Indeed. You're completely correct. If the Mozilla crew want to take on Internet Explorer, then they can't have the general public debugging their software for them. That just won't fly.
Part of the problem is that it's far too easy for bugs to creep into Mozilla. The code is a small step above horrible, and the architecture isn't much better. A lack of up-to-date documentation leads to programmers not knowing which XPCOM interfaces are deprecated, and which aren't.
You can look at browsers like Konqueror and Opera, which offer a very comparable feature set to Firefox, yet do no suffer from the drawbacks. Not only that, but Konqueror and Opera are often described as feeling far more responsive, while being extremely stable. It's things like that which really impress the average Jill and Joe. Excessive memory usage will just perplex them, and likely result in them going back to Internet Explorer.
First of all, I wasn't embedding Gecko into a GTK+ application. Had you bothered to read my post, you would have seen that I was embedding it into another toolkit. So using GtkMozEmbed outright was for the most part out of the question. I didn't want to involve any more unnecessary code than I had to.
Second of all, it doesn't serve as a good example. Look at the code yourself. It's horribly convoluted. While it does indeed provide a fairly usable interface to the programmer who is using it, what's under the hood is an utter mess. That's directly caused by the poor design of Gecko itself.
What do you mean, making it "part of the system"? Are you suggesting that they be embedded within the Linux or BSD kernels, for instance? I would hope not, because for serious use that is a recipe for disaster.
Part of the problem with Java is that each VM has traditionally had its own copy of the Java class library. When you consider how huge the standard library is these days for Java, it's no wonder that even a small Java program consumes so much memory. And running several programs, each duplicating data from the others, is wasteful.
Apple has had for years a JVM that shares classes between numerous virtual machine instances. It thus reduces unnecessary memory consumption.
Firefox does indeed suffer from some very serious memory management-related issues. For anyone who doesn't have an ideological connection to the project, it's obvious why that is.
About 8 months back I attempted to embed Gecko within an existing graphical user interface toolkit. Having heard so much from the open source community about how easy it was to do, I thought it would go rather quickly. Of course, it did not. The lack of up-to-date documentation (if such documentation there at all) and solid examples were some of the big problems.
But the overall architecture struck me as the worst part of Mozilla. Like it or not, it's overly complicated and convoluted in many areas. I admit that it's not easy to build well-designed software, but they so completely missed the boat it's unbelievable. However, it does make it obvious as to why many people complain about Firefox and Seamonkey running so slowly, in addition to suffering from huge memory consumption.
As for the embedding of Gecko, I said to hell with it. I took a page from Apple, and used KHTML instead. The loss in portability by not going with Gecko was well worth the far quicker development time, the lower memory consumption, the increased responsiveness, and the higher degree of stability of KHTML.
This is the sort of nonsense that real conservatives should stand up against. I'm talking about the conservatives who share more in common with libertarians, rather than liberals. The sort of people who realize that a strong economy is built around knowledge, which is directly derived from science, regardless of religion. Then again, such people have been purged from the ranks of the Republican Party over the last while.
He must have nothing better in his life than to fawn over celebrities like some sort of salivating moron.
But can you really blame him? Take a look at his life growing up in America. There is a very good chance that he would have been bombarded by years upon years of pro-celebrity propaganda.
Much like somebody in Middle Ages Europe would have been subservient to the Catholic Church, the vast majority of Americans have had Hollywood as the main influence in their life.
He has been taught all along to get excited about celebrity. While those of us who put more emphasis on education and scholarship do not care about Hollywood and pop culture celebrity, he knows nothing else. Thus it is understandable that he'd get so excited about meeting Bono.
Rosco P. Coltrane, you're quite a celebrity here at Slashdot. There are many here who admire you. I only wish there was a story you could tell us about how you used your celebrity to absolutely make the day (if not the entire year) of some young tech support technician.
Indeed. It's not just television stars. It's the same with vice presidents and other high-level underlings in corporations.
