"I won't be downloading any new versions of Firefox--nor will I enable automatic updates--until they fix the danged memory leaks that have been present since they began their whirlwind upgrade cycle with FF 4.0. Chrome is a handy replacement for what used to be a reliable friend--Firefox."
Oh man, as someone that hung onto 3.62 forever I can feel your pain, but Chrome? That thing is so creepy I couldnt keep it installed for a week.
I have found that the Firefox ESR with a LOT of customisation, including downloading extensions to fix some of the breakage, is the best option out there for me. Firefox "17" with bugfixes but no feature additions seems reasonably stable and has no noticeable memory leaks for me. If they are happening on the order of hours the best solution may be the fast restart extension.
Still eagerly awaiting a sane fork of firefox. I would be happy to pitch in some but I am far from capable of coding or funding it without lots of others onboard.
This is interesting, you see, I have heard this before. There's a lot of handwaving about having to support old programs that YOU dont use anymore (which you equate to NO ONE uses anymore, incorrectly, but I digress) but you dont give me a single concrete example where this has actually caused any sort of problem. I dont hack the xorg code to say myself but I have heard people that should know telling me that while there is a ton of legacy code the maintainers have to check occasionally, it's not a big deal for them, and it doesnt affect anyone else. The only bit in here that I know to be true is that it increases disk requirements but then again it seems to me like if disk space came up in the context of a discussion about using a WM vs a DE, you would be one of the ones calling me an idiot for caring about disk space in this day and age.
In my experience the only thing that makes X slow is unsupported hardware. Which is understandable. On systems where the necessary support is implemented it tends to run faster than Windows/Mac/Slowaris or whatever else the computer can run. I havent seen any convincing evidence that the performance hit from backward compatibility or from the extra abstraction layer (which permits remote X among other things) is very significant at all. And it's not like this is really stuff no one uses. Thinking that is just myopic.
Yeah, dont hold your breath on that. They are pretty much committed to the line that their interface is great, it's you users that suck, and need to be shipped off for re-education if you dont like it.
In reality it's a trainwreck that epitomises what you can get out of a large group of 'designers' who dont have any real work to do.
The larger question I have, and asked many times before without getting any sort of satisfying answer is - what does Wayland provide that X cannot? X is mostly well tested very mature tech and it seems to work fine, and provide MORE not less capability than Wayland.
The search is a minor timesaver but really doesnt change much. Sometimes instead of using alt-tab to reach the cmd window and type a command, I hit the win key and type it instead, which may save one or two keystrokes. But some commands, you still have to open the command window anyway, so what it saves in keystrokes it risks losing again in having to think about whether the new method will work or not on a particular command.
The sea-floors will certainly sink deeper as ocean rises. As continental masses rise, yes the edge of the shelf may come up, extending the coastline, slightly reducing total size of ocean. But as long as this is only coastal crust coming up we are talking about a negligible affect on the world ocean, because that is a very shallow area to begin with and the bulk of the ocean is much deeper. And you see, it is one of many effects, working at cross purposes, some things working to raise the sea level and other things working to effectively lower it. The equation to predict the actual net outcome would be quite a bit more complicated than you thought, and it seems unlikely we are even aware of all the variables involved.
What's unrealistic? You are simply making numbers up, without any data to support them. I could do the same if I wanted to, it proves nothing at all.
"I did not. If the plates rise, the area of sea becomes smaller, so the "sea level" is rising."
Incorrect. There are two types of plates. When ice melts, one type will sink (the sea floors in many areas will move deeper into the mantle under increased water weight) while most of the other type will raise (continental plates weighted down under ice which will be released.) This means deeper oceans and higher land, both of which means LOWER sea levels. But it's not a simple formula to figure out the net results, which might vary greatly (Africa, lacking any ice, would see the most raise/least increase in sea level, while Antarctica, currently covered in deep glaciers, would certainly rebound heavily gaining both altitude and land area.
"That is not an argument but an insult."
Unfortunately, it appears to simply be a true observation. See above.
Your "calculations" remain laughably unrealistic. You even moved the number in the wrong direction when supposedly taking into account the movement of plates - which you clearly do not understand at even an elementary school level.
