One of the biggest problems with bug management is the ability of the bug viewing audience to find bugs that may match the problem they are having.
I've worked within a major corporation (RAID queries) and also worked closely with Mozilla and in both instances I found it extremely frustrating to find bugs, often when I knew the exact keywords that are associated with a given bug.
If there was a search tool akin to Google for searching accurately through large bug databases where users could easily find bugs then the issue of duplicates would be solved almost entirely.
....this doesn't make much sense. MS makes a lot of money based on the popularity of their MSN portal. this portal links to a lot of their other properties as well and it is against their best interest to make it difficult for users with a different browsers to access this page.
one would think that since they want people coming to this page and accessing it regularly they would make it easier for them to get here.
conspiracy theory aside this doesn't make sense from a business point of view. i have a feeling this is a mistake of some sort.
I understand the tragedy, but it cannot be ignored that there was a seventh astronaut onboard Columbia.
Her name is Kalpana Chawla. Times of India has the story here. Text as follows:
Kalpana Chawla did India proud
PTI[ SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 01, 2003 09:25:13 PM ]
WASHINGTON: Kalpana Chawla, who is feared to have perished in the Columbia space shuttle mishap along with six others, had done India proud when she embarked on her first space mission on November 19, 1997.
The Karnal-born Chawla, the first Indian American astronaut, began her career at the Ames Research Center at Nasa in 1988.
A graduate in aeronautical engineering from the Punjab Engineering College she began work at the Ames in the area of fluid dynamics.
Following her successful tenure at the Ames, Chawla in 1993 joined the Overset Methods Inc in California as vice president and a research scientist in charge of simulating various body functions for future space missions.
Nasa selected Chawla as an astronaut candidate in 1994 and she joined the 15th group of astronauts in March 1995.
After an year of training and evaluation, Chawla was assigned as a crew representative to work on technical issues for Nasa's Astronaut Office Extra Vehicular Activities, Robotics, dealing in space walks.
She was instrumental in the testing space control software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory.
Chawla's received recognition here and was assigned as mission specialist and prime robotic arm operator on the STS-87 and was involved in the manual capture of an orbiting satellite.
Born in Karnal in Punjab, Chawla did her schooling from the Tagore School in the city and took a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Punjab Engineering College.
She went on to complete her Masters from the University of Texas in 1984 earned a doctorate from the University of Colorado.
I'm currently using a great host (Spiderhosts). Its costs $15.29 a year, thats a $1.28 a month. I get:
Telnet/SSH access
WAP support (for mobile devices)
Web based Email access
10 POP mail accounts
Unlimited Email forwarders
Default catch all email account
Cron Jobs
MIME types and Apache handlers configuration
2 types of shopping carts
C, C++, Perl and PHP4 support
Raw access logs
3 statistics software
1,000 MB monthly transfers
and then some.
This is not a dedicated machine, but it sure feels like it. Site has never gone down except for a scheduled server move which I knew about ahead of time. Also their customer support turn around time is always under 24 hours and they also offer electronic ticketing to track help requests online.
No phone support, but for the cost, its well well worth it.
Have a look at bug 181035 on Mozilla's Bugzilla. There is some good discussion on how to handle this. A pop-up window can't merely be hidden from view, because invisible windows are considered a security hazard. Maybe the sandbox idea will take off allowing pop-ups to have temporary play room.
However as of now its an open issue at Mozilla with no clear solution in sight. This is going to be an arms race no doubt.
Its because of reasons like this and this and this that I don't want any sort of profit oriented organization or government collecting information about my lifestyle.
Delays due to politicking are one way to think about this. Realistically there are only two countries right now that can effectively address this problem. Most countries in Western Europe right now don't really have space programs that can fully compare to NASA (as far as payload and launch capacity). God knows what China and Japan are really doing or are capable of doing. India right now can't do much of anything.
