I think this push towards full-screen apps is a move backwards.
Only for us who know better. Unfortunately, we are not the target market, anymore. All I see all day at work is people swishing their middle fingers around on their smartphones, and they seem to love all this stuff.
From Firefox to Unity to Aero to Chrome to Ribbon to iAnything, everything released within the last 6 years has driven me nuts. I'm really trying to give this stuff a chance, but I just hate everything I come across. It was the obscure error messages and badly designed menus that confused people, not the taskbars, status bars, and maximize gadgets.
What really frightens me is that the Linux community is heading in this direction, too. WTF?
I've been suffering from this bug for years, and I'm pretty sure it's a memory management bug. The period of the freezes is the same, but the length of the freezes seems to be proportional to the amount of memory being used by the browser. When frozen, the browser will use 100% of one CPU core. My take is that the memory garbage collector is rock stupid, runs in a single pass on a fixed schedule, and doesn't multitask.
Everybody complains about memory leaks, and FF fans keep telling me the leaks have been fixed in newer versions. So what? It's the freezes that bother me. I have 4GB of RAM, and FF rarely uses more than 400MB. If they would introduce some wait states into the memory management code (or whatever tight loop is causing the freezes), then I wouldn't care about the leaks. I don't mind restarting the browser once a day... right now I have to restart it about every 15 minutes, which sucks when I've opened up links in new windows and want to browse them later.
Incidentally, this bug is some kind of universal background task. The freezes even happen when you have a file requester open or are clicking though the browser's config options. Sometimes even after the browser unfreezes, I can't click any buttons on an open file requester. I have to ctrl-alt-del to continue surfing.
I still like using Firefox, but it really has become the Windows of web browsers.
The rivals see the big bad scary Microsoft and end up doing something stupid and killing themselves out of fear.
Perfect summary. It's the same thing that happened to Netscape.
They had a lot of market share and were overconfident. They slacked off, and let their browser fall behind in technology. Suddenly, big evil Goog... er, Microsoft shows up, and suddenly, the underdog panics and realizes they've got to respond to competition once in a while. Then, they start throwing every gimmick and trendy buzzword they can think of into the program until it becomes a slow, bloated, and sometimes unstable mess. Then, they die.
It's sad enough that this pattern happens over and over in the real world, but it's really sad how it happened to the very predecessor of Firefox.
Even a couple years after the advent of SSDs, people still refuse to believe me when I say my system boots in 14 seconds, with a LAMP environment and a bunch of other desktop toolbars and toys. Also, this is XP Pro, not Win7.
The reason I don't use sleep, though, is because I still have problems with my system not waking up. I haven't bothered trying to figure out what hardware is causing the problem, but it's likely either my ATI graphics card, or my X-Fi sound card. Neither company ever made good drivers.
Computers refusing to wake up is not new. I first experienced that feature with the Macs at college, running OS8. They only woke up from sleep about half the time, and that was with Apple's total vertical control over all the hardware and drivers.
I know you're talking about a server, but sometimes the workstations were pretty bad, too.
I used to work in a photo store back in 2005, and for some reason, Kodak used an old SparcStation III for their PictureMaker kiosk. I hated that thing. It was just a flatbed scanner attached to a thermal plastic foil printer, and all it did was make instant copies. It didn't even have the ability to network to our Noritsu digital mini lab (running Kodak software). It took 20 minutes to boot up every morning, and that was before the kiosk software started running.
Kodak eventually replaced the SparcStations with off-the-shelf PCs, and boot times went down to less than a minute. In fact, the new IBM machines had the fastest POST I've ever seen, literally less than 2 seconds from a cold start.
Think about the existing level of competition among oil companies. Now apply this to companies that deal with refined, highly radioactive substances that can't just be slurped out of the ground and require difficult manufacturing techniques. Now add a pinch of public fear over nuclear technology.
They left the PC's architecture 'open', which allowed the cheap clones to be made.
It's important to note that IBM didn't have a choice in the matter, for the same reason Coleco was legally allowed to make a clone of the Atari 2600.
The Mac required special ROMs, so cloning wasn't an option (not like some companies didn't try). The Amiga couldn't be cloned because of all the custom chips. The IBM PC was very easy to reverse engineer, and IBM couldn't do a thing to stop it (not like they didn't try, either).
Political correctness is daintily tip-toeing around words and phrases because those words or phrases may or may not be taboo relative to modern cultural, racial, religious, sexual, etc. constructs.
It's really cool to hear an early example of listening to code. "RAM scanning" was popular on the Amiga many years ago, and it was pretty easy to guess what kind of data was present in the system's memory just by listening to it. Images, code, pre-calculated tables, and text all had unique sounds, so just pumping some memory into the speaker was way faster than looking at a bitmap screen offset or using a hex editor. I used to be able to rip Soundtracker music from games with only a sound editor and nothing else.
I wish I could still do that on a PC. It'd be cool to see what a memory looks and sounds like with a modern OS, even though it'd probably be fragmented to hell.
