offering paid downloads of OSS with no additional support or anything is wrong
I disagree, strongly; the software developer has intentionally chosen to allow it--and allowing sales is the #1 bullet point in the definition of what OSS is, it's not some hidden surprise.
Some of the licenses allow for people to charge for distributing the software.
All of the accepted free software and open-source software allows this--it's a requirement to be called open-source or to widely be considered free software in the GNU sense. Indeed, not allowing commercial distribution/use was the major reason that the old Qt license was considered non-free.
Guaranteeing that right is the very first clause of both the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition. And the FSF has a similar stance, saying in their Free Software Definition "A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution."
"IANAL but I don't think you can go around selling Mozilla-branded items without permission from the Mozilla folks."
This seems to be an accurate view of the law.
It seems technically accurate, but it's somewhat misleading in this case since Mozilla has granted blanket permission for the trademark to be used when distributing unaltered copies of their software.
Amen. I see a lot of people touting transparent windows saying "I can put my editor on top of the docs and read through it!", when I've done the same thing by having the docs on top of my editor (with the bottom of the editor where I'm mostly working visible) for years.
Note that the "menubar at the top of the screen" wart also basically precludes focus-follows-mouse, since if you have a window at the bottom of the screen and cross another to get to the menus, the focus (and top menus) would change.
[Don't even get me started on conflating focus/blur with raise/lower; for years with Netscape 4 I wasn't sure where all these pop-under ads that people were talking about came from, until I realized that some ads would pop up but all my windows would lose focus--Javascript has (or had) no "lower" window method, just "blur". Newer browser have overloaded blur to do blur/lower, sadly.]
So, what you're basically saying is that to get the benefits of OpenGL accelerated desktops, you need a supported card?
No, I'm responding to some else's assertion that an OpenGL desktop somehow makes hardware support simpler--it is, in fact, much more complex to develop such support both technically and politically, and it's more complex for the end-user who just wants their graphics to work out of the box.
And I'm pointing out that compositing is completely orthogonal to 3D on the desktop; 2D compositing managers are perfectly viable.
The other benefits aren't benefits of 3D support per se, but merely side-effects of the relative performance of 2D and 3D hardware; not only has 3D support gotten better in the last 10 years, but sophisticated 2D primitives have largely stagnated and even declined. It is completely reasonable to move to using the 3D rendering technology for exactly that reason, but it's certainly not some OpenGL pixie dust that makes your hardware problems vanish, your desktop shiny, and your children well-mannered.
* Zooming in on any part of the desktop while still being able to interact with it (for the visually impared, this is HUGE)
This doesn't require OpenGL, a 2D compositing desktop does it fine.
* Hardware support beomes much simpler.
Simply untrue; witness the dearth of OpenGL drivers out there for Linux, BSD, et al. Manufacturers are unwilling to release 3d specs for their cards, which makes hardware support much more complex.
* Window manager interaction involves less CPU * SVG rendering can go straight to OpenGL for better rendering performance * Support for alpha blending (for PNG, anti-aliasing, gimp, etc.) is much lower overhead and easier to support universally
Depend on the 2D and 3D capabilities of the card, but probably true on machines which have a supported 3D card.
Deliberate feature locking is never going to benefit the end-customer anyhow, so they have little motivation to purchase a non-OEM copy of anything but 'Ultimate'.
Money is a strong motivator, and presumably Ultimate is going to cost more than Premium.
Nope, Linux user. Drag and drop was my first instinct, but there is no way to open multiple panes at once so that you can drag from one destination to the other. I don't have itunes in front of me right now, but the pane that you can drop to was not obvious from looking at the UI--and you can't have that pane open while the view of your music (on the computer drive) is open (or if you can, it wasn't obvious how to do it). So to organize music within itunes, you'd have to go to the files on computer pane, drag to the ipod tag (which is, IMO, counterintuitive--tabs are not a common drop destination) then switch to the ipod tag and drag things around to organize them.
Once we got it figured out, using a file explorer as a source with the ipod tab open in itunes works just fine. It's a perfectly workable UI once you know your way around it. It's just not particularly intuitive.