I am not a huge fan of ICEWM personally but the same thing seems to have happened as with WindowMaker. The thing is pretty much done. There's nothing exciting left to be done, maybe a little updating of compatibility features (but that is never fun, when you just have to take what the other project gives you as-is and cant do anything cool with it yourself) and an occasional small bugfix is needed to keep it going though. But most everyone DOES have orders of magnitude more computing resources than they need these days, so it's easy to go with the herd mentality and move to one of the other projects, particularly if you are an employed programmer with plenty of cash and free time - exactly the people who normally volunteer to do this sort of work on projects that are still useful.
The thing is, these projects obviously ARE still useful to some of us. And I didnt read his question as implying he didnt want to pay at all - but that he didnt feel he could pay it all alone. If we pooled our resources it really doesnt seem like it would take too many people pitching in $50/year or something for needed maintenance work on a program of this size and scope.
"Not more complicated than calculating how much area a cubic meter of sand will cover if you distribute it in a 1cm thick layer.
Only the numbers are "different" (and bigger)."
Unfortunately you are entirely wrong. I already hinted at at least one reason for this but it seems to have sailed right over your head. You see, the earth is NOT a flat box with walls which can be filled uniformly with water. It is roughly a globe, but far from a perfect one - the surface is covered in giant plates of rock that MOVE. Ice sheets in place on most continents actually weigh those plates down, pressing them further into the underlying magma, and as they melt the continents rise up. Imagine a toy boat, floating in a pond. Put an ice-cube on it, it dips lower in the water. But as the ice cube melts (assuming it can run off instead of being trapped in the boat) the boat rises higher again.
Calculating the actual net effect of a glacier melt on sea levels is thus a much more complicated task than you imagined. And I wouldnt be at all surprised if I have only scratched the surface with this extra variable - there may well be several more I am completely unaware of.
It increases RAM requirements significantly as well.
"If you got space for a single movie you got space for KDE."
And what if I have devices that dont have space for a movie? Particularly free and un-needed?
Or what if I have more disk and ram than I know what to do with, I am still supposed to go through the equivalent of downloading a movie just to manage my windows? Whether I have the space/ram/time/bandwidth or not does not settle the question of whether or not I really want to use it on this in particular.
"That's like the lamest "hater" argument ever."
Wait a moment, let me get this straight, preferring a window manager to your DE makes me a 'hater?'
FFS grow up.
"You realize you can customize your install and it's not a monolithic package in any distro, do you?"
It's still hundreds of megabytes for the absolute minimum install just to get kwin (the window manager in KDE) up and running. Why would I do that when I can get a WM I like better, and do it with a tiny fraction of the resources?
I suspect if you've bothered to try and calculate it you have left a few things out. There was a time a few million years ago when the planet was that hot, and London was not under nearly that much water - it appears to have been a swamp.
Calculating the end result of changes like that is extremely complicated, and even people that have spent their entire life on the subject may easily miscalculate. Melting ice caps historically have *increased* elevations across Scandinavia, for instance, though that doesnt affect London directly.
In fact we arent heading *into* an ice-age, we are living in one. The climate we consider normal is an ice age climate, specifically the interglacial, periods colder than typical for earth, but not the most extreme cold in earths cycle - times when there are solid ice caps at the poles, but they dont extend very far from them. The next phase of the ice-age climate is the shift from interglacial to glacial, a period of greater cold when the glaciers will grow down towards the equators as they have done many times before. And that's 'imminent' on a timescale of tens of thousands of years.
What we're being told to worry about now is that our co2 emissions will cause such drastic warming as to over-ride the Milankovitch and other natural cycles and vault us quickly OUT of our current ice-age, into a hot-house earth state - a much more common state for earth in general but one we should naturally have a few million years to prepare for. In that state, the ice-caps disappear entirely, and the next thing you know you have alligators and palm trees in London again.
Frankly I suspect the forces involved need to be understood a little better before anyone is going to know for sure what will actually wind up happening. Climatology is a rather young discipline tasked with sorting out some incredibly complicated subject matter.
Obama is hardly going to pardon someone that outed his own criminal behaviour.
But what should be happening is a special prosecutor. Snowden would be easy to get back in the country, just give him immunity. I am sure he would be happy to come back and testify in a real court about the crimes he has knowledge of.
It doesnt happen in exactly the same way with proprietary software. Instead of the developers going off to chase whatever they think is new and exciting, they get sent off every so often to chase what marketing thinks is new and exciting, but either way projects are never finished. Programs which become generally mature, in danger of reaching bug free and feature complete, are always phased out in favor of new and shiny one way or another.
