"But, there was a lot of resistance to fixing it. What would you do in that case?"
Not what you did, which is to waste developer time and fill up bugzilla with useless postings.
In the original bug report:
"It seems sensible to increase the stack space to allow 40 instances with 10 tabs each."
So you want the firefox devs to magically give you enough RAM to have 400 web pages open at once? Your original report mentioned nothing at all about memory leaks and gave no technical details (amount of memory available etc).
You then have some useless "me too"s from people, a post from you giving no more useful information and a long post from you talking about god and your hardware buying habits, with no URLs or useful information.
Below all your posts there are one or two useful posts from other people about locating memory leaks. You provide absolutely no information of any use to the devs and again confuse memory leaks and memory consumption.
It's not resistance to fixing the problem, it's that you don't tell them what the problem is.
Look at it from the devs' point of view: they have many automated tests that perform common actions, so they are reasonably sure there are no memory leaks in the common parts of the code. You tell them "I can't open 400 web pages at once. oh, and there might be a memory leak somewhere". How does that help them at all? Add to that the fact you appear to have the Acrobat plugin open, which is closed source and a known memory hog and crash-cause and you're really not helping at all.
"Recently, I discovered that hardware firewalls have become much cheaper. I want to replace some Cisco 675 modem/firewalls, which Cisco has stopped supporting. (We use a hardware firewall for each local LAN and a software firewall for each machine.) Linksys (now owned by Cisco), NetGear, Airlink Plus, and D-Link make these firewalls. I open the home page of each of them, each in a separate instance of FireFox. Their web sites are all poorly designed and I must hunt for the product that would be appropriate."
Why post that? (assuming that is you). It's not useful information in the slightest.
"The tests run by Melissa and Sabrina are valuable in showing that the problems are not dependent on one system or OS; t"
Sabrina's and Melissa's tests weren't anything to do with memory leaks, they just showed that opening lots of firefox windows consumes memory. Not exactly news.
"This is the second crash of FireFox 0.92 on this machine. The crashes occur when going back and forth rapidly between tabs and Windows."
When windows runs out of memory, all sorts of strange things happen. I've done it lots of times doing testing: buttons disappear, applications crash etc. It's quite possible to get Linux boxes into effectively unrecoverable states as well if you run out of memory.
Also, your bug reporting style is very poor. Posting long diatribes about exactly how you get 50 tabs open is not good bug reporting style and is going to piss of the devs. Adding other bugs to the existing bug is also a bad idea.
My experience with reporting bugs (GNOME, Evolution, KDE and Openoffice mainly) has been that the developers were quick to respond, polite and helpful.
Certainly that's the way I try to handle bug reports: the reporter has gone out of their way to do what they can to help make my project better, so it's the least I can do to be polite, even if all the report consists of is "it crashed" or the Nth request for a feature I don't have time to implement.
I would be worried about the future of Firefox if this is the way they handle bugs: could you provide a link to the bug?
I guess as a newly employed, non-car-owning, non-property-owning, non-smoking remote software developer with no pension plan (yet) and not much inheritance coming my way who's just finished 7 years of university education entirely at the taxpayers' expense (I'm just old enough to have received a grant), I have a fairly rose-tinted view of the tax system in this country;)
Hmm, in fact, no you can't. Much of the interface is pretty nasty: no direct manipulation of toolbars for customisation, no graphical indication of styles.
Possibly somebody could do it with some Openoffice macros or something?
Pages does look a nice interface. That said, it is possible to virtually completely reconfigure the Openoffice interface, so someone could probably come up with a more Pages like interface (with floating palettes etc) and offer it for download. Might be a nice project to attempt.
You must have a really bad accountant if you're paying 70-80% tax. Especially considering that the overall tax burden in the UK is around 40% of GDP, with a greater share in direct taxation than most of Europe.
> And sure, let's only allow _one_ application to use the sound device at a time.
With ALSA and DMIX, any sound card can be used by any number of programs at once. I think many cards will do hardware mixing as well. ESD really isn't necessary any more at all.
