I just noticed something: When I started reading this discussion (using SeaMonkey;-) on my Mac Powerbook (latest revs of everything, 512MB memory, the Activity Monitor said that firefox-bin had a VSIZE of about 350MB. That seems about par on OSX for FF, SM, and opera for that matter. After reading a bunch of the messages here on SM, with FF idle in the background, I just noticed that FF's size was about 640MB. Oops! I watched it for a while, and every 20 sec or so its size jumped by a few MB.
I checked what it was running. It had three windows open: Bookmarks, a gmail window with the "static" HTML interface, and a window with 7 weather.gov and noaa tabs open. None of these have any active content, and none use auto-update. I have NoScript and Adblock running. I closed them one tab at a time, and watched for the VSIZE to stabilize for each close. Now there are no FF windows open at all, but its VSIZE is still about 580MB - and it still grows a bit each time Activity Monitor updates its entry. Actually, it's not that simple. A bit ago, the VSIZE dropped from 581.91MB to 581.41MB, and it just jumped back up to 581.97MB. So with no windows open, the size is fluctuating, but slowly increasing.
Looks like it's time to kill the sucker off again and restart it. Damn.
Why did/does Firefox have so many memory leaks? Is it sloppy coding? A framework issue? Third party addons?
The evidence I've seen (and there's a lot of it;-) is "all of the above".
Every few days, with both FF and SM on my Mac Powerbook, I see them rapidly balloon up on my Mac from their normal 300MB or so to 800MB or >1000MB, and simultaneously I see the little rainbow pinwheel "busy" icon when doing things like scrolling a window or opening a menu, and I know it's time to kill the sucker and restart it.
Almost always when this happens, it's right after I've looked at a page that has a video clip or some other such "active" content that invokes a plugin. I've noticed that nearly every flash video causes a jump in memory usage that doesn't drop when the video is done, even if I close the tab that it was in. This also happens with some other kinds of video, and even audio, so it's not just the flash plugin that's the culprit.
I've also repeatedly see the memory (VSIZE) slowly grow when FF and SM are apparently idle, with all their windows closed. It's hard to pin this on anything specific. I've also documented a number of cases of slowly-growing memory usage when I can be reasonably sure that there's no tab open with "active" content, just plain dumb HTML. This has to be due to some poor programming. I'd guess that something in a closed tab is still there running, but of course I can't prove that.
An interesting case is the pages that do auto-update. It'd be nice to disable this, but if it's possible, I don't know how. Anyway, I've seen a few cases where such pages trigger an increase of a few MB every time their update fires. If a page updates every 5 minutes (as most of them seem to), this can add up over a few days. If the pages seem to be simple HTML content, and NoScripts is doing its job, it's hard to think of anything but sloppy coding as the explanation.
Frameworks, of course, are black magic, not for mere mortals to contemplate, and it's risky saying anything about them except "Who knows what they're up to?";-)
I've seen a few references to this, and I just checked their site again. As before, I only found versions for "Windows, English". Is there some way I can make it run on my Mac and/or my linux machines? Does it work in German or Arabic or Chinese?
This is obviously some definition of "portable" that I haven't encountered before...
Hmmm... I have opera on my Mac and linux boxes, and on both of them, closing a tab results in opera opening the tab that was most recently open. I didn't configure it to do this, and I don't seem to find a config thing to control it. But there's so much config stuff in opera that it's probably in there somewhere; I just don't know where they hid it.
Well, I wonder how many of the low_ids have simply "broken".
I used to have a lower one, but one day, it stopped working. It's still there, but it started getting strange error messages. So I just made a new one. It's not like it matters much in RL, y'know.
I wonder how many ids on how many forums are relics like this? I have several others, such as a yahoogroups id from before yahoo gobbled up the.org where I first got it, and in the transition, that id stopped working. Happened to lots of people, and their support people didn't respond. So I made a new one, using the French spelling of my name just for the hell of it.
There's gotta be a good amount of disk space scattered around the Net holding the data for all these old zombie ids. Does/. have any way of recognizing them and wiping them? Does anyone? Does it even matter?
Sometimes I think I should make up a funny or ironic id, and start using that one. Maybe get into a flame war with this id. Then I think that I'd rather read some news stories.
Which started a conversation about what it means when a language steals words from other languages to describe concepts it doesn't have native words for, like the open source movement swiping "libre."
In one linguistics course I had, the prof commented that an unusual feature of English is that its main word-formation technique is borrowing. This isn't quite unique, since there are other languages that do this. Japanese is a good example, with heavy borrowings from Chinese, smaller numbers from Manchurian and other east-Asian languages, and recently from English. Most of the other examples are the artificial languages, such as Malay and Swahili.... they sort of did a Germanesqe thing as well by creating the free-as-in-beer composite.
And since English is a Germanic language, it has a long history of this. Consider words like "forever", "outstanding", "upstairs", "without" or "nonetheless", which centuries ago were written with hyphens, and earlier with spaces. Actually, the last one is still seen with hyphens. I've been seeing "any more" written "anymore" more and more in the past decade. It's a common process in agglutinating languages, which English has become over the past 1000 years or so.
(That same linguistics prof commented that English should be evicted from the Indo-European languages due to its loss of most inflections and adoption of agglutination for word formation. He also observed that English syntax is now much more similar to Chinese than it is to other members of the Indo-European family. All we need to do is to drop the few remaining noun and verb inflections, toss out such things as plurals and tenses and replace them with adjectives and adverbs, and we'll be speaking with true Sinitic syntax.)
The phenomenon has been observed in nature [pointer to Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon] when flightless birds attempt to evade predators.
Huh? Roadrunners aren't flightless. They can fly pretty well, in fact. But their prey is mostly small, ground-living critters, and you usually see them when they're walking around looking for lunch.
(Actually, the roadrunner has been used as a modern species that is fairly similar to the Archaeopterix, mostly in discussions of whether Archaeopterix could fly. The consensus seems to be that this is a fairly good comparison, and Archaeopterix could fly though not strongly. Its teeth look like something designed for a predator that liked to eat small lizards and large beetles, so it all makes sense. But we won't absolutely know until we find a live one.)
Those seventeenth century physicists really didn't do science any favours by calling their one-liner theories laws.
Well, there is one field that's struggling mightily to become a true science that was helped by this terminology. The field is linguistics. The use of "law" with two nearly opposed meanings in English and some other languages is one of the conventional examples in discussions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis basically says that the categories easily expressible in your language constrain your understanding of your world. There are stronger and weaker forms of the hypothesis, and the stronger forms are fairly easily debunked. But there is good observational support for the weaker forms.