I think there's a market for more than one music jukebox, but I think nobody besides Apple has really done it right yet, UI gaffes nonwithstanding.
I think the Rio Karma was pretty good, but the ipod is certainly among the better ones.
a. You may not use the Software on any non-PC product or any embedded or device versions of the above operating systems, including, but not limited to, (A) mobile devices, set top boxes (STB), handhelds, phones, web pads, tablets and Tablet PCs that are not running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, game consoles, TVs, DVD players, media centers (including Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors), electronic billboards or other digital signage, internet appliances or other internet-connected devices, PDAs, medical devices, ATMs, telematic devices, gaming machines, home automation systems, kiosks, remote control devices, or any other consumer electronics device, (B) operator-based mobile, cable, satellite, or television systems, (C) other closed system devices, or (D) any operating system that is not an Authorized Operating System.
I suspect most of the Flash-Haters hate it for what it does, and not because it could be replaced by another standards-compliant, but equally annoying technology.
Rather a lot hate it since for some reason people write sites that rely on it, despite the fact that Flash is not free (forget open) for many users, and is not usable by many.
Most businesses I've worked at do not allow flash players to be installed, because the audit terms are very nebulous ("You agree that Macromedia may audit your use of the Software for compliance with these terms at any time, upon reasonable notice.") and open up the possibility of Macromedia getting access to your internal machines.
And use is completely forbidden on "mobile devices, set top boxes (STB), handhelds, phones, web pads, tablets and Tablet PCs that are not running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, game consoles, TVs, DVD players, media centers".
The Music Store is not iTunes' "killer feature." Ease of use, a basically seamless interface, and tight integration with the iPod are.
iTunes and ease of use in the same sentence? Gaaaa. Even experienced software developers have a large rampup period learning its arcane interface, and it doesn't make easy things easy at all--you have to know which of a large number of tabs do what, and you can't (for instance) right-click on an mp3 and say "send this to my player". There is a pane that supports dragging and dropping to the ipod, but it's nicely hidden away when you start up iTunes for the first time.
If you want to copy _all_ of the music on your machine to the ipod, that's easy at first launch. For people who have more mp3s on their machine than storage space on the ipod, that's not a good option. If you want to just copy a couple files over, it's pretty hopeless until you spend a fair amount of time muddling around to try to get the interface out of your way.
It took me a couple of hours to really feel comfortable with the basics, and I still don't know how to do some fundamental things (if I unmount the ipod, how do I remount it? I have no idea, so I wind up unplugging/replugging it). Once I figured it out, I loaded a bunch of music for my girlfriend--but the kludgy interface has relegated me to the tech support role, since there's no way she's going to be able to use it.
Now the _iPod_ interface itself is very slick, IMO that's the killer feature, with the Music Store 2nd.
The only piece of either desktop I've used that sucks down memory like that is konquerer, which crashes randomly on every 5th site I hit (and it'll load a site fine sometimes and crash on the same site at others) and leaks memory like mad if it manages to stay up. I can't fault it too much, since firefox (for me) also bleeds memory like mad and has to be restarted every couple of days, though epiphany is memory-stable (pointing to the problem being in XUL or some other front-end piece rather than gecko) and the UI is far more responsive than firefox's.
Gnome certainly isn't lightweight, but it's memory-stable for me (I can run for months at a time without restarting it or having severe memory problems).
I've basically switched to epiphany (with all the crap it drags in) + XFCE since I don't use a lot of Gnome whizz-bang anyway and XFCE is much lighter weight.
It certainly seems to me like a case of YMMV depending on exactly which versions and libraries you're using--I know plenty of people who have no problems with KDE and can't keep Gnome up, and vice-versa.:-/
A closer analogue is the American PBS (Public Broadcasting System). This is partially funded through taxes and corporate sponsors, and partially through private donors. Normally there are no commercials, although before and after (not during) a program there will be a "sponsored by a grant from the Ford Motor Company" bit (that can't mention any of Ford's products).
During "pledge weeks" there will be interruptions during the program where they beg for money, often offering trinkets (coffee mugs, shirts, DVDs of popular PBS programs, etc) for people who pledge certain amounts.
