Nope. It's not a 1-to-1 replacement for Outlook. It won't work with Exchange 5.5, it doesn't support forms, public folders, journals, or a heap of other things. If your enterprise depends on Exchange-- and most do-- you're SOL even with Evolution.
Re:Sun Micro lays out recovery plan
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Sun To Sell Linux PCs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I guess I don't get it. How is Linux going to make the PC cheaper? Or are you just talking about the cost of purchase, not the TCO? In the enterprise, Linux is more expensive to run on the desktop than Windows is, because the most basic tools for Windows (Outlook, for one) don't exist in a usable form on Linux.
I don't think Sun is trying to sell computers to home users, here. I think we need to be thinking about how Linux fits into their enterprise computing strategy.
This is why you have a spare disk in the array that automaticaly gets used if a drive fails.
Except, of course, nobody put a gun to your head and made you configure hot spares when you set up your LUNs. They're entirely optional. It's very easy to imagine a scenario in which a system administrator either neglected to or didn't realize he had to configure one or more hot spares. Hell, I don't have to imagine it. I see it all the time.
Also, in some cases RAID set rebuilds impose a significant performance penalty. A RAID may not be configured to start a rebuild automatically. Instead, it's expected that a system administrator will be aware of the failed disk and either physically replace it or use the hot spare, then start a rebuild overnight or something like that. In that situation, all the hot spares in the world won't help you if nobody logs in and starts the rebuild.
I have a theory. I have no idea who posted this question or anything about them, but I saw this same thing happen once, and I bet this is their story: the RAID dropped one disk, but the same person who was in charge of their backups was also in charge of monitoring the RAID, i.e., nobody. So the RAID ran degraded for a while, then poof. Dropped another disk. All hell breaks loose. Film at eleven.
Like I said, I've seen it happen. I'll give you three-to-two odds that that's just how it went down.
Repeat after me, please: The purpose of IT is to help users, not the other way around.
If an employee at this worthy's company lost data, it is the responsibility of the IT department to attempt to recover that data, within reason. That's what the IT department is for. This is a sensitive subject to me, because the IT department at my company closed down the IMAP port on our firewall tonight for what they called "security reasons," despite the fact that (1) we've been running IMAP over that connection for years now, and (2) the connection is encrypted with SSL. It literally took my yelling into the ear of the CTO over the phone, after calling him at home late in the evening, to get this problem fixed. The pervasive attitude of indignant hostility from IT departments in all sorts of industries is really starting to burn me up.
If you worked for me in my IT department, and one of your RAIDs failed, and I had un-backed-up data on it, the only answer I'd want to hear from you is, "Yes, sir, we'll do the best we can and get right back to you." If I even heard a hint from you of the "you were irresponsible so it's not my problem" vein that you showed in your post, you'd find yourself being escorted out of the building carrying your stuff in a cardboard box. And we'd expect you to return the box.
So just keep repeating it to yourself: The purpose of IT is to help users, not the other way around.
Shit. That obviously should have read "four centimeters per year," not "per day." The dang "Submit" and "Preview" buttons are just too close together.
Slashdot should be like a nuclear missile silo. In order to post a comment, two ranking officers should have to insert their keys into boxes on opposite sides of the room and turn them at the same time.
The proceeding message was brought to you by the Two Minute Rule.
You're not thinking about this clearly. The rate at which the moon's orbit is expanding is not constant. When the moon was closer to the Earth-- assuming it was; that's not a fact, but rather just an idea-- the rate at which it was accelerated due to tidal friction was significantly less than it is now. You're assuming the graph of distance between the Earth and the moon over time forms a straight line, with a slope of four centimeters-- centimeters, not inches-- per year. That's not the case. In fact, the curve would have been shaped more like a parabola, with the slope gradually increasing over the eons until it reached the current rate of four centimeters per day.
The Roche limit for the Earth-moon system is about 4 times the radius of the Earth (given a density value for Earth of 5.5 and a density value for the moon of 3.34). The moon is now about 60 Earth radii away. You do the math yourself.;-)
Of course, it's a silly exercise. Ample evidence exists for the accretion theory of lunar formation, which would suggest that the moon as a solid body was formed outside the Roche limit of the Earth. So extrapolating back in time based on recent measurements of lunar motion is kind of like extrapolating your age relative to your little sister. "I'm ten but she's only five; I'm twice her age. So when she's 50 I'll be 100 years old!"
