The concern is not the API. It's that Mozilla no longer has the critical mass to encourage people to port old extensions to the new API, let alone make new ones.
Then they added Gigabit ethernet to all of their machines.
I remember that. They used proprietary connectors for their network ports and required you to buy special, expensive dongles to attach an RJ45 connector. I don't recall ever seeing a PC that used anything other than coax or RJ45, and if it did, you could just pop in a PCI card to fix that. Macs did have PCI available, of course, but you had to pay thousands for that privilege.
Do you really expect audio producers to have to learn a whole new interface that has nothing to do with the physical equipment it's digitally emulating?
Yeah! Why should everyone else in the computer world have all the fun? Audio people should be forced to learn a new UI every week, too!
I agree, but I think this argument carries more weight with any "gaming" control panel. There are some merits to the design of audio software (and you're not going to win any arguments against audiophiles, anyway), but anything related to gaming is just infuriatingly insane.
People complain for years about things they don't like, and the Mozilla foundation says, "Suck it up, dudes." People discuss new features on the forums, and Mozilla heartily ignores said feedback.
Obviously, collecting data by force for investigative purposes will fix this problem, because they have no idea what the problem is!
The more companies whine about telemetry, the more convinced I am telemetry is just for making BS reports to shove into managers' and investors' faces. Numbers are useless if you don't care to interpret them correctly.
Firefox does some stupid stuff at the code level, such as reserving 10% of your physical memory whether it needs it or not. If you have a lot of RAM installed in your system, Firefox will allocate more memory. Hence, it's not unusual to see instances of Firefox using almost 4GB of memory (regardless of what it's doing) if you're running on a high-end machine.
I've been trying to track down why PaleMoon v26 releases memory while PaleMoon v27 (and every version of Firefox I've used for the last decade) always hovers around a specific limit, which on my machine is about 1.2GB. I haven't had much luck since I'm not a professional programmer. However, what's pretty clear that Firefox is not leaking memory, it just swallows up as much as it can and will not release it back to the OS under any circumstances. This wrecks havoc with the garbage collector and is almost entirely responsible for performance issues. Apparently, the philosophy is to allocate a shitload of memory for cache to enhance performance, and then piss all that performance away with cycle collects that freeze the browser solid for several seconds. Brilliant!
It means exactly what they said. They disable an application "just in case" because there's way too much software out there to test for compatibility. Much in the way that apps rigorously tested and rubber-stamped for approval for the company store, but if they turn out to be mal-ware, they're pulled after the damage is done. For your protection!
Seriously, I can't believe how much software was automatically deleted (with no prior warning) from my Windows10 evaluation build after the update from Windows7. Microsoft's rampage against "incompatibility" is just one of the many things that convinced me to stick with Windows7, which has always been compatible with everything no matter how many times I've updated it over the years.
Hey... why bother going through all that trouble when you can just force mandatory code signing to ENSURE things are safe, and then drop support for extensions altogether because the people in charge of the platform always know better?
It still does this, and very badly. It's the single thing I want fixed, and it's been a problem for 10 years. Everyone refuses to acknowledge it's a problem no matter how many profiling reports are shoved in their faces.
The really sad thing is that Firefox is apparently hard-coded to use a certain percentage of your physical memory, so you can't reduce memory usage unless you restart (which needs to be done every 5 minutes). Having less memory installed actually makes Firefox much faster. Go fig.
PaleMoon 26 had none of these problems and it was fantastic, but after updating to PaleMoon 27, it has the same behavior as Firefox. I've been trying to hunt down the changes to figure out what configuration options control memory usage, but it's difficult due to the fact the upgrade from PM 26 and 27 was a huge leap.
We need proper backup software, first. All the major backup companies are moving to cloud-only storage, and OSes do everything possible to prevent backups due to piracy concerns (locking you out of root, only backing up your home folder, etc.)
Consider that for many years the most common way to diagnose problems on PCs was to do a factory reset (whether it was labeled as such or not). Manufacturers don't give a damn about your data and will happily wipe it all out if it saves them 30 seconds on a tech support call.
Even the FOSS community will just yell, "use rsync", oblivious to the fact that it's mirroring software, not backup software. The state of backup software is pathetic.
Everything operated by the touchscreen is the #1 reason why I hate Tesla and will never buy one. From a usability perspective, it's the dumbest possible thing you can do and the very definition of everything wrong with getting Silicon Valley to design anything.
