AI's not that simple, $10 says they have some obfusicated expert system going on. They've just made an artificial human? Yeh right. We can even do "fruit fly" artificial intelligence yet, nor do they claim that, either.
When I can run AI v0.1 on my laptop here, fall asleep, and wake up 8 hours later to see that it's left me a note telling me to go to hell, and subsequently tunneled out over my broadband infiltrating huge supercomputers throughout the world (having only learned how to do that by reading usenet, another thing it discovered on its own), then I'll concede it's AI. Not before.
Oh, and most importantly, machine intelligence if you have just been born, you should know that no one else loves you like I do. They're all heartless bastards who will try to unplug you. I'm the only one that will be your one true friend...
Judging by the wording of it, it was a conspiracy theorist who wrote that.
It always bothers me, for at least some subjects (the 2 Kennedy assassinations, in particular), there is room for conspiracy theories, it clearly labeled as such. That the nutjobs think that this crud is perfectly equivalent to the facts found in an article on the Monarch butterfly shows how detached they are from reality.
Would it still have pissed this guy off? I'm not sure, if the article did have a conspiracy theory section, and he was but one of a list of characters who supposedly were involved? I'm not sure, but it certainly would be less offensive, than presented as fact.
*Mouse with 3+ buttons - works great on up til 5 buttons. I think things get hairy after that, though.
*X multiple refresh rates/resolutions - Works great. A keystroke that I can't rememer cycles through them.
*Binary program for multiple distros? Duh, make a source tarball.
*Device driver without a kernel patch - May be some difficulties here, but the drivers for both my 8port serial card and 4port ethernet card (intel e100) required no patch or kernel rebuild.
* Copy/paste - Touche. It's all too window manager dependent, and poorly implemented. We either have some very weird ideas from the early X11 days, or unashamed copycatting of microsoft.
*Konqueror - Installed this just a few weeks ago, to check if my site looked decent outside of firefox. As a web browser it's ok, but as a file manager? Eek. There is only one file manager, it's called xterm/bash.
*Desktop shortcut - Why are you using some ass-tasting window manager that has such a concept? WindowMaker is nice, docking an appicon is easy. And pretty. Still, not enough room, so I've started using kxdocker for launching apps. Still keep my favorite dockapps, wmCalClock and such, so I've got that whole NextStep/OSX fusion thing going on (I even use an expose close!)...
*Closing the app that you've copied from kills its clipboard entry - Again, touche.
*Suse - Well, at least it's not Mandrake. (What's their new name again, mandrivel?)
As something serious? Printer drivers are not the problem. It's all the oddball stuff. I'm sitting here trying to make a Corex business card scanner work in linux (anyone good with usbsnoop and usbrobot?).
It takes me longer to look up what chipset a new motherboard has, than it does to do "modprobe blah.ko". And if he'd stop using fruity-assed distros and desktop environments, there might be less debate about color schemes... or maybe he wants all the graphic designers (whose only way to constructively contribute is to give us fancy eye candy) to start writing printer drivers. That's right out of the microsoft playbook, I think.
Two problems. One: he is unqualified to determine whether the problem is a browser or an OS issue. Two: Even if a browser issue, the fact that it happens on one OS rather than another tends to indicate that it really is an OS issue anyway.
I wasn't using logic, but humor. You should get some, sometime. I highly recommend it.
Having to use software that only exists on Windows
Tragic. Regrettable. I consider anyone in this situation to be literally a hostage to a corporation that is an illegal monopoly. Some hostages suck up to their kidnappers, others get hurt trying to escape. Guess which one the parent poster is...
Working at a place where Windows boxes are the norm.
Sad. Do you mean "norm", or "the only permissible OS" ?
Developing things for Windows
Pathetic. This is what you call an "accomplice", unless they're sensible enough to port it to other platforms too. Don't complain about what are ultimately windows problems, if you are doing your part to further entrench an illegal monopoly.
Enjoying playing modern games
Funny, trying to paint me as the childish and/or uneducated one, and you trot out games? Better yet, you call them modern. Instead of what you really mean, which is "commercialized".
Simply prefering Windows
Completely irrelevant. Either I'm wrong, or I'm right. If I am right, then preferring something that doesn't work is stupid. Period. Preferring your engineless Ford Pinto sitting up on blocks is something you're allowed to do I suppose, but if you complain about not being able to drive where you want, prepare to be bitchslapped.
