One final thing I want to note concerns the VB6 runtime. The VB6 runtime ships with Windows XP. This means that the VB6 runtime is covered by the Windows XP support timeline. This means that support for the VB6 runtime will last much longer than that of the development environment. Mainstream support for Windows XP will end 2 years after Longhorn launches and extended support will last for 5 years after that. (check out http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifewin)
Um, how is displaying an image format NOT a feature of FF?
I took the OPs meaning that Mozilla had somehow invented PNG.
MS has no intrest in tabbed browsing until FF starting gaining steam
Mozilla had no interest in creating unobtrusive popup blocker notification cues until they saw the one that shipped with XPSP2. Funny how that works, eh?
Its irrelevent that Opera had it first
No, it's not irrelevant for the simple reason that I was talking about innovation. Popularity != innovation.
There is a fundamental difference between two applications drawing the same control differently and two applications shipping with two complete, different and incompatible GUI stacks.
In the context of Microsoft's applications the 'normal' progression is that they create new controls and ship them initially with Office - that then make their way back into the common GUI stack (or at least parts of them do). That's why it's called the.. wait for it... 'Common Controls' library.
That someone feels the need to create an application like Winamp or Sonique (which, admittedly are hardly a good context in which to apply design guidelines) or MusicMatch (which is) or even WMP which looks different than anything else is not Microsoft's fault, and in many cases the same apps are simply using the controls differently. Case in point is the music listing view in MusicMatch - that's just a control called a 'ListView' drawn in a certain way. But it is still a control being loaded and driven from a common library.
The bottom line is, like so many other people, you fall into the mistake of thinking (or wishing) that the only applications people use in Windows are an office suite, MP3 player, browser and email client. There are quite a few applications out there (probably a million!) that simply use the common GUI control library and share the same standardized 'look'.
The GPL is "viral" only when you let it behave that way. Only when you take GPL'ed code and use it in your applications. It doesn't just creep up to you and infect your code base because it doesn't have anything better to do.
You messed up, you allowed that code to get into your company's code base knowing damn well it was wrong to do so based on the contract you signed, which I assume no one forced you to sign.
The company might be stupid in thinking they can lay an IP claim on top of derived code - that's their problem, but you are also partly responsible for it.
You wouldn't be having this program if you've just re-written the code, or at the very least asked before even thinking about bringing it in. While I agree that reinventing the wheel is pointless, sometimes you just have to. Much as I dislike the GPL I can't really fault it for the way it's used. It's not like it does dastardly things on its own.
You can have principles, you can have food and sometimes you can have both. Most of the time you just have to get with the program. Maybe you shouldn't have taken the job if you are so dependent on GPL code.
There have been IE wrappers written to use tabs since at least IE5 was released and the ActiveX control stabilized enough. Heck, that was one of the first things I did when I first played with the control and wrote my test "browser". That and a better "favorites" service.
Mozilla didn't invent tabs - even if we discount IE clones Opera had tabs/MDI before that as well. Mozilla actually didn't invent a bunch of things that they claim as "innovations" - most of them were simply copied from Netscape, who did innovate for the simple reason that they pretty much defined the platform.
For all the fanboy blabbering that goes on around Mozilla the reality is there isn't much innovation to speak of. Not to say they're not good browsers, don't get me wrong. But there's a big difference between evolutions and revolutions.
and so is PNG
PNG is an image format that is standardized through the W3C, it's not a "Firefox feature" anymore than JPG is.
Back way when I 'registered' with Google when the gettin' was slim and the service had just launched. Supposedly I'd get an email when I could join.
A few days later I got an account through Blogger and forgot about it. The email with the invitation that I had registered to recieve must have landed in my inbox a month ago, at least?
In languages providing automatic memory management, like Java, C# or LISP there can be memory leaks too. The memory management does not free an object that is strongly reachable.
Holy shit, what part of "interpreted" and "virtual" do you people not understand? I cannot "leak" memory from JavaScript any more than I can leak it from Java or C# or Python. How hard is that to grasp? If my "application" is leaking memory then it's the virtual machine's or interpreter's fault, period. Period.
You also have too narrow a definition of application
No, I do not. Because I'm not talking about this as an end user but as a developer. "Application" maps cleanly to "process" as far as I'm concerned, because that's the memory allocation scope and boundary for most operating systems. You're just trying to be clever and make a semantic point about what an application is or isn't based on "user experience", which is disingenious if we're discussing memory allocation. Nice try.
You need to get out more. There's a whole world beyond c.
