It's always funny to see someone who never designed professionally in their life suggest GIMP.
GIMP lacks so basic features such as a usable grid, 16-bit/HDR image support, and requires special plugins with numerical inputs to draw a simple rounded rectangle, let alone something more complex.
Did you read the original post? The guy is looking for cheap Photoshop-alike software for his marketing department to use. Somehow I doubt that the marketing gurus are going to be up in arms about the lack of (for example) HDR image support.
They are disclosing information that is material to the operation of their business in a regulatory filing, as required by law. Yes, you and I and anyone else who has been following the GPL v3 draft process or has followed Stallman's work over the past few years already know all of this. But Tivo's investors don't necessarily know. Tivo is required by law to disclose that to them in their regulatory filings because it could affect their profitability and therefore their stock price. Tivo would have to have their head in the sand not to know about this, and therefore they could face serious penalties if they did not disclose it, regardless of whether they are actually worried about the problem or not. Have you ever read these kind of filings before? They include everything, and they always describe the worst possible case. I remember when Amazon was at its peak around $100, their filings regularly said things like "It's possible that this company will never operate profitably." Obviously the people running the company don't think that, or else they would be running the company, but they still have to say it.
It seems to me that writing an entire article about Tivo being "worried" based entirely off of their regulatory filings is already being very bold. To take it a step further and state that they are complaining about the actions of the FSF unfairly targeting them with no further support of the claim is rather beyond ridiculous.
At any rate it's not like they're going to be losing their existing codebase. At worst, this will slow down their future development cycles.
The older Pentium-D and Core Duo multi core processors are still only 32-bit. This prevents people with the original Intel Mac books from running 64-bit Windows on it.
Oh No!! I'm sure every one of those Macbook owners would have been furious had they not been able to install Windows Vista on their shiny new laptops.
Seriously, at the time that Microsoft released Vista, and for some time before, every new mainstream x86 computer supported 64 bit. Microsoft could have released a 64 bit only Vista, and given the jump in hardware requirements Vista represents, I doubt they would have alienated many customers at all.
I wasn't too impressed with amarok last time I tried it. Besides being a slower, uglier clone of an already slow and ugly application, it would downright refuse to play about half of my files, despite them being a type that was supported by the backend that I was using. I spend a while poking around in the code, and basically, amarok would drop any file that it couldn't figure out how to parse the tags for. I brought it up on the forums, and one of the developers asked what I thought the expected behavior should be when I asked it to play a file that it couldn't read the metainfo for. Hello?!? The expected behavior when I ask it to play a file would be to play the file! I don't load up an audio file in my music player to find out who the singer is, I load an audio file in a music player to listen to it.
Maybe it has improved drastically since then (this would have been a little over 6 months ago, I suppose), but the whole experience left a really bad taste. These days I mostly use xfmedia, which is small, clean, and uses the xine backend, so it can play just about anything (works better than anything I've tried so far on windows, anyway). It doesn't support syncing that I am aware of, but I sync my iPod to my work computer, so I really don't care too much about that.
Pressure, capacitance, whatever... We have one of these (not-so) mighty mice in a conference room here at work, and in order to right click, you have to lift your index finger completely off the mouse and click in a very specific spot. (I'm tempted to take a sharpie to the thing and draw an X in the correct spot so people can find it. Most people here who know anything about Macs give up and just Ctrl-click.) Basically, on a Mighty Mouse, every click is a left click unless you click in a very specific spot, and you aren't touching any other part of the mouse. So while I'm sure it is completely trivial to swap the left and right buttons on the mouse in software, the effect would be to make the left button almost useless because of the way the hardware is designed.
On a scale of 1 to 10, the mighty mouse rates just above the hockey pucks Apple included on the old school iMacs. The little scroll ball is a ton of fun though, even if it's not particularly useful.
It looks like he originally used a combination of spaces and tabs (ts=8, sts=4 in vim. I know Visual Studio used to have that as the default indentation behavior.) and the tabs got munched by the HTML conversion.
RAID 0+1. All the perf benefits of RAID0, but 2x the drives. Typically two cabinets RAID 0'd then RAID 1 the two RAID 0s. I get redundancy at a slight penalty of performance due to 2x the writes happening, but no degredation the read.
ZFS aside, wouldn't you be safer doing this the other way? Using n disks, make n/2 RAID 1 arrays, and stripe those arrays together using RAID 0. Should give the same performance as your solution, but with slightly better reliability. Using your version, a second disk failure would bring down the whole array if the disk is anywhere in the opposite RAID 0 setup as the first disk (slightly higher than a 1:2 probability), while in this setup, a second disk failure would only cause data loss if it is in the same RAID 1 array, which would be a 1:n-1 probability.