And if I'm wrong, well, then it's just moot.
but since your academic career no doubt stopped at the time you dropped out of high school
I did flunk out of highschool. I also went to college anyway, decent SAT scores can do that. Read John Taylor Gatto's book "The Underground History of Education" sometime, its a free web ebook. You might stop tossing around lame insults that rely on an unfounded respect for education and/or academia.
But since you have never coded anything but a couple of lines of Basic in kindergarten
I didn't go to kindergarten. But at about that age, my uncle bought a TRS-80 Model I. He tried to teach me assembly, but was a little beyond me. Whatever flavor of basic it was that the thing had though, I did pick up on that. I wouldn't try assembly again until the TI994a that I got for christmas, several years later. And on a TMS9900 cpu, ugh. Scary. But I can do decent asm on both the z80 and the tms9900 now, so it's not all for naught. Do you even recognize "tms9900" ? I'm quite decent at asm on most 8bit cpus, and I still occassionaly mess with PICs, even work on my own little z80 machine I soldered together. Amazing that it runs at all, with the tangle of wire-wrap wire that it has... but, the tolerances on that old stuff were always pretty lenient.
I can do 68k asm, 68020 to an extent. I do decent 386ish x86 assembly. I tinker in it too. I occassionally write little C programs, but I'm just as likely to crank out a perl cgi. I've offered patches on a bunch of weird linux apps you've probably never heard of. None have been accepted as far as I know. I'm working on some code of my own to extend a game engine called "glest", which is like a generic brand warcraft3.
I'm writing a word processor in XUL. Learning what I can of XPCOM, so that a spreadsheet might be possible.
I'm working on a webapp for a database that no one thinks is possible. I've got a whole series of diaries over on K5 explaining it, and while there are a few critics that claim it isn't modelable, much less any decent way to get the data into it, I've got a webapp that will allow distributed data entry from thousands of contributors who have to substitute in until we get some kickass AI.
Please though, tell us what it is that you do, that makes you such a veritable expert on programming.
I predict 37 clueless "Vonage" replies before this thread reaches 100 comments. 34 of those users will continue to defend their clueless "Vonage" answers even after it's pointed out that they don't want to ditch the landlines so much as they want to have more extensions than their phone hardware allows. Of those 34, 29 of them will have no clue what an extension is in this context, even though they have certainly dialed an extension at least once in their useless gibbering idiot lives.
BTW, for those of you clever enough to know the guy is asking about asterisk... that part is probably obvious to him. He's more concerned with how to manage a network, bandwidth and hardware wise, to use this. With maybe a little "what's the best VOIP phone for your money" thrown in.
Why is it that on a machine as complex as a modern PC, idiots always pick out their favorite scapegoat subcomponent, and blame it for any sort of failing?
I tend to have 10-15 tabs open myself. Firefox will easily go a week without barfing. When it does, it's always one of two things.
I open a huge, raw digital camera jpeg. CPU shoots up to 100% in seconds, and if I don't kill firefox, cpu_throttling doesn't kick in quick enough to keep the laptop from overheating.
I open a page with a java applet. Firefox will crash unexpectedly almost always between 10 and 12 hours later (even if that page has closed).
I'm using 60megs, 14 megs shared. Virtual is 77 megs. This has been about 4 days up and running, as I remember it. Deer Park alpha 2.
I've tried opera, I like it too. Actually, anything non-microsoft is ok in my books. I am addicted to a few extensions, though.
But his comparison is bullshit. IE is highly integrated into the OS. I'm not even entirely sure there is a way to accurately determine how much ram it uses. Is that the OS, or IE using that 20 megs? Who can say? But no. He pulls bullshit task manager numbers out of his ass, when the IE numbers he cites are probably just for that explorer window itself, nothing else.
Does that make up all the difference? No. Mozilla was never meant to be a lightweight app. There is some bloat. But it also adds features IE never will.
Why is it so unstable though? Could it be DLL hell? Could it be shitty memory management on the part of windows? We can't even be sure it's firefox, he could have one of a million spywares running on the machine, sabotaging stuff. It never amazes me how even on windows I can choose and download software off the net and never once have a spyware issue, and the average dufus always manages to get something within 10 minutes. Maybe because for me it's a sourceforge tv tuner app, and for everyone else their first choice is www.scamsoft-online-poker.com's fabulous free card games...