PBS produces NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (formerly the Macneil/Lehrer News Hour), science shows (Nature, Nova), Ken Burns documentaries (The Civil War, Baseball, etc), music/arts shows (Austin City Limits, Soundstage), historical/literary dramas (e.g. Masterpiece Theater), interview shows like Charlie Rose, some kid's shows (e.g. Sesame Street, Mr Rogers, Teletubbies, Arthur, Barney) and a diverse host of other shows. They also license some BBC content (including BBC News in the very early morning) and other stuff.
There's also the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which operates similarly and funds local public television.
Windows NT was designed from the obtain to have Orange book B2 certification
This is true, but:
1. Windows NT was only certified B2 secure when not connected to a network.
2. Orange book isn't related to the type of security we're talking about; the certification says nothing about whether there are bugs in the system allowing remote attacks or even local privilege escalations. It only talks about how the system is nominally designed, and even there it's more about logging who does what on the system and forbidding things like copying and pasting between applications running at different security levels.
And if you don't have the staff who can use that tool then what? Hire a dozen new people who know nothing about your company or how it operates and sit them down and expect them to magically write great code that does just what you want?
Sorry mate , in the real world you can't always pick the best tool for staffing reasons and until computers can program themselves thats not going to change.
Have you ever seriously met a good programmer who couldn't pick up a new language quickly? I mean, short of switching to Prolog or SML-NJ or something else fairly unusual, any decent programmer who knows a couple of C, C++, Fortran, Java, VB, C#, Python, Perl, Ruby, Ada, Lisp, Smalltalk, etc isn't going to have any trouble learning another from the list and being pretty productive in a couple of days at most (and that's if you're going to one of the weirder options like Lisp or Smalltalk for someone who's never seen it before).
They're not going to be up on all the language idioms or the dark corners (heck, with C++ you can use it for 10 years and still not know the language fully, let alone the libraries), but they're going to be pretty productive, enough so that if the language was really the right tool for the job then you've probably might the right project management decision in terms of maximizing productivity.
We were able to do some mixed language solutions (C++, FORTRAN, C, perl, etc.) and they were a nightmare to maintain. in hindsight, I think it would be better to keep the apps all in one language rather than mixing.
I have to disagree on this, strongly. I don't think I've ever worked on a large application that was all in one language, and it's not very hard to maintain them as long as you structure the code properly.
1. Avoid heavyweight interfaces like CORBA, COM, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc in favor of simpler IPC solutions; sockets are fast, widely available, and much more likely to be portable and continue working with the next version of your OS/platform/development environment. Also, simpler IPC encourages you to decouple your design, which is generally a performance and maintenance win. 2. Only embed languages into the same process if there's a clear, well supported API for it and you're _positive_ it's the right way to go. Writing a perl or python extension in C is okay. Building.o files from C++ and Fortan and linking together gets to be a nightmare and is best avoided unless you have strong arguments to the contrary. 3. Don't use development environments that lock your code in; the preferred repository for your code should all be in one version-control repository, and it shouldn't be "All the Foolanguage code is done in environment X and just randomly exported to ClearCase to satisfy requirements but the _real_ code/versioning/etc is the environment X crappy internal project versioning and so you can only edit Foolanguage code with environment X".
But the last project I was on had about 100,000 lines of code, split between Java, C, python, and perl. The current one has about 300,000 lines of Python and lesser amounts of Java, PHP, shell, and C. We haven't had any problems with maintenance because of using multiple languages.
At the moment I have FF, NetBeans and OOo running that are consuming just shy of 900m between them. The thing is though their working sets are actually quite small so most of that is off on disk. It's just not really that much of an issue.
It's a major issue for me.