In this case, the English-speaking world has a very visible problem of the ongoing attempts of religious folks to derail or suppress various scientific theories. One of the oldest religious arguments for the existence of their God we might call the lawmaker argument:
The universe clearly obeys laws, and if there are laws, there must be a lawmaker that established those laws. We call that lawmaker "God".
This is a useful example in linguistics, because the argument is based on what is essentially a pun. The term "law" in English is used for two very different things:
1. A "legal law" is a statement of how things should behave (according to some authority that decreed the behavior).
2. A "natural law" is a statement of how things actually behave (according to scientists who study the behavior).
The lawmaker argument is based on ignoring the difference between these two definitions, and pretending that "law" means the same thing in all the clauses in the argument. Actually, the first two instances of "law" in the argument are definition 2, while the last two instances are definition 1.
The fact that well-educated, intelligent people make the above "lawmaker" argument is useful to linguists, as it is a fairly clear example of an incorrect language category that people accept without seeing the logical problem that invalidages the argument.
I've also read a few fun examples of this argument being translated to languages that use different words for the above two definitions. The argument sounds nonsensical in those languages, of course.
And, of course, the title "Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From?" could be used as an example in linguistic discussions of this hypothesis. It appears to be based on the presupposition that if there's a law, there must be a lawmaker. Such a question would probably be asked less often in a language that distinguishes the various meanings of the English word "law".
The geek community that populates this forum is also rather familiar with another case: The English language uses the term "free" for several very different, unrelated concepts. This causes no end of problems with the Free Software concept, which is widely misunderstood by most English-speaking people as talking about price. There seems to be no good replacement that has the simple "sound-bite" quality needed for PR purposes. This problem doesn't translate to other languages, e.g. Spanish which uses "libre" and "gratis" for the two concepts. So it's another case of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at work to constrain our ability to express thoughts.
All human languages are full of examples like these. That's what encouraged Sapir and Whorf to propose their hypothisis. And it has led to uncountable fun linguistic discussions since it was proposed in their fairly concise form.
. We have no evidence that [natural laws]'ve always been the same, only that they've been the same in the last couple hundred years,...
Actually, we do have quite a lot of evidence that the natural laws and physical constants haven't changed for around 13 billion years or so. Pretty much all of astronomy is based on this. If there had been measurable changes over the age of the visible universe, the universe would look a lot different than it does. For example, spectral lines of distant objects would show very different patterns than the spectra of nearby objects.
Of course, a few apparent cracks in the constancy have been spotted. One goes by the name of "cosmic inflation". This is still an area full of conjectures, but some of the most successful explanations do have some unusual physics happening in the early hours of our universe.
But generally, things like the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the mass of elementary particles, the strengths of the fundamental forces, etc. seem to be the same in the most distant parts of the universe as they are here. This puts some strong limits on the size of any changes in these things over the lifetime of the visible universe.
It's that the private sector seems to be an absolute, unmitigated, and ongoing disaster when it comes to providing health care.
This is probably because private corporations aren't in business to provide customer care; they're in business to provide shareholder income. That is done by getting the maximum income while providing the minimum-cost product to the customers. This isn't even Econ 101; it's something that most 10-year-old kids understand.
But I'm not sure how the sorry state of the US medical system is related to IPv6. OK; the medical system could use IPv6, but it's not obvious that this would materially effect the quality (or cost) of health care by more than a fraction of a percent.
In the US, $275 per person per year wouldn't cover the costs of mailing all the silly paperwork that gets shipped around to cover an annual physical and a few doctor's visits.
Similarly, I've noticed that when I read or hear discussions or interviews about the US health system, it almost always seems to turn out to be about the US health insurance system. I keep wanting to jump in and point out that we need health care, not insurance. Insurance companies don't provide health care; they provide money-shuffling services (and an extra layer of administrative cost).
There is essentially no discussion of health care going on in the US right now. The discussion is almost entirely about the financing. Maybe this is a good explanation of why it "doesn't f**ing work", as you so elegantly put it.
They have no way of knowing that the source the can review actually matches any binaries provided via Windows Update.
This is one of the standard points in any meaningful security guidelines.
Brief summary: You don't run any binaries from anyone else. If you don't have the source, you don't run the software. You have people that can study and analyze the source. And you compile it all yourself. With a compiler from a different vendor.
Then there's Ken Thompson's famous (in some circles) Reflections on Trusting Trust article, which is required reading for anyone with serious security interests. It gives you some ideas about how to deal with the compiler itself. Actually, it mainly gives you some good questions, which you might want to try answering, just for the experience of dealing with an infinite regress of trust.
Most of Microsoft's customers will simply use the binary code. In an organization that does this, there's no point whatsoever in discussing the possibility of a backdoor. The management has already demonstrated that they don't care, because their security is only for show.
(Note that this isn't Microsoft bashing. The same applies to any system, including one that's open source. If you run a binary from an outside source, you have no idea what's in it, and you have to meaningful security. People have on several occasions managed to sneak backdoors into releases of linux and other open-source systems. Granted, they might have been caught quickly and fixed, but this tells you nothing about that binary that you're downloading right now.)
I find it perfectly pointful as it allows me to ssh directly into behind-NAT machines. It also makes it much easier to use scp, ftp, or even nfs mounts between NAT nets, completely eliminating the need for complex tunneling or multi-stage jumps.
So how does one learn to do this?
I have two machines (linux, OSX) at home, and both have an IPv6 address on their Ethernet port, but "ssh " gets a "No route to host" error. Adding a "-6" option doesn't change anything except the err ("Invalid argument"). I'm also ssh'd to a remote FreeBSD machine that has a v6 address, and I can't ssh to or from it, either, using IPv6 addresses.
I've looked at "man ssh", but the string "v6" (or "V6") doesn't occur in it anywhere, so that's no help. I did a bit of googling, and of course "ssh IPv6" gets lots of hits, but none of them seem to be a HOWTO.
One limit to adoption of IPv6 is that we geeks need to learn how to use it. I've learned a few things over the years, but not nearly enough to use it effectively. Until this changes, I can't see the general public using it, either. After all, they need geeks to keep their machines alive, and those geeks need to know the IPv6 black magic.
I expect followups to 1) insult me for being an utter n00b, and 2) tell me where to RTFM. Pointers to actual FM pages that teach me something are welcom. (I know how to ignore the insults.;-)
small college is experience problems with their new wireless network equipment in the presence of a few xbox's. however, apparently all over the rest of the country, in huge universities with thousands of xbox 360s... there's no problem whatsoever. the only bit that doesn't fit with this is that they said the IT staff had issues using their bluetooth headsets.