This leaves the US and Russia. Russia has heavy launch capacity, but do they have the budget to pull off something? Probably not.
This brings us to the US. The US is a very cause and effect society. America will not plan ahead to fix a problem 50 or even 15 years in the future. Case in point, the interest in Islam and Middle Eastern studies post 9/11.
Unless we've got something hitting us in the next 6 months or at most in a year, this discussion is going to go on ad infinatum.
"The Computer Sciences Department has opened a new lab facility. The lab features Dell Optiplex GX110 computers running Windows XP. The computers feature 2GHz Intel Pentium-4 processors, 1GiB RAM, CD-RW drives, and 18" LCD monitors. The installed software includes MS Visual Studio.NET, Borland JBuilder 7 Personal Edition, MS Office XP, and Adobe Photoshop 7, as well as a variety of internet-related applications.
An HP laser printer is available in the lab for printing. This lab was made entirely possible by a very generous donation from Microsoft Corporation.
This in a CS department which lives and breathes Debian and Solaris. Money talks and MS has a lot of it to make people talk.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you but ownership of private property does not automatically exempt the owner from societal and environmental obligations.
I did not get a chance to read the page before it was/.ed, but I do know a lot of beaches in California need to be preserved for wildlife conservation issues.
Also environmentalist are much more self-aware of the image they present to the rest of the world than most people give them credit for. As it is the viewpoint they represent is not often popular not to mention inconvenient for most people. If you made these comments without reading the page first, boy...I don't even know where to begin.
This thing weights in at 6.4lbs a full pound heavier than the TiBook. No mention of what the battery life will be like.
If this is like any of the other Apple based knockoffs its just going to be all show and no go. Granted performance wise it should do rather well compared to the G4800, but how long can it run?
"Computer scientists and mathematicians are familiar with abstractions: for
example, a stack is an abstraction that might be implemented by an array, a
pointer, and some executable code; the stack is an abstraction because it elides
many of the details of actual implementation [16]."
Looking at the spelling one would be forced to think so! 'fess up CowboyNeal!!!!
This paper just seems very timely. As someone who is just about finished undergoing the quintessential undergrad experience in CS I think this paper hits a lot of nail square on their heads. Too many schools are hung up on the formal side of things without ever tying them back to the actual root of everything which is programming and this cannot be denied. And the rest of the schools are too busy teaching just programming to stop and discuss the formality of the process.
Anyone out there find a school which strikes this balance in the undergrad??
I wouldn't at all be surprised if Apple is just letting the news mills churn with the 970 while its quietly prepping the G5s for a surprise unveiling at the Jan '03 MW in SF.
I'm just going to walk through this post point by point because I think you've either completely misunderstood Moz/Phoenix or you just haven't given it a solid try.
I like my browser to mesh with my operating system. Not so far to where the OS doesn't let you uninstall it, but to where it blends in with the look of my OS. I use Windows XP, and Mozilla does not look like XP. Sure the GUI is nice, but it looks odd with my Luna style. In addition, IE meshes with Explorer. So I can easily switch between Explorer and Internet explorer. Try typing "C:\Program Files" in Mozilla/Phoenix. Very different.
Can't speak for Phoenix but in Mozilla if you choose your skin to be Classic all the GUI widgets will be drawn natively in your OS style and colours. Also Typing in 'C:\Program Files' works just fine, not sure what you did to make it not work but it works.
In addition, there are many usability issues. Click on the address bar, while it's highlighted, click, hold and drag towards the left or right. It attempts to drag the entire address, maybe to drag and drop in the bookmarks menu. Now try it in IE, it's different. It will highlight the portion and allow you to edit it etc. That is very annoying in Phoenix/Mozilla.
Don't call something a usability issue when it doesn't work the way you expect it to. As much as its convenient to say that Mozilla is made by a bunch of engineers and geeks so usability is ignored, surprisingly its not. Have a look at this bug to see how much the Mozilla community argued before settling on a solution. Also I tried doing exactly what you said and it works for me. Click once on address bar and full URL is highlighted, click again to edit via keyboard and or highlight.
