I found something that is getting the others to switch over. I ask them "Would you use a web browser created by a convicted monopolist?" They always say "No." Then I tell them they are using one (Internet Explorer). This gets there interest and then I get them to download and switch over to Firefox.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
It's funny about Microsoft releasing products for its customers. I look at my laptop...
Xp has this nice little feature called offline files. I figure, cool, I hate the briefcase as I have to update it specifically myself. I set it up, and lo and behold, it syncronizes. Excellent! Go on a brief jaunt with it away from home, and my fiance wants to use my laptop. Ok. Lemme set her up an account, too. What's this? Offline files trying to syncronize?
Dispite being a "multi user operating system", Microsoft failed to tell the Offline Files aspect of the system that Different Users might want to syncronize Different Things. I had to turn off 'fast user switching' so that I could turn on offline files, and yet it's just going to syncronize the same damn files. Perfect.
This isn't the only aspect that I've run up against, but it is my biggest gripe. If they released the product for customers, then they would've finished this feature as it should be implimented. As it is, they simply released it for profit, and because they felt they could.
"Mozilla Chairman Speaks on Open Source/Microsoft"
Mozilla chairman? Who's he? Ohhh MITCH KAPOR!?!?! The guy who developed Lotus 1-2-3!!!
I can already see a Slashdot headline from 20 years in the future. "Gates Foundation Chairman Speaks at AARP Convention."
Insert witty sig here.
It's called ignorance, reinforced by intellectual laziness. Any US citizen (I am one) who has worked in IT support (I have) knows this. No one is worse on this score than business users (I am one, and a CPA to boot). Whenever we talk IT (not often, as I have a bad habit of telling people how bad M$ is, and getting rather hot about it) it amazes me how much business users I deal with do not care in the slightest about the very infrastructure that makes their jobs possible - or, frequently, impossible. One of the biggest problems I see EVERY DAY is the perception by senior management that their IT 'investment' in proprietary software is too big to lose. They know what a sunk cost is, but to suggest that their annual Oracle fees are somehow throwing $ away is heresy. This prevents them from ever doing a decent cost-benefit of using OS tools and products and investing in support and development instead of licensing. The difference is most seen in IT support - who spends their time waiting for the provider to send patches for stuff they can't fix, versus actually fixing stuff.
They call it 'focusing on their core competencies' i.e., they aren't in the 'software business' - I call it, ignoring a better, more efficient way to do your job by controlling your process, but hey, I'm a cubicle monkey, what do I know.
This disgusting phenomenon leaves lots of room for innovation by those smart enough who 'get it', who can quell their nausea long enough to work in the busness sector. Me, I bought a cat and kick it every night when I get home from work, whilst coding and crafting my escape. (kidding, about the cat, BTW cat lovers!)
As the old saying goes, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Evangelize about OS all you like - but until someone evangelizes how much money they make with a solution they developed, perceptions will not change. Those of use working on better mousetraps, and there are many more sucessful than I (I still have a day job) won't likely yell too much - I'd rather get a good service business going, with quality software built my way, and then eat my large, lumbering, ignorant corporate competitors lunches for them BEFORE they figure this out.
My $.02.
And the irony is most /.'s drive crap cars to work. One narrow segment of /.'s lives is "all about the quality, no matter what!" and yet everything else in their life is devoid of any and all quality. Crappy cars, crappy diets, crappy furniture, crappy apartments, etc.
/.'s are never able to understand why John Q. Public won't spend hours and hours screwing with their computer.
;P).
Yet
Actually, Once I started spending my own money, everything became 'all about the quality.'
The trick is you have to be willing to research to get quality. When I realized I should buy a new car instead of repairing my beater over and over, I started researching cars. 6 months of research.. (well, most of it was done in ~3 months, but w/ 2005 models coming out, there was almost no data on em until recently.
I eventually decided not to get the 'best' car I could, but get one thats $3000 cheaper and almost as good. Quality Vs. Price.. a 'value' comparison.
before i start my argument, here's my disclaimer: .
- i use firefox for all my browsing needs, on both linux and windows, been using firefox since it was in all its previous avatars - firebird, phoenix, mozilla, netscape...yawn, and the umpteen names. happy the way it handles things.
- i switched from thunderbird to opera 'cos thunderbird doesnt have a decent mbox import utility, and although complicated - opera mail is really cool - with plenty of shortkeyys to work with.
