Honestly, I'm skeptical too of the whole 1.5 release. As good as the
MoFo has done on the current release of Mozilla, Firefox is clinging by
a thread. I got so fed up with the crashing bullshit that I reverted to
Mozilla. I'd rather use an older, insecure version in place of a buggy,
crash-every-5-minutes-for-no-fucking-reason version. Really, I don't
think you know how upset I get when I'm staring BugZilla in the face
AND it too crashes! How do you document BugZilla crashing??? MoFo needs
to rethink their approach to dominating the browser market, the road
ahead is a bumpy one, people will be tossed and turned, but selling out
is NOT the way.
58. # M2Ys4U Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
Well, I think the problem is you need more people telling other what to do. As it is at the moment, nobody knows what to do.
I tried building firefox 4 or 5 times, each time I had to struggle
through tonnes of useless google results to find out how to build it,
and even then I had to use my noggin to work out what'd gone wrong when
the errors happened.
Better docs, and more bossy people; this is what you need.
59: # Anonymous Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 12:52 pm
I was PAID to work on Mozilla a few years back and would never do it
again. Can't see why a volunteer would either. What's the fun of
programming if you can never wade through the social heirarchy of
unresponsive powers-that-be to get anything checked off?
I understand, of course. How many people outside of Mozilla have even
HEARD of C++, let alone have a PhD in it? Can't be more than twenty,
right? Then, on top of that, it helps if you'd enjoy tweaking
Microsoft. You're only left with three people who are qualified to help
you. (Those numbers are off, you say? Then there must be another reason
you're not attracting help...)
Twenty-two years of programming in the Valley and I have never seen such a glacial project.
You twelve-year bottlenecks can keep it all to yourselves. I'm busy
getting stuff done, making things other than Mozilla work. And I'm
enjoying myself.
60. Peter van der Woude Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Am I wrong to think that the ONLY problem is proper guidance ? We need
someone at the top telling/asking us individuals what to do and when to
do it.
74. M2Ys4U Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
Well, I think the problem is you need more people telling other what to do. As it is at the moment, nobody knows what to do.
I tried building firefox 4 or 5 times, each time I had to struggle
through tonnes of useless google results to find out how to build it,
and even then I had to use my noggin to work out what'd gone wrong when
the errors happened.
Better docs, and more bossy people; this is what you need.
76. Cusser Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 7:20 pm
I think the problem stems from the lack of guidance and help with
respect to getting started. There are many, many talented programmers
out there who should be working themselves up the ranks.
I am not one of them, at least not yet, but I have submitted basic
patches which get bitrotten and die over and over again. A no
hand-holding policy is all well and good, but when you need extras, you
should be extending that proverbial hand outwards.
As a final note, hang in there. You may feel like you're the only one
that cares, but it's people like you who get things changed in the
world.
77. # Gerry Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
> David Lynch:
> I'd argue that better tools reduce the cost-of-entry for new
people, making it more likely that talented people (who already have
other obligations, and thus not all that much time to donat
It's all part of a larger Plan: "Microsoft has disclosed plans to discontinue all smaller versions of their chicken dinners. Future releases will only be in the larger family size. Excess chicken may be stored for future use, but must be saved only in Microsoft approved packaging."
Do you want to be a dog on a leash? Then buy software from people who are so rich they don't have to care.
The moral of the story is that Bill Gates is the grim reaper of software, the world's best-known mortician, Dr. Death in the software world.
This is all about forcibly moving VB programmers to.NET, when they really, really don't want that.
If a product isn't successful, find some way to control people, so they buy it anyway. This is the marketing philosophy of someone who has more money than he knows how to handle.
Okay, those links don't crash Firefox 1.0.1 for you. But they do for some people, even those who have deleted the directory. Does that mean the problem should be ignored? Does that mean that all the other reports linked in the grandparent post should be ignored?
You said, "The Firefox crew handles crash reports pretty quickly in my experience." That's the opposite of what the linked comments say. If you only open one window and a few tabs, Firefox works well. For heavier use, it is very crashy. What does that mean? As one link in the grandparent post explained, it means that eventually Firefox always crashes, if you use it long enough.
Shouldn't the Firefox team be more concerned about crashes? These two ABC news stories, Chavez: Low Oil Rates a Thing of the Past and Blair's Anti-Terrorism Law Wins Approval, for example, crash the latest version of Firefox (1.01) every time. The crashes have been known and fixed for 6 months (Copy and paste the URL, Bugzilla does not accept links from Slashdot.). They have been fixed in the recent developer builds (see bottom of page), but you are warned that recent builds may have other bugs. Shouldn't the developers of a program with "more than 25 million" users release crash fixes quickly or at least warn users?
More reports from users, sometimes imperfect, with minimal editing for clarity:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141 586&cid=11866690 "[Firefox] really shouldn't use as much memory as it does, and it shouldn't have the memory retention policy that it does either. The amount of memory that it uses does matter, because it completely fragments the heap, it pushes the address space of other programs to disk, and it performs... [badly] after you've used another program that requires a lot of memory.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 68266 "basically after using firefox heavily for a while (many tabs open and closed, often on complex pages) firefox will start eating 100% CPU and become slow as molasses and never recover."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 75707
"I have found that if I load a PDF document and then use 'Back' to back up to the page which had the link pointing to the pdf document that Firefox crashes. Eventually, the adobe reader process also crashes."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 63924 "Usually though it [Firefox crash] happens after an extend period of time, without fail really, as my lone firefox window often stays open for days on end, so while my usage habits aren't much (compared to some at least) in the short term, in the long term the crashes have been making me wonder if a memory leak may be the cause, but sadly I lack the time to investigate it myself."
Isn't this partly a social problem?
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
I hit a key accidentally, and Firefox clicked the Submit button for me. Here's what I intended to say:
You said, "... it introduces lots of extra management hassles for larger projects--you have to be constantly alert that developers don't start using unsafe or dangerous constructs."
idlake, you seem to know far more about this than I. Isn't what you said indicative of a social problem? Are programmer employees so uncooperative that they cannot be trained?
It seems to me that a lot of the problems with C++ could be solved simply by not using all the features.
There is a similar problem with human languages. If someone insisted on using a selection from most of the 550,000 English words, he or she would make himself incomprehensible.
You said, "... it introduces lots of extra management hassles for larger projects--you have to be constantly alert that developers don't start using unsafe or dangerous constructs."
idlake, you seem to know far more about this than I. Isn't what you said indicative of a social problem? Are programmer employees so uncooperative that they cannot be trained?
I have appreciated your comments
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
idlake, I want you to know how much I have appreciated your comments in this thread. MOD PARENT idlake UP, EVERYWHERE.
If you do much calling, especially to other countries, BroadVoice seems far, far better. You do need a broadband connection. You do not need a computer. $25/month for unlimited calling to 35 nations. NO per minute charge. You get a telephone number in any U.S. state.
Here are my opinions about how to get your rebates and how to think about rebates in general. We've applied for several thousands of dollars of rebates, and gotten almost all of them, usually after a lot of work. I'm not saying you should get involved with the rebate game, but you may get a good laugh from reading about it. Getting rebates got to be a hobby with us. Like a lot of people, we carried our hobby to extremes. My wife just read this and said, "Oh, it's not a hobby, it's painful when I need to call", but she feels very different when she is in a store that has ridiculously low prices after rebates.
Use the F word: Just say "Fraud". There are only a few rebate fulfillment companies. Once you are on the list as someone who uses the fraud word, they don't try to steal from you.
Always be friendly. Always be businesslike. Call the rebate company. Politely ask the name of the person who answers. Write that down. Mention that offering a rebate and not sending it may be fraud. The employee will usually give some scripted lie, like saying they didn't receive the rebate request. Just politely continue asking for your rebate, and mention that, in legal cases involving fraud, it usually won't be the top managers that go to jail. Mention that anyone who has knowledge of the fraud may be prosecuted.
The rebate staff person does not want to risk legal trouble for a minimum-wage job. They are authorized to give you your rebate in extreme cases. Be an extreme case.
The rebate company does not want to lose a staff person, because it costs money to hire and train them. That is what is likely to happen if the staff person is afraid of legal problems. The manager of the rebate company will tell the staff that there is no chance they will be prosecuted for fraud, which will only make the staff more scared. In this particular case, this particular F word is very powerful.
More tips:
Beware of worthless items: Be aware that many computer items that are sold with rebates are actually worthless. They have been found to be so defective that they could not be sold normally. So, they are advertised as free after rebates, or for a very low cost after rebates. (Usually they use more than one rebate to make it less likely you will do the work.)
We bought three Netgear FVS318 router/firewalls from Fry's. They were advertised with a rebate. After many lost hours we found: 1) The remote administration of the FVS318 requires sending the password in the clear, so there is little remote security. 2) The Log Out menu choice sometimes does not log out. Sometimes the FVS318 becomes confused, and cannot establish a VPN. 3) There were other bugs, more than can be recounted here. 4) Netgear first-level technical support is (at least partly) in Tamil Nadu, India. They are friendly and will happily talk for hours. However, Netgear does not appear to have given the Tamil employees much training. So, in my opinion it is arguable that no one should buy the FVS318. Maybe that's why the rebate offer.
Fry's and Netgear played another trick with the FVS318 rebate offer. They wrote a very long rebate form, with the name and the address at the top, as usual, but asked for the name and the address again at the bottom. If you didn't see the second request for name and address, or thought it was a mistake, they denied the rebate request. We didn't enter the information at the bottom. Our rebates were denied. A friendly Fry's mid-level manager told us she would take care of it, and, after two or three calls to her, she got Netgear to give us our rebates. Elapsed time: 5 1/2 months.
On the other hand, there are good deals: We bought four CD recorder drives for $5 each after rebate that work very well and came with a non-restricted copy of Roxio Easy CD Creator 6.
Shop on the day after Thanksgiving: The best time for rebates is the day after Thanksgiving. That's when people begi
Here is more analysis of how angry people act out their anger, in this case by using logical-sounding arguments designed to create frustration. Here is what the parent comment is effectively saying, in words designed to show the anger, not hide it:
After a short period of me trying to frustrate you, I want you to learn to frustrate yourself. ("You don't give up.")
I can ignore elements of what was said before, in order to make my attempts to frustrate more seem more logical. (Ignoring that many people are reporting problems, and that there is obvious difficulty in characterizing a problem that takes a long time to make itself known.)
If you use a few words that I don't like, I can ignore whatever good there may be in what you did. ("... without all the "firefox is mission critical and godly" stuff...")
Note that first person to bring "god" into the conversation (by saying "ungodly") made it completely clear that he intended to frustrate the bug-reporting process. At that point, the bug became more a social problem, and not just a technical one.
No one should doubt the enormously discouraging influence that one angry person can have on a social group.
I cannot accept your explanation. I have a huge amount of experience in finding software and hardware bugs, and bugs are often at this state of imperfect knowledge.
It's fine if the Firefox developers cannot find the bug, or do not have enough time to look.
It is NOT fine to present illogical arguments about it.
I reserve the right to take what is only a suggestion or speculation from you, and consider it as the entire issue and the entire possible answer.
I expect to be able to discuss other bad things that happened in the world, that have no connection with the subject being discussed, as though they are connected.
I can ignore, or give no credibility to, the entire foregoing discussion.
My own personal experiences have much more credibility to me than what anyone else is saying.
What you said is a good example of exactly how Open Source projects self-destruct.
Behind the facade of reasonableness, there is unreasoning resistence. Basically, these are the facts:
Everyone seems to agree that there is a problem. Numerous people have reported several related symptoms.
Firefox sometimes increases memory use when tabs or windows are closed, exactly the opposite of what is expected.
Firefox sometimes uses 98% of CPU cycles, when no pages are loading, and there is no disk access.
Firefox crashes during normal use sometimes.
This is, effectively, what you said:
I don't like the way you are telling me that there is a bug. There are too many words.
I don't like the reports from other people who agreed with you.
I don't like any of the speculation by you about what is wrong.
Your expectations of the software are too great.
I don't like that you refuse to donate a month of your time learning to use new tools and searching for the bug.
I reserve the right to interpret what you said so that it looks as bad as possible, even if I need to change or ignore the facts.
The only interpretation I will accept about what you said is the most narrow interpretation possible. I refuse to generalize from strong indications.
Other software is probably causing this bug. Effectively, it is okay if this software crashes because other software is poorly written.
All knowledge about software bugs is definite and well-defined. What you have reported is not, so you are wrong.
"... you don't tell them what the problem is" seems like a reasonable complaint to me, even though the entire discussion is about an elusive bug. (If we knew what causes the problem, we would not be having the discussion.)
That's anger, hidden as much as possible in a facade of reasonableness. It doesn't take much of that to destroy whatever cohesiveness there might be in a social group. People will leave the project, giving personal reasons. The usually won't identify clearly what made the project seem heavy to them.
I'm convinced that this bug is being reported in the best possible way, given the difficult circumstances. At this stage, no one knows how to define the problem more clearly. That does not mean that an obvious problem should be ignored.
Inability to make good theories about what causes the symptoms of this bug is not a negative indication about anyone, including Firefox developers. It is a very difficult bug to characterize. Sometimes software bugs are like that.
This problem has such general symptoms that anyone with experience in debugging software might have the reasonable theory that fixing this problem might fix other problems, too, that are not now identified to be related.
What I've said here does not have any personal intent. In fact, I thank you for giving me a chance to explain more clearly what I consider to be a very destructive phenomenon.
I think this is an important discussion, partly because Firefox is about as close to mission-critical software as is possible while having no direct effect on human health and safety. Internet access is having an enormous positive effect on the world, and Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape seems to be the best way we have to make use of that resource. There are several OS alternatives that work quite well. Firefox seems to be the best candidate for the browser.
As the reports say, there is little doubt that there is a problem in Firefox.
But, there was a lot of resistance to fixing it. What would you do in that case? I merely documented my way of using Firefox, attempting to show that my use was not unreasonable.
In response to the resistance, others provided support that the problem really did exist and was serious. Their original reports, which have now been edited, documented that Firefox crashed the OS.
The bug has a variety of symptoms, but it seems to be one bug.
The bug report is a good example of the subject of this discussion thread. There is a lot of time-wasting resistance to acknowledging a problem.
"Posting long diatribes about exactly how you get 50 tabs open is not good bug reporting style and is going to piss of the devs."
In this case, there is no other way to report the bug. It is very elusive. As I said, I think the anecdotes are necessary in this case.
"Adding other bugs to the existing bug is also a bad idea."
Nothing was added. More information about the bug was reported.
"... piss off the devs."
That's the subject of this thread: Anger, especially anger when nothing bad has happened.
"When windows runs out of memory, all sorts of strange things happen."
I agree with you, and this was mentioned in the original bug reports. The problem may be associated with memory management in Windows XP. The problem occurs in Linux, but the symptoms are less severe.
Slashdot Mirror
Please say how you will fix these organizational problems:
(From http://www.steelgryphon.com/blog/index.php?p=37)
58. Josh Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 12:31 pm
Honestly, I'm skeptical too of the whole 1.5 release. As good as the MoFo has done on the current release of Mozilla, Firefox is clinging by a thread. I got so fed up with the crashing bullshit that I reverted to Mozilla. I'd rather use an older, insecure version in place of a buggy, crash-every-5-minutes-for-no-fucking-reason version. Really, I don't think you know how upset I get when I'm staring BugZilla in the face AND it too crashes! How do you document BugZilla crashing??? MoFo needs to rethink their approach to dominating the browser market, the road ahead is a bumpy one, people will be tossed and turned, but selling out is NOT the way.
58. # M2Ys4U Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
Well, I think the problem is you need more people telling other what to do. As it is at the moment, nobody knows what to do.
I tried building firefox 4 or 5 times, each time I had to struggle through tonnes of useless google results to find out how to build it, and even then I had to use my noggin to work out what'd gone wrong when the errors happened.
Better docs, and more bossy people; this is what you need.
59: # Anonymous Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 12:52 pm
I was PAID to work on Mozilla a few years back and would never do it again. Can't see why a volunteer would either. What's the fun of programming if you can never wade through the social heirarchy of unresponsive powers-that-be to get anything checked off?
I understand, of course. How many people outside of Mozilla have even HEARD of C++, let alone have a PhD in it? Can't be more than twenty, right? Then, on top of that, it helps if you'd enjoy tweaking Microsoft. You're only left with three people who are qualified to help you. (Those numbers are off, you say? Then there must be another reason you're not attracting help...)
Twenty-two years of programming in the Valley and I have never seen such a glacial project.
You twelve-year bottlenecks can keep it all to yourselves. I'm busy getting stuff done, making things other than Mozilla work. And I'm enjoying myself.
60. Peter van der Woude Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Am I wrong to think that the ONLY problem is proper guidance ? We need someone at the top telling/asking us individuals what to do and when to do it.
74. M2Ys4U Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
Well, I think the problem is you need more people telling other what to do. As it is at the moment, nobody knows what to do.
I tried building firefox 4 or 5 times, each time I had to struggle through tonnes of useless google results to find out how to build it, and even then I had to use my noggin to work out what'd gone wrong when the errors happened.
Better docs, and more bossy people; this is what you need.
76. Cusser Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 7:20 pm
I think the problem stems from the lack of guidance and help with respect to getting started. There are many, many talented programmers out there who should be working themselves up the ranks.
I am not one of them, at least not yet, but I have submitted basic patches which get bitrotten and die over and over again. A no hand-holding policy is all well and good, but when you need extras, you should be extending that proverbial hand outwards.
As a final note, hang in there. You may feel like you're the only one that cares, but it's people like you who get things changed in the world.
77. # Gerry Says:
March 7th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
> David Lynch:
> I'd argue that better tools reduce the cost-of-entry for new people, making it more likely that talented people (who already have other obligations, and thus not all that much time to donat
It's all part of a larger Plan: "Microsoft has disclosed plans to discontinue all smaller versions of their chicken dinners. Future releases will only be in the larger family size. Excess chicken may be stored for future use, but must be saved only in Microsoft approved packaging."
Do you want to be a dog on a leash? Then buy software from people who are so rich they don't have to care.
The moral of the story is that Bill Gates is the grim reaper of software, the world's best-known mortician, Dr. Death in the software world.
This is all about forcibly moving VB programmers to
If a product isn't successful, find some way to control people, so they buy it anyway. This is the marketing philosophy of someone who has more money than he knows how to handle.
Please don't comment on stories in which you have no interest.
Okay, those links don't crash Firefox 1.0.1 for you. But they do for some people, even those who have deleted the directory. Does that mean the problem should be ignored? Does that mean that all the other reports linked in the grandparent post should be ignored?
You said, "The Firefox crew handles crash reports pretty quickly in my experience." That's the opposite of what the linked comments say. If you only open one window and a few tabs, Firefox works well. For heavier use, it is very crashy. What does that mean? As one link in the grandparent post explained, it means that eventually Firefox always crashes, if you use it long enough.
Shouldn't the Firefox team be more concerned about crashes? These two ABC news stories, Chavez: Low Oil Rates a Thing of the Past and Blair's Anti-Terrorism Law Wins Approval, for example, crash the latest version of Firefox (1.01) every time. The crashes have been known and fixed for 6 months (Copy and paste the URL, Bugzilla does not accept links from Slashdot.). They have been fixed in the recent developer builds (see bottom of page), but you are warned that recent builds may have other bugs. Shouldn't the developers of a program with "more than 25 million" users release crash fixes quickly or at least warn users?
More reports from users, sometimes imperfect, with minimal editing for clarity:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141 586&cid=11864609 "The last few releases have a habit of freezing up in various ways. It's not something that happens every day, but it happens a lot more than it used to."
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141 586&cid=11865831 "... firefox DOES NOT let other applications that need it [memory] get it back. it [Firefox] routinely crawls the machine to a halt until it's killed and restarted."
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141 586&cid=11866690 "[Firefox] really shouldn't use as much memory as it does, and it shouldn't have the memory retention policy that it does either. The amount of memory that it uses does matter, because it completely fragments the heap, it pushes the address space of other programs to disk, and it performs... [badly] after you've used another program that requires a lot of memory.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 68266 "basically after using firefox heavily for a while (many tabs open and closed, often on complex pages) firefox will start eating 100% CPU and become slow as molasses and never recover."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 75707 "I have found that if I load a PDF document and then use 'Back' to back up to the page which had the link pointing to the pdf document that Firefox crashes. Eventually, the adobe reader process also crashes."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 63855 "I'm on a Mac, so it tends to only actually crash when it's loaded down and I hit a bad flash or java applet"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 63924 "Usually though it [Firefox crash] happens after an extend period of time, without fail really, as my lone firefox window often stays open for days on end, so while my usage habits aren't much (compared to some at least) in the short term, in the long term the crashes have been making me wonder if a memory leak may be the cause, but sadly I lack the time to investigate it myself."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 64110 "There are bugs that cause memory leaks and slowdowns, relating to plugins and Javascript. Any one of the page
I hit a key accidentally, and Firefox clicked the Submit button for me. Here's what I intended to say: You said, "... it introduces lots of extra management hassles for larger projects--you have to be constantly alert that developers don't start using unsafe or dangerous constructs."
idlake, you seem to know far more about this than I. Isn't what you said indicative of a social problem? Are programmer employees so uncooperative that they cannot be trained?
It seems to me that a lot of the problems with C++ could be solved simply by not using all the features.
There is a similar problem with human languages. If someone insisted on using a selection from most of the 550,000 English words, he or she would make himself incomprehensible.
You said, "... it introduces lots of extra management hassles for larger projects--you have to be constantly alert that developers don't start using unsafe or dangerous constructs."
idlake, you seem to know far more about this than I. Isn't what you said indicative of a social problem? Are programmer employees so uncooperative that they cannot be trained?
idlake, I want you to know how much I have appreciated your comments in this thread. MOD PARENT idlake UP, EVERYWHERE.
If you do much calling, especially to other countries, BroadVoice seems far, far better. You do need a broadband connection. You do not need a computer. $25/month for unlimited calling to 35 nations. NO per minute charge. You get a telephone number in any U.S. state.
Want to know how to get your rebates? Read How to get your rebates, a comment posted later in this story.
How to get your rebates:
Here are my opinions about how to get your rebates and how to think about rebates in general. We've applied for several thousands of dollars of rebates, and gotten almost all of them, usually after a lot of work. I'm not saying you should get involved with the rebate game, but you may get a good laugh from reading about it. Getting rebates got to be a hobby with us. Like a lot of people, we carried our hobby to extremes. My wife just read this and said, "Oh, it's not a hobby, it's painful when I need to call", but she feels very different when she is in a store that has ridiculously low prices after rebates.
Use the F word: Just say "Fraud". There are only a few rebate fulfillment companies. Once you are on the list as someone who uses the fraud word, they don't try to steal from you.
