Television signals transmitted wirelessly? That's revolutionary! It'll never catch on!
I guess I largely agree with you (except that TV over Wifi isn't going to be any more friendly...) The real problem with TV today, well, aside from the content, isn't so much the "How do I hook it up" but the fact that if you want quality, you end up having to hook up a hell of a lot more than a power supply and a coax connection. And then there's the interfaces which are awful. You'd have thought the Wii would have at least given TV makers some ideas on how they could leave the four hundred button remote behind, but alas no.
If I were to design a TV today, this is what I'd build:
Obviously it'd have a decent screen.
It would have audio decoding built in, so all that's needed is to hook it up to an amplifier for 5.1 audio, irrespective of the input (HDMI, SPDIF, whatever.)
The complicated stuff wouldn't be on the remote. If you're fiddling with the TV trying to set up the picture, the chances are you're right there anyway. Why add set up menus to the remote when you're not going to use them when sitting down?
The remote would be as basic as possible. Volume. Channel up/down. Menu
"Menu" brings up an interface that you literally point at, Wii style. You'd use that to browse listings, watch on-demand content, etc. It'd probably look a little Rokuish.
The TV would sit on your network. It would accept the usual inputs too. Unencrypted compressed content could be stored on any network storage device (it's all digital now anyway) and you'd be able to set up schedules giving you the most important part of DVR functionality.
Unfortunately it'd never work. Why? Because the effing cable and satellite companies would never work with it. So 75%+ of the population would end up with a clumsy UI and connection experience anyway. Urgh.
BTW, I typed "BS" at the end of the Subject line and missed the fact that, for whatever reason (too long? Wrong box had focus?) it didn't actually end up on the subject!
The author is asserting that Amazon.com, on the basis of one CSR email that doesn't make sense, has deliberately decided to prevent its videos from running on the Playbook.
BTW, the situation gets even more obvious when he explains what happens. The video starts to play, and then the player crashes out with a generic error about requiring a Flash upgrade. Does that sound like how it would act if Amazon had told its developers to stop allowing Playbook users access to Amazon's Video?
It's fairly obvious what's going on here. The Blackberry version of Flash is broken. Amazon can't support that. Amazon's CSR, in a garbled way, tried to point the finger at Adobe, or Apple, or someone who he thinks is responsible for the player in the Blackberry. Rather than wait for an communication from Amazon.com, the author went off half-cocked with a far fetched conspiracy theory that in an effort to improve Kindle Fire sales, Amazon.com found the tablet platform that's got the smallest market share, and banned them from using Amazon Prime Video.
OK, this doesn't smell right. This allegation is based upon one email from customer service, and given the context it's even quite possible that "Apple" (mentioned once in the message) was a brainfart with the customer service agent intending to write "Adobe". Lest anyone think I'm grasping at straws, the entire email makes no sense whatsoever if taken literally (as it kind of implies Apple wrote Flash!), but makes perfect sense if you read "Apple" as "Adobe".
After waiting less than a day for confirmation from Amazon the author of the article decides to go ahead and make the claim despite the somewhat dubious circumstances. I don't believe it for a second, and I think the author's an idiot.
Applets that haven't been ported don't work, but the number that don't is decreasingly. Honestly I haven't seen anything I need lately that isn't available, either directly or via a friendly PPA.
I'm unclear as to what you're referring to about the "width of that bar". Everything looks about the same as they did under Ubuntu, minus that replaced menu-on-the-left thing (Ubuntu icon + Applications, Places, System) which is now a single Ubuntu icon with a larger drop down menu containing everything. What bar are you referring to?
Hold down Alt when you right click on the GNOME panel and you'll be very happy.
I've been using GNOME 3 in this mode since Ubuntu's forced GNOME 3 or Unity migration. Bar some tweaks I made to improve things even further for my way of doing things, the desktop is exactly the same as my GNOME 2 desktop. Same panels, launchers, etc.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
Seriously? A car has immediate inherent and utility value - you can drive it around. An option has NO value at it's time of issue - it's the potential ability, after a period of time, to buy stock at a particular price. At issuance it's nearly worthless. Taxing it at full value at the time of issuance is like selling someone a package of carrot seeds, and taxing them the value of a bushel of carrots.
