Liberals LOVE to be generous with other people's money
I get pissed when huge multi-billion dollar corporations wiggle out of paying their fair share of taxes, claiming they shouldn't be punished for being successful. If I expect them to pay their share, that is not the same thing as me being generous with other peoples' money.
We should get government OUT of the charity business and adopt the attitude that these problems are our collective responsibility, but not through the wasteful and inefficient institution of government.
Collective responsibility of the people? What do you think government is?
I don't trust checkboxes, anyway. I hardly trust anything anymore -- open source or not.
Firefox has a checkbox for offline storage that reads, "Tell me when a website asks to store data for offline use". The problem is, the browser will only inform you if the data being saved is larger than a specific amount, and the browser allows data to be written in small chunks. As a result, if you enable this feature, the browser will happily save lots of offline data without ever informing you, let alone asking your permission. I had this checkbox turned on (it's off by default) and I would still regularly find dozens of megs of offline data saved. To "properly" enable the checkbox, you have to go to about:config and change multiple settings, including the exact cutoff limits. The GUI checkbox doesn't do squat.
All browsers, even Firefox, are resorting to these silly tactics to keep you from actually controlling what the browser can do. Don't get me started about how Opera used to regularly break the feature to disable updates (and constantly changed the command-line options), in an attempt to force updates even if you didn't want them.
Plus, those physical items were designed to last longer than 6 months, and if they break or fail to perform to expectation, you can usually hire someone other than the manufacturer to fix them.
At least for now. When will the cloud-based lawn mowers show up?
Yeah, because clever script kiddies keep breaking it (like on just about every Javascript-heavy web page). It's not the button itself that's the problem.
Can you cite any actual evidence that phones make kids socially maladjusted?
I won't cite evidence because I'm lazy, but I think it's been well established that phones and apps are designed specifically to make them as addicting as possible. Behavioral psychologists are aplenty and very busy in Silicon Valley.
A lot of extroverts feel like introverts are broken because they don't want to be surrounded by other people all the time.
Also, there's a LOT more extroverts out there, so it's easy for them to discriminate against introverts and get away with it. It's easy to see yourself as not broken when you're the moral majority.
Having grown up in the 80's, my teachers thought I was broken and regularly punished me for it, let alone tried to fix me. Thankfully, my parents understood I was an introvert, and despite considerable pressure from the school, they refused to put me on drugs.
most people will ditch owning cars (like a landline) and go with car on demand.
I fail to see how this viewpoint fits into the American dream of owning luxury stuffs and keeping up with the Joneses. Nobody likes to ride in someone else's car. By any name or ownership, it's still just a taxi. Even in 3rd-world countries, people own and self-repair rusty beaters instead of renting vehicles.
Plus, even if taxi prices tank due to automation, not everyone lives in a bustling city where distances traveled is low enough so taxi services can meet demand and turn a profit.
I find it amusing that Microsoft is touting x86 emulation under ARM, but not x86 (16 and 32-bit) on x64. Just like how they can currently emulate new versions of DirectX in pure software, but refuse to emulate old versions.
Heh... I like how the article insists that we need to kill legacy software on purpose for SECURITY! That good ol' boogeyman always works to get what you want.
The system he had was enclosed in a box and you could initially see his "demo" of 4 movies in low quality... He was going around investors fishing for money to make it work at bigger resolutions for his lossless compression algorithm.
Ah, yes, the preferred tactic of magnetic perpetual machine salesman!
For instance, Zstandard [github.com] lets you precompute a dictionary of common strings you want to shorten. Imagine if you trained it on HTML so that each tag or other common string just takes a few bits, then you can distribute that dictionary to the whole world so that you can save the bandwidth of transmitting it alongside the compressed data each and every time (like we do with Zip, Gzip, etc.).
Also known as Google Brotli.
I can't say it (or the technique in general) is a good thing.
JavaScript dramatically improves the user experience in web applications.
If pages were to just validate data or swap out same-sized elements, then it might be okay. What they usually do is dynamically load content and perform transitions, which WRECKS the experience.
My biggest beef with dynamic content is that it almost always changes the size of the page, screwing up your scroll bars, reading position, and generally just resulting in things jumping all over the place. I usually scroll pages by clicking and dragging the scroll bar, and with so much dynamic content all over the place, this makes just about every page unusable. Even when scrolling with the space bar or arrow keys, I struggle to read anything with articles skittering all over the place.