Another usability problem is the placement of the Address bar. Why is it at the same layer as the toolbar? (Back, Forward buttons). I believe there is a Bug reported in BugZilla about this in Mozilla, but of course... nobody cares about Usability issues.
Once again don't be so quick to judge. Have you even tried to file a bug or put your comments into a bug or reopen a bug? As I said even though the Mozilla community is primarily geeks and engineers its not a community that "doesn't care" about usability. Don't mock it till you've actually tried to make a change happen.
Why can't I have "Selective Text on Right". And that "Toolbar Customizer" with the drag and drop has bad usability problems. It's very confusing to use. And having to "Name" your toolbars?? Err..
I needn't repeat this enough, Phoenix is at iteration 0.3. The developers are very one-to-one with comments and feedback. Did you even attempt to try to talk to them via email or to the Phoenix/Mozilla community newgroups?
Also, the Bookmark Management is very sloppy. They need sidebar management for bookmarks.
Yet again you're just spewing opinion that has no basis in reality. Mozilla has had Sidebar based bookmark management for more builds that I can even remember now. Also don't say something as if its fact. In my opinion IE's bookmark system...well its not really much of a system because it uses the windows file system to just throw a bunch of files and folders in a another folder...is pretty damn sloppy. Furthermore Mozilla's "sloppy" bookmark system has features that let you keyword certain bookmarks so for example i can go to my Address bar and type in 'g something i am searching for' and have that taken straight to Google.
You've based Mozilla wholeheartedly while giving it at best a half assed chance. Also while you were so quick to bash this "non-usability caring" community did you once stop to think that when you have a problem with IE you've got no where to go other than the crash reporting now featured in XP? Atleast with Mozilla you can directly look into the guts of the program and see exactly why things work the way the work.
Don't give up too quickly my friend, Mozilla is a good friend. Like a pet 60' foot monster on your own leash eating HTML faster than any blue 'e' even could!
Believe it or not OCR software is much much smarter than that. I can't speak for accuracy but OCR pakages these days can actually correct for skewed lines. I work in a university lab where we OCR tons of material to prepare for braille etc. and the batch processing sheetfed scanner we have often sucks pages in such that the pages get scanned at all sort of awkward angles. OmniPage pro and a few other competitors can actually corrent for this skewing and fix it, remarkly well too.
The main question to ask with the whole digicam + OCR setup is what DPI photos does your digicam produce? Anything less than 240DPI and you're toast because your OCR program is just going to cry!
Totally have to second this post. Having been a single proc. system for the past 8 years and now finally switching to a dual Athlon 1800+ is just amazing. Its like having a second processor for everything! Oh wait, I do have a second processor for everything.
Big problems though with heat dissipation and power consumption. Performance is great and all but having to have 8 fans in my case is just not fun.
SMT is a great way to get more perf. out of existing technology.
Not sure if this is of interest at all or just an coincidence but there is a new player in the popup war called AntiAdBlocker.
Whats interesting to note that these AntiAdBlocker people are also hosted on the CAIS.net network. This is the same network from where the forged SpamCop emails are originating.
I'm not sure how many of you checked out the ARS forum for the review but I came across this comment by one of the authors(Kurt) of this article. Direct quote, "I don't particularly like banner blocking features, which is why I didn't mention them at all."
I don't think it helps the credibility of a reviewer when he openly admits to "not liking" a feature and thus refusing to mention it at all.
This review was thorougly tainted and seemed more like a, "In Defense of IE", piece rather than an objective unbiased look at Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
I am stupid.
Lets try this again:
Waste Source (zip)
Host
Waste Source (zip) Host
One of the biggest problems with bug management is the ability of the bug viewing audience to find bugs that may match the problem they are having.
