>It's not exactly sockets, but you can do an awful lot with the XmlHttpRequest object.
Worth noting that Gmail (at least on IE) uses this a *lot*. And that's how it largely achieves it's speed and usability (I use Outlook at work and can attest that Gmail's implementation of autocomplete is actually *better* than Outlook's.)
Well, that's a great observation, but the fact remains, Mozilla's audience has been steadily growing, especially on the Win32 platform. What does that tell you?
That when your market share approaches zero, the only way to go is up.
Most people don't know this or forget and wind up doing an apples to oranges comparison.
Last I heard, Seamonkey and iexplore were both browsers. That makes it an entirely valid apples-to-apples comparison.
Btw, I don't assume ESR and jwz don't speak for everyone. But it's easier to point to their rants than raise my blood pressure ranting here, so I'll just point.
Ooh. Worlds apart. How bloody patronizing.
Patronizing? How so? I'm honestly not sure what you mean. One aspect is of great technical importance while the other is not. If fact is patronizing, then I guess I am.
Crossplatform usually means more code, which is working against cache/disk and memory. That translates into slower everything, all things being equal.
So you're saying because OO.o's and Seamonkey's developers chose to show off their 733T xplatform skills, I as a poor unwashed user shouldn't mind the speed dip and forgive them the sloth? And people wonder where the FLOSS dev crowd gets the "arrogant" label! Sorry - I won't put up with the sloth quietly, I'll bitch and moan about it every chance I get, and *not use* the damn app every chance I get, too.
Thusly, [for xplatform] be done right, everything else being equal, requires better engineering.
Your line of argument pre-supposes one thing: that xplatform is actually required by the users, that users SEE xplatform as a benefit to them. Good engineering starts with evaluating features/benefits/time/cost. Blind mantras of "xplatform everywhere", IMO, are extremely harmful.
There's a good lesson to learn from the Netscape/Mozilla story: Not even 1% of Netscape users (and there were millions) ever asked for the monstrosity called XUL. They only wanted a capable layout engine and a browser that was faster than the current marketplace speed champ: IE4.
Gecko was a great step forward: small, light, fast (and bonus - crossplatform too!) Then, just as Netscape users salivated over the prospect of a *finally* getting a fast, light browser, the Mozilla Project got xplatform GUI religion and proceeded to make XUL. Netscape users were like, "Uh, guys, when will it be ready?" and got a "We can't tell you, but it will be a wondrous thing when it's finally ready". "Can't wait that long, 'mfraid -- we're switching to IE, it's on the desktop anyway", they said, and thus we got 85% market share for IE.
If there was ever a tale of arrogant engineers and poor engineering decisions sinking a ship, this is it.
Because only recently have any non-MS developers been able to even think about doing something like this
this == write good software for Windows? Hmm, tell that to Symantec, Adobe, Macromedia and Borland. Tell that to Lotus, inspite of all the compat problems Notes had.
Worse, those that did, were shot in the foot by Microsoft purposely breaking their applications. That's why. The parallel doesn't exist on other platforms.
Yuck. Slashdot FUD and groupthink and its worst. Breaking their apps indeed - Pagemaker's been running fine on Windows since version 3. What's more, my old Pagemaker for Win3.1 runs on Windows XP. Lotus123 for DOS runs on the Longhorn betas. I know schools which run scoring systems off old dBase apps on Windows 2000. MS has a _better_ track record on back compat than most other commercial vendors - especially Apple.
You're talking about user interface. I'm talking about technical details. Those are worlds apart. That's the difference between user perception and reality.
Ooh. Worlds apart. How bloody patronizing. Go read ESR's CUPS rant (or jwz's older rants) to find out why UI matters. In fact, as MS and Apple continue to demonstrate, it is ALL that matters.
One day arrogant, clueless developers like you will understand that when it comes to desktop software at least, perception IS reality. Until then, the entire OSS GUI experience will continue to be an unmitigated horror.
Shesh. What a jerk. Fact is, most applications don't use such methods because they simply don't matter.
They don't matter if users don't crib. I've never cribbed about Wordpad's load times. But if you have a huge-ass app (Evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Office 95) and you ignore user complaints by telling them glib stuff like "startup times don't matter", then you shouldn't wonder too much when people start flocking to the competition.
Furthermore, you assert that, "they are better engineered that the competition", which is completely false. It requires a superior engineered product to be crossplatform.
"xplatform" and "better engineered" are orthogonal attributes. Platform depenent IE4 was better engineered _and_ better architected than the cross-platform Netscape (upto 4).
Also, since you hoisted xplatform as a feature/benefit of open source, I'd like to raise a few points: xplatform is not a "benefit" for most users (i.e., the ones without holy wars to wage). Most users don't *care* that Mozilla runs on 17 platforms and somebody's toaster: they do care that it runs badly on their platform: Win32 or Linux or whatever.
