If you want to test speed first create a new blank Firefox profile. Of course you wouldn't normally browse like that because you like the functionality of the plugins, but you don't get them with other browsers anyway so you go round in circles. But if you are comparing you must at least compare like with like, although I would say the test is worthless because you don't have what you want in the other browsers so however fast they are you won't want them.
You missed the point. The EU are still in the middle of the antitrust case so they have decided to let that continue rather than stop the progress of the case because of Microsofts statement. They have not said what they want Microsoft to do at all yet, though it is of course heavily implied that something like unbundling the browser would be an outcome. It is like a normal court case where even if the defendant pleads guilty the case continues because they want to sort out sentencing and do things properly. In this case Microsoft appear to have admitted they are guilty and chosen their own sentence but the EU want to actually go through the case themselves so it is done properly.
It is not the general web which is the problem. It is intranet style things which were put together quickly so nobody bothered messing around making it compatible because there was no need.
I have found that with my schools system which isn't actually a custom built intranet application but it is made by RM which means that it is a pile of complete rubbish. First it detects your browser and will only allow IE so you have to change your user agent. Then you find that they managed to program a javascript redirect (which is not needed in the first place if they had bothered to put their main page in the index file) which only works in IE so you have to view the pages source and manually copy the address. They actually use the WebDAV standard to let you access your files but they successfully did the protocol slightly wrong so it only works in some WebDAV clients (this is after you have actually managed to figure out it is WebDAV since they don't tell you they do some funny windows specific rubbish instead). Also even when you use the system as it was designed with IE6 and Windows Explorer on XP (doesn't work on Vista) then you find that you have to enter your username and password 4 times in a row. Anyway that was slightly off topic but I got a bit annoyed with that system so I thought I would have a bit of a rant. There are advantages to RM systems though since their security features could be considered to be somewhat lacking (they managed to allow write access to C:\Windows but they have blocked read and write access to the temp folder).
In the UK. It is not the schools policy they just buy a random piece of filtering software every so often since people usually work round the system pretty rapidly.
It gives a score for some pages but others are blocked by category. 1984 got a fairly low score. Some other things which are blocked on Wikipedia with a high score are Chairman Mao, Marxism (but not Communism), Korea, torture (very high scoring).
Because when a computer has to count 10000 votes (assuming each machine counts and then sends the total) it would just put too much pressure on a single thread. Isn't it obvious?
My school has a website blocking system and interestingly enough they have blocked the wikipedia page on 1984 (Both the year and the novel). The IT technician apparently hadn't read the book so he rather missed the situation when we mentioned it.
I don't understand what you are saying about amarok. I just looked at it in synaptic and it would need 40.6mb to install. 39mb of this is the amarok and amarok core packages. I have a Ubuntu install although I have installed a couple of other kde applications. From looking at the dependencies you basically need qt4 and a couple of other things, and qt4 should be installed anyway on most PC's. Audio does seem to be a bit of a mess though.
Tap water still is free here in the UK. I did hear a thing about some stingy place not giving free tap water a while ago in the news but that is an exception. Of course they try and sell you £2 bottled water.
I use adblock plus but I have my own filter list put in there. The reason for this is because I don't want to block all of the ads. I have a website with adverts which help pay for the running costs. My site uses text adverts exclusively because I don't want my readers to be annoyed or overly inconvenienced by them.
The adverts that I block are the flash adverts and the animated gif adverts as well as any pop under things or other annoyances. I block these because for a start they are annoying to look at and flash etc. But mainly because my computer is not new, my broadband is average so they slow my web browser down. I used to have cases where my cpu would hit 100% and scrolling would crawl, just because of the adverts. Before I installed adblock I would tend to just close the tab but flash seems to leak memory a bit and I would also be interested in the articles (maybe I shouldn't read the articles without the ads but morally I am not that strict). Now I can happily browse the web and I do sometimes click on text ads if they interest me and I happened to notice them.
I am not so sure what you mean by this. I cleared all of my cache and history from within Firefox and it seemed to get wiped. Are you complaining that Firefox stores data that you want stored according to your settings?
