Re:firefox breaks my laptop's ability to wake up
on
The Future of Firefox
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· Score: 1
i don't want to try it now b/c i've got a bunch of great windows open in IE, but I will try it asap. Thanks much for the tip. I do prefer FF and was disappointed that it ended up being the culprit in the wake from sleep problem.
When my laptop is sleeping w/ firefox open, waking it up results in a very slow (up to 10 minutes) period during which the machine is unusable and firefox uses 100% of the CPU.
I have stopped using firefox in windows for this reason. MSN Toolbar tabs stink, but at least I save about 35 minutes per day in wakeup time.
That is purely a technicality. The point remains that the FCC is requiring broadcasters to broadcast a format that NOBODY owns a TV capable of watching!
I wasn't mixing the two up... HDTV is forced upon broadcasters. Digital TV (iptv) is being blocked by the cable tv lobby. My point was that there are a lot of screwed up regulations going on that don't really benefit anyone but entrenched interests.
Uh, HDTV is required in the US. Do you think that US broadcasters would willingly invest millions in new broadcasting hardware to reach a very tiny customer base? I don't think so.
The truth is, the FCC decided to require broadcasters to broadcast x% of their programming in HDTV. That's why you can buy an HDTV and get programming for free over the air.
The HTDV broadcasting requirement was tied to keeping existing TV broadcast licenses.
Further, you should see the extent to which the existing broadcasters and cable companies have waged regulatory war against the Microsoft/SBC IPTV project.
Nobody is going to require you to purchase an HDTV, but the FCC has required broadcasters to broadcast it against their will.
morse code is designed quite consistently with zipf's law, which is nice.... but computer morse readers tend to do a fairly poor job of copying code, and so using morse as input might be just as error prone as the so-called "predictive" input in cell phones (the first feature I turn off -- highly annoying).
why not have the screen of the cell phone be a Graffiti input area designed to be 'written' on with one's finger (about twice the size of the Palm graffiti sensor area)... ?
I think open source can be good when the open codebase facilitates collaboration and makes it possible for more companies to invest in a standard (which is effectively the shared codebase).
Operating system technology is a good target for OSS collaboration, not in the FSF sense but in a very business-oriented economies of scale way. I find the FSF annoying and irrational, btw.
Giving away OSS software and charging for support isn't a good model unless you're really selling a service that the customer needs. It's no different than bundling software with consulting services (something that's been done long before OSS came into vogue). The source code being open is like a very straightforward escrow account containing a CD-ROM of the source combined with a licensing agreement that permits free sharing of the code with a company's partners.
The main economic cases for open sourcing the software are:
- the community will provide "free" maintenance to it - your company can provide expert support for it, for a fee
You mentioned that you have qualms about the second one, and so the question is whether the VP will value the potential savings in maintenance costs enough to give up whatever competitive advantage your firm gains by keeping the software to itself.
I would suggest that you start by advocating opening up parts of it, perhaps under a BSD style license. Attempt to get your VP or someone else to try to get someone like IBM on board doing the support and possibly remarketing parts of it to their business/consulting clients. Of course, I have no idea what kind of software this is or how modular it is, so it may be all or nothing... still, I think that a partnership with a software/services firm that is open source oriented would make a lot of sense.
That depends on what the project's goals are. If the goal is market share, then yes. If the goal is a project that a small number of people will love (such as yourself) then no.
Those are some good points, but I think Moz could go further to copy the IE "de facto" standard. There is also nothing wrong with supporting both simultaneously, such as the correct CSS and the MS version.
The objective should be for developers not to have to include the if then else construction in order to build a site that just works. MS has a vested interest in manipulating the standard to meet its needs (as you correctly point out) but Mozilla has a vested interest in lowering the cost of adopting Mozilla for developers and end users, which in this case entails accomodating the de facto standard that Microsoft created.
Microsoft added new functions, it didn't leave out functions that were in common use by tens of thousands of web sites.
It doesn't matter how XMLHttpRequest was implemented. For most people it could be implemented in about a dozen lines of Python code, which works on both Mac and Linux.
Your statement about operating systems doesn't hold for 3 reasons:
1) the objective of Apple was to make a profit 2) the objective of Linus was to create a free operating system along the lines of Unix. Other have attempted to create free versions of windows. 3) the goal of Moz/FF should be to create a fantastic browser that people want to use. Goals such as standards nit-picking are secondary and probably shouldn't be on the list at all. Why didn't most people use Mozilla until Firefox? Usability. Why don't more people use Firefox today? Incompatibility with "must have" sites. I personally choose to use both (mostly FF) but not everyone is willing to do that.