Just FYI, XFS on IRIX can support files up to 9 million terabytes (9 EB) and filesystems up to 18 million terabytes (18 EB).
It's more complex under Linux. Here's the Linux-specific answer to this question from the FAQ:
Q: Does XFS support large files (bigger then 2GB)?
Yes, XFS supports files larger then 2GB. The large file support (LFS) is largely dependent on the C library of your computer. Glibc 2.2 and higher has full LFS support. If your C lib does not support it you will get errors that the valued is too large for the defined data type.
Userland software needs to be compiled against the LFS compliant C lib in order to work. You will be able to create 2GB+ files on non LFS systems but the tools will not be able to stat them.
Distributions based on Glibc 2.2.x and higher will function normally. Note that some userspace programs like tcsh do not correctly behave even if they are compiled against glibc 2.2.x
You may need to contact your vendor/developer if this is the case.
Here is a snippet of email conversation with Steve Lord on the topic of the maximum filesize of XFS under linux.
I would challenge any filesystem running on Linux on an ia32, and using the page cache to get past the practical limit of 16 Tbytes using buffered I/O. At this point you run out of space to address pages in the cache since the core kernel code uses a 32 bit number as the index number of a page in the cache.
As for XFS itself, this is a constant definition from the code:
All of this is ignoring the current limitation of 2 Tbytes of address space for block devices (including logical volumes). The only way to get a file bigger than this of course is to have large holes in it. And to get past 16 Tbytes you have to used direct I/O.
Which would would mean a theoretical 8388608TB file size. Large enough?
Extended attributes aren't as cool as you think. They're stored in the inode, not the file itself, which is a double-edged sword. For example, go build yourself an XFS-based Samba server. Write a file out of Photoshop to the Samba server, something.psd. Add one or more extended attributes to the file using the attr tool on the server. Open the file in Photoshop via Samba, modify it, and save it. Don't "Save as...", just save it. Now examine your extended attributes.
What? They're gone! For great justice!
Photoshop, and lots of other desktop apps, are clever in the way that they save files. Rather than writing over an existing file, Photohop (and others) will create a new file with a temporary name and write to it. Only after the file has been completely written to disk successfully will Photoshop (and others) unlink the original file and rename the new file to the old name. To the user, it looks like you're saving the new file over the old one, but in fact you're creating an entirely new file with-- get this-- a new inode. Bye-bye extended attributes.
So extended attributes are okay and all, but they have serious limitations as well.
Considerably better than that, my friend. Depending on how you pack your pixels, 1080i requires between about 180 and about 260 MB/s. I can't find the source right now, but a few years SGI announced that they had done over 3 GB/s using a big XFS filesystem on IRIX.
With XFS, the filesystem is definitely not your bottleneck. Using just 8 fibre channel drives, I regularly saturate a gigabit FC loop with data (on the order of 98 MB/s, not counting overhead).
Oh, come on. You can't lead off with something as good as, "Our moon acts like a big scrub brush," and then say you don't want to be quoted!
Re:That would explain one for earth...
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Earth: The Ring World
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· Score: 3, Informative
Okay, so I'd better correct myself before somebody else does.
The Roche limit is technically the distance at which a body of zero tensile strength will tend to fall apart in orbit. Real objects, like moons, can be stable well inside the Roche limit of their parent body because their tensile strength is higher than zero. It's even possible, if the parent body is big enough and the satellite is small enough, that the practical Roche limit for a pair of bodies might be inside the parent body. In that case, the satellite would just spiral down to the parent body and crash before breaking up due to tides.
I think you probably got the idea anyway, but I just wanted to be a little more clear.
Re:That would explain one for earth...
on
Earth: The Ring World
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· Score: 4, Informative
I forgot its name, but there is a range of distance to a planet in which rocks are reduced to dust.
The Roche limit. It has to do with tides, and tides have to do with orbits. The best way to understand how orbits work is to understand how they don't. Picture a solid rotating disc, like a record on a record player. Every point on the disc has the same angular velocity; in other words, it takes the same amount of time for a point on the inside of the disc to make a revolution as it takes for a point on the outside of the disc. This is obvious, because the disc is solid.
