It may have a faster javascript engine, but who cares if I have to wait 40 seconds for the dog to load.
This is like the start-up time of Windows being big news.
Not sure what you're doing with your browser, by my instance of Firefox usually starts up once a day at most, more commonly once every several days. I don't launch it everytime the fancy to load a webpage hits.
Chrome is pretty cool though, as is Safari, but thus far neither has come close to compelling me to abandon Firefox. I had stuck with Opera for some time before Firefox became convincing.
So why don't you go up there and show 'em how it's done?
I'm too busy perfecting my pop can linkup technology. ONCE AGAIN A PERFECT LINKUP!
And no, my post in no way diminished or under-estimated the technical accomplishments of that group. It was a comment on the highlighting of the speed thing, as if the shuttle sat there with a catcher's mitt and snared the hubble flying by at 17,200mph.
And anyways, relative speeds really are a mind blowing thing. The idea that we all are sitting on a spacecraft hurtling at inconceivable speeds...it's hard for our tiny Earthling brains to really comprehend.
So they're going 17,200mph relative to the surface of the Earth? How fast are they going relative to some arbitrarily fixed point in the universe? Relative to another galaxy, we're hurtling towards it at some million mph, so maybe count that in as well.
I am reaching for my pop can while we travel at over 1 million miles per hour. SUCCESS! POP CAN LINKUP COMPLETE!
The judgment was that they couldn't track a person without a warrant. I presume that if they had convinced a judge of probable cause before they lojacked the suspect, they would have been in the clear.
The reason they can't get 5 mil to finish it is because it won't sell very well. It'll end up with an AO rating(because violence aside boobies are bad in the USA) and the vast majority of resellers won't touch if with a fifty foot pole.
Resellers are increasingly irrelevant. This is the type of game that would be sold via a service like Steam, and it would do absolutely gangbusters. For all of the noise about retailers like Walmart, I doubt they account for that big of sales outside of "some dumb game to buy for the nephew" type purchases.
And the target for DNF isn't and hasn't been young kids. There are huge ranks of people like me who would pony up a premium price in a second -- we're far less likely to pirate or to waste our time on that because we actually have a reasonable income and a limited amount of time -- because Duke Nukem 3D was one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences we've ever had. Reading some of the other posts about Duke 3D...damn is it good to reminisce about.
For all of the games I played growing up, none came close to sticking with me like the Duke did.
You talk about them not getting funding, but they basically got funding for what...12 friggin' years? A whole giant team with little or nothing to show for it got bankrolled for that long, so obviously someone thought it was a good plan......to a point.
Their funding got cut off presumably because the investors obviously had heard the last excuse, and in a time of cutbacks they just couldn't justify it anymore (and it is ASTOUNDING that they've tolerated it for this long.)
DNF would have made shitloads of cash, but that's if it would ever have been released (and this video here is neat, but it isn't even close to the demo stage.)
may be the first step in understanding why the flu can cause such high mortality rates in normally healthy individuals
They speak generally about "the flu", but then use the extreme outliers of the Spanish flu of 1918, and the worst fears of the H1N1 virus, as their examples.
My understanding was that the flu virus hits the immuno-compromised much harder -- the young and the elderly being the most at risk, with it being a day or two off work for people with normal immune systems.
H1N1 is getting a lot of attention primarily because it was outside of the norm for the flu, hitting healthy individuals hard in Mexico, although not repeating that behaviour elsewhere.
That's not really why the copy protection is for. The protection is there so that you have to break or circumvent it in order to copy the product: It's like a lock on your front door. Sure it won't stop the robbers, but it will make it even more clear for the jury they intended to rob your house.
This is patently (har har) ridiculously.
Copy protection is for exactly what the GP stated it was for -- blocking casual copying. It makes it a bit of a hassle to copy illegally (though there are numerous examples where it's much less hassle getting a cracked copy, and this is where copy protection loses its already mislaid way), or it adds additional risk that many aren't willing to undertake. That crack software might install trojans, or that cracked copy might come pre-compromised.
To the submitters query, I would imagine that even low-level activation type copy protection has been dramatically successful for Microsoft, especially in the corporate space. While it used to be common to buy the single copy of Office and it happens to get installed on many PCs, activation pretty much eliminated that, and really who is going to risk a crack on the corporate network?