The processor usage of ALSA vs ESD playing back Oggs is much lower.
Yeah, because GNOME is only developed by volunteer hermits living in caves at the moment. It's not like there are big companies paying developers' salaries to work on it or anything.
It's GPL therefore it's Free software. Whether people are paid to work on it or do it out of the goodness of their heart doesn't matter as long as their contributions are GPL.
Even if there were a net output of energy from the CPU along the I/O buses, where does that energy then go? It's converted to heat at some point in peripherals.
It's a simple energy balance. Draw an imaginary box around your computer. You have AC voltage going in at around 200W+. The only outputs of energy are heat from internal components and a tiny amount of sound which is converted to heat in the air, plus maybe 25-30mW of radio energy from your wireless card.
Assuming the computer is at steady-state temperature, power in must equal power out.
The point is that the NHS was very badly underfunded in the past, so increased funding was clearly needed. British people want free health care: the National Insurance premiums are based on your ability to pay and available to everyone.
Nobody in the UK *wants* to pay more taxes. However, people have made the logical connection between more funding and better services, so are prepared to pay higer taxes if it brings them a benefit. This happened back in 1997 when the right-wing Conservatives were thrown out after decades of heading towards a more US style small government, free market approach to government.
Our taxes are still lower than much of Europe. On a £30,000 salary, you could expect to pay £5300 tax and £2800 National Insurance (health and state pension contributions)
There is something of a warm and fuzzy feeling about the NHS - it was founded in the socialist reforms after world war 2 that aimed to create a more equitable society out of the incredibly poor state the war left the UK in.
The NHS is good enough for most purposes: waiting times are down, staff recruitment is up. I went into my local hospital with a broken arm on a busy afternoon, was seen straight away and was on my way home within a couple of hours. The state of dental care is another matter, of course, and so is the whole MRSA/nursing staff not knowing how to wash their hands thing. I don't know many people with private health insurance.
I got my job (starting in April) almost entirely because of my work on a FOSS project. The company had donated some hardware to help development a year ago and basically said "don't forget us when you come to job hunting". A year later, I send them an email and they hire me after reviewing the current state of the project source code. It's a good way to build up a portfolio of code to show to an employer, it shows dedication and organisation and that you enjoy development. Of course, the fact that employers can see your source code can hurt your chances too;)
There are five terrestrial, analogue, free-to-air, channels. Several parts of the country only receive four of those, though. Two of those are BBC (1+2)
There are also a load of digital channels, free-to-air if you own a set top box ($80). Several parts of the country - like Sussex, one of the most densely populated parts of the country outside the major cities - can't receive this at all. Most of the digital channels are endless repeats of the same few shows, however.
I live in an area where I can just about receive digital TV, although with frequent terrible reception. Channel 5 on analogue is a bit flaky, too.
Basically, added together, on a good day there might be an hour or less of interesting TV that isn't a show about buying houses, makeovers or emigrating.
Advertising is becoming gradually more intrusive: 'sponsored' shows, trails for new shows bookending every advert break. Even the BBC has endless TV licence, digital TV and new show trailers despite being "advert free".
I understand that it must be tricky with so many developers in the project to get decisions made. I find it difficult enough with my project, and I'm the only developer! I just felt the quote was indicative of the development mindset that led me to switch to GNOME.
I'm glad that KDE is taking this kind of issue more seriously - I switched to GNOME a while back, but I still check out KDE every so often. I think I still have about 30 lines of code in KImageEffect somewhere.
I'm not sure I'd have the time for working on KDE - I already run my own project and have a pile of feature requests going back months I never seem to get round to.
I lurk on the KDE optimize list and came across the funniest comment in an email there the other day that probably goes a long way to explaining the mess that is KControl. They were discussing reducing disk accesses for displaying icons (a worthwhile cause) by building a database of their location:
"Do you think that it can make sense to add an option in KDE Performance -> System to Cache icons location?"
It's just like they have some instinct to add options rather than taking decisions. Just profile the system with and without the cache on and if it helps, enable it. If building the database takes some time, spawn it as a low-priority background task. Don't push all that work off onto the user.