I would not really agree with you here. Cars have definitely improved. Here in the UK you get lots of older cars although there are still many people who buy a new one every two years (which is great for those of us who like cheap 2 year old cars). The quality of cars has definitely got better. The biggest thing is probably the bodywork which with all of the special coating etc. does not rust like cars used to. I see many cars which are 15 years old, not fancy models which have been carefully looked after like vintage cars, but standard cars which are still running fine.
Some other products don't last as well though but to some extent this is due to the level of sophistication of the products. Take something like a cooker as an example, old gas cookers will last a very long time but when you use them they just aren't as good as modern cookers, the temperature fluctuates too much and they don't heat very evenly but they will still keep running because all they are is a gas pipe with a adjustable valve stuck in it, You just stick a match in it to turn it on.
However I am more of a fan of a modern electric fan oven which has a thermometer to monitor temperature, has a timer which can switch the oven on and off, has a light to say when it is hot enough and distributes the heat well due to the fan. This has far more potential for going wrong however and unfortunately they aren't built to be easily repairable. This is the main problem really, if they were built properly then you would be able to swap out every part very easily and hopefully it would have a very simple diagnostic tool to tell you what went wrong. Of course manufacturers wouldn't like this because you then don't have to buy a new product.
Whether the server is under load or not is irrelevant as I attempted to point out in my previous post.
To clarify I am working on the assumption that if you need the performance of one good server or two worse servers then you will buy either the one good server or the two worse servers. Thus when the servers are idle you will still have one good server or two worse servers. So if the idle power of one good server is lower than the idle power of two worse servers then you will use less power with the good one.
For firefox you can do quite a few of these things you listed already.
The Flashblock Addon prevents flash from starting automatically. The Stop Autoplay addon prevents audio playing automatically. Turning off css transparency can be done using instructions from this web page: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=521126
The master volume control would be difficult because most of the sound comes from flash in my experience so the browser would need to interface with flash for this to work.
Also turning off Javascript transitions is also very difficult since there aren't any predefined javascript transition functions so you would randomly break stuff. This should be implemented by the website programmer.
This would probably be helpful and not very difficult since my Ubuntu setup already automatically runs exe files in wine when I double click. The only bit missing is the automatic installer prompt which could be done like the way that installing the restricted extras works.
The big issue is that WINE is not yet good enough for a large number of applications. Many programs which do work need tweaks which are easily found on wine's appDB but would be hard to automate in a lot of cases (I think there is a project called wine doors which does this to some extent though). Also may program simply don't work in WINE for whatever reasons. But overall it is a good thing to have around but it would need to be carefully done so that users would know about the compatibility issues.
I consider myself a power user to a certain extent. I had been using XP for 7 years and it is plenty stable enough as far as I am concerned. The problem I got which pushed me most strongly towards Linux was how a windows install just seems to slow down and get clogged up or however you want to describe it.
I do admittedly install quite a lot of applications and remove them because I have an old computer which only has a 40GB hard drive. But I don't really see why this should make my PC excessively slow. It was taking about 8 minutes to reach the desktop and open any application. And it would still be churning away at the disk and doing whatever else so it would generally take about 15 minutes to get to its running normally state.
I have tried pretty much everything that I could find. I cut down on startup applications to basically the bare minimum, I even eventually tried automated cleaning tools like CCleaner and some registry cleaning tools (with some trepidation) but these did not help all that much.
The only thing that I have found to work is wiping the lot and doing a clean install of XP. Then the cycle begins again. About 3 months ago I eventually decided to install Ubuntu outside of a VM so I got out an old 10GB hard drive and set up a nice dual boot system.
It is still a bit early to tell whether Ubuntu will exhibit the slowing down symptoms but I have probably filled about 15GB of hard disk so far with various stuff I have been trying out and removing (since I only have 10GB of disk available) and it is all working happily. I have probably booted up windows about 10 times since I installed Ubuntu in 3 months and the computer is used every day. I basically needed to use windows for MS Office because I had to do a piece of work with diagrams and formulas (I was limited to.doc). Also I booted a few times to play the odd game. So overall I have found Linux to be a good alternative and it is quite fun playing around with a new system as well.