And to your flawed analogy, the lock on your front door is again to make the thief's work less convenient and more fraught with risk. Instead of simply walking in, they have to search for entrypoints and then enter in a way that is dramatically more likely to alert a neighbor (like breaking glass or forcing in.)
anyways, your attempts at flamebait won't draw me in - you've already shown in this, and previous comments that you're just out looking for a fight.
You added some noise dressed up with faux authoritarianism, and you consider being called on it a demand for a fight?
Hardly.
if you were willing to learn about something, and not just make inflammatory comments, that would be something else entirely. i feel kind of sorry for you.
Every word of your two posts have been pure troll. I enjoy trolls (it's a weakness), so yes, I do respond.
Tell me again what in Katz' resume is so impressive that my absolutely true statement, which was derived from the lips of Katz himself, is "ignorance"?
map/reduce solves a specific problem in data warehousing - column based lookups given specific rules, able to be broken down into atomics and performed in massive parallel. this allows for very cheap horizontal scaling over a large dataset.
That's great. No one said they had no use. Do you think you're refuting something? You aren't. Linking to Wikipedia doesn't really make you authoritative, as an aside.
this just shows ignorance. even just a cursory scan of damien's resume [209.85.173.132] says otherwise.
Ignorance indeed. Again, as stated otherwise, I was basically quoting from he himself said in a presentation that he gave. But to humor your point, both a cursory and a intensive look at that resume gives me zero hints that he has any credible database knowledge prior to CouchDB. Do you mind guiding where it says otherwise?
Slacker DBs like CouchDB and SimpleDB, have taken off for the simple reason that most developers have absolutely mediocre database knowledge or skills, and rather than learning it's just as easy to just wave it all off as obsolete.
It's no surprise that the creator of CouchDB, for instance, hadn't a clue about databases when he began his project. All of that built up knowledge just ignored while someone invented their own, and it's as rational as rolling your own encryption from scratch without the slightest clue about encryption algorithms or theories.
The funny thing is that, if the summary is true, it could have been TomTom, not MS, that shot first. Maybe MS suing TomTom was just retaliation for TomTom trying to collect royalties.
You and quite a few other posters are getting it quite wrong.
When Microsoft talks about remaining committed to a licensing solution, they're saying "we want these bitches to pay up, but they up and pulled the same stunt on us". They're talking about their own claims against TomTom, and since the maker has thus far refused to back down, and is now turning the same fire onto Microsoft, they're probably even more committed to reaching a licensing deal.
But hopefully it doesn't come to that. Hopefully this whole farce of software patents is blown wide open, and the growing protection racket that Microsoft has going on, adding a Microsoft tax to a lot of goods that you don't even know about, gets demolished.
TomTom is a frickin' hero. Just bought a GPS yesterday and I wish I got a TomTom (got a Garmin).
Contrary to all of the "GM is in bed with big oil!" nonsense, the reality is that the automakers have been battling the conflicting voiced desire of consumers to have more efficient vehicles, with the reality that cheap gas has them buying inefficient beasts when it comes to putting words into actions.
It's hard for products like the Volt to come to market in any real way when gas continues to drop to undercutting levels that eliminate the advantages, so the CEOs are asking for the price of gas to be normalized to a level that more realistically incorporates its full cost.
... I'd buy one of their dog-shit cars or invest in their dog-shit stock. They haven't made a decent car or sensible strategic business decision in 40 years.
GM trucks and SUVs are category leaders for buyers who are into that sort of thing. I'm not into that market, but there you have it. They did gangbuster sales when consumers demanded SUVs.
Their Saturn (RIP soon) Aura and Chevrolet Malibu are segment leading vehicles, and I would take either in a heartbeat over a "dog-shit" Camry or Altima or Accord. And honestly the resale value of some of the Japanese brands had been going through a little bit of a bubble -- sorry, your turd-muffin Civic isn't worth 95% of the new price 3 years later, even if it is inflated because of some buyers with a completely screwed up sense of valuation ("...but, it's a Honda! It'll last forever!" No it won't).