Making the success of a standards jihad a prerequisite to full adoption of one's browser project (Moz, FF) is just putting a roadblock in place that is hard to overcome. Web standards are (and should be) a moving target, so why don't the Moz developers relax a bit and let people use Moz/FF for 100% of their surfing?
Even though the cost of developing a site for IE and FF is now cheaper than ever before, I've already seen one fairly large public website make FF compatibility a "nice to have" feature rather than a "must have". Why? Because at its current market share levels and with the upcoming release of IE7, it's not worth the extra effort coding everything twice. If the FF developers had simply included the non standard stuff, then all sites would work in FireFox... wouldn't that be nice?
I'm sorry but your comment is so off base it deserves a rebuttal.
IE was around for a long time and the FF developers explicitly decided not to support nonstandard features that not just IE but tens of thousands of websites were using.
The standards jihad has held back the Mozilla project big time. Why not just display a "non compliant code" icon on the status bar somewhere... even display a security risk popup.
There was "one programming language" for web scripting back when MS had 95+% of the browser market share, and FF and Moz decided to go on a jihad instead of realizing that the specifics of the standard aren't that important and a de-facto standard is good enough for most people.
Thanks to Microsoft for patenting this very much needed technology and thus protecting it from exploitation. Clearly, Microsoft has held the patent for a long time and has not attempted to gain financially from it, allowing the public to benefit fully from the innovation without worrying about someone coming along and attempting to make a profit from it. In the wake of 9/11, Microsoft used its significant legal muscle to protect the public from those who might wish to profit from other peoples' misfortune.
it might lead to ripping programs incorporating a trust + watermarking system, but since that would allow authorities to trace the origin of ripped files, it might actually harm p2p.
Or maybe p2p systems will start using trust oriented encryption, so that files may be "activated" anywhere but will be hard to fool via this hashing approach.
That is true... there is always an incentive to provide backwards compatible standards when possible, however.
I think the main problem with muni wifi is the economic aspect. Imagine if the only reason anyone needed to upgrade was when the municipality upgraded the access points. Then, rather than early adopters paying a bit extra and paving the way for better service, new standards would only exist if a local municipality voted to pay more to upgrade the entire system. This would not likely happen untill the current system was barely usable. Keep in mind, the baseline standard for 80% of households is still dialup modem. Thus, muncicipalities will only have to "beat" dialup in terms of quality of service in order to view their initiatives as a success. Meanwhile, the market for innovative new products will shrink because everyone will have a free fallback option that might be "good enough"...
To illustrate, if something is free, it costs $0. $0 multiplied by infinity is still less than the price that private firms would need to charge for a better service.
Your analogies are not analogous. Police protection is needed to guarantee that private security firms act within the law and that criminals act within the law, and law enforcement is a necessary part of government. Before this arrangement, people gathered under the protection of warlords or gangsters and we had anarchy. The rule of law requires some moderate form of enforcement.
You mention city buses. They should not be public either. The fact that private firms cannot make a profit providing services in the ghetto is one of the reasons why the ghetto exists. Think about the impact that the interstate highway system had on cities -- it allowed people to affordably move out of the city, leaving only the poor, which eroded the tax base and caused massive urban decay.
Any mainstream economist would agree that making cash payments to the poor who could not afford wireless would be more economically efficient than subsidizing a "free" wireless network. If, as you argue, free wifi is legitimate as a form of welfare, then I think you should acknowledge that it is awfully paternalistic of you to suppose that what the poor need is wifi rather than cash or food or even health insurance. Why not just give them cash and let them decide?
To explain the logic of my example, suppose I pay $50 for a present for you and it's something that you would have only paid $10 for. There went $40 down the toilet, never to be recovered unless I included a gift receipt. If a poor person could have had $10 per month but got wireless instead, and would only have paid $1 for the wireless, there vanished $9.
I don't think name calling is really all that persuasive a form of argument, so I won't harp on it. But I do think Marx would agree with your argument, although he'd say, "why should only the rich get wifi, we need free wifi so that all workers can access the benefits of the internet".
Supply and demand is a law of the universe... I'm not arguing that we should always be happy with the results, but the law still holds. Just as I may not always be happy that gravity prevents me from slam dunking a basketball, I may not always like the market price for a good or sevice, but that doesn't mean that I should go around that pretending that gravity (or supply and demand) are figments of other peoples' imaginations!
So you are saying that people who want higher quality wireless services should have to pay once for the municipal "free" version and again for the premium service? Or do you think that a tax credit or refund should be available for those who wish to waive their "right" to free municipal wifi?
