I've never explored the memory usage issues in Firefox very deeply myself, because as you say it's less than exciting. But the impression I've got from following the project over the last few years is that the memory problems are very hard to find and to fix.
There are lots of bugs that cause memory leaks, a huge number of which have been fixed already. There are also extensions that cause leaks, and combinations of extensions that cause leaks, and so on. If a developer can't reliably reproduce the problem you're seeing then it will be very difficult to fix. But they do seem to be putting a lot of effort into memory problems, from my perspective.
I usually end up killing Firefox no more often than once a week, and that's almost always because of a plug-in problem (Flash, Windows Media Player or Quicktime). This is with 2.0alpha3 on OS X.
The "10% of the brain" idea is popular but utterly wrong. It has a basis in fact, but it horribly misrepresents the truth. Consider the analogy: how much of your muscle do you use at any one time? Do you think that even at your most active you're using every muscle in your body to the greatest possible extent? The same goes for your brain. It's easy to tell from various types of brain scans that the more of your brain at use at any time the more confused and unfocussed you are. This is intuitive.
If you'd rather post your question as a comment and wait for a reponse rather than, say, reading the story summary, then that's up to you. I generally recommend against it.
That's not a literal URL. It means that once you set up your google homepage the URL for it will be of that form, but with the text "gmailuser" replaced by your actual Google username (the bit that comes before @gmail.com in your gmail address). You'll get a 404 if the page hasn't been created yet.
I see how you read my post, but that's not how I intended it. When I wrote "all sources", I meant "all sources used in compiling the article", not "all sources available".
The encyclopaedic approach is (or should be) to cite all the sources of information for every article. We may not be able to say that "the population of X is N" with any certainty, but we can be quite sure of ourselves in reporting that "According to the CIA world factbook, the population of X was N in 2003"
Currently I am using IE (and its derivatives) and considering switching to either Seamonkey or Firefox/Thunderbird.
I have heard opinions (mostly here) that Seamonkey is preferred to the FF/TB combination but my concern is that the interesting plugins/extensions will not work with it.
A minority of people prefer Seamonkey to Firefox and Thunderbird. I'm not sure what their reasons are. Maybe it's because Seamonkey has some features built in for which Firefox requires extensions. I suspect most Seamonkey users were using Mozilla before Firefox came along and they're happy enough not to switch. Most new Mozilla users will use Firefox.
Most Firefox extensions won't work in Seamonkey. I'd say 90% or more, though that's just a guess. If you plan to use extensions Firefox is the browser for you.
Does it support plugins and, if it does, can it use the FireFox/ThunderBird ones?
Plugins are not the same as extensions. But yes, Seamonkey supports both plugins and extensions. The extension system for Seamonkey is nowhere near as polished as Firefox's, but it's similar. You can't just drop any old Firefox extension into Seamonkey and have it work, but it is possible to make an extension that works for both.
Oh, and just to pick a nit: there's no CamelCase in the names of Firefox and Thunderbird.
No it's not. The contest main page says that they have verified that it's legal to enter in the US, Canada (sans Quebec) and the EU. It doesn't say that other areas are excluded. The official rules don't mention any specific jurisdiction.
If you want to use another browser, go ahead. No-one's trying to stop you. If you want a bug in Firefox fixed, make sure the developers are aware of it. If you want to sound like a whiny child, complain about things in a forum where you have no hope of making things better for anyone.
* 666999 - Still deletes your old bookmarks on updates.
Making up bug numbers is hardly helpful. Nor is making up bugs. If you do encounter a bug that resets your bookmarks on update then I suggest you make sure the developers know about it. That means try to find the bug in Bugzilla and, if you can't find it, file it.
I'll leave it to others to comment on the actual content of your comment. Seeing as this is Slashdot, I figure at least half of the replies (this among them) should just point out that the word 'lose' only has one 'o'.
That sketch actually predates Monty Python, though John Cleese and Graham Chapman were in it. It started life on At Last the 1948 Show. The Pythons did perform it a few times, and it was on one of their albums.
Google uses C for just about everything and Amazon uses C++ for lots of things (along with Perl and Java). If you're building something that big you may not want to do it in a language like PHP. Having said that, Yahoo! largely uses PHP so it obviously can scale.
While that may be true, I don't think it's a good path to go down. And others have like former education secretary Bill Bennett: "you could... abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." The next step is to say kill all the poor people to reduce poverty or all the dumb people to raise test scores. It may work, but it's not the right thing to do.
You're right. If you agree with legalisation of abortion then you don't need any crime statistics to sway you. If you disagree with abortion on ethical grounds you will certainly not be persuaded to change your mind by crime figures.
Steven Levitt's work on the abortion-crime link was not done to convince people of the value of abortion. Instead it appears to have been presented to persuade us that perhaps the other factors that are often given credit for reducing crime--things like zero tolerance and more cops--were not as effective as we thought.
Try sending an email to [yourname]@googlemail.com. You'll receive it in your Gmail inbox. They haven't reserved the name for you; they've already given it to you.
After all of the contributions Anonymous Coward has made to Slashdot in the last decade, how can you cruel-hearted moderators mod the parent post down? "Off-topic"? It's funny! Don't worry AC, I still love you.
While I steered clear of the God thing in my initial post, the relevance to religion did occur to me. Skepticism appears to be suffering throughout the world right now, particularly in the US. Given the emotional attachment many people have to their religious beliefs I often find it's easier to get them to realise the importance of skepticism in areas less important to them (like alternative therapies or horoscopes).