I have to restart FF a couple times a day because the memory footprint gets huge, it slows down, and the whole machine becomes sluggish (to the point where switching virtual desktops takes 10+ seconds, typing in gaim windows is noticeably lagged, etc). Oddly, epiphany (which is hardly a lightweight, and uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Mozilla/FF) doesn't have this problem, so I've switched to that. I _think_ FF might be leaking memory when I open/close lots of tabs but I don't know; I do know I can easily have 10-15 tabs open, close them, open more, etc when it starts up, but after a few hours it bloats to 250MB or more and opening/closing tabs gets slow. By this point, just closing FF takes 15-20 seconds. All this with FF 1.5.0.1. Anyway, since epiphany has a more responsive UI and doesn't show that problem I'm happy.
OO has massive startup time and footprint, and running it alongside other big apps causes similar problems; if I just minimize it things are okay, but then the system swaps like mad when I go back to scroll around in whatever docs I had open. When possible, I go with AbiWord to avoid that, but for some complex apps I have to suck it up.
And I'm on a reasonably modern machine with 512MB of RAM--hardly a beast, but not some dinky POS either.
I've heard (or merely always assumed) that flourescent lights take a lot of energy to "ignite" when first turned on but their energy use afterward is far lower than incandescent bulbs
This is a common belief, but in reality while they do use more power to turn on it's not very much more--only equivalent to a few seconds of the light being on.
When you turn on a fluorescent light bulb (correctly called a "lamp"), there is a very brief jump in current when the ballast charges the cathodes and causes the lamp to start. This inrush of current can be many times greater than the normal operating current of the lamp. However, the spike of current draw normally lasts no longer than 1/10th of a second, and draws the equivalent of about 5 seconds of normal operation.
A computer converts all of the energy it uses into heat
That's a "space heater", not a "computer". My computer produces light, other electromagnetic waves (802.11), sound, and airflow as well as heat. Possibly some of those are later converted to heat, but I wouldn't say the computer converts the energy it takes in to heat. And certainly a lot of the light, sound, and em leaves the house before it turns to heat--it's possible that the airflow does the same, I'm not sure.
I have no idea what fraction of the total energy this is--probably fairly small--but it's non-zero.
Having your system properly power-save when not in use is also a big win (make sure it spins down the drives and fans), as is getting a rational graphics card.
Since me and my wife stopped running our computers 24/7, our electric bill went down at least 20%
Did you not have it power-saving properly before? Once the drives spin down and the monitor shuts off, the power draw just isn't that big (unless you have a monster gaming graphics card that doesn't know how to power-save).
Slashdot Mirror
See IRC tax topic 420 - Bartering Income
http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html
They have tons of compliance officers on this, since many business do in fact do a majority of their business by barter.
offering paid downloads of OSS with no additional support or anything is wrong
I disagree, strongly; the software developer has intentionally chosen to allow it--and allowing sales is the #1 bullet point in the definition of what OSS is, it's not some hidden surprise.
Some of the licenses allow for people to charge for distributing the software.
All of the accepted free software and open-source software allows this--it's a requirement to be called open-source or to widely be considered free software in the GNU sense. Indeed, not allowing commercial distribution/use was the major reason that the old Qt license was considered non-free.
Guaranteeing that right is the very first clause of both the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition. And the FSF has a similar stance, saying in their Free Software Definition "A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution."
It seems technically accurate, but it's somewhat misleading in this case since Mozilla has granted blanket permission for the trademark to be used when distributing unaltered copies of their software.
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/poli
*No focus follows mouse
Amen. I see a lot of people touting transparent windows saying "I can put my editor on top of the docs and read through it!", when I've done the same thing by having the docs on top of my editor (with the bottom of the editor where I'm mostly working visible) for years.
Note that the "menubar at the top of the screen" wart also basically precludes focus-follows-mouse, since if you have a window at the bottom of the screen and cross another to get to the menus, the focus (and top menus) would change.
[Don't even get me started on conflating focus/blur with raise/lower; for years with Netscape 4 I wasn't sure where all these pop-under ads that people were talking about came from, until I realized that some ads would pop up but all my windows would lose focus--Javascript has (or had) no "lower" window method, just "blur". Newer browser have overloaded blur to do blur/lower, sadly.]
So, what you're basically saying is that to get the benefits of OpenGL accelerated desktops, you need a supported card?