Without making a refund available, municipal wifi will 1) make better alternatives infinitely more expensive, 2) add a surcharge for next generation technology in the form of the tax levied to pay for the system and 3) kill off potential offerings from private firms who have already invested in technology not anticipating municipal wifi projects.
Consider last mile copper, an infrastructure that has had heavy government involvement from the outset. Muni wifi will lock in current technology in the way that copper was locked in after the government subsidized the creation of the copper infrastructure. Even today, the last mile copper lobby has prevented cable companies from delivering phone service, and has been responsible for sabotaging a lot of voip initiatives.
Competition does not always result in immediate innovation... if the return on investment for innovation is worse than, say, letting the money sit in the bank, then innovation won't happen. But as soon as the threshhold is crossed innovation happens wherever there is competition. It is a law of the universe just like gravity. And yes, even though you don't feel Pluto's gravity pulling on you it is still present and just as real as the gravity that pulls you toward the center of the earth.
So suppose you're a person in SF who wants to pay for wimax because you want a higher level of service... do you get a tax deduction because you have chosen not to use the free muni wifi?
What you are saying is that people who want to advance to a better standard deserve to pay twice for wifi, once for muni wifi and then another time to a provider who sells the service they actually want.
That will surely kill off a lot of business that the higher quality providers would have otherwise been able to get, and so there will be fewer of them and the price of better service will increase as a result.
in terms of the vhs/betamax issue, muni wifi is analogous to a municiple laserdisc standard coming out around 1984 that provided every household with free movies on 12" laserdiscs or those monster size tapes that predated VHS.
So maybe wimax will be the standard that gets locked in. The point is, muni wifi will remove competition and will prevent competition that leads to further innovation. It's a bad idea unless saving a few bucks per month now is more important than being able to buy gigabit wireless with a 2 mile range in 2 or 3 years.
so you're proving my point by your statements. Widespread municipal wifi would kill the competition for better transport technologies and would lock in 802.11g as the premier standard. You're talking about how the occasional muni wifi network won't kill competition. Of course not, just as one cancer cell won't kill you... but when a critical threshhold is reached, death occurs.
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i don't want to try it now b/c i've got a bunch of great windows open in IE, but I will try it asap. Thanks much for the tip. I do prefer FF and was disappointed that it ended up being the culprit in the wake from sleep problem.
Does anyone else have this problem?
When my laptop is sleeping w/ firefox open, waking it up results in a very slow (up to 10 minutes) period during which the machine is unusable and firefox uses 100% of the CPU.
I have stopped using firefox in windows for this reason. MSN Toolbar tabs stink, but at least I save about 35 minutes per day in wakeup time.
How dumb would it be to abandon a favored OS because it would no longer run on a less economical and nonstandard hardware platform!
That is purely a technicality. The point remains that the FCC is requiring broadcasters to broadcast a format that NOBODY owns a TV capable of watching!
I wasn't mixing the two up... HDTV is forced upon broadcasters. Digital TV (iptv) is being blocked by the cable tv lobby. My point was that there are a lot of screwed up regulations going on that don't really benefit anyone but entrenched interests.
Uh, HDTV is required in the US. Do you think that US broadcasters would willingly invest millions in new broadcasting hardware to reach a very tiny customer base? I don't think so.
The truth is, the FCC decided to require broadcasters to broadcast x% of their programming in HDTV. That's why you can buy an HDTV and get programming for free over the air.
The HTDV broadcasting requirement was tied to keeping existing TV broadcast licenses.
Further, you should see the extent to which the existing broadcasters and cable companies have waged regulatory war against the Microsoft/SBC IPTV project.
Nobody is going to require you to purchase an HDTV, but the FCC has required broadcasters to broadcast it against their will.
morse code is designed quite consistently with zipf's law, which is nice.... but computer morse readers tend to do a fairly poor job of copying code, and so using morse as input might be just as error prone as the so-called "predictive" input in cell phones (the first feature I turn off -- highly annoying).
why not have the screen of the cell phone be a Graffiti input area designed to be 'written' on with one's finger (about twice the size of the Palm graffiti sensor area)... ?
Exactly right. I noticed that my original post got modded down... heh heh... I guess the FSF gestappo got offended.
I think open source can be good when the open codebase facilitates collaboration and makes it possible for more companies to invest in a standard (which is effectively the shared codebase).
Operating system technology is a good target for OSS collaboration, not in the FSF sense but in a very business-oriented economies of scale way. I find the FSF annoying and irrational, btw.
