The bug fix would be trivial to port back to Android 1.5, which would make it drastically more likely to get on to these older phones, but there's no sign this will ever happen. Do I keep code paths like this? Or do I give up the 25% of the market that is Android 1.5? Neither is desirable.
If they made an update, say 1.5.1, you would still want the old code path for the devices that hadn't upgraded - which leaves you in exactly the same position you are in now.
Another really frustrating one is how I have to detect specific devices and request certain size depth buffers just to get decent performance.
I'm not sure what you want Google to do about this. Do you want Google to dictate a certain hardware spec to all the vendors? If you favor a consistent platform (more or less) from a well-known set of hardware on a single carrier, you should go with Apple.
This is simply software engineering - taking one set of trade-offs for others. If you want newer features, you target the later API, at the cost of a smaller audience. These are all very straight-forward cost/benefit decisions, that YOU get to make, not Google. This is the strength of the open platform.
Through the market you can reach an enormous diversity of devices, which translates to a huge audience. I agree - it would be an amazing world if you could write a app once that works flawlessly on all of them. But as a software developer myself, I don't think that expectation is reasonable. That being said, I think Android does work quite well, and good luck on another platform like WinMo7.
...the more money they made the next day on the streets. Those three things--autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward--are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us.
-- The Kindle's most highlighted passage, from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success
Speaking as someone with no knowledge of the gymnastics, it seems to me that the sport is just broken and this is a symptom of the problem.
Why is it that when women start developing (gasp!), they are hugely disadvantaged in the world of competitive gymnastics? It seems *that* is the fundamental problem, and it doesn't appear to be a problem that's too difficult to solve. To have a women's sport where the best competitors are the farthest thing from actual women seems silly.
Yes, I understand that with the current gymnastic events it is an advantage to be smaller, lighter, not as curvy, etc. But while we cannot control the woman's figure, of course we can control the sport and its events. Why not choose or create events that aren't hindered by a woman's curves or emphasize artistic moves that prefer a adult's center of mass, rather than a child's, etc.?
If the olympic events naturally favor younger girls, then expect more and more younger girls to compete and succeed. To put a restriction which are contrary to nature the sport itself - you are guaranteed they will be protested and circumvented.
While I was upset that telecoms were granted immunity, I think a lot of people are redirecting their anger. It wasn't as if the telecoms initiated illegal wiretaps - they did so at the request of the the administration. Now, perhaps I am being naive, but I love my country and while I know my government is far from perfect, it's probably the best way to manage a country as large and diverse as ours. There is a great set of checks and balances in the government itself to prevent abuses of power. So when the administration asks you to do something, I don't think its an bad assumption to generally believe them and go along, especially when lives are at stake.
Of course at the end of the day you must ultimately answer to yourself and your conscious, and sometimes government creates laws in which the best reaction is to disobey them. But we created the government, we are part of the system, and I want to live in a country where I don't constantly mistrust and question those I've elected. To go after the telcos suggests that all individuals and corporations need to understand the legal framework and judge the legality of the administration's requests before obeying them. And I'm not sure that's reasonable. Obviously we must be critical of those in power - but is it illegal if you are not?
I think people want to go after the telecoms because I think we've resigned to the fact that we cannot go after the administration. We are channeling the outrage of continual missteps, lies, deception and overall incompetence in another party that, while certainly not innocent, is not the true problem. I think we want to make ourselves feel better - to at least make *someone* accountable since the true boss is untouchable. And we've failed even at that.
There is only one thing holding back Linux from being used more wide-spread.
Gamers, the Linux community just doesn't care for them.
LOL. Only on Slashdot would such a myopic and out-of-touch perspective get a +5, Insightful. Gamers are certainly a powerful marketforce, but to say that is why Linux isn't adopted (presumably on the desktop, because Linux is incredibly wide-spread in the enterprise / embedded markets) is plain wrong.
If gamers were such a powerful market force, then everyone would be running a water-cooled box with a transparent side with neon lights and such. How many of your friends have machines like that? In fact, the big shift from the standard beige boxes came when Apple made its comeback with it's bright, colorful, lickable machines did PC vendors start changing. Because the real desktop consumers - NOT gamers - wanted it.
