Firefox doesn't always render pages consistently; for example, quite often it messes up the Slashdot home page and I have to reload the page to view it properly. I wonder why this is.
I agree with you completely on this stuff. I don't use any extensions, but memory footprint and stuff is irritating.
In regard to the Slashdot bug, there's been an open bug on this since at least August of 2003.
From the first time I used Mozilla, I was immensely disappointed by the memory footprint and what turned out to be problems with the "working set". Firefox isn't all that much better than the latest Mozilla builds, but, as I pessimistically muttered under my breath while using Mozilla that the memory issues would be addressed by increasing the system requirements, I realized when I bought my most recent 512MB DIMM, that my pesimissm would be realized.
I am stunned that more people don't acknowledge this stuff. But I can only assume it is because they aren't running anything else on their machines. Mozilla is fatter than any software on my machine, including MS Office and Lotus Notes. It always has been.
The only promising side is that the bloat appears to be the price of extensability... older browsers have evolved to be able to do what Mozilla is doing off the starting blocks... and given that despite the alternatives are faster and lighter, Mozilla is more reliable, and far more trustworthy than the competition.
The next generation of competition might make Mozilla (or variants) appear small and lightweight by comparision.
Since I'm in an educational environment, I found the content of Sobell's book to be right on target and very helpful for anyone managing Linux in the enterprise....
Run a cable underground to a server and do a network boot from a sealed fanless box.
Has anyone figured out wireless booting?
Your display might be tricky. You probably want a CRT to keep the cost down. All I've seen cool themselves by convection, which might just mean using cheap monitors and some kind of easily removed grille or ramped flap designed to let warm air out, but to keep inordinate amounts of dust from settling inside.
Re:How can we trust Microsoft's software...
on
Gates Nose-Dives at CES
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's tough to set this kind of stuff up for exec demos.
I bet they took some poor tech support person, told them to set up the machine, then gave him them a bunch of drivers which are so bleeding edge that he or she has never seen them before. Then 30 minutes before the presentation, the A/V guy says "hey, the projector's pointer needs this special driver..."
As a techie, the right thing to say to the CxO would be "while it could be used, we intended to <insert planned method here> and the <insert projector here>'s driver stands a slim chance of trashing the machine or making it unstable. We have no time to troubleshoot in the event of a problem."
I had to set up this kind of demo before (not for Microsoft, and not quite as experimental), and part of it was keeping a second machine handy and running which could be swapped out in the event of a catastrophe.
Just imagine what it takes to swap out a live machine with a crashed machine, on a podium during a presentation with roughly a thousand people watching (cat-calling with technical advice), and a CxO which is too preoccupied with their audience to take any special instructions in the event of a failure (i.e. you can't give instructions like, "you were on slide 30", you really need to just get them to that slide).
I never had to do the swap though. No serious problems.
This is the nature of Windows... but the problem isn't really the OS, it's the amount of third-party junk out there and a "just install it, it works on my home machine" kind of attitude.
"If kind and loving mean anything, they have to have meaning now, not in some perpetual afterlife."
IMHO, the same applies to the very existence of God, kind and loving or otherwise.
I see more reason to believe that God is a fabrication of man constructed to cope with lives with no clear purpose and our inevitable deaths. Toss in unscrupulous and/or irrational people and you have all the explanations for all the religious texts and experiences throughout the history of mankind.
It's easy if you redefine kind and loving to apply only to a personal relationship with God and an afterlife. Then you're willing to live in suffering or lay down your life for your religious values.
Nationalist debates with "we" and "you" are crap. It reeks of a sports-team mentality torwards nationalism.
Think about this:
You don't control your government
You don't take responsiblilty for your government's bad decisions
You can't take credit for your government's good decisions
You can't control where you were born
Few people immigrate soley because of agreement with the ideals of a nation and even if they do, they can't take responsiblity or credit for future actions of that government
Toss in the overwhelming cult of knowledge and the phrase "you were wrong" and it turns into the debating equivalent of poking your finger into somebody's chest.
