If the price of oil increases, then energy used in the manufacturing process will be obtained from other places due to the relative price differences. Solar and wind power are two such choices. Hell, even wood could be burned, if it was really necessary.
Even if solar power, etc., is prohibitively expensive now, it may someday become the cheapest source of energy. Thus it will be the source that is used.
So yes, it does take much energy to create glass. But someday that energy may be obtained from the sun, rather than from coal, purely for economic reasons.
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 1, Funny
And do you know what? Wikipedia isn't a credible source.
And being better than Internet Explorer somehow makes Firefox a superior browser? I think not, my young friend!
What you're saying is that a huge, chunky piece of shit (Firefox) is only slightly better than a liquidy stream of fecal matter (Internet Explorer). Regardless, they're both still doodoo.
Opera is one of the best sorts of companies around. They're quite honest, and put out high-quality products. Talk all you want about volunteers and some such working on Mozilla. I'd take Opera over Firefox any day. From a technical standpoint, the features and resource consumption of Opera is far superior to that of Firefox. As for the open codebase of Mozilla, it's pretty much useless due to its low quality.
And recall, Opera got rid of the ads a while back. Of course, I know you haven't bothered to use it recently, so that's why you're making blatantly false statements.
Yeah, we've got some memory leaks once in a while, there are many things we could do better, and we don't run in 64K of RAM, but it really isn't a big deal outside of slashdot postings looking for karma, and it really isn't much worse (if at all) than other apps.
Is this seriously your attitude? It's no wonder that Firefox and much of the other software from the Mozilla project is so bloated. Even on systems with 2 GB or more of RAM, it is still a relatively scarce resource, and thus should not be wasted. I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.
Remember, 400 MB for a web browser is still a massive consumption of memory on a 1 or 2 GB system. When there are many regular folks with systems that only have 512 MB of RAM, you start running into serious performance issues (which is often reported to be the case).
You say it's not a big deal to waste memory. Sorry to say it, but you're fucking wrong. Firefox will continually be looked upon as an inferior browser by those with any software development background if such a trend of waste continues.
I hope you understand why I keep coming back to Opera. They've put out a product that's just as portable and just as featureful as Firefox (if not more so). And they manage to do it without consuming hundreds of MB of RAM.
I understand that it has to deal with issues such as portability and interoperability with other programming languages. Yes, dealing with such issues can often become very complex, especially for larger applications.
However, I do believe that such matters can be dealt with in far more efficient and effective ways than is done so by Mozilla. A browser like Opera, for instance, offers many of the same capabilities as Firefox without even a quarter of the memory consumption, and often with a far greater responsiveness.
When it comes to dealing with complex issues in software, the best thing to do is not to overly complicate them. It appears that the Mozilla project has overcomplicated them, for whatever reason. And that has lead to a browser that consumes far more memory than it should, while also not being as stable as it ideally could be.
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
My apologies. Often times open source zealots honestly suggest that Microsoft should not borrow good ideas from other vendors. Alas, it is good to see you are not such a fool.
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 3, Funny
There's nothing wrong with Microsoft drawing good ideas from Apple, or from anyone else. That's the best thing they should do, as it benefits their customers.
Now just because they incorporate such ideas doesn't mean they do it well. The problem with IE isn't so much the feature set it offers, but how it insecurely and poorly offers those features. Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Safari, and even Firefox to a lesser extent, do a better job of implementing such ideas.
Opera did heavily influence Firefox.
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm not sure why your post was heavily moderated down. It does address a very serious point: Opera did influence Firefox.
Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera. Subsequently, they were found to be very useful features, and thus were adopted by other browsers (Firefox included).
It's not a bad thing at all that Firefox draws from Opera. The goal is to provide the best product possible, and that does at times require the implementation of good ideas that were thought up elsewhere. Browsers like Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb and Safari innovate; Firefox brings those innovations to the masses.
Go take a look at the Mozilla codebase. Seriously, go do it right now. It is amongst the worst code I've seen written. It's overly complex, it's bloated, and it's badly architectured. But please, don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself.
If there were any efforts to limit the inclusion of low quality patches, I think such efforts failed. But then again, what would be a low quality patch to the FreeBSD project may very well look like a real gem when compared to the awful codebase that makes up Mozilla.
The true power of open source is letting us see how awfully written many of the most popular software products are, Mozilla included.
A history of Opera would be more interesting.
on
A History of Firefox
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think I'd rather read such a piece about the history of Opera. Indeed, there is far less known about the inner workings of Opera (the company) than there is about Netscape, let alone the Mozilla project.