I really fail to see why they would bother spending $3 million on Enterprise, or any star trek series. Why not take the money and do something original? A William Gibson-esque cyberpunk series or something.
Why should every TV series go on forever? There have been 98 episodes of Enterprise already. What's the benefit in carrying on. What interesting story lines are there left that 100 hours of shows hasn't already used up?
TNG, Voyager, DS9 all had about one season's worth of good episodes over their entire run. Most of the other episodes were either "remodulate the phase tachyon pulse" endings, dull moralising about the superiority of "the human way", bad soap opera or just plain stupid (any borg episode).
Give up on the Star Trek universe and go spend the money on some new ideas.
Look at what happened to Friends, Buffy, The Simpsons, Angel, Frasier, ER, Sex and the City. Early on, all were excellent (or at least interesting): later seasons become formulaic, repetive and dull. There is a limited number of interesting stories that can be told with one set of characters in a fixed universe.
People actually watch Stargate? I thought every episode I watched of SG-1 was so bad it made the original film look good. It used to be on in some filler slot over here (UK), sunday afternoon or something, but I think it's even slipped from that now.
Oh, wait, looking at the TV guide, it's been replaced with a new series of Enterprise - something about "the mysterious Xindi". Bizarre.
What difference does torrenting the shows make? Unless you're one of the people who's part of the monitoring system (Nielsen rating in the US?) whether you watch the show or not has no effect at all on its ratings. There's no magical transmitter that sends your watching info to the networks in every TV.
Slashdot Mirror
"But, there was a lot of resistance to fixing it. What would you do in that case?"
Not what you did, which is to waste developer time and fill up bugzilla with useless postings.
In the original bug report:
"It seems sensible to increase the stack space to allow 40 instances with 10 tabs
each."
So you want the firefox devs to magically give you enough RAM to have 400 web pages open at once? Your original report mentioned nothing at all about memory leaks and gave no technical details (amount of memory available etc).
You then have some useless "me too"s from people, a post from you giving no more useful information and a long post from you talking about god and your hardware buying habits, with no URLs or useful information.
Below all your posts there are one or two useful posts from other people about locating memory leaks. You provide absolutely no information of any use to the devs and again confuse memory leaks and memory consumption.
It's not resistance to fixing the problem, it's that you don't tell them what the problem is.
Look at it from the devs' point of view: they have many automated tests that perform common actions, so they are reasonably sure there are no memory leaks in the common parts of the code. You tell them "I can't open 400 web pages at once. oh, and there might be a memory leak somewhere". How does that help them at all? Add to that the fact you appear to have the Acrobat plugin open, which is closed source and a known memory hog and crash-cause and you're really not helping at all.
"Recently, I discovered that hardware firewalls have become much cheaper. I want
to replace some Cisco 675 modem/firewalls, which Cisco has stopped supporting.
(We use a hardware firewall for each local LAN and a software firewall for each
machine.) Linksys (now owned by Cisco), NetGear, Airlink Plus, and D-Link make
these firewalls. I open the home page of each of them, each in a separate
instance of FireFox. Their web sites are all poorly designed and I must hunt for
the product that would be appropriate."
Why post that? (assuming that is you). It's not useful information in the slightest.
"The tests run by Melissa and Sabrina are valuable in showing that the problems
are not dependent on one system or OS; t"
Sabrina's and Melissa's tests weren't anything to do with memory leaks, they just showed that opening lots of firefox windows consumes memory. Not exactly news.
"This is the second crash of FireFox 0.92 on this machine. The crashes occur when
going back and forth rapidly between tabs and Windows."
That's a different bug report.
When windows runs out of memory, all sorts of strange things happen. I've done it lots of times doing testing: buttons disappear, applications crash etc. It's quite possible to get Linux boxes into effectively unrecoverable states as well if you run out of memory.
Also, your bug reporting style is very poor. Posting long diatribes about exactly how you get 50 tabs open is not good bug reporting style and is going to piss of the devs. Adding other bugs to the existing bug is also a bad idea.