I think Microsoft/Sony completely missed the boat by overlooking this application for their gaming consoles. Either they just didn't see it or they don't like this behavior and see it as a liability of some kind.
More likely they just haven't figured out how to monetize it yet. Since Microsoft sold both Xbox's at a loss, and Sony is selling the PS3 at a substantial loss, I doubt either is jumping up and down to find a way to let people use them in a way that won't make them any additional revenue.
That's great. Good for you. Really. However, since you seem to have entirely skipped the first line of my post, I'll repeat it again for your benefit. I'll even emphasize it this time so you don't miss it.
Just because you don't see the problem doesn't mean that it doesn't exist for anyone else.
I don't doubt your observations. I know that plenty of people don't have any problems with memory usage on Firefox. But I also know that there are a lot of people do as well, and the attempts of either group of people to discount the other are equally ridiculous. Your experience (and mine) is not universal.
However, since it seems like the only thing that matters to you are useless and arbitrary numbers, my firefox.exe is currently at 125MB with three windows and 4 tabs open. Closing all of the windows except for the one that I am posting in brings it down to about 117. Firefox has been running for about 2 hours, and I have neither the patience or the desire to track how long or how many pages it took me to get to this point.
Just because you don't see the problem doesn't mean that it doesn't exist for anyone else. I regularly see Firefox go above 250 MB of memory, and nothing short of closing it entirely will get that memory back. And despite what you claim, it's not the cache, because according to the documentation for the "browser.cache.memory.capacity" config key, Firefox is only using 18 MB for its cache. According to what you say, I should never see Firefox go over about 75MB, but it's very rare for it to be using less than that unless I've restarted it within the past hour or two.
I don't complain about the problem because honestly, I don't mind closing Firefox out every other day or so to free up the memory, but I do complain about people who deny it's a problem because it doesn't happen to them.
Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored.
It has been for 7 years, why should I expect that to change now?
(Actually, it looks like inline-block really has been implemented for FF 3.0. Thanks guys. In two more years I might actually be able to us it on a real site.)
Not exactly. If you read the article, it sounds like he goes out of his way to find generic names (one example in the article being "weddingshoes.com") or common misspellings of generic names, because there's too much liability involved in getting a name that is a trademarked name or too close to it. If I was to start a company named "Wedding Shoes", should I really be surprised that the domain name is already taken?
the problem with pay-per-sale is that it's almost impossible to track, and it's still ultimately meaningless. Of course, pay-per-click is meaningless too, but since it's easier to track, companies go with the easy meaningless number rather then the hard meaningless number.
There was an article awhile back about "domain kiting" that had a good comment talking about steps to go through to try and by a domain when it expires before a bot snaps it up. I don't remember the details, but the gist of it was, if you try to do it online, you'll never get it, because by the time the web page you are using is updated, the domain will already be taken. Find a registrar that you trust and get somebody on the phone the day it expires. Also, if you don't get it right away, don't freak out - because of the number of companies participating in the domain kiting scheme, there's a good chance that whoever gets the domain will only hold onto it for a week or so.
Anyway, the lists and bots that are discussed in the article are ancient history. The methods they have now are way more advanced.
The science may be sound, but he also uses a lot of hand waving and appeals to emotion that undermine the basic science. I mentioned earlier that, at least on one subject (Pine Beetles) that I have followed with some interest in the past, he goes against actual facts (Pine Beetles are native to the US, while he at least implies if not outright states that they are an invasive species) and scientific consensus (The current outbreak is widely believed to be primarily the result of poor forestry management). It only took one instance of blatant exaggeration to make me skeptical of many of his other examples.
Indeed if you look around, you can find that he's been called on a lot of them, even by people on his side of the debate. His claims about the spread of malaria have been disputed. There is still a large amount of disagreement about the affect of climate change on hurricanes- as far as I can tell, the consensus seems to lean towards fewer stronger storms, rather than more stronger storms as Gore states. I've also seen claims that the lack of snow atop Kilimanjaro has been due to changes in land use around the mountain rather than climate, as the temperature at the peak has actually decreased. I don't know if this is true, but the more of his claims I find to be exaggerations, the less likely I am to believe the rest of them.
He also uses a lot of the classic "playing with statistics" tricks, such as charts without scales and scales that don't start at 0, which make me hesitant to give much credence to them, regardless of how sound the science behind them may or may not be.