It would also be excellent if Opera were to release the source code to some of their historic (and now obsolete) releases, say Opera 3 and earlier. While there may very well be licensing issues concerning some of the code, even being able to store a fair portion of it would be a blessing to computer historians around the world.
Regardless of what caused the relative price of copper to increase relative to zinc, the fact remains that the relative price did increase. And as such, mints moved away from copper towards zinc. Some copper is still used, just as some oil would likely be used. But its use is far more constrained and limited.
I'd recommend against driving your tiny-penis SUV into my cock. As large as your SUV is, my twig is still larger. I would hate to see your SUV's airbag deploy, pushing your genitalia into you such that they form a vagina.
A typical car windshield can stop golfball-sized hail without much difficulty. It is quite possible that similar glass could be used to protect solar panels.
Yes, a particular product today may require oil. But as the price of oil increases due to increased scarcity, manufacturers will instead switch to relatively cheaper non-oil alternatives. So often times you'll end up getting the same products, but they'll be made of a different, cheaper material.
It's happened with coins, for instance. While certain coins one contained large amounts of copper, they now are made mostly of zinc with a thin coating of copper.
Remember, plastic is only used so often today because it is so cheap. Once the price of plastic rises, people will switch to other materials which are relatively cheaper.
I lived a good portion of my life before plastic became widespread. We used glass bottles instead of plastic bottles for many drinks, for instance. Somebody who grew up only using plastic might have a difficult time accepting the idea of not using plastic products. But it's more than possible, and was reality even just a few decades ago.
But such curtailing will happen automatically. As oil becomes more scarce, the price will rise. And thus will rise the prices of products which require oil for their production. So the price of plastics will rise, for instance. People will begin to choose relatively cheaper alternatives. So your toothbrush will likely cost a dollar. But it may consist of a wooden handle, rather than a plastic one.
It's widely known that those men want want loud and/or fast cars are often the men with the smallest penises.
It is also widely known that compared to other men, American men have by far the smallest penises in the world. They try to make up for their genital deficit by driving the biggest, nosiest vehicles they can debt themselves into.
Frankly, I'm glad I'm European, and I ride a bicycle. The only problem I run into is keeping my cock from getting tangled in the bike chain.
Let's triple or quadruple the cost of petrol, for instance, perhaps due to a stagnant American economy or an American attack on Iran. Now you may just see some benefits to such a system. Of course, if the prices rise quickly on such an essential commodity, things might change relatively fast. You may not have a job to drive to, for instance.
So often we hear fuss about our petrol supply running out. Sure, perhaps someday it will. But like usual, basic economics will take care of the situtation for us. When one energy source becomes increasingly scarce, it will become more expensive. Thus other technologies, such as windmills and solar panels, will become relatively cheaper. And thus people and businesses will switch towards them, as in this case. Anyone with any economics background would have known that decades ago.
The person who wrote it, Thom Holwerda, is a managing editor at OSNews. Check out his biography for yourself. Putting his young age aside, he obviously lacks a solid background in IT and computer security. He apparently studied psychology and some form of linguistics at the university level. That's not the resume of somebody who is capable of writing a serious and informative article on computer security.
OSNews can be considered as one of the worst sites on the Internet, nearly as bad as GameFAQs.com.
There really isn't any problem besides KHTML depending on the KDE libraries, which as of the KDE 3.x releases aren't easily ported to Windows.
Indeed, once KDE 4 is released it shouldn't be a problem. But KDE 4 is still under heavy development at this time. I've heard estimates that it will be at least another year before things start to really stabilize with the development of KDE 4.
The average user probably does not care about how much memory is being consumed, in terms of a numerical value. But when they're told by their Linux-using friend that Firefox is a superior browser to Internet Explorer, and then find their system performance dropping after switching to Firefox, they won't be impressed.
And stability sure will impress the average user. I recall many regular users who were very surprised by the massive stability increase between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 or XP, for instance. It wasn't such a big deal for those of us who were already aware of NT, but the average user of Windows 98 or ME sure did notice the stability improvements offered by XP.
A legal solution to a technical problem will never work. The involvement of politicians likely won't lead to secure consumer-grade software.
The best thing to do is to use technologies that encourage secure programming. We're talking about garbage collected languages, for instance, that reduce the risks of buffer overflows. And beyond that, start using BSD or Linux rather than Windows. Of course the list goes on and on.