Long story short, MS has many built in baises for starting up their applications which most applications are not able to benefit from.
Biases? MS' only bias is that its apps work well on Windows. If Mac users can boo and hiss when someone gives them a non-Carbonized app, why can't Windows users crib when you hand them an app that's obviously not optimized for Windows? Windows users expect their apps to behave in a certain way. Get over it and code like the Winamp guys do - they're proof you don't need to be from MS to write good Windows apps.
That said, let me clarify that when I meant "engineered" I did not mean better _architected_ - because each MS product varies in architectural elegance (IIS 5, Sourcesafe - yech, Excel - pretty good, NT kernel - damn good). I meant engineered in the "crafted" sense: MS products are crafted to appear more appealing to the typical user. If you now wish to tell me that Mozilla Seamonkey and OpenOffice are generally more appealing than the MS equivalents, then sorry - I say bullshit.
After that's all said and done, its the application performance, and not startup time... After all, these days, you should only need to start your applications once for the duration you're running your computer.
Since not all my machines have 1G+ RAM, I do close OpenOffice Writer (on Linux) and Word (on Windows) from when I'm done with the document I'm using. I close Moz windows when I run the Gimp. Maybe it's just me and the way I work, but I do NOT start apps only once for the duration I'm running my computer. Now can you understand why apps like Seamonkey and OpenOffice, which have _both_ lousy startup time and lousy perf, bother me so much?
-1, Misinformation. Office and IE don't keep "portions" resident in memory in either the DOS TSR sense *or* in the Mozilla Quickstart (or whatever it's called now) sense.
The case of mshtml.dll, shdocvw.dll, urlmon.dll are a little different. These are *system DLLs* which can be used by any app, including IE (iexplore.exe) -- and the shell (explorer.exe). Explorer in particular will load urlmon if you visit FTP or WebDAV sites.
IIRC after login on a fresh Windows 2000 install, none of mshtml, shdocvw or urlmon are loaded.
Note that Working Set Detection/Maintenance on Windows can change this over time, but it will do so even for Firefox or any other non-MS app.
Btw, the real reason IE and Office start up quickly is because they are better engineered that the competition -- which is typically cross-platform portable code that is not particularly optimized for Windows. Reducing startup time is not necessarily a black art:
[...] Startup time is all about minimizing disk I/O. So analyze your startup code to death: Track every page fault and work to get rid of it. Delay initialization of everything that can be delayed. (The fastest code is code that doesn't run at all.) Take all the functions that are called at startup and put them near each other in memory so you take fewer page faults. Use the/ORDER switch to do this. If you have a large function and only half of it is used at startup, break it into two functions, the part used at startup and the part that isn't. Reorder your data so all the memory used by startup is kept near each other in memory. With CPUs as fast as they are, disk I/O is the limiting factor in app startup. [
link]
The true measure is how fast the app runs, not how fast it opens.
Not sure what your point is, but Open Office and Mozilla both run slower (_and_ open slower) than Office and IE on comparable hardware. Thankfully, Firefox opens slower than IE, but is almost as fast in use for most common tasks, which lets me use it for day-to-day browsing.
Question to the engineers on/.: A lot of places around the world (in 3rd world countries) can't afford airconditioning largely because of the prohibitive electricity cost: the electricity bill for even a small AC would be backbreaking for many third-worlders. Could thermoacoustic cooling be used to develop airconditioners? Even if they were small, they could be useful (if they were energy efficient) for small rooms, or even for airconditioned tents etc.
Great post, although I believe you missed one of the key reasons why many 'foreign' students tend to be better at routine work than original thought -- Indian and Chinese culture both emphasise obedience, subservience to authority and generally not rocking the boat.
A good program doesn't just happen by a bunch of code monkeys sitting down and bashing away, it happens by talented problem solvers designing a workable system, and doleing out the basic tasks to the code monkeys.
The problem is, the vast proportion of business IT and customer/employee-facing needs can be taken care of by code monkeys. This includes IT, HR paperwork, call center management -- all the things that are the outsourcing rage now.
You missed out: great work ethics. The city hasn't lost a day of business in the last four years (Bangalore and Hyderabad have both lost 1 in the same period, other Indian cities lose lots regularly to strikes/violence/riots). Given India's reputation in this area I find this amazing.
Also, it's been a while, but IIRC Madras has one of India's lowest crime rates?
I know this is a joke, but in a way the UK (any.gov, really) bills open source already. Folk who install/deploy/sell Linux solutions pay Value Added Tax on the services they render. The only reason open source volunteers are -- and will remain -- exempt is that they don't enter into transactions with the organizations they're volunteering code to. You can't tax volunteer activity.