I discovered a shitload of artists I've grown to like and listen to. Indie stuff, foreign (well, foreign to the US) and so on. Much of it stuff you mainly find at B&N.
I had never really purchased that much music before. But here's the funny part: between 1999-2002 when I was really into Napster/Kazaa and other P2P networks I actually bought more music than ever before. Why? Because the stuff I really like to listen to I have to have in a CD. A downloaded MP3 just doesn't cut it for me in most cases. So I went out and bought the whole CD for those one or two songs I wanted. In some cases I found even better stuff, and in others the rest of the CD was crap, as is mostly the case. But them's the dregs.
I'm not going to try and make the point that music sharing promotes CD sales, because I don't think it's true regardless of my personal experience, but there's definitely something to say about a worldwide, diverse network of people who share their music. Back in the day you woudl find the most incredible stuff on Napster. Today (on the other networks) it's difficult to find anything beyond the top 40 crap, which is ironic considering that's precisely what the *AA people are trying to get off the networks.
So let me see if I get this right. There is no competition because you don't want there to be. Correct?
What Linus or Stallman or Raymond say or fail to say has absolutely no effect on the fate or role of Linux as a commercial software product. Slackware has no competitors. Novell and IBM and SuSE and Red Hat and everyone else trying to make a buck off it, on the other hand, do.
So aside from playing the petulant Slashbot here with your preachy "let me dumb this down for you stupid Windows users" informational journal entries, you fail to grasp what is really being discussed here: the role of open source and free software in the commercial world. Maybe if you tried to get your head out of your rectum and stopped equating your hobby/hacker love of Linux with how things work out there - you know, in the real world - you'd begin to understand. In the meantime however, I'd appreciate it if you avoided trying to "educate" me altogether.
It just wants to whine, cry foul and point the finger at the big bully "ooohhh, look, OMFG! how dare they attack us, we're so goood!!"
Now that IBM, RHN and Novell are in the ring, Microsoft, Oracle, CA and everyone else are starting to see Linux as a competitor. The problem is that most people in FOSS are not used to competition, they prefer enemies. Enemies are easier to vilify and ridicule. Competitors who are eating your lunch are not. This whole "we are holier than thou and you are so evil" thing is not going to work out there in the real world. Linux needs to compete, not be surrounded by fanboys who can pick their noses and chuckle when they write "Microshaft" and "Windoze".
Slashdot has been the main front in this whining battle for the past few years. It's gone mainstream now, of sorts, and people are starting to notice the ridiculous "OMFG WINDOZE IS TEH SUXX" headlines that adorn the front page day in and day out, complete with borg icon. And don't complain about Microsoft saying this or the other about Linux when most of you spend your waking hours claiming that Windows cannot be secured or otherwise used as a computing platform, using anecdotal data points to build feel-good statistics that only you believe.
Grow up and compete. The "some dude said something bad about Linux"-style whines like this article are starting to sound more and more like Suckdot.
Even if GMail has actually done several hundred polls of the server since then? You're saying that if a running application's memory usage increases, it's the underlying platform's problem?
I don't understand what you're saying here. Load the page once. Note memory usage. Reload. How many more bytes do you expect to see there? I sure as heck don't see IE suck up more than what it's using. If the page changes because the content changed, sure. But the same page? Same content?
Why not blame your operating system?
Blaming FF for it is fine, given that it happens to be the thing that is loading the page, hosting the JS interpreter and allocating the memory for everything.
It's far more reasonable to suggest the application is leaking memory than the platform running that application.
Again, I can't see what you're trying to argue here. It's not like I can call malloc() from JavaScript. You cannot "leak" memory from a browser-hosted script engine, because you have no direct way to allocate it. All you have are accesor methods that are used to create strings, objects, arrays, whatever. If memory is being allocated and not reclaimed then it's the engine's fault, not your script's. Does that make sense? Unless you're talking about code that never loses state, in which case this whole argument is moot - but even assuming full state and given the same static content, there should be no increase in the memory usage.
Applications can leak memory.
GMail is not an application. It's a bunch of scripts running in the browser. The browser is the application, and it's the browser's responsibility to ensure that no memory leaks, because, again, the script has no control over it.
Give me one example of how you "leak" memory in a script. Note that I'm not talking about creating an array and filling it with 1 gazillion strings between the focus() and blur() events. Even in those cases, the browser should clean up after me. At least I hope so. No, an example of a memory leak that is the script's direct fault and responsibility. I'd like to see one.
Of course, script code that causes leaks in the browser's script engine doesn't count... because that would be a leak in the browser. We can go in circles all you want, really.
