I remember attending an air show, and in the middle of the event next to the food court, there was a local car dealership with a Corvette convertible on display. Attendees were able to sit in the car for a short time. When I sat in the car and closed the door, I realized very quickly that the doors had automatically locked, and was unable to exit the car. I was glad it was a convertible and could easily get the attention of the dealers who were busy mingling with the audience.
All this time, I suspected that the car had been modified for display, and normal Corvettes weren't built that way. Am I to believe that being unable to unlock the doors with the power disabled is a standard feature?
My dad insists on using these stupid touch-sensitive dimmer switches in him home, where you hold down on the surface for a certain amount of time to adjust the amount of light in the room. They drive my mother crazy, because simply turning the lights on and off requires just the right touch over just the right amount of time. What's wrong with a simple slider?
Some people are more enthralled by the novelty of a quirky design than they are in the design being efficient, reliable, and intuitive. They seek out things that are bizarre over things that work.
To compliment radarskiy's comment, I'll add that awful memory management has been a well-documented problem in Firefox for over 8 years.
Saying that a plugin/extension is causing obscene memory usage in a browser is in the same league as blaming a virus for an OS crash. It's a cop-out, and flat-out wrong.
Yesterday I caught Firefox using 2.6 GB of memory with only three windows (not tabs) open. I used the profiler to track what was causing the long, regular 2-3 second freezes, and it's always the garbage collector. 95% of any web page's rendering time was caused by the memory manager choking. I closed all but one window, and set the last window to "about:blank." Memory usage didn't even budge. Almost all of that RAM was used by the Javascript heap.
The only time I've ever seen applications use more memory is when I'm running video games, and those programs are designed to waste as much memory as possible.
Not to trivialize your problem, but if there's one nice thing I can say about Firefox is that it's been exceptionally reliable. I've had about 1 crash throughout all of 2015, and that's with Flash installed. Seriously.
I do know that Firefox's hardware graphics acceleration gave me many issues over the years, though that seems to have been resolved since I got my latest nVidia graphics card a couple years ago. My best suggestion is to disable hardware acceleration. Indeed, I can't think of why plugins, extensions, or profile setup would be affected by suspending the system, but if an application uses some "odd" hardware acceleration techniques, problems can persist even across many different video cards. Java (both applets and desktop apps) had the same problem for a long time.
Rather few of the quotes you printed imply women are the target of sexism.
Sounds to me that it's not specifically software developers or even geeks that are the problem, so specifically blaming the tech industry doesn't make much sense.
I'm sure there's people at MS that have to analyze and review samples of these offensive queries.
Is it really fair to subject workers to this kind of psychological abuse while they're sucking up telemetry and mining of all your data for profit? Think of the employees!
I think the point here is that Linux distros are not immune to the business tactics of proprietary, commercial software. Ubuntu has just tested the waters, and end-users need to keep on their toes.
Given that the industry as a whole is moving towards the model of giving everything away for free and profiting from data mining, it won't be long before sponsored ads and opt-out become the norm in the world of FOSS, too. Yeah, it's nice that if a FOSS project turns bad it can be forked. It's nice to say that the efforts of the distros don't affect the kernel itself. However, "Linux" itself isn't useful for much outside of servers and embedded systems, so almost everyone using this OS will be getting a distro, and that requires people to make educated choices as to which distro they can trust.
Lambasting people's concerns as mere FUD isn't going to help. There's real reason to worry about this stuff.
I did look into this, and Opera has changed the name of the command-line switch to disable updates (at least once). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's the problem with products that are in a state of constant development -- you can't just use a Google search to get tips, because the information you find may be out of date.
I use Autoruns to disable most startup processes on my machine. However, on top of a background process, Opera also uses the Task Scheduler to run the browser to check for updates, so you need to disable that as well. Most browsers use multiple update schemes at once, so if the browser doesn't allow you to disable updates from the UI, it's always a toss-up whether you can do anything about it. Bypassing this nonsense may have been simple 5 years ago, but these days it's not trivial by any means.
I lost faith in Opera when they decided to force updates, rather than ask first. They also use an updater that runs as a background process (at least on Windows), which is no better than the Mozilla Maintenance Service. At least Firefox lets you disable the background updater in the UI.
Good luck with that as long as binding arbitration is legal in the USA.
Against my recommendation, my dad wanted me to install Windows10 on his HTPC. I liked reading the part of the Windows10 EULA (near the bottom) where MS effectively declares that my own IP rights are invalid while theirs stand. My dad still doesn't know why I go through so much trouble to keep Win10 off my workstation.
Gee, and it only requires me to have all the latest updates installed as prerequisites.
Why install the spyware/telemetry/nagware updates first, then struggle to disable them? As has been demonstrated with Windows10, I can't trust that MS won't alter my preferences at any time they choose.