> they seem to have removed the ability to turn them off now.
Windows: "Start | Setttings | Taskbar and start menu" has a checkbox (different locations I think for 2000 and XP/2003) to disable personalized menus. If you use XP's Luna theme (why?), the "All Programs" flyout is un-personalized.
Office (2000, XP, 2003): right click on the main toolbar, Customize, Options tab, uncheck "Menus show most recently used commands first".
You've really just proved my point that Windows provides no package management
You are right, Windows doesn't provide any _bundled product_ to manage apps. But it does provide a mechanism through several Win2000-era APIs, and both SMS server and Castanet take advantage of it. (Funny how they never thought it fit to bundle SMS Server with Windows:-))
I've personally watched being installed continue to use a mishmash of Installshield, Winzip, or homegrown routines
The recommended technology for the last 3 years has been MSI. One can use Installshield and many other tools to create MSI-based installations (these, thankfully, follow modern UI guidelines and don't have the moronic teal/blue-gradient full screen look-n-feel) or use a hand-written MSI script.
I do wish MSIs used Mac-style bundles, but I guess back compat would be the issue there. Then again, as a programmer, I don't mind installers because of the greater flexibility they provide. And since my mom can figure out how to install MSN Messenger, I don't think dumbing it down any further will really help.
Again, I'm completely at a loss to find any package management features in Windows.
Have you checked out MS' own SMS Server and Marimba's Castanet (which is written using Java btw); both of these use Windows 2000's application publishing mechanisms to deploy apps just-in-time or all-at-once from a centralized console. Of course, it will not necessarily support all apps; but apps which have standards-based installers will work fine -- this is the vast majority of business software used.
On another unrelated note, folk who crib about Windows after using Win9x _and never trying Win2000 and later_ get zero sympathy from me. Win2000 and XP are (along with OSX) excellent, productive workstations for a large variety of users, compared with the Frankenstein-stitched-together feel one gets with several Linux distros.
I'd take what National Geographic says with a pinch of salt. They're a good mag, but the "poverty porn" sells copies, and I've noted that India is usually painted far worse than it usually is. In particular Nat. Geog. completely misses out on the incredible sense of optimism that you get on the Indian street these days -- very unlike the moaning I see frequently on/.'s posts.
Hmmm...A few months back, National Geographic had a fairly detailed article on caste in India. I believe the article's conclusion disagreed with you.
Depends on what you're doing. Here's the scene in urban India (which is a buttload of people, check the CIA site; I won't write about rural India because I know nothing about it): Families of grooms/brides "arranging" marriages for their kids in India still look for someone of the same caste/religion/language. Again, in urban India, inter-caste/religion/language marriages are quite common these days. Apart from this one curiousity, caste is *not* in the picture in day-to-day urban lives.
In fact, things get better for the historical "lower" castes. People of the so-called "scheduled" (historically downtrodden) castes get affirmative action and get into colleges even with low scores. Percentages (as high as 66%) of government jobs are reserved for them, too. On the other hand, in the private sector, no one gives a shit about what caste you're from: your performance is what counts. Most Indian states have laws that make discriminating based on caste a rather severely punishable crime.
Bottom line: Most of urban India really doesn't care either way (except, oddly enough, during marriage season). Today, there is a new caste system based on (hold your breath) how well-educated you are, how much money you have, and how much money you can flaunt:-p. In short, welcome to capitalist nirvana, a.k.a the Great Indian Dream (which Friedman also mentions in the linked article).
> I think the person doing the alias to man -k is the system administrator
Ah, the "local customization" myth. This may have worked back in the day when all of MIT had three computers, but today there are too many darn computers to administer. Even clueful admins don't bother changing most defaults because they know their changes won't be obvious to end-users. The right place to make these changes is inside the distro, because that way the local mailing list/LUG/linux book will give one consistent, reinforcing message to the end-user.
Yeah, I can see that google sometimes lists pages with get content in it's index. It doesn't want to do it for a lot of pages though, and I haven't figured out why. There seems to be nothing different in the HTML.
One word: backlinks. Pages, even with request parameters, that get linked to from lots of popular (high-pagerank) sites get indexed.
Asimov had a short story along similar lines: Aaron and Moses set out to write Genesis, only to discover they have only enough parchment to squeeze all of they story of creation into seven days or so:-)
Way to go MS - stifle creativity, advancement, technology.
I'm choosing to reply instead of moderate, because this is a *huge* pet peeve of mine. I've always thought NT-the-kernel was pretty elegant (especially compared to some *cough* Unix clones).
Actually, the actual Nt_ interfaces *are* documented, but (afaik) incompletely, and without source it's really of very limited utility.
In their quest for One True API (Win32 and now WinFX) they do seem to have killed off all innovation on top of one of their most technically impressive assets.
