I honestly do not recall any distro upgrade since, say, 94, which resulted in a slowdown of the computers I use. Maybe you could reconsider your choice of OSs?
He is the one who is having problems extracting value from a product (which was handed to him as a gift) when using it in a particular way, which may very well not be the one targeted by the Mozilla Foundation. Just as with every other piece of free software out there, he is very much allowed to go and fix what bothers him in order to do what he wants. If you look at the Linux source, you'll find drivers for things you've never even imagined existed, and they are there because someone wanted, in order to do their business (whatever that may be), Linux to behave in specific ways in which it did not behave, so they saw to that to be changed (they wrote it themselves, they paid someone to write it, whatever)
Have you considered allocating resources to work on the problem of hunting those leaks and fixing them? One of the two browsers you mention provides you with full sources so you have what to work on. You seem to be one of the many people extracting value from Firefox: maybe you could put some value back...
The raw web data transfered for those pages couldn't be more than 10MB, why do they need 60MB?
Do you think that DOM editing of the document tree, for example, should be implemented by actually editing the raw data gotten from the web? Or, for another example, when you double click on a web page, how do you think the word on which the clicked happened is found in the document? I guess you are imagining that the whole document is reparsed, the placement on screen for every single thing is recomputed, reflowed and so on, and then the word in the click coordinates is found? Have you not considered that web browsers developers decided an age ago to do some caching? Don't you imagine that that caching might take more memory that the raw data? Have you even considered the reasonability of what you are asking? How is it on earth that you see yourself as fit to make browser design suggestions?
They really should be caching the raw data, not uncompressed bitmaps of the pages already rendered.
Of course, I'd love to see how a browser designed according to your ideas has to uncompress every image on a web page each time the user moves the scrollbar a pixel down.
Well, if your specific desires are different from the Mozilla Foundation's desires, so that they decide to allocate their money for other purposes, then yes. Those 55 millions look like a sand of grain in the beach when you compare it to the income of, say, Microsoft, and who do you think pays for the fixing of bugs in Microsoft's products? Can you pay your friendly developer to fix a particular bug in, say, XP, which annoys you and which Microsoft does not deem important enough to fix?
[...] after so many years of a single-browser web [...]
Except for maybe the initial days of the web, there have always been several browsers. E.g., I've been only for what seems forever now and have never used IE...
I only get Firefox updates through Fedora. I'm quite sure the Army can ask the people there how they manage... Likewise, you can of course pull updates from the local network.
You went all the way from too picky to wrong, actually. `Android', in this context, is a proper noun, so it does not take a definite article, as you propose...
So you think that while right now we have partial and buggy implementations of one scripting language in most browsers, when we have two new additional scripting languages we'll have two well-supported, to-the-spec implementations of the two new languages in most browsers?
Things have been much much better for me, ever since forever now. And the people around me do not seem to have any trouble, really, using a variety of modern distros.
Well, I have no reason to not believe you, but for example you must have picked a pretty weak distro if you had to track dependencies by hand. I haven't done that since 99ish or so. Before that I was using slackware and, to be honest, I never had any significant trouble with dependencies either during that time.
When you talk about using gconf you usually talk about this user interface.
I am sorry, but that user interface, gconf-editor, is separate and in fact unrelated to gconf. It is not an user interface, actually, but a tool to do certain things. The user interface to the configuration options of an applications should be in that application. Or, some times, in a specially designed dialog presenting them, à la control panel, when it affects more than one app. Or in specialty applications, like gtweak, whose purpose is to be an user interface to modifying some configuration options. While gconf-editor is useful, it is not the user interface to gconf. Not anymore than gconftool-2 is.
Indeed, gconf does not need an user interface, just as much as glib or libgmp do not have user interfaces: they have APIs.
