I have Chrome installed, and I used to use it as my main browser during the FF3 era.
There is literally only one thing keeping me on Firefox - Live Bookmarks. I'm subscribed to a dozen blogs and over a hundred webcomics, all via RSS, and Live Bookmarks are the best way I've found to handle all that. I've tried several other RSS readers, they really don't make sense for the way I use them.
If Chrome ever adds that feature, I'm gone.
Firefox 3 had a nasty bug with Live Bookmarks, where refreshing them (which it does frequently) will make the entire browser freeze. For 1-2 feeds, it's unnoticeable. For a hundred, your browser is basically out of commission for five minutes every hour. It only affected FF3 - FF2 was fine, and FF4 fixed it. So for all that period, I used Chrome, only booting up Firefox once a day to check my feeds.
OS: Windows 6.0.6002, exhibits absolutely no problems with any other programs (ie. even if it's a problem with Windows, it's one that every single other developer has worked around).
Only plugin is: Shockwave Flash (10.3.183.10)
Addons: AdBlock Plus Colorzilla DownloadHelper DownloadThemAll Greasemonkey Menu Editor (small thing that lets you remove useless context menu items like "set as background image") Restart Firefox (adds a button to restart the browser) SkipScreen TinEye Reverse Image Search User Agent Switcher
Oh, and I usually have 1-4 tabs open. Sometimes 30 or so, mainly images. I don't think I've ever had 200 tabs open.
And in case you didn't notice, I didn't complain about the memory. It's using half a gig, and I wouldn't mind at all if it used four times as much, as long as it actually put the memory to good use.
It isn't the RAM usage - it's the performance. I leave Firefox on for two days, it doesn't use any more memory, but rendering, page loading and scrolling are all notably slower. Videos become unwatchable because the screen updates maybe once a second, there's a second or two of delay before it even starts loading a page, and it sometimes lags so badly that it drops input events. All while leaving a gigabyte or two of free memory.
Listen - I have to restart my browser about once a day, because it gradually loses performance until it runs worse (Firefox 7.0.1 on a C2D w/ 4GB of memory) than my old craptop's copy (Firefox 2 on an Athlon 900 w/ 512MB RAM). And that it takes about 2 minutes to restart Firefox when it gets like that.
That's pathetic. That's the kind of stuff I'd expect from Internet Explorer, not Firefox.
I don't know precisely if it's a memory leak, nor do I care. It could be some renderer bug, or some problem interfacing with the OS, or whatever. All I know is that Firefox has severe performance degradation issues, and that the only reason I haven't switched to Chrome permanently is Live Bookmarks (I was primarily Chrome user for all of FF3, using Firefox only to check webcomics once a day).
Memory usage itself isn't necessarily the problem - I'm using half a gig right now, and I've got another two gigs free. But whatever the problem is, it acts a lot like a memory leak, so most people are going to just assume that's it.
I don't care if it uses a LOT of memory, as long as it uses it well. I don't expect to be able to alt-tab between Firefox, Crysis and Blender without delay. I do, however, expect Firefox to run properly when all the machine is running is Firefox, Notepad++ and MPC.
Or just grab a computer with a VIA Nano CPU - they have a built-in true random-number generator, based on thermal and/or electric variances inside the processor. They claim "up to 1600 kilobits per second", so it should provide more than enough for music, provided you aren't adding bit-for-bit random noise in real time.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
Anyone trying to create a new random number generator with the intent of producing more random numbers, without an extensive and specialized education, is guaranteed to fail.
It's deliberate -/. tries to force you to spell-check and proofread your posts before posting them. To quote the FAQ:
No. We believe that discussions in Slashdot are like discussions in real life- you can't change what you say, you only can attempt to clarify by saying more. In other words, you can't delete a comment that you've posted, you only can post a reply to yourself and attempt to clarify what you've said.
In short, you should think twice before you click that 'Submit' button because once you click it, we aren't going to let you Undo it.
It's still rather common to see someone make a foolish mistake, like using BBCode instead of HTML, or using the wrong SI prefix on something.
"Some manufacturers have announced that some of their AM3 motherboards will support AM3+ CPUs, after a simple BIOS upgrade. Mechanical compatibility has been confirmed and it's possible AM3+ CPUs will work in AM3 boards, provided they can supply enough peak current. Another issue might be the use of the sideband temperature sensor interface for reading the temperature from the CPU. Also, certain power-saving features may not work, due to lack of support for rapid VCore switching. Note that use of AM3+ CPUs in AM3 boards may not be officially supported by AMD." - Wikipedia
Funny, from how I read it (even the article!), it sounds more like "pay $0.02 to give your packets priority over everyone else" than any sort of caching, mirroring or other legitimate practices.