I sat in a Model S, and I thought just that was a disaster. Operating anything other than the wheel and pedals is ridiculous. I was hoping the Model 3 would have a more traditional interior because the vehicle was designed to be a bit more mainstream, but it looks like menu navigation while trying to keep your eyes on the road is here to stay.
Slashdot is the only web site I visit that has a shutdown sequence. No kidding. Every time I try to close the browser window, the message "Working..." appears at the bottom of the screen and the window refuses to close until it's done. I'm guessing here, but apparently there's some code to send telemetry back to/., and if it stalls, the browser/tab simply cannot be closed without using Task Manager. Why do web browsers even allow this behavior?
Never mind loading screens, now web pages need shutdown sequences, too. Insane!
The problem is that there's serious social pressure not to do so. I keep having to turn to pirate networks to get archives of free software, let alone old commercial software.
Stuff like Windows Live Mail 2009, which I needed as an intermediate upgrade. Microsoft killed 2009 and tore every trace of it from the web since it was "insecure", but a direct upgrade from Outlook Express to Live Mail 2012 doesn't work, so I had to upgrade from OE to 2009 to 2012. I never intended to use 2009 for production use, but I needed an archive anyway. It was near impossible to find a copy, because everybody knows nobody should use 2009 because it was "old." Where were all the archives?
Possible doesn't mean it's easy. Any talk in favor of keeping Flash or Java running, even out of the mainstream, is usually met with screams of, "NO! KILL IT! We must go out of our way to make SURE people can't use it!"
You know, kind of like how if you try to run certain applications under Windows10, the OS will forcibly delete the applications due to "compatibility issues". In fact, the apps work just fine if you disable the compatibility checks, but someone else is always trying to kill something for purely political reasons. I expect crap like that from commercial developers, but not from the geek community as a whole.
It has no business being used on the web anymore, and that's the rallying cry here.
That's perfectly fine. Disable it by default, and warn the user if they try to turn it on. If they do turn it on, let them deal with the consequences. It's perfectly possible to be reasonable and effective at the same time.
Oh, no... people need to be FORCED not to use it, for their own good! Sorry, but I'd rather not have other people make my decisions for me.
So should the women in the military be forced to look at a twig and berries in the showers? Do you think it's fair to the men to stick a naked women who thinks they are man into a shower with them?
Yes. People should stop being so squeamish about sex. Old enough to kill, but not old enough to handle a wardrobe malfunction! Enforcement of double standards in our society just continues making this non-issue an issue.
When I was a kid in elementary school, I was horrified to know I was expected to wash in front of other boys after gym. It made no difference what sex the other people were, it was the being naked part that bugged me. I grew out of that.
Next, you have PT rules by gender because _biology_ differences give us different limitations and abilities.
Most of those are good old fashioned stereotypes and generalizations. Go ahead and tell me there's no woman who can do 80 pushups in two minutes, bench press 200, climb a 30 foot wall in 15 seconds, etc. Might as well take the safe route and ban 'em all, along with all the transgenders, gays, hipsters...
At the end of the day, it's not about transgender. It's about tradition.
Adobe has been famous for trying to keep standalone versions of the Flash player exclusive to developers. At one point, they wouldn't let you download it unless you registered an account with Adobe, and today you have to do stupid tricks such as adding "&standalone=1" to the end of download URLs. Those tricks are of course not documented and tend to work and not work at random. What else do you expect from a company where the installer will instantly delete itself when you run it, BEFORE it has actually installed. I can't tell you how many times I've had to re-download the Flash stub installer because it wouldn't install live off the Internet. Adobe really, really doesn't want you to archive the installer.
I think it's pretty clear that as time goes on and more things become cloud based, we have to face the reality that a LOT of things today will just stop working in the future. I find it very disappointing how the geek community, especially here on/., has jumped on the bandwagon, shouting for things like Flash to die by force by any means necessary. It's the digital equivalent to book burning. They should know better.
Slashdot Mirror
The concern is not the API. It's that Mozilla no longer has the critical mass to encourage people to port old extensions to the new API, let alone make new ones.
Lots of authors are just quitting.
That works assuming that fans have enough patience. Everyone I know who couldn't get an NES classic just turned to emulation instead.
Then they added Gigabit ethernet to all of their machines.
I remember that. They used proprietary connectors for their network ports and required you to buy special, expensive dongles to attach an RJ45 connector. I don't recall ever seeing a PC that used anything other than coax or RJ45, and if it did, you could just pop in a PCI card to fix that. Macs did have PCI available, of course, but you had to pay thousands for that privilege.
Do you really expect audio producers to have to learn a whole new interface that has nothing to do with the physical equipment it's digitally emulating?