Orbits aren't like that. Two bodies orbiting at different distances from the parent body will have different angular velocities, because the force of gravity attracting them to the parent body varies with distance.
Now, think about what happens when an orbiting body speeds up or slows down. Think spaceman with a jetpack here. If the spaceman, who is orbiting the Earth in a circular path, slows down, he'll start to fall in toward the Earth. If he speeds up, he'll rise away from the Earth. If your velocity at a given distance from the parent body is lower than orbital velocity for that distance, you'll fall toward the body. If it's faster than orbital velocity, you'll tend to rise away from the body.
Now, consider the moon. The moon is a thick body; the distance from the center of the Earth to the near face of the moon is less than the distance to the far face of the moon. The moon orbits the Earth at a velocity appropriate for a body orbiting at the distance of the moon's center of mass. Because the moon is rigid, both the near half and the far half of the moon must also orbit at that same velocity, even though the near side of the moon tends to want to fall in toward the Earth (because its orbital velocity is slightly too low to maintain a circular path) and the far side tends to want to rise way from the Earth (because it's moving too fast).
The result, once you sum everything up, is that there's a net force on the moon pulling it apart along the line between the centers of the moon and the Earth. Because the total tensile strength of the moon-- its own gravity, plus the friction holding it together, plus the strength of the rock that forms it-- is greater than this net force, the moon is in a stable orbit.
But the tidal force has had an effect: long ago, the moon stopped revolving with respect to the Earth. The near face of the moon is held toward the Earth because it is "heavier" (sort of) than the far face of the moon. Tides did that.
Now, if you move the moon closer to the Earth, things will change. Because gravity varies with the square of the distance, the difference between the pull of gravity on the near side and the pull of gravity on the far side will increase as the moon gets closer to the Earth. As the moon moves closer, there's a point where the difference in gravity between near and far sides exceeds the aggregate tensile strength of the moon. At that point, the moon will fracture, and part of it will fall in toward the Earth while the rest rises into a higher orbit.
That distance is called the Roche limit.
Whew.;-)
If you want a really good understanding of orbital motion and tidal forces, pick up a couple of science fiction books by Larry Niven. His Neutron Star includes a short story that uses the tidal force as a key plot point, as does The Integral Trees. No math, just lots of descriptions of how human-scale objects behave in close orbit around stellar-scale objects. You might have to read the stories a few times before you get the idea, but it's worth it.
Now animal rights activists will be yelling. You can not keep an animal penned up.
Ever been on a farm? You don't have to keep cows penned. They're not exactly jackrabbits, you know? Cows are perfectly content to just stand around, eat, poop, and occasionally walk about ten feet so they can have a change of scenery in which to stand around, eat, and poop.
Then when the cow gets good and fat and ready for the grill the animal rights activist will yell even louder at the way it is killed.
Lisa: Do you have any food that wasn't brutally slaughtered? Homer: Well, I think the veal might've died of loneliness.
Wrongo. A good deal of cranial and neurosurgery is performed through the sinus cavity rather than through the skull. In particular, if you ever get a pituitary tumor-- heaven forbid-- your surgeon will use a craneofacial approach to excise it. In other words, he'll use a microscope and some specialized tools to pull the tumor out bit by bit through your nose.
the amount of coal being burnt to charge your mower is more then if you were to just get a gas mower...
Though some may opine to the contrary, electric lawn mowers aren't about the environment. They're about convenience. My electric mower is cleaner and quieter than a gas-powered mower, and I never have to drive to the store for a quart of oil on a Sunday morning.
Oh, whatever. The "diversity is good" defense is often invoked to explain why there are fifty different window managers for Linux. It's a crock. Having both KDE and Gnome means that half the desktop developers out there are wasting their time. Rather than having one desktop that sucks hardly at all, we have two that each suck somewhat.
"Perfection through variety" is only meaningful in the aggregate. That is to say, not at all.
Where did I talk about security? "Log out" in this context simply means closing all the windows associated with an application session at once. If the user has three windows open, closing any of them closes all of them. This isn't a security thing at all; it's a user interface feature that keeps the app from leaving orphaned windows open.