Often times CEOs are very intelligent, good-willed people who are easy enough to deal with. It's those under them who make it difficult. Sometimes the best thing to do with those type of people is to tell them flat out, "Fuck off. We have serious issues to deal with. We don't have time for your political shenanigans. They do not improve the efficiency of our firm."
Nothing scares such management more than the idea that they're impeding the financial success of their firm, especially if they're fairly high up in management.
I had one acquaintance who had taken a temporary job as a tech support technician. When he got calls from people like that, he'd apparently just insert words like "penis" and "assrape" into their conversations. He didn't care if he got fired, and considering the low quality of the firm he was with, the issue never even came up.
He said that saying such things would confuse the hell out of the callers, and their confusion would quickly override their arrogance and anger.
It'd be fun to do tech support for him. Use his own attitude against him. If he wants it done right away, take your time. If all he wanted was a Playstation controller plugged in, turn around and proceed to take the controller apart. Get it working eventually, of course. But make him wait. Of course, there might be financial ramifications for doing so. But it might just be worth it, to get his goat.
Why should Bono have to perform such a menial task? His time is far better spent criticizing various Western governments for not giving enough financial aide to developing nations, while at the same time he is pulling in millions upon millions of dollars from his music dealings.
One of my sons is a paramedic. He was telling me a while back about a recent string incidents they've been called to deal with on a frequent basis. Apparently at some raves a trend has developed wherein the participants insert alcohol bottles into one another's rectums. Some of the people there are apparently so fucked on acid that they'll attempt to insert large bottles of Baileys or Smirnoff, often leading to severe anal destruction.
You misunderstood what he was saying. He wasn't saying that images should only be 1 MB in size. He was referring to the storage capacity of 1 MB. It is often possible to store far more data per megabyte when using compression.
Think of it as the purchasing power of a dollar. It's not a case of everything costing exactly $1. It's about how much you can buy with $1. Think of buying an item today, versus buying an item a year from now (with a moderate inflation rate over that time period). You'll be able to buy more now with each dollar, as compared to what you can buy with each dollar in the future.
Compression allows you to fit more data in per 1 MB.
Try running Mozilla Seamonkey on 1 GHz hardware. It's possible, but not enjoyable. And remember, that's just an email client and a web browser. Likewise, try running OpenOffice. Again, it's not a good experience, even on a system with 1 GB or more of RAM.
Don't ever underestimate the ability of software to become far more bloated, and less efficient. It's a problem that has plagued the industry for years.
It's quite likely that devices in the far future will still be able to decode JPEG images. We can still manipulate tape and disc images from systems from the 1960s, as shown by the SIMH project. Of course, we can also read Old English texts from 700 AD. And we can read other texts from far before that.
If UNIX has taught us anything, it is that we should focus on creating small, highly-specialized applications (be them software, cell phones, cameras, or whatnot). Similarly, what Windows has taught us is that massive, monolithic applications are often failure-prone, unwieldy, and overly expensive.
That is why we need to take caution with these sorts of integrated devices. Soon enough they perform neither function reliably. It is often better to have a cell phone that is only a cell phone, and a camera that is often a camera.
It depends on how much you want to pay. Again, for those who are willing to put out the big bucks, such cameras are readily available.
What it comes down to is a tradeoff between image quality and storage space (where less storage space leads to a lower cost). Digital cameras wouldn't be affordable to the vast majority of people if that tradeoff wasn't made.
When it comes to cameras, storage space is one of those needs that cannot be satiated. People will always want more storage space. At least using JPEG, for instance, the available storage space can be maximized far more than with lossless compression methods.
Part of the problem may also be that GNOME isn't exactly the most well-written software out there. Their attempt to build an object model around C has often been listed as a main cause of the poor performance. A C++ compiler, even those which translate C++ code to C, can take into account the object model supported by C++, and can perform various optimizations. A C compiler has no awareness of the object model that GNOME uses, and hence is not at liberty to perform such optimizations. That is why we see a desktop environment like KDE, which is written in C++, being far more responsive than GNOME.