I had hoped the MSDN academic alliance and shared source licensing would encourage some work, but as long as MS adopts a more liberal download-from-website model for source licenses, innovation on top of the NT kernel is likely to remain a pipe-dream. (When the competition (Linux) is available nicely cross-referenced, you'd have to be crazy to fill out the paperwork for an NT source license.)
How about M-x tex-count-words in emacs? I have that bound to C-c w. I'll bet you $100 that anyone would consider my LaTeX'd documents better looking than your word documents, too. Really!
Um, the grandparent said word processor. LaTeX isn't (LyX is a pretty rudimentary one, though). Neither is emacs. Yet;-).
Our PARAMs(super computers), Barhmos(supersonic cruise missiles), etc, all denied technologies, give your country strategists sleepless nights and yes they kick-ass in price competitiveness.
Ah, deshi pride. Lovely to behold. From http://www.brahmos.com/home.html: An Indian-Russian Joint Venture. LOL. Read, "tech brought over from Russia". Really innovative. PARAM. Distributed SPARC arch that was cutting edge 20 years ago and whose sole claim to supercomputer fame was an obsolete DoC/BXA classification. Hey, know what, these days even G5s are supercomputers.
We have basic healthcare for everyone!
No shit, sherlock. You don't. You are either an effing liar, or some government propaganda goon made a sucker out of you. Gotta grant you though, even the new PIO ambassador dork wouldn't be able to pass that off with a straight face. Btw, everyone != spoilt brats like you. The day everyone includes the starving tribals in Kalahandi and the landless poor in UP, I'll buy ya a beer.
And does your 44X have the money to hire a chauffer for the BMW Series 5??? The 44X here can hire one servant for cleaning the house, one to wash the car, one to get groceries for you, one to look after the child(ren). Why do they keep doing such things themselves?
Because the US believes that human skills have a price. That means maids and chaffeurs are expensive, because we pay them what they're worth, unlike the vast majority of urban Indians who lead cushy lives supported by rural poor who work like slaves and are paid a fucking pittance.
you have Bill Gates and then the king of all troubles, the junior Bush!
And Bush - LOL, he more than your pussyfooting leaders put the fear of God into Pakistan. It's good to see the BJP appreciate him more than you do, though. I do hope he wins November, though, if only to piss you leftist pansies off some more.
And yeah, the US has problems. But we at least admit them, unlike you third world hellhole denizens who keep getting into some potladen trip about being in the "best of all possible worlds". Just to keep things balanced, India has done amazing work in services over the past 10 years. But that worked has benefited only a fraction of its population, and hasn't trickled down enough, and even those receiving the benefits are getting nothing like the world standard.
90% of the current 44Xers had their fathers going to jobs in bicycles at some point. Driving Corollas one generation down was not even dreamt of.
Aaah. (rummages through one of my old posts which you replied to):
So yeah, I wouldn't say the educated, qualified, talented Indian -- the 10 grand a year type -- has a great quality of life.
But yeah - compared to the life most of these people's parents had, this is heaven; so it's not surprising that they don't see anything wrong with the kind of life they're leading.
So I guess we're basically agreeing with each other. Nice. Have an excellent day!
My, your argumentative 5k1llZ just shine through your words:-) (did you head your school's debating society?)... "bitter India-Originated Ass" and "argue like a woman" indeed. I know several women lawyers, would love to send them your thoughts on this if you could elaborate!
It's easy to sit in your TCS/Wipro veal-pens and spout ad-hominems. Maybe when you're done, you'll want to answer this:
500k x 2 a year for a (assume) Double Income One Kid couple. After taxes, it'd be less, but assume zero taxes. This is _44X_ India's Per Capita. *What* does the 1000k buy you --
Quality healthcare? (good enough that your leaders get treated in the damn country as opposed to wasting taxpayer money and scurrying to the US for medical treatment? I might add: lots of sorry India-originated Asses there too!) Or is world-class healthcare the right of India's top 0.1% only?
Good education for their kids? India's education system is a purgatory: great talent filtration but little teaching. Of course, with the crowds you have this is acceptable.
Higher education? little innovative work, and what innovation happens is mostly "cost innovation" -- a ceaseless struggle to "optimize" generally available tech to suit "deshi" budgets: Simputer, Cordect. No wonder *good* IITians sneer at doing graduate school there.
Somewhat less seriously - a BMW Series 5? Surely the 44X people should be able to afford it? Why do they keep driving stuff like the Hyundai Accent and the Corolla (rock bottom cars here?)
I could go on and on but really there are too many examples to state. And I'm not even touching on India's historic caste (and now religion) problems, safety of women (12 yr old girl raped in a Mumbai train with passengers onboard? wtf?), pathetic hospitals, state failure (Shiva Sena-led mob rule in Mumbai, chaos in Bihar), and all that, because you in your Pepsi drinking India probably don't even know that a Bharat exists outside that thirsts for potable -- let's not talk about *piped* -- water.
