Comment Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome (Score 1) 383
I was making a general point, not especially directed at you.
Sorry your experience with Firefox has worse than the norm, though.
Comment Re:Both Firefox and Chrome have big problems (Score 1) 383
Firefox 10 or 11 will assume add-ons are compatible by default, which is more or less what you're asking for
There will be a few exceptions, such as add-ons with binary components and add-ons that are known to not work.
Comment Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome (Score 1) 383
Remember: A bug not manifesting in your instance of a program is not the same as the program being bug free.
Conversely, a bug manifesting in your instance of a program is not the same as the program being a bug-ridden piece of crap written by insane monkeys.
Could Crowd-Sourced Direct Democracy Work? 594
maccallr writes "The Occupy movement is getting everyone talking about how to fix the world's economic (and social, environmental, ...) problems. It is even trialling new forms of 'open' democracy. Trouble is, it's easy to criticize the physical occupiers for being unrepresentative of the general population — and much of their debating time is spent on practical rather than policy issues. Well-meaning but naive occupiers could be susceptible to exploitation by the political establishment and vested interests. In the UK, virtual occupiers are using Google Moderator to propose and debate policy in the comfort of their homes (where, presumably, it is easier to find out stuff you didn't know). Could something like this be done on a massive scale (national or global) to reach consensus on what needs to be done? How do you maximize participation by 'normal folk' on complex issues? What level of participation could be considered quorate? How do you deal with block votes? What can we learn from electronic petitions and Iceland's crowd-sourced constitution? Is the 'Occupy' branding appropriate? What other pitfalls are there? Or are existing models of democracy and dictatorship fit for purpose?"
One issue I see with a global version of something like this is all of the people in the world who haven't even heard of the Internet.
Submission + - HP to introduce flash replacement in 2013 (electronicsweekly.com)
Spy Hunter writes: Memristors are the basis of a new memory technology being developed by HP and Hynix. At the International Electronics Forum 2011 today Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs, said "We’re planning to put a replacement chip on the market to go up against flash within a year and a half." "We’re running hundreds of wafers through the fab," and "we're way ahead of where we thought we would be at this moment in time."
They're not stopping at a flash replacement either, with Williams saying "In 2014 possibly, or certainly by 2015, we will have a competitor for DRAM and then we’ll replace SRAM." With a non-volatile replacement for DRAM and SRAM, will we soon see the end of the reboot entirely?
They're not stopping at a flash replacement either, with Williams saying "In 2014 possibly, or certainly by 2015, we will have a competitor for DRAM and then we’ll replace SRAM." With a non-volatile replacement for DRAM and SRAM, will we soon see the end of the reboot entirely?
Comment Re:iPhone 5 may be a Sprint exclusive (Score 1) 366
Apple could get concessions like better integration with traditional telco infrastructure. Remember Visual Voicemail in the OG iPhone, credited to the collaboration with AT&T? Maybe now we'll see IP calling, integrated FaceTime, etc. Also, Apple could get service guarantees for iPhone users like guaranteed infrastructure investments, unlimited and unthrottled data and/or tethering. Also, piles of money. Perhaps the new iPhone is more expensive to manufacture and Apple needs bigger subsidies that only Sprint agreed to.
New Transistor Could Let Chips Interface With Living Systems 72
An anonymous reader writes with a UW news item about a really neat new transistor design. From the release: "Human [sic, probably meant Electronic] devices, from light bulbs to iPods, send information using electrons. Human bodies and all other living things, on the other hand, send signals and perform work using ions or protons. Materials scientists at the University of Washington have built a novel transistor that uses protons, creating a key piece for devices that can communicate directly with living things. Among the many potential areas for application is that of prosthetic limbs."
The paper's abstract is available, but the full paper is unfortunately paywalled. The Rolandi research group has a few other neat projects in related areas.
NASA Reveals New Images of Apollo Landing Sites 269
sighted writes "Sharp new images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites in amazing detail, including the last foot trails left by astronauts on the lunar surface."
These pictures were grabbed after the LRO dropped its orbit from 50km above the surface to 25km.