I have found that openoffice can be slow when opening large complicated.doc files. There was one which had large diagrams made from hundreds of lines and text boxes. I found that if I then saved into odf format it was much better. Also I found that it had issues with a 50mb powerpoint file even after resaving (although that did speed it up significantly) but then again a 50mb powerpoint with about 6 slides should not be created.
This example is actually one where using Ubuntu or pretty much any Linux distro would have stopped her doing this. Under default setup the only way to get nautilus running with root permissions is via the command line so unless they were good enough to figure out that they needed root permissions and got them them they would not be able to damage their system in this way.
A car uses less fuel sitting at a traffic light in a given amount of time unless there is something badly wrong with the design of your car. It naturally uses more fuel per mile because you aren't going anywhere. I would imagine that servers are similar because when they are sitting idle the useful work compared to power is terrible because no work is being done. Whereas with full load more power is used but it is useful work like when you are using your car to get somewhere.
Of course in both situations it is best to be removing the idle time because it is pure waste with nothing useful being done.
Performance data is vital for something like this. I am not sure whether it is taken into account in any way since the specification download is broken on the energy star website.
Basically this is because it you have a server that can handle twice the load then it can use twice as much idle power and be just as efficient as two low performance servers. So performance of the server although being very hard to measure is needed to make the rating anything other than worthless.
But conversely the flash IDE is horrible for coding. It feels like it was designed for graphic design with a bit of coding support stuck in afterwards. In the default setup the text editing area is too small and the debugger is terrible. It is hard to make it throw an error. Back when I tried it a couple of years ago it would not error when I tried accessing a property of an object which did not exist. I just moved to the open source compiler (mtasc) and a decent external text editor for all of the code.
How about if you make a free disk defragmenter which just happens to have a bug which corrupts data across a hard disc. Here you caused damage rather than just having a lack of advertised functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to test speed first create a new blank Firefox profile. Of course you wouldn't normally browse like that because you like the functionality of the plugins, but you don't get them with other browsers anyway so you go round in circles. But if you are comparing you must at least compare like with like, although I would say the test is worthless because you don't have what you want in the other browsers so however fast they are you won't want them.
I got upgraded for 3.5b99 to 3.5 (presumably RC1 but it is like yours) and that is on Jaunty.
You missed the point. The EU are still in the middle of the antitrust case so they have decided to let that continue rather than stop the progress of the case because of Microsofts statement. They have not said what they want Microsoft to do at all yet, though it is of course heavily implied that something like unbundling the browser would be an outcome. It is like a normal court case where even if the defendant pleads guilty the case continues because they want to sort out sentencing and do things properly. In this case Microsoft appear to have admitted they are guilty and chosen their own sentence but the EU want to actually go through the case themselves so it is done properly.
It is not the general web which is the problem. It is intranet style things which were put together quickly so nobody bothered messing around making it compatible because there was no need.
I have found that with my schools system which isn't actually a custom built intranet application but it is made by RM which means that it is a pile of complete rubbish. First it detects your browser and will only allow IE so you have to change your user agent. Then you find that they managed to program a javascript redirect (which is not needed in the first place if they had bothered to put their main page in the index file) which only works in IE so you have to view the pages source and manually copy the address. They actually use the WebDAV standard to let you access your files but they successfully did the protocol slightly wrong so it only works in some WebDAV clients (this is after you have actually managed to figure out it is WebDAV since they don't tell you they do some funny windows specific rubbish instead). Also even when you use the system as it was designed with IE6 and Windows Explorer on XP (doesn't work on Vista) then you find that you have to enter your username and password 4 times in a row. Anyway that was slightly off topic but I got a bit annoyed with that system so I thought I would have a bit of a rant. There are advantages to RM systems though since their security features could be considered to be somewhat lacking (they managed to allow write access to C:\Windows but they have blocked read and write access to the temp folder).
In the UK. It is not the schools policy they just buy a random piece of filtering software every so often since people usually work round the system pretty rapidly.
It gives a score for some pages but others are blocked by category. 1984 got a fairly low score. Some other things which are blocked on Wikipedia with a high score are Chairman Mao, Marxism (but not Communism), Korea, torture (very high scoring).