Slashdot Mirror
Do these studies have entries at Wikipedia we could refer to?
If the price of oil increases, then energy used in the manufacturing process will be obtained from other places due to the relative price differences. Solar and wind power are two such choices. Hell, even wood could be burned, if it was really necessary.
Even if solar power, etc., is prohibitively expensive now, it may someday become the cheapest source of energy. Thus it will be the source that is used.
So yes, it does take much energy to create glass. But someday that energy may be obtained from the sun, rather than from coal, purely for economic reasons.
And do you know what? Wikipedia isn't a credible source.
And being better than Internet Explorer somehow makes Firefox a superior browser? I think not, my young friend!
What you're saying is that a huge, chunky piece of shit (Firefox) is only slightly better than a liquidy stream of fecal matter (Internet Explorer). Regardless, they're both still doodoo.
It's because I'm always right. Why bother with the other side(s) when the one I present is flawless?
Opera is one of the best sorts of companies around. They're quite honest, and put out high-quality products. Talk all you want about volunteers and some such working on Mozilla. I'd take Opera over Firefox any day. From a technical standpoint, the features and resource consumption of Opera is far superior to that of Firefox. As for the open codebase of Mozilla, it's pretty much useless due to its low quality.
And recall, Opera got rid of the ads a while back. Of course, I know you haven't bothered to use it recently, so that's why you're making blatantly false statements.
Yeah, we've got some memory leaks once in a while, there are many things we could do better, and we don't run in 64K of RAM, but it really isn't a big deal outside of slashdot postings looking for karma, and it really isn't much worse (if at all) than other apps.
Is this seriously your attitude? It's no wonder that Firefox and much of the other software from the Mozilla project is so bloated. Even on systems with 2 GB or more of RAM, it is still a relatively scarce resource, and thus should not be wasted. I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.
Remember, 400 MB for a web browser is still a massive consumption of memory on a 1 or 2 GB system. When there are many regular folks with systems that only have 512 MB of RAM, you start running into serious performance issues (which is often reported to be the case).
You say it's not a big deal to waste memory. Sorry to say it, but you're fucking wrong. Firefox will continually be looked upon as an inferior browser by those with any software development background if such a trend of waste continues.
I hope you understand why I keep coming back to Opera. They've put out a product that's just as portable and just as featureful as Firefox (if not more so). And they manage to do it without consuming hundreds of MB of RAM.
I understand that it has to deal with issues such as portability and interoperability with other programming languages. Yes, dealing with such issues can often become very complex, especially for larger applications.
However, I do believe that such matters can be dealt with in far more efficient and effective ways than is done so by Mozilla. A browser like Opera, for instance, offers many of the same capabilities as Firefox without even a quarter of the memory consumption, and often with a far greater responsiveness.
When it comes to dealing with complex issues in software, the best thing to do is not to overly complicate them. It appears that the Mozilla project has overcomplicated them, for whatever reason. And that has lead to a browser that consumes far more memory than it should, while also not being as stable as it ideally could be.
My apologies. Often times open source zealots honestly suggest that Microsoft should not borrow good ideas from other vendors. Alas, it is good to see you are not such a fool.
There's nothing wrong with Microsoft drawing good ideas from Apple, or from anyone else. That's the best thing they should do, as it benefits their customers.
Now just because they incorporate such ideas doesn't mean they do it well. The problem with IE isn't so much the feature set it offers, but how it insecurely and poorly offers those features. Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Safari, and even Firefox to a lesser extent, do a better job of implementing such ideas.
I'm not sure why your post was heavily moderated down. It does address a very serious point: Opera did influence Firefox.
Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera. Subsequently, they were found to be very useful features, and thus were adopted by other browsers (Firefox included).
It's not a bad thing at all that Firefox draws from Opera. The goal is to provide the best product possible, and that does at times require the implementation of good ideas that were thought up elsewhere. Browsers like Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb and Safari innovate; Firefox brings those innovations to the masses.
Go take a look at the Mozilla codebase. Seriously, go do it right now. It is amongst the worst code I've seen written. It's overly complex, it's bloated, and it's badly architectured. But please, don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself.
If there were any efforts to limit the inclusion of low quality patches, I think such efforts failed. But then again, what would be a low quality patch to the FreeBSD project may very well look like a real gem when compared to the awful codebase that makes up Mozilla.
The true power of open source is letting us see how awfully written many of the most popular software products are, Mozilla included.