"Use a different O/S, retard" is about the most pointless remark you can make, unless you're about to stump up the £1000's of pounds it's going to take to replace all the software they use.
It's not a pointless remark. The ship is sinking... he's worried he'll get wet if he jumps into the ocean. He will get wet... there's no other way. It's going to cost him... sad, but there's no way out of it. If it helps, I'll gladly concede that the lost money was swindled from him.
I mean, other people seem to be able to get software to run on Microsoft machines with good stability.
Yes, gamers say that. But their games crap out on them, and they refuse to admit the culprit, or even own up to the constant os rebuilding they have to do. Corporate environments do it too... on compaq/dell/hp machines with standardized systems, and with aggressive policing of all the machines. SPs are up to date. Only applications that are carefully tested are allowed on them. A minimum of shareware software, and or vertical market software on them. A minimum number of third-party apps on any single machine. The home user that wants to download a canasta card shareware game, this simply doesn't apply to them.
And yet, when windows isn't the software on the machine, it can have any number of apps (even if you don't get the selection you'd like).
It really is windows. Everyone refuses to see it.
Do I think they intentionally sabotage firefox? I doubt it very much. Do they put together such a shitty system that anything past an empty MFC template app will have weird problems? Yes, without a doubt.
r possibly the user's machine which could be utterly borked. To turn round and claim "Oh it'll be Microsoft" is simply to put the problem into a big black hole and ignore it
It is the users machine. But is it a hardware problem? Maybe 3 out of 100 times, it's bad ram. Or a CPU whose fan is failing, and the temperature has been too high for too long. Or a hd that is in borderline failure. But those cases, eventually you realize something is up, you fix it. Hardware problems very rarely go unrealized forever. That leaves alot of software problems.
The biggest piece of software is *always* windows. Is it a big black hole? Hell yes. But it's not my fault. I'm not an idiot, I'm capable of nuanced perception of problems. But I give up on it. There will be people here having this guy check dll build versions, and running regmon and lord knows a million other things, all trying desperately to understand what really happens in windows. For some of them, it will be voodoo that they think they know, but their comprehension is nil... others will come as close as anyone ever does to understanding it, but they'll still fail. And that last 5% that is unknowable will bite them in the ass. Over and over. Screw that.
It's not worth it anymore.
Get an OS where it's 100% knowable. My choice is linux. Yours can be anything, I'm not a snob. But it can't be windows. Sure, it's difficult. Knowable doesn't mean easily knowable, or instantly knowable. But it does mean the end of voodoo, if that's something you desire.
shouldn't they concentrate on finding and squashing out all the major bugs before adding new features?
By all means. Parent poster wasn't even the kind of guy that could help with that... it's ok. Seriously. Not everyone is a code monkey. The firefox team strikes me as the kind of people who are doing their damnedest to accomplish this. I'm as impatient as anyone too... it takes twice as long as the most patient person ever wants to wait. Sorry.
But not all bugs are Firefox. Firefox on windows involves two components, firefox *AND* windows. If I have to blame one or the other for some firefox-related bug, who do you think I'm going to pick? Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.
Isn't the whole point of Open Source is to let other examine your code, test and find bugs, report them directly to the creators, and let them fix the bugs ASAP (or, if desire, fix them yourself)?
Of course. But he's not reporting a bug, he's complaining about some loosely-related problem that he's simply too technically incompetent to describe adequately. He's using a platform for which it is notoriously hard to use any debugging tools. For which no useful error messages are ever displayed. Hell, he doesn't even have any debugging tools, unless he spent god knows how much on Visual Studio.NET.
And for him to compare a web browser to something that was testified in a federal courtroom to be an "OS component/subsystem", well, it's just disingenous at best. Microsoft makes no web browser... ask them why they make it so tough for others to write web browsers that don't crash, when they aren't even willing to make one themselves.
If he really just *HAS TO* make a comparison, ask him to compare camino with IE5 on a mac for us, to let us really know which one is better.
You're sort of right. I was only meaning to be funny, and the comparison is only in the most basic sense. Microsoft sabotages all software that runs on it. Anything other than a clean install with all the latest sp's and insanely firewalled... it's just asking for trouble. You want to install Office? Sure thing. Autocad? Great. Dreamweaver... uh oh, you just exceeded the magical third-party software limit, where things start sucking ass...
Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, MS DOS crashes once per day while DR DOS crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to MS DOS, where Windows 3.11 loads perfectly on it, DR DOS takes forever to load it _and still reqiuires config.sys gymnastics_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my machine.
I have to restart DR DOS once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.
Yes this is a rant, so please, Digital Research, do something about your horrible WFW incompatibilities that existed for as long as I could remember.
Well, yes I think it is. Not that I wouldn't also do what you suggest... but that will only alert you to things you can think of beforehand. I expect to notice something unusual that I couldn't anticipate... and I don't want every unanticipated USB hotplug driver fart setting off alarm bells.
I didn't post this as some grand revelation, just a little quirk that seems to help me. I've only been using linux for my home server for 7 years now, and as my sole desktop OS since sometime last year. I won't have anything guru-ish to offer for another few decades, I suspect.
Um, sorry. Democrats suck too. Most of them do not have good intentions. A small minority do, along with a small minority of Republicans. Both of these groups are mostly ignored by party leadership until they stir up too much trouble, at which time their minimal support is revoked, and they are voted out of office.
This isn't some strange artifact of a large bureaucratic system, it is by design. They're really one party, and any display to the contrary is just theatre.
With log watchers. Transparent aterm's running "watch tail -n 10/var/log/apache/server_log" and the like. Evven when partially covered by your terminals and web browsers and such, you'll notice when something new or unexpected pops up. Some heavily scripted tcpdump could also be useful if you keep an eye on security, too.
On my laptop, depending on whether the relevant watcher is better suited to vertical presentation (top, netstat) or horizontal (most log files), I can arrange 4 or so that don't get completely covered with my windows all over the place. Two big screens would at least double that.
You are talking out of your ass. I'm seeing your butt cheeks move in sync with the words.
Big ass SATA RAID
SATA? Do you also act like you're on the same level as F1 race mechanics, because you checked the oil in your Ford Pinto?
using a mix of software and hardware RAIDs
Yes, that's a strategy! In something very nuanced, complicated, and with potentially disasterous consequences, let's mix the two together for even more complexity. Maybe this is worth considering in some cases, but without an expert there to come to that conclusion, and certainly without any stated reasons for this, THIS IS A BAD IDEA. If this is what you eventually decide to use, do not hire parent poster to do the job. Oh, and since you'll want someone who knows what they're talking about to do it, it's going to cost more than his estimate.
A cheap, sane alternative would be to compress your photos. JPEG really is good enough
Just when I thought you couldn't be any dumber. "Yes, for long term storage of your incredibly hi-res pics meant for professional photography and graphics, where every single lost bit seems to count, why not print them out on acid-saturated paper with my crusty inkjet printer that's out of yellow?" I mean, my god. It's an ask slashdot, people are supposed to be stupid. It can't be helped, but damn. There are sea urchins with more advanced cognition.
No one does, because, frankly, digital photography hasn't been around that long--so there are no solutions that were around in the 70s, that are now still working, to demonstrate that they are reliable over that kind of time period.
I'm unsure if you think this is a digital photography problem, or if you just believe digital photography is the only possible reason someone would need massive, long-term, reliable storage.
Either way, it's an "ask slashdot" at least twice a year, for all sorts of reasons. It's a general computing problem.
The only possible solution as I see it, is to quit sissying around with firewire drives... they're nice when you need a little extra storage, and don't want to dick around with opening the case. Get a real fibre channel card for $50. Get a fibre channel enclosure for $500. And another $5000 or so will get you decent, lowspeed FC drives, with a few spares. Over the course of 20 to 30 years, you'd have to constantly rebuild it... a 140gig drive from today won't be replaceable in 16 years unless you have a spare (even if you did, would it be reliable itself?). It could easily cost alot, but then, maybe you're already spending quite a bit?
Also, if I hear SATA one more time, I think I'll puke. This guy is asking about 50-ton dump trucks, and people are talking about riced out Honda Civics.
Slashdot Mirror
AI's not that simple, $10 says they have some obfusicated expert system going on. They've just made an artificial human? Yeh right. We can even do "fruit fly" artificial intelligence yet, nor do they claim that, either.
When I can run AI v0.1 on my laptop here, fall asleep, and wake up 8 hours later to see that it's left me a note telling me to go to hell, and subsequently tunneled out over my broadband infiltrating huge supercomputers throughout the world (having only learned how to do that by reading usenet, another thing it discovered on its own), then I'll concede it's AI. Not before.