Of course this means that driving over the cable at slow speeds causes no damage or premature wear on the tires. It's never a problem if you don't notice.
That's all nice and well from the Linux side of things, but it's the Windows market that makes them money.
I stopped buying AMD graphics cards because the Windows drivers kept shitting themselves and making my life miserable... consistently over a period of many years. Even with their driver [branding] overhaul, it's going to take a lot of time to rebuild trust and convince me their hardware is worth buying again. That's not NVidia's fault.
Could you explain why you would expect an atmosphere at all, even a thin one made of helium? Is it because the planet is so far from the sun that solar winds are unlikely to blow the helium away, or the energy of the helium is so low it can't achieve escape velocity, as happens on Earth?
Oceans of liquid hydrogen sounds like mighty awesome stuff.
I used to write (and occasionally still do) small, re-distributable scripts meant to be run from shared/virtual hosts. It pisses me off to no end how almost all tools and frameworks are written under the assumption that you'll be running a dedicated server in an enterprise environment where the owner has some kind of admin access to install dependencies separately.
Coming from someone who doesn't know much about the hardware end of things, do routers actually get the domain names and do DNS resolution themselves, or do they only the IP addresses from the PC?
I know that you can't use the hosts file to block Microsoft's sites because Windows apparently has the IP addresses hard-coded.
I'd trust Gentoo or any other Linux distro more than Windows any day of the week, but I'm not stupid enough to give any foundation a free pass just because it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.
As a very part-time developer, I understand that entropy rules all. For all the lamenting about how bloated programs or operating systems have become, people continue to request more and more features.
The only trend I see in software design these days is massive dumbing-down of UIs, removal of features that empower the user, tons of social integration people don't want, pre-installed apps you can't remove or disable, and shitloads of ads. Are you seriously suggesting that people want all this crap, or are the marketeers just being creative with how they interpret the telemetry when they pitch new designs to investors?
The only real example of software where it's impossible to satisfy feature requests is when it comes to games. Application design is pretty straightforward. You know, similar to how the desktop PC industry evolved until all the eye candy and DRM started showing up and destroyed performance.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember attending an air show, and in the middle of the event next to the food court, there was a local car dealership with a Corvette convertible on display. Attendees were able to sit in the car for a short time. When I sat in the car and closed the door, I realized very quickly that the doors had automatically locked, and was unable to exit the car. I was glad it was a convertible and could easily get the attention of the dealers who were busy mingling with the audience.
All this time, I suspected that the car had been modified for display, and normal Corvettes weren't built that way. Am I to believe that being unable to unlock the doors with the power disabled is a standard feature?
Come on. When was the last time you read a car manual except to get the size of wiper blade replacements?
Boredom.
My dad insists on using these stupid touch-sensitive dimmer switches in him home, where you hold down on the surface for a certain amount of time to adjust the amount of light in the room. They drive my mother crazy, because simply turning the lights on and off requires just the right touch over just the right amount of time. What's wrong with a simple slider?
Some people are more enthralled by the novelty of a quirky design than they are in the design being efficient, reliable, and intuitive. They seek out things that are bizarre over things that work.
To compliment radarskiy's comment, I'll add that awful memory management has been a well-documented problem in Firefox for over 8 years.
Saying that a plugin/extension is causing obscene memory usage in a browser is in the same league as blaming a virus for an OS crash. It's a cop-out, and flat-out wrong.
Yesterday I caught Firefox using 2.6 GB of memory with only three windows (not tabs) open. I used the profiler to track what was causing the long, regular 2-3 second freezes, and it's always the garbage collector. 95% of any web page's rendering time was caused by the memory manager choking. I closed all but one window, and set the last window to "about:blank." Memory usage didn't even budge. Almost all of that RAM was used by the Javascript heap.
The only time I've ever seen applications use more memory is when I'm running video games, and those programs are designed to waste as much memory as possible.
Not to trivialize your problem, but if there's one nice thing I can say about Firefox is that it's been exceptionally reliable. I've had about 1 crash throughout all of 2015, and that's with Flash installed. Seriously.
I do know that Firefox's hardware graphics acceleration gave me many issues over the years, though that seems to have been resolved since I got my latest nVidia graphics card a couple years ago. My best suggestion is to disable hardware acceleration. Indeed, I can't think of why plugins, extensions, or profile setup would be affected by suspending the system, but if an application uses some "odd" hardware acceleration techniques, problems can persist even across many different video cards. Java (both applets and desktop apps) had the same problem for a long time.
Rather few of the quotes you printed imply women are the target of sexism.
Sounds to me that it's not specifically software developers or even geeks that are the problem, so specifically blaming the tech industry doesn't make much sense.
I'm sure there's people at MS that have to analyze and review samples of these offensive queries.
Is it really fair to subject workers to this kind of psychological abuse while they're sucking up telemetry and mining of all your data for profit? Think of the employees!