My experience with reporting bugs (GNOME, Evolution, KDE and Openoffice mainly) has been that the developers were quick to respond, polite and helpful.
Certainly that's the way I try to handle bug reports: the reporter has gone out of their way to do what they can to help make my project better, so it's the least I can do to be polite, even if all the report consists of is "it crashed" or the Nth request for a feature I don't have time to implement.
I would be worried about the future of Firefox if this is the way they handle bugs: could you provide a link to the bug?
I guess as a newly employed, non-car-owning, non-property-owning, non-smoking remote software developer with no pension plan (yet) and not much inheritance coming my way who's just finished 7 years of university education entirely at the taxpayers' expense (I'm just old enough to have received a grant), I have a fairly rose-tinted view of the tax system in this country ;)
Hmm, in fact, no you can't. Much of the interface is pretty nasty: no direct manipulation of toolbars for customisation, no graphical indication of styles.
Possibly somebody could do it with some Openoffice macros or something?
Pages does look a nice interface. That said, it is possible to virtually completely reconfigure the Openoffice interface, so someone could probably come up with a more Pages like interface (with floating palettes etc) and offer it for download. Might be a nice project to attempt.
Where did I say we don't pay enough tax?
You must have a really bad accountant if you're paying 70-80% tax. Especially considering that the overall tax burden in the UK is around 40% of GDP, with a greater share in direct taxation than most of Europe.
What is this "Unix" of which you speak. Is that some kind of old-style Linux distro? ;)
> And sure, let's only allow _one_ application to use the sound device at a time.
With ALSA and DMIX, any sound card can be used by any number of programs at once. I think many cards will do hardware mixing as well. ESD really isn't necessary any more at all.
The processor usage of ALSA vs ESD playing back Oggs is much lower.
Yeah, because GNOME is only developed by volunteer hermits living in caves at the moment. It's not like there are big companies paying developers' salaries to work on it or anything.
It's GPL therefore it's Free software. Whether people are paid to work on it or do it out of the goodness of their heart doesn't matter as long as their contributions are GPL.
Even if there were a net output of energy from the CPU along the I/O buses, where does that energy then go? It's converted to heat at some point in peripherals.
It's a simple energy balance. Draw an imaginary box around your computer. You have AC voltage going in at around 200W+. The only outputs of energy are heat from internal components and a tiny amount of sound which is converted to heat in the air, plus maybe 25-30mW of radio energy from your wireless card.
Assuming the computer is at steady-state temperature, power in must equal power out.
You don't pay VAT on everything, so it's not "17.5% of the remainder". Council tax is a ridiculous system, though.
The point is that the NHS was very badly underfunded in the past, so increased funding was clearly needed. British people want free health care: the National Insurance premiums are based on your ability to pay and available to everyone.
Nobody in the UK *wants* to pay more taxes. However, people have made the logical connection between more funding and better services, so are prepared to pay higer taxes if it brings them a benefit. This happened back in 1997 when the right-wing Conservatives were thrown out after decades of heading towards a more US style small government, free market approach to government.
Our taxes are still lower than much of Europe. On a £30,000 salary, you could expect to pay £5300 tax and £2800 National Insurance (health and state pension contributions)
There is something of a warm and fuzzy feeling about the NHS - it was founded in the socialist reforms after world war 2 that aimed to create a more equitable society out of the incredibly poor state the war left the UK in.
The NHS is good enough for most purposes: waiting times are down, staff recruitment is up. I went into my local hospital with a broken arm on a busy afternoon, was seen straight away and was on my way home within a couple of hours. The state of dental care is another matter, of course, and so is the whole MRSA/nursing staff not knowing how to wash their hands thing. I don't know many people with private health insurance.
Yes, on an Amstrad PCW9512. Daisywheel printer, 3" disk drives, 300baud modem. They ran some form of CP/M.
They were great machines for their day, mainly because of Locoscript, a fantastic word processor.