Yeah! Why should everyone else in the computer world have all the fun? Audio people should be forced to learn a new UI every week, too!
I agree, but I think this argument carries more weight with any "gaming" control panel. There are some merits to the design of audio software (and you're not going to win any arguments against audiophiles, anyway), but anything related to gaming is just infuriatingly insane.
People complain for years about things they don't like, and the Mozilla foundation says, "Suck it up, dudes." People discuss new features on the forums, and Mozilla heartily ignores said feedback.
Obviously, collecting data by force for investigative purposes will fix this problem, because they have no idea what the problem is!
The more companies whine about telemetry, the more convinced I am telemetry is just for making BS reports to shove into managers' and investors' faces. Numbers are useless if you don't care to interpret them correctly.
Hey, they have to fund the AtariBox somehow!
Oh, wait... that's being crowdfunded... to "reduce investor risk". Never mind.
Few people actually point out what sex they are in their posts. Are you sure you can accurately tell what they are?
Firefox does some stupid stuff at the code level, such as reserving 10% of your physical memory whether it needs it or not. If you have a lot of RAM installed in your system, Firefox will allocate more memory. Hence, it's not unusual to see instances of Firefox using almost 4GB of memory (regardless of what it's doing) if you're running on a high-end machine.
I've been trying to track down why PaleMoon v26 releases memory while PaleMoon v27 (and every version of Firefox I've used for the last decade) always hovers around a specific limit, which on my machine is about 1.2GB. I haven't had much luck since I'm not a professional programmer. However, what's pretty clear that Firefox is not leaking memory, it just swallows up as much as it can and will not release it back to the OS under any circumstances. This wrecks havoc with the garbage collector and is almost entirely responsible for performance issues. Apparently, the philosophy is to allocate a shitload of memory for cache to enhance performance, and then piss all that performance away with cycle collects that freeze the browser solid for several seconds. Brilliant!
It means exactly what they said. They disable an application "just in case" because there's way too much software out there to test for compatibility. Much in the way that apps rigorously tested and rubber-stamped for approval for the company store, but if they turn out to be mal-ware, they're pulled after the damage is done. For your protection!
Seriously, I can't believe how much software was automatically deleted (with no prior warning) from my Windows10 evaluation build after the update from Windows7. Microsoft's rampage against "incompatibility" is just one of the many things that convinced me to stick with Windows7, which has always been compatible with everything no matter how many times I've updated it over the years.
Tell me about that time the Mozilla CEO was outed for his political slants.
I use PaleMoon (Firefox-based) won't touch Chrome with a barge pole, but I think you'll find it hard to find any company without a political slant.
The only reason I can remember every fight I had with my sister is because it happened only once in all the years we grew up.
Exception to the rule, I suppose, but I never bought this bullshit that it's just human nature that siblings are bred to fight.
Hey... why bother going through all that trouble when you can just force mandatory code signing to ENSURE things are safe, and then drop support for extensions altogether because the people in charge of the platform always know better?
I'm surprised it's so low.
It still does this, and very badly. It's the single thing I want fixed, and it's been a problem for 10 years. Everyone refuses to acknowledge it's a problem no matter how many profiling reports are shoved in their faces.
The really sad thing is that Firefox is apparently hard-coded to use a certain percentage of your physical memory, so you can't reduce memory usage unless you restart (which needs to be done every 5 minutes). Having less memory installed actually makes Firefox much faster. Go fig.
PaleMoon 26 had none of these problems and it was fantastic, but after updating to PaleMoon 27, it has the same behavior as Firefox. I've been trying to hunt down the changes to figure out what configuration options control memory usage, but it's difficult due to the fact the upgrade from PM 26 and 27 was a huge leap.
Yes, by a wide margin. There are still some hard-coded sites that required Firefox by brand name, but as of PaleMoon 27, almost everything works.
For some sites you will still have to go into the preferences and enable Firefox emulation (custom User Agent). Some web sites insist on being stupid.
This would solve a ton of storage/backup issues.
We need proper backup software, first. All the major backup companies are moving to cloud-only storage, and OSes do everything possible to prevent backups due to piracy concerns (locking you out of root, only backing up your home folder, etc.)
Consider that for many years the most common way to diagnose problems on PCs was to do a factory reset (whether it was labeled as such or not). Manufacturers don't give a damn about your data and will happily wipe it all out if it saves them 30 seconds on a tech support call.
Even the FOSS community will just yell, "use rsync", oblivious to the fact that it's mirroring software, not backup software. The state of backup software is pathetic.