What's the KDE base system? 500 megs or more these days? I havent looked at it in years. But tell me, why would I download and install all that for a window manager when I can get one that works better in less than a meg? Really?
Dont get me wrong, KDE is ok. A lot better than GNOME. But I think it's absolutely ludicrous to talk about installing KDE just to get a WM. Which is what we are talking about. ICEWM, it's even in the name.
What he wants, and your analysis practically fell across it without you ever noticing, is simply someone to do maintenance work so he can keep using the window manager he knows and loves. What's so wrong with that?
The hardest thing would be getting a coder that's mature enough to do the job properly. It would take very little time to simply maintain the mature code and occasionally stomp a bug. Unfortunately if you give this job to a younger coder, regardless of what country he's from, you stand a very high chance of seeing him go crazy wanting to add new features and just screw it all up.
"Linux and BSD are a bit different when you get to the console."
Actually they arent. Dont let the default shells fool you. You can get bash on BSD and Zsh on linux. Or you could install ksh on either one for that matter.
If you install and use bash and other gnu tools in preference to the BSD tools, you would wind up with GNU/BSD.
"Right now, in this post, what I am against is bogus arguments either way."
And you did that quite well.
(And if there was a big meta-package I could install on Windows to add all the GNU tools, ported and compiled for Windows, THEN I might talk about GNU/Windows. I keep waiting for someone to package up ReactOS like that to support netbooks, but I digress.)
And btw, I think a big part of why Stallman draws a red line on his terminology here is out of fear of exactly the sort of deliberate confusion that was used above us in this thread. 'Android is linux' is technically true, but since so many people hear 'linux' and think of a fully functioning GNU OS that happens to use linux as the kernel, it's very (deliberately) misleading. Android is really little if any more open than OSX. Both exploit a free kernel by hooking it into unfree userland and incorporating unfree drivers without which it is no longer functional.
Slashdot Mirror
"I won't be downloading any new versions of Firefox--nor will I enable automatic updates--until they fix the danged memory leaks that have been present since they began their whirlwind upgrade cycle with FF 4.0. Chrome is a handy replacement for what used to be a reliable friend--Firefox."
Oh man, as someone that hung onto 3.62 forever I can feel your pain, but Chrome? That thing is so creepy I couldnt keep it installed for a week.
I have found that the Firefox ESR with a LOT of customisation, including downloading extensions to fix some of the breakage, is the best option out there for me. Firefox "17" with bugfixes but no feature additions seems reasonably stable and has no noticeable memory leaks for me. If they are happening on the order of hours the best solution may be the fast restart extension.
Still eagerly awaiting a sane fork of firefox. I would be happy to pitch in some but I am far from capable of coding or funding it without lots of others onboard.
Looks like several more important bugfixes.
"I'm not even going to try and guess what you'd type into cmd to get that."
inetcpl.cpl
It's occasionally useful to find something but for the most part I already know the commands for the things I want to do.
This is interesting, you see, I have heard this before. There's a lot of handwaving about having to support old programs that YOU dont use anymore (which you equate to NO ONE uses anymore, incorrectly, but I digress) but you dont give me a single concrete example where this has actually caused any sort of problem. I dont hack the xorg code to say myself but I have heard people that should know telling me that while there is a ton of legacy code the maintainers have to check occasionally, it's not a big deal for them, and it doesnt affect anyone else. The only bit in here that I know to be true is that it increases disk requirements but then again it seems to me like if disk space came up in the context of a discussion about using a WM vs a DE, you would be one of the ones calling me an idiot for caring about disk space in this day and age.
In my experience the only thing that makes X slow is unsupported hardware. Which is understandable. On systems where the necessary support is implemented it tends to run faster than Windows/Mac/Slowaris or whatever else the computer can run. I havent seen any convincing evidence that the performance hit from backward compatibility or from the extra abstraction layer (which permits remote X among other things) is very significant at all. And it's not like this is really stuff no one uses. Thinking that is just myopic.
Yeah, dont hold your breath on that. They are pretty much committed to the line that their interface is great, it's you users that suck, and need to be shipped off for re-education if you dont like it.
In reality it's a trainwreck that epitomises what you can get out of a large group of 'designers' who dont have any real work to do.
The larger question I have, and asked many times before without getting any sort of satisfying answer is - what does Wayland provide that X cannot? X is mostly well tested very mature tech and it seems to work fine, and provide MORE not less capability than Wayland.
NIH syndrome?
