Malice doesn't excuse stupidity, any more than stupidity excuses malice. If a thief is caught, you don't accept the excuse "the back door was unlocked, if I hadn't ripped him off, somebody else would have" That's lame. Also lame: "Why should I have to lock my back door? People should know better than to steal."
It seems to me that a memory leak that causes the application to slow down, freeze, and crash is pretty basic. And yet it took them 7 years to fix it. That's pretty unimpressive.
If they had fixed this bug just a few months earlier, I wouldn't have gotten terminally frustrated and switched to Chrome — this year. But given the flaky history of Firefox, I suspect something would have driven me away eventually.
I probably got modded down by the same people who left AC posts accusing me of:"blaming the victim", Hey, if you're negligent, you bear some responsibility for the result. That doesn't mitigate Lulzsec's malice, but neither does Lulzsec's malice mitigate Sony's negligence.
I hate walled gardens too, but nobody's getting them shoved down their throats. People choose to buy iOS devices. It may be a poor choice, but it's theirs. ' And the walled garden issue doesn't apply here..Apple doesn't control third-party OS X software the way it does for iOS,
When you respond to a post, you should actually read it. The situation I described was about usability, not bling.
Yes, Apple products are notorious for the bling factor and other silly branding gimmicks. But Macs also have a solid record for usability. For you to credit the choice of serious developers to "peer recognition and blending in" is superficial and arrogant.
No, sorry. I was involved in early efforts to cash in on the move to Linux and it became obvious early on that nobody was buying what we were selling. Microsoft achieved lockin in the early days of the PC revolution, and no amount of crappy OSs (Vista being only one of many such turds) could break that lockin.
Desktop Linux's one big opportunity was server developers, because developers need a hackable desktop. Windows is too tangled up in complex, obscure APIs to rate as hackable. The same used to be true for Macs, but that changed when they moved to a Unix-based OS, making OS X as hackable as Linux, with much better standardization and support. Much more expensive, of course, but that's not a factor when your employer is paying for your hardware.
I say it suceeded where it counts, to computer literate people like me and many many other slashdotters.
If my last in-office job is any indication, that's just not true. For our job laptops, everybody had their choice of Thinkpad/Ubuntu or Mac. My aging brain has never adapted to the idiosyncrasies of Macs, so I chose Ubuntu. But most of the younger workers — the development engineers, the QA people, tech support — had Macs. And they were all masterfully adept at working with them. The fancy desktop idioms of the Mac platform seem to have been polished to a fine gleam. Ubuntu is still a work in progress; its main merit is that it was closer to what I was used to.
I come at it from the opposite direction: I'm no fan of LulzSec, but Sony deserves to have its toenails removed for being so bloody sloppy about security.
I'm pretty sure that 5081 refers to a specific single-field layout, not to 80-column punched cards as such. There were many layouts. I seem to recall using something very similar to this FORTRAN card even when I wasn't doing FORTRAN, and I don't think they had "FORTRAN STATEMENT" printed on them.
I don't recall anybody loathing punched cards. They were a simple, reliable, if somewhat bulky medium. It is true that magnetic discs represented a great improvement. In my case, floppies were never more than a backup medium, since the systems I worked with always had hard disks.
Sigh. I've already installed the update, but I feel no motivation at all to take it for a spin. I've gotten used to Chrome's quirks and limitations, and don't have a lot of incentive to go back. Now, if this had happened just a couple months ago.
But I didn't. And jeez, it took them 7 years to fix a really basic bug. To heck with it.
My orbital mechanics sucks, but apparently smarter people have thought this through. It's not as intuitively simple as a tether between the Earth's equator and a geostationary satellite, but the physics does work:
My issue is that this is yet another fancy space project that presupposes an earth to high-orbit launching capability we don't have, nobody is seriously working on, and would seem to require more financial support than anybody has the will to deliver.
If somebody can crack this nut, then we can start talking about lunar space elevators, missions to other planets, and other fun stuff. But until that happens, all these fancy proposals are just so much hot air.
If Facebook apps are glitchy (I'm an old antisocial type who doesn't get the whole Facebook thing), then their programming methodology is kind of beside the point. The best programmers screw up. That's what QA is for. Assuming they have it. Is it passe these days?
I first learned to program 40 years ago, and the lone-wolf mentality of programmers was obvious to me from day one. I think it mostly had to do with computers still being alien to most people, and organizations tolerating antisocial behavior in their programmers because there weren't that many to choose from.
Nowadays almost everybody grows up with access to computers, often from before they've learned talk. (I'm damned jealous of that!) Now a computer is nothing special, and you probably learned to use it in a social setting, as opposed to hiding in your bedroom with a PC (which was the norm 20 years ago) or sneaking off to the computer center at 2 am so you could get fast turnaround on batch jobs (which is how I learned).
there is the problem of getting tired, where programming ends up being handed off between partners while the other partner zones out, and at each handoff, one has to come back up to speed.
If only one programmer is actually working and the other is zoning out, is that really pair programming? Doesn't sound like it.