We are pawns. Say it out loud. "We are pawns"
Given that we are pawns, now how much sense does it make to say "you were wrong?"
To say otherwise is to contribute to the anti-French crap. The American people had no control over the government's and private media's adoption of the anti-French crap, and the French people had no control over their stance regarding the war in Iraq.
Now, IMHO, any American who adopts any nationalist crap directed against the citizens or residents of a country are guilty of nationalism. Exactly like any American who adopts any racist crap aginst the members of any perceived race are guilty of racism.
Nations are to nationalism what race is to racism.
I've hit cars doing stupid shit like you propose. I've had cars hit me BECAUSE someone did stupid shit like you propose. Just get out of the fucking way and let everyone past you, rather than try to decide how everyone else should drive. And 'intelligent'? Slowing traffic flow is never 'intelligent'. You are one arrogant dude.
I happen to agree with the original sentiment... slow down and force the tailgater to calm the hell down or change lanes.
Just yesterday, somebody with those asshole lights was tailgating me, you know, the ultra-bright lights which are probably very good off-road, but when blasting through your rear-view mirror by an asshole tailgater, they make it IMPOSSIBLE to safely change lanes. So, I have three options... 1. do nothing and let them endanger my life. 2. speed up dramatically and change lanes, endangering my life, encouraging them to continue the practice and breaking the law or 3. slow down.
Now slowing to 10MPH is an exaggeration, or flagrantly irresponsible, but slowing to 10 under the average speed (usually going from 20 over to 10 over)
When I first started driving, I figured I was doing something wrong and did #2, that was a bad idea, nearly caused an accident. Now I'm a firm believer in #3, it's tempting to add the middle finger too, but that just aggrivates the jerk.
I'm looking for a new job because of this
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've told management: "I don't want to run an instant messenger, it hurts my productivity and is very stressful"
They replied: "It's the way we're doing business as a team"
Now I'm looking for a job elsewhere, because exactly as described in the article, I'm exhausted at the end of the day, I have a backlog of projects like you wouldn't imagine, it's stupid.
I've found myself reluctant to focus on complex tasks because I expect to be interrupted. Interruptions from instant messaging are often emergencies which occupy a whole day with stupid little updates and inappropriate prioritization. It seems the A-hole bugging you on IM is more important than the person silently and patiently waiting for the scheduled deadline.
I forget things, I can't read a document to completion or properly compose replies to email. Infact... right now, I'm avoiding a complex task... my IM will crackle to life any second with some stupid emergency. It feels futile to even get started when it takes an hour just to set things up to start working on it. Four times in the past two weeks, my instant messenger has dragged me into some emergency which has prevented me from working on it.
I'm trying to push management back to a usenet-style system for "I need help!" emergencies and a careful analysis of timelines and responsibility (i.e. fault and impact) before anyone picks up a phone. There's nothing wrong with interrupting people if there's an emergency, but management should be able to prevent it from reaching that point.
(Hey look, I got an instant message! and it should only take about two hours to deal with. Glad I didn't get started on that project.)
You won't be able to drive if the whole coast is trying to evacuate in under 10 hours.
Then think about hospitals and old age homes... will the doctors even stay?
Re:More money than brains I guess
on
Re-Pet a Reality
·
· Score: 1
the wealthy, who got there by exploitation / birth / luck. we should be happy with the crumbs from their tables, while 10s of thousands die each year due to lack of health insurance, thank god the labour resource is increased by one of these rich wankers cloning a cat.
It's easy to point out the problem, but do you have a solution?
Introduce aging and heirs. Then introduce children as a method to keep player-control of their fortune. Then players are forced to have kids... who are weak and need defending... which means the wealthy and powerful have a vested interest in a system which protects them (can't be logged in all the time!), along with the newbs:-)
Anything which requires "laws" implemented in game logic sucks. It has to be player-driven.
