Several people have asked for the bug number. Here it is:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22266 0
(Direct links to Firefox's Bugzilla from Slashdot are denied. Put the URL into a separate tab. Take out the space in the URL inserted by Slashdot.)
This bug, and this Slashdot story, are important because, for millions of well-educated people, Firefox is a window on the world. Note that many people in less-developed countries won't be running Windows unless it is pirated, because they cannot afford it. They need high-quality free software like Firefox. In less-developed countries, it is the small percentage of educated people who are likely to have computers and a connection to the internet. These people have a disproportinately big effect on the health of their countries.
Bug ID 222660, comment #32: Below is my most recent comment about the bug, which crashes all Firefox windows and tabs after many windows and tabs have been opened.
Problem clarified: Before the crash, Firefox uses almost 100% CPU cycles. See the file attachment in Comment #31, showing Firefox 1.0 taking 98% of the CPU cycles. The hard disk was idle at that time and had been idle for at least two minutes. Note that the bug being discussed here crashes TalkBack, too, so that there are no TalkBack reports.
Testing conditions: 1) Toshiba laptop model 2415-S205, 2.0 GHz Mobile Pentium, 512 MB of memory. Windows XP SP2, all critical patches applied. This is a different computer than used for any of the other testing.
2) Firefox 1.0 with 200 days of History. Bookmarks file is 2.5 Megabytes.
New Comment: In the original filing of this bug, Firefox was characterized as "slow" as the problem with the bug advanced toward crashing Firefox. See also comment #10 "slow", comment #6, "all of the browser windows became unresponsive", and comment #13, ' "not responding" in task manager" '.
Apparently the slowness was caused by Firefox taking a huge percentage of CPU cycles before crashing.
The problem may have improved since this bug was originally posted, but the bug is still substantially the same.
Response to criticism:
1) Comment #30: "i don't see a single talkbackid anywhere in this bug report,..."
That's because whatever crashes Firefox crashes the TalkBack program as well.
2) Comment #27: "... your crash could be caused by any number of issues with Firefox, or by something completely unrelated (faulty memory?)."
That's why I tested with several different computers and two operating systems.
3) Comment #27: "... posting over and over again stating that "firefox crashed when I loaded lots of tabs" is not helpful to development in any way."
Note that the posts were in different versions of Firefox, verifying that the bug has not been fixed.
4) Comment #27: "I myself frequently use many windows/tabs and have not been able to reproduce the crashes you speak of. That is why I will mark this bug WORKSFORME." And, "General descriptions of symptoms and anecdotes, like the ones in this bug, will not help resolve any issues."
Note that the actual conditions of failure are carefully documented in the original bug report, and by other authors in Comment #6 and Comment #7.
Note that the criticism in comment #27 does not document the conditions, but merely recounts the author's anecdote: "I myself frequently use many windows/tabs..."
What are many? What is frequently?
5) Comment #22: "If you're experiencing a memory leak and can document it using tools listed at http://www.mozilla.org/performance/tools.html then please open a new bug."
I've given that suggestion a lot of thought. I have a lot of debugging experience, but not with those tools. I'm guessing that learning to use the tools and searching for memory leaks would take at least a month of full-time work. I'm guessing that
The problems with reporting bugs in Firefox are trivial compared to reporting bugs to Microsoft, in my experience.
A top-level Microsoft support technician got interested in a very well-documented bug in Windows XP that I reported. He decided, partly as an experiment to teach himself about Microsoft, to work with several Microsoft groups. Result: An entire waste of time of many, many hours, over a period of months.
I've been reporting several bugs in Windows XP for literally years, and they haven't been fixed. If you work with both Linux and Windows XP, do you notice that Linux has a powerful, bug-free Command Line Interface, and the CLI in Windows XP is weak and buggy? (Yes, I know they are working on replacing it.)
I've posted bugs to Firefox Bugzilla. All I know about the Firefox "community" comes from that.
One of the bug posts, about a serious memory leak that causes a complete crash, was handled in an angry way, even though I had spent hours documenting it on two computers and two operating systems.
This is an extremely common phenomenon among Open Source authors. They often use their position as a way of acting out their anger. I was criticized because I use Firefox in a more intense way than other users! When I posted a carefully written response to the criticism, I got criticism for posting a long response.
I offered to re-write the manual for another Open Source project, and got a negative response that was encouraging and discouraging at the same time.
On another project, I entered a minor bug. The program was crashing if it saw a DOS end-of-text-file character in its text file input. I got back a long, philosophical discussion about why they were not willing to fix the bug because it was a problem that came from DOS.
One person with an anger problem can literally control the development of an Open Source project by scaring away potential helpers.
In my experience, the anger is often not expressed in a way that is obviously angry. It comes as opposition, sometimes very subtle opposition, even to good ideas or to useful help. The opposition vastly increases the amount of time required to contribute to a project.
The serious Firefox crash I reported in October 2003 was still there in February 2005 in version 1.0, even though it was verified by others in a careful way.
The background for all this is that Firefox is apparently the best browser, and an important window to the world for millions of people.
This is an important subject, and there is a lot more to say, but I don't have time now.
And, I find it is disgusting that the Bush administration is putting Fiorina forward for Head of the World Bank, when she was such a failure at her last job. The phony people are in control.
Slashdot is powerful! On Tuesday I complained about Carly Fiorina in a
Slashdot
comment, and on Wednesday she was fired. (See the 6th paragraph of the comment, and the subsequent
comment.)
Questioning the sanity of Utah leaders is close to the real issue.
It is not necessary to be intelligent to get elected. It is only necessary to be popular. Many politicians have very little analytical ability. In this case, they can't see all the reasons this idea won't work.
Note to political leaders: Avoid embarrassment! Whenever you are considering a law involving computers, have Slashdot make it a story first. Hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers will gladly tell you if there are problems with your idea. It's free, and it's quick. You will get at least 500 comments in 24 hours, if your idea is especially embarrassing. Many of the comments will be useless, but there are a lot of very smart Slashdot readers.
I agree that telecoms can do WiFi more efficiently. But they won't unless the government mandates it. Muni wireless is a way to get started. Eventually, there will be WiFi everywhere, and we will use VOIP for our cell phones. The cell phone towers will become WiFi towers.
Along the way, there will be less profit for some people, who will fight change.
People who make money doing things the old way don't want anyone doing things a new way.
Those who made money with horses did not want cars to be introduced.
Decades ago, the painter's unions tried to get the newly introduced paint rollers ruled illegal. They were afraid people would paint their own houses.
The big companies use VOIP to move your long distance calls around. They want private VOIP to be outlawed so they can make a huge profit doing the same thing themselves.
Aggregating a huge number of users with Municipal WiFi is far more efficient than having each person have a separate account with an ISP. The ISPs want Municipal and private WiFi to be made illegal so they can make a huge profit doing same thing themselves.
It's "Please, please, please corrupt the government so that I can make easy money."
On my high-speed DSL connection, I got only the word "loading..." for
only a few seconds, but it seemed like a long time. Ford must be very arrogant
indeed to believe that this does not annoy people with dial-up connections.
Second, you get the option "Low Speed Non-Flash" only after you have
loaded the Flash page. That makes me realize why I don't like the average
Flash enthusiasts web designer. They aren't very intelligent, and they assume
I'm not very intelligent.
Third, Flash breaks tabbled browsers!!! When I right click on a Flash
ad, I don't get the normal menu. My normal way of shopping is to load several
pages and flip between them on demand. Macromedia thinks I should not be able
to do this.
Fourth, the site uses blind links. I don't know what will happen until
I click.
Fifth, after something is clicked on the main page, the connection is
kept alive, as is shown by the message "Transferring data from
www.fordvehicles.com..." which remains there forever and can't be made to go
away by hitting the Escape key.
If there is something that cannot be done in standard HTML, standard HTML
should be improved. Flash has had perhaps 38 serious security vulnerabilities.
It is not good to introduce an entirely new, essentially proprietary
technology.
I agree that there are some interesting uses of Flash, but Flash sites discourage visiting the same web site many times, because even interesting moving pictures become boring after someone has watched them maybe 3 times.
That's why Google is so successful. The company has a policy of not annoying people.
Conditions in the U.S. are worse than you are saying. The bottom and
middle parts of the U.S. government often function well, but the top
part of the government is thoroughly corrupted by conflict of interest.
U.S. citizens often live in a mental fantasy land in which
they view themselves as the best, and cannot hear anything else. Politicians
manipulate this. Look at most of the replies to your comment. Most involve
some illogical trick to avoid examining the problems. Many U.S. citizens
believe that they are so superior that it is entirely okay that their government's
foreign policy depends on killing people to solve problems, rather than actually
solving the problems.
The U.S. government has fought 24 wars
since World War II. The system of violence works by creating fear so richpeople
can profit.
The U.S. government is being sold to anyone who has the money. Huge
amounts of money are being borrowed and transferred to the pockets of those in
power. The U.S. government is now far more in debt than ever before: Debt Clock. If you are a U.S.
citizen, you are expected to pay. Those who want corruption in the U.S.
government want the government to borrow. The corrupters find ways to
transfer the money to their pockets.
The origin of the present problems was in the 40s and 50s, when U.S.
government leaders made two decisions. It is likely that those in power then
did not understand that their decisions would eventually corrupt the entire
government. At the time, the decisions seemed logical.
First, the government decided that it could act in other countries in
secret. Second, the U.S. government decided it could act in secret to protect
U.S. businesses in other countries.
What probably no one realized then was how much that would come to be
a corrupting influence on the government. Probably no one realized then how
much additional profit big multinational businesses could make by arranging,
in secret, for U.S. taxpayers to pay for the security arrangements needed by
U.S. multinational businesses.
Soon huge businesses were arguing that the U.S. government should
subvert democratically elected leaders, as the government did in Iran in 1953.
Soon U.S. businesses would arrange unfair contracts with corrupt leaders, and
when there was a protest, call for U.S. government intervention in the name of
patriotism.
That's partly how we got to the present situation, where two men,
whose family and business associates and friends have extensive investments in
global oil businesses, are president and vice-president of the entire U.S.
government, even though there is conflict of interest in such an arrangement.
My opinion: There is a social breakdown happening in the U.S. now, and it is very difficult to live there. People are less relaxed and happy than in the last 50 years. It will be really, really difficult to adjust to living there.
What needs to be measured now is not the number of Iraqis killed, but the average number per year. The U.S. is well on its way to beating Saddam in the long run. Remember, every war causes destabilization that last sometimes a hundred years or more.
Remember that the U.S. government does not keep information about how many people it has killed.
You said, "Microsoft has always been extremely aggressive against
competitors..."
That's true, and no one should think they know the extent of the
aggressiveness. I came to that conclusion after trying to document some of the
aggression in my article,
Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.
What made DOS dominant in the later years? Microsoft
deliberately allowed piracy. That's my conclusion and opinion after
considerable study of the matter.
Microsoft created a 2-tier market that squeezed out competitors. You
could buy DOS for a lot of money. Then, you could buy DOS for very little
money, if you would accept a pirated version. Products that competed honestly
in the market could not sell cheaper than the widely pirated DOS, and they
disappeared. (Most people cannot look at a manual and see that it has
obviously been reproduced from a photocopied original rather than typesetting;
most people did not know the copies were pirated.)
One day in the years of DOS, I got irritated at this, and decided to
protest. They've closed the loophole now, but back then you could call
Microsoft and get the phone number of their legal department. I told the woman
that answered that my closest 10 distributors were all selling pirated copies
of DOS. The woman was very interested. She sounded young and neither of us
realized the implications of what we were doing. Once she had accepted my
complaint, the information was inside the company, and they had to go ahead
with a court case. I participated as a witness against the most open of the
pirates, and Microsoft won.
If you were a dealer back then, you either felt that you were taking a
huge risk selling illegal copies of DOS, or you could not compete with other
resellers. So, it made sense that Microsoft and I were temporarily on the same
side of an issue.
Microsoft does the same thing with Microsoft Office, in my opinion. I
sold computers only to businesses, strictly legally. But once a friend asked
me for help with buying a computer, and we went to what seemed to be the best
retail seller in town. We bought a nice computer, and then the salesman
offered me Microsoft Office for $50. So, there was Corel, trying to sell Word
Perfect for a reasonable price, and they were being undercut by Microsoft's
2-tier market.
Nothing has changed, apparently. I got perhaps 100 spam email messages
today, and a large number of them offer Windows XP Professional and Microsoft
Office for under a hundred dollars. It's not a big secret. (Anyone who is not getting
enough Microsoft software piracy offers, just post your email address somewhere on the internet.)
It's not hard to know who is pirating, because each message contains information about how
to find the seller. For example, "Totally legal Microsoft for a tenth of
the price WINDOWS X'P Pro + OFFICE X.P Pro - 80 Dollars Contact:
http://cork.perfect-oemcds.biz." Microsoft Office is dominant because
Microsoft apparently takes a relaxed attitude toward stopping pirates.
That's the later years. What made Microsoft dominant in the early
years? Here are my observations and conclusions and opinions:
Back then, IBM executives did not know how to type. They had
secretaries for that. IBM was then on the way down. (In later years it was
resurrected.) IBM executives did not want to create a mess in their brains
by remembering actual technical facts. That's a short way of depicting the IBM
culture back then.
IBM executives went to see the then-dominant OS seller Digital
Research to arrange an OS for the IBM PC. When they arrived the DR CEO had
decided to fly his private plane instead, and his wife was less than
respectful. Then the executives went to Microsoft, and Microsoft licensed DOS
rather than selling it. Back then the IBM PC was not a product an IBM manager
wanted on his resume. A product that would only be used by secretaries
probably didn't seem important.
Here's a good way to test whether HP is a successful company: Ask yourself, if you were holding HP stock right now, would you decide to sell it?
I would. Selling ink for $8,000 a gallon is a very unstable situation that occurs because of an unusual market phenomenon. There is no security in it at all.
HP is not using a sustainable business model any longer. It is depending on the intimidation of people who are getting started with new technology.
I refill all my Canon cartridges. If Canon, for example, decided to be the first one to actually sell an honest product, and encourage refilling, HP's business would collapse overnight.
Someday soon, ink will sell for reasonable prices again, and HP's unreasonable profitability from ink will be gone.
No, but it is amazing to me. The business press is a huge effort that it is almost completely uninformed on technical matters. Scary, because that means that most readers don't know enough not to be impressed by what's written. As business becomes more complicated technically, more and more companies are operating with partial blindness.
Okay... Maybe that's why HP's printer software is so medieval.
If you try to uninstall the latest Windows software that HP provides for one of its printers, the uninstall deletes something like 9,000 files in your C:\WinNT folder, leaving the OS completely inoperative, of course.
"In 1995, Cisco CEO John Chambers did not even have a PC on his desk, let alone use one."
Here's a comment about John Chambers. Look at the others in the same thread. A lot of people think Cisco is doing a very poor job.
If it takes 10 years to sink the company, does that mean the non-technical manager can be considered a good manager for 10 years?
Part of Cisco's secret has been a lack of competition for some very high-level products for which there was not good competition.
When they sense there is bad management, the best technically oriented people don't leave immediately. They may carry the company for several years. Then customer inertia may carry the company for several more years.
My experience with Cisco is that, whatever it may have been in the past, it is now a company on the way down.
What often happens is that the non-technical manager inherits a technically strong company, and the inertia carries him along until the company falls apart. That's apparently what happened to Apple under John Sculley, for example.
Certainly one could get the feeling that Cisco is falling apart. I was subscribed to a newsletter for some Cisco equipment, and Cisco would
regularly send me poorly written email messages of more than 150,000 bytes.
Contacting Cisco technical assistance was a frustrating exercise in corporate politics. Cisco representatives would regularly talk to me using acronyms known only inside Cisco.
John Chambers, Cisco CEO, is certainly an example of a non-technical manager doing a poor job. He is presiding over his company while it seems to be rapidly on the way down.
If the past is any guide, when Cisco gets someone else, the business press, which apparently has no technically capable writers, will give some half-baked reason for the failure, and they will again run praising articles about another imperial CEO.
Agreed, managers must know enough to realize their limitations. Not only was the recently fired HP CEO Carly Fiorina not able to realize her limitations, for example, she did not think her limitations mattered.
People say that the printer division is HP's last profitable division.
However, it is not the printers that make money, but selling ink for
$8,000 per gallon (mostly cheap solvent, bought in tank car loads).
If that is correct, HP is not a real business, but one that depends on
taking advantage of its customers to make money.
If that is true, then Carly Fiorina was not a businesswoman at all, but merely able to give the appearance of competence. And that, in turn, means that people who write for
the business press are completely incompetent, too.
Similarly, often the business press claims that Microsoft is a
successful company. But would Microsoft have been successful if it had not had
a very unusual situation in which it was able to arrange a virtual monopoly by
breaking the antitrust law? Someone who had a monopoly on water, for example, could make Bill Gates look like a poor man in a week.
However, I have some disagreement with what you said. You said, "Translation: you don't have to know how to do everything or how everything works as long as you know that your knowledge is limited and someone else more technically minded probably should be listened to."
The problem with that is the manager must have enough technical knowledge to understand very well who has more technical knowledge than he, and who can therefore be trusted. Typically, that's a lot more technical knowledge than what people mean when they say "you don't have to know how to do everything or how everything works".
Slashdot Mirror
Several people have asked for the bug number. Here it is:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22266 0
(Direct links to Firefox's Bugzilla from Slashdot are denied. Put the URL into a separate tab. Take out the space in the URL inserted by Slashdot.)
This bug, and this Slashdot story, are important because, for millions of well-educated people, Firefox is a window on the world. Note that many people in less-developed countries won't be running Windows unless it is pirated, because they cannot afford it. They need high-quality free software like Firefox. In less-developed countries, it is the small percentage of educated people who are likely to have computers and a connection to the internet. These people have a disproportinately big effect on the health of their countries.
Bug ID 222660, comment #32:
Below is my most recent comment about the bug, which crashes all Firefox windows and tabs after many windows and tabs have been opened.
Problem clarified: Before the crash, Firefox uses almost 100% CPU cycles. See the file attachment in Comment #31, showing Firefox 1.0 taking 98% of the CPU cycles. The hard disk was idle at that time and had been idle for at least two minutes. Note that the bug being discussed here crashes TalkBack, too, so that there are no TalkBack reports.
Testing conditions: 1) Toshiba laptop model 2415-S205, 2.0 GHz Mobile Pentium, 512 MB of memory. Windows XP SP2, all critical patches applied. This is a different computer than used for any of the other testing.
2) Firefox 1.0 with 200 days of History. Bookmarks file is 2.5 Megabytes.
New Comment: In the original filing of this bug, Firefox was characterized as "slow" as the problem with the bug advanced toward crashing Firefox. See also comment #10 "slow", comment #6, "all of the browser windows became unresponsive", and comment #13, ' "not responding" in task manager" '.
Apparently the slowness was caused by Firefox taking a huge percentage of CPU cycles before crashing.
The problem may have improved since this bug was originally posted, but the bug is still substantially the same.
Response to criticism:
1) Comment #30: "i don't see a single talkbackid anywhere in this bug report,..."
That's because whatever crashes Firefox crashes the TalkBack program as well.
2) Comment #27: "... your crash could be caused by any number of issues with Firefox, or by something completely unrelated (faulty memory?)."
That's why I tested with several different computers and two operating systems.
3) Comment #27: "... posting over and over again stating that "firefox crashed when I loaded lots of tabs" is not helpful to development in any way."
Note that the posts were in different versions of Firefox, verifying that the bug has not been fixed.
4) Comment #27: "I myself frequently use many windows/tabs and have not been able to reproduce the crashes you speak of. That is why I will mark this bug WORKSFORME." And, "General descriptions of symptoms and anecdotes, like the ones in this bug, will not help resolve any issues."
Note that the actual conditions of failure are carefully documented in the original bug report, and by other authors in Comment #6 and Comment #7.
Note that the criticism in comment #27 does not document the conditions, but merely recounts the author's anecdote: "I myself frequently use many windows/tabs..."
What are many? What is frequently?
5) Comment #22: "If you're experiencing a memory leak and can document it using tools listed at http://www.mozilla.org/performance/tools.html then please open a new bug."
I've given that suggestion a lot of thought. I have a lot of debugging experience, but not with those tools. I'm guessing that learning to use the tools and searching for memory leaks would take at least a month of full-time work. I'm guessing that
[Grin]
Whatever the answer is, it is definitely not in commercial software. See my comment just above: The Firefox people are great compared to Microsoft. With Microsoft, you pay to be disrespected.
An additional remark:
The problems with reporting bugs in Firefox are trivial compared to reporting bugs to Microsoft, in my experience.
A top-level Microsoft support technician got interested in a very well-documented bug in Windows XP that I reported. He decided, partly as an experiment to teach himself about Microsoft, to work with several Microsoft groups. Result: An entire waste of time of many, many hours, over a period of months.
I've been reporting several bugs in Windows XP for literally years, and they haven't been fixed. If you work with both Linux and Windows XP, do you notice that Linux has a powerful, bug-free Command Line Interface, and the CLI in Windows XP is weak and buggy? (Yes, I know they are working on replacing it.)
I've posted bugs to Firefox Bugzilla. All I know about the Firefox "community" comes from that.
One of the bug posts, about a serious memory leak that causes a complete crash, was handled in an angry way, even though I had spent hours documenting it on two computers and two operating systems.
This is an extremely common phenomenon among Open Source authors. They often use their position as a way of acting out their anger. I was criticized because I use Firefox in a more intense way than other users! When I posted a carefully written response to the criticism, I got criticism for posting a long response.
I offered to re-write the manual for another Open Source project, and got a negative response that was encouraging and discouraging at the same time.
On another project, I entered a minor bug. The program was crashing if it saw a DOS end-of-text-file character in its text file input. I got back a long, philosophical discussion about why they were not willing to fix the bug because it was a problem that came from DOS.
One person with an anger problem can literally control the development of an Open Source project by scaring away potential helpers.
In my experience, the anger is often not expressed in a way that is obviously angry. It comes as opposition, sometimes very subtle opposition, even to good ideas or to useful help. The opposition vastly increases the amount of time required to contribute to a project.
The serious Firefox crash I reported in October 2003 was still there in February 2005 in version 1.0, even though it was verified by others in a careful way.
The background for all this is that Firefox is apparently the best browser, and an important window to the world for millions of people.
This is an important subject, and there is a lot more to say, but I don't have time now.
Exactly right. There's no science for acupuncture. However, it does work in some cases.
Obviously, any Slashdot comment would have to survive a test of logic.
And, I find it is disgusting that the Bush administration is putting Fiorina forward for Head of the World Bank, when she was such a failure at her last job. The phony people are in control.
Slashdot is powerful! On Tuesday I complained about Carly Fiorina in a Slashdot comment, and on Wednesday she was fired. (See the 6th paragraph of the comment, and the subsequent comment.)
Questioning the sanity of Utah leaders is close to the real issue.
It is not necessary to be intelligent to get elected. It is only necessary to be popular. Many politicians have very little analytical ability. In this case, they can't see all the reasons this idea won't work.
Note to political leaders: Avoid embarrassment! Whenever you are considering a law involving computers, have Slashdot make it a story first. Hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers will gladly tell you if there are problems with your idea. It's free, and it's quick. You will get at least 500 comments in 24 hours, if your idea is especially embarrassing. Many of the comments will be useless, but there are a lot of very smart Slashdot readers.
I agree that telecoms can do WiFi more efficiently. But they won't unless the government mandates it. Muni wireless is a way to get started. Eventually, there will be WiFi everywhere, and we will use VOIP for our cell phones. The cell phone towers will become WiFi towers.
Along the way, there will be less profit for some people, who will fight change.
People who make money doing things the old way don't want anyone doing things a new way.
Those who made money with horses did not want cars to be introduced.
Decades ago, the painter's unions tried to get the newly introduced paint rollers ruled illegal. They were afraid people would paint their own houses.
The big companies use VOIP to move your long distance calls around. They want private VOIP to be outlawed so they can make a huge profit doing the same thing themselves.
Aggregating a huge number of users with Municipal WiFi is far more efficient than having each person have a separate account with an ISP. The ISPs want Municipal and private WiFi to be made illegal so they can make a huge profit doing same thing themselves.
It's "Please, please, please corrupt the government so that I can make easy money."
I very much like the graphic design in the first link: http://www.fordvehicles.com/trucks/f150/index.asp
However, there were five shortcomings:
On my high-speed DSL connection, I got only the word "loading..." for only a few seconds, but it seemed like a long time. Ford must be very arrogant indeed to believe that this does not annoy people with dial-up connections.
Second, you get the option "Low Speed Non-Flash" only after you have loaded the Flash page. That makes me realize why I don't like the average Flash enthusiasts web designer. They aren't very intelligent, and they assume I'm not very intelligent.
Third, Flash breaks tabbled browsers!!! When I right click on a Flash ad, I don't get the normal menu. My normal way of shopping is to load several pages and flip between them on demand. Macromedia thinks I should not be able to do this.
Fourth, the site uses blind links. I don't know what will happen until I click.
Fifth, after something is clicked on the main page, the connection is kept alive, as is shown by the message "Transferring data from www.fordvehicles.com..." which remains there forever and can't be made to go away by hitting the Escape key.
If there is something that cannot be done in standard HTML, standard HTML should be improved. Flash has had perhaps 38 serious security vulnerabilities. It is not good to introduce an entirely new, essentially proprietary technology.
Flash is loved by ignorant managers who only look at their new web site once, and then link deep inside it.
Please provide links to good Flash websites.
I agree that there are some interesting uses of Flash, but Flash sites discourage visiting the same web site many times, because even interesting moving pictures become boring after someone has watched them maybe 3 times.
That's why Google is so successful. The company has a policy of not annoying people.
Conditions in the U.S. are worse than you are saying. The bottom and middle parts of the U.S. government often function well, but the top part of the government is thoroughly corrupted by conflict of interest.
U.S. citizens often live in a mental fantasy land in which they view themselves as the best, and cannot hear anything else. Politicians manipulate this. Look at most of the replies to your comment. Most involve some illogical trick to avoid examining the problems. Many U.S. citizens believe that they are so superior that it is entirely okay that their government's foreign policy depends on killing people to solve problems, rather than actually solving the problems.
The U.S. government has fought 24 wars since World War II. The system of violence works by creating fear so rich people can profit.
The U.S. government is being sold to anyone who has the money. Huge amounts of money are being borrowed and transferred to the pockets of those in power. The U.S. government is now far more in debt than ever before: Debt Clock. If you are a U.S. citizen, you are expected to pay. Those who want corruption in the U.S. government want the government to borrow. The corrupters find ways to transfer the money to their pockets.
The origin of the present problems was in the 40s and 50s, when U.S. government leaders made two decisions. It is likely that those in power then did not understand that their decisions would eventually corrupt the entire government. At the time, the decisions seemed logical.
First, the government decided that it could act in other countries in secret. Second, the U.S. government decided it could act in secret to protect U.S. businesses in other countries.
What probably no one realized then was how much that would come to be a corrupting influence on the government. Probably no one realized then how much additional profit big multinational businesses could make by arranging, in secret, for U.S. taxpayers to pay for the security arrangements needed by U.S. multinational businesses.
Soon huge businesses were arguing that the U.S. government should subvert democratically elected leaders, as the government did in Iran in 1953. Soon U.S. businesses would arrange unfair contracts with corrupt leaders, and when there was a protest, call for U.S. government intervention in the name of patriotism.
That's partly how we got to the present situation, where two men, whose family and business associates and friends have extensive investments in global oil businesses, are president and vice-president of the entire U.S. government, even though there is conflict of interest in such an arrangement.
My opinion: There is a social breakdown happening in the U.S. now, and it is very difficult to live there. People are less relaxed and happy than in the last 50 years. It will be really, really difficult to adjust to living there.
What needs to be measured now is not the number of Iraqis killed, but the average number per year. The U.S. is well on its way to beating Saddam in the long run. Remember, every war causes destabilization that last sometimes a hundred years or more.
Remember that the U.S. government does not keep information about how many people it has killed.
You said, "Microsoft has always been extremely aggressive against competitors..."
That's true, and no one should think they know the extent of the aggressiveness. I came to that conclusion after trying to document some of the aggression in my article, Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.
What made DOS dominant in the later years? Microsoft deliberately allowed piracy. That's my conclusion and opinion after considerable study of the matter.
Microsoft created a 2-tier market that squeezed out competitors. You could buy DOS for a lot of money. Then, you could buy DOS for very little money, if you would accept a pirated version. Products that competed honestly in the market could not sell cheaper than the widely pirated DOS, and they disappeared. (Most people cannot look at a manual and see that it has obviously been reproduced from a photocopied original rather than typesetting; most people did not know the copies were pirated.)
One day in the years of DOS, I got irritated at this, and decided to protest. They've closed the loophole now, but back then you could call Microsoft and get the phone number of their legal department. I told the woman that answered that my closest 10 distributors were all selling pirated copies of DOS. The woman was very interested. She sounded young and neither of us realized the implications of what we were doing. Once she had accepted my complaint, the information was inside the company, and they had to go ahead with a court case. I participated as a witness against the most open of the pirates, and Microsoft won.
If you were a dealer back then, you either felt that you were taking a huge risk selling illegal copies of DOS, or you could not compete with other resellers. So, it made sense that Microsoft and I were temporarily on the same side of an issue.
Microsoft does the same thing with Microsoft Office, in my opinion. I sold computers only to businesses, strictly legally. But once a friend asked me for help with buying a computer, and we went to what seemed to be the best retail seller in town. We bought a nice computer, and then the salesman offered me Microsoft Office for $50. So, there was Corel, trying to sell Word Perfect for a reasonable price, and they were being undercut by Microsoft's 2-tier market.
Nothing has changed, apparently. I got perhaps 100 spam email messages today, and a large number of them offer Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office for under a hundred dollars. It's not a big secret. (Anyone who is not getting enough Microsoft software piracy offers, just post your email address somewhere on the internet.)
It's not hard to know who is pirating, because each message contains information about how to find the seller. For example, "Totally legal Microsoft for a tenth of the price WINDOWS X'P Pro + OFFICE X.P Pro - 80 Dollars Contact: http://cork.perfect-oemcds.biz." Microsoft Office is dominant because Microsoft apparently takes a relaxed attitude toward stopping pirates.