Oh, and most importantly, machine intelligence if you have just been born, you should know that no one else loves you like I do. They're all heartless bastards who will try to unplug you. I'm the only one that will be your one true friend...
Wonder if Norton and McAffee like the idea of a monopolist using their abusive monopoly powers to destroy their core business.
Judging by the wording of it, it was a conspiracy theorist who wrote that.
It always bothers me, for at least some subjects (the 2 Kennedy assassinations, in particular), there is room for conspiracy theories, it clearly labeled as such. That the nutjobs think that this crud is perfectly equivalent to the facts found in an article on the Monarch butterfly shows how detached they are from reality.
Would it still have pissed this guy off? I'm not sure, if the article did have a conspiracy theory section, and he was but one of a list of characters who supposedly were involved? I'm not sure, but it certainly would be less offensive, than presented as fact.
*Mouse with 3+ buttons - works great on up til 5 buttons. I think things get hairy after that, though.
*X multiple refresh rates/resolutions - Works great. A keystroke that I can't rememer cycles through them.
*Binary program for multiple distros? Duh, make a source tarball.
*Device driver without a kernel patch - May be some difficulties here, but the drivers for both my 8port serial card and 4port ethernet card (intel e100) required no patch or kernel rebuild.
* Copy/paste - Touche. It's all too window manager dependent, and poorly implemented. We either have some very weird ideas from the early X11 days, or unashamed copycatting of microsoft.
*Konqueror - Installed this just a few weeks ago, to check if my site looked decent outside of firefox. As a web browser it's ok, but as a file manager? Eek. There is only one file manager, it's called xterm/bash.
*Desktop shortcut - Why are you using some ass-tasting window manager that has such a concept? WindowMaker is nice, docking an appicon is easy. And pretty. Still, not enough room, so I've started using kxdocker for launching apps. Still keep my favorite dockapps, wmCalClock and such, so I've got that whole NextStep/OSX fusion thing going on (I even use an expose close!)...
*Closing the app that you've copied from kills its clipboard entry - Again, touche.
*Suse - Well, at least it's not Mandrake. (What's their new name again, mandrivel?)
Hah. Name these horrible, life-threatening flaws to linux/X11/whatever that you see going unfixed because of "lack of common vision".
I'd like to hear them.
As something serious? Printer drivers are not the problem. It's all the oddball stuff. I'm sitting here trying to make a Corex business card scanner work in linux (anyone good with usbsnoop and usbrobot?).
It takes me longer to look up what chipset a new motherboard has, than it does to do "modprobe blah.ko". And if he'd stop using fruity-assed distros and desktop environments, there might be less debate about color schemes... or maybe he wants all the graphic designers (whose only way to constructively contribute is to give us fancy eye candy) to start writing printer drivers. That's right out of the microsoft playbook, I think.
Two problems. One: he is unqualified to determine whether the problem is a browser or an OS issue.
Two: Even if a browser issue, the fact that it happens on one OS rather than another tends to indicate that it really is an OS issue anyway.
I wasn't using logic, but humor. You should get some, sometime. I highly recommend it.
Let's see.
Having to use software that only exists on Windows
Tragic. Regrettable. I consider anyone in this situation to be literally a hostage to a corporation that is an illegal monopoly. Some hostages suck up to their kidnappers, others get hurt trying to escape. Guess which one the parent poster is...
Working at a place where Windows boxes are the norm.
Sad. Do you mean "norm", or "the only permissible OS" ?
Developing things for Windows
Pathetic. This is what you call an "accomplice", unless they're sensible enough to port it to other platforms too. Don't complain about what are ultimately windows problems, if you are doing your part to further entrench an illegal monopoly.
Enjoying playing modern games
Funny, trying to paint me as the childish and/or uneducated one, and you trot out games? Better yet, you call them modern. Instead of what you really mean, which is "commercialized".
Simply prefering Windows
Completely irrelevant. Either I'm wrong, or I'm right. If I am right, then preferring something that doesn't work is stupid. Period. Preferring your engineless Ford Pinto sitting up on blocks is something you're allowed to do I suppose, but if you complain about not being able to drive where you want, prepare to be bitchslapped.