Giving away OSS software and charging for support isn't a good model unless you're really selling a service that the customer needs. It's no different than bundling software with consulting services (something that's been done long before OSS came into vogue). The source code being open is like a very straightforward escrow account containing a CD-ROM of the source combined with a licensing agreement that permits free sharing of the code with a company's partners.
The main economic cases for open sourcing the software are:
- the community will provide "free" maintenance to it
- your company can provide expert support for it, for a fee
You mentioned that you have qualms about the second one, and so the question is whether the VP will value the potential savings in maintenance costs enough to give up whatever competitive advantage your firm gains by keeping the software to itself.
I would suggest that you start by advocating opening up parts of it, perhaps under a BSD style license. Attempt to get your VP or someone else to try to get someone like IBM on board doing the support and possibly remarketing parts of it to their business/consulting clients. Of course, I have no idea what kind of software this is or how modular it is, so it may be all or nothing... still, I think that a partnership with a software/services firm that is open source oriented would make a lot of sense.
It's not tough to figure out what IE does... in fact, there's good documentation and there are even emulation layers available! see here
That depends on what the project's goals are. If the goal is market share, then yes. If the goal is a project that a small number of people will love (such as yourself) then no.
Those are some good points, but I think Moz could go further to copy the IE "de facto" standard. There is also nothing wrong with supporting both simultaneously, such as the correct CSS and the MS version.
The objective should be for developers not to have to include the if then else construction in order to build a site that just works. MS has a vested interest in manipulating the standard to meet its needs (as you correctly point out) but Mozilla has a vested interest in lowering the cost of adopting Mozilla for developers and end users, which in this case entails accomodating the de facto standard that Microsoft created.
Microsoft added new functions, it didn't leave out functions that were in common use by tens of thousands of web sites.
It doesn't matter how XMLHttpRequest was implemented. For most people it could be implemented in about a dozen lines of Python code, which works on both Mac and Linux.
Your statement about operating systems doesn't hold for 3 reasons:
1) the objective of Apple was to make a profit
2) the objective of Linus was to create a free operating system along the lines of Unix. Other have attempted to create free versions of windows.
3) the goal of Moz/FF should be to create a fantastic browser that people want to use. Goals such as standards nit-picking are secondary and probably shouldn't be on the list at all. Why didn't most people use Mozilla until Firefox? Usability. Why don't more people use Firefox today? Incompatibility with "must have" sites. I personally choose to use both (mostly FF) but not everyone is willing to do that.
Making the success of a standards jihad a prerequisite to full adoption of one's browser project (Moz, FF) is just putting a roadblock in place that is hard to overcome. Web standards are (and should be) a moving target, so why don't the Moz developers relax a bit and let people use Moz/FF for 100% of their surfing?
Even though the cost of developing a site for IE and FF is now cheaper than ever before, I've already seen one fairly large public website make FF compatibility a "nice to have" feature rather than a "must have". Why? Because at its current market share levels and with the upcoming release of IE7, it's not worth the extra effort coding everything twice. If the FF developers had simply included the non standard stuff, then all sites would work in FireFox... wouldn't that be nice?
I'm sorry but your comment is so off base it deserves a rebuttal.
IE was around for a long time and the FF developers explicitly decided not to support nonstandard features that not just IE but tens of thousands of websites were using.
The standards jihad has held back the Mozilla project big time. Why not just display a "non compliant code" icon on the status bar somewhere... even display a security risk popup.
There was "one programming language" for web scripting back when MS had 95+% of the browser market share, and FF and Moz decided to go on a jihad instead of realizing that the specifics of the standard aren't that important and a de-facto standard is good enough for most people.
Thanks to Microsoft for patenting this very much needed technology and thus protecting it from exploitation. Clearly, Microsoft has held the patent for a long time and has not attempted to gain financially from it, allowing the public to benefit fully from the innovation without worrying about someone coming along and attempting to make a profit from it. In the wake of 9/11, Microsoft used its significant legal muscle to protect the public from those who might wish to profit from other peoples' misfortune.
it might lead to ripping programs incorporating a trust + watermarking system, but since that would allow authorities to trace the origin of ripped files, it might actually harm p2p.
Or maybe p2p systems will start using trust oriented encryption, so that files may be "activated" anywhere but will be hard to fool via this hashing approach.
That is true... there is always an incentive to provide backwards compatible standards when possible, however.