That would increase factory assembly time by 1.8 seconds, and manufacturing costs by 2 cents. Unacceptable!
One of the things I truly love about SD cards is that they have a write protect switch. This should be standard equipment on all memory cards, USB thumb drives, external hard drives, etc.
I was listening for people speak paranoia about being attacked by terrorists, but they were drowned out by the people calling for bin Laden's head on a pike (and, hey, throw in Hussain's mug for good measure).
It's time for software developers to make the decisions, rather than "designers".
Or maybe good designers, rather than bad ones.
There's nothing worse than an engineer who designs according to what he wants, rather than the customer's needs. Except for a designer who designs according to what he wants, rather than the customer's needs.
Perhaps Firefox should take a page out of Ubuntu's playbook, and offer a special LTS (Long Term Support) release that will receive back-ported security fixes for the next two or three years.
In other words, a stable release.
For me, that would be Firefox 3.6 (despite still being plagued with freezing problems).
Funny, I don't recall seeing version numbers next to all the other programs and accessories in my Start Menu. Not that it's difficult to find out what they are if I'm curious.
It's just plain stupid how version numbers are being used for marketing and constantly being thrown in peoples' faces, while other things like status bars are EVIL and need to be hidden from people, by force if necessary.
Marketing bullshit isn't something I really expected from open source developers, but I suppose nobody is immune to ego trips.
Once they "catch up" to Chrome, they'll probably go back to their regular numbering system again.
I still haven't upgraded to 4 (even though FF3.6 is still giving me intermittent freezing problems). I'm a web developer, and my extensions are just a bit more sophisticated than something that lets me Tweet faster, so updating to a major version is a big deal. I'm not going to put up with DLL Hell in 2011, and I don't trust the updater to leave multiple installations as they are. If I need to test something newer versions of Firefox, I'll continue using the portable version.
Technology might make people lazy. What else is new?
We'll cope, so long as we do something about the lawsuits. I'm wondering if the liability factor might make this technology just as expensive as a group home.
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I think this push towards full-screen apps is a move backwards.
Only for us who know better. Unfortunately, we are not the target market, anymore. All I see all day at work is people swishing their middle fingers around on their smartphones, and they seem to love all this stuff.
From Firefox to Unity to Aero to Chrome to Ribbon to iAnything, everything released within the last 6 years has driven me nuts. I'm really trying to give this stuff a chance, but I just hate everything I come across. It was the obscure error messages and badly designed menus that confused people, not the taskbars, status bars, and maximize gadgets.
What really frightens me is that the Linux community is heading in this direction, too. WTF?
Is that why Java installs so many "Quick Starters" as background processes and plug-ins in every nook and cranny it can?
I've been suffering from this bug for years, and I'm pretty sure it's a memory management bug. The period of the freezes is the same, but the length of the freezes seems to be proportional to the amount of memory being used by the browser. When frozen, the browser will use 100% of one CPU core. My take is that the memory garbage collector is rock stupid, runs in a single pass on a fixed schedule, and doesn't multitask.
Everybody complains about memory leaks, and FF fans keep telling me the leaks have been fixed in newer versions. So what? It's the freezes that bother me. I have 4GB of RAM, and FF rarely uses more than 400MB. If they would introduce some wait states into the memory management code (or whatever tight loop is causing the freezes), then I wouldn't care about the leaks. I don't mind restarting the browser once a day... right now I have to restart it about every 15 minutes, which sucks when I've opened up links in new windows and want to browse them later.
Incidentally, this bug is some kind of universal background task. The freezes even happen when you have a file requester open or are clicking though the browser's config options. Sometimes even after the browser unfreezes, I can't click any buttons on an open file requester. I have to ctrl-alt-del to continue surfing.
I still like using Firefox, but it really has become the Windows of web browsers.
The rivals see the big bad scary Microsoft and end up doing something stupid and killing themselves out of fear.
Perfect summary. It's the same thing that happened to Netscape.
They had a lot of market share and were overconfident. They slacked off, and let their browser fall behind in technology. Suddenly, big evil Goog... er, Microsoft shows up, and suddenly, the underdog panics and realizes they've got to respond to competition once in a while. Then, they start throwing every gimmick and trendy buzzword they can think of into the program until it becomes a slow, bloated, and sometimes unstable mess. Then, they die.
It's sad enough that this pattern happens over and over in the real world, but it's really sad how it happened to the very predecessor of Firefox.
What do you mean about volatility? Aside from Steve Jobs announcing his first medical leave...
Duct tape those sentences together and you've got your answer.
Even a couple years after the advent of SSDs, people still refuse to believe me when I say my system boots in 14 seconds, with a LAMP environment and a bunch of other desktop toolbars and toys. Also, this is XP Pro, not Win7.
The reason I don't use sleep, though, is because I still have problems with my system not waking up. I haven't bothered trying to figure out what hardware is causing the problem, but it's likely either my ATI graphics card, or my X-Fi sound card. Neither company ever made good drivers.