Well, a quick google check right now found "about 14,100" matches for "xbox wifi interference". A (somewhat less quick) scan of the first 100 or so matches show that around 1/3 are from people questioning the idea, about 1/2 are from people seriously discussing the problem, and the rest are random "misc" comments not so easy to classify. Some of the pages are several years old.
Just out of curiosity, since a few people here mention Wii, I also googled "wii wifi interference", and got about 10,800 hits. However, few of those seem to be about the wii causing the problem. Most are about diagnosis and/or suggested fixes.
So it seems that the xbox has been known for several years to be a significant source of interference. Not that it's the only culprit, of course; the 2.4GH spectrum is unregulated and notorious for out-of-spec transmitters. But the Xbox is a consumer product with significant sales, and it does seem to be fairly accurately identified as a major source of interference.
As someone else noted earlier, Microsoft has known of the problem for some time, and even had to help WalMart fix the problem in its stores. But MS seems to insist that it's "unlikely" that consumers would see the problem. I'd take this to mean that they're taking the usual Customer Support approach that "You're the only one we've heard this complaint from" and not bothering to fix the problem for anyone but powerful corporate customers.
(Note that that really wasn't a Microsoft bash. Such behavior is almost universal in corporate customer support. We only hear it from MS's PR folks more because their customers need so much more support. Bash, bash!;-)
It is certain that MS now has one of the best solution for corporate on the PC.
Actually, there's a simple, direct argument against this. I've mostly seen it used in projects to wean big companies off their IBM mainframes onto a flock of little, distributed non-IBM systems, but it works equally well with Microsoft. The argument consists of a question:
Is it a good idea to have all your data accessible and controlled by a giant corporation that views your data as a "profit center"?
With both IBM and Microsoft, you are locked into data in formats that can only be handled by IBM/Microsoft software. You don't have access to the source of that software. You don't know what that software can do with your data; you only know what IBM/Microsoft tells you the software can do. Both companies' software has been caught "calling home", sending customers' data back to an unknown IBM/Microsoft site. They do this because they see profit in it.
Does this make you nervous? It sure should. That vaunted "Microsoft desktop" is a secret passageway into your organization's data. You have no way of knowing what they're doing with (or to) your data.
We might also note, of course, that google is now a publicly-held corporation. As others have pointed out here, their stockholders could (and probably do) put pressure on google's management to abrogate their "Do no evil" motto, and do whatever might be profitable with any data in their machines. You and I can't watch their software at work, and we can't see all of its source code. We really have no idea what all it might be doing.
Trusting google with your data is every bit as foolish as trusting IBM or Microsoft with it. Why would you put any trust in a corporation that hides their software's inner workings from you?
Wikipedia is not, nor ever was intended to be, anything but an online encyclopedia.
Exactly. What they should do is something like what they did with wiktionary.org, which of course is a very useful site that's rapidly creating a general-purpose online dictionary of lots of languages. But it's not like wikipedia, and it's organized as a separate site using the same approach.
Jimmy Wales has enough work keeping wikipedia working as intended. He doesn't need the distraction of managing material that can only be managed properly by mathematicians. Wikipedia itself should just contain "encyclopedic" entries for major mathematical topics. A bunch of mathematicians should take the wiki code and set up wikimatica.org to hold the details. It should be a general-purpose collection of all mathematical knowledge, i.e., proofs. The wikipedia articles can refer people to its main pages.
A single site for all the world's knowledge isn't really all that good an idea. It would be better to structure the task better, by continuing to split it up among subject-oriented wikis. Those wikis can cross-reference each other however their authors like. But encyclopedists don't need the distraction of validating mathematical proofs, and mathematicians don't need the distraction of writing good high-level summaries of their work.
Why - once the vote is cast - does it need to remain secret?
Several reasons:
1) Your boss learns that you didn't vote the way he told you, so you're out of a job.
2) The local gang of thugs learn that you didn't vote the way they told you, so they come around and break your childrens' kneecaps (or yours, if you don't have any children).
3) The local banker learns that you didn't vote the approved way, so the next time you apply for credit, you're turned down.
4) The politician you didn't vote for wins, and he arranges with your local police and firemen to not show up when the local gang of thugs drop by to rob or torch your house.
These are not hypothetical. Do a bit of reading on the political machines in places like Chicago and New York. Or any other major city, for that matter.
What I find intriguing about it is how confused the judicial system seems about how to apply pre-internet laws to crimes.
But this has been well understood for decades. The explanation is simple: As soon as the word "computer" is uttered, all precedent is discarded, and we have to laboriously re-learn every lesson of history.
If you remember that, then very little of the insanity of the political and legal systems when dealing with computers is a mystery.
You see this quite clearly in the way the Internet has been commercialized. We used to have laws dealing with things like speech, religion, and commercial monopolies. But now we have computers involved with them all, so none of our hard-won laws on them apply any more.
But give it time. In a few centuries, a millennium at most, all the laws and freedoms of the previous millennium will be relearned and applied to things that involve computers. It really shouldn't take any longer (or any more deaths) than it did the first time around.
Why is it so difficult to comprehend a system that tabulates votes and leaves an audit trail?
Actually, that's one of the major difficulties. With an election, an audit trail must have an important property that isn't required by a financial system's audit trail: The audit trail must not expose a voter's actual votes.
With financial systems, there's no serious problem if the auditing system allows the bank employees to see the numbers in a customer's records. There are even situations where it's considered reasonable for a government agency to access an individual's financial records.
But with voting, exposing an individual's vote to either election employees or government agencies immediately enables such things as vote buying and vote extortion, which would pretty much eliminate the very reason for having the election.
The basic principal of auditing financial systems is to have everything stored redundantly in several different forms, with different people in charge of the different kinds of data, and a lot of cross-checking to spot inconsistencies. This does entail a minor problem of exposure of the data to the outside world, but that's not considered fatal, and can be mostly controlled by fining the people responsible for the exposure. With voting systems, none of this is true. Exposing the votes is a fatal flaw, and the people responsible are very rarely punished. All too often, they're the ones who end up running the government.
It's sorta tricky to come up with an election auditing system that keeps votes secret, while verifying that those votes are accurately counted.
Not entirely. True, external conditions are the explanation of most of any species' genes. But Darwin himself point out obvious exceptions, and posited that evolution could respond to intra-species conditions. One of the popular examples back then was the peacock's tail, which is obvious a hindrance to the bird. But it exists, because peahens like a guy with a big, flashy tail. And the explanation doesn't stop there, because you also want to explain why a peahen would like something so ostentatious. The textbook explanation is that it shows that the male is so strong and healthy that he can survive despite the problems that the tail causes.
