I should have been more clear in my parent comment above that I understand that the problems of Mozilla and Firefox crashing because of plug-ins has existed for at least 2 years.
Has anyone else found that the 2 1/2-year-old CPU and memory
hogging bug is worse with Firefox 1.5? Have you experienced it in Mozilla?
I'm surprised at the number of crashes in Mozilla and Firefox. Here
are some quotes about crashes from the Known Issues for SeaMonkey 1.0 Beta page:
"A significant number of SeaMonkey crashes are actually caused by
Java. Please make sure you are using the latest available version of
Java."
"Sun's JRE will crash at startup if your useragent does not begin
with Mozilla/5."
"Some SeaMonkey crashes are actually caused by Flash. Please make
sure you are using the latest available Flash plugin (Bug 211213)."
"On Windows the Adobe SVG plugin crashes. Workaround: Don't copy it
(NPSVG3.dll, NPSVG3.zip) into your plugins folder. If you want to view SVGs,
SeaMonkey builds (except Linux GTK1) include native SVG support. (Bug
133567)"
The software I write (cash register software) would be considered
unreleasable if it crashed. I notice that Mozilla and Firefox developers talk
about crashes in what seems to me to be an easy-going fashion. I don't feel that way about Firefox
and Mozilla crashes. When they crash, or have serious symptoms
like the CPU and memory hogging bug mentioned above, I may lose literally
hours of work. After a crash I must re-establish all my windows and tabs.
Wow. I think it is a PR attempt mostly, and judging by the fact my parent comment was modded down, the PR works. Slashdotters are completely taken in by a small amount of charity, and now Bill Gates is a great guy. Very weak minded, in my opinion.
T-Mobile Prepaid. 10 cents/minute if you spend $100. Fewer tricks than other companies. Your time extends to a new year if you spend $10 before the end of the first year, I was told.
Here's a quote from the Economist article about Mitchell Baker: 'For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with "spare time and no social life". Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer -- her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek.'
Although, as the Economist article says, Mitchell Baker "gradually found herself the leader of this project" (the Mozilla Foundation), she is not able to understand or detect when there is a technical problem. How can someone lead a group when she cannot begin to understand the conversations?
The word "geek" is extremely offensive, although the word is often used in a way that implies that it is acceptable. Calling someone a geek is the social equivalent of calling a black person a nigger.
Having "no social life" is not a benefit for a programmer. It is a huge shortcoming in everything in life, including programming.
Although I myself am a programmer, I'm married to the woman of my choice. I have no trouble getting and holding the attention of attractive women, and not because of looks. The unthinking assumption that technically knowledgeable people are socially unskilled is unacceptable, and for many, not true.
This seems to be a leadership problem: There is a huge well-known bug in Firefox 1.5, the CPU and memory hogging bug. Developers refuse to fix it, even though anyone can demonstrate
the bug easily. Apparently there is some kind of social problem. Maybe no one
has the authority to deal with a major bug. It seems to be the kind of problem that can exist when a programming team is led by someone with no technical knowledge.
This bug has been reported to Bugzilla, and is very easy to reproduce
(see below), but Firefox developers have marked it invalid because there is
not enough specific information! The bug has existed in Firefox for more than
2 years, and several people report that it is worse in Firefox 1.5. Firefox's
Bugzilla does not allow direct links from Slashdot, so copy and paste Bugzilla
URLs into a new tab. Remove the space:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131 456
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660
See comments #48 and #49 of bug 222660 for an example of the symptoms under Windows XP. A typical Windows Task Manager screen shot attached to comment #49 shows the "I/O Other Bytes" increasing by 20K/second with no
program activity. At that point, the bug was not yet showing the worst symptoms.
The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use or more with no activity, normally occur after
opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs, as happens when researching
something on the internet over a period of hours or days. The bug symptoms are
worse after putting the computer on standby or after hibernating. My
experience has been that the memory and CPU hogging always occur together, so
they appear to be the same bug. However, the CPU hogging symptom takes longer
to appear. If the computer has perhaps 256 Megabytes of memory, the most obvious symptom at the beginning is hard disk thrashing.
You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and
closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html. To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of big occuring in normal use, since that web page is huge.
Maybe the only solution is for a developer who knows the code to reproduce the
problem and see what causes it. It is not clear to me why they are unwilling to do
so. This bug seems especially interesting to me. It is likely that fixing this
bug will fix other issues. It is likely that fixing this bug will make it easier
to work on the Firefox code.
I posted the bug numbered 222660 in Bugzilla. It is interesting to note that
apparently no developer has bothered to read the entire bug report and take
the time to understand it. For 2 1/2 years, developers have been saying things
like this: 1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly version. 2) Yes, this bug
exists, but it isn't important. 3) No one has posted a TalkBack report. (If
they read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack
report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too.) 4) I
This is not a troll. And, I agree it is unfortunate. However, I saw Mitchell Baker being interviewed by Charlie Rose. She was amazingly socially unsophisticated. She said she had no technical knowledge, but is a lawyer. She gave the impression that she needs to be replaced by someone more capable.
She gave such a poor account of herself that Charlie Rose was visibly embarrassed. That's the only time I've seen Charlie Rose embarrassed in the many years I've watched his interviews.
Don't think you are being loyal to Mozilla by supporting someone who is so obviously not suited to be a leader.
I compared the information about
Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize winner, in the Encyclopedia Britannica with that found elsewhere on the Internet.
The Encyclopedia Britannica article was not inaccurate. It was, however, extremely misleading. It was worse than worthless, since it gave the idea that Barbara McClintock's achievements were much less valuable and extensive than they actually are. After many years and much progress in Biology, her work is still valuable. A copy of her papers requires 80 feet of shelf space!
The Wikipedia article is far, far better than the one in the full Encyclopedia Britannica.
No space-limited, profit-oriented publication can compare to internet research, for most topics. I don't think that Encyclopedia Britannica has anything against Barbara McClintock, but the company must decide how much paper they want to buy.
I have PLENTY of experience with Windows being unreliable.
If you are using Windows XP, just re-load the operating system over the old system, and that will very likely fix everything. Boot from the Windows XP CD. Important: Skip the first "Repair" chance. The second is what you want.
Another phrase for the business strategy of an unreliable mainstream operating system is "maximizing shareholder value". Many people who begin to have trouble simply buy another computer, and Microsoft makes more money, since Microsoft makes them buy the OS again.
This is scary because it is intended as just a first step, and because the present administration of the U.S. government sells government policy to the highest bidder.
I seriously doubt that Sony's behavior has changed in any significant way. Here is what Mark Russinovich had to say on November 30, 2005: Premature Victory Declaration?
It seems to me that GoDaddy takes advantage of people who have little technical knowledge, and tries to push them to buy services they don't need.
Sometimes GoDaddy web pages are so full of ads for dubious services that it is difficult to find the useful content.
The "review" is really dishonest advertising.
on
Antispyware Shootout
·
· Score: 1
My opinion: Notice that the story is a special kind of public relations. It's an ad.
The ONLY Anti-Spyware that makes sense is ZoneAlarm Security Suite, which includes anti-spyware and anti-virus in one program with the best firewall. But they didn't review that one.
There are more and more "reviews" like that one, in which the real purpose is to try to keep customers away from the best product.
For information about computer industry abuses, read Ed Foster's Gripelog. In this case:
"... current term of copyright protection (70 years after the author's death)"
That's an example of sneaky corruption in law-making. It is usually very difficult to know if and when the author died. So, in practice, most materials will not become available immediately after the copyright term is ended.
I remember reading that Sun paid $88,000,000 for Star Office, that became Open Office. Sun still charges for support for Star Office, and my guess is that Sun has made a profit on its investment in Star Office, even though an open source version is free.
Slashdot Mirror
It seemed to me that Can Spam was 100% government corruption. A few have been prosecuted, for show. However, spam has increased.
The purpose of Can Spam was to stop U.S. states from enacting their own legislation. Can Spam made all the laws in the states invalid.
The end of Google?
That's the end of Google. Anyone want to make a billion dollars by providing a search engine that is not annoying?
I should have been more clear in my parent comment above that I understand that the problems of Mozilla and Firefox crashing because of plug-ins has existed for at least 2 years.
Has anyone else found that the 2 1/2-year-old CPU and memory hogging bug is worse with Firefox 1.5? Have you experienced it in Mozilla?
I'm surprised at the number of crashes in Mozilla and Firefox. Here are some quotes about crashes from the Known Issues for SeaMonkey 1.0 Beta page:
"A significant number of SeaMonkey crashes are actually caused by Java. Please make sure you are using the latest available version of Java."
"Sun's JRE will crash at startup if your useragent does not begin with Mozilla/5."
"Some SeaMonkey crashes are actually caused by Flash. Please make sure you are using the latest available Flash plugin (Bug 211213)."
"On Windows the Adobe SVG plugin crashes. Workaround: Don't copy it (NPSVG3.dll, NPSVG3.zip) into your plugins folder. If you want to view SVGs, SeaMonkey builds (except Linux GTK1) include native SVG support. (Bug 133567)"
The software I write (cash register software) would be considered unreleasable if it crashed. I notice that Mozilla and Firefox developers talk about crashes in what seems to me to be an easy-going fashion. I don't feel that way about Firefox and Mozilla crashes. When they crash, or have serious symptoms like the CPU and memory hogging bug mentioned above, I may lose literally hours of work. After a crash I must re-establish all my windows and tabs.
Wow. I think it is a PR attempt mostly, and judging by the fact my parent comment was modded down, the PR works. Slashdotters are completely taken in by a small amount of charity, and now Bill Gates is a great guy. Very weak minded, in my opinion.
At least 60 billion dollars lost because of Microsoft Windows viruses. He gives back 1/4 billion, and now he's a hero?
T-Mobile Prepaid. 10 cents/minute if you spend $100. Fewer tricks than other companies. Your time extends to a new year if you spend $10 before the end of the first year, I was told.
Quote from a comment posted below: Mozilla browser "... crashes or locks up on me daily...". (From the comment Never written any code.)
As the comment poster says, that is evidence of poor leadership.
Here's a quote from the Economist article about Mitchell Baker: 'For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with "spare time and no social life". Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer -- her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek.'
Although, as the Economist article says, Mitchell Baker "gradually found herself the leader of this project" (the Mozilla Foundation), she is not able to understand or detect when there is a technical problem. How can someone lead a group when she cannot begin to understand the conversations?
The word "geek" is extremely offensive, although the word is often used in a way that implies that it is acceptable. Calling someone a geek is the social equivalent of calling a black person a nigger.
Having "no social life" is not a benefit for a programmer. It is a huge shortcoming in everything in life, including programming.
Although I myself am a programmer, I'm married to the woman of my choice. I have no trouble getting and holding the attention of attractive women, and not because of looks. The unthinking assumption that technically knowledgeable people are socially unskilled is unacceptable, and for many, not true.
This seems to be a leadership problem: There is a huge well-known bug in Firefox 1.5, the CPU and memory hogging bug. Developers refuse to fix it, even though anyone can demonstrate the bug easily. Apparently there is some kind of social problem. Maybe no one has the authority to deal with a major bug. It seems to be the kind of problem that can exist when a programming team is led by someone with no technical knowledge.
This bug has been reported to Bugzilla, and is very easy to reproduce (see below), but Firefox developers have marked it invalid because there is not enough specific information! The bug has existed in Firefox for more than 2 years, and several people report that it is worse in Firefox 1.5. Firefox's Bugzilla does not allow direct links from Slashdot, so copy and paste Bugzilla URLs into a new tab. Remove the space:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131 456
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660
See comments #48 and #49 of bug 222660 for an example of the symptoms under Windows XP. A typical Windows Task Manager screen shot attached to comment #49 shows the "I/O Other Bytes" increasing by 20K/second with no program activity. At that point, the bug was not yet showing the worst symptoms.
The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use or more with no activity, normally occur after opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs, as happens when researching something on the internet over a period of hours or days. The bug symptoms are worse after putting the computer on standby or after hibernating. My experience has been that the memory and CPU hogging always occur together, so they appear to be the same bug. However, the CPU hogging symptom takes longer to appear. If the computer has perhaps 256 Megabytes of memory, the most obvious symptom at the beginning is hard disk thrashing.
You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html. To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of big occuring in normal use, since that web page is huge.
Maybe the only solution is for a developer who knows the code to reproduce the problem and see what causes it. It is not clear to me why they are unwilling to do so. This bug seems especially interesting to me. It is likely that fixing this bug will fix other issues. It is likely that fixing this bug will make it easier to work on the Firefox code.