No, I'm responding to some else's assertion that an OpenGL desktop somehow makes hardware support simpler--it is, in fact, much more complex to develop such support both technically and politically, and it's more complex for the end-user who just wants their graphics to work out of the box.
And I'm pointing out that compositing is completely orthogonal to 3D on the desktop; 2D compositing managers are perfectly viable.
The other benefits aren't benefits of 3D support per se, but merely side-effects of the relative performance of 2D and 3D hardware; not only has 3D support gotten better in the last 10 years, but sophisticated 2D primitives have largely stagnated and even declined. It is completely reasonable to move to using the 3D rendering technology for exactly that reason, but it's certainly not some OpenGL pixie dust that makes your hardware problems vanish, your desktop shiny, and your children well-mannered.
Advantages of an OpenGL desktop:
* Zooming in on any part of the desktop while still being able to interact with it (for the visually impared, this is HUGE)
This doesn't require OpenGL, a 2D compositing desktop does it fine.
* Hardware support beomes much simpler.
Simply untrue; witness the dearth of OpenGL drivers out there for Linux, BSD, et al. Manufacturers are unwilling to release 3d specs for their cards, which makes hardware support much more complex.
* Window manager interaction involves less CPU
* SVG rendering can go straight to OpenGL for better rendering performance
* Support for alpha blending (for PNG, anti-aliasing, gimp, etc.) is much lower overhead and easier to support universally
Depend on the 2D and 3D capabilities of the card, but probably true on machines which have a supported 3D card.
Deliberate feature locking is never going to benefit the end-customer anyhow, so they have little motivation to purchase a non-OEM copy of anything but 'Ultimate'.
Money is a strong motivator, and presumably Ultimate is going to cost more than Premium.
CVS is one way to go, and seriously consider it if you're going to be working on group projects.
Version control is invaluable even for individual developers. It's helped me out on personal projects more than once.
I'm going to guess that you're a Windows user
Nope, Linux user. Drag and drop was my first instinct, but there is no way to open multiple panes at once so that you can drag from one destination to the other. I don't have itunes in front of me right now, but the pane that you can drop to was not obvious from looking at the UI--and you can't have that pane open while the view of your music (on the computer drive) is open (or if you can, it wasn't obvious how to do it). So to organize music within itunes, you'd have to go to the files on computer pane, drag to the ipod tag (which is, IMO, counterintuitive--tabs are not a common drop destination) then switch to the ipod tag and drag things around to organize them.
Once we got it figured out, using a file explorer as a source with the ipod tab open in itunes works just fine. It's a perfectly workable UI once you know your way around it. It's just not particularly intuitive.
I think there's a market for more than one music jukebox, but I think nobody besides Apple has really done it right yet, UI gaffes nonwithstanding.
I think the Rio Karma was pretty good, but the ipod is certainly among the better ones.
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/lice
I suspect most of the Flash-Haters hate it for what it does, and not because it could be replaced by another standards-compliant, but equally annoying technology.
Rather a lot hate it since for some reason people write sites that rely on it, despite the fact that Flash is not free (forget open) for many users, and is not usable by many.
Most businesses I've worked at do not allow flash players to be installed, because the audit terms are very nebulous ("You agree that Macromedia may audit your use of the Software for compliance with these terms at any time, upon reasonable notice.") and open up the possibility of Macromedia getting access to your internal machines.
And use is completely forbidden on "mobile devices, set top boxes (STB), handhelds, phones, web pads, tablets and Tablet PCs that are not running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, game consoles, TVs, DVD players, media centers".
The Music Store is not iTunes' "killer feature." Ease of use, a basically seamless interface, and tight integration with the iPod are.
iTunes and ease of use in the same sentence? Gaaaa. Even experienced software developers have a large rampup period learning its arcane interface, and it doesn't make easy things easy at all--you have to know which of a large number of tabs do what, and you can't (for instance) right-click on an mp3 and say "send this to my player". There is a pane that supports dragging and dropping to the ipod, but it's nicely hidden away when you start up iTunes for the first time.