Of course, there are some other minor issues with gconf (some people think that XML is not universally a good choice for configration settings),
That's an often heard complaint, and an equally absurd one. What on earth does `being a universally good choice for configuratin' possibly mean? Why would anyone (the developers and the users) be touching the XML files? Are you aware that there is nothing in gconf which actually depends on XML, as the actual storage is handled by backends, and there was and there could be backends using databases, like a Berkeley database table, or an LDAP server, or whatever?
gconf is far from perfect. But the amount of ignorance in its respect that one hears, and the complaints based on that ignorance that ensue, are really amazing...
Well, as you noted earlier, computer scientists are not engineers. They are not trained to be, act or resemble engineers. You can be a computer scientist and never ever use a computer.
If your boss is looking for an engineer, and in the job descriptions he asks for a CS degree, and then finds that CS people are not engineers, and then thinks that this is a problem with computer scientists, then yes, maybe you should tell him that he might want to reconsider things a bit.
BTW, there is a difference between `understanding computer code' and `system level debugging and stuff'...
Every single file there has a different format so it has to be parsed by a different parser./li>
You are limited by the POSIX file semantics, so you need to deal with locks, atomicity magic and so on in order to allow different apps or even different instances of the same app to modify them concrrently, and you have to do this in every app,
you need to implement some kind of transaction handling to ensure that apps that crash do not leave broken configuration files, and so on.
You are limited by the notification capabilities of your filesystem for modifications, but then you you are also limited by granularity, as the only way to get notifications of a change in a specific subset of of preferences for an app (and not others) forces you to either split your configuration files in many little files, or rescan a (potentially huge) configuration file looking for changes since the last time you saw it (in particular, you need to know how did that configuration file looked before the change) unless you are using a filesystem thatnot only notifies you that a change has happened to the file but also what changed.
You've basically confused the actual implementation with the abstract concept of configurable setting, so if you for want to change the backend (say, you want to put preferences in an LDAP server) you have to rewrite all apps (you could use fuse, of course; but you can make a nice fuse module presenting the gconf settings as a filesystem, too).
If you want to allow admins to set up mandatory settings, limit options available to users, lock others, etc, or you want to be able to have several profiles, each consisting of a different set of configuration options which apply to a set of applications, you have to implement everything in every app.
etc
There is much that is wrong and missing in gconf, but pretending that stuffing/etc and ~ with.someapp.rc files was ok is just showing off ignorance of the issues.
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I get you did not get the memo: Wine Is Not an Emulator.
I honestly do not recall any distro upgrade since, say, 94, which resulted in a slowdown of the computers I use. Maybe you could reconsider your choice of OSs?
I hope they are making the sources available, so as to comply with the license of the software they are distributing...
The point is, it is not their problems, but his.
He is the one who is having problems extracting value from a product (which was handed to him as a gift) when using it in a particular way, which may very well not be the one targeted by the Mozilla Foundation. Just as with every other piece of free software out there, he is very much allowed to go and fix what bothers him in order to do what he wants. If you look at the Linux source, you'll find drivers for things you've never even imagined existed, and they are there because someone wanted, in order to do their business (whatever that may be), Linux to behave in specific ways in which it did not behave, so they saw to that to be changed (they wrote it themselves, they paid someone to write it, whatever)
Have you considered allocating resources to work on the problem of hunting those leaks and fixing them? One of the two browsers you mention provides you with full sources so you have what to work on. You seem to be one of the many people extracting value from Firefox: maybe you could put some value back...
The raw web data transfered for those pages couldn't be more than 10MB, why do they need 60MB?
Do you think that DOM editing of the document tree, for example, should be implemented by actually editing the raw data gotten from the web? Or, for another example, when you double click on a web page, how do you think the word on which the clicked happened is found in the document? I guess you are imagining that the whole document is reparsed, the placement on screen for every single thing is recomputed, reflowed and so on, and then the word in the click coordinates is found? Have you not considered that web browsers developers decided an age ago to do some caching? Don't you imagine that that caching might take more memory that the raw data? Have you even considered the reasonability of what you are asking? How is it on earth that you see yourself as fit to make browser design suggestions?