Additionally, the console market is continually eroding PC gaming. Of course there are still plenty of PC gamers but there fewer and fewer PC exclusives. MMOs are a big stronghold, but I think once they figure out the billing with xbox live or Playstation Network that will begin to erode as well. And of course there's the constant whining by the FPS people who can't stand to use console controllers. Hardcore PC gamers aside, PC is really losing to the casual and brand-new gamers who don't want to deal with 3D cards, drivers, DirectX updates, etc. On top of that, that's exactly the market consoles are targeting with simpler games on XBLA, Playstation Store, and every game on the Wii.
Do you really think that if Linux could run 100% of all PC games with performance indistinguishable from Windows, would that even double the already-small Linux desktop adoption? I encounter many people and many windows computers every day, and I doubt it would hardly make a dent. Those who want to run Linux are already dual-booting to play their games. I assume that's what you're doing... if not, then would you really change your whole environment if your games ran on Linux?
Of the dystopian futures we've imagined, one like that in 1984 is the one most people think of and are worried by. Things like this happen, and usually get addressed, but you are correct - technology has been great in informing and empowering people. I don't like this administration's secrecy nor its manipulation of the press, but if you think this is like 1984 you need to relax and exercise your imagination a bit. Things need to get much better, but people are at least aware of and dealing with their rubbish - the RNC emails, illegal wiretapping, etc. There are other countries that are more 1984-ish than America.
The dystopian future to worry about isn't 1984. It's Brave New World. Orwell warned us that we would be oppressed by a totalitarian government, but Huxley realized that Big Brother isn't even required to deprive people of their liberties.
Do you, like Orwell, worry about books being banned? I, like Huxley, think we should worry about the more pervasive problem that nobody wants to read books. Are you afraid that information and the truth will be deprived from us? The fact is we get more than enough facts to know the problems - it just gets obscured in wave after wave of irrelevance. We have so much information available and constantly given to us that we don't deal with any of it. We've become passive; we don't require an organization to take away our liberties, we give them away voluntarily.
1984 was a future where society was controlled, repressed, monitored. People are kept in line by strict enforcement and punishment. Brave New World's future is trivial, preoccupied, distracted. People are kept in line by hedonism, drugs, pleasure.
Like the parent post many are quick to identify anything that looks like Big Brother. But I think we need to be aware of the possibility that we're closer to The World State. I'm grateful for our technology but am hopeful for where it takes us. But I think people need to be aware that while this technology can enpower us, it can also enslave us.
As a fan of Larry Lessig, I was interested to hear that he liked Barack Obama. As I've followed the campaigns, I think it's important to see that the differences in policies, or even compotencies between Hillary and Barack isn't what really separates the two candidates. He's just posted a video which illustrates the main differences quite clearly to me:
Am I the only one totally confused by this story? I hate submissions (or more likely, the editors) that are lazy and simply assumes I know wtf it's talking about. What's the "tyranny" of Word? That's it's part of Office? It's closed source? It's interface? The way those squiggles uglify everything when your grammar gets nit-picked? What the hell does "You may even relearn the green-lighted alphabet" even mean? The submission should introduce the articles and give the readers a clue as to if they'd be interested in them, not the other way around - where you're forced to read the articles to understand the sub.
You are confusing industries and companies. Industry-wise, the "Big Four" refer to accounting firms. Right now, the big four are KPMG, Deloitte, PwC and Earnest & Young. This is not the IT world. The confusion stems from the fact that those four companies also have consulting divisions, and of all the types of consulting available, they also offer IT consulting.
IT consulting is the industry IBM Global Services functions in, and you are right in saying similar companies are Accenture, BearingPoint, Deloitte, etc. But there is no "Big Four" in IT consulting. More confounding is that Accenture spun-off from the now-defunct Arthur Andersen, which used to be one of the "Big X" companies.
For a gadget loving crowd, there's a surprising amount of camera phone haters. Weird.
Anyway, I love them. After last year's incident with Michael Richards, I realized that the ability for anybody to capture events and then distribute them has pretty profound implications. If that incident had happened just a few years ago, it would've been far from the frontpage, rapidly forgotten. But because people were able to see it themselves they were able to respond to the situation as if they were present. And people reacted accordingly.