It's the equivalent of someone pulling the carpet from under your feet, and when you fall on your ass and smash your skull against the floor, web developers stare down at you and shout, "Look how much we've improved your experience!"
Don't even get me started about sluggishness, or standard browser navigation being broken (such as shift-clicking to open in a new window). Dynamic content screws up a lot of things, and doing it properly takes a lot of extra work. This all assumes that the pages are using the DOM correctly, too, as I still encounter pages that show up as blank, because now with so much executable code driving the loading of content, web pages can "crash" on certain browsers. Developers often use frameworks to create their pages, too, and most of the frameworks I've used are horrible, using every stupid trick in the book, and detect browsers by brand name, rather than capability. I have a hell of a time getting anything to work properly in Pale Moon, despite the fact it's basically Firefox with a different logo and telemetry removed (I've inspected the source code myself -- the changes are surprisingly minimal).
Say what you want, but surfing the modern web is shit. There's a reason why I quit being a web developer, and all the stupid Javascript tricks I was expected to learn and implement was a major part of it.
PaleMoon recently got an extensive update to a new fork of Firefox. Alas, this had the unfortunate side effect of making it just as slow as recent versions of Firefox.
I'm using PaleMoon right now and I still like it, but it's not as good as it was last year.
a lot of those useful features were culled to make way for the multi-process stuff that's required for them to compete with Chrome on performance.
Bullshit. Memory management has been the #1 problem with Firefox for 10 years and the developers refuse to hear any complaints about it. Switching to a multi-process model won't do jack to speed up the browser when it's gulping down several gigs because it was hard-coded to use a certain percentage of RAM... which cannot be overridden in the configuration.
But hey, at least extensions won't be completely eliminated, ensuring that they'll still have 3rd parties to blame when the browser screws up.
This represents a problem that has been around for a decade: Firefox allocates memory as a percentage of total RAM available, and will not release it properly, even after the garbage collector runs. It caches multiple copies of everything (as I can clearly see when using a memory visualization tool) and won't release memory unless at gunpoint. Memory isn't being leaked, just hoarded. If they would just tweak the default memory and cache policy, it would be way faster overnight.
This is the reason I switched to PaleMoon, because version 26 idles around 300MB of memory usage and is nice and fast no matter what I view. Alas, after updating to version 27 it started behaving like Firefox again, gulping up memory. I've been investigating the difference between PaleMoon 26 and Firefox 24 LTS, in the hopes of tracking down what Firefox is doing wrong, but... I'm not really an application developer, so it's been slow work.
You can only hand out so much money before it becomes meaningless and we all go bankrupt and EVRYBODY becomes poor
Well, the not-so-poor will become poorer, at least. It's all too easy to say that 90% is everyone and 10% is nobody. I hear that a lot when it comes to reviewing telemetry reports.
Indeed. However, this still just assumes you're fully responsible for your own financial situation. Some of us have gotten screwed by our parents and bad credit can loom over your head even before moving out on your own. Thankfully I haven't had this problem, but I know other people who were so far in debt "out the door" it has taken a decade or more to repair their credit. It's common for debt to spill over to others in a family, especially to the children.
...you could have literally twice as many lanes open.
We could, but we won't. For some reason it's a cultural thing to have grocery baggers, not economic. If it was acceptable not to have baggers, they would all get laid off and we'd have the same number of cashier lanes open. I should know, because while there's baggers in the store in my home town, there aren't in the town next to mine (and the cashier lines are always swamped due to a lack of cashiers).
More recently, the download progress UI in Firefox was changed so it no longer tells you the size of the file you're downloading, it only gives you a progress indicator. I'm still banging my head trying to figure out why they thought that information was so useless that it HAD to be removed to make it "better."
I use Pale Moon as my primary browser, and Firefox as a backup if a web page doesn't work. If a web site doesn't work with either browser, I don't bother viewing it and just go somewhere else. To hell with web designers that make sites that require a "supported" browser, or use Javascript frameworks that are hard-coded to scan for popular brand names in the user agent.
Slashdot Mirror
Liberals LOVE to be generous with other people's money
I get pissed when huge multi-billion dollar corporations wiggle out of paying their fair share of taxes, claiming they shouldn't be punished for being successful. If I expect them to pay their share, that is not the same thing as me being generous with other peoples' money.
We should get government OUT of the charity business and adopt the attitude that these problems are our collective responsibility, but not through the wasteful and inefficient institution of government.
Collective responsibility of the people? What do you think government is?
This tells me anyone can sell any product in any size and claim it's based on rough sawn dimensions.