Bottom line: In the country of the blind, the one-eyed is king. In a billion-strong country of people struggling to make ends meet, where magistrates issue warrants against the president of the fucking country for as little as $900 in bribes, you guys with your 22X and 44X incomes *think* that because you got MTV, cappuccinos and the Matrix:Revolutions premiere, you've got it made.
But you haven't. You're really living in a bubble. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
>It's not exactly sockets, but you can do an awful lot with the XmlHttpRequest object.
Worth noting that Gmail (at least on IE) uses this a *lot*. And that's how it largely achieves it's speed and usability (I use Outlook at work and can attest that Gmail's implementation of autocomplete is actually *better* than Outlook's.)
Probably. Thing is, I typically start my browser less than once a week. I leave Moz up with lots of tabs open all the time.
You do realize you are an atypical user? Most users turn off their computers, or at least log off, once in a while.
Well, that's a great observation, but the fact remains, Mozilla's audience has been steadily growing, especially on the Win32 platform. What does that tell you?
That when your market share approaches zero, the only way to go is up.
Last I heard, Seamonkey and iexplore were both browsers. That makes it an entirely valid apples-to-apples comparison.
Btw, I don't assume ESR and jwz don't speak for everyone. But it's easier to point to their rants than raise my blood pressure ranting here, so I'll just point.
Touche!
Crossplatform usually means more code, which is working against cache/disk and memory. That translates into slower everything, all things being equal.
So you're saying because OO.o's and Seamonkey's developers chose to show off their 733T xplatform skills, I as a poor unwashed user shouldn't mind the speed dip and forgive them the sloth? And people wonder where the FLOSS dev crowd gets the "arrogant" label! Sorry - I won't put up with the sloth quietly, I'll bitch and moan about it every chance I get, and *not use* the damn app every chance I get, too.
Thusly, [for xplatform] be done right, everything else being equal, requires better engineering.
Your line of argument pre-supposes one thing: that xplatform is actually required by the users, that users SEE xplatform as a benefit to them. Good engineering starts with evaluating features/benefits/time/cost. Blind mantras of "xplatform everywhere", IMO, are extremely harmful.
There's a good lesson to learn from the Netscape/Mozilla story: Not even 1% of Netscape users (and there were millions) ever asked for the monstrosity called XUL. They only wanted a capable layout engine and a browser that was faster than the current marketplace speed champ: IE4.
Gecko was a great step forward: small, light, fast (and bonus - crossplatform too!) Then, just as Netscape users salivated over the prospect of a *finally* getting a fast, light browser, the Mozilla Project got xplatform GUI religion and proceeded to make XUL. Netscape users were like, "Uh, guys, when will it be ready?" and got a "We can't tell you, but it will be a wondrous thing when it's finally ready". "Can't wait that long, 'mfraid -- we're switching to IE, it's on the desktop anyway", they said, and thus we got 85% market share for IE.
If there was ever a tale of arrogant engineers and poor engineering decisions sinking a ship, this is it.
Because only recently have any non-MS developers been able to even think about doing something like this
this == write good software for Windows? Hmm, tell that to Symantec, Adobe, Macromedia and Borland. Tell that to Lotus, inspite of all the compat problems Notes had.
Worse, those that did, were shot in the foot by Microsoft purposely breaking their applications. That's why. The parallel doesn't exist on other platforms.
Yuck. Slashdot FUD and groupthink and its worst. Breaking their apps indeed - Pagemaker's been running fine on Windows since version 3. What's more, my old Pagemaker for Win3.1 runs on Windows XP. Lotus123 for DOS runs on the Longhorn betas. I know schools which run scoring systems off old dBase apps on Windows 2000. MS has a _better_ track record on back compat than most other commercial vendors - especially Apple.
You're talking about user interface. I'm talking about technical details. Those are worlds apart. That's the difference between user perception and reality.
Ooh. Worlds apart. How bloody patronizing. Go read ESR's CUPS rant (or jwz's older rants) to find out why UI matters. In fact, as MS and Apple continue to demonstrate, it is ALL that matters.
One day arrogant, clueless developers like you will understand that when it comes to desktop software at least, perception IS reality. Until then, the entire OSS GUI experience will continue to be an unmitigated horror.
Shesh. What a jerk. Fact is, most applications don't use such methods because they simply don't matter.
They don't matter if users don't crib. I've never cribbed about Wordpad's load times. But if you have a huge-ass app (Evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Office 95) and you ignore user complaints by telling them glib stuff like "startup times don't matter", then you shouldn't wonder too much when people start flocking to the competition.