GM has a lot of perfectly good vehicles, but nonetheless there is this whole subsection of the market with their memes that they'll stick to, forever gargling the same nonsense because they're so in love with their Honda Civic or whatever. I have no loyalty to any car maker, but I wouldn't exclude it just because of some 20-year old rhetoric (though I would exclude it right now until there's a little more certainty about its longevity, though very soon the same will be said about all the car makers. It is getting ugly.)
The downside of the Atom motherboard for NAS is only two SATA ports. Mine is working fine as a combined SDTV MythTV box and 24/7 web/file server, but I think that eventually I'm going to have to replace it with a low-power AMD motherboard and CPU so I can add more hard drives and RAID them.
I almost went the route of making this a media center as well, however I use the Xbox 360 for that right now (in addition to a BR player), and held myself back from upgrading. However next will be a media center, where I'll get the board for the Core 2 with the onboard hardware h.264 and so on decoding (the DG45FC). This one I just plan on using as a hidden away little NAS / backup to a remote device / play around device, so it's copiously powered for that, and I only plan on using one HD for it, and the possibility of a USB one for local backups (wish it had an external eSATA, but alas. Maybe a cheap add-in PCI card).
Since I was on the kick, your mention of mini-itx had me doing a bit of looking, and I ended up getting a D945GCLF2 (an intel all-in-one MB with onboard 1Gbps ethernet and a dual-core Atom 330). It will be interesting to see how useful of a NAS I can make that into.
Came perilously close to buying a beagleboard this morning for a roll-it-yourself home media server (NAS / uPnP and so on), and just generally playing around with, when I discovered that it doesn't have onboard networking.
I don't want to have to hang a USB network dongle on it and then deal with the driver issues, not to mention that 1Gbps networking would be nice and the 480mpbs of USB seriously crimps that already (though then again storage would be on USB as well, so I suppose it wouldn't be a real limit).
Anyone know any competitive products that feature good performance and onboard networking...and maybe eSata (and maybe a h.264 processor chip along with 1080p functionality? Maybe a kitchen sink)? The BeagleBoard looks 90% there, but for toying around uses the lack of a network port just kills it for me.
(Sidenote: I have a DS106j NAS and it is a great device but is brutally underpowered. Despite heralding its 1Gbps network connection, the thing can't push 1/4 of the speed of 100Mbps networking, which makes it very slow for larger files and media browsing)
That would be terribly witty if it weren't for the fact that most Netbooks do have a SODIMM socket. And anyways, the lowest common denominator doesn't dictate the market.
I don't know what you call "modern", but I would say this is completely ridiculous and untrue. Especially given the enormous complexity of the modern web, Firefox is a utter marvel.
Firefox still has shitty concurrency(which would make up for its slowness to some extent), so one tab rendering will lock up the whole browser.
Strange - it doesn't lock up the whole browser for me. Did your rhetoric get stuck in 1999 or something, unable to make the Y2K transition?
But pretending that 2GB of memory and using something faster than a 486/33DX makes it fast and snappy it's just complete bullshit.
It is snap and ridiculously snappy. Just for the sake of debating the other commentator I had to fire up Internet Explorer. Groan. Launching new tabs taking seconds.
But if they keep spending release cycles adding things like the Awesomebar, and safebrowsing, then they aren't going to be at the top for much longer.
They are capable of working on more than one thing. In fact it's a bit humorous seeing all of these whines given that they're also working on a massive JavaScript speedup, dramatically reduced memory fragmentation, more control over caching, and so on and so on.
But the Firefox critics will still continue to pretend to be fans while spouting laughably ridiculous complaints about the browser.
Strangely, my browsing consists of more than sitting on the Google homepage.
Open four tabs in each - digg, slashdot, thestar.com and cnn.com. Firefox comes into a pretty significant lead already, but now trying actually doing anything.
But you keep on benchmarking sitting in an essentially empty browser if that makes you feel special.
Why ask Monty? Why not ask every major web player on the planet why they choose 'Microsoft Access level technology'.
You realize that MySQL wasn't invented yesterday, right? That it has plied its course for some 14 years now.