Something like Akamai doesn't even make sense for smartphones, where the biggest bottleneck is usually between the tower and the phone, not between the ISP and the source server.
From what I understand, Bulldozer isn't designed poorly - the implementation is just lacking. Sounds to me like they pushed a beta product out for quarterly product presence, but the real product isn't far behind...
Actually, a huge part of Bulldozer's problem is marketing lies. The architecture is very interesting - it's based on a "module" made of an instruction fetcher/decoder, two integer cores, a floating-point core, and two levels of cache. The effect is comparable to Intel's Hyper-Threading, even if the implementation is different. A four-module Bulldozer chip is comparable to a hyper-threaded quad-core Intel chip - it can ALWAYS run four threads at once, and can theoretically reach eight.
The problem is, AMD didn't market it that way. They market their four-module chips as 8-core, and their two-module chips as quad-core. Which isn't, technically, lying - they do have that many integer cores - but that marketing caused problems when benchmarks came out. People saw "AMD 8-core chip beaten by Intel 4-core chip" and thought "man, those cores must suck BALLS. And since even I know that a lot of programs are still single-threaded, it really makes no sense for me to buy an AMD chip right now".
It's almost justice, seeing the marketers fired for this. They stretched the truth beyond what the public would believe, and it bit them in the ass.
The other problem with Bulldozer is pricing - Bulldozer chips, at least right now, are ~$30 more expensive than the comparable Sandy Bridge processor. Sure, you'll quite likely save twice that if you're upgrading, since Bulldozer is mostly compatible with older motherboards while Intel is still thrashing sockets, but that's not going to be the case for everyone.
That's on the desktop. Which, admittedly, is a major source of revenue for Microsoft, but not the only one. On servers, you're looking at about a 50/50 split (plus or minus 30%, depending on how you define "server" and who's paying for the study). Microsoft is definitely threatened there - they may even be the underdogs in that case.
Besides, MS never gets more than a slap on the wrist.
Not in the US, but the European Union is pretty good at it. Back in 2008 they fined the company over 10% their annual revenue, just for bundling Windows Media Player.
Ah, but there's essentially a political vacuum in Libya right now. The "status quo" is practically anarchy - there's no politicians interested in maintaining it. So it just might actually work, there.
Look at the rules of the UN Security Council (arguably the most important part of the UN). Five countries (the US, UK, France, Russia and China) have absolute veto power. You need all of them to at least abstain in order to do pretty much any military act, as well as most economic sanctions and embargoes. Since three of those are more-or-less "civilized democracies", there's a pretty heavy restraint on the more extremist members.
I keep all the ID3 tags I care about in order as well. Artist, definitely, as well as album and release year. Genre I don't do quite so specifically (I don't split it beyond "Rock" or "Metal" or "Soundtrack" or so on).
There is one weird bit, though. Several files have the times. It claims to be, say, 26 minutes, but it only has 5 minutes or so of data. Since it's only a very few songs, it's not a big deal, and I've never cared enough to figure out how to fix it.
Nope. He's never really done any of the game design. He's probably one of the best programmers on the planet, but the game design was always someone else - Romero, or Hall, or American, or Peterson, or whoever they have at the moment.
And if Anonymous were primarily operating in or near Mexico, that would be a grave cause for concern. Given that Anonymous is primarily European or from the northern parts of the US, they're less of a physical threat. I highly doubt the Mexican cartels can easily strike at people living in Boston, or Washington, or Vancouver, or London, or Moscow. They're very powerful within their domain, but they don't have much reach.
Additionally, Anonymous is generally pretty good at remaining anonymous. The prisoner they have probably doesn't have much more information on the others than aliases, perhaps vague geographic areas.
Still, I don't think Anonymous has all that much ability to strike at the cartels, either. They're decent at taking down websites, but the cartels don't have any. They're good at digging up embarrassing information, but drug lords aren't public figures that can be shamed out of office. It's a classic stalemate - neither side can seriously affect the other.
If you wanted to work in the gaming industry, would you rather want to be a coder or actually the game designer?
Bad analogy there. Game designers are about as far from programming as possible. You see plenty of game designer/level designer people or game designer/storywriters, you see some game designer/artist people (particularly in Japan), and you even see some game designer/musician people. I can't name of the top of my head a single game designer/programmer who isn't an indie developer (where everyone is a bit of everything, really).
PS: You mislinked your xkcd, I believe this is the one you wanted.
No, I deliberately linked to a future one.