Furthermore, you assert that, "they are better engineered that the competition", which is completely false. It requires a superior engineered product to be crossplatform.
... After all, these days, you should only need to start your applications once for the duration you're running your computer.
"xplatform" and "better engineered" are orthogonal attributes. Platform depenent IE4 was better engineered _and_ better architected than the cross-platform Netscape (upto 4).
Also, since you hoisted xplatform as a feature/benefit of open source, I'd like to raise a few points: xplatform is not a "benefit" for most users (i.e., the ones without holy wars to wage). Most users don't *care* that Mozilla runs on 17 platforms and somebody's toaster: they do care that it runs badly on their platform: Win32 or Linux or whatever.
Long story short, MS has many built in baises for starting up their applications which most applications are not able to benefit from.
Biases? MS' only bias is that its apps work well on Windows. If Mac users can boo and hiss when someone gives them a non-Carbonized app, why can't Windows users crib when you hand them an app that's obviously not optimized for Windows? Windows users expect their apps to behave in a certain way. Get over it and code like the Winamp guys do - they're proof you don't need to be from MS to write good Windows apps.
That said, let me clarify that when I meant "engineered" I did not mean better _architected_ - because each MS product varies in architectural elegance (IIS 5, Sourcesafe - yech, Excel - pretty good, NT kernel - damn good). I meant engineered in the "crafted" sense: MS products are crafted to appear more appealing to the typical user. If you now wish to tell me that Mozilla Seamonkey and OpenOffice are generally more appealing than the MS equivalents, then sorry - I say bullshit.
After that's all said and done, its the application performance, and not startup time
Since not all my machines have 1G+ RAM, I do close OpenOffice Writer (on Linux) and Word (on Windows) from when I'm done with the document I'm using. I close Moz windows when I run the Gimp. Maybe it's just me and the way I work, but I do NOT start apps only once for the duration I'm running my computer. Now can you understand why apps like Seamonkey and OpenOffice, which have _both_ lousy startup time and lousy perf, bother me so much?
The case of mshtml.dll, shdocvw.dll, urlmon.dll are a little different. These are *system DLLs* which can be used by any app, including IE (iexplore.exe) -- and the shell (explorer.exe). Explorer in particular will load urlmon if you visit FTP or WebDAV sites.
IIRC after login on a fresh Windows 2000 install, none of mshtml, shdocvw or urlmon are loaded.
Note that Working Set Detection/Maintenance on Windows can change this over time, but it will do so even for Firefox or any other non-MS app.
Btw, the real reason IE and Office start up quickly is because they are better engineered that the competition -- which is typically cross-platform portable code that is not particularly optimized for Windows. Reducing startup time is not necessarily a black art:
The true measure is how fast the app runs, not how fast it opens.
Not sure what your point is, but Open Office and Mozilla both run slower (_and_ open slower) than Office and IE on comparable hardware. Thankfully, Firefox opens slower than IE, but is almost as fast in use for most common tasks, which lets me use it for day-to-day browsing.
For the last time, people: NO. It was the "X Window System".
Question to the engineers on /.: A lot of places around the world (in 3rd world countries) can't afford airconditioning largely because of the prohibitive electricity cost: the electricity bill for even a small AC would be backbreaking for many third-worlders. Could thermoacoustic cooling be used to develop airconditioners? Even if they were small, they could be useful (if they were energy efficient) for small rooms, or even for airconditioned tents etc.
Great post, although I believe you missed one of the key reasons why many 'foreign' students tend to be better at routine work than original thought -- Indian and Chinese culture both emphasise obedience, subservience to authority and generally not rocking the boat.
A good program doesn't just happen by a bunch of code monkeys sitting down and bashing away, it happens by talented problem solvers designing a workable system, and doleing out the basic tasks to the code monkeys.
The problem is, the vast proportion of business IT and customer/employee-facing needs can be taken care of by code monkeys. This includes IT, HR paperwork, call center management -- all the things that are the outsourcing rage now.
>On a more positive note
You missed out: great work ethics. The city hasn't lost a day of business in the last four years (Bangalore and Hyderabad have both lost 1 in the same period, other Indian cities lose lots regularly to strikes/violence/riots). Given India's reputation in this area I find this amazing.
Also, it's been a while, but IIRC Madras has one of India's lowest crime rates?
I know this is a joke, but in a way the UK (any .gov, really) bills open source already. Folk who install/deploy/sell Linux solutions pay Value Added Tax on the services they render. The only reason open source volunteers are -- and will remain -- exempt is that they don't enter into transactions with the organizations they're volunteering code to. You can't tax volunteer activity.
> they seem to have removed the ability to turn them off now.