Comment Re:UNCO is unconfirmed but it uses a lot of time (Score 1) 334
Comment Re:Why does this matter? (Score 1) 207
A browser is many of the many apps i run on my systems
FTFY.
(If you're running an email app, a feed aggregation app, and a social network app in your browser, then your browser is going to use some memory.)
Comment Re:UNCO is unconfirmed but it uses a lot of time (Score 1) 334
I triaged bugs back in 2000, too. What was your username or email address in Bugzilla?
Nowadays my focuses are security and finding bugs.
In 2009 I wrote about how to make triage more efficient and more effective. (Tyler linked to my post). And I actually triaged a subset of bugs that way when I was tasked with bringing down the number of crash bug reports.
Comment Re:Mozilla may not want Google (Score 1) 182
What exactly do Mozilla do with 100 million dollars of tax-free revenue?
The first thing we do with it is to pay taxes. It was not trivial for us to figure out how to do that.
Are they building a war chest?
You can get a sense of how much we're saving by reading financial reports from previous years. To some extent, we're saving not because we want to save, but because we can only hire people so fast while maintaining quality and culture.
That'd be 500 full time employees at 100k per year with 50 million left over in case of emergencies.
500 full time Mozilla employees and contractors isn't far off.
I've heard a rule of thumb that once you throw in benefits, offices, and travel, the cost of employing someone is about twice their salary. I don't know whether that holds for Mozilla, which has generous employee benefits but many remote employees.
Comment Re:How about not breaking add-ons? (Score 1) 364
every single time, Firebug and Greasemonkey stop working.
If you use a beta version of Firefox and want to use Firebug, the Firebug developers say you should use the beta version of Firebug. It would be nice if Firefox Beta automatically went out and fetched the beta version of Firebug instead of just saying the version you have is incompatible.
Greasemonkey is often more compatible than its authors let on. I'm using it with Firefox 8 Nightly and it's working fine, despite being marked as only compatible with Firefox 5. I bet it would work in your Firefox 6 Beta just fine.
There's also a competitor to Greasemonkey called Scriptish that is marked as compatible with Firefox 6 beta. I've heard good things about it but haven't tried switching yet.
track add-ons better and not refuse to load them just because they haven't yet been certified to work
That's the plan!
AMO-hosted extensions that use APIs that haven't changed are automatically assumed to work. So are extensions developed using the new SDK.
To do it safely for other extensions, we'll need to gather data from beta users (like you -- thanks!) to find out whether the extension still does its job, whether it causes crashes (crash-stats correlations), and whether it causes other widespread problems (telemetry correlations).
Future beta versions of Firefox will probably ask you whether you also want to beta-test extensions that might not be compatible. For now you have to set a hidden pref to do that.
Comment Re:64bit: NOT new, just Win getting parity w/linx+ (Score 1) 364
I'm pretty sure "__misaligned_access" in that stack trace is a red herring. Notice the large offsets and multiple frames blamed on the "same function". It's probably a section of ntoskrnl for which you don't have full symbols.
In theory you can get a decent stack trace (or even stack traces for all threads) by following the instructions on How to get a stacktrace with WinDbg. In theory. I tried once and got about as far as you did.
Comment Re:Rendering (Score 1) 441
Does that mean the goal of Rust is to become part of Firefox at some point?
Yes, the hope is that parts of Firefox will begin to be written in Rust. I heard a rumor that we might replace our HTML parser first. (Our current HTML parser has one of the weirdest build requirements; it's written in a custom subset of Java that can be source-translated into C++.)
I had always wondered why Mozilla would suddenly become interested in writing a new programming language out of the blue
As opposed to digging deeper and deeper into our unhappy dialect of C++?
Didn't seem like the sort of organization with so much excess resources to throw around that it would be useful to start spinning up such a thing
We're doing pretty okay on money for now
instead of, say, buying more build slaves
IIRC, we were limited there by datacenter power or space. We recently got space in a data center in Phoenix, which should help a lot.
We were also limited there by trying to use the same hardware to test Firefox's performance on all desktop operating systems, which meant using a specific version of the Mac Mini for everything. And using the same hardware for both performance testing and unit testing. We're going to change that.