I remember spending hours playing with this stuff when I was about 6 years old or so. It came in different colors, and I remember building tiny underwater sandcastles with it.
I wonder whatever happened to that stuff? Probably turned out to be toxic. Was it Snow Crash that talked about kid's toys and pajamas being either flameproof or non-carcinogenic but not both at the same time?
I've only used Mozilla on Windows 2000, so I can't comment on the Mac version. My question on this topic is "Did you enable quicklaunch?"
I guess you're not getting my point. I don't care why Mozilla is slow. The mere fact that it's slow is enough to get me to remove it from my system. To think that there's a "make run faster" preference somewhere... that's just nuts. If you can make it go faster, you should. It shouldn't be an option, especially one that isn't on by default.
This, more than anything, is evidence that the Mozilla team isn't really interested in building a browser that people will actually want to use. They're just building a browser for themselves.
I would hazard a guess that you prefer the interface that you are used to, and don't like it when an application doesn't clone it.
No, no, no. Both Mac OS X and Windows have user interface guidelines. Applications that don't follow them are quirky and wrong. In their mad rush to create a browser than runs on lots of platforms, they decided to ignore platform-specific user interface guidelines. If I'm using Windows, I want to use programs that work the way Windows programs should. If I'm using a Mac, I want to use programs that work the way Mac programs should. I don't want to use a program that looks and feels like a half-assed port.
I will say that most people that I know LIKE having many choices.
Then I would say that most of the people you know are atypical. The first thing I want to do every time I fire up a new build of Mozilla-- which has been more times than I care to admit-- is turn off that damned home page. In order to do so, I have to navigate through a baffling list of checkboxes and radio buttons. That's broken and wrong.
There's a "home" button on the Personal Toolbar!
So you're saying the only way I can get a home button on the toolbar (or, rather, a toolbar) is to have a second toolbar open all the time? If any reasonable person stopped for just a minute to think about that, they'd realize how absurd it sounds.
Mozilla has a "skinnable" interface, so it is possible to customize it a great deal more than your current browser.
Skins schmins. I've already complained about how Mozilla doesn't look and feel like a native application. What makes you think I'd want to throw a "skin" on it that makes it look even less like a native application? Besides, find me a skin that puts a home button on the toolbar and I'll shut up.
Another vague criticism. At least here you admit your inability to articulate exactly what is wrong. "They don't work." is just bitching, it isn't a reasoned comment.
Try 'em. Use 'em. If you decide that they're not broken, good for you. I've decided that they're broken. I'm sure lots of other people share that opinion. If you want to ignore it, be my guest.
I guess you've looked through the source code to make this determination?
Yup.
Why compare the footprint of Mozilla to MS Word and Excel?
Because Word and Excel are big programs that each do a hell of a lot more than Mozilla ever could. The fact that Mozilla eats more RAM than either of them should be an embarrassment.
Hell, most of that RAM probably goes to chrome, anyway.
Browsing in separate windows in Mozilla is ignoring one of its best features: "tabbed browsing."
Advocating tabbed browsing is ignoring one of my best features: I don't like it.
There is no way that I can describe how much simpler and faster it is
It's simpler and faster because Mozilla is such a pig at opening new windows, right?
Pop-up blocking, mouse gestures, (overall)better security and extensibility that means there are continually new features as add-ons
(1) I haven't seen pop-ups since I installed OmniWeb, which disables them all by itself.
(2) Mouse gestures? You're kidding, right? You think that's usable? That's a gimmick for people who are impressed by gimmicks. It's right up there with speech and handwriting recognition: useless 99% of the time.
(3) "Better security and extensibility" is an ironic comment considering we're writing this in context of an article about a security bug. Sounds like Mozilla is calling IE black here. And extensibility? Who the fuck cares about extensibility in a web browser? The browser should be small in size, lightweight in RAM, reliable, and fast. All four of those were sacrificed in building Mozilla.
The Mozilla project is a failure. It has failed to produce a usable web browser, even after all these years.
But if they disable onunload, aren't you screwed then if you're relying on it working? Surely there must be a more robust way?