Because when a computer has to count 10000 votes (assuming each machine counts and then sends the total) it would just put too much pressure on a single thread. Isn't it obvious?
My school has a website blocking system and interestingly enough they have blocked the wikipedia page on 1984 (Both the year and the novel). The IT technician apparently hadn't read the book so he rather missed the situation when we mentioned it.
I don't understand what you are saying about amarok. I just looked at it in synaptic and it would need 40.6mb to install. 39mb of this is the amarok and amarok core packages. I have a Ubuntu install although I have installed a couple of other kde applications. From looking at the dependencies you basically need qt4 and a couple of other things, and qt4 should be installed anyway on most PC's. Audio does seem to be a bit of a mess though.
Tap water still is free here in the UK. I did hear a thing about some stingy place not giving free tap water a while ago in the news but that is an exception. Of course they try and sell you £2 bottled water.
I would challenge you to find a business model which is not for some little niche market which has stayed unchanged for 100 years.
I use adblock plus but I have my own filter list put in there. The reason for this is because I don't want to block all of the ads. I have a website with adverts which help pay for the running costs. My site uses text adverts exclusively because I don't want my readers to be annoyed or overly inconvenienced by them.
The adverts that I block are the flash adverts and the animated gif adverts as well as any pop under things or other annoyances. I block these because for a start they are annoying to look at and flash etc. But mainly because my computer is not new, my broadband is average so they slow my web browser down. I used to have cases where my cpu would hit 100% and scrolling would crawl, just because of the adverts. Before I installed adblock I would tend to just close the tab but flash seems to leak memory a bit and I would also be interested in the articles (maybe I shouldn't read the articles without the ads but morally I am not that strict). Now I can happily browse the web and I do sometimes click on text ads if they interest me and I happened to notice them.
Could you show me a laptop which has the same performance as a $1200 desktop for $1350. I would imagine that it might be a larger difference.
I am not so sure what you mean by this. I cleared all of my cache and history from within Firefox and it seemed to get wiped. Are you complaining that Firefox stores data that you want stored according to your settings?
I would not really agree with you here. Cars have definitely improved. Here in the UK you get lots of older cars although there are still many people who buy a new one every two years (which is great for those of us who like cheap 2 year old cars). The quality of cars has definitely got better. The biggest thing is probably the bodywork which with all of the special coating etc. does not rust like cars used to. I see many cars which are 15 years old, not fancy models which have been carefully looked after like vintage cars, but standard cars which are still running fine.
Some other products don't last as well though but to some extent this is due to the level of sophistication of the products. Take something like a cooker as an example, old gas cookers will last a very long time but when you use them they just aren't as good as modern cookers, the temperature fluctuates too much and they don't heat very evenly but they will still keep running because all they are is a gas pipe with a adjustable valve stuck in it, You just stick a match in it to turn it on.
However I am more of a fan of a modern electric fan oven which has a thermometer to monitor temperature, has a timer which can switch the oven on and off, has a light to say when it is hot enough and distributes the heat well due to the fan. This has far more potential for going wrong however and unfortunately they aren't built to be easily repairable. This is the main problem really, if they were built properly then you would be able to swap out every part very easily and hopefully it would have a very simple diagnostic tool to tell you what went wrong. Of course manufacturers wouldn't like this because you then don't have to buy a new product.
Whether the server is under load or not is irrelevant as I attempted to point out in my previous post.
To clarify I am working on the assumption that if you need the performance of one good server or two worse servers then you will buy either the one good server or the two worse servers. Thus when the servers are idle you will still have one good server or two worse servers. So if the idle power of one good server is lower than the idle power of two worse servers then you will use less power with the good one.
For firefox you can do quite a few of these things you listed already.
The Flashblock Addon prevents flash from starting automatically.
The Stop Autoplay addon prevents audio playing automatically.
Turning off css transparency can be done using instructions from this web page: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=521126
The master volume control would be difficult because most of the sound comes from flash in my experience so the browser would need to interface with flash for this to work.
Also turning off Javascript transitions is also very difficult since there aren't any predefined javascript transition functions so you would randomly break stuff. This should be implemented by the website programmer.