Another major problem is just the typical poor coding that plagues many pieces of software. Inexperienced coders can at times make bad choices regarding the algorithms to use, resulting in slow programs. CDE was developed by professionals, for instance, and that is shown by its high degree of performance, especially on modern hardware.
Indeed, I know full well that I can get drivers from their web site. I'm just not willing to buy a hardware product from them until they offer accelerated drivers for it.
Has anyone tried the Solaris drivers with other nVidia cards? I have gotten the Linux ones to work well, but the ones for FreeBSD were problematic. About six months ago I ported some visualization software from aging IRIX systems to Linux for a client. We used an nVidia card (I don't recall the exact model) in an Opteron system, and the accelerated OpenGL implementation included with the nVidia Linux drivers. The transition went very well, and the client got a boost in performance.
In the future I would be inclined to suggest the use of Solaris, but I am as yet unsure as to the quality of nVidia's Solaris drivers.
Again, it depends on what you consider "blogging" to be.
Nothing about the particular definition I supplied suggests that it has to be a human (or even a pigeon) posting the information.
You might suggest that a blog entry would have to have meaning. But that's not necessarily true. A blog in Chinese, for instance, would look far more like gibberish to somebody who only speaks English than a PHP-generated string of numerals.
It depends what you define "blogging" as. Do you consider the frequent posting of short blurbs of information to a publically-accessible web site to be blogging? If so, then this would indeed qualify as blogging.
It'd be like having a pay phone strapped to your back. Would you want to go to work like that? Would you like to try to have intercourse with your wife, only to have the phone ring as you're about to ejaculate?
It's quite obvious that this will hassle the birds.
Buzzwords are used to get the attention of people at large. This time they're using the word "blog", while other times people use words like "terrorist", "communist", "liberal", "synergy", "rich web application", and so forth.
Sure, the word is likely misapplied, but that's irrelevant. The main point is to get attention, which can at times lead directly to the receipt of financial support.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. You're completely correct. If the Mozilla crew want to take on Internet Explorer, then they can't have the general public debugging their software for them. That just won't fly.
Part of the problem is that it's far too easy for bugs to creep into Mozilla. The code is a small step above horrible, and the architecture isn't much better. A lack of up-to-date documentation leads to programmers not knowing which XPCOM interfaces are deprecated, and which aren't.
You can look at browsers like Konqueror and Opera, which offer a very comparable feature set to Firefox, yet do no suffer from the drawbacks. Not only that, but Konqueror and Opera are often described as feeling far more responsive, while being extremely stable. It's things like that which really impress the average Jill and Joe. Excessive memory usage will just perplex them, and likely result in them going back to Internet Explorer.
First of all, I wasn't embedding Gecko into a GTK+ application. Had you bothered to read my post, you would have seen that I was embedding it into another toolkit. So using GtkMozEmbed outright was for the most part out of the question. I didn't want to involve any more unnecessary code than I had to.
Second of all, it doesn't serve as a good example. Look at the code yourself. It's horribly convoluted. While it does indeed provide a fairly usable interface to the programmer who is using it, what's under the hood is an utter mess. That's directly caused by the poor design of Gecko itself.
What do you mean, making it "part of the system"? Are you suggesting that they be embedded within the Linux or BSD kernels, for instance? I would hope not, because for serious use that is a recipe for disaster.
Part of the problem with Java is that each VM has traditionally had its own copy of the Java class library. When you consider how huge the standard library is these days for Java, it's no wonder that even a small Java program consumes so much memory. And running several programs, each duplicating data from the others, is wasteful.
Apple has had for years a JVM that shares classes between numerous virtual machine instances. It thus reduces unnecessary memory consumption.
Firefox does indeed suffer from some very serious memory management-related issues. For anyone who doesn't have an ideological connection to the project, it's obvious why that is.
About 8 months back I attempted to embed Gecko within an existing graphical user interface toolkit. Having heard so much from the open source community about how easy it was to do, I thought it would go rather quickly. Of course, it did not. The lack of up-to-date documentation (if such documentation there at all) and solid examples were some of the big problems.