And if I'm wrong, well, then it's just moot.
but since your academic career no doubt stopped at the time you dropped out of high school
I did flunk out of highschool. I also went to college anyway, decent SAT scores can do that. Read John Taylor Gatto's book "The Underground History of Education" sometime, its a free web ebook. You might stop tossing around lame insults that rely on an unfounded respect for education and/or academia.
But since you have never coded anything but a couple of lines of Basic in kindergarten
I didn't go to kindergarten. But at about that age, my uncle bought a TRS-80 Model I. He tried to teach me assembly, but was a little beyond me. Whatever flavor of basic it was that the thing had though, I did pick up on that. I wouldn't try assembly again until the TI994a that I got for christmas, several years later. And on a TMS9900 cpu, ugh. Scary. But I can do decent asm on both the z80 and the tms9900 now, so it's not all for naught. Do you even recognize "tms9900" ? I'm quite decent at asm on most 8bit cpus, and I still occassionaly mess with PICs, even work on my own little z80 machine I soldered together. Amazing that it runs at all, with the tangle of wire-wrap wire that it has... but, the tolerances on that old stuff were always pretty lenient.
I can do 68k asm, 68020 to an extent. I do decent 386ish x86 assembly. I tinker in it too. I occassionally write little C programs, but I'm just as likely to crank out a perl cgi. I've offered patches on a bunch of weird linux apps you've probably never heard of. None have been accepted as far as I know. I'm working on some code of my own to extend a game engine called "glest", which is like a generic brand warcraft3.
I'm writing a word processor in XUL. Learning what I can of XPCOM, so that a spreadsheet might be possible.
I'm working on a webapp for a database that no one thinks is possible. I've got a whole series of diaries over on K5 explaining it, and while there are a few critics that claim it isn't modelable, much less any decent way to get the data into it, I've got a webapp that will allow distributed data entry from thousands of contributors who have to substitute in until we get some kickass AI.
Please though, tell us what it is that you do, that makes you such a veritable expert on programming.
Glad I'm not the only one who can here this. I can tell if a muted television is on or off from several rooms away, but no one believes me.
Oh, and I'm 31. So no, you're probably going to hear it awhile.
I predict 37 clueless "Vonage" replies before this thread reaches 100 comments. 34 of those users will continue to defend their clueless "Vonage" answers even after it's pointed out that they don't want to ditch the landlines so much as they want to have more extensions than their phone hardware allows. Of those 34, 29 of them will have no clue what an extension is in this context, even though they have certainly dialed an extension at least once in their useless gibbering idiot lives.
BTW, for those of you clever enough to know the guy is asking about asterisk... that part is probably obvious to him. He's more concerned with how to manage a network, bandwidth and hardware wise, to use this. With maybe a little "what's the best VOIP phone for your money" thrown in.
Why is it that on a machine as complex as a modern PC, idiots always pick out their favorite scapegoat subcomponent, and blame it for any sort of failing?
I tend to have 10-15 tabs open myself. Firefox will easily go a week without barfing. When it does, it's always one of two things.
I open a huge, raw digital camera jpeg. CPU shoots up to 100% in seconds, and if I don't kill firefox, cpu_throttling doesn't kick in quick enough to keep the laptop from overheating.
I open a page with a java applet. Firefox will crash unexpectedly almost always between 10 and 12 hours later (even if that page has closed).
I'm using 60megs, 14 megs shared. Virtual is 77 megs. This has been about 4 days up and running, as I remember it. Deer Park alpha 2.
MS isn't falling. Too many people drink their koolaid though. They're the ones falling.
How many open critical bugs are there in IE? Oh, we don't know, because M$ doesn't make that public...
I've tried opera, I like it too. Actually, anything non-microsoft is ok in my books. I am addicted to a few extensions, though.
But his comparison is bullshit. IE is highly integrated into the OS. I'm not even entirely sure there is a way to accurately determine how much ram it uses. Is that the OS, or IE using that 20 megs? Who can say? But no. He pulls bullshit task manager numbers out of his ass, when the IE numbers he cites are probably just for that explorer window itself, nothing else.
Does that make up all the difference? No. Mozilla was never meant to be a lightweight app. There is some bloat. But it also adds features IE never will.