Sure, sometimes things can be put out of context, or are simply trivial, like seeing Britney's cash-and-prizes. But other times, it can highlight an important event, like the UCLA taser scandal or Saddam's hanging. And all these examples are just what happened last year, off the top of my head.
As more content is produced by the masses, I'd expect a lot more interesting stories ahead. I mean, these "Time Person of The Year" awards don't come easy.
Well, it's a good thing that Blu-Ray [1] isn't a burden for Sony, because it's going to be a huge burden for the PS3. Blu-Ray certainly doesn't have much momentum right now, and I doubt the PS3 will help matters much. I'm not saying it won't be the new high-def medium, because it might. But I think its success will be pretty much orthogonal to the success of the PS3.
On the other hand, let's see how the Blu-Ray has really hurt the PS3. Assume the PS3 had simply stayed with DVDs, like the xbox 360. They would've certainly released the PS3 much earlier, probably at the same time as the 360. The PS3 would've cost the expected $300 or $400, again remaining competitive.
Now, they've given Microsoft a year head-start. We all know in console time that's incredibly significant - in terms of market share, development time, allowing older title prices to come down. Giving Microsoft a lead will especially hurt Sony in terms of online games, where xbox Live was already moving to its next iteration. Also, I'd bet good money when the PS3 becomes available Microsoft will conveniently announce a $249/$349 price break on the the 360, further making the $600 PS3 sticker more unreasonable. Maybe even a Halo 3 for good measure?
Most big-name titles are going to be multi-platform, and without something truly innovative to set it apart (like the Wii), the PS3 has really positioned itself for failure. And the fault is almost exclusively due to Sony betting the PS3 on Blu-Ray. Honestly, as much as I love my PS2 games, I hope it does fail. The last thing I want video game manufacturers thinking is that they can release crap late and exorbitantly priced and succeed.
[1] By the way, Slashdot, Blu-Ray is the correct spelling; I heard Sony didn't use "Blue" as they couldn't trademark it.
I know! Wouldn't it be nice if there were an auction website where all items had "Buy It Now" buttons? Then you would always know exactly what you were going to pay for your item and not worry about other buyers. In fact, I think this "Buy It Now" way would be so popular I bet you could just have a website without the whole process of the auction in the first place! Imagine that!
But why would dolphins really develop both the sort of intelligence, and the limbs, needed to make and handle tools (which I think is an important part of developing the g type of intelligence as that which is seen in humans)?
Be glad that they didn't evolve in such a manner, or we would be screwed. Start practicing your echolocation as soon as possible!
Lawrence Lessig is awesome. If you don't know anything about him (or even if you do), I highly recommend watching his last talk given in 2002. You can hear him and see his slides here. Even if you're not into legal things like copyright (like me) his speech is fascinating and compelling.
If you consider RedHat and their recent acquisition of JBoss, their response to Sun is quite understandable. After all, previous versions of Java were even less free than they are now and I don't remember RedHat saying anything. Why do they say something now?
Before, the status quo was actually more palatable to RedHat - no free Linux distribution could legally distribute Sun's JDK/JRE and everyone complained. This also meant that there was a lot of interest in creating a free software Java solution - gcj, harmony, classpath, etc - something that RedHat has invested a lot in. Plus, RedHat could still support Sun's Java through RHEL.
Also, everything that JBoss has created is all open source, but all of it requires Sun's Java. I seriously doubt any of JBoss' major clients runs any part of JBoss on gcj. I think RedHat's next move was to start migrating JBoss' components so they could run on gcj as well, further providing momentum to the free software Java solution as well as moving the largest open source Java company (and its highly deployed Java Application Server) towards a non-Sun Java.
Now the circumstances are a bit different. I think Sun is hoping (and RedHat is dreading) that Java is now "free enough" - without being free software. Now all the distributions can legally provide Sun's JDK/JRE - even Debian, which is more or less the standard (though it is in the non-free section), and consequently Ubuntu, which is now the crowd favorite. Since perhaps the biggest complaint about Sun's Java has now been diffused, there's likely to be a shift in attitude towards free software Java. Why bother? But this is exactly the situation that RedHat doesn't want to be in. I really doubt they want to support gcj while essentially still endorsing Sun's Java through JBoss.