Sir, that pack of beef was actually 2 pounds -- before we cut off the excess fat for a uniform finish.
So when standards change over time, we still call them standards, and we just totally accept it because reasons.
This kind of logic reminds me why binding arbitration is becoming standard practice. As long as everyone does it, it's okay.
I don't trust checkboxes, anyway. I hardly trust anything anymore -- open source or not.
Firefox has a checkbox for offline storage that reads, "Tell me when a website asks to store data for offline use". The problem is, the browser will only inform you if the data being saved is larger than a specific amount, and the browser allows data to be written in small chunks. As a result, if you enable this feature, the browser will happily save lots of offline data without ever informing you, let alone asking your permission. I had this checkbox turned on (it's off by default) and I would still regularly find dozens of megs of offline data saved. To "properly" enable the checkbox, you have to go to about:config and change multiple settings, including the exact cutoff limits. The GUI checkbox doesn't do squat.
All browsers, even Firefox, are resorting to these silly tactics to keep you from actually controlling what the browser can do. Don't get me started about how Opera used to regularly break the feature to disable updates (and constantly changed the command-line options), in an attempt to force updates even if you didn't want them.
Plus, those physical items were designed to last longer than 6 months, and if they break or fail to perform to expectation, you can usually hire someone other than the manufacturer to fix them.
At least for now. When will the cloud-based lawn mowers show up?
It seems like back rarely does what you expect.
Yeah, because clever script kiddies keep breaking it (like on just about every Javascript-heavy web page). It's not the button itself that's the problem.
Can you cite any actual evidence that phones make kids socially maladjusted?
I won't cite evidence because I'm lazy, but I think it's been well established that phones and apps are designed specifically to make them as addicting as possible. Behavioral psychologists are aplenty and very busy in Silicon Valley.
A lot of extroverts feel like introverts are broken because they don't want to be surrounded by other people all the time.
Also, there's a LOT more extroverts out there, so it's easy for them to discriminate against introverts and get away with it. It's easy to see yourself as not broken when you're the moral majority.
Having grown up in the 80's, my teachers thought I was broken and regularly punished me for it, let alone tried to fix me. Thankfully, my parents understood I was an introvert, and despite considerable pressure from the school, they refused to put me on drugs.
most people will ditch owning cars (like a landline) and go with car on demand.
I fail to see how this viewpoint fits into the American dream of owning luxury stuffs and keeping up with the Joneses. Nobody likes to ride in someone else's car. By any name or ownership, it's still just a taxi. Even in 3rd-world countries, people own and self-repair rusty beaters instead of renting vehicles.
Plus, even if taxi prices tank due to automation, not everyone lives in a bustling city where distances traveled is low enough so taxi services can meet demand and turn a profit.
I find it amusing that Microsoft is touting x86 emulation under ARM, but not x86 (16 and 32-bit) on x64. Just like how they can currently emulate new versions of DirectX in pure software, but refuse to emulate old versions.
Heh... I like how the article insists that we need to kill legacy software on purpose for SECURITY! That good ol' boogeyman always works to get what you want.
The system he had was enclosed in a box and you could initially see his "demo" of 4 movies in low quality... He was going around investors fishing for money to make it work at bigger resolutions for his lossless compression algorithm.
Ah, yes, the preferred tactic of magnetic perpetual machine salesman!
For instance, Zstandard [github.com] lets you precompute a dictionary of common strings you want to shorten. Imagine if you trained it on HTML so that each tag or other common string just takes a few bits, then you can distribute that dictionary to the whole world so that you can save the bandwidth of transmitting it alongside the compressed data each and every time (like we do with Zip, Gzip, etc.).
Also known as Google Brotli.
I can't say it (or the technique in general) is a good thing.
Pretty much by default, if software is known to be ransomware, Microsoft will remove it from the store. Thus, no known ransomware is on the store.
It's the unknown stuff that's the problem. It won't be known until after the timebomb has been released and the damage is done.
Gotta love word salad and technicalities.
Seri-ous question: can you say, "Siri, undo?"
I've had the same issue with all my old floppy disks. All my stuff from the 80's works perfectly, but most stuff post '95 has some kind of problem.
Workstation mode
First Game Mode, and now this? How about you just stop needlessly rebuilding search indexes and .NET assemblies for hours and hours every week!
Also, will it disable forced reboots while you're in the middle of your work? People using workstations tend to dislike that.
JavaScript dramatically improves the user experience in web applications.