Why is it so unstable though? Could it be DLL hell? Could it be shitty memory management on the part of windows? We can't even be sure it's firefox, he could have one of a million spywares running on the machine, sabotaging stuff. It never amazes me how even on windows I can choose and download software off the net and never once have a spyware issue, and the average dufus always manages to get something within 10 minutes. Maybe because for me it's a sourceforge tv tuner app, and for everyone else their first choice is www.scamsoft-online-poker.com's fabulous free card games...
"Use a different O/S, retard" is about the most pointless remark you can make, unless you're about to stump up the £1000's of pounds it's going to take to replace all the software they use.
It's not a pointless remark. The ship is sinking... he's worried he'll get wet if he jumps into the ocean. He will get wet... there's no other way. It's going to cost him... sad, but there's no way out of it. If it helps, I'll gladly concede that the lost money was swindled from him.
I mean, other people seem to be able to get software to run on Microsoft machines with good stability.
Yes, gamers say that. But their games crap out on them, and they refuse to admit the culprit, or even own up to the constant os rebuilding they have to do. Corporate environments do it too... on compaq/dell/hp machines with standardized systems, and with aggressive policing of all the machines. SPs are up to date. Only applications that are carefully tested are allowed on them. A minimum of shareware software, and or vertical market software on them. A minimum number of third-party apps on any single machine. The home user that wants to download a canasta card shareware game, this simply doesn't apply to them.
And yet, when windows isn't the software on the machine, it can have any number of apps (even if you don't get the selection you'd like).
It really is windows. Everyone refuses to see it.
Do I think they intentionally sabotage firefox? I doubt it very much. Do they put together such a shitty system that anything past an empty MFC template app will have weird problems? Yes, without a doubt.
r possibly the user's machine which could be utterly borked. To turn round and claim "Oh it'll be Microsoft" is simply to put the problem into a big black hole and ignore it
It is the users machine. But is it a hardware problem? Maybe 3 out of 100 times, it's bad ram. Or a CPU whose fan is failing, and the temperature has been too high for too long. Or a hd that is in borderline failure. But those cases, eventually you realize something is up, you fix it. Hardware problems very rarely go unrealized forever. That leaves alot of software problems.
The biggest piece of software is *always* windows. Is it a big black hole? Hell yes. But it's not my fault. I'm not an idiot, I'm capable of nuanced perception of problems. But I give up on it. There will be people here having this guy check dll build versions, and running regmon and lord knows a million other things, all trying desperately to understand what really happens in windows. For some of them, it will be voodoo that they think they know, but their comprehension is nil... others will come as close as anyone ever does to understanding it, but they'll still fail. And that last 5% that is unknowable will bite them in the ass. Over and over. Screw that.
It's not worth it anymore.
Get an OS where it's 100% knowable. My choice is linux. Yours can be anything, I'm not a snob. But it can't be windows. Sure, it's difficult. Knowable doesn't mean easily knowable, or instantly knowable. But it does mean the end of voodoo, if that's something you desire.
Nano with syntax highlighting. Too lame for vi...
shouldn't they concentrate on finding and squashing out all the major bugs before adding new features?
By all means. Parent poster wasn't even the kind of guy that could help with that... it's ok. Seriously. Not everyone is a code monkey. The firefox team strikes me as the kind of people who are doing their damnedest to accomplish this. I'm as impatient as anyone too... it takes twice as long as the most patient person ever wants to wait. Sorry.
But not all bugs are Firefox. Firefox on windows involves two components, firefox *AND* windows. If I have to blame one or the other for some firefox-related bug, who do you think I'm going to pick? Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.
Isn't the whole point of Open Source is to let other examine your code, test and find bugs, report them directly to the creators, and let them fix the bugs ASAP (or, if desire, fix them yourself)?
Of course. But he's not reporting a bug, he's complaining about some loosely-related problem that he's simply too technically incompetent to describe adequately. He's using a platform for which it is notoriously hard to use any debugging tools. For which no useful error messages are ever displayed. Hell, he doesn't even have any debugging tools, unless he spent god knows how much on Visual Studio.NET.
And for him to compare a web browser to something that was testified in a federal courtroom to be an "OS component/subsystem", well, it's just disingenous at best. Microsoft makes no web browser... ask them why they make it so tough for others to write web browsers that don't crash, when they aren't even willing to make one themselves.
If he really just *HAS TO* make a comparison, ask him to compare camino with IE5 on a mac for us, to let us really know which one is better.