The article is more about taxing, or the lack of such in, capital gains, and it's worth noting that even unsold the shares had utility value in that they could be used as collateral.
Heck yes there is. It punishes people for saving and investing. It's only marginally less lousy than punishing people for making money in the first place. The correct avenue is to tax consumption.
Why should we "punish" people who buy things?!
I think if you talk about taxes in terms of "punishing" people then you're already on the wrong track. Taxes are about funding the work the government does for us. The government is responsible for a wide range of activities, and ultimately the decisions it makes end up creating a social framework that benefits some more than others. When deciding how much each person should pay for this, there's both a moral and practical argument:
The moral argument is that those who benefit most from the resultant society a government enables should pay the most for it.
The practical argument is that those who can more than afford to pay for government can pay more than those who don't.
None of these arguments are about punishment. While some systems - including the US during WW-II and immediately afterwards - used penal level rates of taxation for extremely high incomes in a partial effort to encourage those who could afford to to invest in their own businesses and raise the salaries, or increase the numbers of, their own employees, for the most part taxes on those earning the most have always left those people... earning the most, and having every incentive to continue doing so.
For that reason, it's entirely fair to tax both income (be it earned or unearned) and property. We traditionally have kept property taxes small because we don't want to force anyone to have to relinquish their homes or other major assets, and unearned income - capital gains - used to be taxed at a rate comparable to (earned) income tax. Since the mid-nineties, however, after Gingrich pushed through a package of tax reforms, capital gains has been ridiculously low.
And as can be seen above, capital gains taxes contains rather a lot of loopholes anyway.
My own view is that it's absurd to argue that unearned income should be free of taxation, or taxed at a lower rate than regular income tax. For that reason, raising capital gains taxes, and making it harder to profit from property without paying taxes on that income, is entirely fair. (And I have no problem with the idea that capital losses should, similarly, reduce your taxes, as they do today.)
I haven't used iTunes for a long time (and don't even have a Mac any more), but I can say even then it sounded somewhat simpler than what you're implying.
I use Google Music, Amazon MP3, and Rhapsody. What all three do (and I assume iTunes does too to the same extent these days) is combine MP3 purchasing with music management (even back then, the iTunes Store did, it's just its management centered around a single computer.) You don't download an MP3 file via your browser, move it to the right directory, and move on to the next one until you've downloaded your playlist, the systems, to varying degrees, automate the entire process, and do so especially well with devices like Android phones.
From reading your description, and the Wikipedia description of GrooveShark, there are at least two problems with an unlicensed service trying to do the same thing. The first is DMCA complaints have lead to their apps being pulled from iPhones and Android app stores, and the other is that the system pretty much encourages DMCA complaints against its library, which means that any playlist management services they may provide are inherently unreliable.
The only extent to which unlicensed services are "easier", to my mind, is the lack of necessary registration. However, while Rhapsody might suffer from this, almost everyone has an Amazon account already, virtually all Android phone users have an Android Market (eg. Google shopping) account, and virtually all iOS users have an iTunes account.
Let's explain using an example.
From my phone, I can start up Android Market, click Music, and either browse for music or search for it. Once I select the one I want, I click "Buy". I may have to re-enter my password, but that's about it.
At this point:
The music is automatically listed in the Music app. I can stream it immediately, or pin it so it downloads onto the phone or tablet
The music is being downloaded on my computer at home (even if I'm not at home) and imported into Rhythmbox without me lifting a finger
I can pull up a web browser at work, go to music.google.com, and the music is right there, and I can listen to it using streaming.
I can build playlists including the music on both the Android app and music.google.com, and they'll also be synced across one another.
I can, with one click, share the music with friends who can at least sample the music for free
If there are any special exceptions for which the above are not good enough - ie I want to put my music on a Victorian-era iPod like my 10G touchwheel thing, or burn a CD, or whatever, I still get the MP3, and can download it from anywhere at any time.
Virtually every scenario I'm likely to run into is covered by the first set of points above. Also there's Rhapsody, which requires only a subscription, and which all but the second and last points are valid.
Are there negatives? I guess if I were a teenager, I'd gripe about the costs, but on the other hand, if you (or your parents) can afford to get you a smartphone, you can at least afford a Rhapsody subscription.