But the overall architecture struck me as the worst part of Mozilla. Like it or not, it's overly complicated and convoluted in many areas. I admit that it's not easy to build well-designed software, but they so completely missed the boat it's unbelievable. However, it does make it obvious as to why many people complain about Firefox and Seamonkey running so slowly, in addition to suffering from huge memory consumption.
As for the embedding of Gecko, I said to hell with it. I took a page from Apple, and used KHTML instead. The loss in portability by not going with Gecko was well worth the far quicker development time, the lower memory consumption, the increased responsiveness, and the higher degree of stability of KHTML.
This is the sort of nonsense that real conservatives should stand up against. I'm talking about the conservatives who share more in common with libertarians, rather than liberals. The sort of people who realize that a strong economy is built around knowledge, which is directly derived from science, regardless of religion. Then again, such people have been purged from the ranks of the Republican Party over the last while.
He must have nothing better in his life than to fawn over celebrities like some sort of salivating moron.
But can you really blame him? Take a look at his life growing up in America. There is a very good chance that he would have been bombarded by years upon years of pro-celebrity propaganda.
Much like somebody in Middle Ages Europe would have been subservient to the Catholic Church, the vast majority of Americans have had Hollywood as the main influence in their life.
He has been taught all along to get excited about celebrity. While those of us who put more emphasis on education and scholarship do not care about Hollywood and pop culture celebrity, he knows nothing else. Thus it is understandable that he'd get so excited about meeting Bono.
Rosco P. Coltrane, you're quite a celebrity here at Slashdot. There are many here who admire you. I only wish there was a story you could tell us about how you used your celebrity to absolutely make the day (if not the entire year) of some young tech support technician.
Indeed. It's not just television stars. It's the same with vice presidents and other high-level underlings in corporations.
Often times CEOs are very intelligent, good-willed people who are easy enough to deal with. It's those under them who make it difficult. Sometimes the best thing to do with those type of people is to tell them flat out, "Fuck off. We have serious issues to deal with. We don't have time for your political shenanigans. They do not improve the efficiency of our firm."
Nothing scares such management more than the idea that they're impeding the financial success of their firm, especially if they're fairly high up in management.
I had one acquaintance who had taken a temporary job as a tech support technician. When he got calls from people like that, he'd apparently just insert words like "penis" and "assrape" into their conversations. He didn't care if he got fired, and considering the low quality of the firm he was with, the issue never even came up.
He said that saying such things would confuse the hell out of the callers, and their confusion would quickly override their arrogance and anger.
It'd be fun to do tech support for him. Use his own attitude against him. If he wants it done right away, take your time. If all he wanted was a Playstation controller plugged in, turn around and proceed to take the controller apart. Get it working eventually, of course. But make him wait. Of course, there might be financial ramifications for doing so. But it might just be worth it, to get his goat.
Why should Bono have to perform such a menial task? His time is far better spent criticizing various Western governments for not giving enough financial aide to developing nations, while at the same time he is pulling in millions upon millions of dollars from his music dealings.
One of my sons is a paramedic. He was telling me a while back about a recent string incidents they've been called to deal with on a frequent basis. Apparently at some raves a trend has developed wherein the participants insert alcohol bottles into one another's rectums. Some of the people there are apparently so fucked on acid that they'll attempt to insert large bottles of Baileys or Smirnoff, often leading to severe anal destruction.
You misunderstood what he was saying. He wasn't saying that images should only be 1 MB in size. He was referring to the storage capacity of 1 MB. It is often possible to store far more data per megabyte when using compression.
Think of it as the purchasing power of a dollar. It's not a case of everything costing exactly $1. It's about how much you can buy with $1. Think of buying an item today, versus buying an item a year from now (with a moderate inflation rate over that time period). You'll be able to buy more now with each dollar, as compared to what you can buy with each dollar in the future.
Compression allows you to fit more data in per 1 MB.