I got my job (starting in April) almost entirely because of my work on a FOSS project. The company had donated some hardware to help development a year ago and basically said "don't forget us when you come to job hunting". A year later, I send them an email and they hire me after reviewing the current state of the project source code. ;)
It's a good way to build up a portfolio of code to show to an employer, it shows dedication and organisation and that you enjoy development.
Of course, the fact that employers can see your source code can hurt your chances too
There are five terrestrial, analogue, free-to-air, channels. Several parts of the country only receive four of those, though. Two of those are BBC (1+2)
There are also a load of digital channels, free-to-air if you own a set top box ($80). Several parts of the country - like Sussex, one of the most densely populated parts of the country outside the major cities - can't receive this at all. Most of the digital channels are endless repeats of the same few shows, however.
I live in an area where I can just about receive digital TV, although with frequent terrible reception. Channel 5 on analogue is a bit flaky, too.
Basically, added together, on a good day there might be an hour or less of interesting TV that isn't a show about buying houses, makeovers or emigrating.
Advertising is becoming gradually more intrusive: 'sponsored' shows, trails for new shows bookending every advert break. Even the BBC has endless TV licence, digital TV and new show trailers despite being "advert free".
but this is more info about the largest doners.
What have kebabs got to do with it?
I would recommend getting a locking blade if possible. A blade that can move is very annoying.
My partially missing thumb pad and I second that. Boy did that bleed.
If somebody didn't bring up old arguments every time a relevant story was posted on Slashdot, there'd be no comments ;)
Interesting discussion on dot.kde.org, by the way.
I understand that it must be tricky with so many developers in the project to get decisions made. I find it difficult enough with my project, and I'm the only developer! I just felt the quote was indicative of the development mindset that led me to switch to GNOME.
I'm glad that KDE is taking this kind of issue more seriously - I switched to GNOME a while back, but I still check out KDE every so often. I think I still have about 30 lines of code in KImageEffect somewhere.
I'm not sure I'd have the time for working on KDE - I already run my own project and have a pile of feature requests going back months I never seem to get round to.
I lurk on the KDE optimize list and came across the funniest comment in an email there the other day that probably goes a long way to explaining the mess that is KControl. They were discussing reducing disk accesses for displaying icons (a worthwhile cause) by building a database of their location:
"Do you think that it can make sense to add an option in KDE Performance -> System to Cache icons location?"
It's just like they have some instinct to add options rather than taking decisions. Just profile the system with and without the cache on and if it helps, enable it. If building the database takes some time, spawn it as a low-priority background task. Don't push all that work off onto the user.
I really fail to see why they would bother spending $3 million on Enterprise, or any star trek series. Why not take the money and do something original? A William Gibson-esque cyberpunk series or something.
Why should every TV series go on forever? There have been 98 episodes of Enterprise already. What's the benefit in carrying on. What interesting story lines are there left that 100 hours of shows hasn't already used up?
TNG, Voyager, DS9 all had about one season's worth of good episodes over their entire run. Most of the other episodes were either "remodulate the phase tachyon pulse" endings, dull moralising about the superiority of "the human way", bad soap opera or just plain stupid (any borg episode).
Give up on the Star Trek universe and go spend the money on some new ideas.
Look at what happened to Friends, Buffy, The Simpsons, Angel, Frasier, ER, Sex and the City. Early on, all were excellent (or at least interesting): later seasons become formulaic, repetive and dull. There is a limited number of interesting stories that can be told with one set of characters in a fixed universe.
People actually watch Stargate? I thought every episode I watched of SG-1 was so bad it made the original film look good. It used to be on in some filler slot over here (UK), sunday afternoon or something, but I think it's even slipped from that now.
Oh, wait, looking at the TV guide, it's been replaced with a new series of Enterprise - something about "the mysterious Xindi". Bizarre.
What difference does torrenting the shows make? Unless you're one of the people who's part of the monitoring system (Nielsen rating in the US?) whether you watch the show or not has no effect at all on its ratings. There's no magical transmitter that sends your watching info to the networks in every TV.