If ours were an application designed for public use over the Internet, I'd say yes... and no. Yes, we'd be screwed if clients connected to the application using unsupported browsers with key features disabled. And no, there's no more robust way in that situation, other than just redesigning the whole app to remove the dependency on multiple windows, which our market research (yeah, you heard me) tells us is a big part of the application user experience.
But the good news is that this app is not meant for public use, and we have a certain degree of control over the client environment. That is to say, we tell our customers that their client systems must be such-n-such. To the extent that it's possible, we prevent the customers from making honest mistakes by checking user agent headers and whatnot. If somebody wanted to deliberately conceal their browser type by modifying the user agent header, they could log in to the application and create an error condition by doing something that we assume they can't do. At which point they would have done nothing but succeeded in annoying us.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. It's not a 1-to-1 replacement for Outlook. It won't work with Exchange 5.5, it doesn't support forms, public folders, journals, or a heap of other things. If your enterprise depends on Exchange-- and most do-- you're SOL even with Evolution.
I guess I don't get it. How is Linux going to make the PC cheaper? Or are you just talking about the cost of purchase, not the TCO? In the enterprise, Linux is more expensive to run on the desktop than Windows is, because the most basic tools for Windows (Outlook, for one) don't exist in a usable form on Linux.
I don't think Sun is trying to sell computers to home users, here. I think we need to be thinking about how Linux fits into their enterprise computing strategy.
This is why you have a spare disk in the array that automaticaly gets used if a drive fails.
Except, of course, nobody put a gun to your head and made you configure hot spares when you set up your LUNs. They're entirely optional. It's very easy to imagine a scenario in which a system administrator either neglected to or didn't realize he had to configure one or more hot spares. Hell, I don't have to imagine it. I see it all the time.
Also, in some cases RAID set rebuilds impose a significant performance penalty. A RAID may not be configured to start a rebuild automatically. Instead, it's expected that a system administrator will be aware of the failed disk and either physically replace it or use the hot spare, then start a rebuild overnight or something like that. In that situation, all the hot spares in the world won't help you if nobody logs in and starts the rebuild.
I have a theory. I have no idea who posted this question or anything about them, but I saw this same thing happen once, and I bet this is their story: the RAID dropped one disk, but the same person who was in charge of their backups was also in charge of monitoring the RAID, i.e., nobody. So the RAID ran degraded for a while, then poof. Dropped another disk. All hell breaks loose. Film at eleven.
Like I said, I've seen it happen. I'll give you three-to-two odds that that's just how it went down.
Repeat after me, please: The purpose of IT is to help users, not the other way around.
If an employee at this worthy's company lost data, it is the responsibility of the IT department to attempt to recover that data, within reason. That's what the IT department is for. This is a sensitive subject to me, because the IT department at my company closed down the IMAP port on our firewall tonight for what they called "security reasons," despite the fact that (1) we've been running IMAP over that connection for years now, and (2) the connection is encrypted with SSL. It literally took my yelling into the ear of the CTO over the phone, after calling him at home late in the evening, to get this problem fixed. The pervasive attitude of indignant hostility from IT departments in all sorts of industries is really starting to burn me up.
If you worked for me in my IT department, and one of your RAIDs failed, and I had un-backed-up data on it, the only answer I'd want to hear from you is, "Yes, sir, we'll do the best we can and get right back to you." If I even heard a hint from you of the "you were irresponsible so it's not my problem" vein that you showed in your post, you'd find yourself being escorted out of the building carrying your stuff in a cardboard box. And we'd expect you to return the box.
So just keep repeating it to yourself: The purpose of IT is to help users, not the other way around.
Shit. That obviously should have read "four centimeters per year," not "per day." The dang "Submit" and "Preview" buttons are just too close together.
Slashdot should be like a nuclear missile silo. In order to post a comment, two ranking officers should have to insert their keys into boxes on opposite sides of the room and turn them at the same time.
The proceeding message was brought to you by the Two Minute Rule.
You're not thinking about this clearly. The rate at which the moon's orbit is expanding is not constant. When the moon was closer to the Earth-- assuming it was; that's not a fact, but rather just an idea-- the rate at which it was accelerated due to tidal friction was significantly less than it is now. You're assuming the graph of distance between the Earth and the moon over time forms a straight line, with a slope of four centimeters-- centimeters, not inches-- per year. That's not the case. In fact, the curve would have been shaped more like a parabola, with the slope gradually increasing over the eons until it reached the current rate of four centimeters per day.