- i have a relatively decent config - amd 64 3000+, asus k8n, 512mb pc3200 ddr, geforce 2 gfx, soundblaster, 160 gb sata hdd - so its not like the machine might be an impediment for smooth running of firefox
------------------------here goes----------
- i have praised firefox enough to many people, i have evangelised firefox in browsing centres, replaced IE on many desktops at my friends and relatives' place. so why always, only talk good about firefox? there should be a fair share of critical reviews too! i have a few grouses to air, although, this is not the firefox forum.
1. the extensions management is really bad in firefox, i have been persistently having troubles with management of extensions - some of them refuse to get installed. changing versions - the plugins do not work on upgrading to the latest and the greatest release. the plugin/ extension writers are way too slow many times to upgrade. question of holes left by the extensions - lack of validity/ checks on the third party extensions. the recent inclusion of auto extension updation doesnt always work
2. bookmarks - why does the bookmark disappear when the browser crashes occasionally ? this is really hopeless. yes, i know there's an extension to fix it , bookmark backup - but why isnt it built in ? while browsing with multiple tabs, sometimes, the bookmarks in the toolbar act strange, and loads in a corner. the bookmark bugs have made many people go back to IE or switch to opera.
3. java is a pain - as it loads - is persistent. sometimes an impediment while opening multiple tabs. slows down the whole experience. the cache is like a giant leak. as you adblock many ads along the way - after a period the ad block management gets heavier, and confused sort of. (not really a firefox's fault)
these three have been a thorn in the flesh since ages. i will not be switching to any other browser, but its like - firefox isnt the undisputed king, nor is it enough to wish IE away. i hope that firefox writers will concentrate on fixing the issues - small number of manageable extensions, better plugin management, it has to be consistent even with point releases - apparently a large part of thier user-base - i am sure is an "intelligent" user - who upgrades with every point release - as shown by the large number of people who upgraded from preview release to final release. i hope mitch is listening!
Oh it basically is. The browser 'experience' is pretty much all the same with some subtle differences and varying degrees of clean and successful implementation. One is an Accord, the other is a Camry. But generally they both do the same things the same ways and what makes your experience hard or easy or interesting or valuable for one is equally true for the other. For something to be different it would have to function differently like the address bar in XP except after that the experience is still the same. If a 'browser' worked like the XP address bar and then popped the results in a translucent subwindow inside the application you were already using, that would be a differet experience, for example.
from TFA:
rapidly evolving baby steps
A little OT, but my favorite part of Offline Files is when I'm not connected to any network and the system tells me that synchronization completed successfully. So confidence inspiring!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Stay tuned. Imminent increases in the price of fuel will focus your attention on eliminating the less valuable pieces of vehicle feature bloat.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You do have a point. But the business world is also a form of meritocracy. It is just that /. geeks consider intelligence, consideration and community spirit worth merit.
The business world considers power, money and market share worth merit.
That is why meritocracies are flawed systems.
Who ends up with control all depends on who determines what is worth merit.
watashi wa bengoshi dewa arimasen!
I see a lot of IE versus Firefox comments, so I'll just get it out of the way now.
/leaner memory footprint, and renders CSS like a good webbrowser SHOULD, then firefox loses some of it edge.
Firefox renders CSS more consistently than IE. Developers like that.
Firefox uses about 2 mb less than IE while running in windows XP viewing the same slashdot thread.
Firefox allows window tabbing.
things not affected: Popup blocking, since SP2 does it. Plugins, since activeX is dead anyways.
Basically, if IE 7 uses tabs, has a smaller
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
convict Pronunciation Key (kn-vkt)
v. convicted, convicting, convicts
v. tr.
1. Law. To find or prove (someone) guilty of an offense or crime, especially by the verdict of a court: The jury convicted the defendant of manslaughter.
2. To show or declare to be blameworthy; condemn: His remarks convicted him of a lack of sensitivity.
3. To make aware of one's sinfulness or guilt.
---
"The ruling is the climax of a trial that began just over a year ago in which the Justice Department accused Microsoft of bullying competitors in an attempt to control the personal computer software market.
"Microsoft has demonstrated it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's core products," Jackson wrote.
"Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market.
"Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors," he added. "In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market.""
If you think about it all three of the plugins you mentioned are solving problems that could be more appropriately solved on the other end.
