SQLite databases are a single file, so backing up your bookmarks should be the same... copy the file.
I wonder if there is a password on the database. If not it could lead to bookmark injection attacks from other programs you install (that could also happen with the bookmarks.html file) like happens with IE. I think this is a great opportunity to create a bookmarks file that can't be altered unless you type in a password. Perhaps the SQLite password can be set during install and altered from within Firefox's preferences. It could be a keyring password that also gives you access to your saved site passwords, sort of like Opera and Konqueror.
FWIW, I am using yesterday's trunk build and there doesn't appear to be any memory problem at all. With several Firefox windows open each with a few tabs the firefox-bin process is using 65 MB RAM. This is on Ubuntu Dapper.
Grab a nightly trunk build and it's quite a bit closer to the reference rendering. I believe the trunk is what's going to be Firefox 3. It has the newer Gecko.
They'll just put it into a pill you can buy at the pharmacy like any other health supplement. I take 4 grams of vitamin C daily and you don't see me eating a dozen oranges every day.
Exactly. I started using Debian because not only are the packages the best in the world, but it's easy to get things working. Now I'm beta testing VMWare Server because that makes it even easier. I created a few virtual machines (one LAMP, one Ruby on Rails/Lighty, one database-only, etc) and can have them running in less than ten minutes + the time it takes to do any specific configuration for whatever app goes on there, which is usually only a few minutes. The VMs are configured to auto-update themselves from Debian's repositories every night, so out of the box I just run apt-get to update from when I made the VM and it's all set to go.
I used to compile every major package, back when I didn't know as much about Linux or being a sysadmin. Now that I know what I'm doing I have the confidence needed to use a binary package manager to its fullest.
"I just want to use CSS, and plug the whole thing into a database."
I'm confused. CSS works with HTML to do page layout. Ruby on Rails uses template which are written in HTML and CSS just like any other web page.
As far as just plugging it into the database, I suppose Rails is as close as you're going to get unless you just want to use a Content Management System (try joomla if you want a CMS). With Rails you build your database backend, then create a few lines of code to have Rails pull out the data and put it into the template. You can use the scaffolding feature to quickly create input forms, which might work fine as-is if you just want a quick way to drop text onto the site.
Give it a try and you'll find it can meet just about any needs. The HTML templates are something like JSP where you drop your data into an HTML page, so there is no limit on RoR site designs.
You'll find that most of the time Rails' data handling makes your life much easier than other frameworks. When Rails doesn't quite make the right decisions about your data you can always override the default functionality with the same or less work than would be required using other frameworks.
In my opinion, Rails is a no lose situation. Actually for me coming from a PHP and Java background it's an always win situation. I get Ruby, which is a better language than PHP or Java, plus I get Rails, which is the best web app framework I've ever worked with.
That's exactly what I do. I actually record hundreds of CDs and leave them lying on the ground outside the high school. I figure I have the right to give away music I paid for.
In all seriousness, I like these taxes. I don't have a lot of extra money to pay for music, so after paying this tax I can feel good about downloading music. The Canadian courts ruled years ago that the recording industry can't sue people who've paid the tax, so it makes me happy knowing that I'm a law-abiding citizen.
And if the artists have a problem with that they can take it up with their record company.
"Ok - that's going to inconvinience the Linux users for sure. Maybe Samsung made a marketing choice to target the remaining 95% of all potential users."
But a USB mass storage device would have targetted 100% of all users. It's not like they had to decide between 95% or 5%.
I can't think of many non-computer businesses that are willing to turn away five of every hundred people who walk through their door, yet that practice is common in the computer industry.
"I was confronted with the nastiness that requires me dork with kernal parameters, setting it to emulate SCSI"
Fedora Core 4 is massively misconfigured. This stuff *does* "just work" on every other major desktop distro. I dropped Fedora after Core 2 sucked so much it made me want to puke. Suse was a breath of fresh air and now Ubuntu makes me dance with glee.
1. VMWare makes backups much easier. Just compress and copy a directory.
2. Disaster recovery. Did your main server just go down with five VMWare guests? No problem, just copy your recent backups (or from the crashed server's hard drive if it still works) to a new server's VMWare installation. No setting up all those apps and OS configurations. The VMWare host is a very simple installation that is easy to recover since no non-default apps other than VMWare are needed.
3. Do more with less hardware. Many companies try not to buy hardware unless it's abolutely necessary. It's great to be able to create a new development or testing server at the drop of a hat without needing new hardware.
"Not saying that developers overseas are worse, just that when you are rebuilding an invoicing system it is much easier if you can talk to the accounting/leasing departments directly and they can tell you immediately if something breaks."