Or is your problem that you honestly cannot understand how a Javascript application can leak memory?
I think you're rather confused as to what an application is and how this whole memory thing works.
I'm sorry but whoever you try to spin it, it's something that shouldn't happen.
If FF is going to eat up 100MB of RAM to open Gmail, fine. Assuming nothing happens except for their refresh interval (which I think is 5 minutes), when I get back the next day I expect it to be at 100MB. It's as simple as that.
Personally I've never seen a problem with Gmail per se, though I don't keep it open for a day. OTOH, I've seen FF start gobbling up more and more memory while doing nothing but minimizing and restoring with 4-5 tabs open.
FF is a sieve as far as I'm concerned. That doesn't mean I don't consider it to be a good browser, and I can mostly live with the memory usage. But you and everyone else around here tends to come up with these amazing theories as to why FF consumes/leaks so much memory. Your was just one of the funnier ones I've read.
I'm sure eventually the Moz folks will fix it, but that's not the point.
Really, I don't have a problem with applications using xMB of RAM, as long as they do not leak it. I use an app written in.NET that gobbles up 200MB of RAM and I can live with that, but it does not leak. It's not about the amount - especially in a machine with 1GB.
ROFL, I can almost see myself trying to make the point that some JavaScript code might cause IE to swallow 200MB or RAM and actually getting modded interesting for it.
Uncanny how you can replicate your own post down to the letter, hmmm? You're just trolling for karma (complete with "M$" references, which never fail) and you posted "DUPE" because someone figured you out.
Just your luck I happened to load this article, eh?
They'll tell you as soon as you point out where or how they are distributing them (yes, that's why it wasn't a GPL question).
Why should Google be "ethical"? Likely these modifications are part of their IP trove, which keeps them ahead of the (already heated up) competition.
If you don't like the way someone uses the software you're giving away then perhaps you shouldn't give it away, or maybe it's just that the license is flawed. It's dumb to expect people who run billion-dollar publicly traded corporations to be "ethical". Mom and pop shops are "ethical".
The whole concept of "free software" as encoded by the GPL is increasingly being outmoded by things like server-bound distributed applications (see that clumsy Affero GPL) and companies like Google which have strategic interests in the stuff. It's called progress.
Kinda like the open source PR war machine (valiantly spearheaded by Slashdot) made the most of every single IE advisory and vulnerability in the past four years?
Welcome to the real world. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Really? What are you going to say when this case stands, Microsoft gets screwed on this patent and then Eolas turns around and tries to screw the Mozilla foundation, mmm? Are you going to cross your fingers as well?
The president of Eolas once said he wouldn't go after Mozilla. If FF becomes popular enough, do you figure he's going to keep his "word"?
You just keep crossing your fingers. Microsoft can afford to pay Eolas off. Your favorite cheap software foundations can't.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you like some salt with that crow?
I took the OPs meaning that Mozilla had somehow invented PNG.
MS has no intrest in tabbed browsing until FF starting gaining steam
Mozilla had no interest in creating unobtrusive popup blocker notification cues until they saw the one that shipped with XPSP2. Funny how that works, eh?
Its irrelevent that Opera had it first
No, it's not irrelevant for the simple reason that I was talking about innovation. Popularity != innovation.
In the context of Microsoft's applications the 'normal' progression is that they create new controls and ship them initially with Office - that then make their way back into the common GUI stack (or at least parts of them do). That's why it's called the.. wait for it... 'Common Controls' library.
That someone feels the need to create an application like Winamp or Sonique (which, admittedly are hardly a good context in which to apply design guidelines) or MusicMatch (which is) or even WMP which looks different than anything else is not Microsoft's fault, and in many cases the same apps are simply using the controls differently. Case in point is the music listing view in MusicMatch - that's just a control called a 'ListView' drawn in a certain way. But it is still a control being loaded and driven from a common library.
The bottom line is, like so many other people, you fall into the mistake of thinking (or wishing) that the only applications people use in Windows are an office suite, MP3 player, browser and email client. There are quite a few applications out there (probably a million!) that simply use the common GUI control library and share the same standardized 'look'.
Your point?
Hope that helps.
You messed up, you allowed that code to get into your company's code base knowing damn well it was wrong to do so based on the contract you signed, which I assume no one forced you to sign.
The company might be stupid in thinking they can lay an IP claim on top of derived code - that's their problem, but you are also partly responsible for it.