Windows: "Start | Setttings | Taskbar and start menu" has a checkbox (different locations I think for 2000 and XP/2003) to disable personalized menus. If you use XP's Luna theme (why?), the "All Programs" flyout is un-personalized.
Office (2000, XP, 2003): right click on the main toolbar, Customize, Options tab, uncheck "Menus show most recently used commands first".
You've really just proved my point that Windows provides no package management
:-))
You are right, Windows doesn't provide any _bundled product_ to manage apps. But it does provide a mechanism through several Win2000-era APIs, and both SMS server and Castanet take advantage of it. (Funny how they never thought it fit to bundle SMS Server with Windows
I've personally watched being installed continue to use a mishmash of Installshield, Winzip, or homegrown routines
The recommended technology for the last 3 years has been MSI. One can use Installshield and many other tools to create MSI-based installations (these, thankfully, follow modern UI guidelines and don't have the moronic teal/blue-gradient full screen look-n-feel) or use a hand-written MSI script.
I do wish MSIs used Mac-style bundles, but I guess back compat would be the issue there. Then again, as a programmer, I don't mind installers because of the greater flexibility they provide. And since my mom can figure out how to install MSN Messenger, I don't think dumbing it down any further will really help.
Again, I'm completely at a loss to find any package management features in Windows.
Have you checked out MS' own SMS Server and Marimba's Castanet (which is written using Java btw); both of these use Windows 2000's application publishing mechanisms to deploy apps just-in-time or all-at-once from a centralized console. Of course, it will not necessarily support all apps; but apps which have standards-based installers will work fine -- this is the vast majority of business software used.
On another unrelated note, folk who crib about Windows after using Win9x _and never trying Win2000 and later_ get zero sympathy from me. Win2000 and XP are (along with OSX) excellent, productive workstations for a large variety of users, compared with the Frankenstein-stitched-together feel one gets with several Linux distros.
I'd take what National Geographic says with a pinch of salt. They're a good mag, but the "poverty porn" sells copies, and I've noted that India is usually painted far worse than it usually is. In particular Nat. Geog. completely misses out on the incredible sense of optimism that you get on the Indian street these days -- very unlike the moaning I see frequently on /.'s posts.
:-p. In short, welcome to capitalist nirvana, a.k.a the Great Indian Dream (which Friedman also mentions in the linked article).
Hmmm...A few months back, National Geographic had a fairly detailed article on caste in India. I believe the article's conclusion disagreed with you.
Depends on what you're doing. Here's the scene in urban India (which is a buttload of people, check the CIA site; I won't write about rural India because I know nothing about it): Families of grooms/brides "arranging" marriages for their kids in India still look for someone of the same caste/religion/language. Again, in urban India, inter-caste/religion/language marriages are quite common these days. Apart from this one curiousity, caste is *not* in the picture in day-to-day urban lives.
In fact, things get better for the historical "lower" castes. People of the so-called "scheduled" (historically downtrodden) castes get affirmative action and get into colleges even with low scores. Percentages (as high as 66%) of government jobs are reserved for them, too. On the other hand, in the private sector, no one gives a shit about what caste you're from: your performance is what counts. Most Indian states have laws that make discriminating based on caste a rather severely punishable crime.
Bottom line: Most of urban India really doesn't care either way (except, oddly enough, during marriage season). Today, there is a new caste system based on (hold your breath) how well-educated you are, how much money you have, and how much money you can flaunt
> I think the person doing the alias to man -k is the system administrator
Ah, the "local customization" myth. This may have worked back in the day when all of MIT had three computers, but today there are too many darn computers to administer. Even clueful admins don't bother changing most defaults because they know their changes won't be obvious to end-users. The right place to make these changes is inside the distro, because that way the local mailing list/LUG/linux book will give one consistent, reinforcing message to the end-user.
Yeah, I can see that google sometimes lists pages with get content in it's index. It doesn't want to do it for a lot of pages though, and I haven't figured out why. There seems to be nothing different in the HTML.
One word: backlinks. Pages, even with request parameters, that get linked to from lots of popular (high-pagerank) sites get indexed.
>so that will end up being a 6-7 year interval between OS releases
Look at the bright side, at least no one can laugh at Debian again.
Asimov had a short story along similar lines: Aaron and Moses set out to write Genesis, only to discover they have only enough parchment to squeeze all of they story of creation into seven days or so :-)
Way to go MS - stifle creativity, advancement, technology.
I'm choosing to reply instead of moderate, because this is a *huge* pet peeve of mine. I've always thought NT-the-kernel was pretty elegant (especially compared to some *cough* Unix clones).
Actually, the actual Nt_ interfaces *are* documented, but (afaik) incompletely, and without source it's really of very limited utility.
In their quest for One True API (Win32 and now WinFX) they do seem to have killed off all innovation on top of one of their most technically impressive assets.
