Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Predictions For 2016? (slashdot.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Ok folks, it's been ten years since we've done this. What are your tech/science/nerd/misc predictions for 2016? Is VR going to be the bombshell it's being hyped as? Are wearables going to come into their own? Which tech companies are going to implode, and which are going to blossom? What discoveries are we going to make this year? Will people ever shut up about Donald Trump? Which new movies, books, games, and TV shows are going to be awesome? Which are going to suck? How will our privacy and security erode in 2016? And anything else you'd care to forecast.
I think that 2016 will be a disastrous year for Firefox. Thanks to more dumb changes by Mozilla, most of which will be unwanted by Firefox's few remaining users, many of these users will move to Chrome, Edge, Safari, or one of the other browsers out there. Firefox's share of the market, which is only in the high single-digits at this point, will drop below 5%.
Furthermore, Mozilla supporters will continue to refuse to acknowledge why this massive drop in market share will have happened. Instead of just admitting that Mozilla fucked up and fucked over its users, these Mozilla supporters will use excuses like "Google advertised Chrome a lot" and "it's because of mobile browsers". They still won't realize, or at least admit, what the real problem has been: Mozilla has repeatedly fucked over Firefox's users with one stupid, unwanted and awful change after another!
Additionally, Servo and Rust won't see much progress in 2016. Rust will continue to spin its wheels as it tries to become as useful as C++14 has been for a few years. Servo might get to the point of providing an IE 7 level of experience, rather than the IE 3 style experience it currently provides. Both will continue to be a waste of resources that could have instead been put toward improving Firefox's performance or fixing many of its longstanding bugs.
Systemd has spoken, but it's impossible to decode its incoherent message. Perhaps it's saying that it is a perpetual victim of injustice. Then again, it might be babbling that this is the best of all possible worlds and that it is the best of all possible organizations. Let's get down to business: It ought to unstop its ears and uncover its eyes. Only then will systemd hear that to which it has been too long heedless. Only then will it see that when I hear it say that it has an absolute right to be intolerant in the name of tolerance, I have to wonder about it. Is it thoroughly worthless? Is it simply being asinine? Or is it merely embracing a delusion in which it must believe in order to continue believing in itself? First, I'll give you a very brief answer, and then I'll go back and explain my answer in detail. As for the brief answer, while systemd has been beating the drums of opportunism, I've been trying to take the mechanisms, language, ideology, and phraseology for determining what is right and what is wrong out of the hands of systemd and its adherents and put them back in the hands of ordinary people. In doing so, I've learned that in its quest to prevent us from getting in touch with our feelings it has left no destructive scheme unutilized.
Every time systemd spouts some nonsense about how it's inflexibly honest, thoroughly patriotic, and eminently solicitous to promote, in all proper ways, the public good, the effect is that its apple-polishers become even more loyal to it. Sociologists refer to the phenomenon of increased devotion to a maledicent theory at the very hour of its destruction by external evidence as “cognitive dissonance”. I, for one, call it proof that systemd wants us to feel sorry for the subhuman, mindless skivers who promote the lie of stoicism. I warrant we should instead feel sorry for their victims, all of whom know full well that systemd is trapped in a vicious cycle. The more opposition to its bromides it faces, the more prudish it becomes. The more prudish it becomes, the more opposition to its bromides it faces. I wish I didn't have to be the one to break the news that I pray for the day when those who support those for whom hatred has become a way of life will see what they're doing to the world and to all of its citizens. Nevertheless, I cannot afford to pass by anything that may help me make my point. So let me just state that if we are to provide actionable steps people can take to break the spell of great expectations that now binds poxy bigamists to systemd, then we must be guided by a healthy and progressive ideology, not by the high-handed and pesky ideologies that systemd promotes.
Epistemic warlordism weakens political determination and gives comfort to anarchism. To overcome this the question of the role played by systemd's faction must be broached directly. Let me suggest we do by examining the way that whenever I hear systemd's dupes witter on about how hanging out with nauseating converts to misoneism is a wonderful, culturally enriching experience, I interpret this poppycock as an implicit request for chemical treatment of their rampant (and generally unacknowledged) Asperger syndrome. The biggest supporters of systemd's unscrupulous, disloyal rantings are snotty charlatans and craven filthy-types. A secondary class of ardent supporters consists of ladies of elastic virtue and cosmopolitan tendencies to whom such things afford a decent excuse for displaying their fascinations at their open windows. Let's just ignore systemd and see what it does.
In any case, there is something in the way of “natural law” that can be stated awkwardly as follows: “Anyone who was sober for more than an hour or two during the last five years knows that systemd's presumptuous calumnies have been establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and everywhere else that presumptuous calumnies can appear.” Please do not quote me on that. Instead, work it into a better natural law and enunciate it in clearer and more concise te