I think the legal services have, contrary to what you think, done a stunning job of making legal music purchases, or subscriptions, compelling and much easier than the alternatives. "Downloading" an "MP3" may seem "simpler" in a nerdy way, but only if all you do is throw MP3s into a directory on a single hard drive. Getting music is not just about obtaining a binary package, it's about using it afterwards. That's what Google Music, Rhapsody, etc, do very, very, well indeed.
Have you used Windows lately? 10:1 if you pick out a random PC that was bundled with any operating systems other than Vista or 7, it's more likely to run Ubuntu without problems than Windows 7.
This was a launch going ahead despite the fact that people in a position to stop it knew that there was an extremely likely chance there'd be a tragedy. This isn't like the Titanic where a collection of bad circumstances conspired to cause a serious accident. This was utter and compete managerial negligence. And lest you think that, hey, maybe the "problem" was in the structure of management of the launch, no, it wasn't, that structure was exactly the one designed to prevent exactly this kind of failure. Every entity had a veto on launch, so that if experts in one entity knew there was a problem, they could prevent it from happening. That veto was not applied, and there is no explanation as to why other than negligence.
BTW, the FAA today has an experimental aircraft program. You can make a single engined plane up to (I think) 2,000lbs in weight in your back yard, and you're allowed to fly it. I'm sure some people have been killed as a result, but you can bet they weren't because someone with a position to stop a flight knew that a plane had a serious safety flaw, and said "Go ahead anyway".
You think that's bad? I had to go to the doctor the other day, and he was all "Well, let's cure that cancer of yours" (or whatever it was) and I was like "Hold on a moment, do you know Bresenham's line algorithm?
Would you believe he didn't? I had to NOT merely describe the algorithm, AND explain how to use sign changes and axies swaps to ensure any line could be drawn, but even what a damned BITMAP was. I walked right out, I wasn't going to trust HIM to heal my brain tumor.
Also the so-called plumber didn't know what a singleton was. I'm getting impatient now, I've rigged up a siphon to suck water out of the laundy room into the yard, but I haven't found a single pumber yet who knows a damned thing about programming.
No crashes in two days. Firefox is for the most part responsive despite the tests being done (deliberately) in the worst environment I could think of - my work Ubuntu VM. The only time it crawled was using Blogger to write a blog entry, and once I finished, it stopped crawling, which... well, that was itself a massive improvement, if I did something to make it crawl, typically the only way to stop Firefox crawling was to restart it. No longer.
Yahoo Mail and Twitter, together with less memory intensive tabs like GMail, are still sitting there and are usable. I can never figure out what the actual memory figure is, but with a lot of tabs open, it's somewhere between 600M and 1200M (explicit vs vsize); typically I'd expect the figures to be over 1G/over 2G respectively within an hour or two of restarting the browser.
I have to say I'm absolutely delighted. My favorite browser is usable again.
Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you! You've done a wonderful thing.
Just to let you know, I haven't forgotten. But I am trying to make the report useful.
What I'm doing is using the version ten release from http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-next/ubuntu/. The last version I downloaded, on Wednesday, has crashed when I left it (twice) alone for a couple of days with Twitter and Yahoo Mail tabs. I've reported those crashes via the bug reporter pop-up that comes up. I'm downloading the latest build now.
What I will say is that while the version of ten I had prior to Wednesday exhibited the "mush" issues I'm talking about, the one that's crashed twice hasn't. Which is why I'm holding off. It could be it's growing much more slowly and then crashing, or alternatively it could be crashing for some entirely unrelated issue and the mush issues I've been experiencing are fixed. I'll let you know either way, and file a bug report if the mush thing comes back.
I dunno. In the 1980s games costed somewhere between $2 and $10, per tape.
I'd be happy with a market that looks like Steam quite honestly. When I go to Gamestop, a typical used game costs more than the equivalent game on Steam, usually much more. I know people are wedded to the whole "I want to be able to resell it" thing, but sometimes the means don't generate the ends.
Thank you for the correction. I have to say I'm very surprised that this is new, especially as I always assumed Google did a lot of cross site tracking, regardless of whether it was Google owned, or just something that had Adsense on it. Most of us have had the experience of browsing a particular site for products and then finding that (what we assume is) Adsense serves up ads for those products everywhere else.
I agree with your sentiment that Google is being up-front about this, and that's positive.