The Roche limit for the Earth-moon system is about 4 times the radius of the Earth (given a density value for Earth of 5.5 and a density value for the moon of 3.34). The moon is now about 60 Earth radii away. You do the math yourself. ;-)
Of course, it's a silly exercise. Ample evidence exists for the accretion theory of lunar formation, which would suggest that the moon as a solid body was formed outside the Roche limit of the Earth. So extrapolating back in time based on recent measurements of lunar motion is kind of like extrapolating your age relative to your little sister. "I'm ten but she's only five; I'm twice her age. So when she's 50 I'll be 100 years old!"
It's more complex under Linux. Here's the Linux-specific answer to this question from the FAQ:
Extended attributes aren't as cool as you think. They're stored in the inode, not the file itself, which is a double-edged sword. For example, go build yourself an XFS-based Samba server. Write a file out of Photoshop to the Samba server, something.psd. Add one or more extended attributes to the file using the attr tool on the server. Open the file in Photoshop via Samba, modify it, and save it. Don't "Save as...", just save it. Now examine your extended attributes.
What? They're gone! For great justice!
Photoshop, and lots of other desktop apps, are clever in the way that they save files. Rather than writing over an existing file, Photohop (and others) will create a new file with a temporary name and write to it. Only after the file has been completely written to disk successfully will Photoshop (and others) unlink the original file and rename the new file to the old name. To the user, it looks like you're saving the new file over the old one, but in fact you're creating an entirely new file with-- get this-- a new inode. Bye-bye extended attributes.
So extended attributes are okay and all, but they have serious limitations as well.
1. high speed read write (good enough for 1080i?)
Considerably better than that, my friend. Depending on how you pack your pixels, 1080i requires between about 180 and about 260 MB/s. I can't find the source right now, but a few years SGI announced that they had done over 3 GB/s using a big XFS filesystem on IRIX.
With XFS, the filesystem is definitely not your bottleneck. Using just 8 fibre channel drives, I regularly saturate a gigabit FC loop with data (on the order of 98 MB/s, not counting overhead).
Oh, come on. You can't lead off with something as good as, "Our moon acts like a big scrub brush," and then say you don't want to be quoted!
Okay, so I'd better correct myself before somebody else does.
The Roche limit is technically the distance at which a body of zero tensile strength will tend to fall apart in orbit. Real objects, like moons, can be stable well inside the Roche limit of their parent body because their tensile strength is higher than zero. It's even possible, if the parent body is big enough and the satellite is small enough, that the practical Roche limit for a pair of bodies might be inside the parent body. In that case, the satellite would just spiral down to the parent body and crash before breaking up due to tides.
I think you probably got the idea anyway, but I just wanted to be a little more clear.
I forgot its name, but there is a range of distance to a planet in which rocks are reduced to dust.
;-)
The Roche limit. It has to do with tides, and tides have to do with orbits. The best way to understand how orbits work is to understand how they don't. Picture a solid rotating disc, like a record on a record player. Every point on the disc has the same angular velocity; in other words, it takes the same amount of time for a point on the inside of the disc to make a revolution as it takes for a point on the outside of the disc. This is obvious, because the disc is solid.
Orbits aren't like that. Two bodies orbiting at different distances from the parent body will have different angular velocities, because the force of gravity attracting them to the parent body varies with distance.
Now, think about what happens when an orbiting body speeds up or slows down. Think spaceman with a jetpack here. If the spaceman, who is orbiting the Earth in a circular path, slows down, he'll start to fall in toward the Earth. If he speeds up, he'll rise away from the Earth. If your velocity at a given distance from the parent body is lower than orbital velocity for that distance, you'll fall toward the body. If it's faster than orbital velocity, you'll tend to rise away from the body.
Now, consider the moon. The moon is a thick body; the distance from the center of the Earth to the near face of the moon is less than the distance to the far face of the moon. The moon orbits the Earth at a velocity appropriate for a body orbiting at the distance of the moon's center of mass. Because the moon is rigid, both the near half and the far half of the moon must also orbit at that same velocity, even though the near side of the moon tends to want to fall in toward the Earth (because its orbital velocity is slightly too low to maintain a circular path) and the far side tends to want to rise way from the Earth (because it's moving too fast).