Make everywhere a PVP zone and now in the game logic, you do need to have serious consequences if you die, maybe related to the age/strength of your character at the time of death. For one, all your posessions are probably going to be looted, and the system which the players decide upon determines how your heir might get access to your fortunes.
It could be fun to play MMORPGS with in-game court orders and bounties, both on the criminal, vigilante and law enforcement side.
Re:More money than brains I guess
on
Re-Pet a Reality
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...the $50K (or less) would be better used...
The odd thing about money is that it follows a conservation principle... it's never destroyed, it just changes form.
$50k was just liberated from somebody who didn't need it. Half of it went into taxes (on the operation, the materials for the operation, the salaries for the employees etc), the other half was distributed among those who performed the operation.
You could argue that it was a $50k investment towards the practitioners of vetrenary science, which I'm sure bennefits the rest of society somehow.
I have no problem with wealthy people spending money on frivilous things. It does bug me though when they spend it on things which hurt everyone else... like gas-guzzling cars, old growth wood, clothes made from slave labour, stuff like that.
IMHO, the greater harm was done just by creating another cat rather than saving one from a shelter... the $50k is better liberated regardless of how or why... and the harm done isn't that big a deal.
They're just saying that breaking them up is pretty much impossible from foreign soil. It can only be done indirectly... e.g. "break up your company or you can't do business in Europe", as opposed to the U.S. which can say "break up your company or be broken up by the courts"
By not showing realistic consequences, kids know that the stuff isn't real. Just trying to pick up an anvil will quickly make them think otherwise.
On the other hand stuff like pro-wrestling pretends to be very real, and the atheletes execute lethal manuvers on one another with non-lethal results. Worse, in pro-wrestling, they show wanton out-of-control violence with people begging for mercy.
Power Rangers? I'm not sure that's so bad. Kids will imitate the moves, but at least if their victim begs for mercy, it won't be just like it was on T.V.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox doesn't always render pages consistently; for example, quite often it messes up the Slashdot home page and I have to reload the page to view it properly. I wonder why this is.
I agree with you completely on this stuff. I don't use any extensions, but memory footprint and stuff is irritating.
In regard to the Slashdot bug, there's been an open bug on this since at least August of 2003.
From the first time I used Mozilla, I was immensely disappointed by the memory footprint and what turned out to be problems with the "working set". Firefox isn't all that much better than the latest Mozilla builds, but, as I pessimistically muttered under my breath while using Mozilla that the memory issues would be addressed by increasing the system requirements, I realized when I bought my most recent 512MB DIMM, that my pesimissm would be realized.
I am stunned that more people don't acknowledge this stuff. But I can only assume it is because they aren't running anything else on their machines. Mozilla is fatter than any software on my machine, including MS Office and Lotus Notes. It always has been.
The only promising side is that the bloat appears to be the price of extensability... older browsers have evolved to be able to do what Mozilla is doing off the starting blocks... and given that despite the alternatives are faster and lighter, Mozilla is more reliable, and far more trustworthy than the competition.
The next generation of competition might make Mozilla (or variants) appear small and lightweight by comparision.
Since I'm in an educational environment, I found the content of Sobell's book to be right on target and very helpful for anyone managing Linux in the enterprise....
AGGGGHH!!
Sometimes if I see a re-run of something on T.V., I have flashbacks to the game of XCOM I was playing when I was first watching it.
It's freakish.
Run a cable underground to a server and do a network boot from a sealed fanless box.
Has anyone figured out wireless booting?
Your display might be tricky. You probably want a CRT to keep the cost down. All I've seen cool themselves by convection, which might just mean using cheap monitors and some kind of easily removed grille or ramped flap designed to let warm air out, but to keep inordinate amounts of dust from settling inside.
It's tough to set this kind of stuff up for exec demos.
I bet they took some poor tech support person, told them to set up the machine, then gave him them a bunch of drivers which are so bleeding edge that he or she has never seen them before. Then 30 minutes before the presentation, the A/V guy says "hey, the projector's pointer needs this special driver..."