Well, maybe they are, maybe they're not, but of the three articles published in the last 24 hours by Slashdot:
One was an outright falsehood. (The claim Google is forcing all new sign-ups to create Google+ profiles.)
One was misleading, and arguably the truth was positive (spin was "Google is changing their ToS so that everyone has to share their details across all their websites!"), reality was "Google has always shared information across their websites, and the ToS is being standardized and hence made easier to understand.
And then there's this one, which appears to take a negative incident for Google (Google did, indeed, take ads from online pharmacies), and add some serious but unsubstantiated (and dubiously sourced) allegations to it (Billion-dollar-a-year Google's CEOs for some reason deciding, directly, to chase the million dollar market for online pharmacy ads. Does this one even make sense?)
While I can't agree that the memory problems are solved, having read your presentation I have to thank you for the good work you're doing to make Firefox usable again.
People are not being malicious when they say they're still noticing the problems. I don't know if the average Mozilla developer simply loads up a bunch of text only pages and says "Wow, it's fast now" or what exactly, but there's a gulf between what some are saying about Firefox being fixed, and the experience of the rest of us. Nobody's trying to "punish" Firefox by pointing it out, it's just we want a stable, smooth, browser, and we want it to be Firefox, and we're getting upset because Firefox used to be that, and isn't today.
My experience: I can't load Yahoo Mail for any length of time in Firefox without it turning to mush. If I leave Firefox open for a couple of days with mostly static tabs, twitter excepting, and make the mistake of using other applications, it'll turn to mush.
And by mush I mean swap hell when you try to scroll a web page, that kind of thing.
This isn't just happening on my 1.5Gb VM at work or 1Gb Netbook, it's happening on my 8Gb freshly installed no-profile-other-than-that-produced-by-Firefox-sync no-extensions-even-AdBlock Ubuntu machine.
So... look, if we didn't love Firefox, we wouldn't be upset. I feel dirty, and without the tools I want to use, when I use Chrome, but the reality is that I keep a Chrome window open at all times and use that for much of my regular browsing.
So... thank you for the work you're doing. Don't let the fact people are still criticizing Firefox's memory issues mean that your work isn't appreciated. I appreciate you hunting the wolves, just understand it doesn't matter that the town crier is saying they're gone, I was attacked by one just a few hours ago, so they're obviously out there.
Benchmarks are one thing, real life is another. I'm having to restart Firefox on a regular basis on my BRAND NEW EIGHT GIGABYTE LAPTOP. That's right:
In an age in which 1G netbooks are extremely common, I have eight times as much memory
It's a new laptop = fresh install of everything. The only thing carried over from my old machine was via Firefox Sync
So if you're about to whine "But Squiggy! It must be your profile! And you need to get with the program and have 4G of RAM", there's your answer. I don't want to hear it.
I really don't understand people like you who insist there isn't a problem when:
There's a massive groundswell of frustration and anger about the issue
Slashdot posts another "Mozilla reports - we found the problem! Next release will not have those memory problems!" article EVERY MONTH
Usage of CHROME, which in every other respect is an inferior browser to Firefox, is going through the roof
You think we're making it up? You think everyone's just switching to Chrome for the hell of it? Clue: they're not switching because it's more compatible, or more user friendly, or has more features. Because nobody outside of a Google diehard would ever argue such a thing.
We use Firefox for a bit. Some time goes by. Maybe we launch another application. Perhaps we view a PDF. And then it starts. It takes a second or more for Firefox to notice we clicked on something. The scrollbar is no longer real time. Switching a tab causes nothing to happen for ten seconds. We try closing tabs. We go to "about:memory" and hit every button. It seems... slightly faster. Or was that our imagination? Hmmm, it's gone slow again.
I'm giving up. I downloaded Firefox 3.6 from Mozilla's website last night. I'm going to make it my default browser.
Leaving aside established players (Yahoo), and companies with enough clout to get things done (Microsoft) there's at least Baidu(sp?) and Yandex might differ in opinion on the viability of creating search engines and making them popular.
And, to be quite honest with you, making a crawler and building a search engine around it doesn't take a lot of money if you're not likely to see a lot of traffic, so it is something someone can experiment with, expecting only to see a few thousand users a month. Hell, if you wanted to, you could relatively easily take on Google with a product-for-product match. Webmail? There's open source tools to do that, for example. Social networking? Slide a custom theme onto a Wordpress install and you're half way done.