1. Advertisements could go away.
2. Flash could have a setting called Click to play
3. Your bank could rewrite their code to stop blocking anything but IE.
Not that those problems are going to go away but if you think about it all of the "bloat" you mentioned are really useful features to fix a problem someone else is causing.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
So I can either live in cloud cuckoo land, or actually make my PC behave like I want it to.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The Postman
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Firefox and IE are both ultimately descendants of NCSA Mosaic, so this whole reverse-engineering debate is kind of pointless, IMO.
Power to the Peaceful
"They discuss, amongst other things, what it's like competing with Microsoft, and Firefox as an operating system."
Wow. I didn't think Firefox had reached the functionality of emacs yet...
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Rather, I'd say that bloat is a question of architecture. The command line isn't bloat, since all the commands are properly seperated from the shell itself. If every command was a part of the shell program itself, then it would be bloat, even though it has the exact same capabilities.
That's why Firefox may be called bloated -- not because all the extensions are included by default (which they, of course, aren't), but rather because all the extensions that you choose to include run as part of the same program. They become part of the firefox program itself when you install them. That is also why "It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solutions". Since the extensions aren't properly seperated from themselves or the core Firefox program (the shell, if you will), it becomes ever more difficult to avoid conflicts.
That's also why a Linux distro is often considered less bloated than Windows, even though it's capable of so much more.
Note again the parallel of the UNIX command line. There are even more combinations of programs (extensions, if you will) in the command line than there are for Firefox, but that's not a problem since it has a better underlying architecture. Not really part of the subject, but I can't help noting how "light-weight" is such a relative word... Firefox may be light-weight compared to IE, the Mozilla suite, etc., but can you really call any program that takes 25 MBs of memory just to start of "light-weight"?Sorry, but I think MSFT has a very long way to go
before their "ship goes turtle". $50 Billion USD
can buy an awful lot of "pontoon outriggers", in
the form of (1) USA software patents, (2) DCMA,
(3) buying their way into EU software patents,
and (4) SCO-like attacks against F/OSS.
Unless, of course, there is a "sea change" in
American politics, and an honest-to-goodness
populist regime comes to power (Executive Branch
AND Legislative Branch). Given the current SITREP,
those are some very long odds to hope for.
Of course it is. Haven't you noticed that even if the number oh Hz (Mhz, Ghz) continues to increase as Moore law says, the performance doesn't have the same increment?
(I think it's even an economic law that says this, although it doesn't have a proof for microprocessors).
So the new Hz's that are coming are more sluggish, more slow and young and not that restless as the ones from days back.
Processors' pipes are lenghtening before their speed can manage it.
Therefore, until we get ourself some new type of hardware to code onto, we have to write better code. Even if it's automatically generated by RAD tools, algorithms still count when measuring performance.
ergo:There is no point writing bad code just because processors are faster
On the other side, there are some points in writing slightly slower bad code that can be:
- read later by another developer
- extensible - produces closer-to-usability programs.
I agree with an upper post that Commodore would do them all, but I won't manage living without today's UIs.
gtkaml.org
Why yes I do. I mean being citizens is all well and good I supose, i mean it has a tough history because of people like Stalin and Lenen. In the end though, I can only judge what has happened to me, and for me capitalism has worked out good.
I see this atrophic concept of Market and Share coming up again and again, let's break it down shall we?
The word marketshare doesn't exist, though lately (interestingly enough) has been in wide circulation regardless.
People seem to forget this marketshare was once comprised of two words, Market and Share.
The first word 'Market' signifies an environment predisposed to maximal choice for the benefit of consumers, and also for the vendors who enjoy a large turnout on market day. M$'s concept of Market would be like going to buy fruit and vegetables on market day to find only one vendor. Disturbingly the previous vendors now all seem to be stacking shelves and helping you put fruit in bags..
The second word here is 'Share'. In the context of Market Share is perhaps best considered as the verb to share. 'To share' implicitly means 'to distribute ownership of - to partake, enjoy or suffer with others'. This word 'share' M$ simply has no concept of - except of course in the context of 'shares' (distributed ownership of the company not the market).
M$ doesn't seek Market Share, perhaps they seek this new thing called 'Marketshare' i'm not sure. One thing certain is that they seek 'Monopoly', the word I think the parent's author was looking for. Monopoly is also made of two words, Mono (a prefex signifying 'One') and Poly (also a prefix/adjective meaning 'of many atoms or parts).