If you want to copy _all_ of the music on your machine to the ipod, that's easy at first launch. For people who have more mp3s on their machine than storage space on the ipod, that's not a good option. If you want to just copy a couple files over, it's pretty hopeless until you spend a fair amount of time muddling around to try to get the interface out of your way.
It took me a couple of hours to really feel comfortable with the basics, and I still don't know how to do some fundamental things (if I unmount the ipod, how do I remount it? I have no idea, so I wind up unplugging/replugging it). Once I figured it out, I loaded a bunch of music for my girlfriend--but the kludgy interface has relegated me to the tech support role, since there's no way she's going to be able to use it.
Now the _iPod_ interface itself is very slick, IMO that's the killer feature, with the Music Store 2nd.
They drink the real Budweiser, which, after all, is an old German beer
The real Budweiser is an old Czech beer. It's sold in the US as Czechvar.
The only piece of either desktop I've used that sucks down memory like that is konquerer, which crashes randomly on every 5th site I hit (and it'll load a site fine sometimes and crash on the same site at others) and leaks memory like mad if it manages to stay up. I can't fault it too much, since firefox (for me) also bleeds memory like mad and has to be restarted every couple of days, though epiphany is memory-stable (pointing to the problem being in XUL or some other front-end piece rather than gecko) and the UI is far more responsive than firefox's.
:-/
Gnome certainly isn't lightweight, but it's memory-stable for me (I can run for months at a time without restarting it or having severe memory problems).
I've basically switched to epiphany (with all the crap it drags in) + XFCE since I don't use a lot of Gnome whizz-bang anyway and XFCE is much lighter weight.
It certainly seems to me like a case of YMMV depending on exactly which versions and libraries you're using--I know plenty of people who have no problems with KDE and can't keep Gnome up, and vice-versa.
A closer analogue is the American PBS (Public Broadcasting System). This is partially funded through taxes and corporate sponsors, and partially through private donors. Normally there are no commercials, although before and after (not during) a program there will be a "sponsored by a grant from the Ford Motor Company" bit (that can't mention any of Ford's products).
During "pledge weeks" there will be interruptions during the program where they beg for money, often offering trinkets (coffee mugs, shirts, DVDs of popular PBS programs, etc) for people who pledge certain amounts.
PBS produces NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (formerly the Macneil/Lehrer News Hour), science shows (Nature, Nova), Ken Burns documentaries (The Civil War, Baseball, etc), music/arts shows (Austin City Limits, Soundstage), historical/literary dramas (e.g. Masterpiece Theater), interview shows like Charlie Rose, some kid's shows (e.g. Sesame Street, Mr Rogers, Teletubbies, Arthur, Barney) and a diverse host of other shows. They also license some BBC content (including BBC News in the very early morning) and other stuff.
There's also the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which operates similarly and funds local public television.
Windows NT was designed from the obtain to have Orange book B2 certification
This is true, but:
1. Windows NT was only certified B2 secure when not connected to a network.
2. Orange book isn't related to the type of security we're talking about; the certification says nothing about whether there are bugs in the system allowing remote attacks or even local privilege escalations. It only talks about how the system is nominally designed, and even there it's more about logging who does what on the system and forbidding things like copying and pasting between applications running at different security levels.
And if you don't have the staff who can use that tool then what?
Hire a dozen new people who know nothing about your company or how
it operates and sit them down and expect them to magically write great
code that does just what you want?
Sorry mate , in the real world you can't always pick the best tool
for staffing reasons and until computers can program themselves thats
not going to change.
Have you ever seriously met a good programmer who couldn't pick up a new language quickly? I mean, short of switching to Prolog or SML-NJ or something else fairly unusual, any decent programmer who knows a couple of C, C++, Fortran, Java, VB, C#, Python, Perl, Ruby, Ada, Lisp, Smalltalk, etc isn't going to have any trouble learning another from the list and being pretty productive in a couple of days at most (and that's if you're going to one of the weirder options like Lisp or Smalltalk for someone who's never seen it before).
They're not going to be up on all the language idioms or the dark corners (heck, with C++ you can use it for 10 years and still not know the language fully, let alone the libraries), but they're going to be pretty productive, enough so that if the language was really the right tool for the job then you've probably might the right project management decision in terms of maximizing productivity.