The result, once you sum everything up, is that there's a net force on the moon pulling it apart along the line between the centers of the moon and the Earth. Because the total tensile strength of the moon-- its own gravity, plus the friction holding it together, plus the strength of the rock that forms it-- is greater than this net force, the moon is in a stable orbit.
But the tidal force has had an effect: long ago, the moon stopped revolving with respect to the Earth. The near face of the moon is held toward the Earth because it is "heavier" (sort of) than the far face of the moon. Tides did that.
Now, if you move the moon closer to the Earth, things will change. Because gravity varies with the square of the distance, the difference between the pull of gravity on the near side and the pull of gravity on the far side will increase as the moon gets closer to the Earth. As the moon moves closer, there's a point where the difference in gravity between near and far sides exceeds the aggregate tensile strength of the moon. At that point, the moon will fracture, and part of it will fall in toward the Earth while the rest rises into a higher orbit.
That distance is called the Roche limit.
Whew.
If you want a really good understanding of orbital motion and tidal forces, pick up a couple of science fiction books by Larry Niven. His Neutron Star includes a short story that uses the tidal force as a key plot point, as does The Integral Trees. No math, just lots of descriptions of how human-scale objects behave in close orbit around stellar-scale objects. You might have to read the stories a few times before you get the idea, but it's worth it.
Now animal rights activists will be yelling. You can not keep an animal penned up.
Ever been on a farm? You don't have to keep cows penned. They're not exactly jackrabbits, you know? Cows are perfectly content to just stand around, eat, poop, and occasionally walk about ten feet so they can have a change of scenery in which to stand around, eat, and poop.
Then when the cow gets good and fat and ready for the grill the animal rights activist will yell even louder at the way it is killed.
Lisa: Do you have any food that wasn't brutally slaughtered?
Homer: Well, I think the veal might've died of loneliness.
Wrongo. A good deal of cranial and neurosurgery is performed through the sinus cavity rather than through the skull. In particular, if you ever get a pituitary tumor-- heaven forbid-- your surgeon will use a craneofacial approach to excise it. In other words, he'll use a microscope and some specialized tools to pull the tumor out bit by bit through your nose.
Good thing you're not a brain surgeon.
the amount of coal being burnt to charge your mower is more then if you were to just get a gas mower...
Though some may opine to the contrary, electric lawn mowers aren't about the environment. They're about convenience. My electric mower is cleaner and quieter than a gas-powered mower, and I never have to drive to the store for a quart of oil on a Sunday morning.
To heck with that. If you really want an environmentally sound way of dealing with your grass problem, get one of these.
Dude, before you get all smug, read this.
Well it sounds like your one of those 1/10th of 1% of the people that this wasn't designed for.
Your biggest mistake here is saying that Mozilla was designed. It wasn't. It grew. And like all software that just grows, it ended up terrible.
Oh, whatever. The "diversity is good" defense is often invoked to explain why there are fifty different window managers for Linux. It's a crock. Having both KDE and Gnome means that half the desktop developers out there are wasting their time. Rather than having one desktop that sucks hardly at all, we have two that each suck somewhat.
"Perfection through variety" is only meaningful in the aggregate. That is to say, not at all.
Where did I talk about security? "Log out" in this context simply means closing all the windows associated with an application session at once. If the user has three windows open, closing any of them closes all of them. This isn't a security thing at all; it's a user interface feature that keeps the app from leaving orphaned windows open.
I remember spending hours playing with this stuff when I was about 6 years old or so. It came in different colors, and I remember building tiny underwater sandcastles with it.
I wonder whatever happened to that stuff? Probably turned out to be toxic. Was it Snow Crash that talked about kid's toys and pajamas being either flameproof or non-carcinogenic but not both at the same time?
I've only used Mozilla on Windows 2000, so I can't comment on the Mac version. My question on this topic is "Did you enable quicklaunch?"
I guess you're not getting my point. I don't care why Mozilla is slow. The mere fact that it's slow is enough to get me to remove it from my system. To think that there's a "make run faster" preference somewhere... that's just nuts. If you can make it go faster, you should. It shouldn't be an option, especially one that isn't on by default.