If, by some crazy coincidence, Friday's comic is even loosely relevant, it may be taken as proof that I can foresee the future (at least by the sort of person who believes that crap).
The REAL reason they haven't reported on it? Microsoft, in conjunction with Sony, working on behalf of the MPAA/RIAA, using Republican tax breaks, funded a top-secret re-education camp run by the Westboro Baptist Church to brainwash the entire country of Japan into becoming their mind-controlled cannon fodder for their war against truth, justice, and open-source software. Jack Thompson is rumored to be involved.
We should all immediately panic. Once we finish panicking, we should immediately go out and shoot every lawyer, politician or corporate executive you can find. The revolution begins now.
In a major disaster like that, the news literally cannot report on everything. There's thousands of things that, on a slow day, would be newsworthy. In this case, the media focused on the reactors that were failing, and ignored those that merely performed as designed.
The media rarely pays attention to "systems experienced abnormality, performing according to disaster plans".
Case in point: North Anna Power Station shut down automatically due to the recent East Coast earthquake. They're still actually shut down, because the government is overreacting and running additional inspections. And yet the only way I even know that is because my father works for the company that maintains their water system, and they called for information regarding that. There's been almost no mainstream media reporting on it. But the facts haven't been hidden - the top Google result for "lake anna power plant" is the official page by the plant operator, with a header about the earthquake response. The information is there, it's just not widely known to be worth reading.
I'm going to need a a video camera, a terawatt laser, 40,000 liters of chlorine triflouride, a Mi-24 helicopter, Morgan Freeman, and a duck. And a lot of duct tape.
The PS3 did take a while from release to get hacked, I'll give you that. But it was not for technical reasons.
For most of the PS3's lifespan, it supported Linux out-of-the-box. Since that's enough for most people, they didn't feel the need to break it just to boot, say, FreeBSD.
Once Sony disabled it, it took less than a month for a jailbreak to be made. They managed to stop it by using a ton of lawsuits and threats, However, even with a truly massive legal campaign, it took less than a year for a jailbreak to be released.
Slashdot Mirror
Greasemonkey is highly unlikely - it runs a single script, and it's limited to one domain.
I don't think it's DwHelper, but I'll go ahead and disable it anyways - I almost never use it.
I have Chrome installed, and I used to use it as my main browser during the FF3 era.
There is literally only one thing keeping me on Firefox - Live Bookmarks. I'm subscribed to a dozen blogs and over a hundred webcomics, all via RSS, and Live Bookmarks are the best way I've found to handle all that. I've tried several other RSS readers, they really don't make sense for the way I use them.
If Chrome ever adds that feature, I'm gone.
Firefox 3 had a nasty bug with Live Bookmarks, where refreshing them (which it does frequently) will make the entire browser freeze. For 1-2 feeds, it's unnoticeable. For a hundred, your browser is basically out of commission for five minutes every hour. It only affected FF3 - FF2 was fine, and FF4 fixed it. So for all that period, I used Chrome, only booting up Firefox once a day to check my feeds.
Will do next time I can gather data on it. Since it's a gradual thing, I can't really do it right now.
OK, then, how about this:
Configuration:
Firefox 7.0.1 (fully up-to-date)
Hardware:
Core 2 Duo, 2.26gHz
GeForce 9600
4GB memory
OS:
Windows 6.0.6002, exhibits absolutely no problems with any other programs (ie. even if it's a problem with Windows, it's one that every single other developer has worked around).
Only plugin is:
Shockwave Flash (10.3.183.10)
Addons:
AdBlock Plus
Colorzilla
DownloadHelper
DownloadThemAll
Greasemonkey
Menu Editor (small thing that lets you remove useless context menu items like "set as background image")
Restart Firefox (adds a button to restart the browser)
SkipScreen
TinEye Reverse Image Search
User Agent Switcher
Oh, and I usually have 1-4 tabs open. Sometimes 30 or so, mainly images. I don't think I've ever had 200 tabs open.
And in case you didn't notice, I didn't complain about the memory. It's using half a gig, and I wouldn't mind at all if it used four times as much, as long as it actually put the memory to good use.
It isn't the RAM usage - it's the performance. I leave Firefox on for two days, it doesn't use any more memory, but rendering, page loading and scrolling are all notably slower. Videos become unwatchable because the screen updates maybe once a second, there's a second or two of delay before it even starts loading a page, and it sometimes lags so badly that it drops input events. All while leaving a gigabyte or two of free memory.
Listen - I have to restart my browser about once a day, because it gradually loses performance until it runs worse (Firefox 7.0.1 on a C2D w/ 4GB of memory) than my old craptop's copy (Firefox 2 on an Athlon 900 w/ 512MB RAM). And that it takes about 2 minutes to restart Firefox when it gets like that.