I can name one. Pine beetles are not an invasive species in North America, and have always been present in large portions of the western US. While it is possible that climate plays a role in the severe outbreaks that we are seeing currently, most people familiar with the situation believe it to be primarily a result of poor forestry management.
I've also been told that many of his comments regarding the Antarctic ozone hole do not reflect the actual facts, but I don't know much about that area personally.
That said, the fact that he was willing to so blatantly exaggerate the Pine Beetle problem, which is one of the few topics that he covered that I do know anything about, makes a little suspicious about his willingness to play loose with the facts in the rest of the movie.
Anyway, where he really lost me was his little tobacco farming anecdote. He talks about knowing what it's like to have to make hard choices because his father decided to stop growing tobacco after his sister died of lung cancer. I certainly respect that decision, but from what little I do know of his family history, I'm not so sure I believe his family was all that dependent on the income that they were making from tobacco. It's a lot easier to quit a job for idealogical reasons when you don't actually need the money. The rest of us generally find it to be more palatable if we have a fallback in place first.
That's the most obvious benefit, but there are several others as well. Off the top of my head:
1) Turning the engine off at idle. This is really only a benefit in stop and go driving, but it's difficult to do this efficiently in a standard car.
2) Decreased gasoline engine size. My ~100hp Corolla very rarely uses the full 100 hp. If it were a hybrid, it could use a smaller, say 70-80 hp engine, which would use less gasoline than the 100hp engine when the electric motor is off, and the electric motor can kick in when the extra oomph is needed.
3) Running the gasoline engine more efficiently. Gasoline engines only provide optimum power and efficiency within a fairly narrow RPM range. It has proven very difficult so far to create continuously variable transmissions that work effectively in the power/torque ranges required for a passenger vehicle with a gasoline engine. Because it has two motors working together, Toyota has been able to design an effective continuously variable transmission for their hybrid drivetrain, which allows the gasoline engine to spend much more of it's time in the RPM range that produces the best power and efficiency.
Am I the only person who finds it ironic that somebody who spends so much time talking about usability and readability still hasn't figured out the point of something as basic as margins? Good grief, his site just hurts to read no matter how wide I make my browser.
"Senior Master Mechanic"... I'm guessing that unlike you, you're brother is not in the middle of the pack for salaries in his career. I'm not saying that he's better or worse at what he does than you, but it definitely does not appear to be an apples to apples comparison here.
If you want incoming calls to "just happen" without having to find your phone first, I think you need to start talking to some quantum mechanics researchers, not the electronics companies that make the current generation of phones.
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Did you read the original post? The guy is looking for cheap Photoshop-alike software for his marketing department to use. Somehow I doubt that the marketing gurus are going to be up in arms about the lack of (for example) HDR image support.
Uh, no. They're not.
They are disclosing information that is material to the operation of their business in a regulatory filing, as required by law. Yes, you and I and anyone else who has been following the GPL v3 draft process or has followed Stallman's work over the past few years already know all of this. But Tivo's investors don't necessarily know. Tivo is required by law to disclose that to them in their regulatory filings because it could affect their profitability and therefore their stock price. Tivo would have to have their head in the sand not to know about this, and therefore they could face serious penalties if they did not disclose it, regardless of whether they are actually worried about the problem or not. Have you ever read these kind of filings before? They include everything, and they always describe the worst possible case. I remember when Amazon was at its peak around $100, their filings regularly said things like "It's possible that this company will never operate profitably." Obviously the people running the company don't think that, or else they would be running the company, but they still have to say it.
It seems to me that writing an entire article about Tivo being "worried" based entirely off of their regulatory filings is already being very bold. To take it a step further and state that they are complaining about the actions of the FSF unfairly targeting them with no further support of the claim is rather beyond ridiculous.
At any rate it's not like they're going to be losing their existing codebase. At worst, this will slow down their future development cycles.
Oh No!! I'm sure every one of those Macbook owners would have been furious had they not been able to install Windows Vista on their shiny new laptops.
Seriously, at the time that Microsoft released Vista, and for some time before, every new mainstream x86 computer supported 64 bit. Microsoft could have released a 64 bit only Vista, and given the jump in hardware requirements Vista represents, I doubt they would have alienated many customers at all.
I wasn't too impressed with amarok last time I tried it. Besides being a slower, uglier clone of an already slow and ugly application, it would downright refuse to play about half of my files, despite them being a type that was supported by the backend that I was using. I spend a while poking around in the code, and basically, amarok would drop any file that it couldn't figure out how to parse the tags for. I brought it up on the forums, and one of the developers asked what I thought the expected behavior should be when I asked it to play a file that it couldn't read the metainfo for. Hello?!? The expected behavior when I ask it to play a file would be to play the file! I don't load up an audio file in my music player to find out who the singer is, I load an audio file in a music player to listen to it.