It all depends which you put in front of the other and whether there's air in between.
Try 'Sharemarket' and 'Share Market' for instance, get it?
andanotherthing.......
I REALLY wish Offline Files would replicate the folder structure rather than just displaying the files (or am I being a real muppet and missing something?)
When a passenger of the foot, hooves in sight, tootel the horn trumpet melodiously
Silly---
Firefox is not an operating system. EMACS, OTOH.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Does it even support Unicode? That alone could double the size of the application.
Clever signature text goes here.
Really. I have no idea what you are trying to say, but there must be something there because you've been moderated +5 and you have a low UID.
The goal - the bizplan - of FF and OOo is not to make money, it's to make products.
Have you ever used a MS product that didn't piss you off in some subtle way?
I think the same can be said about mostly any computer software on the market.
Flash can be automatically installed, I've done it in Windows and Linux. Just visit a page with an SWF in and it prompts you. Of course, you need root on a Unix box.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I'm a self-taught programmer, and I'll admit not a very skilled one because I've had few opportunities for my code to be used outside of my own computer. That hasn't stopped me from trying though. I've been writing games on and off for years, and this has been my experience.
:^)
My first computer was a C64, and the game I was writing quickly grew beyond it's capabilities. It was a case of "Wouldn't it be nice if I could do this..."
Next, was a C128, and the same thing happened again, but more quickly this time and for the same reason.
Then came the Amiga 500 (upgraded of course). I rewrote my old code and thought I might be able to get it all to work. It wasn't feature-creep this time though - my apartment was broken into and my computer stolen.
Then I finally got my first PC, and I started a new game. I had it working! Everything I wanted and more was in it except... A full featured open-ended universe for the player to well... play in. So I started a universe creator that turned into a strategy game that has become an enormous resource hog. To give you some idea of the kind of creeping bloat we're talking about now, I'm working on simulating nationalism and religious strife and their effects on planetary economies. It has become less a programming task than an endless crusade. By the time I finish one feature (I just rewrote the code for diseases), I have two new ones. I WILL exceed the capabilities again of this machine.
So keeping in mind that I'm a disorganized and crappy programmer, here's Tim's Law of Feature Creep (as it applies to Tim): Regardless of resource supply, demand WILL grow to meet it.
And for good measure, here's Tim's Law of Social Interaction: Nothing good will come of a conversation that starts with: "Here, smell this."
Seeing as that's my only social law, it's easy to see why I'm 35, single, and dateless for almost 12 years.
i just copy the userContent.css file in my profile directory. no need to install adblock nor flash click to play.
no need to install some of these extensions when those features are already in the default browser...
my blog
It's also about popularity. Most /. were probably picked on or socially outcast when younger by the popular crowd at school. For this, they typically rebel against anything popular and gravitate toward the underdog and embrace their "outcastness". They will tend to do things the opposite of what is popular. There have been many things that change over time. In the past (80s), geeks had to be fairly wealthy (have fairly wealthy parents) to afford a computer. Today, most seem strapped for cash. Geeks were typically highly educated back then, usually. Today, many morons think they are geeks. I think the number of geeks who were health-food nuts has declined, too. Geeks of the 80s were typically straight laced, today it's common to hear about geeks who enjoy... chemical entertainment.
It's mostly about the underdog. If/when Linux becomes dominant to the point Microsoft is today, there'll be some other underdog that the geeks will migrate towards because it's 'cool' to be in a smaller 'l33t' group that is somehow superior (in their own eyes) than the 'common masses'.
Rather, I'd say that bloat is a question of architecture. The command line isn't bloat, since all the commands are properly seperated from the shell itself. If every command was a part of the shell program itself, then it would be bloat, even though it has the exact same capabilities.
:)
So busybox is bloat.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Have you ever used a MS product that didn't piss you off in some subtle way?
Have you ever used a product that didn't piss you off in some subtle way?
You wouldn't happen to be trolling, now, would you? :)
-Mike
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
The reason that most geeks are going for the 'smaller team' is that they know stuff that J. Random End-Luser doesn't: they understand why Windows is a bad choice, and why [generic unix] is better.
