In Ubuntu I frequently get crashes that either lock the system up so badly that I can only control the mouse and everything else is frozen, or everything including the mouse locks up (and trying to switch to another screen never seems to work). I might just be an Ubuntu/Debian/Gnome issue though..
I would suggest that either something is misconfigured or miscompiled. I can't tell you if it is Ubuntu, since I don't really like it much, but I've been led to understand that Debian tends to adopt a conservative enough approach to ensure stability.
But I have used Slackware boxes for the last 16 years, with none of the symptoms you describe. More recently, I have been using Arch, which reflects much of the philosophy of Slackware-type distros, and that seems equally stable. I'm equally sure that the issue doesn't lie with Gnome, which has been stable for a long time.
If you're not so concerned with missing calls, turn off your god damned ringer when you put it down somewhere so people that are actually trying to work...
That might work for a cube-rat, but I work in an environment with lots of background noise from machinery, in a (metal-walled) building where phone reception is poor, so I have to leave it in selected places. In any case, it's only the two of us there, so the ringtone doesn't bother anybody...
Mass emails would be less distracting if they were posted to a bulletin board or RSS feed
I've taken to using a template response borrowed from Slashdot:
"Your message has been intercepted by a lameness filter..." and offering a series of suggestions. People get the message eventually. (Yes, it probably is a bit obnoxious, but I can be like that sometimes...)
Why? If it's urgent then they'll phone. An advantage of email is that I deal with it at my convenience.
Indeed. I go a step further than that. A colleague used to go to great lengths to bring me my phone if it rang when I had put it down on a desk or somewhere, until I explained to him that the purpose of a mobile phone is to make life EASIER for the owner, and I prefer not to be a slave to it.
The fact that someone has taken the trouble to call indicates that the matter is reasonably urgent, so I actually do call back soon, but at a time of MY choosing.
This might seem a cranky attitude to take, but then I guess I'm a cranky old man now.:-) In any case, my policy keeps life simpler, and enables me to give the correspondent the attention s/he deserves rather than a rushed or ill-considered response.
How the heck is checking multiple social networking sites, blogs and RSS feeds going to be any less distracting or addictive than having one place to check all your messages?
Fair point. I've managed to put some distance between myself and my email by connecting all my email accounts to Thunderbird, and just firing up the client two or three times a day. I don't really care if anyone hates me for it, they can always call me if the matter is urgent.
Slashdot is my major distraction, I waste WAY too much time here.:-) At least I don't do Facebook though; That really does seem to swallow up peoples' lives...
I learned a while ago that Firefox has lots of zealots in the moderator ranks.
I must not feed the trolls. I must not feed the trolls...
But damn it, that's nonsense. The moderators change from one day to the next, and meta-moderation works reasonably well at keeping things fair.
But a browser is only a browser, and flaming one or the other accomplishes nothing. I can even work with IE if I have to (though I don't have to like it).
But in any case, just because a new kid is on the block in the form of Chrome, it does not necessarily follow that Firefox suddenly sucks. With the latter, we are free to add as many extensions as we need (though I only use adblock and flashblock), and I guess that to some extent defines how big a footprint it is going to make.
Much has been made of breaking up tabs into separate processes to make things safer, which on the face of it is not a bad idea in itself.
However, I would ask how often you manage to crash Firefox. I have been using it since it was still Mozilla, and I struggle to remember ANY occasions when it has crashed. OK, yes, it has happened, but very very rarely.
But getting back to the point, I wonder if anyone here can get back to the point and enlighten us as to why (or whether) Firefox should embrace webkit?
Im a fan of Ubuntu, but if its still running in 2017 in its current format without being replaced at the top, I'd be really worried about the lack of competition in the free software movement.
Given that Unix has already been around for something like 30 years, I wouldn't be too worried.
As far as I (a bear of little brain;-)) can determine, it makes little difference whether or not the sun is overhead at noon.
I am aware that historically it made a difference to navigators using clock and sextant to establish their position. I, as a yachtsman, still prefer to keep in practice with this having encountered a potentially nasty situation where the electronic gear fritzed out as a result of a good soaking with sodium chloride in solution with dihydrogen monoxide. Besides, the instruments are beautiful, and it's cool to be able to use them.;-)
But I recognise that most simply rely on the GPS, and it really doesn't matter how one sets the clock there so long as everybody agrees.
Averages are no help. The Earth's rotation is slowing down.
Ah. I knew there was a reason why I find it that much harder to get out of bed in the morning. I thought it was due to the fact that I'm past my use-by date...;-)
you're assuming that for the next 7200 years we still would need leap seconds
I wouldn't even assume that the human race will exist in 7200 years. Most of our "civilisations" haven't had a lifetime of more than a few hundred years, and with the lengths to which we've gone to turn the planet into a desert, it's unlikely that it will support us for long.
If any remnants of our species do survive, I very much doubt if they will be in any condition to be worried about the odd second here or there.
You can patent science fiction today, wait it out, do ZERO work, and then collect large sums of money.
Although it goes against the grain in my case to defend the patent system, since it has been abused so much by trolls such as Microsoft et al, the whole purpose of a patent is to give the inventor time to get his idea on the market. In this case, I gather, the guy had 11 years to get his act together, but nothing came of it. The point is, he had to pay a lot of money to get the patent up (probably more than he ever got back), so he does not qualify as such a troll.
If Apple have seen fit to seek his input, in whatever way, then kudos to them say I.
What is clearly evolutionary today would have been mind boggling science fiction in the 1970s.
This is true. Back in the '70s, I would probably have thought of our consumer-grade flatbed scanners as being pretty close to science fiction. And I would almost certainly have thought of "mind-reading" headsets such as these as being very nearly akin to magic.
Up until then, people manually sorted their music into folders (I know many who still do), and had to drag and drop what they wanted onto their players.
Yes, I was one such; even after I got my first iPod, I found myself wishing I could get past Apple's database arrangement for storing music tracks, as it really pissed me off at the time. Looking back, I'm not even sure that I can remember why, apart from the fact that my only computers at the time were Linux boxes.
Gtkpod just wasn't that stable then (although the underlying libraries were), so that might have accounted for it. Since I now use a Mac as my interface for the iPod, I don't worry about that any more, but gtkpod has been reliable for a good while now.
This is hardly new. It has been recognised for some time that so-called "junk" DNA is nothing of the sort, but is almost certainly associated with gene expression to some degree.
The cool thing here (and what, I hope, will keep me in a job for a while) is trying to work out how.
(The fun aspect of molecular biology is that so much changes even over the course of a 4-year degree course... - and to think I nearly went into maths, where I wouldn't be doing anything remotely cutting-edge until PhD level...)
If something rock-solid is needed, one could do worse than continue to use ReiserFS3. (This is what I use.) It's feature-complete, and very stable. I have not had one mishap with it since I implemented it years ago.
But if you want something more bleeding-edge, one could try Reiser4 (development of which I think has stagnated) or btrfs, which seems to implement the main design considerations of Reiser4, but has jagged edges waiting to be cleaned up.
If something stable and under current maintenance is required, a conservative suggestion is of course Ext3.
I was actually stating that google left major chunks behind, running and collecting information to send to the mothership...
This is the main thing that bothers me about Chrome. Nobody has yet (to my knowledge) supplied any details of what the program sends back to Google. I really don't want to participate in marketing exercises, and Adblock and Flashblock are the only extensions I insist on using with FF3, and by now they have become pretty much essential to how I like to work.
I know Chrome is meant to be open-source, but I wonder how practicable it is do disable its less welcome aspects without interfering with the usefulness of the software.
Although, as yet, it is not yet available on any of the platforms that I run, I find myself wondering if most of the attraction of it is the fact that it is new.
its just an "outbreak"... saying a sudden outbreak is redundant.
...as, of course, are all of these "fixed that for ya" posts.
There seems to have been a rash of these lately, to the extent that when I have the points, I have found myself automatically modding them -1 redundant. They are rarely funny any more.
The parent post was referring to the proposed Linux offering. Your comment is irrelevant in this context.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
And you didnt use to be able to do this. Laptops just werent stable over weeks with tons of standby/hibernate usage and leaving tons of stuff running.
Hmmm. My 4-year-old iBook G4 only ever gets switched off when I get on a plane (i.e. maybe every few months). I just close it up whenever I carry it around, and open it when I'm ready. Never misses a beat. But definitely not high-end material, even when it was new.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
...only functional when you spend a bunch of time researching and downloading plugins. It's bare bones and crappy without at least 5-10 plugins.
Really? Just what do you want from a browser? All I care to use is Adblock and Flashblock. The whole point of a browser is to provide as minimal an obstruction between the content you're viewing and yourself as possible.
If I had 38 tabs open, I would regard that as a good time to close the browser and start again. I just don't need that amount of clutter. Even on my desktop system, with its dual-screen Xinerama arrangement, it is impossible to keep track of much more then 15 tabs per screenful. Though if you're trawling through that many porn sites, I guess you might have more things on your mind than the efficiency of your browsing experience.;-)
For the record, FF3 on my OS X laptop is using 231Mb with 10 tabs open. On my Linux desktop machine, with the same tabs open it is using 124Mb.
Slashdot Mirror
In Ubuntu I frequently get crashes that either lock the system up so badly that I can only control the mouse and everything else is frozen, or everything including the mouse locks up (and trying to switch to another screen never seems to work). I might just be an Ubuntu/Debian/Gnome issue though..
I would suggest that either something is misconfigured or miscompiled. I can't tell you if it is Ubuntu, since I don't really like it much, but I've been led to understand that Debian tends to adopt a conservative enough approach to ensure stability.
But I have used Slackware boxes for the last 16 years, with none of the symptoms you describe. More recently, I have been using Arch, which reflects much of the philosophy of Slackware-type distros, and that seems equally stable. I'm equally sure that the issue doesn't lie with Gnome, which has been stable for a long time.
If you're not so concerned with missing calls, turn off your god damned ringer when you put it down somewhere so people that are actually trying to work...
That might work for a cube-rat, but I work in an environment with lots of background noise from machinery, in a (metal-walled) building where phone reception is poor, so I have to leave it in selected places. In any case, it's only the two of us there, so the ringtone doesn't bother anybody...
Mass emails would be less distracting if they were posted to a bulletin board or RSS feed
I've taken to using a template response borrowed from Slashdot:
"Your message has been intercepted by a lameness filter..." and offering a series of suggestions. People get the message eventually. (Yes, it probably is a bit obnoxious, but I can be like that sometimes...)
Why? If it's urgent then they'll phone. An advantage of email is that I deal with it at my convenience.
:-) In any case, my policy keeps life simpler, and enables me to give the correspondent the attention s/he deserves rather than a rushed or ill-considered response.
Indeed. I go a step further than that. A colleague used to go to great lengths to bring me my phone if it rang when I had put it down on a desk or somewhere, until I explained to him that the purpose of a mobile phone is to make life EASIER for the owner, and I prefer not to be a slave to it.
The fact that someone has taken the trouble to call indicates that the matter is reasonably urgent, so I actually do call back soon, but at a time of MY choosing.
This might seem a cranky attitude to take, but then I guess I'm a cranky old man now.
How the heck is checking multiple social networking sites, blogs and RSS feeds going to be any less distracting or addictive than having one place to check all your messages?
:-) At least I don't do Facebook though; That really does seem to swallow up peoples' lives...
Fair point. I've managed to put some distance between myself and my email by connecting all my email accounts to Thunderbird, and just firing up the client two or three times a day. I don't really care if anyone hates me for it, they can always call me if the matter is urgent.
Slashdot is my major distraction, I waste WAY too much time here.
Dude, it should be in your email.
;-)
Not if you're married. Or at least, not if you want to stay married...
I learned a while ago that Firefox has lots of zealots in the moderator ranks.
I must not feed the trolls.
I must not feed the trolls...
But damn it, that's nonsense. The moderators change from one day to the next, and meta-moderation works reasonably well at keeping things fair.
But a browser is only a browser, and flaming one or the other accomplishes nothing. I can even work with IE if I have to (though I don't have to like it).
But in any case, just because a new kid is on the block in the form of Chrome, it does not necessarily follow that Firefox suddenly sucks. With the latter, we are free to add as many extensions as we need (though I only use adblock and flashblock), and I guess that to some extent defines how big a footprint it is going to make.
Much has been made of breaking up tabs into separate processes to make things safer, which on the face of it is not a bad idea in itself.
However, I would ask how often you manage to crash Firefox. I have been using it since it was still Mozilla, and I struggle to remember ANY occasions when it has crashed. OK, yes, it has happened, but very very rarely.
But getting back to the point, I wonder if anyone here can get back to the point and enlighten us as to why (or whether) Firefox should embrace webkit?
Im a fan of Ubuntu, but if its still running in 2017 in its current format without being replaced at the top, I'd be really worried about the lack of competition in the free software movement.
Given that Unix has already been around for something like 30 years, I wouldn't be too worried.
As far as I (a bear of little brain ;-)) can determine, it makes little difference whether or not the sun is overhead at noon.
;-)
I am aware that historically it made a difference to navigators using clock and sextant to establish their position. I, as a yachtsman, still prefer to keep in practice with this having encountered a potentially nasty situation where the electronic gear fritzed out as a result of a good soaking with sodium chloride in solution with dihydrogen monoxide. Besides, the instruments are beautiful, and it's cool to be able to use them.
But I recognise that most simply rely on the GPS, and it really doesn't matter how one sets the clock there so long as everybody agrees.
Averages are no help. The Earth's rotation is slowing down.
;-)
Ah. I knew there was a reason why I find it that much harder to get out of bed in the morning. I thought it was due to the fact that I'm past my use-by date...
you're assuming that for the next 7200 years we still would need leap seconds
I wouldn't even assume that the human race will exist in 7200 years. Most of our "civilisations" haven't had a lifetime of more than a few hundred years, and with the lengths to which we've gone to turn the planet into a desert, it's unlikely that it will support us for long.
If any remnants of our species do survive, I very much doubt if they will be in any condition to be worried about the odd second here or there.
You can patent science fiction today, wait it out, do ZERO work, and then collect large sums of money.
Although it goes against the grain in my case to defend the patent system, since it has been abused so much by trolls such as Microsoft et al, the whole purpose of a patent is to give the inventor time to get his idea on the market. In this case, I gather, the guy had 11 years to get his act together, but nothing came of it. The point is, he had to pay a lot of money to get the patent up (probably more than he ever got back), so he does not qualify as such a troll.
If Apple have seen fit to seek his input, in whatever way, then kudos to them say I.
What is clearly evolutionary today would have been mind boggling science fiction in the 1970s.
This is true. Back in the '70s, I would probably have thought of our consumer-grade flatbed scanners as being pretty close to science fiction. And I would almost certainly have thought of "mind-reading" headsets such as these as being very nearly akin to magic.
All a matter of perception, I suppose...
Up until then, people manually sorted their music into folders (I know many who still do), and had to drag and drop what they wanted onto their players.
Yes, I was one such; even after I got my first iPod, I found myself wishing I could get past Apple's database arrangement for storing music tracks, as it really pissed me off at the time. Looking back, I'm not even sure that I can remember why, apart from the fact that my only computers at the time were Linux boxes.
Gtkpod just wasn't that stable then (although the underlying libraries were), so that might have accounted for it. Since I now use a Mac as my interface for the iPod, I don't worry about that any more, but gtkpod has been reliable for a good while now.
I'm as concerned as the next person about statuary rape
;-)
I wouldn't be. I would have thought it might be a bit of a detumefying experience, though those statues might not notice...
This is hardly new. It has been recognised for some time that so-called "junk" DNA is nothing of the sort, but is almost certainly associated with gene expression to some degree.
The cool thing here (and what, I hope, will keep me in a job for a while) is trying to work out how.
(The fun aspect of molecular biology is that so much changes even over the course of a 4-year degree course... - and to think I nearly went into maths, where I wouldn't be doing anything remotely cutting-edge until PhD level...)
Yes, indeed I was jumping the queue. I just got impatient with the FP trolls, and saw no harm in interrupting them. ;-)
One in particular, CA Unicenter, blew chunks
;-)
Who is Chunks?
If something rock-solid is needed, one could do worse than continue to use ReiserFS3. (This is what I use.) It's feature-complete, and very stable. I have not had one mishap with it since I implemented it years ago.
But if you want something more bleeding-edge, one could try Reiser4 (development of which I think has stagnated) or btrfs, which seems to implement the main design considerations of Reiser4, but has jagged edges waiting to be cleaned up.
If something stable and under current maintenance is required, a conservative suggestion is of course Ext3.
I was actually stating that google left major chunks behind, running and collecting information to send to the mothership...
This is the main thing that bothers me about Chrome. Nobody has yet (to my knowledge) supplied any details of what the program sends back to Google. I really don't want to participate in marketing exercises, and Adblock and Flashblock are the only extensions I insist on using with FF3, and by now they have become pretty much essential to how I like to work.
I know Chrome is meant to be open-source, but I wonder how practicable it is do disable its less welcome aspects without interfering with the usefulness of the software.
Although, as yet, it is not yet available on any of the platforms that I run, I find myself wondering if most of the attraction of it is the fact that it is new.
its just an "outbreak"... saying a sudden outbreak is redundant.
...as, of course, are all of these "fixed that for ya" posts.
There seems to have been a rash of these lately, to the extent that when I have the points, I have found myself automatically modding them -1 redundant. They are rarely funny any more.
The parent post was referring to the proposed Linux offering. Your comment is irrelevant in this context.
And you didnt use to be able to do this. Laptops just werent stable over weeks with tons of standby/hibernate usage and leaving tons of stuff running.
Hmmm. My 4-year-old iBook G4 only ever gets switched off when I get on a plane (i.e. maybe every few months). I just close it up whenever I carry it around, and open it when I'm ready. Never misses a beat. But definitely not high-end material, even when it was new.
...only functional when you spend a bunch of time researching and downloading plugins. It's bare bones and crappy without at least 5-10 plugins.
;-)
Really? Just what do you want from a browser? All I care to use is Adblock and Flashblock. The whole point of a browser is to provide as minimal an obstruction between the content you're viewing and yourself as possible.
If I had 38 tabs open, I would regard that as a good time to close the browser and start again. I just don't need that amount of clutter. Even on my desktop system, with its dual-screen Xinerama arrangement, it is impossible to keep track of much more then 15 tabs per screenful. Though if you're trawling through that many porn sites, I guess you might have more things on your mind than the efficiency of your browsing experience.
For the record, FF3 on my OS X laptop is using 231Mb with 10 tabs open. On my Linux desktop machine, with the same tabs open it is using 124Mb.
...but I haven't seen such a spike in spam (virus-laden or otherwise) at all.
But then again, I don't check my server logs that often any more. Maybe I should...