For about the first 7 of those, it was absolutely horrific, chosen only by idiots who had absolutely no idea what they're doing. Since then, sure it has started to gain features that every other RDBMS vendor has had long before, with each step the naive userbase suddenly coming into realization of what they were missing, finally abandoning the hilarious rhetoric they'd been spouting online since.
Though it's funny that now we're doing it all again with products like CouchDB. I laughed when I watched the video of the Damien guy where he professes to having started with no idea about databases, but why let them stop him? The history of MySQL follows the same sad tale. In both cases, people afraid of real databases just clutch onto their talking points and rhetoric and tell us that their super ridiculous chosen technology is somehow superior in its inferiority.
Another Firefox Version, and more bloat is added to this "clean and lean" version of the Mozilla browser...
My local electronics store just had a sale - 2GB DIMMs or SODIMMs for $14.99. My processor's average utilization during its ontime sits somewhere between 0.1% and 0.0%.
The lame "bloat" complaints grow tired, and are generally the fallback of people who just want to hate on Firefox and it's their standard talking point. Firefox easily holds its own against Chrome and Safari, brutalizes Internet Explorer, with the only really "winner" of the bloat competition being Opera (but really, who uses Opera? Joking...I started my departure from IE with Opera, and loved the mouse gestures, but then Firefox won me over).
Meanwhile, I see each version of Internet Explorer really better than the other.
Which proves exactly what I said above. Internet Explorer is the piggiest pig pig of the bunch, not only consuming the most storage and memory resources, but dramatically more CPU resources for modern browsing.
Firefox is a great browser, and they should continue making it better, albeit perhaps having functionality "loadable" and optional so Luddites computing on their 486/33 (DX!) can save the tired whines.
I'm not sure I agree with you at all. LAMP has its place.
I said nothing about Linux or Apache. LA certainly has its place, though if you look back in the early years of Linux -- remember back when you had to go through a bunch of kernel make files and hand edit all of your driver settings and so on -- there was the same sort of attempt to make lemonade out of lemons that we've seen with MySQL's multi-year mistake. At the time you had to actually compile every driver into the kernel, and this was heralded as a model of efficiency and custom suited kernels, and so on. Then it gained the loadable driver ability, and that farce was quickly discarded. We've seen the same thing with MySQL, where as it finally gains functionality that competitors have had for decades, we're finally hearing the end of the ridiculous "But it's *good* that it has laughable integrity" arguments.
Put it this way, I've administered MS-SQL, Oracle and MySQL databases, I'll take MySQL any day.
My question to him would be "Why? Why send so many naive and misled followers back to Microsoft Access level technology and choices when we should have taken those lessons and moved forward?" MySQL, like PHP, is one of those mistake technologies that thrived despite itself, and when you go to the root of it you find someone saying "I knew nothing about the technology, but just started building from scratch, re-making the mistakes every other product made 20 years earlier".
Netscape after being bought by AOL went down the tubes and IE was one of the best that was available for Windows in my opinion
Netscape was already a freshly killed corpse before AOL's purchase. Remember that IE 4 was already out for over a year before AOL got involved, and IE was galloping into a strong lead.
Bundling wasn't the reason for Netscape's death. It was Netscape's incompetence and lack of focus (read some of jwz's material from the time as the company was overtaken by suits), coupled with the fact that Microsoft could spend lots of money on something that really made them no revenue, while Netscape's ability to do that dried up as their server products lost traction.
Slashdot Mirror
This is like the start-up time of Windows being big news.
Not sure what you're doing with your browser, by my instance of Firefox usually starts up once a day at most, more commonly once every several days. I don't launch it everytime the fancy to load a webpage hits.
Chrome is pretty cool though, as is Safari, but thus far neither has come close to compelling me to abandon Firefox. I had stuck with Opera for some time before Firefox became convincing.
I'm too busy perfecting my pop can linkup technology. ONCE AGAIN A PERFECT LINKUP!
And no, my post in no way diminished or under-estimated the technical accomplishments of that group. It was a comment on the highlighting of the speed thing, as if the shuttle sat there with a catcher's mitt and snared the hubble flying by at 17,200mph.
And anyways, relative speeds really are a mind blowing thing. The idea that we all are sitting on a spacecraft hurtling at inconceivable speeds...it's hard for our tiny Earthling brains to really comprehend.