And here's the kicker: if you do this, you can get Google to "pay for it". You could fund the entire thing using an Adsense account.
Why, then, are few people doing this?
Well, most of the time it's because it's assumed that, while Google's search might be just awful right now, it'll eventually be fixed by the time you or I have put together something half decent - and putting something together that's better than Altavista is hard. So the only people putting together alternatives to Google are those who are trying to do something massively different, and it's the massively different bit that's usually tripping them up.
Yes, people are always coming up with new search engines and then disappearing off of the map. Usually it's because those search engines are crap. And often it's because they're just not marketed and managed correctly. Google's dominance rarely has anything to do with it - Google was once a new search engine, back when we all used Yahoo's directories and Altavista's searchs.
That's not actually true. There's a box you can uncheck on the initial signup page that allows you to opt out of creating a profile, and, further, even if you create one, you can immediately delete it.
But yes, Slashdot did report, falsely, that very allegation earlier today, and it rather emphasizes my point: a lot of bogus negative stories about a company that's made a lot of enemies lately.
Can we limit criticizing Google to things it actually does, for example, it's awful search engine?
Slashdot Mirror
Television signals transmitted wirelessly? That's revolutionary! It'll never catch on!
I guess I largely agree with you (except that TV over Wifi isn't going to be any more friendly...) The real problem with TV today, well, aside from the content, isn't so much the "How do I hook it up" but the fact that if you want quality, you end up having to hook up a hell of a lot more than a power supply and a coax connection. And then there's the interfaces which are awful. You'd have thought the Wii would have at least given TV makers some ideas on how they could leave the four hundred button remote behind, but alas no.
If I were to design a TV today, this is what I'd build:
The TV would sit on your network. It would accept the usual inputs too. Unencrypted compressed content could be stored on any network storage device (it's all digital now anyway) and you'd be able to set up schedules giving you the most important part of DVR functionality.
Unfortunately it'd never work. Why? Because the effing cable and satellite companies would never work with it. So 75%+ of the population would end up with a clumsy UI and connection experience anyway. Urgh.
BTW, I typed "BS" at the end of the Subject line and missed the fact that, for whatever reason (too long? Wrong box had focus?) it didn't actually end up on the subject!
Your explanation like it better I do.
The author is asserting that Amazon.com, on the basis of one CSR email that doesn't make sense, has deliberately decided to prevent its videos from running on the Playbook.
BTW, the situation gets even more obvious when he explains what happens. The video starts to play, and then the player crashes out with a generic error about requiring a Flash upgrade. Does that sound like how it would act if Amazon had told its developers to stop allowing Playbook users access to Amazon's Video?
It's fairly obvious what's going on here. The Blackberry version of Flash is broken. Amazon can't support that. Amazon's CSR, in a garbled way, tried to point the finger at Adobe, or Apple, or someone who he thinks is responsible for the player in the Blackberry. Rather than wait for an communication from Amazon.com, the author went off half-cocked with a far fetched conspiracy theory that in an effort to improve Kindle Fire sales, Amazon.com found the tablet platform that's got the smallest market share, and banned them from using Amazon Prime Video.
As Bugs Bunny would say, "What a maroon."
No, RIM's customer has more than one, he's a big fan of the platform as it happens!
OK, this doesn't smell right. This allegation is based upon one email from customer service, and given the context it's even quite possible that "Apple" (mentioned once in the message) was a brainfart with the customer service agent intending to write "Adobe". Lest anyone think I'm grasping at straws, the entire email makes no sense whatsoever if taken literally (as it kind of implies Apple wrote Flash!), but makes perfect sense if you read "Apple" as "Adobe".
After waiting less than a day for confirmation from Amazon the author of the article decides to go ahead and make the claim despite the somewhat dubious circumstances. I don't believe it for a second, and I think the author's an idiot.
Applets that haven't been ported don't work, but the number that don't is decreasingly. Honestly I haven't seen anything I need lately that isn't available, either directly or via a friendly PPA.