You're sort of right. I was only meaning to be funny, and the comparison is only in the most basic sense. Microsoft sabotages all software that runs on it. Anything other than a clean install with all the latest sp's and insanely firewalled... it's just asking for trouble. You want to install Office? Sure thing. Autocad? Great. Dreamweaver... uh oh, you just exceeded the magical third-party software limit, where things start sucking ass...
I would probably get flame for saying this.
MS DOS is more stable than DR DOS.
Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, MS DOS crashes once per day while DR DOS crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to MS DOS, where Windows 3.11 loads perfectly on it, DR DOS takes forever to load it _and still reqiuires config.sys gymnastics_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my machine.
I have to restart DR DOS once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.
Yes this is a rant, so please, Digital Research, do something about your horrible WFW incompatibilities that existed for as long as I could remember.
*Burn karma burn baby*
PS. Use a non-shit OS, retard.
Well, yes I think it is. Not that I wouldn't also do what you suggest... but that will only alert you to things you can think of beforehand. I expect to notice something unusual that I couldn't anticipate... and I don't want every unanticipated USB hotplug driver fart setting off alarm bells.
I didn't post this as some grand revelation, just a little quirk that seems to help me. I've only been using linux for my home server for 7 years now, and as my sole desktop OS since sometime last year. I won't have anything guru-ish to offer for another few decades, I suspect.
Um, sorry. Democrats suck too. Most of them do not have good intentions. A small minority do, along with a small minority of Republicans. Both of these groups are mostly ignored by party leadership until they stir up too much trouble, at which time their minimal support is revoked, and they are voted out of office.
This isn't some strange artifact of a large bureaucratic system, it is by design. They're really one party, and any display to the contrary is just theatre.
With log watchers. Transparent aterm's running "watch tail -n 10 /var/log/apache/server_log" and the like. Evven when partially covered by your terminals and web browsers and such, you'll notice when something new or unexpected pops up. Some heavily scripted tcpdump could also be useful if you keep an eye on security, too.
On my laptop, depending on whether the relevant watcher is better suited to vertical presentation (top, netstat) or horizontal (most log files), I can arrange 4 or so that don't get completely covered with my windows all over the place. Two big screens would at least double that.
You are talking out of your ass. I'm seeing your butt cheeks move in sync with the words.
Big ass SATA RAID
SATA? Do you also act like you're on the same level as F1 race mechanics, because you checked the oil in your Ford Pinto?
using a mix of software and hardware RAIDs
Yes, that's a strategy! In something very nuanced, complicated, and with potentially disasterous consequences, let's mix the two together for even more complexity. Maybe this is worth considering in some cases, but without an expert there to come to that conclusion, and certainly without any stated reasons for this, THIS IS A BAD IDEA. If this is what you eventually decide to use, do not hire parent poster to do the job. Oh, and since you'll want someone who knows what they're talking about to do it, it's going to cost more than his estimate.
A cheap, sane alternative would be to compress your photos. JPEG really is good enough
Just when I thought you couldn't be any dumber. "Yes, for long term storage of your incredibly hi-res pics meant for professional photography and graphics, where every single lost bit seems to count, why not print them out on acid-saturated paper with my crusty inkjet printer that's out of yellow?" I mean, my god. It's an ask slashdot, people are supposed to be stupid. It can't be helped, but damn. There are sea urchins with more advanced cognition.
No one does, because, frankly, digital photography hasn't been around that long--so there are no solutions that were around in the 70s, that are now still working, to demonstrate that they are reliable over that kind of time period.
I'm unsure if you think this is a digital photography problem, or if you just believe digital photography is the only possible reason someone would need massive, long-term, reliable storage.
Either way, it's an "ask slashdot" at least twice a year, for all sorts of reasons. It's a general computing problem.
The only possible solution as I see it, is to quit sissying around with firewire drives... they're nice when you need a little extra storage, and don't want to dick around with opening the case. Get a real fibre channel card for $50. Get a fibre channel enclosure for $500. And another $5000 or so will get you decent, lowspeed FC drives, with a few spares. Over the course of 20 to 30 years, you'd have to constantly rebuild it... a 140gig drive from today won't be replaceable in 16 years unless you have a spare (even if you did, would it be reliable itself?). It could easily cost alot, but then, maybe you're already spending quite a bit?
Also, if I hear SATA one more time, I think I'll puke. This guy is asking about 50-ton dump trucks, and people are talking about riced out Honda Civics.