Any beginning textbook on evolution will explain the phrase "sexual selection" for cases like this. There are some obvious ones in humans. For example, female mammals normally only have swollen mammary glands while nursing children, because the rest of the time, they're just excess mass that gets in the way of fleeing a predator or chasing prey. But human males react to breasts as "sexy", i.e., they're a sign of fertility. The result was that human females were selected for permanently swollen mammaries (which aren't actually much of a burden for a critter that walks erect).
Examples of intra-species sexual selection like this abound in nature. Some of them are rather bizarre, such as a male lizard's throat pouch or a male quetzal's tail that's 3 or 4 times as long as his body.
There are also non-sexual features that arise from intra-species selection. Dig around in biology texts, and you'll find descriptions of a lot of them. One common set of examples can be found in social species, which almost always have some decorative feature that distinguishes them from other similar-looking species.
For example, we have pet cockatiels, which normally have a distinctive orange cheek patch. This is a typical species-recognition mark, saying "I'm a cockatiel" to all the other cockatiels close enough to see it. We actually have one "white-face" cocktiel now, a male that's lacking his yellow/orange pigment gene, and his cheek patch is white. We have a female that refuses his advances, probably because she "knows" that he's not a cockatiel without that orange cheek patch. (Hey, would you want to mate with a guy without orange cheeks?) Parrot breeders can tell you a lot about the problems they have breeding fancy birds whose species-recognition marks are messed up.
Anyway, the idea that evolution is in response solely to external conditions is a common misconception. It's usually true, but we know lots of counterexamples. Nature is more complex than you might guess.
Even simple demographics show that people who have higher levels of education tend to have fewer children.
This is part of one of the major misunderstandings of how the evolutionary process works. The survivors aren't necesssrily the ones with the most offspring. If this were true, every species would turn out as many children as they possibly can. But there are thousands of known species that survive quite well with a low rate of reproduction. We're one of them.
The basic explanation in our case is fairly straightforward: One of our oddities is that we're primates, and we're a top-level predator. Top-level predators generally have very low reproduction rates. A good predator can't afford to have too many children, because then you wipe out the prey population, and everyone starves. Our ancestors were competing primarily with species like lions and hyenas, not with ants and butterflies. Like the lions and hyenas, the humans that survived were the ones that produced a small number of strong, healthy, and well-educated children. The other groups of humans that overpopulated their area wiped out the prey, and had a low-protein diet that left them weak and hungry. They were vulnerable to the clan in the next valley that had a few strong children than knew how to use their high-tech killing tools.
Today, the upper classes, which also are usually the best educated, maintain that pattern of having few children, and educating them well. In particular, the upper classes teach their children how to control and live off the lower classes, who are encouraged to breed and overpopulate, to provide a supply of workers that are barely getting by.
The human survival strategy is for a breeding population to have only slightly more than 2 children per female. Those children are trained to run things in the next generation. People who don't understand this and believe that having lots of children is nature's best survival strategy are the ones that the educated population will continue to prey on. That strategy works for mice; it doesn't work for humans.
The only flaw I have seen [in Feisty] at all was a quirk in the suspend mode which doesn't matter as I hadn't intended to use it anyway.
Funny thing; I have a Mac Powerbook with the latest revs of everything, and it still has random flakinesses in its suspend and sleep modes. Just this morning, I opened it up, watched its usual flash of the suspend image - and the screen went black, with the little sleep light blinking. It woke up after maybe 30 seconds, showed the suspend image, started drawing the windows I'd had open last night - and the screen went blank again, with the sleep light blinking. After another 30 seconds or so, I hit the boot button. A minute later it was running fine, but of course I had to restart all my apps.
It also occasionally blacks out the screen and goes to sleep at random times, 3 or 4 times per month, and usually won't wake up. Sometimes closing the lid, waiting a bit, and opening it will get it running again, but usually it's in a permanent sleep.
After using this machine for a few years (alongside various linux releases), I'd have to say that I'm not too impressed by the "it just works" mantra of the Mac fan club. The linux systems have far less flakiness.
(And, of course, it's impossible to demo any flakiness to a support person. Sorta like when your car is making a funny noise, so you take it in, and as soon as you turn off the street into the shop, the noise stops.;-)
Design by committee rarely works well. You're proposing something even worse. Let's allow Microsoft's competitors to define "standards" then force Microsoft to follow them. That's really a recipe for innovation.
But we do this all the time. For example, here in the US, electrical devices are required to work on 120V 60Hz AC, and I haven't heard that this is a major impediment to innovation. Granted, there are minor grumbles from manufacturers about needing several different power supplies, so that 240V AC and 50Hz AC can also be used. But still, how has this stifled innovation?
And note that both the Internet and the Web have standards that are in every sense a "committee" design. In this case, we did hear a lot of grumbling from knowedgeable geeks that both IP/TCP and HTTP/HTML were far from optimal designs. But in fact we don't hear this much from the vendors, who are mostly managed by people who don't have a clue about data packets or text markup. And in fact, both the Internet and the Web have led to a blizzard of innovation from millions of companies, despite their suboptimal committee design nature.
The real problem here is that the legal and political systems are fairly clueless about computer technology, and are likely to totally screw up any decrees with a technical component. Thus, the right solution to the problems caused by Microsoft's obstructionism is a strict separation between "system" and "application" software. Since MS sells an OS, it shouldn't be permitted to sell user-level applications. This would eliminate things like claiming that a browser is tied into the OS, and it would put pressure on the OS people to fully document their APIs. But there's no chance whatsoever that such a separation will ever come about, because nobody in any legislature or court (except Al Gore;-) would understand the issue.
In fact, IE is already a good example of how not imposing such a "committee" design causes problems. If MS's claim that IE is tied to the OS are true, then their desire for market control has led to an atrociously bad design of their OS. Of course, the fact that they did quickly supply IE-free versions of Windows showed that they were simply lying. But the fact that they have mostly gotten away with doing this is itself a major block to innovation. It has led to the widespread management support of web sites that only "work" with IE. This not only sabotages the general need for industry standards; it also forces developers not working for MS to waste time trying to make their software work for non-standard browsers for where there is no full documentation.
It's hard to see how this helps innovation, when the really innovative web software such as opera, firefox, safari, icab, konqueror, et al are pushed aside by the general pressure to work only with IE and not worry about the "unpopular" browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
I just noticed something: When I started reading this discussion (using SeaMonkey ;-) on my Mac Powerbook (latest revs of everything, 512MB memory, the Activity Monitor said that firefox-bin had a VSIZE of about 350MB. That seems about par on OSX for FF, SM, and opera for that matter. After reading a bunch of the messages here on SM, with FF idle in the background, I just noticed that FF's size was about 640MB. Oops! I watched it for a while, and every 20 sec or so its size jumped by a few MB.