There's a wealth of skeptical thought to be found at the skeptics' circle though it can usually considered--if you'll excuse the ironic pun--to be preaching to the choir.
A lot of things are "widely known". That doesn't make them all true, it just means that very often people believe what they want to be true rather than what can be shown to be true. Any useful citations about Gates using a Mac? Or are you just blindly regurgitating what you heard and wanted to believe?
How is it hard to admit? The prevailing wisdom (which isn't correct in general, but is in this case) is that most open-source software has usability problems. It's not a new idea; what's news here is that Novell is taking steps to improve it.
On behalf of those of us who learned our general relativity from a physics professor rather than a pastor: you're talking out of your or someone else's ass. None of what you just said has anything to do with relativity.
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So obviously that conversation *isn't* the source of these quotes because it wasn't recorded.
Don't they email the questions and answers?
I've never explored the memory usage issues in Firefox very deeply myself, because as you say it's less than exciting. But the impression I've got from following the project over the last few years is that the memory problems are very hard to find and to fix.
There are lots of bugs that cause memory leaks, a huge number of which have been fixed already. There are also extensions that cause leaks, and combinations of extensions that cause leaks, and so on. If a developer can't reliably reproduce the problem you're seeing then it will be very difficult to fix. But they do seem to be putting a lot of effort into memory problems, from my perspective.
I usually end up killing Firefox no more often than once a week, and that's almost always because of a plug-in problem (Flash, Windows Media Player or Quicktime). This is with 2.0alpha3 on OS X.
The "10% of the brain" idea is popular but utterly wrong. It has a basis in fact, but it horribly misrepresents the truth. Consider the analogy: how much of your muscle do you use at any one time? Do you think that even at your most active you're using every muscle in your body to the greatest possible extent? The same goes for your brain. It's easy to tell from various types of brain scans that the more of your brain at use at any time the more confused and unfocussed you are. This is intuitive.
We use all of our brains, just not all at once.
If you'd rather post your question as a comment and wait for a reponse rather than, say, reading the story summary, then that's up to you. I generally recommend against it.
Set up your pages at http://pages.google.com/. You need a Google account to sign in.
That's not a literal URL. It means that once you set up your google homepage the URL for it will be of that form, but with the text "gmailuser" replaced by your actual Google username (the bit that comes before @gmail.com in your gmail address). You'll get a 404 if the page hasn't been created yet.
I see how you read my post, but that's not how I intended it. When I wrote "all sources", I meant "all sources used in compiling the article", not "all sources available".
The encyclopaedic approach is (or should be) to cite all the sources of information for every article. We may not be able to say that "the population of X is N" with any certainty, but we can be quite sure of ourselves in reporting that "According to the CIA world factbook, the population of X was N in 2003"
Most Firefox extensions won't work in Seamonkey. I'd say 90% or more, though that's just a guess. If you plan to use extensions Firefox is the browser for you.
Oh, and just to pick a nit: there's no CamelCase in the names of Firefox and Thunderbird.
If you want to use another browser, go ahead. No-one's trying to stop you. If you want a bug in Firefox fixed, make sure the developers are aware of it. If you want to sound like a whiny child, complain about things in a forum where you have no hope of making things better for anyone.
I'll leave it to others to comment on the actual content of your comment. Seeing as this is Slashdot, I figure at least half of the replies (this among them) should just point out that the word 'lose' only has one 'o'.
That sketch actually predates Monty Python, though John Cleese and Graham Chapman were in it. It started life on At Last the 1948 Show. The Pythons did perform it a few times, and it was on one of their albums.
Keep in mind that the records only go back to the early 1900s when the hall of records was mysteriously blown away.
You're right. If you agree with legalisation of abortion then you don't need any crime statistics to sway you. If you disagree with abortion on ethical grounds you will certainly not be persuaded to change your mind by crime figures.
Steven Levitt's work on the abortion-crime link was not done to convince people of the value of abortion. Instead it appears to have been presented to persuade us that perhaps the other factors that are often given credit for reducing crime--things like zero tolerance and more cops--were not as effective as we thought.
Try sending an email to [yourname]@googlemail.com. You'll receive it in your Gmail inbox. They haven't reserved the name for you; they've already given it to you.
After all of the contributions Anonymous Coward has made to Slashdot in the last decade, how can you cruel-hearted moderators mod the parent post down? "Off-topic"? It's funny! Don't worry AC, I still love you.
While I steered clear of the God thing in my initial post, the relevance to religion did occur to me. Skepticism appears to be suffering throughout the world right now, particularly in the US. Given the emotional attachment many people have to their religious beliefs I often find it's easier to get them to realise the importance of skepticism in areas less important to them (like alternative therapies or horoscopes).
There's a wealth of skeptical thought to be found at the skeptics' circle though it can usually considered--if you'll excuse the ironic pun--to be preaching to the choir.
A lot of things are "widely known". That doesn't make them all true, it just means that very often people believe what they want to be true rather than what can be shown to be true. Any useful citations about Gates using a Mac? Or are you just blindly regurgitating what you heard and wanted to believe?
How is it hard to admit? The prevailing wisdom (which isn't correct in general, but is in this case) is that most open-source software has usability problems. It's not a new idea; what's news here is that Novell is taking steps to improve it.
On behalf of those of us who learned our general relativity from a physics professor rather than a pastor: you're talking out of your or someone else's ass. None of what you just said has anything to do with relativity.