I've worked within a major corporation (RAID queries) and also worked closely with Mozilla and in both instances I found it extremely frustrating to find bugs, often when I knew the exact keywords that are associated with a given bug.
If there was a search tool akin to Google for searching accurately through large bug databases where users could easily find bugs then the issue of duplicates would be solved almost entirely.
....this doesn't make much sense. MS makes a lot of money based on the popularity of their MSN portal. this portal links to a lot of their other properties as well and it is against their best interest to make it difficult for users with a different browsers to access this page.
one would think that since they want people coming to this page and accessing it regularly they would make it easier for them to get here.
conspiracy theory aside this doesn't make sense from a business point of view. i have a feeling this is a mistake of some sort.
Damn you and all your talk of yawning. I've alread yawned 3 times now!!! ARGH!
I understand the tragedy, but it cannot be ignored that there was a seventh astronaut onboard Columbia.
Her name is Kalpana Chawla. Times of India has the story here.
Text as follows:
Kalpana Chawla did India proud
PTI[ SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 01, 2003 09:25:13 PM ]
WASHINGTON: Kalpana Chawla, who is feared to have perished in the Columbia space shuttle mishap along with six others, had done India proud when she embarked on her first space mission on November 19, 1997.
The Karnal-born Chawla, the first Indian American astronaut, began her career at the Ames Research Center at Nasa in 1988.
A graduate in aeronautical engineering from the Punjab Engineering College she began work at the Ames in the area of fluid dynamics.
Following her successful tenure at the Ames, Chawla in 1993 joined the Overset Methods Inc in California as vice president and a research scientist in charge of simulating various body functions for future space missions.
Nasa selected Chawla as an astronaut candidate in 1994 and she joined the 15th group of astronauts in March 1995.
After an year of training and evaluation, Chawla was assigned as a crew representative to work on technical issues for Nasa's Astronaut Office Extra Vehicular Activities, Robotics, dealing in space walks.
She was instrumental in the testing space control software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory.
Chawla's received recognition here and was assigned as mission specialist and prime robotic arm operator on the STS-87 and was involved in the manual capture of an orbiting satellite.
Born in Karnal in Punjab, Chawla did her schooling from the Tagore School in the city and took a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Punjab Engineering College.
She went on to complete her Masters from the University of Texas in 1984 earned a doctorate from the University of Colorado.
I'm currently using a great host (Spiderhosts). Its costs $15.29 a year, thats a $1.28 a month. I get:
Telnet/SSH access
WAP support (for mobile devices)
Web based Email access
10 POP mail accounts
Unlimited Email forwarders
Default catch all email account
Cron Jobs
MIME types and Apache handlers configuration
2 types of shopping carts
C, C++, Perl and PHP4 support
Raw access logs
3 statistics software
1,000 MB monthly transfers
and then some.
This is not a dedicated machine, but it sure feels like it. Site has never gone down except for a scheduled server move which I knew about ahead of time. Also their customer support turn around time is always under 24 hours and they also offer electronic ticketing to track help requests online.
No phone support, but for the cost, its well well worth it.
Have a look at bug 181035 on Mozilla's Bugzilla. There is some good discussion on how to handle this. A pop-up window can't merely be hidden from view, because invisible windows are considered a security hazard. Maybe the sandbox idea will take off allowing pop-ups to have temporary play room.
However as of now its an open issue at Mozilla with no clear solution in sight. This is going to be an arms race no doubt.
Its because of reasons like this and this and this that I don't want any sort of profit oriented organization or government collecting information about my lifestyle.
Delays due to politicking are one way to think about this. Realistically there are only two countries right now that can effectively address this problem. Most countries in Western Europe right now don't really have space programs that can fully compare to NASA (as far as payload and launch capacity). God knows what China and Japan are really doing or are capable of doing. India right now can't do much of anything.
This leaves the US and Russia. Russia has heavy launch capacity, but do they have the budget to pull off something? Probably not.