So they're going 17,200mph relative to the surface of the Earth? How fast are they going relative to some arbitrarily fixed point in the universe? Relative to another galaxy, we're hurtling towards it at some million mph, so maybe count that in as well.
I am reaching for my pop can while we travel at over 1 million miles per hour. SUCCESS! POP CAN LINKUP COMPLETE!
The judgment was that they couldn't track a person without a warrant. I presume that if they had convinced a judge of probable cause before they lojacked the suspect, they would have been in the clear.
Resellers are increasingly irrelevant. This is the type of game that would be sold via a service like Steam, and it would do absolutely gangbusters. For all of the noise about retailers like Walmart, I doubt they account for that big of sales outside of "some dumb game to buy for the nephew" type purchases.
And the target for DNF isn't and hasn't been young kids. There are huge ranks of people like me who would pony up a premium price in a second -- we're far less likely to pirate or to waste our time on that because we actually have a reasonable income and a limited amount of time -- because Duke Nukem 3D was one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences we've ever had. Reading some of the other posts about Duke 3D...damn is it good to reminisce about.
For all of the games I played growing up, none came close to sticking with me like the Duke did.
You talk about them not getting funding, but they basically got funding for what...12 friggin' years? A whole giant team with little or nothing to show for it got bankrolled for that long, so obviously someone thought it was a good plan... ...to a point.
Their funding got cut off presumably because the investors obviously had heard the last excuse, and in a time of cutbacks they just couldn't justify it anymore (and it is ASTOUNDING that they've tolerated it for this long.)
DNF would have made shitloads of cash, but that's if it would ever have been released (and this video here is neat, but it isn't even close to the demo stage.)
They speak generally about "the flu", but then use the extreme outliers of the Spanish flu of 1918, and the worst fears of the H1N1 virus, as their examples.
My understanding was that the flu virus hits the immuno-compromised much harder -- the young and the elderly being the most at risk, with it being a day or two off work for people with normal immune systems.
H1N1 is getting a lot of attention primarily because it was outside of the norm for the flu, hitting healthy individuals hard in Mexico, although not repeating that behaviour elsewhere.
This is patently (har har) ridiculously.
Copy protection is for exactly what the GP stated it was for -- blocking casual copying. It makes it a bit of a hassle to copy illegally (though there are numerous examples where it's much less hassle getting a cracked copy, and this is where copy protection loses its already mislaid way), or it adds additional risk that many aren't willing to undertake. That crack software might install trojans, or that cracked copy might come pre-compromised.
To the submitters query, I would imagine that even low-level activation type copy protection has been dramatically successful for Microsoft, especially in the corporate space. While it used to be common to buy the single copy of Office and it happens to get installed on many PCs, activation pretty much eliminated that, and really who is going to risk a crack on the corporate network?
And to your flawed analogy, the lock on your front door is again to make the thief's work less convenient and more fraught with risk. Instead of simply walking in, they have to search for entrypoints and then enter in a way that is dramatically more likely to alert a neighbor (like breaking glass or forcing in.)
You added some noise dressed up with faux authoritarianism, and you consider being called on it a demand for a fight?
Hardly.
Every word of your two posts have been pure troll. I enjoy trolls (it's a weakness), so yes, I do respond.
Tell me again what in Katz' resume is so impressive that my absolutely true statement, which was derived from the lips of Katz himself, is "ignorance"?
That's great. No one said they had no use. Do you think you're refuting something? You aren't. Linking to Wikipedia doesn't really make you authoritative, as an aside.
Ignorance indeed. Again, as stated otherwise, I was basically quoting from he himself said in a presentation that he gave. But to humor your point, both a cursory and a intensive look at that resume gives me zero hints that he has any credible database knowledge prior to CouchDB. Do you mind guiding where it says otherwise?
I'm just going on the statements he made about his own (lack of) knowledge in this video.
Slacker DBs like CouchDB and SimpleDB, have taken off for the simple reason that most developers have absolutely mediocre database knowledge or skills, and rather than learning it's just as easy to just wave it all off as obsolete.