That's pathetic. That's the kind of stuff I'd expect from Internet Explorer, not Firefox.
I don't know precisely if it's a memory leak, nor do I care. It could be some renderer bug, or some problem interfacing with the OS, or whatever. All I know is that Firefox has severe performance degradation issues, and that the only reason I haven't switched to Chrome permanently is Live Bookmarks (I was primarily Chrome user for all of FF3, using Firefox only to check webcomics once a day).
Memory usage itself isn't necessarily the problem - I'm using half a gig right now, and I've got another two gigs free. But whatever the problem is, it acts a lot like a memory leak, so most people are going to just assume that's it.
I don't care if it uses a LOT of memory, as long as it uses it well. I don't expect to be able to alt-tab between Firefox, Crysis and Blender without delay. I do, however, expect Firefox to run properly when all the machine is running is Firefox, Notepad++ and MPC.
Or just grab a computer with a VIA Nano CPU - they have a built-in true random-number generator, based on thermal and/or electric variances inside the processor. They claim "up to 1600 kilobits per second", so it should provide more than enough for music, provided you aren't adding bit-for-bit random noise in real time.
In brief:
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
Anyone trying to create a new random number generator with the intent of producing more random numbers, without an extensive and specialized education, is guaranteed to fail.
It's deliberate - /. tries to force you to spell-check and proofread your posts before posting them. To quote the FAQ:
No. We believe that discussions in Slashdot are like discussions in real life- you can't change what you say, you only can attempt to clarify by saying more. In other words, you can't delete a comment that you've posted, you only can post a reply to yourself and attempt to clarify what you've said.
In short, you should think twice before you click that 'Submit' button because once you click it, we aren't going to let you Undo it.
It's still rather common to see someone make a foolish mistake, like using BBCode instead of HTML, or using the wrong SI prefix on something.
Goes both ways:
"Some manufacturers have announced that some of their AM3 motherboards will support AM3+ CPUs, after a simple BIOS upgrade. Mechanical compatibility has been confirmed and it's possible AM3+ CPUs will work in AM3 boards, provided they can supply enough peak current. Another issue might be the use of the sideband temperature sensor interface for reading the temperature from the CPU. Also, certain power-saving features may not work, due to lack of support for rapid VCore switching. Note that use of AM3+ CPUs in AM3 boards may not be officially supported by AMD." - Wikipedia
Funny, from how I read it (even the article!), it sounds more like "pay $0.02 to give your packets priority over everyone else" than any sort of caching, mirroring or other legitimate practices.
Something like Akamai doesn't even make sense for smartphones, where the biggest bottleneck is usually between the tower and the phone, not between the ISP and the source server.
From what I understand, Bulldozer isn't designed poorly - the implementation is just lacking. Sounds to me like they pushed a beta product out for quarterly product presence, but the real product isn't far behind...
Actually, a huge part of Bulldozer's problem is marketing lies. The architecture is very interesting - it's based on a "module" made of an instruction fetcher/decoder, two integer cores, a floating-point core, and two levels of cache. The effect is comparable to Intel's Hyper-Threading, even if the implementation is different. A four-module Bulldozer chip is comparable to a hyper-threaded quad-core Intel chip - it can ALWAYS run four threads at once, and can theoretically reach eight.
The problem is, AMD didn't market it that way. They market their four-module chips as 8-core, and their two-module chips as quad-core. Which isn't, technically, lying - they do have that many integer cores - but that marketing caused problems when benchmarks came out. People saw "AMD 8-core chip beaten by Intel 4-core chip" and thought "man, those cores must suck BALLS. And since even I know that a lot of programs are still single-threaded, it really makes no sense for me to buy an AMD chip right now".
It's almost justice, seeing the marketers fired for this. They stretched the truth beyond what the public would believe, and it bit them in the ass.
The other problem with Bulldozer is pricing - Bulldozer chips, at least right now, are ~$30 more expensive than the comparable Sandy Bridge processor. Sure, you'll quite likely save twice that if you're upgrading, since Bulldozer is mostly compatible with older motherboards while Intel is still thrashing sockets, but that's not going to be the case for everyone.
That's on the desktop. Which, admittedly, is a major source of revenue for Microsoft, but not the only one. On servers, you're looking at about a 50/50 split (plus or minus 30%, depending on how you define "server" and who's paying for the study). Microsoft is definitely threatened there - they may even be the underdogs in that case.
Besides, MS never gets more than a slap on the wrist.