This brings us to the US. The US is a very cause and effect society. America will not plan ahead to fix a problem 50 or even 15 years in the future. Case in point, the interest in Islam and Middle Eastern studies post 9/11.
Unless we've got something hitting us in the next 6 months or at most in a year, this discussion is going to go on ad infinatum.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you but ownership of private property does not automatically exempt the owner from societal and environmental obligations.
/.ed, but I do know a lot of beaches in California need to be preserved for wildlife conservation issues.
I did not get a chance to read the page before it was
Also environmentalist are much more self-aware of the image they present to the rest of the world than most people give them credit for. As it is the viewpoint they represent is not often popular not to mention inconvenient for most people. If you made these comments without reading the page first, boy...I don't even know where to begin.
This thing weights in at 6.4lbs a full pound heavier than the TiBook. No mention of what the battery life will be like.
If this is like any of the other Apple based knockoffs its just going to be all show and no go. Granted performance wise it should do rather well compared to the G4800, but how long can it run?
"Computer scientists and mathematicians are familiar with abstractions: for example, a stack is an abstraction that might be implemented by an array, a pointer, and some executable code; the stack is an abstraction because it elides many of the details of actual implementation [16]."
Looking at the spelling one would be forced to think so! 'fess up CowboyNeal!!!!
This paper just seems very timely. As someone who is just about finished undergoing the quintessential undergrad experience in CS I think this paper hits a lot of nail square on their heads. Too many schools are hung up on the formal side of things without ever tying them back to the actual root of everything which is programming and this cannot be denied. And the rest of the schools are too busy teaching just programming to stop and discuss the formality of the process.
Anyone out there find a school which strikes this balance in the undergrad??
Its unbelievable to think that we haven't seen the G5 yet. I mean where the hell did it go? Wasn't it in volume production? Wasn't it hitting 2.4Ghz back in 2001? Didn't Apple have production silicon that hit 1.6GHz all the while giving tremendous performance?
I wouldn't at all be surprised if Apple is just letting the news mills churn with the 970 while its quietly prepping the G5s for a surprise unveiling at the Jan '03 MW in SF.
I'm just going to walk through this post point by point because I think you've either completely misunderstood Moz/Phoenix or you just haven't given it a solid try.
I like my browser to mesh with my operating system. Not so far to where the OS doesn't let you uninstall it, but to where it blends in with the look of my OS. I use Windows XP, and Mozilla does not look like XP. Sure the GUI is nice, but it looks odd with my Luna style. In addition, IE meshes with Explorer. So I can easily switch between Explorer and Internet explorer. Try typing "C:\Program Files" in Mozilla/Phoenix. Very different.
Can't speak for Phoenix but in Mozilla if you choose your skin to be Classic all the GUI widgets will be drawn natively in your OS style and colours. Also Typing in 'C:\Program Files' works just fine, not sure what you did to make it not work but it works.
In addition, there are many usability issues. Click on the address bar, while it's highlighted, click, hold and drag towards the left or right. It attempts to drag the entire address, maybe to drag and drop in the bookmarks menu. Now try it in IE, it's different. It will highlight the portion and allow you to edit it etc. That is very annoying in Phoenix/Mozilla.
Don't call something a usability issue when it doesn't work the way you expect it to. As much as its convenient to say that Mozilla is made by a bunch of engineers and geeks so usability is ignored, surprisingly its not. Have a look at this bug to see how much the Mozilla community argued before settling on a solution. Also I tried doing exactly what you said and it works for me. Click once on address bar and full URL is highlighted, click again to edit via keyboard and or highlight.
Another usability problem is the placement of the Address bar. Why is it at the same layer as the toolbar? (Back, Forward buttons). I believe there is a Bug reported in BugZilla about this in Mozilla, but of course... nobody cares about Usability issues.