If pages were to just validate data or swap out same-sized elements, then it might be okay. What they usually do is dynamically load content and perform transitions, which WRECKS the experience.
My biggest beef with dynamic content is that it almost always changes the size of the page, screwing up your scroll bars, reading position, and generally just resulting in things jumping all over the place. I usually scroll pages by clicking and dragging the scroll bar, and with so much dynamic content all over the place, this makes just about every page unusable. Even when scrolling with the space bar or arrow keys, I struggle to read anything with articles skittering all over the place.
It's the equivalent of someone pulling the carpet from under your feet, and when you fall on your ass and smash your skull against the floor, web developers stare down at you and shout, "Look how much we've improved your experience!"
Don't even get me started about sluggishness, or standard browser navigation being broken (such as shift-clicking to open in a new window). Dynamic content screws up a lot of things, and doing it properly takes a lot of extra work. This all assumes that the pages are using the DOM correctly, too, as I still encounter pages that show up as blank, because now with so much executable code driving the loading of content, web pages can "crash" on certain browsers. Developers often use frameworks to create their pages, too, and most of the frameworks I've used are horrible, using every stupid trick in the book, and detect browsers by brand name, rather than capability. I have a hell of a time getting anything to work properly in Pale Moon, despite the fact it's basically Firefox with a different logo and telemetry removed (I've inspected the source code myself -- the changes are surprisingly minimal).
Say what you want, but surfing the modern web is shit. There's a reason why I quit being a web developer, and all the stupid Javascript tricks I was expected to learn and implement was a major part of it.
PaleMoon recently got an extensive update to a new fork of Firefox. Alas, this had the unfortunate side effect of making it just as slow as recent versions of Firefox.
I'm using PaleMoon right now and I still like it, but it's not as good as it was last year.
a lot of those useful features were culled to make way for the multi-process stuff that's required for them to compete with Chrome on performance.
Bullshit. Memory management has been the #1 problem with Firefox for 10 years and the developers refuse to hear any complaints about it. Switching to a multi-process model won't do jack to speed up the browser when it's gulping down several gigs because it was hard-coded to use a certain percentage of RAM... which cannot be overridden in the configuration.
But hey, at least extensions won't be completely eliminated, ensuring that they'll still have 3rd parties to blame when the browser screws up.
This represents a problem that has been around for a decade: Firefox allocates memory as a percentage of total RAM available, and will not release it properly, even after the garbage collector runs. It caches multiple copies of everything (as I can clearly see when using a memory visualization tool) and won't release memory unless at gunpoint. Memory isn't being leaked, just hoarded. If they would just tweak the default memory and cache policy, it would be way faster overnight.
This is the reason I switched to PaleMoon, because version 26 idles around 300MB of memory usage and is nice and fast no matter what I view. Alas, after updating to version 27 it started behaving like Firefox again, gulping up memory. I've been investigating the difference between PaleMoon 26 and Firefox 24 LTS, in the hopes of tracking down what Firefox is doing wrong, but... I'm not really an application developer, so it's been slow work.
You can only hand out so much money before it becomes meaningless and we all go bankrupt and EVRYBODY becomes poor
Well, the not-so-poor will become poorer, at least. It's all too easy to say that 90% is everyone and 10% is nobody. I hear that a lot when it comes to reviewing telemetry reports.
Indeed. However, this still just assumes you're fully responsible for your own financial situation. Some of us have gotten screwed by our parents and bad credit can loom over your head even before moving out on your own. Thankfully I haven't had this problem, but I know other people who were so far in debt "out the door" it has taken a decade or more to repair their credit. It's common for debt to spill over to others in a family, especially to the children.
...you could have literally twice as many lanes open.
We could, but we won't. For some reason it's a cultural thing to have grocery baggers, not economic. If it was acceptable not to have baggers, they would all get laid off and we'd have the same number of cashier lanes open. I should know, because while there's baggers in the store in my home town, there aren't in the town next to mine (and the cashier lines are always swamped due to a lack of cashiers).
More recently, the download progress UI in Firefox was changed so it no longer tells you the size of the file you're downloading, it only gives you a progress indicator. I'm still banging my head trying to figure out why they thought that information was so useless that it HAD to be removed to make it "better."
I use Pale Moon as my primary browser, and Firefox as a backup if a web page doesn't work. If a web site doesn't work with either browser, I don't bother viewing it and just go somewhere else. To hell with web designers that make sites that require a "supported" browser, or use Javascript frameworks that are hard-coded to scan for popular brand names in the user agent.