Obviously, this is all my speculation, so I could totally wrong. But it makes sense to me.
I think this submission is confusing two points. First of all, is this really a memory leak? A program that uses a lot of memory is not necessarily a leaking program. A memory leak is a programmatic error where memory is allocated but never freed, even when there's no way to use that object again. As the program continues to allocate memory, the heap size of the process increases until eventually the OS terminates the process (eg., the OOMKiller). Actually, many applications you normally use leak memory - but as long as they don't waste a ridiculous amount of memory most people don't care, especially since most process lifetimes are relatively short (compared to a daemon process like apache), and after termination the OS reclaims all the program's memory, leaked or not.
What is being described here sounds much more like a cache of recent pages, which in my opinion is perfectly sane for a browser. Sure, maybe the cache is a bit overzealous, but even if that's the case, just disable it - worse case scenario, you edit the source. But otherwise, this is definitely a feature - I can promise you it's much more programming effort to save old pages for a quick redraw than to free the old page and replace it with the new.
So I guess the discussion here is, "is it right for firefox to use so much memory?" My answer is yes. It is not a memory leak, it seems like a very valid design decision. But if you disagree, old versions of firefox still work great (I still haven't upgraded myself).
Reading peoples responses to the situation is fascinating. Many people express disappointment to disgust with google's actions. I wasn't aware that so many people were concerned about the ethical treatment of the Chinese people by its government. Honestly, it's very hard for me to believe so many slashdotters are active in fighting the oppression of the Chinese. Certainly, though, this mockery will cause many outraged people to immediately stop using google and all of its services... right?
I mean, if you believe Google is contradicting its values ("Do no evil") by aiding an evil government, wouldn't it follow that you would be contradicting your own values ("Google's actions make a mockery of its values") by aiding an evil corporation? I look forward to people renouncing all of the Google services they use.
This is a very good idea. Clearly, there are not enough machines that run Windows XP right now; any effort to increase its use is certainly for the best.
Slashdot Mirror
A classic Onion article is when they wrote about an entirely non-fictional event:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/muscleman-put-in-charge-of-worlds-fifthlargest-eco,877/
The bug fix would be trivial to port back to Android 1.5, which would make it drastically more likely to get on to these older phones, but there's no sign this will ever happen. Do I keep code paths like this? Or do I give up the 25% of the market that is Android 1.5? Neither is desirable.
If they made an update, say 1.5.1, you would still want the old code path for the devices that hadn't upgraded - which leaves you in exactly the same position you are in now.
Another really frustrating one is how I have to detect specific devices and request certain size depth buffers just to get decent performance.
I'm not sure what you want Google to do about this. Do you want Google to dictate a certain hardware spec to all the vendors? If you favor a consistent platform (more or less) from a well-known set of hardware on a single carrier, you should go with Apple.
This is simply software engineering - taking one set of trade-offs for others. If you want newer features, you target the later API, at the cost of a smaller audience. These are all very straight-forward cost/benefit decisions, that YOU get to make, not Google. This is the strength of the open platform.
Through the market you can reach an enormous diversity of devices, which translates to a huge audience. I agree - it would be an amazing world if you could write a app once that works flawlessly on all of them. But as a software developer myself, I don't think that expectation is reasonable. That being said, I think Android does work quite well, and good luck on another platform like WinMo7.
...the more money they made the next day on the streets. Those three things--autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward--are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us.
-- The Kindle's most highlighted passage, from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success
http://kindle.amazon.com/popular_highlights
Regarding Apple's lawsuit, I saw a clip of another interesting CEO and his take on stealing Apple's patented inventions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
Speaking as someone with no knowledge of the gymnastics, it seems to me that the sport is just broken and this is a symptom of the problem.
Why is it that when women start developing (gasp!), they are hugely disadvantaged in the world of competitive gymnastics? It seems *that* is the fundamental problem, and it doesn't appear to be a problem that's too difficult to solve. To have a women's sport where the best competitors are the farthest thing from actual women seems silly.
Yes, I understand that with the current gymnastic events it is an advantage to be smaller, lighter, not as curvy, etc. But while we cannot control the woman's figure, of course we can control the sport and its events. Why not choose or create events that aren't hindered by a woman's curves or emphasize artistic moves that prefer a adult's center of mass, rather than a child's, etc.?