As a techie, the right thing to say to the CxO would be "while it could be used, we intended to <insert planned method here> and the <insert projector here>'s driver stands a slim chance of trashing the machine or making it unstable. We have no time to troubleshoot in the event of a problem."
I had to set up this kind of demo before (not for Microsoft, and not quite as experimental), and part of it was keeping a second machine handy and running which could be swapped out in the event of a catastrophe.
Just imagine what it takes to swap out a live machine with a crashed machine, on a podium during a presentation with roughly a thousand people watching (cat-calling with technical advice), and a CxO which is too preoccupied with their audience to take any special instructions in the event of a failure (i.e. you can't give instructions like, "you were on slide 30", you really need to just get them to that slide).
I never had to do the swap though. No serious problems.
This is the nature of Windows... but the problem isn't really the OS, it's the amount of third-party junk out there and a "just install it, it works on my home machine" kind of attitude.
Register that domain name!
"...pound-me-in-the-ass prison..."
While I'm sure the wardens appreciate your enthusiasm in the penal system, conjugal visits are not your civic duty.
"If kind and loving mean anything, they have to have meaning now, not in some perpetual afterlife."
IMHO, the same applies to the very existence of God, kind and loving or otherwise.
I see more reason to believe that God is a fabrication of man constructed to cope with lives with no clear purpose and our inevitable deaths. Toss in unscrupulous and/or irrational people and you have all the explanations for all the religious texts and experiences throughout the history of mankind.
It's easy if you redefine kind and loving to apply only to a personal relationship with God and an afterlife. Then you're willing to live in suffering or lay down your life for your religious values.
They're not taxes, they're a levy, and they're not going to the Government, they're going to SOCAN
Often the page is sent in the clear, but the submit action is an https link.
Not that I think that such behaviour is good practice... just that it might very well have been encrypted.
Or an Austrian govenor? :-)
...we know that you were wrong...
Nationalist debates with "we" and "you" are crap. It reeks of a sports-team mentality torwards nationalism.
Think about this:
Toss in the overwhelming cult of knowledge and the phrase "you were wrong" and it turns into the debating equivalent of poking your finger into somebody's chest.
We are pawns. Say it out loud. "We are pawns"
Given that we are pawns, now how much sense does it make to say "you were wrong?"
To say otherwise is to contribute to the anti-French crap. The American people had no control over the government's and private media's adoption of the anti-French crap, and the French people had no control over their stance regarding the war in Iraq.
Now, IMHO, any American who adopts any nationalist crap directed against the citizens or residents of a country are guilty of nationalism. Exactly like any American who adopts any racist crap aginst the members of any perceived race are guilty of racism.
Nations are to nationalism what race is to racism.
I've hit cars doing stupid shit like you propose. I've had cars hit me BECAUSE someone did stupid shit like you propose. Just get out of the fucking way and let everyone past you, rather than try to decide how everyone else should drive. And 'intelligent'? Slowing traffic flow is never 'intelligent'. You are one arrogant dude.
I happen to agree with the original sentiment... slow down and force the tailgater to calm the hell down or change lanes.
Just yesterday, somebody with those asshole lights was tailgating me, you know, the ultra-bright lights which are probably very good off-road, but when blasting through your rear-view mirror by an asshole tailgater, they make it IMPOSSIBLE to safely change lanes. So, I have three options... 1. do nothing and let them endanger my life. 2. speed up dramatically and change lanes, endangering my life, encouraging them to continue the practice and breaking the law or 3. slow down.
Now slowing to 10MPH is an exaggeration, or flagrantly irresponsible, but slowing to 10 under the average speed (usually going from 20 over to 10 over)
When I first started driving, I figured I was doing something wrong and did #2, that was a bad idea, nearly caused an accident. Now I'm a firm believer in #3, it's tempting to add the middle finger too, but that just aggrivates the jerk.
I've told management: "I don't want to run an instant messenger, it hurts my productivity and is very stressful"
They replied: "It's the way we're doing business as a team"
Now I'm looking for a job elsewhere, because exactly as described in the article, I'm exhausted at the end of the day, I have a backlog of projects like you wouldn't imagine, it's stupid.