Try running Mozilla Seamonkey on 1 GHz hardware. It's possible, but not enjoyable. And remember, that's just an email client and a web browser. Likewise, try running OpenOffice. Again, it's not a good experience, even on a system with 1 GB or more of RAM.
Don't ever underestimate the ability of software to become far more bloated, and less efficient. It's a problem that has plagued the industry for years.
It's quite likely that devices in the far future will still be able to decode JPEG images. We can still manipulate tape and disc images from systems from the 1960s, as shown by the SIMH project. Of course, we can also read Old English texts from 700 AD. And we can read other texts from far before that.
If UNIX has taught us anything, it is that we should focus on creating small, highly-specialized applications (be them software, cell phones, cameras, or whatnot). Similarly, what Windows has taught us is that massive, monolithic applications are often failure-prone, unwieldy, and overly expensive.
That is why we need to take caution with these sorts of integrated devices. Soon enough they perform neither function reliably. It is often better to have a cell phone that is only a cell phone, and a camera that is often a camera.
It depends on how much you want to pay. Again, for those who are willing to put out the big bucks, such cameras are readily available.
What it comes down to is a tradeoff between image quality and storage space (where less storage space leads to a lower cost). Digital cameras wouldn't be affordable to the vast majority of people if that tradeoff wasn't made.
When it comes to cameras, storage space is one of those needs that cannot be satiated. People will always want more storage space. At least using JPEG, for instance, the available storage space can be maximized far more than with lossless compression methods.
Part of the problem may also be that GNOME isn't exactly the most well-written software out there. Their attempt to build an object model around C has often been listed as a main cause of the poor performance. A C++ compiler, even those which translate C++ code to C, can take into account the object model supported by C++, and can perform various optimizations. A C compiler has no awareness of the object model that GNOME uses, and hence is not at liberty to perform such optimizations. That is why we see a desktop environment like KDE, which is written in C++, being far more responsive than GNOME.
Another major problem is just the typical poor coding that plagues many pieces of software. Inexperienced coders can at times make bad choices regarding the algorithms to use, resulting in slow programs. CDE was developed by professionals, for instance, and that is shown by its high degree of performance, especially on modern hardware.
Indeed, I know full well that I can get drivers from their web site. I'm just not willing to buy a hardware product from them until they offer accelerated drivers for it.
Has anyone tried the Solaris drivers with other nVidia cards? I have gotten the Linux ones to work well, but the ones for FreeBSD were problematic. About six months ago I ported some visualization software from aging IRIX systems to Linux for a client. We used an nVidia card (I don't recall the exact model) in an Opteron system, and the accelerated OpenGL implementation included with the nVidia Linux drivers. The transition went very well, and the client got a boost in performance.
In the future I would be inclined to suggest the use of Solaris, but I am as yet unsure as to the quality of nVidia's Solaris drivers.
When will they be releasing drivers for Linux, BSD and Solaris that support this card?
Again, it depends on what you consider "blogging" to be.
Nothing about the particular definition I supplied suggests that it has to be a human (or even a pigeon) posting the information.
You might suggest that a blog entry would have to have meaning. But that's not necessarily true. A blog in Chinese, for instance, would look far more like gibberish to somebody who only speaks English than a PHP-generated string of numerals.
It depends what you define "blogging" as. Do you consider the frequent posting of short blurbs of information to a publically-accessible web site to be blogging? If so, then this would indeed qualify as blogging.
It'd be like having a pay phone strapped to your back. Would you want to go to work like that? Would you like to try to have intercourse with your wife, only to have the phone ring as you're about to ejaculate?
It's quite obvious that this will hassle the birds.
Buzzwords are used to get the attention of people at large. This time they're using the word "blog", while other times people use words like "terrorist", "communist", "liberal", "synergy", "rich web application", and so forth.
Sure, the word is likely misapplied, but that's irrelevant. The main point is to get attention, which can at times lead directly to the receipt of financial support.
Soon enough people will shoot the birds, steal their phones, and then sell those phones.