I think I'd rather read such a piece about the history of Opera. Indeed, there is far less known about the inner workings of Opera (the company) than there is about Netscape, let alone the Mozilla project.
It would also be excellent if Opera were to release the source code to some of their historic (and now obsolete) releases, say Opera 3 and earlier. While there may very well be licensing issues concerning some of the code, even being able to store a fair portion of it would be a blessing to computer historians around the world.
Regardless of what caused the relative price of copper to increase relative to zinc, the fact remains that the relative price did increase. And as such, mints moved away from copper towards zinc. Some copper is still used, just as some oil would likely be used. But its use is far more constrained and limited.
I'd recommend against driving your tiny-penis SUV into my cock. As large as your SUV is, my twig is still larger. I would hate to see your SUV's airbag deploy, pushing your genitalia into you such that they form a vagina.
A typical car windshield can stop golfball-sized hail without much difficulty. It is quite possible that similar glass could be used to protect solar panels.
Yes, a particular product today may require oil. But as the price of oil increases due to increased scarcity, manufacturers will instead switch to relatively cheaper non-oil alternatives. So often times you'll end up getting the same products, but they'll be made of a different, cheaper material.
It's happened with coins, for instance. While certain coins one contained large amounts of copper, they now are made mostly of zinc with a thin coating of copper.
Remember, plastic is only used so often today because it is so cheap. Once the price of plastic rises, people will switch to other materials which are relatively cheaper.
I lived a good portion of my life before plastic became widespread. We used glass bottles instead of plastic bottles for many drinks, for instance. Somebody who grew up only using plastic might have a difficult time accepting the idea of not using plastic products. But it's more than possible, and was reality even just a few decades ago.
But such curtailing will happen automatically. As oil becomes more scarce, the price will rise. And thus will rise the prices of products which require oil for their production. So the price of plastics will rise, for instance. People will begin to choose relatively cheaper alternatives. So your toothbrush will likely cost a dollar. But it may consist of a wooden handle, rather than a plastic one.
It's widely known that those men want want loud and/or fast cars are often the men with the smallest penises.
It is also widely known that compared to other men, American men have by far the smallest penises in the world. They try to make up for their genital deficit by driving the biggest, nosiest vehicles they can debt themselves into.
Frankly, I'm glad I'm European, and I ride a bicycle. The only problem I run into is keeping my cock from getting tangled in the bike chain.
Let's triple or quadruple the cost of petrol, for instance, perhaps due to a stagnant American economy or an American attack on Iran. Now you may just see some benefits to such a system. Of course, if the prices rise quickly on such an essential commodity, things might change relatively fast. You may not have a job to drive to, for instance.
So often we hear fuss about our petrol supply running out. Sure, perhaps someday it will. But like usual, basic economics will take care of the situtation for us. When one energy source becomes increasingly scarce, it will become more expensive. Thus other technologies, such as windmills and solar panels, will become relatively cheaper. And thus people and businesses will switch towards them, as in this case. Anyone with any economics background would have known that decades ago.
The person who wrote it, Thom Holwerda, is a managing editor at OSNews. Check out his biography for yourself. Putting his young age aside, he obviously lacks a solid background in IT and computer security. He apparently studied psychology and some form of linguistics at the university level. That's not the resume of somebody who is capable of writing a serious and informative article on computer security.
OSNews can be considered as one of the worst sites on the Internet, nearly as bad as GameFAQs.com.
There really isn't any problem besides KHTML depending on the KDE libraries, which as of the KDE 3.x releases aren't easily ported to Windows.
Indeed, once KDE 4 is released it shouldn't be a problem. But KDE 4 is still under heavy development at this time. I've heard estimates that it will be at least another year before things start to really stabilize with the development of KDE 4.
The average user probably does not care about how much memory is being consumed, in terms of a numerical value. But when they're told by their Linux-using friend that Firefox is a superior browser to Internet Explorer, and then find their system performance dropping after switching to Firefox, they won't be impressed.
And stability sure will impress the average user. I recall many regular users who were very surprised by the massive stability increase between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 or XP, for instance. It wasn't such a big deal for those of us who were already aware of NT, but the average user of Windows 98 or ME sure did notice the stability improvements offered by XP.
A legal solution to a technical problem will never work. The involvement of politicians likely won't lead to secure consumer-grade software.
The best thing to do is to use technologies that encourage secure programming. We're talking about garbage collected languages, for instance, that reduce the risks of buffer overflows. And beyond that, start using BSD or Linux rather than Windows. Of course the list goes on and on.