I think the main problem with muni wifi is the economic aspect. Imagine if the only reason anyone needed to upgrade was when the municipality upgraded the access points. Then, rather than early adopters paying a bit extra and paving the way for better service, new standards would only exist if a local municipality voted to pay more to upgrade the entire system. This would not likely happen untill the current system was barely usable. Keep in mind, the baseline standard for 80% of households is still dialup modem. Thus, muncicipalities will only have to "beat" dialup in terms of quality of service in order to view their initiatives as a success. Meanwhile, the market for innovative new products will shrink because everyone will have a free fallback option that might be "good enough"...
To illustrate, if something is free, it costs $0. $0 multiplied by infinity is still less than the price that private firms would need to charge for a better service.
Your analogies are not analogous. Police protection is needed to guarantee that private security firms act within the law and that criminals act within the law, and law enforcement is a necessary part of government. Before this arrangement, people gathered under the protection of warlords or gangsters and we had anarchy. The rule of law requires some moderate form of enforcement.
You mention city buses. They should not be public either. The fact that private firms cannot make a profit providing services in the ghetto is one of the reasons why the ghetto exists. Think about the impact that the interstate highway system had on cities -- it allowed people to affordably move out of the city, leaving only the poor, which eroded the tax base and caused massive urban decay.
Any mainstream economist would agree that making cash payments to the poor who could not afford wireless would be more economically efficient than subsidizing a "free" wireless network. If, as you argue, free wifi is legitimate as a form of welfare, then I think you should acknowledge that it is awfully paternalistic of you to suppose that what the poor need is wifi rather than cash or food or even health insurance. Why not just give them cash and let them decide?
To explain the logic of my example, suppose I pay $50 for a present for you and it's something that you would have only paid $10 for. There went $40 down the toilet, never to be recovered unless I included a gift receipt. If a poor person could have had $10 per month but got wireless instead, and would only have paid $1 for the wireless, there vanished $9.
I don't think name calling is really all that persuasive a form of argument, so I won't harp on it. But I do think Marx would agree with your argument, although he'd say, "why should only the rich get wifi, we need free wifi so that all workers can access the benefits of the internet".
Supply and demand is a law of the universe... I'm not arguing that we should always be happy with the results, but the law still holds. Just as I may not always be happy that gravity prevents me from slam dunking a basketball, I may not always like the market price for a good or sevice, but that doesn't mean that I should go around that pretending that gravity (or supply and demand) are figments of other peoples' imaginations!
So you are saying that people who want higher quality wireless services should have to pay once for the municipal "free" version and again for the premium service? Or do you think that a tax credit or refund should be available for those who wish to waive their "right" to free municipal wifi?
Without making a refund available, municipal wifi will 1) make better alternatives infinitely more expensive, 2) add a surcharge for next generation technology in the form of the tax levied to pay for the system and 3) kill off potential offerings from private firms who have already invested in technology not anticipating municipal wifi projects.
Consider last mile copper, an infrastructure that has had heavy government involvement from the outset. Muni wifi will lock in current technology in the way that copper was locked in after the government subsidized the creation of the copper infrastructure. Even today, the last mile copper lobby has prevented cable companies from delivering phone service, and has been responsible for sabotaging a lot of voip initiatives.
Competition does not always result in immediate innovation... if the return on investment for innovation is worse than, say, letting the money sit in the bank, then innovation won't happen. But as soon as the threshhold is crossed innovation happens wherever there is competition. It is a law of the universe just like gravity. And yes, even though you don't feel Pluto's gravity pulling on you it is still present and just as real as the gravity that pulls you toward the center of the earth.
So suppose you're a person in SF who wants to pay for wimax because you want a higher level of service... do you get a tax deduction because you have chosen not to use the free muni wifi?
What you are saying is that people who want to advance to a better standard deserve to pay twice for wifi, once for muni wifi and then another time to a provider who sells the service they actually want.
That will surely kill off a lot of business that the higher quality providers would have otherwise been able to get, and so there will be fewer of them and the price of better service will increase as a result.
in terms of the vhs/betamax issue, muni wifi is analogous to a municiple laserdisc standard coming out around 1984 that provided every household with free movies on 12" laserdiscs or those monster size tapes that predated VHS.
So maybe wimax will be the standard that gets locked in. The point is, muni wifi will remove competition and will prevent competition that leads to further innovation. It's a bad idea unless saving a few bucks per month now is more important than being able to buy gigabit wireless with a 2 mile range in 2 or 3 years.
so you're proving my point by your statements. Widespread municipal wifi would kill the competition for better transport technologies and would lock in 802.11g as the premier standard. You're talking about how the occasional muni wifi network won't kill competition. Of course not, just as one cancer cell won't kill you... but when a critical threshhold is reached, death occurs.
verizon competes with other wireless carriers in every municipality. municipal wifi faces no competition whatsoever.