Making a choice depends on the question being asked and for what criteria. It's difficult to say what is a "bad" choice and what is a "good" choice when there was no question/criteria stated.
Many of the Linux folks pick the platform (Linux) and see everything else as being built on top of it. Most users pick the applications and see the OS as just something necessary to get their applications to run. That is one of the main issues that some don't understand.
Well, if you had seen the first set of computer generated timelines from the planet "Hollow"(names randomly picked when colonized), you'd think that my nationalism model was pretty funny too. Positive effect - negative effect, what's the difference? One little typo... and you've never seen people so happy about having their society descend into anarchy.
My favorite stupid mistake (on this game) though had to be the immortal planetary governor of Mars. Two little typos and the bastard won every election for 400 years and refused to die of old age.
My all-time favorite blunder on any game I've written had a simulated starship being chased down by a SAR drone (Search and Rescue - it was going out to collect an ejected pilot). I would pause, try to debug the problem, restart, run away again, pause, debug, rinse, repeat... for two hours before I found that little mistake.
It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solutions when there are nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings. There's a basic tension in principle that can never be completely resolved.
Sure, it can be resolved: through proper modular architecture. The UNIX shell and its associated commands have such an architecture.
Mozilla and all the other Windows refugees, on the other hand, don't. The fault isn't Microsoft's or Netscape's, though: their programmers are just victims of a bad education. They actually think that building huge object-oriented architectures in which thousands of classes live all within the same address space is a good idea. That sort of silliness started with Smalltalk, which taught a generation of programmers that putting thousands of classes together and coupling them as closely as possible is a good thing.
There is a non-bloated, good, modular architecture for GUIs out there somewhere, but someone yet needs to find it. Perhaps the first step is for people to start realizing that it is worth looking for it and that the kind of bloat represented by Mozilla, MS Office, and OpenOffice is not inevitable.
I think in a lot of instances the applications focus should be doing it's job well and plugins are great for fixing other problems or adding features that are not related to the task of the application.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I always end up seeing this all over the web. How is bloat figured?
FF, IE, and Opera all seem to use a similar amount of RAM (50MB or so) in most listings I've seen.
FF is 4.7MB to download, IE is ~12MB depending, Opera is 3.5MB.
I could go on, but I really don't see how FF is any less bloaty than the others.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Only they dont actually produce the keyboards, they just rebrand them.. Their mice suck too, very easy to break compared to a logitech.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Yeah: everything Debian stable has ever included. T'other day I wanted to set up webmail access to my home email server. So I surfed for ninety seconds, logged in as root, typed "apt-get install squirrelmail" and thirty seconds later (literally) I had web access to my home mail. Call it three minutes from 'want' to 'got'.
*That's* what is supposed to happen. IMO the Debian project is the ultimate 'OS' - componentised, modular, and *stable*.
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I'm no XUL expert, but I believe extensions are effective "overlaid" onto the basic mozilla app at runtime. They do not "become part" of the browser any more than HTML and javascript (which ultimately are client-side widgets) in a webpage do.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
It's a mathematical problem: if you're bad, you win, if all people are bad, they all lose.
Google "prisoners dilemma"
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
Firefox is doing it's job well. My point was that the original poster mentioned that all of those plugins should be automatically incorporated instead of being plugins.
To me that would be bloat. Let firefox focus on browsing and building a framework to allow developers to build plugins.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
No not at all - think of it this way. If you're selling a Bentley then your competition is not other cars. It's a plane or a skil lodge in Vail. That's their business plan. If you are MS and you spend 3 decades cobbling together mid-level products half of which were conceived by other companies then your competition is not other firms making similar products. That is not your business plan. They don't compete on product. So the product per se really isn't all that important.
If you check out these benchmarks you'll see that even the Cray Y-MP could only crunch 67 MFLOPS.
My point was that it would take 75,000 20 year-old PC's (sure, it would take less Y-MP's, but they have their own power and size issues) to equal the processing power (in FP) of a single current technology CPU. And there are more powerful processors than the Opteron x48 out there. The 2.0Ghz G5 can crank 6.0 GFLOPS. That's a 100,000 PC XT/AT's.
Many moons ago, we had a 10 MegaWatt transformer just outside of Phoenix blow. And I do mean blow. People over ten miles away heard the explosion! It is simply not practical to run 75,000 20 year-old computers. 5MW is a practically insane amount of power.
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle