Phoenix when it was originally developed was intended as an alternative not an upgrade to Mozilla, an alternative to an all in one browser / mail suite.
"Focus development efforts on the new standalone applications: the browser currently code-named Firefox, the Mozilla Thunderbird mail/news application, and standalone composer and other apps based on the the new XUL toolkit used by Firefox and Thunderbird. We aim to make Firefox and Thunderbird our premier products, and encourage extension authors and other ISVs to target these applications for their work as well." [my emphasis]
Based on the present trend of things, it will be more than 20 years.
Hopefully it'll be a lot longer than that... most drivers on the road today have enough trouble handling two dimensions. And they'll have even more trouble when they're trying to find a song on their phone with built-in 20TB drive at the same time...
And I still havent found a player with equal or better quality than the iPod.
You did read that earlier/. story about the ipod shuffle simply being based around a standard SigmaTel chip, didn't you?? I.e. the ipod suffle is exactly the same as any generic mp3 flash player out there (well, except that the shuffle doesn't have a screen, an FM tuner and can't play WMA files...)
There isn't a file manager I'm personally satisfied with.
Have you had a look at ROX? It's small, fast, and has some nice shell integration (eg. you can navigate directories/files as you would in bash, with tab completion, etc; you can run shell commands in a minibuffer; a command to open a terminal at the directory you're browsing...) - it even provides a desktop and will automatically mount and unmount devices, if that floats your boat (you don't need to have it enabled)
Personally, I use IceWM for windowmanagement (it's fast, more themeable than *box variants and provides a nice taskbar) coupled with ROX. I noticed the other day that this combo is what VectorLinux provides as an alternative to KDE, so obviously I'm not the only one using the two.
I've run into at least one laptop that runs KNOPPIX fine, but hangs when loading Linux from disk (under Knoppix, Debian, and Redhat FC3). These distributions all install fine, but they invariably hang up halfway through the boot process, on inane things like starting up the print service (and stuff that has nothing to do with hardware).
Well, at least you could then use knoppix to remove the link to the offending bootscript in the start-level of your choice... (you could use the distro's rescue disc to do this as well, of course...) For that matter you could just boot into single user mode and fix it that way...
You should also be able to do this to view the syslogs and work out what the last was that the kernel was trying to do. For that matter, if the magic-SysRq feature is enabled in any of those distros (and I think it is in FC3 at least, god only knows why all distros don't build their kernels with it) you could see if you can do Alt-SysRq-r, Alt-SysRq-e, Alt-SysRq-i - that should kill everything except init, and at least tells you that the kernel hasn't hung. You may be able to work on the system from here, or if you just want to cleanly reboot follow it by Alt-SysRq-s, u, b to reboot)
Really has me frustrated. BTW, the hardware in question is an Alienware Area-51m laptop.
Well, the brand and model name don't exactly inspire confidence;)
Things are so bad, there have been fairly mainstream, plausible attempts to show that Jesus was an entirely mythical character. You just cannot do that with Henry VIII, but the sheer lack of timely corroborating evidence makes it possible with Jesus.
/* Disclaimer: I'm not religious, but I'm not anti-religious either, and I find this whole area fascinating. That said, I've never researched this and don't know much about it;) */
First off, you can't really make a comparison between the primary source material available on Henry VIII vs. that available on Jesus - we're talking different world regions, seriously different time periods, etc, etc. What you'd have to do is see if there was any evidence extant for any other weird Jewish cult leaders running around in the first century AD. Because that's all that Jesus - if he did exist - was to the Romans, who were the guys writing stuff down. The problem with Jesus and Christianity is that it started off in a region of the world that already had way too much religious trouble, as a exclusive off-shoot of Judaism. No-one was going to pay much attention to that at the time, so it's not surprising that no-one recorded anything about just another mad prophet called Jesus.
The first reference to them is in Tacitus' Annals, which demonstrates only that there were Christians living in Rome by about 100AD.
Actually, by 64 AD (i.e. the date of the great fire of Rome). We also can assume that since the Christians were blamed for starting it, they'd been around for a bit getting a name for themselves. It'd be interesting to know more about the spread of other Jewish cults around that time period - it seems quite impressive that within 30-odd years of ol' JC getting himself crossed off there are enough of those weird Christian guys hanging about Rome for people to see them as serious trouble-makers.
And the big problem with Jesus-never-existed arguments, AFAICS, is that the fact remains that Christianity started and it spread. And there must have been some central prophet-figure to start it. So you basically have the "Shakespeare wasn't written by Shakespeare, but by another guy with the same name" problem.
(That is, unless it's all a deliberate hoax dreamed up by a few bored Jerusalemites on a Sunday arvo - in which case, more power to them. That's gotta be the best con ever:)
I estimated that the debugging help they wanted would have taken me perhaps 100 hours to perform because I don't know the tools they were suggesting and they were not offering help.
Yes, I did notice that they did rather expect you to know a whole suite of tools backwards, with no explanation. I don't know about the talkback stuff - I'd guess that probably doesn't take too long if it's possible and you know how to do it. But if that's the case someone should have explained exactly what to do.
I must say that personally I've never noticed firefox to suffer memory leaks (the early releases of thunderbird, otoh, were shockers in this regard). I guess a big problem with this bug is that the scope is so huge. For example, does it happen when you've not opened any plugins/helper applications such as acrobat inside the browser tabs?
The Mozilla team's handling of this bug is an example of a common partial failure in the development of Open Source software. If there is no corporate participation, some bugs just don't get considered, because no one wants to do the work.
I don't know how true that is in general - most OSS developers take pride in their work and memory leaks are pretty serious things. Mind you, from the few Firefox/Mozilla bugs I've followed some of the developers have big issues interacting nicely with their user base - perhaps it just depends on who gets assigned the bug. I did notice some follow up questions in the bug listing about whether it still occurred with various builds, so it may be that someone's still paying attention to it... ?
Note that links directly to Bugzilla from Slashdot are blocked. It is necessary to put the URL into a new tab.
Only if you don't block sending the referrer info. Under about:config, change "network.http.sendRefererHeader" to 0... and you can then click here without any problems:)
However, the bug report was ignored. I got suggestions like "Every app is going to cause a crash if it's opened enough times." My use of browsers was characterized as "ungodly". Someone eventually characterized the bug as "works for me", even though he did not disclose how he tested.
Reading through the bug it seems as though the developers asked (albeit rather rudely) for some detailed debugging help which was never carried out. My reading of it was that if you submitted that info they'd look into fixing it - it's rather difficult to fix any bug if you can't reproduce it and the submitter can't provide anything to document it. If you couldn't be bothered doing that then that's fine, but don't blame the Firefox crew for it.
Anyway, just wanted to point out that Mozilla itself exists for more than just feeding Firefox.
Interestingly, in terms of users it's not feeding firefox. According to the story stats, Mozilla (non-firefox) usage has stayed almost stable during the reported time period (June '04 -> Feb '05) - the growth appears to be due to users switching from IE.
No seriously - I know people are saying computers are over-powerful for todays basic needs but that thing is a dog,........
*grin*... it's not through choice! Just happens to be the PC connected to the microscope at one place where I do research, and if I want to check my mail or read/. it's that or nothing. Don't worry, at home I've got an AthlonXP 2000 with 512Mb RAM; at my normal workplace there's P4s with the same. But any port in a storm...
Re:Too bad it still doesn't fix the RAM problem
on
Firefox 1.0.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Too bad it won't run decently on anything less than a Pentium III with 256MB of RAM.
I run it on a Cyrix-133Mhz with 40Mb of RAM and Win95 - it runs better (less memory usage, faster) than IE5. Still slow to start up, of course, but I'm not expecting much from an old machine like that...
The Gentoo installation should be pretty decent. It's a stage 1 install with the 2.6.9-cko3 kernel, Reiser file system, etc. Yet the Windows GUI has much more "snap" to it. I swear it responds INSTANTLY - I've never seen such responsiveness, and it all appears to be due to the I/O subsystem.
More interesting would be knowing what GUI you're running on your linux installs. As a poster mentioned before, KDE & Gnome are bloated and unbelievably slow compared to most WMs out there. There's plenty of stuff that will respond instantly WM-wise. Also, could you document exactly what features you expect to have "snap"?
However, I've got to admit that firefox seems much slower under linux, and I've always wondered why that is. Perhaps GTK and QT are just inefficient, compared to the win32 toolkit. I'm not sure.
P.S. What is the best current linux distribution for slow computers, with plenty of RAM.
Most distros are OK - the main thing is not installing KDE or Gnome, as another post mentioned, but using either XFCE or a WM/filemanager combination. ROX works very nicely as a filemanager on old PCs (as well as on fast ones, too!); I find IceWM very nice and fast, but there are heaps of other WMs that will fit the bill.
If you do use a major distro, the boot process on an old machine will be pretty glacial unless you customise it (i.e. turn off all of the services that you don't need, which means most of them!), and even then it'll be slow. An alternative would be to use some of the stripped down distros, but then you really need to know what you're doing - CRUX linux is very nice, but it requires the compile of your own kernel during the install process and also requires you to write/edit the boot scripts. But it will boot really fast if you set it up right - I had a 100Mhz Pentium laptop with 16Mb of ram boot to login in 20 secs with CRUX.
I'm currently using FC3 on a 366Mhz PII laptop with 64Mb RAM, running IceWM, ROX and using LyX to write my thesis. It works very nicely... (the boot process takes a while, but luckily for me software suspend (swsusp2) works beautifully and I can hibernate and resume at will in about 12 secs)
The big problem with linux on old PCs for newbies, IME, is that there's no fast replacement for MSWord. LyX isn't really for newbies, and OOo will take about a day to start on an old machine. Don't know whether Abiword's any good these days - might be worth a look. Mind you, if all the machine's being used for is to surf for pr0n, I guess erudite things like word processors aren't going to be a deciding factor;)
(someone correct this if it's wrong - stats were never my strong point, which is why I'm a scientist;)
What may be even worse is that the graphs are comparing deviation against a 95% confidence limit. The problem with saying there's 95% confidence that a deviation will happen significantly, is that this also implies that there's a 5% probability that the events happened by chance alone. i.e. once every twenty observations you would expect the deviation to take a path similar to the 95% confidence line.
Now let's look at the frequency of observations. We're looking at time ranges between 15 seconds (new year's) to 144 hours (papal visit), with most cited in the article being in the minutes range. So let's think about analysing blocks of ten minutes. There's 60*24 = 1440 minutes per day = 144 blocks of 10 minutes, and you would expect 1 in every 20 of these blocks to show a deviation around the 95% confidence line. That means (I think!) that one random number generator, running completely randomly, will give supposedly significant spikes more than 7 times a day. (and that's assuming that you've pre-packaged those blocks for analysis and not cherry picking as the previous post described...)
Now there's more than one random number generator being used here for some of the observations, but where multiple generators are used it seems as though the researchers used a very small time frame (15 seconds for new year's) coupled with a large time frame (10 minutes, where presumably any significant spike within this time was counted as "the" significant spike for each generator). So again we'd expect to see a couple 15 second deviations by chance alone within a 10 minute time frame at the 95% confidence interval for each generator.
This whole exercise strikes me as a good way of demonstrating the ways in which stats can be abused. But then again, I'm not a statistician. So if someone can tell me why this is wrong, please do so...
I agree it's a bad UI design - personally, I've removed the google thing from firefox completely. What I do is have the keyword for a google search set as "g" - that way, to search for something I simply type in
g some-phrase some random words
into the location bar, and up pops the search results. If you don't already have the google quicksearch bookmark, make one with the location:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
- note that you can do this with any search by substituting the search terms with %s, it's all pretty neat.
Of course, in theory it should be possible to change the default action for a non-web address typed into the location bar from "I'm feeling lucky" to a standard search (which would be the more sensible option, IMO), but using the keyword's so easy I've never bothered to find out how.
That "you don't like it, don't use it!" thing tends to be pretty silly as well. First of all, it's stupidly obvious. If someone's complaining, and when the ask-for-help/offer-criticism, the response they get is rude and insulting, they certainly won't be using that software for very long.
But it's not a question of ignoring feedback or criticism per se, there's the matter of the way that feedback is written. If you send in complaints in a rude, blunt and ugly tone, then if you're lucky to get a response back at all that response will be likewise rude and blunt.
You know, most OSS developers give up their free time to work on their projects, which they make freely available to anyone and everyone. They don't make any money, they often don't get any kudos. That's pretty nice of them, when you think about it. Now think about the sort of people who take that for granted and write insulting posts like the AC that started this thread: "What I think should be focused on first is getting the GIMP's UI to standardize on NOT SUCKING. Get back to me when you've gotten somewhere with that"... I think most OSS projects would be quite happy if people like that never used their software.
If you really want to influence an OSS project, then send in constructive criticism that is specific, not insulting and offers useful solutions. If you don't like the interface, don't say "IT SUCKS!", suggest exactly how it could be improved and why that would be helpful. But do also appreciate that the developers don't have unlimited time and they may not wish to implement your ideas...
That's probably why current versions of firefox have a whitelist enabled - by default, any site other than the main mozilla extensions repository simply cannot install an xpi, unless the user adds that site to the whitelist. And even then, they'll still have to go through the usual wait-3-secs prompt business.
Of course, dress the XPI up with a link to free pr0n and there's plenty of lusers that'll add the site to the whitelist and click install. But at least it'll only cause problems for the really greedy/stupid...
I spend all day in front of a monitor because that's what I'm paid to do. I use SuSE 9.2 with KDE because it's easier on the eyes than anything else I've tried. The extra comfort is worth the CPU cycles.
You're saying that KDE eye candy is easier on your eyes? Each to their own, I guess. Hey, people must have found that quintessential 70s brown-and-orange colour scheme easy on their eyes at one time...;)
Personally, I find that nothing beats a good LCD monitor... and for hours and hours of coding I actually find non-aa fonts much easier to read: they're crisper and hence my eyes don't have to keep trying to focus on something that they can't...
Mind you - I still like having applications look reasonably nice, don't think I'd prefer it if everyone started using Athena as a toolkit or something... but only if that application works efficiently. I certainly don't want to have my time wasted by eye-candy bloat, which IMO is exactly what KDE does. (My current choice of a desktop (IceWM plus ROX) was based on the fact that they both performed almost as snappily when using my old P133 notebook... compare that to KDE, which took several minutes just to start and about twenty seconds to open a file manager window!)
I am tired of seeing this rolled out naively again and again. I like smooth fonts, multimedia support, device management, hires icons, a little bit of eye candy etc etc.
But it's still bloat! So, OK, you might like it, but you don't need it to get the job done, do you? You could manage files with a filemanager that doesn't have svg icons, you could code or word process with a application that doesn't have sub-pixel smoothed fonts. Eye candy is eye candy - it appeals to the masses, but if your computer is only a means to an end (and hell, I know mine isn't half the time, but that's beside the point) then all that eye candy doesn't make the end job any better and it certainly doesn't make it get done any faster.
Personally, I can't stand bloated code - just because you've got the cycles, doesn't mean you have to waste them on inefficient crap. And that's probably why I use IceWM (which has more than enough eye candy for me) instead of KDE or GNOME, Nedit instead of emacs or vim, rxvt instead of Eterm, etc, etc. Mind you, I also reckon the article is based on looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses: I remember waiting minutes for a word processor to start up ten-fifteen years ago, and things seem to be a lot more snappy now even with all the modern bloat...
Maybe they've already sold them to everyone who cares.
I'd say this is highly likely - the people who use PDAs long term don't really need the bells and whistles of new units, as the major use of PDAs is to enter, store, organise and retrieve plain text. The other features might be nice, but I don't know anyone who regularly upgrades their PDA because of them.
I am surprised at how many windows users browse the web (among other things) while logged in with administrator privileges.
I'm not. I recently supervised the purchase of a new laptop for my mother, and since it was a fresh machine I set up a separate administrator account, told her never to use it except when installing software and/or windows updates. I installed firefox and t'bird, explained about spyware and that unless software is open-source there's no such thing as a free lunch. And she took it all in and that was fine... except that heaps of software for windows expects to be run as administrator. The amount of problems she's run into simply through running as a non-privileged user is astonishing, and it often seems as though MS is the worst offender of them all.
The moral is: if you want to run without root privileges on Windows, you're going to have to put up with a heap of annoying crap. And that's assuming that the user is informed enough to even realise that there's such a thing as "administrator" and that they're set up by default to run as that - there's nothing under the WinXP setup that I saw that alerts users to the need to run as a non-privileged user.
I've seen it in many webmail systems (it's usually called 'forwarding').
No. "Forwarding" means sending a copy of mail that arrives in your webmail account on to another email account.
What I'm talking about is sending mail directly through PINE/Thunderbird/Sylpheed/OutlookExpress (god help us!)/etc, just as you probably do with the email address your ISP provides you with. If you're still confused, google for "SMTP"...
Not to be trolling, but what are these awesome features, besides the storage space?
Well, if you're not trolling and are genuinely interested... there are two things that greatly impressed me about Gmail: first, the speed of the interface, which is amazing even over dialup; secondly, the ease of use. This is the first email application I've thought to be better than PINE, which I've used for the last ten years, so I'm not in it for the pretty bells and whistles. But this has keyboard shortcuts and the threading feature is the best I've seen...
In any case, what Gmail also provides if you want it (I don't) is not only POP downloading of mail but also SMTP sending of mail - and that IME is much less common in free webmail clients: in fact I've never seen it before. What it means is that you could completely bypass the Gmail web interface if you wanted to.
And... if you use the POP3 and SMTP features you can still have access to all your mail, threaded - including the mail you've sent via SMTP - through the web when you're away from your own PC. That's pretty neat, I think...
Molestar uses a very loose defintion of "lines"... So as far as line count is concerned TinyP2P is around half the size as Molestar.
No. Perhaps you should have had a look at the TinyP2P web site, which defines a line as follows: "Each line has 80 characters or fewer."
If you really want to compare sizes though, compare the number of characters: TinyP2P has 951 non-whitespace characters; Molster has 436. And the author of Molster also makes the point that almost all the P2P work of TinyP2P is done by an external library. Have a look here for more of the author's thoughts on the matter of sizes - they're quite interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Phoenix when it was originally developed was intended as an alternative not an upgrade to Mozilla, an alternative to an all in one browser / mail suite.
...
Yes, but then see the current mozilla roadmap (http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html): I'll quote from the first key point
"Focus development efforts on the new standalone applications: the browser currently code-named Firefox, the Mozilla Thunderbird mail/news application, and standalone composer and other apps based on the the new XUL toolkit used by Firefox and Thunderbird. We aim to make Firefox and Thunderbird our premier products, and encourage extension authors and other ISVs to target these applications for their work as well." [my emphasis]
Based on the present trend of things, it will be more than 20 years.
... most drivers on the road today have enough trouble handling two dimensions. And they'll have even more trouble when they're trying to find a song on their phone with built-in 20TB drive at the same time ...
Hopefully it'll be a lot longer than that
It's just another linux machine with that horrible X thing on it.
... ;-P
That's funny - if he wasn't running linux I would have said it's just another machine with that horrible OS X thing on it
And I still havent found a player with equal or better quality than the iPod.
/. story about the ipod shuffle simply being based around a standard SigmaTel chip, didn't you?? I.e. the ipod suffle is exactly the same as any generic mp3 flash player out there (well, except that the shuffle doesn't have a screen, an FM tuner and can't play WMA files ...)
You did read that earlier
There isn't a file manager I'm personally satisfied with.
...) - it even provides a desktop and will automatically mount and unmount devices, if that floats your boat (you don't need to have it enabled)
Have you had a look at ROX? It's small, fast, and has some nice shell integration (eg. you can navigate directories/files as you would in bash, with tab completion, etc; you can run shell commands in a minibuffer; a command to open a terminal at the directory you're browsing
Personally, I use IceWM for windowmanagement (it's fast, more themeable than *box variants and provides a nice taskbar) coupled with ROX. I noticed the other day that this combo is what VectorLinux provides as an alternative to KDE, so obviously I'm not the only one using the two.
I've run into at least one laptop that runs KNOPPIX fine, but hangs when loading Linux from disk (under Knoppix, Debian, and Redhat FC3). These distributions all install fine, but they invariably hang up halfway through the boot process, on inane things like starting up the print service (and stuff that has nothing to do with hardware).
... (you could use the distro's rescue disc to do this as well, of course ...) For that matter you could just boot into single user mode and fix it that way ...
;)
Well, at least you could then use knoppix to remove the link to the offending bootscript in the start-level of your choice
You should also be able to do this to view the syslogs and work out what the last was that the kernel was trying to do. For that matter, if the magic-SysRq feature is enabled in any of those distros (and I think it is in FC3 at least, god only knows why all distros don't build their kernels with it) you could see if you can do Alt-SysRq-r, Alt-SysRq-e, Alt-SysRq-i - that should kill everything except init, and at least tells you that the kernel hasn't hung. You may be able to work on the system from here, or if you just want to cleanly reboot follow it by Alt-SysRq-s, u, b to reboot)
Really has me frustrated. BTW, the hardware in question is an Alienware Area-51m laptop.
Well, the brand and model name don't exactly inspire confidence
First off, you can't really make a comparison between the primary source material available on Henry VIII vs. that available on Jesus - we're talking different world regions, seriously different time periods, etc, etc. What you'd have to do is see if there was any evidence extant for any other weird Jewish cult leaders running around in the first century AD. Because that's all that Jesus - if he did exist - was to the Romans, who were the guys writing stuff down. The problem with Jesus and Christianity is that it started off in a region of the world that already had way too much religious trouble, as a exclusive off-shoot of Judaism. No-one was going to pay much attention to that at the time, so it's not surprising that no-one recorded anything about just another mad prophet called Jesus.
The first reference to them is in Tacitus' Annals, which demonstrates only that there were Christians living in Rome by about 100AD.
Actually, by 64 AD (i.e. the date of the great fire of Rome). We also can assume that since the Christians were blamed for starting it, they'd been around for a bit getting a name for themselves. It'd be interesting to know more about the spread of other Jewish cults around that time period - it seems quite impressive that within 30-odd years of ol' JC getting himself crossed off there are enough of those weird Christian guys hanging about Rome for people to see them as serious trouble-makers.
And the big problem with Jesus-never-existed arguments, AFAICS, is that the fact remains that Christianity started and it spread. And there must have been some central prophet-figure to start it. So you basically have the "Shakespeare wasn't written by Shakespeare, but by another guy with the same name" problem.
(That is, unless it's all a deliberate hoax dreamed up by a few bored Jerusalemites on a Sunday arvo - in which case, more power to them. That's gotta be the best con ever
I estimated that the debugging help they wanted would have taken me perhaps 100 hours to perform because I don't know the tools they were suggesting and they were not offering help.
... ?
Yes, I did notice that they did rather expect you to know a whole suite of tools backwards, with no explanation. I don't know about the talkback stuff - I'd guess that probably doesn't take too long if it's possible and you know how to do it. But if that's the case someone should have explained exactly what to do.
I must say that personally I've never noticed firefox to suffer memory leaks (the early releases of thunderbird, otoh, were shockers in this regard). I guess a big problem with this bug is that the scope is so huge. For example, does it happen when you've not opened any plugins/helper applications such as acrobat inside the browser tabs?
The Mozilla team's handling of this bug is an example of a common partial failure in the development of Open Source software. If there is no corporate participation, some bugs just don't get considered, because no one wants to do the work.
I don't know how true that is in general - most OSS developers take pride in their work and memory leaks are pretty serious things. Mind you, from the few Firefox/Mozilla bugs I've followed some of the developers have big issues interacting nicely with their user base - perhaps it just depends on who gets assigned the bug. I did notice some follow up questions in the bug listing about whether it still occurred with various builds, so it may be that someone's still paying attention to it
Note that links directly to Bugzilla from Slashdot are blocked. It is necessary to put the URL into a new tab.
... and you can then click here without any problems :)
Only if you don't block sending the referrer info. Under about:config, change "network.http.sendRefererHeader" to 0
However, the bug report was ignored. I got suggestions like "Every app is going to cause a crash if it's opened enough times." My use of browsers was characterized as "ungodly". Someone eventually characterized the bug as "works for me", even though he did not disclose how he tested.
Reading through the bug it seems as though the developers asked (albeit rather rudely) for some detailed debugging help which was never carried out. My reading of it was that if you submitted that info they'd look into fixing it - it's rather difficult to fix any bug if you can't reproduce it and the submitter can't provide anything to document it. If you couldn't be bothered doing that then that's fine, but don't blame the Firefox crew for it.
Anyway, just wanted to point out that Mozilla itself exists for more than just feeding Firefox.
Interestingly, in terms of users it's not feeding firefox. According to the story stats, Mozilla (non-firefox) usage has stayed almost stable during the reported time period (June '04 -> Feb '05) - the growth appears to be due to users switching from IE.
No seriously - I know people are saying computers are over-powerful for todays basic needs but that thing is a dog,........
... it's not through choice! Just happens to be the PC connected to the microscope at one place where I do research, and if I want to check my mail or read /. it's that or nothing. Don't worry, at home I've got an AthlonXP 2000 with 512Mb RAM; at my normal workplace there's P4s with the same. But any port in a storm ...
*grin*
Too bad it won't run decently on anything less than a Pentium III with 256MB of RAM.
...
I run it on a Cyrix-133Mhz with 40Mb of RAM and Win95 - it runs better (less memory usage, faster) than IE5. Still slow to start up, of course, but I'm not expecting much from an old machine like that
The Gentoo installation should be pretty decent. It's a stage 1 install with the 2.6.9-cko3 kernel, Reiser file system, etc. Yet the Windows GUI has much more "snap" to it. I swear it responds INSTANTLY - I've never seen such responsiveness, and it all appears to be due to the I/O subsystem.
More interesting would be knowing what GUI you're running on your linux installs. As a poster mentioned before, KDE & Gnome are bloated and unbelievably slow compared to most WMs out there. There's plenty of stuff that will respond instantly WM-wise. Also, could you document exactly what features you expect to have "snap"?
However, I've got to admit that firefox seems much slower under linux, and I've always wondered why that is. Perhaps GTK and QT are just inefficient, compared to the win32 toolkit. I'm not sure.
P.S. What is the best current linux distribution for slow computers, with plenty of RAM.
... (the boot process takes a while, but luckily for me software suspend (swsusp2) works beautifully and I can hibernate and resume at will in about 12 secs)
;)
Most distros are OK - the main thing is not installing KDE or Gnome, as another post mentioned, but using either XFCE or a WM/filemanager combination. ROX works very nicely as a filemanager on old PCs (as well as on fast ones, too!); I find IceWM very nice and fast, but there are heaps of other WMs that will fit the bill.
If you do use a major distro, the boot process on an old machine will be pretty glacial unless you customise it (i.e. turn off all of the services that you don't need, which means most of them!), and even then it'll be slow. An alternative would be to use some of the stripped down distros, but then you really need to know what you're doing - CRUX linux is very nice, but it requires the compile of your own kernel during the install process and also requires you to write/edit the boot scripts. But it will boot really fast if you set it up right - I had a 100Mhz Pentium laptop with 16Mb of ram boot to login in 20 secs with CRUX.
I'm currently using FC3 on a 366Mhz PII laptop with 64Mb RAM, running IceWM, ROX and using LyX to write my thesis. It works very nicely
The big problem with linux on old PCs for newbies, IME, is that there's no fast replacement for MSWord. LyX isn't really for newbies, and OOo will take about a day to start on an old machine. Don't know whether Abiword's any good these days - might be worth a look. Mind you, if all the machine's being used for is to surf for pr0n, I guess erudite things like word processors aren't going to be a deciding factor
(someone correct this if it's wrong - stats were never my strong point, which is why I'm a scientist ;)
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What may be even worse is that the graphs are comparing deviation against a 95% confidence limit. The problem with saying there's 95% confidence that a deviation will happen significantly, is that this also implies that there's a 5% probability that the events happened by chance alone. i.e. once every twenty observations you would expect the deviation to take a path similar to the 95% confidence line.
Now let's look at the frequency of observations. We're looking at time ranges between 15 seconds (new year's) to 144 hours (papal visit), with most cited in the article being in the minutes range. So let's think about analysing blocks of ten minutes. There's 60*24 = 1440 minutes per day = 144 blocks of 10 minutes, and you would expect 1 in every 20 of these blocks to show a deviation around the 95% confidence line. That means (I think!) that one random number generator, running completely randomly, will give supposedly significant spikes more than 7 times a day. (and that's assuming that you've pre-packaged those blocks for analysis and not cherry picking as the previous post described
Now there's more than one random number generator being used here for some of the observations, but where multiple generators are used it seems as though the researchers used a very small time frame (15 seconds for new year's) coupled with a large time frame (10 minutes, where presumably any significant spike within this time was counted as "the" significant spike for each generator). So again we'd expect to see a couple 15 second deviations by chance alone within a 10 minute time frame at the 95% confidence interval for each generator.
This whole exercise strikes me as a good way of demonstrating the ways in which stats can be abused. But then again, I'm not a statistician. So if someone can tell me why this is wrong, please do so
I agree it's a bad UI design - personally, I've removed the google thing from firefox completely. What I do is have the keyword for a google search set as "g" - that way, to search for something I simply type in
g some-phrase some random words
into the location bar, and up pops the search results. If you don't already have the google quicksearch bookmark, make one with the location:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
- note that you can do this with any search by substituting the search terms with %s, it's all pretty neat.
Of course, in theory it should be possible to change the default action for a non-web address typed into the location bar from "I'm feeling lucky" to a standard search (which would be the more sensible option, IMO), but using the keyword's so easy I've never bothered to find out how.
That "you don't like it, don't use it!" thing tends to be pretty silly as well. First of all, it's stupidly obvious. If someone's complaining, and when the ask-for-help/offer-criticism, the response they get is rude and insulting, they certainly won't be using that software for very long.
... I think most OSS projects would be quite happy if people like that never used their software.
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But it's not a question of ignoring feedback or criticism per se, there's the matter of the way that feedback is written. If you send in complaints in a rude, blunt and ugly tone, then if you're lucky to get a response back at all that response will be likewise rude and blunt.
You know, most OSS developers give up their free time to work on their projects, which they make freely available to anyone and everyone. They don't make any money, they often don't get any kudos. That's pretty nice of them, when you think about it. Now think about the sort of people who take that for granted and write insulting posts like the AC that started this thread: "What I think should be focused on first is getting the GIMP's UI to standardize on NOT SUCKING. Get back to me when you've gotten somewhere with that"
If you really want to influence an OSS project, then send in constructive criticism that is specific, not insulting and offers useful solutions. If you don't like the interface, don't say "IT SUCKS!", suggest exactly how it could be improved and why that would be helpful. But do also appreciate that the developers don't have unlimited time and they may not wish to implement your ideas
Spyware already exists for firefox in XPI form.
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That's probably why current versions of firefox have a whitelist enabled - by default, any site other than the main mozilla extensions repository simply cannot install an xpi, unless the user adds that site to the whitelist. And even then, they'll still have to go through the usual wait-3-secs prompt business.
Of course, dress the XPI up with a link to free pr0n and there's plenty of lusers that'll add the site to the whitelist and click install. But at least it'll only cause problems for the really greedy/stupid
I spend all day in front of a monitor because that's what I'm paid to do. I use SuSE 9.2 with KDE because it's easier on the eyes than anything else I've tried. The extra comfort is worth the CPU cycles.
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... and for hours and hours of coding I actually find non-aa fonts much easier to read: they're crisper and hence my eyes don't have to keep trying to focus on something that they can't ...