Maybe it has improved drastically since then (this would have been a little over 6 months ago, I suppose), but the whole experience left a really bad taste. These days I mostly use xfmedia, which is small, clean, and uses the xine backend, so it can play just about anything (works better than anything I've tried so far on windows, anyway). It doesn't support syncing that I am aware of, but I sync my iPod to my work computer, so I really don't care too much about that.
Pressure, capacitance, whatever... We have one of these (not-so) mighty mice in a conference room here at work, and in order to right click, you have to lift your index finger completely off the mouse and click in a very specific spot. (I'm tempted to take a sharpie to the thing and draw an X in the correct spot so people can find it. Most people here who know anything about Macs give up and just Ctrl-click.) Basically, on a Mighty Mouse, every click is a left click unless you click in a very specific spot, and you aren't touching any other part of the mouse. So while I'm sure it is completely trivial to swap the left and right buttons on the mouse in software, the effect would be to make the left button almost useless because of the way the hardware is designed.
On a scale of 1 to 10, the mighty mouse rates just above the hockey pucks Apple included on the old school iMacs. The little scroll ball is a ton of fun though, even if it's not particularly useful.
It looks like he originally used a combination of spaces and tabs (ts=8, sts=4 in vim. I know Visual Studio used to have that as the default indentation behavior.) and the tabs got munched by the HTML conversion.
ZFS aside, wouldn't you be safer doing this the other way? Using n disks, make n/2 RAID 1 arrays, and stripe those arrays together using RAID 0. Should give the same performance as your solution, but with slightly better reliability. Using your version, a second disk failure would bring down the whole array if the disk is anywhere in the opposite RAID 0 setup as the first disk (slightly higher than a 1:2 probability), while in this setup, a second disk failure would only cause data loss if it is in the same RAID 1 array, which would be a 1:n-1 probability.
More likely they just haven't figured out how to monetize it yet. Since Microsoft sold both Xbox's at a loss, and Sony is selling the PS3 at a substantial loss, I doubt either is jumping up and down to find a way to let people use them in a way that won't make them any additional revenue.
XBOX 360: $299
Apple TV: $299
Where is this "free" you speak of? If I could a 360 for free, I might actually get one.
That's great. Good for you. Really. However, since you seem to have entirely skipped the first line of my post, I'll repeat it again for your benefit. I'll even emphasize it this time so you don't miss it.
Just because you don't see the problem doesn't mean that it doesn't exist for anyone else.
I don't doubt your observations. I know that plenty of people don't have any problems with memory usage on Firefox. But I also know that there are a lot of people do as well, and the attempts of either group of people to discount the other are equally ridiculous. Your experience (and mine) is not universal.
However, since it seems like the only thing that matters to you are useless and arbitrary numbers, my firefox.exe is currently at 125MB with three windows and 4 tabs open. Closing all of the windows except for the one that I am posting in brings it down to about 117. Firefox has been running for about 2 hours, and I have neither the patience or the desire to track how long or how many pages it took me to get to this point.
Reread this statement:
the consensus seems to lean towards fewer stronger storms, rather than more stronger storms as Gore states.
Just because you don't see the problem doesn't mean that it doesn't exist for anyone else. I regularly see Firefox go above 250 MB of memory, and nothing short of closing it entirely will get that memory back. And despite what you claim, it's not the cache, because according to the documentation for the "browser.cache.memory.capacity" config key, Firefox is only using 18 MB for its cache. According to what you say, I should never see Firefox go over about 75MB, but it's very rare for it to be using less than that unless I've restarted it within the past hour or two.
I don't complain about the problem because honestly, I don't mind closing Firefox out every other day or so to free up the memory, but I do complain about people who deny it's a problem because it doesn't happen to them.
It has been for 7 years, why should I expect that to change now?
(Actually, it looks like inline-block really has been implemented for FF 3.0. Thanks guys. In two more years I might actually be able to us it on a real site.)
Not exactly. If you read the article, it sounds like he goes out of his way to find generic names (one example in the article being "weddingshoes.com") or common misspellings of generic names, because there's too much liability involved in getting a name that is a trademarked name or too close to it. If I was to start a company named "Wedding Shoes", should I really be surprised that the domain name is already taken?
the problem with pay-per-sale is that it's almost impossible to track, and it's still ultimately meaningless. Of course, pay-per-click is meaningless too, but since it's easier to track, companies go with the easy meaningless number rather then the hard meaningless number.