You wouldn't be having this program if you've just re-written the code, or at the very least asked before even thinking about bringing it in. While I agree that reinventing the wheel is pointless, sometimes you just have to. Much as I dislike the GPL I can't really fault it for the way it's used. It's not like it does dastardly things on its own.
You can have principles, you can have food and sometimes you can have both. Most of the time you just have to get with the program. Maybe you shouldn't have taken the job if you are so dependent on GPL code.
There have been IE wrappers written to use tabs since at least IE5 was released and the ActiveX control stabilized enough. Heck, that was one of the first things I did when I first played with the control and wrote my test "browser". That and a better "favorites" service.
Mozilla didn't invent tabs - even if we discount IE clones Opera had tabs/MDI before that as well. Mozilla actually didn't invent a bunch of things that they claim as "innovations" - most of them were simply copied from Netscape, who did innovate for the simple reason that they pretty much defined the platform.
For all the fanboy blabbering that goes on around Mozilla the reality is there isn't much innovation to speak of. Not to say they're not good browsers, don't get me wrong. But there's a big difference between evolutions and revolutions.
and so is PNG
PNG is an image format that is standardized through the W3C, it's not a "Firefox feature" anymore than JPG is.
A few days later I got an account through Blogger and forgot about it. The email with the invitation that I had registered to recieve must have landed in my inbox a month ago, at least?
Your skills sure are basic.
Holy shit, what part of "interpreted" and "virtual" do you people not understand? I cannot "leak" memory from JavaScript any more than I can leak it from Java or C# or Python. How hard is that to grasp? If my "application" is leaking memory then it's the virtual machine's or interpreter's fault, period. Period.
You also have too narrow a definition of application
No, I do not. Because I'm not talking about this as an end user but as a developer. "Application" maps cleanly to "process" as far as I'm concerned, because that's the memory allocation scope and boundary for most operating systems. You're just trying to be clever and make a semantic point about what an application is or isn't based on "user experience", which is disingenious if we're discussing memory allocation. Nice try.
You need to get out more. There's a whole world beyond c.
Yeah, thanks.
Every Google story generates tens of thousands of ad impressions for Slashdork. They'd be stupid not to ride the wave if it's there.
Otherwise I'd suggest you either trust Google or stop using it.
I had never really purchased that much music before. But here's the funny part: between 1999-2002 when I was really into Napster/Kazaa and other P2P networks I actually bought more music than ever before. Why? Because the stuff I really like to listen to I have to have in a CD. A downloaded MP3 just doesn't cut it for me in most cases. So I went out and bought the whole CD for those one or two songs I wanted. In some cases I found even better stuff, and in others the rest of the CD was crap, as is mostly the case. But them's the dregs.
I'm not going to try and make the point that music sharing promotes CD sales, because I don't think it's true regardless of my personal experience, but there's definitely something to say about a worldwide, diverse network of people who share their music. Back in the day you woudl find the most incredible stuff on Napster. Today (on the other networks) it's difficult to find anything beyond the top 40 crap, which is ironic considering that's precisely what the *AA people are trying to get off the networks.
C'mon mods, this is funny. Check out the lzip website, you'll get it.
What Linus or Stallman or Raymond say or fail to say has absolutely no effect on the fate or role of Linux as a commercial software product. Slackware has no competitors. Novell and IBM and SuSE and Red Hat and everyone else trying to make a buck off it, on the other hand, do.
So aside from playing the petulant Slashbot here with your preachy "let me dumb this down for you stupid Windows users" informational journal entries, you fail to grasp what is really being discussed here: the role of open source and free software in the commercial world. Maybe if you tried to get your head out of your rectum and stopped equating your hobby/hacker love of Linux with how things work out there - you know, in the real world - you'd begin to understand. In the meantime however, I'd appreciate it if you avoided trying to "educate" me altogether.
Thanks.
Now that IBM, RHN and Novell are in the ring, Microsoft, Oracle, CA and everyone else are starting to see Linux as a competitor. The problem is that most people in FOSS are not used to competition, they prefer enemies. Enemies are easier to vilify and ridicule. Competitors who are eating your lunch are not. This whole "we are holier than thou and you are so evil" thing is not going to work out there in the real world. Linux needs to compete, not be surrounded by fanboys who can pick their noses and chuckle when they write "Microshaft" and "Windoze".
Slashdot has been the main front in this whining battle for the past few years. It's gone mainstream now, of sorts, and people are starting to notice the ridiculous "OMFG WINDOZE IS TEH SUXX" headlines that adorn the front page day in and day out, complete with borg icon. And don't complain about Microsoft saying this or the other about Linux when most of you spend your waking hours claiming that Windows cannot be secured or otherwise used as a computing platform, using anecdotal data points to build feel-good statistics that only you believe.