I had hoped the MSDN academic alliance and shared source licensing would encourage some work, but as long as MS adopts a more liberal download-from-website model for source licenses, innovation on top of the NT kernel is likely to remain a pipe-dream. (When the competition (Linux) is available nicely cross-referenced, you'd have to be crazy to fill out the paperwork for an NT source license.)
How about M-x tex-count-words in emacs? I have that bound to C-c w. I'll bet you $100 that anyone would consider my LaTeX'd documents better looking than your word documents, too. Really!
;-).
Um, the grandparent said word processor. LaTeX isn't (LyX is a pretty rudimentary one, though). Neither is emacs. Yet
Ah, deshi pride. Lovely to behold. From http://www.brahmos.com/home.html: An Indian-Russian Joint Venture. LOL. Read, "tech brought over from Russia". Really innovative. PARAM. Distributed SPARC arch that was cutting edge 20 years ago and whose sole claim to supercomputer fame was an obsolete DoC/BXA classification. Hey, know what, these days even G5s are supercomputers.
We have basic healthcare for everyone!
No shit, sherlock. You don't. You are either an effing liar, or some government propaganda goon made a sucker out of you. Gotta grant you though, even the new PIO ambassador dork wouldn't be able to pass that off with a straight face. Btw, everyone != spoilt brats like you. The day everyone includes the starving tribals in Kalahandi and the landless poor in UP, I'll buy ya a beer.
And does your 44X have the money to hire a chauffer for the BMW Series 5??? The 44X here can hire one servant for cleaning the house, one to wash the car, one to get groceries for you, one to look after the child(ren). Why do they keep doing such things themselves?
Because the US believes that human skills have a price. That means maids and chaffeurs are expensive, because we pay them what they're worth, unlike the vast majority of urban Indians who lead cushy lives supported by rural poor who work like slaves and are paid a fucking pittance.
you have Bill Gates and then the king of all troubles, the junior Bush!
Gates - ah yes, he who invests large sums so that Indians can live without the scourge of AIDS. The bastard.
And Bush - LOL, he more than your pussyfooting leaders put the fear of God into Pakistan. It's good to see the BJP appreciate him more than you do, though. I do hope he wins November, though, if only to piss you leftist pansies off some more.
And yeah, the US has problems. But we at least admit them, unlike you third world hellhole denizens who keep getting into some potladen trip about being in the "best of all possible worlds". Just to keep things balanced, India has done amazing work in services over the past 10 years. But that worked has benefited only a fraction of its population, and hasn't trickled down enough, and even those receiving the benefits are getting nothing like the world standard.
90% of the current 44Xers had their fathers going to jobs in bicycles at some point. Driving Corollas one generation down was not even dreamt of.
Aaah. (rummages through one of my old posts which you replied to):So I guess we're basically agreeing with each other. Nice. Have an excellent day!
It's easy to sit in your TCS/Wipro veal-pens and spout ad-hominems. Maybe when you're done, you'll want to answer this:
500k x 2 a year for a (assume) Double Income One Kid couple. After taxes, it'd be less, but assume zero taxes. This is _44X_ India's Per Capita. *What* does the 1000k buy you --
- Quality healthcare? (good enough that your leaders get treated in the damn country as opposed to wasting taxpayer money and scurrying to the US for medical treatment? I might add: lots of sorry India-originated Asses there too!) Or is world-class healthcare the right of India's top 0.1% only?
- Good education for their kids? India's education system is a purgatory: great talent filtration but little teaching. Of course, with the crowds you have this is acceptable.
- Higher education? little innovative work, and what innovation happens is mostly "cost innovation" -- a ceaseless struggle to "optimize" generally available tech to suit "deshi" budgets: Simputer, Cordect. No wonder *good* IITians sneer at doing graduate school there.
- Somewhat less seriously - a BMW Series 5? Surely the 44X people should be able to afford it? Why do they keep driving stuff like the Hyundai Accent and the Corolla (rock bottom cars here?)
I could go on and on but really there are too many examples to state. And I'm not even touching on India's historic caste (and now religion) problems, safety of women (12 yr old girl raped in a Mumbai train with passengers onboard? wtf?), pathetic hospitals, state failure (Shiva Sena-led mob rule in Mumbai, chaos in Bihar), and all that, because you in your Pepsi drinking India probably don't even know that a Bharat exists outside that thirsts for potable -- let's not talk about *piped* -- water.Bottom line: In the country of the blind, the one-eyed is king. In a billion-strong country of people struggling to make ends meet, where magistrates issue warrants against the president of the fucking country for as little as $900 in bribes, you guys with your 22X and 44X incomes *think* that because you got MTV, cappuccinos and the Matrix:Revolutions premiere, you've got it made.
But you haven't. You're really living in a bubble. Get over it.