There was an article awhile back about "domain kiting" that had a good comment talking about steps to go through to try and by a domain when it expires before a bot snaps it up. I don't remember the details, but the gist of it was, if you try to do it online, you'll never get it, because by the time the web page you are using is updated, the domain will already be taken. Find a registrar that you trust and get somebody on the phone the day it expires. Also, if you don't get it right away, don't freak out - because of the number of companies participating in the domain kiting scheme, there's a good chance that whoever gets the domain will only hold onto it for a week or so.
Anyway, the lists and bots that are discussed in the article are ancient history. The methods they have now are way more advanced.
...they are equally unimpressive. All five are available on DVD- In fact, I already own 2 of them.
The science may be sound, but he also uses a lot of hand waving and appeals to emotion that undermine the basic science. I mentioned earlier that, at least on one subject (Pine Beetles) that I have followed with some interest in the past, he goes against actual facts (Pine Beetles are native to the US, while he at least implies if not outright states that they are an invasive species) and scientific consensus (The current outbreak is widely believed to be primarily the result of poor forestry management). It only took one instance of blatant exaggeration to make me skeptical of many of his other examples.
Indeed if you look around, you can find that he's been called on a lot of them, even by people on his side of the debate. His claims about the spread of malaria have been disputed. There is still a large amount of disagreement about the affect of climate change on hurricanes- as far as I can tell, the consensus seems to lean towards fewer stronger storms, rather than more stronger storms as Gore states. I've also seen claims that the lack of snow atop Kilimanjaro has been due to changes in land use around the mountain rather than climate, as the temperature at the peak has actually decreased. I don't know if this is true, but the more of his claims I find to be exaggerations, the less likely I am to believe the rest of them.
He also uses a lot of the classic "playing with statistics" tricks, such as charts without scales and scales that don't start at 0, which make me hesitant to give much credence to them, regardless of how sound the science behind them may or may not be.
I can name one. Pine beetles are not an invasive species in North America, and have always been present in large portions of the western US. While it is possible that climate plays a role in the severe outbreaks that we are seeing currently, most people familiar with the situation believe it to be primarily a result of poor forestry management.
I've also been told that many of his comments regarding the Antarctic ozone hole do not reflect the actual facts, but I don't know much about that area personally.
That said, the fact that he was willing to so blatantly exaggerate the Pine Beetle problem, which is one of the few topics that he covered that I do know anything about, makes a little suspicious about his willingness to play loose with the facts in the rest of the movie.
Anyway, where he really lost me was his little tobacco farming anecdote. He talks about knowing what it's like to have to make hard choices because his father decided to stop growing tobacco after his sister died of lung cancer. I certainly respect that decision, but from what little I do know of his family history, I'm not so sure I believe his family was all that dependent on the income that they were making from tobacco. It's a lot easier to quit a job for idealogical reasons when you don't actually need the money. The rest of us generally find it to be more palatable if we have a fallback in place first.
That's the most obvious benefit, but there are several others as well. Off the top of my head:
1) Turning the engine off at idle. This is really only a benefit in stop and go driving, but it's difficult to do this efficiently in a standard car.
2) Decreased gasoline engine size. My ~100hp Corolla very rarely uses the full 100 hp. If it were a hybrid, it could use a smaller, say 70-80 hp engine, which would use less gasoline than the 100hp engine when the electric motor is off, and the electric motor can kick in when the extra oomph is needed.
3) Running the gasoline engine more efficiently. Gasoline engines only provide optimum power and efficiency within a fairly narrow RPM range. It has proven very difficult so far to create continuously variable transmissions that work effectively in the power/torque ranges required for a passenger vehicle with a gasoline engine. Because it has two motors working together, Toyota has been able to design an effective continuously variable transmission for their hybrid drivetrain, which allows the gasoline engine to spend much more of it's time in the RPM range that produces the best power and efficiency.
Well, I'm not going to complain too much. I prefer useful to pretty.
I usually do "sudo bash" when I want a root shell.
Am I the only person who finds it ironic that somebody who spends so much time talking about usability and readability still hasn't figured out the point of something as basic as margins? Good grief, his site just hurts to read no matter how wide I make my browser.
"Senior Master Mechanic"... I'm guessing that unlike you, you're brother is not in the middle of the pack for salaries in his career. I'm not saying that he's better or worse at what he does than you, but it definitely does not appear to be an apples to apples comparison here.
If you want incoming calls to "just happen" without having to find your phone first, I think you need to start talking to some quantum mechanics researchers, not the electronics companies that make the current generation of phones.