This, more than anything, is evidence that the Mozilla team isn't really interested in building a browser that people will actually want to use. They're just building a browser for themselves.
I would hazard a guess that you prefer the interface that you are used to, and don't like it when an application doesn't clone it.
No, no, no. Both Mac OS X and Windows have user interface guidelines. Applications that don't follow them are quirky and wrong. In their mad rush to create a browser than runs on lots of platforms, they decided to ignore platform-specific user interface guidelines. If I'm using Windows, I want to use programs that work the way Windows programs should. If I'm using a Mac, I want to use programs that work the way Mac programs should. I don't want to use a program that looks and feels like a half-assed port.
I will say that most people that I know LIKE having many choices.
Then I would say that most of the people you know are atypical. The first thing I want to do every time I fire up a new build of Mozilla-- which has been more times than I care to admit-- is turn off that damned home page. In order to do so, I have to navigate through a baffling list of checkboxes and radio buttons. That's broken and wrong.
There's a "home" button on the Personal Toolbar!
So you're saying the only way I can get a home button on the toolbar (or, rather, a toolbar) is to have a second toolbar open all the time? If any reasonable person stopped for just a minute to think about that, they'd realize how absurd it sounds.
Mozilla has a "skinnable" interface, so it is possible to customize it a great deal more than your current browser.
Skins schmins. I've already complained about how Mozilla doesn't look and feel like a native application. What makes you think I'd want to throw a "skin" on it that makes it look even less like a native application? Besides, find me a skin that puts a home button on the toolbar and I'll shut up.
Another vague criticism. At least here you admit your inability to articulate exactly what is wrong. "They don't work." is just bitching, it isn't a reasoned comment.
Try 'em. Use 'em. If you decide that they're not broken, good for you. I've decided that they're broken. I'm sure lots of other people share that opinion. If you want to ignore it, be my guest.
I guess you've looked through the source code to make this determination?
Yup.
Why compare the footprint of Mozilla to MS Word and Excel?
Because Word and Excel are big programs that each do a hell of a lot more than Mozilla ever could. The fact that Mozilla eats more RAM than either of them should be an embarrassment.
Hell, most of that RAM probably goes to chrome, anyway.
Browsing in separate windows in Mozilla is ignoring one of its best features: "tabbed browsing."
Advocating tabbed browsing is ignoring one of my best features: I don't like it.
There is no way that I can describe how much simpler and faster it is
It's simpler and faster because Mozilla is such a pig at opening new windows, right?
Pop-up blocking, mouse gestures, (overall)better security and extensibility that means there are continually new features as add-ons
(1) I haven't seen pop-ups since I installed OmniWeb, which disables them all by itself.
(2) Mouse gestures? You're kidding, right? You think that's usable? That's a gimmick for people who are impressed by gimmicks. It's right up there with speech and handwriting recognition: useless 99% of the time.
(3) "Better security and extensibility" is an ironic comment considering we're writing this in context of an article about a security bug. Sounds like Mozilla is calling IE black here. And extensibility? Who the fuck cares about extensibility in a web browser? The browser should be small in size, lightweight in RAM, reliable, and fast. All four of those were sacrificed in building Mozilla.
The Mozilla project is a failure. It has failed to produce a usable web browser, even after all these years.
But if they disable onunload, aren't you screwed then if you're relying on it working? Surely there must be a more robust way?
If ours were an application designed for public use over the Internet, I'd say yes... and no. Yes, we'd be screwed if clients connected to the application using unsupported browsers with key features disabled. And no, there's no more robust way in that situation, other than just redesigning the whole app to remove the dependency on multiple windows, which our market research (yeah, you heard me) tells us is a big part of the application user experience.
But the good news is that this app is not meant for public use, and we have a certain degree of control over the client environment. That is to say, we tell our customers that their client systems must be such-n-such. To the extent that it's possible, we prevent the customers from making honest mistakes by checking user agent headers and whatnot. If somebody wanted to deliberately conceal their browser type by modifying the user agent header, they could log in to the application and create an error condition by doing something that we assume they can't do. At which point they would have done nothing but succeeded in annoying us.