I'm unclear as to what you're referring to about the "width of that bar". Everything looks about the same as they did under Ubuntu, minus that replaced menu-on-the-left thing (Ubuntu icon + Applications, Places, System) which is now a single Ubuntu icon with a larger drop down menu containing everything. What bar are you referring to?
Hold down Alt when you right click on the GNOME panel and you'll be very happy.
I've been using GNOME 3 in this mode since Ubuntu's forced GNOME 3 or Unity migration. Bar some tweaks I made to improve things even further for my way of doing things, the desktop is exactly the same as my GNOME 2 desktop. Same panels, launchers, etc.
The article is more about taxing, or the lack of such in, capital gains, and it's worth noting that even unsold the shares had utility value in that they could be used as collateral.
Why should we "punish" people who buy things?!
I think if you talk about taxes in terms of "punishing" people then you're already on the wrong track. Taxes are about funding the work the government does for us. The government is responsible for a wide range of activities, and ultimately the decisions it makes end up creating a social framework that benefits some more than others. When deciding how much each person should pay for this, there's both a moral and practical argument:
The moral argument is that those who benefit most from the resultant society a government enables should pay the most for it.
The practical argument is that those who can more than afford to pay for government can pay more than those who don't.
None of these arguments are about punishment. While some systems - including the US during WW-II and immediately afterwards - used penal level rates of taxation for extremely high incomes in a partial effort to encourage those who could afford to to invest in their own businesses and raise the salaries, or increase the numbers of, their own employees, for the most part taxes on those earning the most have always left those people... earning the most, and having every incentive to continue doing so.
For that reason, it's entirely fair to tax both income (be it earned or unearned) and property. We traditionally have kept property taxes small because we don't want to force anyone to have to relinquish their homes or other major assets, and unearned income - capital gains - used to be taxed at a rate comparable to (earned) income tax. Since the mid-nineties, however, after Gingrich pushed through a package of tax reforms, capital gains has been ridiculously low.
And as can be seen above, capital gains taxes contains rather a lot of loopholes anyway.
My own view is that it's absurd to argue that unearned income should be free of taxation, or taxed at a lower rate than regular income tax. For that reason, raising capital gains taxes, and making it harder to profit from property without paying taxes on that income, is entirely fair. (And I have no problem with the idea that capital losses should, similarly, reduce your taxes, as they do today.)
I haven't used iTunes for a long time (and don't even have a Mac any more), but I can say even then it sounded somewhat simpler than what you're implying.
I use Google Music, Amazon MP3, and Rhapsody. What all three do (and I assume iTunes does too to the same extent these days) is combine MP3 purchasing with music management (even back then, the iTunes Store did, it's just its management centered around a single computer.) You don't download an MP3 file via your browser, move it to the right directory, and move on to the next one until you've downloaded your playlist, the systems, to varying degrees, automate the entire process, and do so especially well with devices like Android phones.
From reading your description, and the Wikipedia description of GrooveShark, there are at least two problems with an unlicensed service trying to do the same thing. The first is DMCA complaints have lead to their apps being pulled from iPhones and Android app stores, and the other is that the system pretty much encourages DMCA complaints against its library, which means that any playlist management services they may provide are inherently unreliable.
The only extent to which unlicensed services are "easier", to my mind, is the lack of necessary registration. However, while Rhapsody might suffer from this, almost everyone has an Amazon account already, virtually all Android phone users have an Android Market (eg. Google shopping) account, and virtually all iOS users have an iTunes account.
Let's explain using an example.
From my phone, I can start up Android Market, click Music, and either browse for music or search for it. Once I select the one I want, I click "Buy". I may have to re-enter my password, but that's about it.
At this point:
Virtually every scenario I'm likely to run into is covered by the first set of points above. Also there's Rhapsody, which requires only a subscription, and which all but the second and last points are valid.
Are there negatives? I guess if I were a teenager, I'd gripe about the costs, but on the other hand, if you (or your parents) can afford to get you a smartphone, you can at least afford a Rhapsody subscription.
I think the legal services have, contrary to what you think, done a stunning job of making legal music purchases, or subscriptions, compelling and much easier than the alternatives. "Downloading" an "MP3" may seem "simpler" in a nerdy way, but only if all you do is throw MP3s into a directory on a single hard drive. Getting music is not just about obtaining a binary package, it's about using it afterwards. That's what Google Music, Rhapsody, etc, do very, very, well indeed.