Once again don't be so quick to judge. Have you even tried to file a bug or put your comments into a bug or reopen a bug? As I said even though the Mozilla community is primarily geeks and engineers its not a community that "doesn't care" about usability. Don't mock it till you've actually tried to make a change happen.
Why can't I have "Selective Text on Right". And that "Toolbar Customizer" with the drag and drop has bad usability problems. It's very confusing to use. And having to "Name" your toolbars?? Err..
I needn't repeat this enough, Phoenix is at iteration 0.3. The developers are very one-to-one with comments and feedback. Did you even attempt to try to talk to them via email or to the Phoenix/Mozilla community newgroups?
Also, the Bookmark Management is very sloppy. They need sidebar management for bookmarks.
Yet again you're just spewing opinion that has no basis in reality. Mozilla has had Sidebar based bookmark management for more builds that I can even remember now. Also don't say something as if its fact. In my opinion IE's bookmark system...well its not really much of a system because it uses the windows file system to just throw a bunch of files and folders in a another folder...is pretty damn sloppy. Furthermore Mozilla's "sloppy" bookmark system has features that let you keyword certain bookmarks so for example i can go to my Address bar and type in 'g something i am searching for' and have that taken straight to Google.
You've based Mozilla wholeheartedly while giving it at best a half assed chance. Also while you were so quick to bash this "non-usability caring" community did you once stop to think that when you have a problem with IE you've got no where to go other than the crash reporting now featured in XP? Atleast with Mozilla you can directly look into the guts of the program and see exactly why things work the way the work.
Don't give up too quickly my friend, Mozilla is a good friend. Like a pet 60' foot monster on your own leash eating HTML faster than any blue 'e' even could!
And for the first time in history a table is Slashdotted!
Why do I get this feeling that Microsoft just got a whole lot of free market research done just cruising the Slashot forum for this story at +2?
Believe it or not OCR software is much much smarter than that. I can't speak for accuracy but OCR pakages these days can actually correct for skewed lines. I work in a university lab where we OCR tons of material to prepare for braille etc. and the batch processing sheetfed scanner we have often sucks pages in such that the pages get scanned at all sort of awkward angles. OmniPage pro and a few other competitors can actually corrent for this skewing and fix it, remarkly well too.
The main question to ask with the whole digicam + OCR setup is what DPI photos does your digicam produce? Anything less than 240DPI and you're toast because your OCR program is just going to cry!
Totally have to second this post. Having been a single proc. system for the past 8 years and now finally switching to a dual Athlon 1800+ is just amazing. Its like having a second processor for everything! Oh wait, I do have a second processor for everything.
Big problems though with heat dissipation and power consumption. Performance is great and all but having to have 8 fans in my case is just not fun.
SMT is a great way to get more perf. out of existing technology.
Now to make smarter developers.
Not sure if this is of interest at all or just an coincidence but there is a new player in the popup war called AntiAdBlocker.
Whats interesting to note that these AntiAdBlocker people are also hosted on the CAIS.net network. This is the same network from where the forged SpamCop emails are originating.
I'm not sure how many of you checked out the ARS forum for the review but I came across this comment by one of the authors(Kurt) of this article. Direct quote, "I don't particularly like banner blocking features, which is why I didn't mention them at all."
I don't think it helps the credibility of a reviewer when he openly admits to "not liking" a feature and thus refusing to mention it at all.
This review was thorougly tainted and seemed more like a, "In Defense of IE", piece rather than an objective unbiased look at Mozilla.
Hit their search page,
r eV301.cgi
http://www.securecomputing.com/cgi-bin/filter_whe
and search for sourceforge.net. In the results, you can suggest a recomended they be removed from the list.
Or better yet! SLASHDOT their page, bring them to their knees and let them feel the full effect of a herd of angry nerds!
Is this show going to go Fairbanks and help the super computing geeks find hot dates with hot ski bunny types?!
--
Billy Corgan: Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins.
Homer Simpson: Homer Simpson, smiling politely.