It's no surprise that the creator of CouchDB, for instance, hadn't a clue about databases when he began his project. All of that built up knowledge just ignored while someone invented their own, and it's as rational as rolling your own encryption from scratch without the slightest clue about encryption algorithms or theories.
You and quite a few other posters are getting it quite wrong.
When Microsoft talks about remaining committed to a licensing solution, they're saying "we want these bitches to pay up, but they up and pulled the same stunt on us". They're talking about their own claims against TomTom, and since the maker has thus far refused to back down, and is now turning the same fire onto Microsoft, they're probably even more committed to reaching a licensing deal.
But hopefully it doesn't come to that. Hopefully this whole farce of software patents is blown wide open, and the growing protection racket that Microsoft has going on, adding a Microsoft tax to a lot of goods that you don't even know about, gets demolished.
TomTom is a frickin' hero. Just bought a GPS yesterday and I wish I got a TomTom (got a Garmin).
Contrary to all of the "GM is in bed with big oil!" nonsense, the reality is that the automakers have been battling the conflicting voiced desire of consumers to have more efficient vehicles, with the reality that cheap gas has them buying inefficient beasts when it comes to putting words into actions.
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/automakers-join-call-for-higher-federal-gas-tax/
It's hard for products like the Volt to come to market in any real way when gas continues to drop to undercutting levels that eliminate the advantages, so the CEOs are asking for the price of gas to be normalized to a level that more realistically incorporates its full cost.
GM trucks and SUVs are category leaders for buyers who are into that sort of thing. I'm not into that market, but there you have it. They did gangbuster sales when consumers demanded SUVs.
Their Saturn (RIP soon) Aura and Chevrolet Malibu are segment leading vehicles, and I would take either in a heartbeat over a "dog-shit" Camry or Altima or Accord. And honestly the resale value of some of the Japanese brands had been going through a little bit of a bubble -- sorry, your turd-muffin Civic isn't worth 95% of the new price 3 years later, even if it is inflated because of some buyers with a completely screwed up sense of valuation ("...but, it's a Honda! It'll last forever!" No it won't).
GM has a lot of perfectly good vehicles, but nonetheless there is this whole subsection of the market with their memes that they'll stick to, forever gargling the same nonsense because they're so in love with their Honda Civic or whatever. I have no loyalty to any car maker, but I wouldn't exclude it just because of some 20-year old rhetoric (though I would exclude it right now until there's a little more certainty about its longevity, though very soon the same will be said about all the car makers. It is getting ugly.)
I almost went the route of making this a media center as well, however I use the Xbox 360 for that right now (in addition to a BR player), and held myself back from upgrading. However next will be a media center, where I'll get the board for the Core 2 with the onboard hardware h.264 and so on decoding (the DG45FC). This one I just plan on using as a hidden away little NAS / backup to a remote device / play around device, so it's copiously powered for that, and I only plan on using one HD for it, and the possibility of a USB one for local backups (wish it had an external eSATA, but alas. Maybe a cheap add-in PCI card).
Since I was on the kick, your mention of mini-itx had me doing a bit of looking, and I ended up getting a D945GCLF2 (an intel all-in-one MB with onboard 1Gbps ethernet and a dual-core Atom 330). It will be interesting to see how useful of a NAS I can make that into.
Came perilously close to buying a beagleboard this morning for a roll-it-yourself home media server (NAS / uPnP and so on), and just generally playing around with, when I discovered that it doesn't have onboard networking.
I don't want to have to hang a USB network dongle on it and then deal with the driver issues, not to mention that 1Gbps networking would be nice and the 480mpbs of USB seriously crimps that already (though then again storage would be on USB as well, so I suppose it wouldn't be a real limit).
Anyone know any competitive products that feature good performance and onboard networking...and maybe eSata (and maybe a h.264 processor chip along with 1080p functionality? Maybe a kitchen sink)? The BeagleBoard looks 90% there, but for toying around uses the lack of a network port just kills it for me.
(Sidenote: I have a DS106j NAS and it is a great device but is brutally underpowered. Despite heralding its 1Gbps network connection, the thing can't push 1/4 of the speed of 100Mbps networking, which makes it very slow for larger files and media browsing)
That would be terribly witty if it weren't for the fact that most Netbooks do have a SODIMM socket. And anyways, the lowest common denominator doesn't dictate the market.