Have you used Windows lately? 10:1 if you pick out a random PC that was bundled with any operating systems other than Vista or 7, it's more likely to run Ubuntu without problems than Windows 7.
Or before the fact, as in this case.
This was a launch going ahead despite the fact that people in a position to stop it knew that there was an extremely likely chance there'd be a tragedy. This isn't like the Titanic where a collection of bad circumstances conspired to cause a serious accident. This was utter and compete managerial negligence. And lest you think that, hey, maybe the "problem" was in the structure of management of the launch, no, it wasn't, that structure was exactly the one designed to prevent exactly this kind of failure. Every entity had a veto on launch, so that if experts in one entity knew there was a problem, they could prevent it from happening. That veto was not applied, and there is no explanation as to why other than negligence.
BTW, the FAA today has an experimental aircraft program. You can make a single engined plane up to (I think) 2,000lbs in weight in your back yard, and you're allowed to fly it. I'm sure some people have been killed as a result, but you can bet they weren't because someone with a position to stop a flight knew that a plane had a serious safety flaw, and said "Go ahead anyway".
You think that's bad? I had to go to the doctor the other day, and he was all "Well, let's cure that cancer of yours" (or whatever it was) and I was like "Hold on a moment, do you know Bresenham's line algorithm?
Would you believe he didn't? I had to NOT merely describe the algorithm, AND explain how to use sign changes and axies swaps to ensure any line could be drawn, but even what a damned BITMAP was. I walked right out, I wasn't going to trust HIM to heal my brain tumor.
Also the so-called plumber didn't know what a singleton was. I'm getting impatient now, I've rigged up a siphon to suck water out of the laundy room into the yard, but I haven't found a single pumber yet who knows a damned thing about programming.
No crashes in two days. Firefox is for the most part responsive despite the tests being done (deliberately) in the worst environment I could think of - my work Ubuntu VM. The only time it crawled was using Blogger to write a blog entry, and once I finished, it stopped crawling, which... well, that was itself a massive improvement, if I did something to make it crawl, typically the only way to stop Firefox crawling was to restart it. No longer.
Yahoo Mail and Twitter, together with less memory intensive tabs like GMail, are still sitting there and are usable. I can never figure out what the actual memory figure is, but with a lot of tabs open, it's somewhere between 600M and 1200M (explicit vs vsize); typically I'd expect the figures to be over 1G/over 2G respectively within an hour or two of restarting the browser.
I have to say I'm absolutely delighted. My favorite browser is usable again.
Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you! You've done a wonderful thing.
Just to let you know, I haven't forgotten. But I am trying to make the report useful.
What I'm doing is using the version ten release from http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-next/ubuntu/. The last version I downloaded, on Wednesday, has crashed when I left it (twice) alone for a couple of days with Twitter and Yahoo Mail tabs. I've reported those crashes via the bug reporter pop-up that comes up. I'm downloading the latest build now.
What I will say is that while the version of ten I had prior to Wednesday exhibited the "mush" issues I'm talking about, the one that's crashed twice hasn't. Which is why I'm holding off. It could be it's growing much more slowly and then crashing, or alternatively it could be crashing for some entirely unrelated issue and the mush issues I've been experiencing are fixed. I'll let you know either way, and file a bug report if the mush thing comes back.
I dunno. In the 1980s games costed somewhere between $2 and $10, per tape.
I'd be happy with a market that looks like Steam quite honestly. When I go to Gamestop, a typical used game costs more than the equivalent game on Steam, usually much more. I know people are wedded to the whole "I want to be able to resell it" thing, but sometimes the means don't generate the ends.
Thank you for the correction. I have to say I'm very surprised that this is new, especially as I always assumed Google did a lot of cross site tracking, regardless of whether it was Google owned, or just something that had Adsense on it. Most of us have had the experience of browsing a particular site for products and then finding that (what we assume is) Adsense serves up ads for those products everywhere else.
I agree with your sentiment that Google is being up-front about this, and that's positive.
What's triggering this?
Thank you. I need to figure out how to make a useful bug report, but I will do that.
As the sibling says, Google used to do it better. I'd probably use Altavista if it was still available.
While I can't agree that the memory problems are solved, having read your presentation I have to thank you for the good work you're doing to make Firefox usable again.