We were able to do some mixed language solutions (C++, FORTRAN, C, perl, etc.) and they were a nightmare to maintain. in hindsight, I think it would be better to keep the apps all in one language rather than mixing.
.o files from C++ and Fortan and linking together gets to be a nightmare and is best avoided unless you have strong arguments to the contrary.
I have to disagree on this, strongly. I don't think I've ever worked on a large application that was all in one language, and it's not very hard to maintain them as long as you structure the code properly.
1. Avoid heavyweight interfaces like CORBA, COM, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc in favor of simpler IPC solutions; sockets are fast, widely available, and much more likely to be portable and continue working with the next version of your OS/platform/development environment. Also, simpler IPC encourages you to decouple your design, which is generally a performance and maintenance win.
2. Only embed languages into the same process if there's a clear, well supported API for it and you're _positive_ it's the right way to go. Writing a perl or python extension in C is okay. Building
3. Don't use development environments that lock your code in; the preferred repository for your code should all be in one version-control repository, and it shouldn't be "All the Foolanguage code is done in environment X and just randomly exported to ClearCase to satisfy requirements but the _real_ code/versioning/etc is the environment X crappy internal project versioning and so you can only edit Foolanguage code with environment X".
But the last project I was on had about 100,000 lines of code, split between Java, C, python, and perl. The current one has about 300,000 lines of Python and lesser amounts of Java, PHP, shell, and C. We haven't had any problems with maintenance because of using multiple languages.
At the moment I have FF, NetBeans and OOo running that are consuming just shy of 900m between them. The thing is though their working sets are actually quite small so most of that is off on disk. It's just not really that much of an issue.
It's a major issue for me.
I have to restart FF a couple times a day because the memory footprint gets huge, it slows down, and the whole machine becomes sluggish (to the point where switching virtual desktops takes 10+ seconds, typing in gaim windows is noticeably lagged, etc). Oddly, epiphany (which is hardly a lightweight, and uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Mozilla/FF) doesn't have this problem, so I've switched to that. I _think_ FF might be leaking memory when I open/close lots of tabs but I don't know; I do know I can easily have 10-15 tabs open, close them, open more, etc when it starts up, but after a few hours it bloats to 250MB or more and opening/closing tabs gets slow. By this point, just closing FF takes 15-20 seconds. All this with FF 1.5.0.1. Anyway, since epiphany has a more responsive UI and doesn't show that problem I'm happy.
OO has massive startup time and footprint, and running it alongside other big apps causes similar problems; if I just minimize it things are okay, but then the system swaps like mad when I go back to scroll around in whatever docs I had open. When possible, I go with AbiWord to avoid that, but for some complex apps I have to suck it up.
And I'm on a reasonably modern machine with 512MB of RAM--hardly a beast, but not some dinky POS either.
As an alternative, you can have focus-follows-mouse and put the docs on top of the terminal.
One of many reasons I hate click-to-focus, autoraise, and other things that force the window with focus to also be the on top.
This is a common belief, but in reality while they do use more power to turn on it's not very much more--only equivalent to a few seconds of the light being on.
See, for instance, http://www.naturalhandyman.com/iip/infelectrical/
A computer converts all of the energy it uses into heat
That's a "space heater", not a "computer". My computer produces light, other electromagnetic waves (802.11), sound, and airflow as well as heat. Possibly some of those are later converted to heat, but I wouldn't say the computer converts the energy it takes in to heat. And certainly a lot of the light, sound, and em leaves the house before it turns to heat--it's possible that the airflow does the same, I'm not sure.
I have no idea what fraction of the total energy this is--probably fairly small--but it's non-zero.
Having your system properly power-save when not in use is also a big win (make sure it spins down the drives and fans), as is getting a rational graphics card.
Since me and my wife stopped running our computers 24/7, our electric bill went down at least 20%
Did you not have it power-saving properly before? Once the drives spin down and the monitor shuts off, the power draw just isn't that big (unless you have a monster gaming graphics card that doesn't know how to power-save).