I checked what it was running. It had three windows open: Bookmarks, a gmail window with the "static" HTML interface, and a window with 7 weather.gov and noaa tabs open. None of these have any active content, and none use auto-update. I have NoScript and Adblock running. I closed them one tab at a time, and watched for the VSIZE to stabilize for each close. Now there are no FF windows open at all, but its VSIZE is still about 580MB - and it still grows a bit each time Activity Monitor updates its entry. Actually, it's not that simple. A bit ago, the VSIZE dropped from 581.91MB to 581.41MB, and it just jumped back up to 581.97MB. So with no windows open, the size is fluctuating, but slowly increasing.
Looks like it's time to kill the sucker off again and restart it. Damn.
Why did/does Firefox have so many memory leaks? Is it sloppy coding? A framework issue? Third party addons?
;-) is "all of the above".
;-)
The evidence I've seen (and there's a lot of it
Every few days, with both FF and SM on my Mac Powerbook, I see them rapidly balloon up on my Mac from their normal 300MB or so to 800MB or >1000MB, and simultaneously I see the little rainbow pinwheel "busy" icon when doing things like scrolling a window or opening a menu, and I know it's time to kill the sucker and restart it.
Almost always when this happens, it's right after I've looked at a page that has a video clip or some other such "active" content that invokes a plugin. I've noticed that nearly every flash video causes a jump in memory usage that doesn't drop when the video is done, even if I close the tab that it was in. This also happens with some other kinds of video, and even audio, so it's not just the flash plugin that's the culprit.
I've also repeatedly see the memory (VSIZE) slowly grow when FF and SM are apparently idle, with all their windows closed. It's hard to pin this on anything specific. I've also documented a number of cases of slowly-growing memory usage when I can be reasonably sure that there's no tab open with "active" content, just plain dumb HTML. This has to be due to some poor programming. I'd guess that something in a closed tab is still there running, but of course I can't prove that.
An interesting case is the pages that do auto-update. It'd be nice to disable this, but if it's possible, I don't know how. Anyway, I've seen a few cases where such pages trigger an increase of a few MB every time their update fires. If a page updates every 5 minutes (as most of them seem to), this can add up over a few days. If the pages seem to be simple HTML content, and NoScripts is doing its job, it's hard to think of anything but sloppy coding as the explanation.
Frameworks, of course, are black magic, not for mere mortals to contemplate, and it's risky saying anything about them except "Who knows what they're up to?"
I've seen a few references to this, and I just checked their site again. As before, I only found versions for "Windows, English". Is there some way I can make it run on my Mac and/or my linux machines? Does it work in German or Arabic or Chinese?
...
This is obviously some definition of "portable" that I haven't encountered before
Hmmm ... I have opera on my Mac and linux boxes, and on both of them, closing a tab results in opera opening the tab that was most recently open. I didn't configure it to do this, and I don't seem to find a config thing to control it. But there's so much config stuff in opera that it's probably in there somewhere; I just don't know where they hid it.
His voting record is way off-topic in a user-id-measuring contest (mine's big, but prime!)
...! ... wanders off mumbling to himself ...
Mine's a multiple of both 13 and 6131. Nya nya
Well, I wonder how many of the low_ids have simply "broken".
.org where I first got it, and in the transition, that id stopped working. Happened to lots of people, and their support people didn't respond. So I made a new one, using the French spelling of my name just for the hell of it.
/. have any way of recognizing them and wiping them? Does anyone? Does it even matter?
I used to have a lower one, but one day, it stopped working. It's still there, but it started getting strange error messages. So I just made a new one. It's not like it matters much in RL, y'know.
I wonder how many ids on how many forums are relics like this? I have several others, such as a yahoogroups id from before yahoo gobbled up the
There's gotta be a good amount of disk space scattered around the Net holding the data for all these old zombie ids. Does
Sometimes I think I should make up a funny or ironic id, and start using that one. Maybe get into a flame war with this id. Then I think that I'd rather read some news stories.
Which started a conversation about what it means when a language steals words from other languages to describe concepts it doesn't have native words for, like the open source movement swiping "libre."
... they sort of did a Germanesqe thing as well by creating the free-as-in-beer composite.
In one linguistics course I had, the prof commented that an unusual feature of English is that its main word-formation technique is borrowing. This isn't quite unique, since there are other languages that do this. Japanese is a good example, with heavy borrowings from Chinese, smaller numbers from Manchurian and other east-Asian languages, and recently from English. Most of the other examples are the artificial languages, such as Malay and Swahili.
And since English is a Germanic language, it has a long history of this. Consider words like "forever", "outstanding", "upstairs", "without" or "nonetheless", which centuries ago were written with hyphens, and earlier with spaces. Actually, the last one is still seen with hyphens. I've been seeing "any more" written "anymore" more and more in the past decade. It's a common process in agglutinating languages, which English has become over the past 1000 years or so.
(That same linguistics prof commented that English should be evicted from the Indo-European languages due to its loss of most inflections and adoption of agglutination for word formation. He also observed that English syntax is now much more similar to Chinese than it is to other members of the Indo-European family. All we need to do is to drop the few remaining noun and verb inflections, toss out such things as plurals and tenses and replace them with adjectives and adverbs, and we'll be speaking with true Sinitic syntax.)
The phenomenon has been observed in nature [pointer to Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon] when flightless birds attempt to evade predators.
Huh? Roadrunners aren't flightless. They can fly pretty well, in fact. But their prey is mostly small, ground-living critters, and you usually see them when they're walking around looking for lunch.
(Actually, the roadrunner has been used as a modern species that is fairly similar to the Archaeopterix, mostly in discussions of whether Archaeopterix could fly. The consensus seems to be that this is a fairly good comparison, and Archaeopterix could fly though not strongly. Its teeth look like something designed for a predator that liked to eat small lizards and large beetles, so it all makes sense. But we won't absolutely know until we find a live one.)
Well, there is one field that's struggling mightily to become a true science that was helped by this terminology. The field is linguistics. The use of "law" with two nearly opposed meanings in English and some other languages is one of the conventional examples in discussions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
This hypothesis basically says that the categories easily expressible in your language constrain your understanding of your world. There are stronger and weaker forms of the hypothesis, and the stronger forms are fairly easily debunked. But there is good observational support for the weaker forms.