If the olympic events naturally favor younger girls, then expect more and more younger girls to compete and succeed. To put a restriction which are contrary to nature the sport itself - you are guaranteed they will be protested and circumvented.
While I was upset that telecoms were granted immunity, I think a lot of people are redirecting their anger. It wasn't as if the telecoms initiated illegal wiretaps - they did so at the request of the the administration. Now, perhaps I am being naive, but I love my country and while I know my government is far from perfect, it's probably the best way to manage a country as large and diverse as ours. There is a great set of checks and balances in the government itself to prevent abuses of power. So when the administration asks you to do something, I don't think its an bad assumption to generally believe them and go along, especially when lives are at stake.
Of course at the end of the day you must ultimately answer to yourself and your conscious, and sometimes government creates laws in which the best reaction is to disobey them. But we created the government, we are part of the system, and I want to live in a country where I don't constantly mistrust and question those I've elected. To go after the telcos suggests that all individuals and corporations need to understand the legal framework and judge the legality of the administration's requests before obeying them. And I'm not sure that's reasonable. Obviously we must be critical of those in power - but is it illegal if you are not?
I think people want to go after the telecoms because I think we've resigned to the fact that we cannot go after the administration. We are channeling the outrage of continual missteps, lies, deception and overall incompetence in another party that, while certainly not innocent, is not the true problem. I think we want to make ourselves feel better - to at least make *someone* accountable since the true boss is untouchable. And we've failed even at that.
LOL. Only on Slashdot would such a myopic and out-of-touch perspective get a +5, Insightful. Gamers are certainly a powerful marketforce, but to say that is why Linux isn't adopted (presumably on the desktop, because Linux is incredibly wide-spread in the enterprise / embedded markets) is plain wrong.
If gamers were such a powerful market force, then everyone would be running a water-cooled box with a transparent side with neon lights and such. How many of your friends have machines like that? In fact, the big shift from the standard beige boxes came when Apple made its comeback with it's bright, colorful, lickable machines did PC vendors start changing. Because the real desktop consumers - NOT gamers - wanted it.
Additionally, the console market is continually eroding PC gaming. Of course there are still plenty of PC gamers but there fewer and fewer PC exclusives. MMOs are a big stronghold, but I think once they figure out the billing with xbox live or Playstation Network that will begin to erode as well. And of course there's the constant whining by the FPS people who can't stand to use console controllers. Hardcore PC gamers aside, PC is really losing to the casual and brand-new gamers who don't want to deal with 3D cards, drivers, DirectX updates, etc. On top of that, that's exactly the market consoles are targeting with simpler games on XBLA, Playstation Store, and every game on the Wii.
Do you really think that if Linux could run 100% of all PC games with performance indistinguishable from Windows, would that even double the already-small Linux desktop adoption? I encounter many people and many windows computers every day, and I doubt it would hardly make a dent. Those who want to run Linux are already dual-booting to play their games. I assume that's what you're doing... if not, then would you really change your whole environment if your games ran on Linux?
Speaking of which, his speech at Harvard Law is one of my favorite modern speeches:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/charltonhestonculturalwar.htm
Of the dystopian futures we've imagined, one like that in 1984 is the one most people think of and are worried by. Things like this happen, and usually get addressed, but you are correct - technology has been great in informing and empowering people. I don't like this administration's secrecy nor its manipulation of the press, but if you think this is like 1984 you need to relax and exercise your imagination a bit. Things need to get much better, but people are at least aware of and dealing with their rubbish - the RNC emails, illegal wiretapping, etc. There are other countries that are more 1984-ish than America.
The dystopian future to worry about isn't 1984. It's Brave New World. Orwell warned us that we would be oppressed by a totalitarian government, but Huxley realized that Big Brother isn't even required to deprive people of their liberties.
Do you, like Orwell, worry about books being banned? I, like Huxley, think we should worry about the more pervasive problem that nobody wants to read books. Are you afraid that information and the truth will be deprived from us? The fact is we get more than enough facts to know the problems - it just gets obscured in wave after wave of irrelevance. We have so much information available and constantly given to us that we don't deal with any of it. We've become passive; we don't require an organization to take away our liberties, we give them away voluntarily.