Not only that, but programmers in general need to improve the way they communicate with end-users on in-house development. Outsourcing even next door makes communication worse. One thing I've been trying to improve on myself over the past few years is talking to the users about more than just their bug reports and software trouble. I work with them as they use a legacy system and I watch how they balance paperwork with data input and historical record retrieval. If I can learn how to do the end-user's job before I even start designing the program I'm going to write then I'm much better off later in the development cycle. I end up being able to code huge portions of the app saying to myself, "wow, this is such a great way to solve this problem!".
On the same line of thought, up until the end of 2004 I spent five years working as a programmer in the marketing department of a large company. It was a weird setup, but I learned a lot. This has been invaluable at my current position where I've taken the lead on things such as corporate branding. I have non-programming skills that nobody else at this small company has. I've routinely been asked to sit in on meetings that had nothing to do with programming because my input on other matters is respected.
Now ask yourself what computer science program teaches this stuff? None that I know of. Far too many programmers spend huge portions of their career thinking that they should only be programming. Programming is little more than the end result of applying your skills to solve business problems. If you don't understand the business you won't be able to solve those problems as well as you could.
If I can sum up my point to make it relevant to this topic, it's that you need to stop outsourcing wherever you can. The benefits to developing in-house are innumerable if the programmers take the initiative to communicate and learn about the business. This sort of communication is an ongoing process that lasts years and spans many projects, not something that can be learned by a project manager in two weeks while he or she writes down a thousand use cases and diagrams.
No, the dot-com atmosphere was well above and a few games and some nakednews.com viewing. I'm talking about a very well-respected 60+ year-old company. We didn't exactly broadcast our escapades to HR, but in general everyone at the company liked to have fun. We even found out that one female employee had her own porn web site. When word spread the firewall logs were funny ("Check out what the CEO's looking at!")
Can we all agree that this guy is lying. Of course he played for more than a few minutes. We all have our necessary distractions. I browse Slashdot. My boss downloads hockey fights and forwards me Nigerian email scams (I kid you not!).
Every good manager knows that employees need a bit of time to themselves. Just look at Google's policy for working on personal projects and what a great benefit that policy is to both Google and its employees.
At my last job we had short Unreal Tournamet sessions one day a week and nakednews.com viewings in the morning, and everybody was really happy with their job. Everybody got a lot of great work done.
You definitely need to standardize, but don't do it on one language. I've been programming for a decade and I have yet to meet a language that did everything I could ever want a language to do.
So, decide what sorts of different problems your programmers have to solve and which kinds of applications they create. If you have teams in charge of different areas then it's safe for them to choose their own language(s). For instance, your web programmers might want PHP, Ruby and Java, so let them do it. Don't let them pick some unknown language, though.
Depending on how diverse your programming tasks are you can probably standardize on three or four languages that do everything you need. Say, Java, C, Perl and PHP. Maybe throw Ruby or Python in there as well, but having Perl, Ruby and Python is kind of overkill on similar languages. Also make sure you actually choose languages that make sense. Don't decide to throw out PHP because your web programmers can use Java because if their work can be done with PHP then they'll get more work done with PHP than if they used Java.
Many children can hear electronic devices such as TVs, but most lose this ability in their teens or twenties. It's just a high frequency sound.
As for the AC who replied to you about being able to tell when his cell phone is about to ring, he's also hearing the high-pitched sound of the phone coming out of standby mode. It's just like what happens when a TV is turned on.
Everywhere looks favourable when you compare it to Manchester.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
"Opera... has more functionality out of the box than Firefox."
Firefox has *never* been about out-of-the-box features. In fact, the entire reason why the extension system exists is so users can choose which advanced features they want rather than having everything included in the browser by default.
"Opera has always been the "browser innovator". Most features in Firefox were available in Opera ages before Firefox did it"
A few features were present in Opera before Firefox, but certainly not most. I'll give you tabs, but what about Web Developer, live RSS bookmarks, advanced javascript debugger, etc? Firefox, both through the browser and through extensions, has innovated the web browser more than anybody since Netscape. Look at AdBlock, GreaseMonkey and ColorZilla... I know many people who would be lost without those extensions.
It's simply not fair to compare Firefox without extensions when they are such an important part of the browser. Once you do compare extensions it's plainly obvious that no other browser comes close to matching Firefox's featureset.
Slashdot Mirror
SQLite databases are a single file, so backing up your bookmarks should be the same... copy the file.
I wonder if there is a password on the database. If not it could lead to bookmark injection attacks from other programs you install (that could also happen with the bookmarks.html file) like happens with IE. I think this is a great opportunity to create a bookmarks file that can't be altered unless you type in a password. Perhaps the SQLite password can be set during install and altered from within Firefox's preferences. It could be a keyring password that also gives you access to your saved site passwords, sort of like Opera and Konqueror.