The bug has often been reported on Slashdot. Here are a few examples:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169676&cid=141 43632
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62671
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 66613
I posted the bug numbered 222660 in Bugzilla. It is interesting to note that apparently no developer has bothered to read the entire bug report and take the time to understand it. For 2 1/2 years, developers have been saying things like this: 1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly version. 2) Yes, this bug exists, but it isn't important. 3) No one has posted a TalkBack report. (If they read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too.) 4) I
Unfortunately, the Charlie Rose show charges $30 for a copy of the show on which Mitchell Baker appeared.
Transcripts are cheaper, but the Charlie Rose show does not guarantee the accuracy of its transcripts.
This is not a troll. And, I agree it is unfortunate. However, I saw Mitchell Baker being interviewed by Charlie Rose. She was amazingly socially unsophisticated. She said she had no technical knowledge, but is a lawyer. She gave the impression that she needs to be replaced by someone more capable.
She gave such a poor account of herself that Charlie Rose was visibly embarrassed. That's the only time I've seen Charlie Rose embarrassed in the many years I've watched his interviews.
Don't think you are being loyal to Mozilla by supporting someone who is so obviously not suited to be a leader.
I compared the information about Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize winner, in the Encyclopedia Britannica with that found elsewhere on the Internet.
The Encyclopedia Britannica article was not inaccurate. It was, however, extremely misleading. It was worse than worthless, since it gave the idea that Barbara McClintock's achievements were much less valuable and extensive than they actually are. After many years and much progress in Biology, her work is still valuable. A copy of her papers requires 80 feet of shelf space!
The Wikipedia article is far, far better than the one in the full Encyclopedia Britannica.
No space-limited, profit-oriented publication can compare to internet research, for most topics. I don't think that Encyclopedia Britannica has anything against Barbara McClintock, but the company must decide how much paper they want to buy.
I have PLENTY of experience with Windows being unreliable.
If you are using Windows XP, just re-load the operating system over the old system, and that will very likely fix everything. Boot from the Windows XP CD. Important: Skip the first "Repair" chance. The second is what you want.
Another phrase for the business strategy of an unreliable mainstream operating system is "maximizing shareholder value". Many people who begin to have trouble simply buy another computer, and Microsoft makes more money, since Microsoft makes them buy the OS again.
--
Who has killed more Iraqis? Saddam or Bush?
This is scary because it is intended as just a first step, and because the present administration of the U.S. government sells government policy to the highest bidder.
--
Who has killed more Iraqis? Saddam or Bush?
Yes, it's called "maximizing shareholder value".
If Microsoft is the richest software company in the world, why is Internet Explorer possibly the most vulnerable software on earth?
I seriously doubt that Sony's behavior has changed in any significant way. Here is what Mark Russinovich had to say on November 30, 2005: Premature Victory Declaration?
It seems to me that GoDaddy takes advantage of people who have little technical knowledge, and tries to push them to buy services they don't need.
Sometimes GoDaddy web pages are so full of ads for dubious services that it is difficult to find the useful content.
My opinion: Notice that the story is a special kind of public relations. It's an ad.
The ONLY Anti-Spyware that makes sense is ZoneAlarm Security Suite, which includes anti-spyware and anti-virus in one program with the best firewall. But they didn't review that one.
There are more and more "reviews" like that one, in which the real purpose is to try to keep customers away from the best product.
For information about computer industry abuses, read Ed Foster's Gripelog. In this case:
Case Against Zone Labs is 180 Degrees Off
Why ZoneAlarm is the best firewall: LeakTest shows other firewalls allow phoning home.
Subscribe to Ed Foster's Griplog for good stories about computer industry abuses. For example:
Case Against Zone Labs (ZoneAlarm) is 180 Degrees Off
Please ignore the ignorant replies to the parent post. There is no way of researching death certificates to find with certainty if an author has died.
"... current term of copyright protection (70 years after the author's death)"
That's an example of sneaky corruption in law-making. It is usually very difficult to know if and when the author died. So, in practice, most materials will not become available immediately after the copyright term is ended.
I remember reading that Sun paid $88,000,000 for Star Office, that became Open Office. Sun still charges for support for Star Office, and my guess is that Sun has made a profit on its investment in Star Office, even though an open source version is free.