I think the point here is that Linux distros are not immune to the business tactics of proprietary, commercial software. Ubuntu has just tested the waters, and end-users need to keep on their toes.
Given that the industry as a whole is moving towards the model of giving everything away for free and profiting from data mining, it won't be long before sponsored ads and opt-out become the norm in the world of FOSS, too. Yeah, it's nice that if a FOSS project turns bad it can be forked. It's nice to say that the efforts of the distros don't affect the kernel itself. However, "Linux" itself isn't useful for much outside of servers and embedded systems, so almost everyone using this OS will be getting a distro, and that requires people to make educated choices as to which distro they can trust.
Lambasting people's concerns as mere FUD isn't going to help. There's real reason to worry about this stuff.
I did look into this, and Opera has changed the name of the command-line switch to disable updates (at least once). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's the problem with products that are in a state of constant development -- you can't just use a Google search to get tips, because the information you find may be out of date.
I use Autoruns to disable most startup processes on my machine. However, on top of a background process, Opera also uses the Task Scheduler to run the browser to check for updates, so you need to disable that as well. Most browsers use multiple update schemes at once, so if the browser doesn't allow you to disable updates from the UI, it's always a toss-up whether you can do anything about it. Bypassing this nonsense may have been simple 5 years ago, but these days it's not trivial by any means.
I lost faith in Opera when they decided to force updates, rather than ask first. They also use an updater that runs as a background process (at least on Windows), which is no better than the Mozilla Maintenance Service. At least Firefox lets you disable the background updater in the UI.
Good luck with that as long as binding arbitration is legal in the USA.
Against my recommendation, my dad wanted me to install Windows10 on his HTPC. I liked reading the part of the Windows10 EULA (near the bottom) where MS effectively declares that my own IP rights are invalid while theirs stand. My dad still doesn't know why I go through so much trouble to keep Win10 off my workstation.
Gee, and it only requires me to have all the latest updates installed as prerequisites.
Why install the spyware/telemetry/nagware updates first, then struggle to disable them? As has been demonstrated with Windows10, I can't trust that MS won't alter my preferences at any time they choose.
Of course this means that driving over the cable at slow speeds causes no damage or premature wear on the tires. It's never a problem if you don't notice.
That's all nice and well from the Linux side of things, but it's the Windows market that makes them money.
I stopped buying AMD graphics cards because the Windows drivers kept shitting themselves and making my life miserable... consistently over a period of many years. Even with their driver [branding] overhaul, it's going to take a lot of time to rebuild trust and convince me their hardware is worth buying again. That's not NVidia's fault.
Could you explain why you would expect an atmosphere at all, even a thin one made of helium? Is it because the planet is so far from the sun that solar winds are unlikely to blow the helium away, or the energy of the helium is so low it can't achieve escape velocity, as happens on Earth?
Oceans of liquid hydrogen sounds like mighty awesome stuff.
But... who wouldn't want a steady job inflating party balloons?
Where's mine?!
You mean like all the other privacy options that Microsoft simply resets to defaults on a regular basis without telling you?
Yes, there's value in using incognito mode for porn.
There's value in using a completely separate web browser for, say, online banking. I'd only trust incognito mode to be "good enough".
Thanks for this.
I used to write (and occasionally still do) small, re-distributable scripts meant to be run from shared/virtual hosts. It pisses me off to no end how almost all tools and frameworks are written under the assumption that you'll be running a dedicated server in an enterprise environment where the owner has some kind of admin access to install dependencies separately.
Coming from someone who doesn't know much about the hardware end of things, do routers actually get the domain names and do DNS resolution themselves, or do they only the IP addresses from the PC?
I know that you can't use the hosts file to block Microsoft's sites because Windows apparently has the IP addresses hard-coded.
I'd trust Gentoo or any other Linux distro more than Windows any day of the week, but I'm not stupid enough to give any foundation a free pass just because it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.
As a very part-time developer, I understand that entropy rules all. For all the lamenting about how bloated programs or operating systems have become, people continue to request more and more features.
The only trend I see in software design these days is massive dumbing-down of UIs, removal of features that empower the user, tons of social integration people don't want, pre-installed apps you can't remove or disable, and shitloads of ads. Are you seriously suggesting that people want all this crap, or are the marketeers just being creative with how they interpret the telemetry when they pitch new designs to investors?
The only real example of software where it's impossible to satisfy feature requests is when it comes to games. Application design is pretty straightforward. You know, similar to how the desktop PC industry evolved until all the eye candy and DRM started showing up and destroyed performance.
So... it's better to outright crash than return a message that it depends on a feature that's not available?
Because uninstalling and disabling are the same thing.
Because uninstalling forcibly and warning people are the same thing.
Because good ideas and bad ideas are the same thing.