FWIW, I am using yesterday's trunk build and there doesn't appear to be any memory problem at all. With several Firefox windows open each with a few tabs the firefox-bin process is using 65 MB RAM. This is on Ubuntu Dapper.
Grab a nightly trunk build and it's quite a bit closer to the reference rendering. I believe the trunk is what's going to be Firefox 3. It has the newer Gecko.
They'll just put it into a pill you can buy at the pharmacy like any other health supplement. I take 4 grams of vitamin C daily and you don't see me eating a dozen oranges every day.
Exactly. I started using Debian because not only are the packages the best in the world, but it's easy to get things working. Now I'm beta testing VMWare Server because that makes it even easier. I created a few virtual machines (one LAMP, one Ruby on Rails/Lighty, one database-only, etc) and can have them running in less than ten minutes + the time it takes to do any specific configuration for whatever app goes on there, which is usually only a few minutes. The VMs are configured to auto-update themselves from Debian's repositories every night, so out of the box I just run apt-get to update from when I made the VM and it's all set to go.
I used to compile every major package, back when I didn't know as much about Linux or being a sysadmin. Now that I know what I'm doing I have the confidence needed to use a binary package manager to its fullest.
I was corrupted by VB in my youth. It really does teach you bad programming practices.
Go with Ruby. It's such a lovely language.
Try emailing a public contact at Samba and see if they can give you any advice. They obviously had to figure this out a long time ago.
You could also contact a lawyer.
"I just want to use CSS, and plug the whole thing into a database."
I'm confused. CSS works with HTML to do page layout. Ruby on Rails uses template which are written in HTML and CSS just like any other web page.
As far as just plugging it into the database, I suppose Rails is as close as you're going to get unless you just want to use a Content Management System (try joomla if you want a CMS). With Rails you build your database backend, then create a few lines of code to have Rails pull out the data and put it into the template. You can use the scaffolding feature to quickly create input forms, which might work fine as-is if you just want a quick way to drop text onto the site.
Give it a try and you'll find it can meet just about any needs. The HTML templates are something like JSP where you drop your data into an HTML page, so there is no limit on RoR site designs.
You'll find that most of the time Rails' data handling makes your life much easier than other frameworks. When Rails doesn't quite make the right decisions about your data you can always override the default functionality with the same or less work than would be required using other frameworks.
In my opinion, Rails is a no lose situation. Actually for me coming from a PHP and Java background it's an always win situation. I get Ruby, which is a better language than PHP or Java, plus I get Rails, which is the best web app framework I've ever worked with.
"There may be a day that there's one platform that runs on all three major OSes (Linux, Mac, Windows)."
Like... Java?
That's exactly what I do. I actually record hundreds of CDs and leave them lying on the ground outside the high school. I figure I have the right to give away music I paid for.
In all seriousness, I like these taxes. I don't have a lot of extra money to pay for music, so after paying this tax I can feel good about downloading music. The Canadian courts ruled years ago that the recording industry can't sue people who've paid the tax, so it makes me happy knowing that I'm a law-abiding citizen.
And if the artists have a problem with that they can take it up with their record company.
Thank you for explaining it to me. I will happily pay whatever it takes to not hear pop music. I wonder if I can pay for some dead air radio stations?
"Ok - that's going to inconvinience the Linux users for sure.
Maybe Samsung made a marketing choice to target the remaining
95% of all potential users."
But a USB mass storage device would have targetted 100% of all users. It's not like they had to decide between 95% or 5%.
I can't think of many non-computer businesses that are willing to turn away five of every hundred people who walk through their door, yet that practice is common in the computer industry.
"I was confronted with the nastiness that requires me dork with kernal parameters, setting it to emulate SCSI"
Fedora Core 4 is massively misconfigured. This stuff *does* "just work" on every other major desktop distro. I dropped Fedora after Core 2 sucked so much it made me want to puke. Suse was a breath of fresh air and now Ubuntu makes me dance with glee.
Why virtualize?
1. VMWare makes backups much easier. Just compress and copy a directory.
2. Disaster recovery. Did your main server just go down with five VMWare guests? No problem, just copy your recent backups (or from the crashed server's hard drive if it still works) to a new server's VMWare installation. No setting up all those apps and OS configurations. The VMWare host is a very simple installation that is easy to recover since no non-default apps other than VMWare are needed.
3. Do more with less hardware. Many companies try not to buy hardware unless it's abolutely necessary. It's great to be able to create a new development or testing server at the drop of a hat without needing new hardware.
"Steve Jobs has the power to dictate everything about how, when, where, and on what you run his sortware."
No, Apple can enforce their rights under copyright law and that's it. They don't own the copy you have purchased... they just own the copyright.
I bet they'd sell more, but G rated 'adult entertainment' will be a hard sell. So much for Mario.