Always be friendly. Always be businesslike. Call the rebate company. Politely ask the name of the person who answers. Write that down. Mention that offering a rebate and not sending it may be fraud. The employee will usually give some scripted lie, like saying they didn't receive the rebate request. Just politely continue asking for your rebate, and mention that, in legal cases involving fraud, it usually won't be the top managers that go to jail. Mention that anyone who has knowledge of the fraud may be prosecuted.
The rebate staff person does not want to risk legal trouble for a minimum-wage job. They are authorized to give you your rebate in extreme cases. Be an extreme case.
The rebate company does not want to lose a staff person, because it costs money to hire and train them. That is what is likely to happen if the staff person is afraid of legal problems. The manager of the rebate company will tell the staff that there is no chance they will be prosecuted for fraud, which will only make the staff more scared. In this particular case, this particular F word is very powerful.
More tips:
Beware of worthless items: Be aware that many computer items that are sold with rebates are actually worthless. They have been found to be so defective that they could not be sold normally. So, they are advertised as free after rebates, or for a very low cost after rebates. (Usually they use more than one rebate to make it less likely you will do the work.)
We bought three Netgear FVS318 router/firewalls from Fry's. They were advertised with a rebate. After many lost hours we found: 1) The remote administration of the FVS318 requires sending the password in the clear, so there is little remote security. 2) The Log Out menu choice sometimes does not log out. Sometimes the FVS318 becomes confused, and cannot establish a VPN. 3) There were other bugs, more than can be recounted here. 4) Netgear first-level technical support is (at least partly) in Tamil Nadu, India. They are friendly and will happily talk for hours. However, Netgear does not appear to have given the Tamil employees much training. So, in my opinion it is arguable that no one should buy the FVS318. Maybe that's why the rebate offer.
Fry's and Netgear played another trick with the FVS318 rebate offer. They wrote a very long rebate form, with the name and the address at the top, as usual, but asked for the name and the address again at the bottom. If you didn't see the second request for name and address, or thought it was a mistake, they denied the rebate request. We didn't enter the information at the bottom. Our rebates were denied. A friendly Fry's mid-level manager told us she would take care of it, and, after two or three calls to her, she got Netgear to give us our rebates. Elapsed time: 5 1/2 months.
On the other hand, there are good deals: We bought four CD recorder drives for $5 each after rebate that work very well and came with a non-restricted copy of Roxio Easy CD Creator 6.
Shop on the day after Thanksgiving: The best time for rebates is the day after Thanksgiving. That's when people begi
Here is more analysis of how angry people act out their anger, in this case by using logical-sounding arguments designed to create frustration. Here is what the parent comment is effectively saying, in words designed to show the anger, not hide it:
Note that first person to bring "god" into the conversation (by saying "ungodly") made it completely clear that he intended to frustrate the bug-reporting process. At that point, the bug became more a social problem, and not just a technical one.
No one should doubt the enormously discouraging influence that one angry person can have on a social group.
I cannot accept your explanation. I have a huge amount of experience in finding software and hardware bugs, and bugs are often at this state of imperfect knowledge.
It's fine if the Firefox developers cannot find the bug, or do not have enough time to look.
It is NOT fine to present illogical arguments about it.
See my comment, What you said is an example of this kind of anger.. Here are more characterizations of this type of anger, prompted by what you said, effectively:
What you said is a good example of exactly how Open Source projects self-destruct.
Behind the facade of reasonableness, there is unreasoning resistence. Basically, these are the facts:
- Everyone seems to agree that there is a problem. Numerous people have reported several related symptoms.
- Firefox sometimes increases memory use when tabs or windows are closed, exactly the opposite of what is expected.
- Firefox sometimes uses 98% of CPU cycles, when no pages are loading, and there is no disk access.
- Firefox crashes during normal use sometimes.
This is, effectively, what you said:- I don't like the way you are telling me that there is a bug. There are too many words.
- I don't like the reports from other people who agreed with you.
- I don't like any of the speculation by you about what is wrong.
- Your expectations of the software are too great.
