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Open Source Worse than Flying
george writes "In an article published on TheRegister, Otto Z. Stern makes the bold statement that "The only thing as goat-rendering awful as flying has to be the progression of open source code." Accusing Open Source of being buggy and its devolopers of preoccupation with mudane details."I'm sitting here...wondering when the Linux freaks are going to solve their Ubuntu versus Mandriva color scheme debate or maybe even write a printer driver so that something I buy actually works with my open sores PC.""
Tell him to get a Samsung ML-1610, comes with the Linux drivers right in the box! As do most of their other models, works like a charm.
- Hilary Rosen is a lesbian.
- Carli Fiorina is a man.
- Only a sniping blogger militia can protect us from exploding Chinamen.
I rest my case.Sorry, but you couldn't write yourself out of a paper bag.
I'll eat karma on this post. People need to know. I know I'm not a writer, but I'm not assuming that my writing is worth shit.
That article is one of the least coherent things to appear on Slashdot, and that's quite an achievment. I never really liked stream of conciousness in high school and I can't say that I like it any better on a web page than in paperback. I can't imagine what posessed anyone to submit that story or what caused an "editor" to post it. It just doesn't have any content.
Sounds like the stuff Dvorak would say. It's really boring reading this crap, yet I think it's on slashdot because it's a guaranteed story to generate posts which surely helps slashdot's income.
It's satire. Have you never read El Reg before?
WTF is the world coming to?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
He must be a Libra. The match with this horoscope is really stunning.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
HP has an excellent printer drivers project complete with a working GTK toolbox program: http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/> Just install CUPS and then follow the instructions here: http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/install.php> as for the Article.. Zern tends to write with his tongue in cheek.
-- Cheers!
Otto Z. Stern's articles appear in the Register's humor section as just that-humor articles. Does no one check these things anymore?
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
I'm amazed at how many people look at the free lunch of OSS and complain that it's a burger and not the filet mignon they get from the $100 a plate restaurant.
My attitude to OSS is that it's free, and I'm grateful for what I've been given. I contribute bug fixes back, I give feedback, I've made suggestions and donations, and I've provided low-level support (like telling Firefox users to retry their problem using the latest browser, but at least it lowers the queue).
I'm grateful because when I choose to use OSS, it's mostly because of massive cost savings - I got some shareware and some OSS software working together and saved me a few hundred over buying Visio. In addition, it's given me flexibility. I found a .net web control that saved me a few hundred, but I decided that an extra feature was required. I got in there and changed it. Try getting a vendor to make a small change for one customer and see how much it costs you.
You are right about hardware, and even though I've only used Linux a little, I now choose hardware in part on this basis - that it gives me flexibility. My next laptop will probably be Lenovo because they get written up well for Linux compatibility. You can even buy machines like Shuttles that have been tested with Mandrake.
There's definitely a problem with open source development. My guess is that more emphasis should be place on raising money. Maybe open source programmers need more support than they are getting.
There is a HUGE, well-known bug in Firefox 1.5, the CPU and Memory Hogging bug. Developers refuse to fix it, even though anyone can demonstrate the bug easily. Apparently there is some kind of social problem. Maybe no one has the authority to deal with a major bug.
This 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
The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use with no activity, 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.
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.
The bug has often been reported on Slashdot. Here are a few examples:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169676&cid=141 43632
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62671
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 66613
I posted the bug numbered 222660 in Bugzilla. It is interesting to note that apparently no developer has bothered to read the entire bug report and take the time to understand it. For 2 1/2 years, developers have been saying things like this: 1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly version. 2) Yes, this bug exists, but it isn't important. 3) No one has posted a TalkBack report. (If they read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too.) 4) If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug. 5) This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. The other bugs aren't specified. 6) You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. 7) I don't like the way you worded your report. 8) Often someone uses the subject to act out anger; that person pretends to be interested in the subject.
I doubt this subject will just go away, not after more than 2 1/2 years of discussion. There has been a Slashdot story about it: Reducing Firefox's Memory Use. There's a lot of discussion in the comments to the story that the problem is a bug, rather than just something that needs improving.
Other people have raised the issue, all somewhat inaccurately, since the "memory leak"
Otto Z. Stern is a character created by The Register to post humorous, trolling, sarcastic or satirical articles. His articles are always over the top, and intended to provoke flames or make a point in a humorous manner. The character is intended to be an angry, bigoted loudmouth, sort of like Maddox (of "The Best Page In The Universe" fame), and anyone who takes his articles seriously and posts them on Slashdot is a fool.
Isn't it a bit ironic that you're bashing open source when you're also telling us that you're having the hardware related problems with NVIDIA's open source hostile hardware (which they don't release specifications for) and their own CLOSED SOURCE proprietary drivers? Blame NVIDIA for that, not Ubuntu.
Uummm, I hate to tell you this, but OS X uses the cups printer system, the same as most Linux systems. It's just as easy to set up a printer on a Linux system as it is on OS X. Even down to the list of supported printers. I don't think you could have choosen a worse example of unique Mac superiority than their printing system. *LMAO*
The Unofficial CUPS-on-Apple-Mac-OS-X FAQ
CUPS; it just works.
A troll, written by one of the regular Register staffers, for the apparent purpose of attracting flames from the gullible.
He doesn't exist.
His sole raison d'etre is to get a rise out of people.
For the love of Om, don't feed the troll any more, people!
No, it's not really an apt analogy because they simply don't make cars with hoods welded shut. Your ingredients/nutritional information label analogy doesn't really work either, because I can't buy food without nutrional information or ingredients in this country (the UK), although you can in France interestingly enough. I know exactly what my computer is doing with the information I give it. I control what information goes in and what goes out. I don't disagree with open source software and the movement, in fact most of the applications I use on a day to day basis (firefox, open office, thunderbird among others) are open source, but my operating system of choice is windows because I'm comfortable with it, it lets me do exactly what I want to do and not concern myself with anything else and I know EXACTLY what is happening with the information I give it. I'd know in an instant if data I'd supplied it with is going to some spurious target I hadn't allowed. With 15 years of Windows experience, I'd like to think I'm pretty competant and aware of the pitfalls of using Windows.
Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He criticizes the fact that planes don't fly faster without stopping to think why that is. He criticizes the people that promote opensource. He criticizes opensource, while doing it in a way that seems to say opensource is linux. Open sourced includes a lot more things than that. After all of the insults, the article states he is a director at a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. There is a difference between insulting and informing on the negative aspects and, apparently, he does not know it.