"Not saying that developers overseas are worse, just that when you are rebuilding an invoicing system it is much easier if you can talk to the accounting/leasing departments directly and they can tell you immediately if something breaks."
Not only that, but programmers in general need to improve the way they communicate with end-users on in-house development. Outsourcing even next door makes communication worse. One thing I've been trying to improve on myself over the past few years is talking to the users about more than just their bug reports and software trouble. I work with them as they use a legacy system and I watch how they balance paperwork with data input and historical record retrieval. If I can learn how to do the end-user's job before I even start designing the program I'm going to write then I'm much better off later in the development cycle. I end up being able to code huge portions of the app saying to myself, "wow, this is such a great way to solve this problem!".
On the same line of thought, up until the end of 2004 I spent five years working as a programmer in the marketing department of a large company. It was a weird setup, but I learned a lot. This has been invaluable at my current position where I've taken the lead on things such as corporate branding. I have non-programming skills that nobody else at this small company has. I've routinely been asked to sit in on meetings that had nothing to do with programming because my input on other matters is respected.
Now ask yourself what computer science program teaches this stuff? None that I know of. Far too many programmers spend huge portions of their career thinking that they should only be programming. Programming is little more than the end result of applying your skills to solve business problems. If you don't understand the business you won't be able to solve those problems as well as you could.
If I can sum up my point to make it relevant to this topic, it's that you need to stop outsourcing wherever you can. The benefits to developing in-house are innumerable if the programmers take the initiative to communicate and learn about the business. This sort of communication is an ongoing process that lasts years and spans many projects, not something that can be learned by a project manager in two weeks while he or she writes down a thousand use cases and diagrams.
"Ahh, the dot-com atmosphere."
No, the dot-com atmosphere was well above and a few games and some nakednews.com viewing. I'm talking about a very well-respected 60+ year-old company. We didn't exactly broadcast our escapades to HR, but in general everyone at the company liked to have fun. We even found out that one female employee had her own porn web site. When word spread the firewall logs were funny ("Check out what the CEO's looking at!")
Can we all agree that this guy is lying. Of course he played for more than a few minutes. We all have our necessary distractions. I browse Slashdot. My boss downloads hockey fights and forwards me Nigerian email scams (I kid you not!).
Every good manager knows that employees need a bit of time to themselves. Just look at Google's policy for working on personal projects and what a great benefit that policy is to both Google and its employees.
At my last job we had short Unreal Tournamet sessions one day a week and nakednews.com viewings in the morning, and everybody was really happy with their job. Everybody got a lot of great work done.
You definitely need to standardize, but don't do it on one language. I've been programming for a decade and I have yet to meet a language that did everything I could ever want a language to do.
So, decide what sorts of different problems your programmers have to solve and which kinds of applications they create. If you have teams in charge of different areas then it's safe for them to choose their own language(s). For instance, your web programmers might want PHP, Ruby and Java, so let them do it. Don't let them pick some unknown language, though.
Depending on how diverse your programming tasks are you can probably standardize on three or four languages that do everything you need. Say, Java, C, Perl and PHP. Maybe throw Ruby or Python in there as well, but having Perl, Ruby and Python is kind of overkill on similar languages. Also make sure you actually choose languages that make sense. Don't decide to throw out PHP because your web programmers can use Java because if their work can be done with PHP then they'll get more work done with PHP than if they used Java.
Many children can hear electronic devices such as TVs, but most lose this ability in their teens or twenties. It's just a high frequency sound.
As for the AC who replied to you about being able to tell when his cell phone is about to ring, he's also hearing the high-pitched sound of the phone coming out of standby mode. It's just like what happens when a TV is turned on.
Everywhere looks favourable when you compare it to Manchester.
"Opera ... has more functionality out of the box than Firefox."
Firefox has *never* been about out-of-the-box features. In fact, the entire reason why the extension system exists is so users can choose which advanced features they want rather than having everything included in the browser by default.
"Opera has always been the "browser innovator". Most features in Firefox were available in Opera ages before Firefox did it"
A few features were present in Opera before Firefox, but certainly not most. I'll give you tabs, but what about Web Developer, live RSS bookmarks, advanced javascript debugger, etc? Firefox, both through the browser and through extensions, has innovated the web browser more than anybody since Netscape. Look at AdBlock, GreaseMonkey and ColorZilla... I know many people who would be lost without those extensions.
It's simply not fair to compare Firefox without extensions when they are such an important part of the browser. Once you do compare extensions it's plainly obvious that no other browser comes close to matching Firefox's featureset.
"Personally, I find the idea of paying a levy on every piece of media I *could* use to pirate music repugnant."
Is it worse than suing children and grandmothers after they download a few songs... or don't download them as the case may be?