... but only if that application works efficiently. I certainly don't want to have my time wasted by eye-candy bloat, which IMO is exactly what KDE does. (My current choice of a desktop (IceWM plus ROX) was based on the fact that they both performed almost as snappily when using my old P133 notebook ... compare that to KDE, which took several minutes just to start and about twenty seconds to open a file manager window!)
You're saying that KDE eye candy is easier on your eyes? Each to their own, I guess. Hey, people must have found that quintessential 70s brown-and-orange colour scheme easy on their eyes at one time
Personally, I find that nothing beats a good LCD monitor
Mind you - I still like having applications look reasonably nice, don't think I'd prefer it if everyone started using Athena as a toolkit or something
I am tired of seeing this rolled out naively again and again. I like smooth fonts, multimedia support, device management, hires icons, a little bit of eye candy etc etc.
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But it's still bloat! So, OK, you might like it, but you don't need it to get the job done, do you? You could manage files with a filemanager that doesn't have svg icons, you could code or word process with a application that doesn't have sub-pixel smoothed fonts. Eye candy is eye candy - it appeals to the masses, but if your computer is only a means to an end (and hell, I know mine isn't half the time, but that's beside the point) then all that eye candy doesn't make the end job any better and it certainly doesn't make it get done any faster.
Personally, I can't stand bloated code - just because you've got the cycles, doesn't mean you have to waste them on inefficient crap. And that's probably why I use IceWM (which has more than enough eye candy for me) instead of KDE or GNOME, Nedit instead of emacs or vim, rxvt instead of Eterm, etc, etc. Mind you, I also reckon the article is based on looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses: I remember waiting minutes for a word processor to start up ten-fifteen years ago, and things seem to be a lot more snappy now even with all the modern bloat
Maybe they've already sold them to everyone who cares.
I'd say this is highly likely - the people who use PDAs long term don't really need the bells and whistles of new units, as the major use of PDAs is to enter, store, organise and retrieve plain text. The other features might be nice, but I don't know anyone who regularly upgrades their PDA because of them.
I am surprised at how many windows users browse the web (among other things) while logged in with administrator privileges.
... except that heaps of software for windows expects to be run as administrator. The amount of problems she's run into simply through running as a non-privileged user is astonishing, and it often seems as though MS is the worst offender of them all.
I'm not. I recently supervised the purchase of a new laptop for my mother, and since it was a fresh machine I set up a separate administrator account, told her never to use it except when installing software and/or windows updates. I installed firefox and t'bird, explained about spyware and that unless software is open-source there's no such thing as a free lunch. And she took it all in and that was fine
The moral is: if you want to run without root privileges on Windows, you're going to have to put up with a heap of annoying crap. And that's assuming that the user is informed enough to even realise that there's such a thing as "administrator" and that they're set up by default to run as that - there's nothing under the WinXP setup that I saw that alerts users to the need to run as a non-privileged user.
I've seen it in many webmail systems (it's usually called 'forwarding').
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No. "Forwarding" means sending a copy of mail that arrives in your webmail account on to another email account.
What I'm talking about is sending mail directly through PINE/Thunderbird/Sylpheed/OutlookExpress (god help us!)/etc, just as you probably do with the email address your ISP provides you with. If you're still confused, google for "SMTP"
Not to be trolling, but what are these awesome features, besides the storage space?
... there are two things that greatly impressed me about Gmail: first, the speed of the interface, which is amazing even over dialup; secondly, the ease of use. This is the first email application I've thought to be better than PINE, which I've used for the last ten years, so I'm not in it for the pretty bells and whistles. But this has keyboard shortcuts and the threading feature is the best I've seen ...
... if you use the POP3 and SMTP features you can still have access to all your mail, threaded - including the mail you've sent via SMTP - through the web when you're away from your own PC. That's pretty neat, I think ...
Well, if you're not trolling and are genuinely interested
In any case, what Gmail also provides if you want it (I don't) is not only POP downloading of mail but also SMTP sending of mail - and that IME is much less common in free webmail clients: in fact I've never seen it before. What it means is that you could completely bypass the Gmail web interface if you wanted to.
And
Molestar uses a very loose defintion of "lines" ... So as far as line count is concerned TinyP2P is around half the size as Molestar.
No. Perhaps you should have had a look at the TinyP2P web site, which defines a line as follows: "Each line has 80 characters or fewer."
If you really want to compare sizes though, compare the number of characters: TinyP2P has 951 non-whitespace characters; Molster has 436. And the author of Molster also makes the point that almost all the P2P work of TinyP2P is done by an external library. Have a look here for more of the author's thoughts on the matter of sizes - they're quite interesting.