People are not being malicious when they say they're still noticing the problems. I don't know if the average Mozilla developer simply loads up a bunch of text only pages and says "Wow, it's fast now" or what exactly, but there's a gulf between what some are saying about Firefox being fixed, and the experience of the rest of us. Nobody's trying to "punish" Firefox by pointing it out, it's just we want a stable, smooth, browser, and we want it to be Firefox, and we're getting upset because Firefox used to be that, and isn't today.
My experience: I can't load Yahoo Mail for any length of time in Firefox without it turning to mush. If I leave Firefox open for a couple of days with mostly static tabs, twitter excepting, and make the mistake of using other applications, it'll turn to mush.
And by mush I mean swap hell when you try to scroll a web page, that kind of thing.
This isn't just happening on my 1.5Gb VM at work or 1Gb Netbook, it's happening on my 8Gb freshly installed no-profile-other-than-that-produced-by-Firefox-sync no-extensions-even-AdBlock Ubuntu machine.
So... look, if we didn't love Firefox, we wouldn't be upset. I feel dirty, and without the tools I want to use, when I use Chrome, but the reality is that I keep a Chrome window open at all times and use that for much of my regular browsing.
So... thank you for the work you're doing. Don't let the fact people are still criticizing Firefox's memory issues mean that your work isn't appreciated. I appreciate you hunting the wolves, just understand it doesn't matter that the town crier is saying they're gone, I was attacked by one just a few hours ago, so they're obviously out there.
Benchmarks are one thing, real life is another. I'm having to restart Firefox on a regular basis on my BRAND NEW EIGHT GIGABYTE LAPTOP. That's right:
So if you're about to whine "But Squiggy! It must be your profile! And you need to get with the program and have 4G of RAM", there's your answer. I don't want to hear it.
I really don't understand people like you who insist there isn't a problem when:
You think we're making it up? You think everyone's just switching to Chrome for the hell of it? Clue: they're not switching because it's more compatible, or more user friendly, or has more features. Because nobody outside of a Google diehard would ever argue such a thing.
We use Firefox for a bit. Some time goes by. Maybe we launch another application. Perhaps we view a PDF. And then it starts. It takes a second or more for Firefox to notice we clicked on something. The scrollbar is no longer real time. Switching a tab causes nothing to happen for ten seconds. We try closing tabs. We go to "about:memory" and hit every button. It seems... slightly faster. Or was that our imagination? Hmmm, it's gone slow again.
I'm giving up. I downloaded Firefox 3.6 from Mozilla's website last night. I'm going to make it my default browser.
Leaving aside established players (Yahoo), and companies with enough clout to get things done (Microsoft) there's at least Baidu(sp?) and Yandex might differ in opinion on the viability of creating search engines and making them popular.
And, to be quite honest with you, making a crawler and building a search engine around it doesn't take a lot of money if you're not likely to see a lot of traffic, so it is something someone can experiment with, expecting only to see a few thousand users a month. Hell, if you wanted to, you could relatively easily take on Google with a product-for-product match. Webmail? There's open source tools to do that, for example. Social networking? Slide a custom theme onto a Wordpress install and you're half way done.
And here's the kicker: if you do this, you can get Google to "pay for it". You could fund the entire thing using an Adsense account.
Why, then, are few people doing this?
Well, most of the time it's because it's assumed that, while Google's search might be just awful right now, it'll eventually be fixed by the time you or I have put together something half decent - and putting something together that's better than Altavista is hard. So the only people putting together alternatives to Google are those who are trying to do something massively different, and it's the massively different bit that's usually tripping them up.
Yes, people are always coming up with new search engines and then disappearing off of the map. Usually it's because those search engines are crap. And often it's because they're just not marketed and managed correctly. Google's dominance rarely has anything to do with it - Google was once a new search engine, back when we all used Yahoo's directories and Altavista's searchs.
That's not actually true. There's a box you can uncheck on the initial signup page that allows you to opt out of creating a profile, and, further, even if you create one, you can immediately delete it.
But yes, Slashdot did report, falsely, that very allegation earlier today, and it rather emphasizes my point: a lot of bogus negative stories about a company that's made a lot of enemies lately.
Can we limit criticizing Google to things it actually does, for example, it's awful search engine?