In this case, the English-speaking world has a very visible problem of the ongoing attempts of religious folks to derail or suppress various scientific theories. One of the oldest religious arguments for the existence of their God we might call the lawmaker argument:
This is a useful example in linguistics, because the argument is based on what is essentially a pun. The term "law" in English is used for two very different things:
1. A "legal law" is a statement of how things should behave (according to some authority that decreed the behavior).
2. A "natural law" is a statement of how things actually behave (according to scientists who study the behavior).
The lawmaker argument is based on ignoring the difference between these two definitions, and pretending that "law" means the same thing in all the clauses in the argument. Actually, the first two instances of "law" in the argument are definition 2, while the last two instances are definition 1.
The fact that well-educated, intelligent people make the above "lawmaker" argument is useful to linguists, as it is a fairly clear example of an incorrect language category that people accept without seeing the logical problem that invalidages the argument.
I've also read a few fun examples of this argument being translated to languages that use different words for the above two definitions. The argument sounds nonsensical in those languages, of course.
And, of course, the title "Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From?" could be used as an example in linguistic discussions of this hypothesis. It appears to be based on the presupposition that if there's a law, there must be a lawmaker. Such a question would probably be asked less often in a language that distinguishes the various meanings of the English word "law".
The geek community that populates this forum is also rather familiar with another case: The English language uses the term "free" for several very different, unrelated concepts. This causes no end of problems with the Free Software concept, which is widely misunderstood by most English-speaking people as talking about price. There seems to be no good replacement that has the simple "sound-bite" quality needed for PR purposes. This problem doesn't translate to other languages, e.g. Spanish which uses "libre" and "gratis" for the two concepts. So it's another case of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at work to constrain our ability to express thoughts.
All human languages are full of examples like these. That's what encouraged Sapir and Whorf to propose their hypothisis. And it has led to uncountable fun linguistic discussions since it was proposed in their fairly concise form.
. We have no evidence that [natural laws]'ve always been the same, only that they've been the same in the last couple hundred years, ...
Actually, we do have quite a lot of evidence that the natural laws and physical constants haven't changed for around 13 billion years or so. Pretty much all of astronomy is based on this. If there had been measurable changes over the age of the visible universe, the universe would look a lot different than it does. For example, spectral lines of distant objects would show very different patterns than the spectra of nearby objects.
Of course, a few apparent cracks in the constancy have been spotted. One goes by the name of "cosmic inflation". This is still an area full of conjectures, but some of the most successful explanations do have some unusual physics happening in the early hours of our universe.
But generally, things like the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the mass of elementary particles, the strengths of the fundamental forces, etc. seem to be the same in the most distant parts of the universe as they are here. This puts some strong limits on the size of any changes in these things over the lifetime of the visible universe.
It's that the private sector seems to be an absolute, unmitigated, and ongoing disaster when it comes to providing health care.
This is probably because private corporations aren't in business to provide customer care; they're in business to provide shareholder income. That is done by getting the maximum income while providing the minimum-cost product to the customers. This isn't even Econ 101; it's something that most 10-year-old kids understand.
But I'm not sure how the sorry state of the US medical system is related to IPv6. OK; the medical system could use IPv6, but it's not obvious that this would materially effect the quality (or cost) of health care by more than a fraction of a percent.
In the US, $275 per person per year wouldn't cover the costs of mailing all the silly paperwork that gets shipped around to cover an annual physical and a few doctor's visits.
Similarly, I've noticed that when I read or hear discussions or interviews about the US health system, it almost always seems to turn out to be about the US health insurance system. I keep wanting to jump in and point out that we need health care, not insurance. Insurance companies don't provide health care; they provide money-shuffling services (and an extra layer of administrative cost).
There is essentially no discussion of health care going on in the US right now. The discussion is almost entirely about the financing. Maybe this is a good explanation of why it "doesn't f**ing work", as you so elegantly put it.
They have no way of knowing that the source the can review actually matches any binaries provided via Windows Update.
This is one of the standard points in any meaningful security guidelines.
Brief summary: You don't run any binaries from anyone else. If you don't have the source, you don't run the software. You have people that can study and analyze the source. And you compile it all yourself. With a compiler from a different vendor.
Then there's Ken Thompson's famous (in some circles) Reflections on Trusting Trust article, which is required reading for anyone with serious security interests. It gives you some ideas about how to deal with the compiler itself. Actually, it mainly gives you some good questions, which you might want to try answering, just for the experience of dealing with an infinite regress of trust.
Most of Microsoft's customers will simply use the binary code. In an organization that does this, there's no point whatsoever in discussing the possibility of a backdoor. The management has already demonstrated that they don't care, because their security is only for show.
(Note that this isn't Microsoft bashing. The same applies to any system, including one that's open source. If you run a binary from an outside source, you have no idea what's in it, and you have to meaningful security. People have on several occasions managed to sneak backdoors into releases of linux and other open-source systems. Granted, they might have been caught quickly and fixed, but this tells you nothing about that binary that you're downloading right now.)
I find it perfectly pointful as it allows me to ssh directly into behind-NAT machines. It also makes it much easier to use scp, ftp, or even nfs mounts between NAT nets, completely eliminating the need for complex tunneling or multi-stage jumps.
;-)
So how does one learn to do this?
I have two machines (linux, OSX) at home, and both have an IPv6 address on their Ethernet port, but "ssh " gets a "No route to host" error. Adding a "-6" option doesn't change anything except the err ("Invalid argument"). I'm also ssh'd to a remote FreeBSD machine that has a v6 address, and I can't ssh to or from it, either, using IPv6 addresses.
I've looked at "man ssh", but the string "v6" (or "V6") doesn't occur in it anywhere, so that's no help. I did a bit of googling, and of course "ssh IPv6" gets lots of hits, but none of them seem to be a HOWTO.
One limit to adoption of IPv6 is that we geeks need to learn how to use it. I've learned a few things over the years, but not nearly enough to use it effectively. Until this changes, I can't see the general public using it, either. After all, they need geeks to keep their machines alive, and those geeks need to know the IPv6 black magic.
I expect followups to 1) insult me for being an utter n00b, and 2) tell me where to RTFM. Pointers to actual FM pages that teach me something are welcom. (I know how to ignore the insults.
small college is experience problems with their new wireless network equipment in the presence of a few xbox's. however, apparently all over the rest of the country, in huge universities with thousands of xbox 360s... there's no problem whatsoever. the only bit that doesn't fit with this is that they said the IT staff had issues using their bluetooth headsets.