They really should be caching the raw data, not uncompressed bitmaps of the pages already rendered.Of course, I'd love to see how a browser designed according to your ideas has to uncompress every image on a web page each time the user moves the scrollbar a pixel down.
Well, if your specific desires are different from the Mozilla Foundation's desires, so that they decide to allocate their money for other purposes, then yes. Those 55 millions look like a sand of grain in the beach when you compare it to the income of, say, Microsoft, and who do you think pays for the fixing of bugs in Microsoft's products? Can you pay your friendly developer to fix a particular bug in, say, XP, which annoys you and which Microsoft does not deem important enough to fix?
Except for maybe the initial days of the web, there have always been several browsers. E.g., I've been only for what seems forever now and have never used IE...
I only get Firefox updates through Fedora. I'm quite sure the Army can ask the people there how they manage... Likewise, you can of course pull updates from the local network.
How did you go from "it has this bug" to "Firefox is a lousy piece of software"?
You can always pay a developer to fix what you want...
Someone wants to remind you of a great example. Cancel or allow?
You went all the way from too picky to wrong, actually. `Android', in this context, is a proper noun, so it does not take a definite article, as you propose...
come on, someone with mod points mark this as funny...
If you manage to write an app that crashes the phone OS, then the phone OS cannot be that good, can it?
At the risk of being obvious... try google.
Try "OTF font", as "OTF" catches too many other things.
You'd hate to see VBScript but you are OK with PHP... Funny that.
So you think that while right now we have partial and buggy implementations of one scripting language in most browsers, when we have two new additional scripting languages we'll have two well-supported, to-the-spec implementations of the two new languages in most browsers?
So you are imagining that whoever (allegedly) got bribed is going to distribute the money among the users of the 17000 machines?
Hmm. You must be new here...
Well, as you know, YMMV.
Things have been much much better for me, ever since forever now. And the people around me do not seem to have any trouble, really, using a variety of modern distros.
Enjoy your windows installs.
Well, I have no reason to not believe you, but for example you must have picked a pretty weak distro if you had to track dependencies by hand. I haven't done that since 99ish or so. Before that I was using slackware and, to be honest, I never had any significant trouble with dependencies either during that time.
I am sorry, but that user interface, gconf-editor, is separate and in fact unrelated to gconf. It is not an user interface, actually, but a tool to do certain things. The user interface to the configuration options of an applications should be in that application. Or, some times, in a specially designed dialog presenting them, à la control panel, when it affects more than one app. Or in specialty applications, like gtweak, whose purpose is to be an user interface to modifying some configuration options. While gconf-editor is useful, it is not the user interface to gconf. Not anymore than gconftool-2 is.
Indeed, gconf does not need an user interface, just as much as glib or libgmp do not have user interfaces: they have APIs.
Of course, there are some other minor issues with gconf (some people think that XML is not universally a good choice for configration settings),That's an often heard complaint, and an equally absurd one. What on earth does `being a universally good choice for configuratin' possibly mean? Why would anyone (the developers and the users) be touching the XML files? Are you aware that there is nothing in gconf which actually depends on XML, as the actual storage is handled by backends, and there was and there could be backends using databases, like a Berkeley database table, or an LDAP server, or whatever?
gconf is far from perfect. But the amount of ignorance in its respect that one hears, and the complaints based on that ignorance that ensue, are really amazing...
Well, as you noted earlier, computer scientists are not engineers. They are not trained to be, act or resemble engineers. You can be a computer scientist and never ever use a computer.
If your boss is looking for an engineer, and in the job descriptions he asks for a CS degree, and then finds that CS people are not engineers, and then thinks that this is a problem with computer scientists, then yes, maybe you should tell him that he might want to reconsider things a bit.
BTW, there is a difference between `understanding computer code' and `system level debugging and stuff'...
What's wrong with it?
There is much that is wrong and missing in gconf, but pretending that stuffing /etc and ~ with .someapp.rc files was ok is just showing off ignorance of the issues.