I've found myself reluctant to focus on complex tasks because I expect to be interrupted. Interruptions from instant messaging are often emergencies which occupy a whole day with stupid little updates and inappropriate prioritization. It seems the A-hole bugging you on IM is more important than the person silently and patiently waiting for the scheduled deadline.
I forget things, I can't read a document to completion or properly compose replies to email. Infact... right now, I'm avoiding a complex task... my IM will crackle to life any second with some stupid emergency. It feels futile to even get started when it takes an hour just to set things up to start working on it. Four times in the past two weeks, my instant messenger has dragged me into some emergency which has prevented me from working on it.
I'm trying to push management back to a usenet-style system for "I need help!" emergencies and a careful analysis of timelines and responsibility (i.e. fault and impact) before anyone picks up a phone. There's nothing wrong with interrupting people if there's an emergency, but management should be able to prevent it from reaching that point.
(Hey look, I got an instant message! and it should only take about two hours to deal with. Glad I didn't get started on that project.)
Note that the yodel is utterly worthless without the backing of a corporation willing to fork over the money to use it.
You won't be able to drive if the whole coast is trying to evacuate in under 10 hours.
Then think about hospitals and old age homes... will the doctors even stay?
the wealthy, who got there by exploitation / birth / luck. we should be happy with the crumbs from their tables, while 10s of thousands die each year due to lack of health insurance, thank god the labour resource is increased by one of these rich wankers cloning a cat.
It's easy to point out the problem, but do you have a solution?
Introduce aging and heirs. Then introduce children as a method to keep player-control of their fortune. Then players are forced to have kids... who are weak and need defending... which means the wealthy and powerful have a vested interest in a system which protects them (can't be logged in all the time!), along with the newbs :-)
Anything which requires "laws" implemented in game logic sucks. It has to be player-driven.
Make everywhere a PVP zone and now in the game logic, you do need to have serious consequences if you die, maybe related to the age/strength of your character at the time of death. For one, all your posessions are probably going to be looted, and the system which the players decide upon determines how your heir might get access to your fortunes.
It could be fun to play MMORPGS with in-game court orders and bounties, both on the criminal, vigilante and law enforcement side.
...the $50K (or less) would be better used...
The odd thing about money is that it follows a conservation principle... it's never destroyed, it just changes form.
$50k was just liberated from somebody who didn't need it. Half of it went into taxes (on the operation, the materials for the operation, the salaries for the employees etc), the other half was distributed among those who performed the operation.
You could argue that it was a $50k investment towards the practitioners of vetrenary science, which I'm sure bennefits the rest of society somehow.
I have no problem with wealthy people spending money on frivilous things. It does bug me though when they spend it on things which hurt everyone else... like gas-guzzling cars, old growth wood, clothes made from slave labour, stuff like that.
IMHO, the greater harm was done just by creating another cat rather than saving one from a shelter... the $50k is better liberated regardless of how or why... and the harm done isn't that big a deal.
They're just saying that breaking them up is pretty much impossible from foreign soil. It can only be done indirectly... e.g. "break up your company or you can't do business in Europe", as opposed to the U.S. which can say "break up your company or be broken up by the courts"
By reading. Lots of reading. And hey, you can pronounce stuff because you're speaking the language with your friend daily.
So could the BBC create a webserver that the BBC couldn't crash?
That page is at least three years out of date...
http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/200 1/07/10/un_ranking010710
By not showing realistic consequences, kids know that the stuff isn't real. Just trying to pick up an anvil will quickly make them think otherwise.
On the other hand stuff like pro-wrestling pretends to be very real, and the atheletes execute lethal manuvers on one another with non-lethal results. Worse, in pro-wrestling, they show wanton out-of-control violence with people begging for mercy.
Power Rangers? I'm not sure that's so bad. Kids will imitate the moves, but at least if their victim begs for mercy, it won't be just like it was on T.V.