Everything operated by the touchscreen is the #1 reason why I hate Tesla and will never buy one. From a usability perspective, it's the dumbest possible thing you can do and the very definition of everything wrong with getting Silicon Valley to design anything.
I sat in a Model S, and I thought just that was a disaster. Operating anything other than the wheel and pedals is ridiculous. I was hoping the Model 3 would have a more traditional interior because the vehicle was designed to be a bit more mainstream, but it looks like menu navigation while trying to keep your eyes on the road is here to stay.
The rich also never learn
Look at the last election results. It's the Average Joes that never learn.
Lazy programmers who don't giving a fuck about the user experience.
Everyone related to UX is guilty, not just programmers. Merely hearing the word "experience" is enough to get me flipping tables.
Slashdot is the only web site I visit that has a shutdown sequence. No kidding. Every time I try to close the browser window, the message "Working..." appears at the bottom of the screen and the window refuses to close until it's done. I'm guessing here, but apparently there's some code to send telemetry back to /., and if it stalls, the browser/tab simply cannot be closed without using Task Manager. Why do web browsers even allow this behavior?
Never mind loading screens, now web pages need shutdown sequences, too. Insane!
The problem is that there's serious social pressure not to do so. I keep having to turn to pirate networks to get archives of free software, let alone old commercial software.
Stuff like Windows Live Mail 2009, which I needed as an intermediate upgrade. Microsoft killed 2009 and tore every trace of it from the web since it was "insecure", but a direct upgrade from Outlook Express to Live Mail 2012 doesn't work, so I had to upgrade from OE to 2009 to 2012. I never intended to use 2009 for production use, but I needed an archive anyway. It was near impossible to find a copy, because everybody knows nobody should use 2009 because it was "old." Where were all the archives?
Possible doesn't mean it's easy. Any talk in favor of keeping Flash or Java running, even out of the mainstream, is usually met with screams of, "NO! KILL IT! We must go out of our way to make SURE people can't use it!"
You know, kind of like how if you try to run certain applications under Windows10, the OS will forcibly delete the applications due to "compatibility issues". In fact, the apps work just fine if you disable the compatibility checks, but someone else is always trying to kill something for purely political reasons. I expect crap like that from commercial developers, but not from the geek community as a whole.
It has no business being used on the web anymore, and that's the rallying cry here.
That's perfectly fine. Disable it by default, and warn the user if they try to turn it on. If they do turn it on, let them deal with the consequences. It's perfectly possible to be reasonable and effective at the same time.
Oh, no... people need to be FORCED not to use it, for their own good! Sorry, but I'd rather not have other people make my decisions for me.
So should the women in the military be forced to look at a twig and berries in the showers? Do you think it's fair to the men to stick a naked women who thinks they are man into a shower with them?
Yes. People should stop being so squeamish about sex. Old enough to kill, but not old enough to handle a wardrobe malfunction! Enforcement of double standards in our society just continues making this non-issue an issue.
When I was a kid in elementary school, I was horrified to know I was expected to wash in front of other boys after gym. It made no difference what sex the other people were, it was the being naked part that bugged me. I grew out of that.
Next, you have PT rules by gender because _biology_ differences give us different limitations and abilities.
Most of those are good old fashioned stereotypes and generalizations. Go ahead and tell me there's no woman who can do 80 pushups in two minutes, bench press 200, climb a 30 foot wall in 15 seconds, etc. Might as well take the safe route and ban 'em all, along with all the transgenders, gays, hipsters...
At the end of the day, it's not about transgender. It's about tradition.
Adobe has been famous for trying to keep standalone versions of the Flash player exclusive to developers. At one point, they wouldn't let you download it unless you registered an account with Adobe, and today you have to do stupid tricks such as adding "&standalone=1" to the end of download URLs. Those tricks are of course not documented and tend to work and not work at random. What else do you expect from a company where the installer will instantly delete itself when you run it, BEFORE it has actually installed. I can't tell you how many times I've had to re-download the Flash stub installer because it wouldn't install live off the Internet. Adobe really, really doesn't want you to archive the installer.
I think it's pretty clear that as time goes on and more things become cloud based, we have to face the reality that a LOT of things today will just stop working in the future. I find it very disappointing how the geek community, especially here on /., has jumped on the bandwagon, shouting for things like Flash to die by force by any means necessary. It's the digital equivalent to book burning. They should know better.
And... if I don't have the source code?
Will there continue to be a standalone player that will let me play all the SWF files I've downloaded over the years?