The search is a minor timesaver but really doesnt change much. Sometimes instead of using alt-tab to reach the cmd window and type a command, I hit the win key and type it instead, which may save one or two keystrokes. But some commands, you still have to open the command window anyway, so what it saves in keystrokes it risks losing again in having to think about whether the new method will work or not on a particular command.
The sea-floors will certainly sink deeper as ocean rises. As continental masses rise, yes the edge of the shelf may come up, extending the coastline, slightly reducing total size of ocean. But as long as this is only coastal crust coming up we are talking about a negligible affect on the world ocean, because that is a very shallow area to begin with and the bulk of the ocean is much deeper. And you see, it is one of many effects, working at cross purposes, some things working to raise the sea level and other things working to effectively lower it. The equation to predict the actual net outcome would be quite a bit more complicated than you thought, and it seems unlikely we are even aware of all the variables involved.
What's unrealistic? You are simply making numbers up, without any data to support them. I could do the same if I wanted to, it proves nothing at all.
"I did not. If the plates rise, the area of sea becomes smaller, so the "sea level" is rising."
Incorrect. There are two types of plates. When ice melts, one type will sink (the sea floors in many areas will move deeper into the mantle under increased water weight) while most of the other type will raise (continental plates weighted down under ice which will be released.) This means deeper oceans and higher land, both of which means LOWER sea levels. But it's not a simple formula to figure out the net results, which might vary greatly (Africa, lacking any ice, would see the most raise/least increase in sea level, while Antarctica, currently covered in deep glaciers, would certainly rebound heavily gaining both altitude and land area.
"That is not an argument but an insult."
Unfortunately, it appears to simply be a true observation. See above.
Your "calculations" remain laughably unrealistic. You even moved the number in the wrong direction when supposedly taking into account the movement of plates - which you clearly do not understand at even an elementary school level.
I am not a huge fan of ICEWM personally but the same thing seems to have happened as with WindowMaker. The thing is pretty much done. There's nothing exciting left to be done, maybe a little updating of compatibility features (but that is never fun, when you just have to take what the other project gives you as-is and cant do anything cool with it yourself) and an occasional small bugfix is needed to keep it going though. But most everyone DOES have orders of magnitude more computing resources than they need these days, so it's easy to go with the herd mentality and move to one of the other projects, particularly if you are an employed programmer with plenty of cash and free time - exactly the people who normally volunteer to do this sort of work on projects that are still useful.
The thing is, these projects obviously ARE still useful to some of us. And I didnt read his question as implying he didnt want to pay at all - but that he didnt feel he could pay it all alone. If we pooled our resources it really doesnt seem like it would take too many people pitching in $50/year or something for needed maintenance work on a program of this size and scope.
"Not more complicated than calculating how much area a cubic meter of sand will cover if you distribute it in a 1cm thick layer.
Only the numbers are "different" (and bigger)."
Unfortunately you are entirely wrong. I already hinted at at least one reason for this but it seems to have sailed right over your head. You see, the earth is NOT a flat box with walls which can be filled uniformly with water. It is roughly a globe, but far from a perfect one - the surface is covered in giant plates of rock that MOVE. Ice sheets in place on most continents actually weigh those plates down, pressing them further into the underlying magma, and as they melt the continents rise up. Imagine a toy boat, floating in a pond. Put an ice-cube on it, it dips lower in the water. But as the ice cube melts (assuming it can run off instead of being trapped in the boat) the boat rises higher again.
Calculating the actual net effect of a glacier melt on sea levels is thus a much more complicated task than you imagined. And I wouldnt be at all surprised if I have only scratched the surface with this extra variable - there may well be several more I am completely unaware of.
Only important to people silly enough to own iDevices.
Why doesnt Apple follow the spec here? So they can charge you extra for accessories. Why do you keep doing business with them?
No. People are really that stupid.
"Dude, it's disk space, not RAM."
It increases RAM requirements significantly as well.
"If you got space for a single movie you got space for KDE."
And what if I have devices that dont have space for a movie? Particularly free and un-needed?
Or what if I have more disk and ram than I know what to do with, I am still supposed to go through the equivalent of downloading a movie just to manage my windows? Whether I have the space/ram/time/bandwidth or not does not settle the question of whether or not I really want to use it on this in particular.
"That's like the lamest "hater" argument ever."
Wait a moment, let me get this straight, preferring a window manager to your DE makes me a 'hater?'