Grow up and compete. The "some dude said something bad about Linux"-style whines like this article are starting to sound more and more like Suckdot.
Let me guess - you're a really good "web developer", right? Right. Well, I suppose your definition of a "leak" is good enough for that.
You're calling me a liar. I resent that.
I wasn't calling you a liar. Just slightly ignorant.
I'm foeing you. Asshole.
Holy merciful sweet Heysooz, cry me a fucking river and all that.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Load the page once. Note memory usage. Reload. How many more bytes do you expect to see there? I sure as heck don't see IE suck up more than what it's using. If the page changes because the content changed, sure. But the same page? Same content?
Why not blame your operating system?
Blaming FF for it is fine, given that it happens to be the thing that is loading the page, hosting the JS interpreter and allocating the memory for everything.
It's far more reasonable to suggest the application is leaking memory than the platform running that application.
Again, I can't see what you're trying to argue here. It's not like I can call malloc() from JavaScript. You cannot "leak" memory from a browser-hosted script engine, because you have no direct way to allocate it. All you have are accesor methods that are used to create strings, objects, arrays, whatever. If memory is being allocated and not reclaimed then it's the engine's fault, not your script's. Does that make sense? Unless you're talking about code that never loses state, in which case this whole argument is moot - but even assuming full state and given the same static content, there should be no increase in the memory usage.
Applications can leak memory.
GMail is not an application. It's a bunch of scripts running in the browser. The browser is the application, and it's the browser's responsibility to ensure that no memory leaks, because, again, the script has no control over it.
Give me one example of how you "leak" memory in a script. Note that I'm not talking about creating an array and filling it with 1 gazillion strings between the focus() and blur() events. Even in those cases, the browser should clean up after me. At least I hope so. No, an example of a memory leak that is the script's direct fault and responsibility. I'd like to see one.
Of course, script code that causes leaks in the browser's script engine doesn't count... because that would be a leak in the browser. We can go in circles all you want, really.
Or is your problem that you honestly cannot understand how a Javascript application can leak memory?
I think you're rather confused as to what an application is and how this whole memory thing works.
If FF is going to eat up 100MB of RAM to open Gmail, fine. Assuming nothing happens except for their refresh interval (which I think is 5 minutes), when I get back the next day I expect it to be at 100MB. It's as simple as that.
Personally I've never seen a problem with Gmail per se, though I don't keep it open for a day. OTOH, I've seen FF start gobbling up more and more memory while doing nothing but minimizing and restoring with 4-5 tabs open.
FF is a sieve as far as I'm concerned. That doesn't mean I don't consider it to be a good browser, and I can mostly live with the memory usage. But you and everyone else around here tends to come up with these amazing theories as to why FF consumes/leaks so much memory. Your was just one of the funnier ones I've read.
I'm sure eventually the Moz folks will fix it, but that's not the point.
Really, I don't have a problem with applications using xMB of RAM, as long as they do not leak it. I use an app written in .NET that gobbles up 200MB of RAM and I can live with that, but it does not leak. It's not about the amount - especially in a machine with 1GB.
Almost.
Just your luck I happened to load this article, eh?
Still adventurous and innovative. Congratulations to these guys, this is quite an accomplishment.
I concur =)
They'll tell you as soon as you point out where or how they are distributing them (yes, that's why it wasn't a GPL question).
Why should Google be "ethical"? Likely these modifications are part of their IP trove, which keeps them ahead of the (already heated up) competition.
If you don't like the way someone uses the software you're giving away then perhaps you shouldn't give it away, or maybe it's just that the license is flawed. It's dumb to expect people who run billion-dollar publicly traded corporations to be "ethical". Mom and pop shops are "ethical".
The whole concept of "free software" as encoded by the GPL is increasingly being outmoded by things like server-bound distributed applications (see that clumsy Affero GPL) and companies like Google which have strategic interests in the stuff. It's called progress.
Welcome to the real world. You can't have your cake and eat it.
The president of Eolas once said he wouldn't go after Mozilla. If FF becomes popular enough, do you figure he's going to keep his "word"?
You just keep crossing your fingers. Microsoft can afford to pay Eolas off. Your favorite cheap software foundations can't.
ROFL. Just when I think the Slashbots couldn't suprise me anymore, along comes something like this, from a 800,000+ UIN, no less.
Mad propz sir, mad props to you.