I don't know what you call "modern", but I would say this is completely ridiculous and untrue. Especially given the enormous complexity of the modern web, Firefox is a utter marvel.
Strange - it doesn't lock up the whole browser for me. Did your rhetoric get stuck in 1999 or something, unable to make the Y2K transition?
It is snap and ridiculously snappy. Just for the sake of debating the other commentator I had to fire up Internet Explorer. Groan. Launching new tabs taking seconds.
They are capable of working on more than one thing. In fact it's a bit humorous seeing all of these whines given that they're also working on a massive JavaScript speedup, dramatically reduced memory fragmentation, more control over caching, and so on and so on.
But the Firefox critics will still continue to pretend to be fans while spouting laughably ridiculous complaints about the browser.
Strangely, my browsing consists of more than sitting on the Google homepage.
Open four tabs in each - digg, slashdot, thestar.com and cnn.com. Firefox comes into a pretty significant lead already, but now trying actually doing anything.
But you keep on benchmarking sitting in an essentially empty browser if that makes you feel special.
You realize that MySQL wasn't invented yesterday, right? That it has plied its course for some 14 years now.
For about the first 7 of those, it was absolutely horrific, chosen only by idiots who had absolutely no idea what they're doing. Since then, sure it has started to gain features that every other RDBMS vendor has had long before, with each step the naive userbase suddenly coming into realization of what they were missing, finally abandoning the hilarious rhetoric they'd been spouting online since.
Though it's funny that now we're doing it all again with products like CouchDB. I laughed when I watched the video of the Damien guy where he professes to having started with no idea about databases, but why let them stop him? The history of MySQL follows the same sad tale. In both cases, people afraid of real databases just clutch onto their talking points and rhetoric and tell us that their super ridiculous chosen technology is somehow superior in its inferiority.
My local electronics store just had a sale - 2GB DIMMs or SODIMMs for $14.99. My processor's average utilization during its ontime sits somewhere between 0.1% and 0.0%.
The lame "bloat" complaints grow tired, and are generally the fallback of people who just want to hate on Firefox and it's their standard talking point. Firefox easily holds its own against Chrome and Safari, brutalizes Internet Explorer, with the only really "winner" of the bloat competition being Opera (but really, who uses Opera? Joking...I started my departure from IE with Opera, and loved the mouse gestures, but then Firefox won me over).
Which proves exactly what I said above. Internet Explorer is the piggiest pig pig of the bunch, not only consuming the most storage and memory resources, but dramatically more CPU resources for modern browsing.
Firefox is a great browser, and they should continue making it better, albeit perhaps having functionality "loadable" and optional so Luddites computing on their 486/33 (DX!) can save the tired whines.
I said nothing about Linux or Apache. LA certainly has its place, though if you look back in the early years of Linux -- remember back when you had to go through a bunch of kernel make files and hand edit all of your driver settings and so on -- there was the same sort of attempt to make lemonade out of lemons that we've seen with MySQL's multi-year mistake. At the time you had to actually compile every driver into the kernel, and this was heralded as a model of efficiency and custom suited kernels, and so on. Then it gained the loadable driver ability, and that farce was quickly discarded. We've seen the same thing with MySQL, where as it finally gains functionality that competitors have had for decades, we're finally hearing the end of the ridiculous "But it's *good* that it has laughable integrity" arguments.
Well since you put it that way...
My question to him would be "Why? Why send so many naive and misled followers back to Microsoft Access level technology and choices when we should have taken those lessons and moved forward?" MySQL, like PHP, is one of those mistake technologies that thrived despite itself, and when you go to the root of it you find someone saying "I knew nothing about the technology, but just started building from scratch, re-making the mistakes every other product made 20 years earlier".
Netscape was already a freshly killed corpse before AOL's purchase. Remember that IE 4 was already out for over a year before AOL got involved, and IE was galloping into a strong lead.
Bundling wasn't the reason for Netscape's death. It was Netscape's incompetence and lack of focus (read some of jwz's material from the time as the company was overtaken by suits), coupled with the fact that Microsoft could spend lots of money on something that really made them no revenue, while Netscape's ability to do that dried up as their server products lost traction.