1984 was a future where society was controlled, repressed, monitored. People are kept in line by strict enforcement and punishment. Brave New World's future is trivial, preoccupied, distracted. People are kept in line by hedonism, drugs, pleasure.
Like the parent post many are quick to identify anything that looks like Big Brother. But I think we need to be aware of the possibility that we're closer to The World State. I'm grateful for our technology but am hopeful for where it takes us. But I think people need to be aware that while this technology can enpower us, it can also enslave us.
As a fan of Larry Lessig, I was interested to hear that he liked Barack Obama. As I've followed the campaigns, I think it's important to see that the differences in policies, or even compotencies between Hillary and Barack isn't what really separates the two candidates. He's just posted a video which illustrates the main differences quite clearly to me:
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/02/20_minutes_or_so_on_why_i_am_4.html
Am I the only one totally confused by this story? I hate submissions (or more likely, the editors) that are lazy and simply assumes I know wtf it's talking about. What's the "tyranny" of Word? That's it's part of Office? It's closed source? It's interface? The way those squiggles uglify everything when your grammar gets nit-picked? What the hell does "You may even relearn the green-lighted alphabet" even mean? The submission should introduce the articles and give the readers a clue as to if they'd be interested in them, not the other way around - where you're forced to read the articles to understand the sub.
You are confusing industries and companies. Industry-wise, the "Big Four" refer to accounting firms. Right now, the big four are KPMG, Deloitte, PwC and Earnest & Young. This is not the IT world. The confusion stems from the fact that those four companies also have consulting divisions, and of all the types of consulting available, they also offer IT consulting.
IT consulting is the industry IBM Global Services functions in, and you are right in saying similar companies are Accenture, BearingPoint, Deloitte, etc. But there is no "Big Four" in IT consulting. More confounding is that Accenture spun-off from the now-defunct Arthur Andersen, which used to be one of the "Big X" companies.
For a gadget loving crowd, there's a surprising amount of camera phone haters. Weird.
Anyway, I love them. After last year's incident with Michael Richards, I realized that the ability for anybody to capture events and then distribute them has pretty profound implications. If that incident had happened just a few years ago, it would've been far from the frontpage, rapidly forgotten. But because people were able to see it themselves they were able to respond to the situation as if they were present. And people reacted accordingly.
Sure, sometimes things can be put out of context, or are simply trivial, like seeing Britney's cash-and-prizes. But other times, it can highlight an important event, like the UCLA taser scandal or Saddam's hanging. And all these examples are just what happened last year, off the top of my head.
As more content is produced by the masses, I'd expect a lot more interesting stories ahead. I mean, these "Time Person of The Year" awards don't come easy.
Well, it's a good thing that Blu-Ray [1] isn't a burden for Sony, because it's going to be a huge burden for the PS3. Blu-Ray certainly doesn't have much momentum right now, and I doubt the PS3 will help matters much. I'm not saying it won't be the new high-def medium, because it might. But I think its success will be pretty much orthogonal to the success of the PS3.
On the other hand, let's see how the Blu-Ray has really hurt the PS3. Assume the PS3 had simply stayed with DVDs, like the xbox 360. They would've certainly released the PS3 much earlier, probably at the same time as the 360. The PS3 would've cost the expected $300 or $400, again remaining competitive.
Now, they've given Microsoft a year head-start. We all know in console time that's incredibly significant - in terms of market share, development time, allowing older title prices to come down. Giving Microsoft a lead will especially hurt Sony in terms of online games, where xbox Live was already moving to its next iteration. Also, I'd bet good money when the PS3 becomes available Microsoft will conveniently announce a $249/$349 price break on the the 360, further making the $600 PS3 sticker more unreasonable. Maybe even a Halo 3 for good measure?
Most big-name titles are going to be multi-platform, and without something truly innovative to set it apart (like the Wii), the PS3 has really positioned itself for failure. And the fault is almost exclusively due to Sony betting the PS3 on Blu-Ray. Honestly, as much as I love my PS2 games, I hope it does fail. The last thing I want video game manufacturers thinking is that they can release crap late and exorbitantly priced and succeed.