- I don't like that you refuse to donate a month of your time learning to use new tools and searching for the bug.
- I reserve the right to interpret what you said so that it looks as bad as possible, even if I need to change or ignore the facts.
- The only interpretation I will accept about what you said is the most narrow interpretation possible. I refuse to generalize from strong indications.
- Other software is probably causing this bug. Effectively, it is okay if this software crashes because other software is poorly written.
- All knowledge about software bugs is definite and well-defined. What you have reported is not, so you are wrong.
- "... you don't tell them what the problem is" seems like a reasonable complaint to me, even though the entire discussion is about an elusive bug. (If we knew what causes the problem, we would not be having the discussion.)
That's anger, hidden as much as possible in a facade of reasonableness. It doesn't take much of that to destroy whatever cohesiveness there might be in a social group. People will leave the project, giving personal reasons. The usually won't identify clearly what made the project seem heavy to them.I'm convinced that this bug is being reported in the best possible way, given the difficult circumstances. At this stage, no one knows how to define the problem more clearly. That does not mean that an obvious problem should be ignored.
Inability to make good theories about what causes the symptoms of this bug is not a negative indication about anyone, including Firefox developers. It is a very difficult bug to characterize. Sometimes software bugs are like that.
This problem has such general symptoms that anyone with experience in debugging software might have the reasonable theory that fixing this problem might fix other problems, too, that are not now identified to be related.
What I've said here does not have any personal intent. In fact, I thank you for giving me a chance to explain more clearly what I consider to be a very destructive phenomenon.
I think this is an important discussion, partly because Firefox is about as close to mission-critical software as is possible while having no direct effect on human health and safety. Internet access is having an enormous positive effect on the world, and Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape seems to be the best way we have to make use of that resource. There are several OS alternatives that work quite well. Firefox seems to be the best candidate for the browser.
Yes, BroadVoice. Much better than Vonage, in my opinion.
As the reports say, there is little doubt that there is a problem in Firefox.
But, there was a lot of resistance to fixing it. What would you do in that case? I merely documented my way of using Firefox, attempting to show that my use was not unreasonable.
In response to the resistance, others provided support that the problem really did exist and was serious. Their original reports, which have now been edited, documented that Firefox crashed the OS.
The bug has a variety of symptoms, but it seems to be one bug.
The bug report is a good example of the subject of this discussion thread. There is a lot of time-wasting resistance to acknowledging a problem.
When the crash occurs, it does not update the history file before crashing.
However, this is a good idea. All but the most recent history file entries would be available.
The problem, however, does not seem associated only with one web page. It seems to become progressively worse over a period of days.
I've been told by Microsoft people that they are working on a complete new CLI.
"... could you provide a link to the bug?"
See the Slashdot comment below, Firefox Bug ID 222660, All windows and tabs crash.
"Posting long diatribes about exactly how you get 50 tabs open is not good bug reporting style and is going to piss of the devs."
In this case, there is no other way to report the bug. It is very elusive. As I said, I think the anecdotes are necessary in this case.
"Adding other bugs to the existing bug is also a bad idea."
Nothing was added. More information about the bug was reported.
"... piss off the devs."
That's the subject of this thread: Anger, especially anger when nothing bad has happened.
"When windows runs out of memory, all sorts of strange things happen."
I agree with you, and this was mentioned in the original bug reports. The problem may be associated with memory management in Windows XP. The problem occurs in Linux, but the symptoms are less severe.
"You can't post an attack like that without giving at least a bug number."
It's not an attack. I hope it is useful input, that can help get the job done.
There is more about the bug, and the bug ID, in this Slashdot comment below: Firefox Bug ID 222660, All windows and tabs crash.
MOD PARENT UP. Some excellent insight. Some people feel personally attacked when a bug is reported.
" Could you provide more details regarding the memory leak issue you talked about?"
See the Slashdot comment below, Firefox Bug ID 222660, All windows and tabs crash.