;-)
Well, a quick google check right now found "about 14,100" matches for "xbox wifi interference". A (somewhat less quick) scan of the first 100 or so matches show that around 1/3 are from people questioning the idea, about 1/2 are from people seriously discussing the problem, and the rest are random "misc" comments not so easy to classify. Some of the pages are several years old.
Just out of curiosity, since a few people here mention Wii, I also googled "wii wifi interference", and got about 10,800 hits. However, few of those seem to be about the wii causing the problem. Most are about diagnosis and/or suggested fixes.
So it seems that the xbox has been known for several years to be a significant source of interference. Not that it's the only culprit, of course; the 2.4GH spectrum is unregulated and notorious for out-of-spec transmitters. But the Xbox is a consumer product with significant sales, and it does seem to be fairly accurately identified as a major source of interference.
As someone else noted earlier, Microsoft has known of the problem for some time, and even had to help WalMart fix the problem in its stores. But MS seems to insist that it's "unlikely" that consumers would see the problem. I'd take this to mean that they're taking the usual Customer Support approach that "You're the only one we've heard this complaint from" and not bothering to fix the problem for anyone but powerful corporate customers.
(Note that that really wasn't a Microsoft bash. Such behavior is almost universal in corporate customer support. We only hear it from MS's PR folks more because their customers need so much more support. Bash, bash!
It is certain that MS now has one of the best solution for corporate on the PC.
Actually, there's a simple, direct argument against this. I've mostly seen it used in projects to wean big companies off their IBM mainframes onto a flock of little, distributed non-IBM systems, but it works equally well with Microsoft. The argument consists of a question:
Is it a good idea to have all your data accessible and controlled by a giant corporation that views your data as a "profit center"?
With both IBM and Microsoft, you are locked into data in formats that can only be handled by IBM/Microsoft software. You don't have access to the source of that software. You don't know what that software can do with your data; you only know what IBM/Microsoft tells you the software can do. Both companies' software has been caught "calling home", sending customers' data back to an unknown IBM/Microsoft site. They do this because they see profit in it.
Does this make you nervous? It sure should. That vaunted "Microsoft desktop" is a secret passageway into your organization's data. You have no way of knowing what they're doing with (or to) your data.
We might also note, of course, that google is now a publicly-held corporation. As others have pointed out here, their stockholders could (and probably do) put pressure on google's management to abrogate their "Do no evil" motto, and do whatever might be profitable with any data in their machines. You and I can't watch their software at work, and we can't see all of its source code. We really have no idea what all it might be doing.
Trusting google with your data is every bit as foolish as trusting IBM or Microsoft with it. Why would you put any trust in a corporation that hides their software's inner workings from you?
This mite bee a good thyme too post this famous common tarry:
(Funny thing: The spell checker in this browser - no, I won't say which one - told me that "chequer" was mispelled.
(Also, I've never learned who wrote it. Anyone know?)
Wikipedia is not, nor ever was intended to be, anything but an online encyclopedia.
Exactly. What they should do is something like what they did with wiktionary.org, which of course is a very useful site that's rapidly creating a general-purpose online dictionary of lots of languages. But it's not like wikipedia, and it's organized as a separate site using the same approach.
Jimmy Wales has enough work keeping wikipedia working as intended. He doesn't need the distraction of managing material that can only be managed properly by mathematicians. Wikipedia itself should just contain "encyclopedic" entries for major mathematical topics. A bunch of mathematicians should take the wiki code and set up wikimatica.org to hold the details. It should be a general-purpose collection of all mathematical knowledge, i.e., proofs. The wikipedia articles can refer people to its main pages.
A single site for all the world's knowledge isn't really all that good an idea. It would be better to structure the task better, by continuing to split it up among subject-oriented wikis. Those wikis can cross-reference each other however their authors like. But encyclopedists don't need the distraction of validating mathematical proofs, and mathematicians don't need the distraction of writing good high-level summaries of their work.
Why - once the vote is cast - does it need to remain secret?
Several reasons:
1) Your boss learns that you didn't vote the way he told you, so you're out of a job.
2) The local gang of thugs learn that you didn't vote the way they told you, so they come around and break your childrens' kneecaps (or yours, if you don't have any children).
3) The local banker learns that you didn't vote the approved way, so the next time you apply for credit, you're turned down.
4) The politician you didn't vote for wins, and he arranges with your local police and firemen to not show up when the local gang of thugs drop by to rob or torch your house.
These are not hypothetical. Do a bit of reading on the political machines in places like Chicago and New York. Or any other major city, for that matter.
What I find intriguing about it is how confused the judicial system seems about how to apply pre-internet laws to crimes.
But this has been well understood for decades. The explanation is simple: As soon as the word "computer" is uttered, all precedent is discarded, and we have to laboriously re-learn every lesson of history.
If you remember that, then very little of the insanity of the political and legal systems when dealing with computers is a mystery.
You see this quite clearly in the way the Internet has been commercialized. We used to have laws dealing with things like speech, religion, and commercial monopolies. But now we have computers involved with them all, so none of our hard-won laws on them apply any more.
But give it time. In a few centuries, a millennium at most, all the laws and freedoms of the previous millennium will be relearned and applied to things that involve computers. It really shouldn't take any longer (or any more deaths) than it did the first time around.
Why is it so difficult to comprehend a system that tabulates votes and leaves an audit trail?
Actually, that's one of the major difficulties. With an election, an audit trail must have an important property that isn't required by a financial system's audit trail: The audit trail must not expose a voter's actual votes.
With financial systems, there's no serious problem if the auditing system allows the bank employees to see the numbers in a customer's records. There are even situations where it's considered reasonable for a government agency to access an individual's financial records.
But with voting, exposing an individual's vote to either election employees or government agencies immediately enables such things as vote buying and vote extortion, which would pretty much eliminate the very reason for having the election.
The basic principal of auditing financial systems is to have everything stored redundantly in several different forms, with different people in charge of the different kinds of data, and a lot of cross-checking to spot inconsistencies. This does entail a minor problem of exposure of the data to the outside world, but that's not considered fatal, and can be mostly controlled by fining the people responsible for the exposure. With voting systems, none of this is true. Exposing the votes is a fatal flaw, and the people responsible are very rarely punished. All too often, they're the ones who end up running the government.
It's sorta tricky to come up with an election auditing system that keeps votes secret, while verifying that those votes are accurately counted.
"evolution" is a response to external conditons.