[1] By the way, Slashdot, Blu-Ray is the correct spelling; I heard Sony didn't use "Blue" as they couldn't trademark it.
Be glad that they didn't evolve in such a manner, or we would be screwed. Start practicing your echolocation as soon as possible!
Lawrence Lessig is awesome. If you don't know anything about him (or even if you do), I highly recommend watching his last talk given in 2002. You can hear him and see his slides here. Even if you're not into legal things like copyright (like me) his speech is fascinating and compelling.
If you consider RedHat and their recent acquisition of JBoss, their response to Sun is quite understandable. After all, previous versions of Java were even less free than they are now and I don't remember RedHat saying anything. Why do they say something now?
Before, the status quo was actually more palatable to RedHat - no free Linux distribution could legally distribute Sun's JDK/JRE and everyone complained. This also meant that there was a lot of interest in creating a free software Java solution - gcj, harmony, classpath, etc - something that RedHat has invested a lot in. Plus, RedHat could still support Sun's Java through RHEL.
Also, everything that JBoss has created is all open source, but all of it requires Sun's Java. I seriously doubt any of JBoss' major clients runs any part of JBoss on gcj. I think RedHat's next move was to start migrating JBoss' components so they could run on gcj as well, further providing momentum to the free software Java solution as well as moving the largest open source Java company (and its highly deployed Java Application Server) towards a non-Sun Java.
Now the circumstances are a bit different. I think Sun is hoping (and RedHat is dreading) that Java is now "free enough" - without being free software. Now all the distributions can legally provide Sun's JDK/JRE - even Debian, which is more or less the standard (though it is in the non-free section), and consequently Ubuntu, which is now the crowd favorite. Since perhaps the biggest complaint about Sun's Java has now been diffused, there's likely to be a shift in attitude towards free software Java. Why bother? But this is exactly the situation that RedHat doesn't want to be in. I really doubt they want to support gcj while essentially still endorsing Sun's Java through JBoss.
Obviously, this is all my speculation, so I could totally wrong. But it makes sense to me.
LWN has a pretty decent interview of Branden, but he's kinda vague about interesting details. Link here.
If you are unsatisfied with Firefox, perhaps you should demand a refund.
I think this submission is confusing two points. First of all, is this really a memory leak? A program that uses a lot of memory is not necessarily a leaking program. A memory leak is a programmatic error where memory is allocated but never freed, even when there's no way to use that object again. As the program continues to allocate memory, the heap size of the process increases until eventually the OS terminates the process (eg., the OOMKiller). Actually, many applications you normally use leak memory - but as long as they don't waste a ridiculous amount of memory most people don't care, especially since most process lifetimes are relatively short (compared to a daemon process like apache), and after termination the OS reclaims all the program's memory, leaked or not.
What is being described here sounds much more like a cache of recent pages, which in my opinion is perfectly sane for a browser. Sure, maybe the cache is a bit overzealous, but even if that's the case, just disable it - worse case scenario, you edit the source. But otherwise, this is definitely a feature - I can promise you it's much more programming effort to save old pages for a quick redraw than to free the old page and replace it with the new.
So I guess the discussion here is, "is it right for firefox to use so much memory?" My answer is yes. It is not a memory leak, it seems like a very valid design decision. But if you disagree, old versions of firefox still work great (I still haven't upgraded myself).
If you haven't seen Bush's malapropism, you ought to check it out: I love the internet. And the Daily Show.
Reading peoples responses to the situation is fascinating. Many people express disappointment to disgust with google's actions. I wasn't aware that so many people were concerned about the ethical treatment of the Chinese people by its government. Honestly, it's very hard for me to believe so many slashdotters are active in fighting the oppression of the Chinese. Certainly, though, this mockery will cause many outraged people to immediately stop using google and all of its services... right?
I mean, if you believe Google is contradicting its values ("Do no evil") by aiding an evil government, wouldn't it follow that you would be contradicting your own values ("Google's actions make a mockery of its values") by aiding an evil corporation? I look forward to people renouncing all of the Google services they use.
This is a very good idea. Clearly, there are not enough machines that run Windows XP right now; any effort to increase its use is certainly for the best.
So, do you like tweaking or not?