Not in the US, but the European Union is pretty good at it. Back in 2008 they fined the company over 10% their annual revenue, just for bundling Windows Media Player.
Ah, but there's essentially a political vacuum in Libya right now. The "status quo" is practically anarchy - there's no politicians interested in maintaining it. So it just might actually work, there.
Look at the rules of the UN Security Council (arguably the most important part of the UN). Five countries (the US, UK, France, Russia and China) have absolute veto power. You need all of them to at least abstain in order to do pretty much any military act, as well as most economic sanctions and embargoes. Since three of those are more-or-less "civilized democracies", there's a pretty heavy restraint on the more extremist members.
I keep all the ID3 tags I care about in order as well. Artist, definitely, as well as album and release year. Genre I don't do quite so specifically (I don't split it beyond "Rock" or "Metal" or "Soundtrack" or so on).
There is one weird bit, though. Several files have the times. It claims to be, say, 26 minutes, but it only has 5 minutes or so of data. Since it's only a very few songs, it's not a big deal, and I've never cared enough to figure out how to fix it.
Nope. He's never really done any of the game design. He's probably one of the best programmers on the planet, but the game design was always someone else - Romero, or Hall, or American, or Peterson, or whoever they have at the moment.
And if Anonymous were primarily operating in or near Mexico, that would be a grave cause for concern. Given that Anonymous is primarily European or from the northern parts of the US, they're less of a physical threat. I highly doubt the Mexican cartels can easily strike at people living in Boston, or Washington, or Vancouver, or London, or Moscow. They're very powerful within their domain, but they don't have much reach.
Additionally, Anonymous is generally pretty good at remaining anonymous. The prisoner they have probably doesn't have much more information on the others than aliases, perhaps vague geographic areas.
Still, I don't think Anonymous has all that much ability to strike at the cartels, either. They're decent at taking down websites, but the cartels don't have any. They're good at digging up embarrassing information, but drug lords aren't public figures that can be shamed out of office. It's a classic stalemate - neither side can seriously affect the other.
If you wanted to work in the gaming industry, would you rather want to be a coder or actually the game designer?
Bad analogy there. Game designers are about as far from programming as possible. You see plenty of game designer/level designer people or game designer/storywriters, you see some game designer/artist people (particularly in Japan), and you even see some game designer/musician people. I can't name of the top of my head a single game designer/programmer who isn't an indie developer (where everyone is a bit of everything, really).
PS: You mislinked your xkcd, I believe this is the one you wanted.
No, I deliberately linked to a future one.
If, by some crazy coincidence, Friday's comic is even loosely relevant, it may be taken as proof that I can foresee the future (at least by the sort of person who believes that crap).
OK then. Let me try again:
The REAL reason they haven't reported on it? Microsoft, in conjunction with Sony, working on behalf of the MPAA/RIAA, using Republican tax breaks, funded a top-secret re-education camp run by the Westboro Baptist Church to brainwash the entire country of Japan into becoming their mind-controlled cannon fodder for their war against truth, justice, and open-source software. Jack Thompson is rumored to be involved.
We should all immediately panic. Once we finish panicking, we should immediately go out and shoot every lawyer, politician or corporate executive you can find. The revolution begins now.
obligatory xkcd
In a major disaster like that, the news literally cannot report on everything. There's thousands of things that, on a slow day, would be newsworthy. In this case, the media focused on the reactors that were failing, and ignored those that merely performed as designed.
The media rarely pays attention to "systems experienced abnormality, performing according to disaster plans".
Case in point: North Anna Power Station shut down automatically due to the recent East Coast earthquake. They're still actually shut down, because the government is overreacting and running additional inspections. And yet the only way I even know that is because my father works for the company that maintains their water system, and they called for information regarding that. There's been almost no mainstream media reporting on it. But the facts haven't been hidden - the top Google result for "lake anna power plant" is the official page by the plant operator, with a header about the earthquake response. The information is there, it's just not widely known to be worth reading.
I'm going to need a a video camera, a terawatt laser, 40,000 liters of chlorine triflouride, a Mi-24 helicopter, Morgan Freeman, and a duck. And a lot of duct tape.
The PS3 did take a while from release to get hacked, I'll give you that. But it was not for technical reasons.
For most of the PS3's lifespan, it supported Linux out-of-the-box. Since that's enough for most people, they didn't feel the need to break it just to boot, say, FreeBSD.
Once Sony disabled it, it took less than a month for a jailbreak to be made. They managed to stop it by using a ton of lawsuits and threats, However, even with a truly massive legal campaign, it took less than a year for a jailbreak to be released.