Computers refusing to wake up is not new. I first experienced that feature with the Macs at college, running OS8. They only woke up from sleep about half the time, and that was with Apple's total vertical control over all the hardware and drivers.
I know you're talking about a server, but sometimes the workstations were pretty bad, too.
I used to work in a photo store back in 2005, and for some reason, Kodak used an old SparcStation III for their PictureMaker kiosk. I hated that thing. It was just a flatbed scanner attached to a thermal plastic foil printer, and all it did was make instant copies. It didn't even have the ability to network to our Noritsu digital mini lab (running Kodak software). It took 20 minutes to boot up every morning, and that was before the kiosk software started running.
Kodak eventually replaced the SparcStations with off-the-shelf PCs, and boot times went down to less than a minute. In fact, the new IBM machines had the fastest POST I've ever seen, literally less than 2 seconds from a cold start.
Think about the existing level of competition among oil companies. Now apply this to companies that deal with refined, highly radioactive substances that can't just be slurped out of the ground and require difficult manufacturing techniques. Now add a pinch of public fear over nuclear technology.
Too cheap to meter, of course.
They left the PC's architecture 'open', which allowed the cheap clones to be made.
It's important to note that IBM didn't have a choice in the matter, for the same reason Coleco was legally allowed to make a clone of the Atari 2600.
The Mac required special ROMs, so cloning wasn't an option (not like some companies didn't try). The Amiga couldn't be cloned because of all the custom chips. The IBM PC was very easy to reverse engineer, and IBM couldn't do a thing to stop it (not like they didn't try, either).
All the antimatter in galaxy cores is in the black holes! Duh!
Wait... I meant, gravistar.
Political correctness is daintily tip-toeing around words and phrases because those words or phrases may or may not be taboo relative to modern cultural, racial, religious, sexual, etc. constructs.
Or, it tested well with the focus groups.
It's really cool to hear an early example of listening to code. "RAM scanning" was popular on the Amiga many years ago, and it was pretty easy to guess what kind of data was present in the system's memory just by listening to it. Images, code, pre-calculated tables, and text all had unique sounds, so just pumping some memory into the speaker was way faster than looking at a bitmap screen offset or using a hex editor. I used to be able to rip Soundtracker music from games with only a sound editor and nothing else.
I wish I could still do that on a PC. It'd be cool to see what a memory looks and sounds like with a modern OS, even though it'd probably be fragmented to hell.
Yeah, don't worry, it's all just concept stuff. Just like the stupid stuff that preceded Firefox 4 and eventually went gold.
That would increase factory assembly time by 1.8 seconds, and manufacturing costs by 2 cents. Unacceptable!
One of the things I truly love about SD cards is that they have a write protect switch. This should be standard equipment on all memory cards, USB thumb drives, external hard drives, etc.
You mean like the security advisers who got axed from Sony before all hell broke loose?
I wasn't aware that fear is the only emotion that fuels revenge.
were able to make us scared of them
I thought it was merely revenge.
I was listening for people speak paranoia about being attacked by terrorists, but they were drowned out by the people calling for bin Laden's head on a pike (and, hey, throw in Hussain's mug for good measure).
I doubt it's as bad as everyone fears
Thanks for the reassurance. I've seen a lot of bad things follow statements like this.
It's time for software developers to make the decisions, rather than "designers".
Or maybe good designers, rather than bad ones.
There's nothing worse than an engineer who designs according to what he wants, rather than the customer's needs. Except for a designer who designs according to what he wants, rather than the customer's needs.
Perhaps Firefox should take a page out of Ubuntu's playbook, and offer a special LTS (Long Term Support) release that will receive back-ported security fixes for the next two or three years.
In other words, a stable release.
For me, that would be Firefox 3.6 (despite still being plagued with freezing problems).
Funny, I don't recall seeing version numbers next to all the other programs and accessories in my Start Menu. Not that it's difficult to find out what they are if I'm curious.
It's just plain stupid how version numbers are being used for marketing and constantly being thrown in peoples' faces, while other things like status bars are EVIL and need to be hidden from people, by force if necessary.
Marketing bullshit isn't something I really expected from open source developers, but I suppose nobody is immune to ego trips.
Once they "catch up" to Chrome, they'll probably go back to their regular numbering system again.
I still haven't upgraded to 4 (even though FF3.6 is still giving me intermittent freezing problems). I'm a web developer, and my extensions are just a bit more sophisticated than something that lets me Tweet faster, so updating to a major version is a big deal. I'm not going to put up with DLL Hell in 2011, and I don't trust the updater to leave multiple installations as they are. If I need to test something newer versions of Firefox, I'll continue using the portable version.
Technology might make people lazy. What else is new?
We'll cope, so long as we do something about the lawsuits. I'm wondering if the liability factor might make this technology just as expensive as a group home.
Now it will only take another 5 years before other Firefox users stop blaming me for my addons or profile.
I haven't seen such denial from a user base since the MacOS extension days.
If you drew it as a blizzard scene, there would still be plenty of people offended by it.