FFS grow up.
"You realize you can customize your install and it's not a monolithic package in any distro, do you?"
It's still hundreds of megabytes for the absolute minimum install just to get kwin (the window manager in KDE) up and running. Why would I do that when I can get a WM I like better, and do it with a tiny fraction of the resources?
As I read it he wasnt disputing that the AOSP is hosted by google, he was disputing that it is the entire userland.
Are you certain of that?
I suspect if you've bothered to try and calculate it you have left a few things out. There was a time a few million years ago when the planet was that hot, and London was not under nearly that much water - it appears to have been a swamp.
Calculating the end result of changes like that is extremely complicated, and even people that have spent their entire life on the subject may easily miscalculate. Melting ice caps historically have *increased* elevations across Scandinavia, for instance, though that doesnt affect London directly.
In fact we arent heading *into* an ice-age, we are living in one. The climate we consider normal is an ice age climate, specifically the interglacial, periods colder than typical for earth, but not the most extreme cold in earths cycle - times when there are solid ice caps at the poles, but they dont extend very far from them. The next phase of the ice-age climate is the shift from interglacial to glacial, a period of greater cold when the glaciers will grow down towards the equators as they have done many times before. And that's 'imminent' on a timescale of tens of thousands of years.
What we're being told to worry about now is that our co2 emissions will cause such drastic warming as to over-ride the Milankovitch and other natural cycles and vault us quickly OUT of our current ice-age, into a hot-house earth state - a much more common state for earth in general but one we should naturally have a few million years to prepare for. In that state, the ice-caps disappear entirely, and the next thing you know you have alligators and palm trees in London again.
Frankly I suspect the forces involved need to be understood a little better before anyone is going to know for sure what will actually wind up happening. Climatology is a rather young discipline tasked with sorting out some incredibly complicated subject matter.
"The NSA provides a valuable service to this country and should not be limited by red tape." That 'red tape' is called the Constitution.
Obama is hardly going to pardon someone that outed his own criminal behaviour.
But what should be happening is a special prosecutor. Snowden would be easy to get back in the country, just give him immunity. I am sure he would be happy to come back and testify in a real court about the crimes he has knowledge of.
It doesnt happen in exactly the same way with proprietary software. Instead of the developers going off to chase whatever they think is new and exciting, they get sent off every so often to chase what marketing thinks is new and exciting, but either way projects are never finished. Programs which become generally mature, in danger of reaching bug free and feature complete, are always phased out in favor of new and shiny one way or another.
What's the KDE base system? 500 megs or more these days? I havent looked at it in years. But tell me, why would I download and install all that for a window manager when I can get one that works better in less than a meg? Really?
Dont get me wrong, KDE is ok. A lot better than GNOME. But I think it's absolutely ludicrous to talk about installing KDE just to get a WM. Which is what we are talking about. ICEWM, it's even in the name.
"So what exactly does he want?"
What he wants, and your analysis practically fell across it without you ever noticing, is simply someone to do maintenance work so he can keep using the window manager he knows and loves. What's so wrong with that?
The hardest thing would be getting a coder that's mature enough to do the job properly. It would take very little time to simply maintain the mature code and occasionally stomp a bug. Unfortunately if you give this job to a younger coder, regardless of what country he's from, you stand a very high chance of seeing him go crazy wanting to add new features and just screw it all up.
Not that I agree with his original point, but...
"Linux and BSD are a bit different when you get to the console."
Actually they arent. Dont let the default shells fool you. You can get bash on BSD and Zsh on linux. Or you could install ksh on either one for that matter.
If you install and use bash and other gnu tools in preference to the BSD tools, you would wind up with GNU/BSD.
"Right now, in this post, what I am against is bogus arguments either way."
And you did that quite well.
(And if there was a big meta-package I could install on Windows to add all the GNU tools, ported and compiled for Windows, THEN I might talk about GNU/Windows. I keep waiting for someone to package up ReactOS like that to support netbooks, but I digress.)
And btw, I think a big part of why Stallman draws a red line on his terminology here is out of fear of exactly the sort of deliberate confusion that was used above us in this thread. 'Android is linux' is technically true, but since so many people hear 'linux' and think of a fully functioning GNU OS that happens to use linux as the kernel, it's very (deliberately) misleading. Android is really little if any more open than OSX. Both exploit a free kernel by hooking it into unfree userland and incorporating unfree drivers without which it is no longer functional.