This would probably be helpful and not very difficult since my Ubuntu setup already automatically runs exe files in wine when I double click. The only bit missing is the automatic installer prompt which could be done like the way that installing the restricted extras works.
The big issue is that WINE is not yet good enough for a large number of applications. Many programs which do work need tweaks which are easily found on wine's appDB but would be hard to automate in a lot of cases (I think there is a project called wine doors which does this to some extent though). Also may program simply don't work in WINE for whatever reasons. But overall it is a good thing to have around but it would need to be carefully done so that users would know about the compatibility issues.
I consider myself a power user to a certain extent. I had been using XP for 7 years and it is plenty stable enough as far as I am concerned. The problem I got which pushed me most strongly towards Linux was how a windows install just seems to slow down and get clogged up or however you want to describe it.
I do admittedly install quite a lot of applications and remove them because I have an old computer which only has a 40GB hard drive. But I don't really see why this should make my PC excessively slow. It was taking about 8 minutes to reach the desktop and open any application. And it would still be churning away at the disk and doing whatever else so it would generally take about 15 minutes to get to its running normally state.
I have tried pretty much everything that I could find. I cut down on startup applications to basically the bare minimum, I even eventually tried automated cleaning tools like CCleaner and some registry cleaning tools (with some trepidation) but these did not help all that much.
The only thing that I have found to work is wiping the lot and doing a clean install of XP. Then the cycle begins again. About 3 months ago I eventually decided to install Ubuntu outside of a VM so I got out an old 10GB hard drive and set up a nice dual boot system.
It is still a bit early to tell whether Ubuntu will exhibit the slowing down symptoms but I have probably filled about 15GB of hard disk so far with various stuff I have been trying out and removing (since I only have 10GB of disk available) and it is all working happily. I have probably booted up windows about 10 times since I installed Ubuntu in 3 months and the computer is used every day. I basically needed to use windows for MS Office because I had to do a piece of work with diagrams and formulas (I was limited to .doc). Also I booted a few times to play the odd game. So overall I have found Linux to be a good alternative and it is quite fun playing around with a new system as well.
I have found that openoffice can be slow when opening large complicated .doc files. There was one which had large diagrams made from hundreds of lines and text boxes. I found that if I then saved into odf format it was much better. Also I found that it had issues with a 50mb powerpoint file even after resaving (although that did speed it up significantly) but then again a 50mb powerpoint with about 6 slides should not be created.
This example is actually one where using Ubuntu or pretty much any Linux distro would have stopped her doing this. Under default setup the only way to get nautilus running with root permissions is via the command line so unless they were good enough to figure out that they needed root permissions and got them them they would not be able to damage their system in this way.
A car uses less fuel sitting at a traffic light in a given amount of time unless there is something badly wrong with the design of your car. It naturally uses more fuel per mile because you aren't going anywhere. I would imagine that servers are similar because when they are sitting idle the useful work compared to power is terrible because no work is being done. Whereas with full load more power is used but it is useful work like when you are using your car to get somewhere.
Of course in both situations it is best to be removing the idle time because it is pure waste with nothing useful being done.
Performance data is vital for something like this. I am not sure whether it is taken into account in any way since the specification download is broken on the energy star website.
Basically this is because it you have a server that can handle twice the load then it can use twice as much idle power and be just as efficient as two low performance servers. So performance of the server although being very hard to measure is needed to make the rating anything other than worthless.
But conversely the flash IDE is horrible for coding. It feels like it was designed for graphic design with a bit of coding support stuck in afterwards. In the default setup the text editing area is too small and the debugger is terrible. It is hard to make it throw an error. Back when I tried it a couple of years ago it would not error when I tried accessing a property of an object which did not exist. I just moved to the open source compiler (mtasc) and a decent external text editor for all of the code.
Except the evidence in question provides a counterexample to your point. http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/browserStatistics.action is where the figures came from and the more recent versions are without exception faster than the previous versions.
How about if you make a free disk defragmenter which just happens to have a bug which corrupts data across a hard disc. Here you caused damage rather than just having a lack of advertised functionality.