Although we all love to use Firefox, we have to admit it’s not the fastest app to launch. I always thought that its bottleneck was its modular XUL plug-in technology. After all, extracting plug-ins from compressed containers, then interpreting and integrating the contents to the app each time it launches, on-the-fly does take some CPU time, disk ops and memory allocation time.
Firefox 3 however has some improvements that should make it a phenomenal foe to IE7 when it comes to speed.
- Defragmentation, which has reduced memory usage after startup in more than one third.
- Image cache, fonts cache, back/forward cache, and more. They have all been tuned up to free used resources after certain time of inactivity.
- Uncompressed images are discarded from memory after a while if not active.
- More efficient animated GIFs storage in memory.
- About 400 memory leaks have been hunted and taken down thanks in part to better tools to identify them.
- A cycle collector takes care of objects referencing each other preventing either of them being cleared from memory.
There is a question on LinkedIn by Bill Gates.
How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?
An excellent question. I decided to answer and so I did, but once I submitted it, I decided I wanted to add more to the answer, so i deleted it and once I was done editing, I tried to submit it again. Unfortunately, LinkedIn didn’t notice that I had deleted by previous answer and told me I couldn’t answer the same question twice. This being the case, I’m going to blog my answer here.
The continual shift and evolution of the collective mindset and public memes will inevitably reach a phase where careers and lives dedicated to science and technology are not only attractive pursuits for young individuals but are also universally admired and appreciated as the gears of progress in the machinery of human existence and are respected as such.
One traditional field that has already settled its distinguished position is medicine. A career in this field is often encouraged (or at least mentioned as a suggestion) by parents. Key in this advice is not only the monetary considerations of the parent for the child’s future, but a career in medicine is universally viewed as being respectable, noble and beneficial. Simplifying this anthropologically; being the (parent of) the doctor in your tribe has obvious benefits.
The speed at which our culture and the ideas in it evolve is dynamic and manipulable. In order to popularize careers in science and technology, these avenues of opportunity must be presented as beneficial, respectable and attractive in our collective consciousness. This can be done through popular media (sitcoms, TV ads, movies) on school campuses but is also influenced by decisions made by governments and the language used by our political leaders.
A minor request
If you are a decider; If you decide how people do their work; If you are in the IT industry; If you manage a team of developers, scripters, sequencers, packagers, administrators or network monitors; for the love of everything you may claim to hold holy or good, please, never ask of your people to develop or do any kind of productive work that takes longer than 10 minutes on a remote desktop connection with just one monitor per workstation.
Spare your potentially cheerful workforce the agony and frustration of being gears in an impractical paradigm that is nothing more than a misunderstood and faulty application of the remote service delivery business model.
Remote service delivery is a great way to manage and administer server farms, deliver first and second level support services to clients and that is basically it. Managers often confuse the potentials of the technology with the potentials of the service. The technology in this case are protocols such as RDP, VNC, AIP, etc that facilitate remote control capabilities for clients and servers. The service is the convenience of managing your client’s infrastructure remotely from the comfort of your own HQ, branch office or minion cellar. This is when some people get confused.
Cut it out, already!
Let me explain what can go wrong with this philosophy by utilizing an analogy: A baker offers you the service of baking a cake. He’s also offering you the remote service of calling you when the cake is done and maybe drive by to drop the cake off at your house. That would be the alpha and omega of this service. He bakes the cake in his kitchen (in-house development) and gives you a ring when it’s done (a remote service). Now imagine a baker that offers you remote baking services. You, as a client may be curious as to what he’s up to, so you play along and see where he’s going with this. The baker comes in your house, installs a room sized arm robot in your kitchen and leaves. He then goes back to his own kitchen and using a laptop and a joystick starts remotely controlling the robot in your kitchen to make you your cake….very slowly…and he dropped some eggs. He will blame that on your pans.
There seems to be a steady growing trend of IT corporations offering application packaging, sequencing, development and general productive services remotely. This initially evolved from the trend of outsourcing IT services to 3rd party suppliers (core business isolation) but has now taken grotesque forms and dimensions. Entire corporations following each other like religious lemmings thinking outsourcing and remote services is the answer to all ails that saves a buck at the end of the fiscal year.
Development is either done in-house or on-site. Doing it remotely will just increase your client’s TCO per workplace, produce late results and in the long run could cost you your clients.
You may choose to do everything remotely….but you shouldn’t. Seriously…..cut it out!
There once was this minimalistic, free file hosting service called “boomspeed” that had the potential of become the Google of quick and simple file hosting services.
Due to their popularity and greed, Boomspeed started a paid premium service that gave users 250MB of web space and premium support. They kept their free service for the existing members so they wouldn’t lose their audience.
I signed up the free service some 4 or 5 years ago and liked the fact that you could access your files using FTP and the web interface we quite user friendly.
At one point or another…Boomspeed turned greedier than it has previously turned.
This morning Wendy informed me that one of the files hosted on my old Boomspeed account wasn’t showing up on her blog.
luckily I had a backup of it hosted on 0xtc.com and it was fixed quickly, but it made me wonder what happened to the old one on Boomspeed so I went to check it out.
403
Access Denied! All the files in my old Boomspeed account’s directory are being blocked. Unshared. Captive. My once free account had suddenly been renamed to a “trail” account that has now been taken hostage by Boomspeed and may only be reactivated once until I pay them a ransom sum of $25.
Thank you for using Boomspeed.
Free trials from the years 2001-2006 ended on January 1st, 2007.
…it reads.
Free trials from 2001 to 2006? A 5 year “trial”?! Are you shitting me?
Screw you!
Oh, and Greg Deeter is an asshole.