That's the later years. What made Microsoft dominant in the early years? Here are my observations and conclusions and opinions:
Back then, IBM executives did not know how to type. They had secretaries for that. IBM was then on the way down. (In later years it was resurrected.) IBM executives did not want to create a mess in their brains by remembering actual technical facts. That's a short way of depicting the IBM culture back then.
IBM executives went to see the then-dominant OS seller Digital Research to arrange an OS for the IBM PC. When they arrived the DR CEO had decided to fly his private plane instead, and his wife was less than respectful. Then the executives went to Microsoft, and Microsoft licensed DOS rather than selling it. Back then the IBM PC was not a product an IBM manager wanted on his resume. A product that would only be used by secretaries probably didn't seem important.
Here's a good way to test whether HP is a successful company: Ask yourself, if you were holding HP stock right now, would you decide to sell it?
I would. Selling ink for $8,000 a gallon is a very unstable situation that occurs because of an unusual market phenomenon. There is no security in it at all.
HP is not using a sustainable business model any longer. It is depending on the intimidation of people who are getting started with new technology.
I refill all my Canon cartridges. If Canon, for example, decided to be the first one to actually sell an honest product, and encourage refilling, HP's business would collapse overnight.
Someday soon, ink will sell for reasonable prices again, and HP's unreasonable profitability from ink will be gone.
No, but it is amazing to me. The business press is a huge effort that it is almost completely uninformed on technical matters. Scary, because that means that most readers don't know enough not to be impressed by what's written. As business becomes more complicated technically, more and more companies are operating with partial blindness.
Okay... Maybe that's why HP's printer software is so medieval.
If you try to uninstall the latest Windows software that HP provides for one of its printers, the uninstall deletes something like 9,000 files in your C:\WinNT folder, leaving the OS completely inoperative, of course.
"In 1995, Cisco CEO John Chambers did not even have a PC on his desk, let alone use one."
Here's a comment about John Chambers. Look at the others in the same thread. A lot of people think Cisco is doing a very poor job.
If it takes 10 years to sink the company, does that mean the non-technical manager can be considered a good manager for 10 years?
Part of Cisco's secret has been a lack of competition for some very high-level products for which there was not good competition.
When they sense there is bad management, the best technically oriented people don't leave immediately. They may carry the company for several years. Then customer inertia may carry the company for several more years.
My experience with Cisco is that, whatever it may have been in the past, it is now a company on the way down.
What often happens is that the non-technical manager inherits a technically strong company, and the inertia carries him along until the company falls apart. That's apparently what happened to Apple under John Sculley, for example.
Certainly one could get the feeling that Cisco is falling apart. I was subscribed to a newsletter for some Cisco equipment, and Cisco would regularly send me poorly written email messages of more than 150,000 bytes.
Contacting Cisco technical assistance was a frustrating exercise in corporate politics. Cisco representatives would regularly talk to me using acronyms known only inside Cisco.
John Chambers, Cisco CEO, is certainly an example of a non-technical manager doing a poor job. He is presiding over his company while it seems to be rapidly on the way down.
If the past is any guide, when Cisco gets someone else, the business press, which apparently has no technically capable writers, will give some half-baked reason for the failure, and they will again run praising articles about another imperial CEO.
Agreed, managers must know enough to realize their limitations. Not only was the recently fired HP CEO Carly Fiorina not able to realize her limitations, for example, she did not think her limitations mattered.
People say that the printer division is HP's last profitable division. However, it is not the printers that make money, but selling ink for $8,000 per gallon (mostly cheap solvent, bought in tank car loads).
If that is correct, HP is not a real business, but one that depends on taking advantage of its customers to make money.
If that is true, then Carly Fiorina was not a businesswoman at all, but merely able to give the appearance of competence. And that, in turn, means that people who write for the business press are completely incompetent, too.
Similarly, often the business press claims that Microsoft is a successful company. But would Microsoft have been successful if it had not had a very unusual situation in which it was able to arrange a virtual monopoly by breaking the antitrust law? Someone who had a monopoly on water, for example, could make Bill Gates look like a poor man in a week.
However, I have some disagreement with what you said. You said, "Translation: you don't have to know how to do everything or how everything works as long as you know that your knowledge is limited and someone else more technically minded probably should be listened to."
The problem with that is the manager must have enough technical knowledge to understand very well who has more technical knowledge than he, and who can therefore be trusted. Typically, that's a lot more technical knowledge than what people mean when they say "you don't have to know how to do everything or how everything works".
Shell Beach, I wish everyone in Open Source had your social skills.