Not entirely. True, external conditions are the explanation of most of any species' genes. But Darwin himself point out obvious exceptions, and posited that evolution could respond to intra-species conditions. One of the popular examples back then was the peacock's tail, which is obvious a hindrance to the bird. But it exists, because peahens like a guy with a big, flashy tail. And the explanation doesn't stop there, because you also want to explain why a peahen would like something so ostentatious. The textbook explanation is that it shows that the male is so strong and healthy that he can survive despite the problems that the tail causes.
Any beginning textbook on evolution will explain the phrase "sexual selection" for cases like this. There are some obvious ones in humans. For example, female mammals normally only have swollen mammary glands while nursing children, because the rest of the time, they're just excess mass that gets in the way of fleeing a predator or chasing prey. But human males react to breasts as "sexy", i.e., they're a sign of fertility. The result was that human females were selected for permanently swollen mammaries (which aren't actually much of a burden for a critter that walks erect).
Examples of intra-species sexual selection like this abound in nature. Some of them are rather bizarre, such as a male lizard's throat pouch or a male quetzal's tail that's 3 or 4 times as long as his body.
There are also non-sexual features that arise from intra-species selection. Dig around in biology texts, and you'll find descriptions of a lot of them. One common set of examples can be found in social species, which almost always have some decorative feature that distinguishes them from other similar-looking species.
For example, we have pet cockatiels, which normally have a distinctive orange cheek patch. This is a typical species-recognition mark, saying "I'm a cockatiel" to all the other cockatiels close enough to see it. We actually have one "white-face" cocktiel now, a male that's lacking his yellow/orange pigment gene, and his cheek patch is white. We have a female that refuses his advances, probably because she "knows" that he's not a cockatiel without that orange cheek patch. (Hey, would you want to mate with a guy without orange cheeks?) Parrot breeders can tell you a lot about the problems they have breeding fancy birds whose species-recognition marks are messed up.
Anyway, the idea that evolution is in response solely to external conditions is a common misconception. It's usually true, but we know lots of counterexamples. Nature is more complex than you might guess.
Even simple demographics show that people who have higher levels of education tend to have fewer children.
This is part of one of the major misunderstandings of how the evolutionary process works. The survivors aren't necesssrily the ones with the most offspring. If this were true, every species would turn out as many children as they possibly can. But there are thousands of known species that survive quite well with a low rate of reproduction. We're one of them.
The basic explanation in our case is fairly straightforward: One of our oddities is that we're primates, and we're a top-level predator. Top-level predators generally have very low reproduction rates. A good predator can't afford to have too many children, because then you wipe out the prey population, and everyone starves. Our ancestors were competing primarily with species like lions and hyenas, not with ants and butterflies. Like the lions and hyenas, the humans that survived were the ones that produced a small number of strong, healthy, and well-educated children. The other groups of humans that overpopulated their area wiped out the prey, and had a low-protein diet that left them weak and hungry. They were vulnerable to the clan in the next valley that had a few strong children than knew how to use their high-tech killing tools.
Today, the upper classes, which also are usually the best educated, maintain that pattern of having few children, and educating them well. In particular, the upper classes teach their children how to control and live off the lower classes, who are encouraged to breed and overpopulate, to provide a supply of workers that are barely getting by.
The human survival strategy is for a breeding population to have only slightly more than 2 children per female. Those children are trained to run things in the next generation. People who don't understand this and believe that having lots of children is nature's best survival strategy are the ones that the educated population will continue to prey on. That strategy works for mice; it doesn't work for humans.
The only flaw I have seen [in Feisty] at all was a quirk in the suspend mode which doesn't matter as I hadn't intended to use it anyway.
;-)
Funny thing; I have a Mac Powerbook with the latest revs of everything, and it still has random flakinesses in its suspend and sleep modes. Just this morning, I opened it up, watched its usual flash of the suspend image - and the screen went black, with the little sleep light blinking. It woke up after maybe 30 seconds, showed the suspend image, started drawing the windows I'd had open last night - and the screen went blank again, with the sleep light blinking. After another 30 seconds or so, I hit the boot button. A minute later it was running fine, but of course I had to restart all my apps.
It also occasionally blacks out the screen and goes to sleep at random times, 3 or 4 times per month, and usually won't wake up. Sometimes closing the lid, waiting a bit, and opening it will get it running again, but usually it's in a permanent sleep.
After using this machine for a few years (alongside various linux releases), I'd have to say that I'm not too impressed by the "it just works" mantra of the Mac fan club. The linux systems have far less flakiness.
(And, of course, it's impossible to demo any flakiness to a support person. Sorta like when your car is making a funny noise, so you take it in, and as soon as you turn off the street into the shop, the noise stops.
Design by committee rarely works well. You're proposing something even worse. Let's allow Microsoft's competitors to define "standards" then force Microsoft to follow them. That's really a recipe for innovation.
;-) would understand the issue.
But we do this all the time. For example, here in the US, electrical devices are required to work on 120V 60Hz AC, and I haven't heard that this is a major impediment to innovation. Granted, there are minor grumbles from manufacturers about needing several different power supplies, so that 240V AC and 50Hz AC can also be used. But still, how has this stifled innovation?
And note that both the Internet and the Web have standards that are in every sense a "committee" design. In this case, we did hear a lot of grumbling from knowedgeable geeks that both IP/TCP and HTTP/HTML were far from optimal designs. But in fact we don't hear this much from the vendors, who are mostly managed by people who don't have a clue about data packets or text markup. And in fact, both the Internet and the Web have led to a blizzard of innovation from millions of companies, despite their suboptimal committee design nature.
The real problem here is that the legal and political systems are fairly clueless about computer technology, and are likely to totally screw up any decrees with a technical component. Thus, the right solution to the problems caused by Microsoft's obstructionism is a strict separation between "system" and "application" software. Since MS sells an OS, it shouldn't be permitted to sell user-level applications. This would eliminate things like claiming that a browser is tied into the OS, and it would put pressure on the OS people to fully document their APIs. But there's no chance whatsoever that such a separation will ever come about, because nobody in any legislature or court (except Al Gore
In fact, IE is already a good example of how not imposing such a "committee" design causes problems. If MS's claim that IE is tied to the OS are true, then their desire for market control has led to an atrociously bad design of their OS. Of course, the fact that they did quickly supply IE-free versions of Windows showed that they were simply lying. But the fact that they have mostly gotten away with doing this is itself a major block to innovation. It has led to the widespread management support of web sites that only "work" with IE. This not only sabotages the general need for industry standards; it also forces developers not working for MS to waste time trying to make their software work for non-standard browsers for where there is no full documentation.
It's hard to see how this helps innovation, when the really innovative web software such as opera, firefox, safari, icab, konqueror, et al are pushed aside by the general pressure to work only with IE and not worry about the "unpopular" browsers.