The first time I heard of pair programming, it was in this article, which describes combining it with the Pomodoro technique, where nobody works for more than 25 minutes at a stretch. That would seem to address the one-guy-gets-tired issues, and indeed the general problem of people pushing at a job when taking a break would raise their overall efficiency.
I'm a tech writer, and I've often wanted to try pair writing with a development engineer. That would be a nice dovetailing of skills, since each of us would be strong in areas where the other is weak. Opportunity has never come up, alas.
My experience with FF is even worse than yours. I could get painful slowdowns just using the browser, without multiple windows, for an hour or two. The Windows task manager shows it using over a gigabyte. The blame has to belong to one of my plugins, but which one? I've tried selective disabling, with no luck.
I gave up on FF a few months ago. I'd resisted the move to Chrome for years (not enough plugins, too much GUI cleverness) but the aggravation of repeated slowdowns, freezes, and crashes was finally too much for me. It didn't help the FF updates included lame GUI changes that were poorly thought out and whose only merit was that they made FF look more like Chrome.
This announcement sort of tempts me. Yeah, fixes to the memory leak nonsense have been announced before, but this is the first time they've claimed to fix leaks in the plugin environment. Still, having made the painful transition to Chrome, I don't feel strongly motivated to move back.
It's as big as a tank too. OK, if you only need black and white printing, you need a high-volume printer, and you have the room for it, I'm sure it makes sense to spend $85 for a used LJ4.
But none of those applies to me. I have a tiny inkjet that lives on a shelf above my desk, prints color, and only cost me $35 brand new. It does the occasional letter, printed form, and photograph quite well, and that's all I need it to do. I buy maybe one cartridge a year, so cartridge costs are not an issue.
If you do a lot of high-volume printing, then I guess laser printers make sense. But some of us print only a few pages a month on average. The higher cost of lasers just doesn't make sense for us.
Solar boosters love to talk about "grid parity" but I find the idea that it will be competitive with coal in two years laughable. Anybody who claims this is cherry-picking their figures. There isn't even agreement as to what figures are valid. Some forms of solar energy show great promise (thermal solar could theoretically replace all competing sources) but costs, construction delays, NIMBY issues, and other problems mean it's a long term project, not something that takes over in a couple years.
Carbon sequestration by growing and burying wood? it's a good idea, but it can't be scaled up the way you claim. That takes land, and agricultural land is already maxed out. We're limited to thining out existing forests and burying the wood from them. That would consume maybe 10% of the carbon we're currently pumping into the atmosphere — a figure that's rapidly rising.
There are a lot of good ideas for producing less carbon and sequestering the carbon we do produce, but none of them can be implemented quickly. The only thing that can be done quickly is limiting emissions. Alas, that encounters too much political and economic pushback.
Your final argument is that previous predictions of disaster have been wrong, therefore future predictions must be wrong too. There are multiple problems with that. It's a logical fallacy (the boy keeps crying wolf, therefore there are no wolves). Some of the catastrophes you cite have not had time to lead to real disaster (Peak oil will take a few more decades to screw us over, but a glance at rising gas prices makes me dubious that it's a myth). Some have been avoided because of the warnings of disaster (banning ozone-depleting chemicals seems to have put the ozone holes on the road to healing).
I wouldn't be too smug about not being fooled. You seem to be doing a good job of fooling yourself.
I've already responded to this stupidity (and been thoroughly flamed for it) but since then I've read all the obituaries for him. These were instructive, since he's rarely been in the news since his retirement from the astronaut corps.
And here's one fact that leaped out at me: Neil Armstrong got really mad when people hyped up his achievement and called him a great man. He thought that kind of hype minimized the hard work of thousands of people who helped the Apollo program succeed.
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Malice doesn't excuse stupidity, any more than stupidity excuses malice. If a thief is caught, you don't accept the excuse "the back door was unlocked, if I hadn't ripped him off, somebody else would have" That's lame. Also lame: "Why should I have to lock my back door? People should know better than to steal."
It seems to me that a memory leak that causes the application to slow down, freeze, and crash is pretty basic. And yet it took them 7 years to fix it. That's pretty unimpressive.
If they had fixed this bug just a few months earlier, I wouldn't have gotten terminally frustrated and switched to Chrome — this year. But given the flaky history of Firefox, I suspect something would have driven me away eventually.
The people I'm talking about all worked for a well-known SaaS provider. I can't prove my experience is typical, but neither can you.
I probably got modded down by the same people who left AC posts accusing me of :"blaming the victim", Hey, if you're negligent, you bear some responsibility for the result. That doesn't mitigate Lulzsec's malice, but neither does Lulzsec's malice mitigate Sony's negligence.
I hate walled gardens too, but nobody's getting them shoved down their throats. People choose to buy iOS devices. It may be a poor choice, but it's theirs. .Apple doesn't control third-party OS X software the way it does for iOS,
'
And the walled garden issue doesn't apply here.
When you respond to a post, you should actually read it. The situation I described was about usability, not bling.
Yes, Apple products are notorious for the bling factor and other silly branding gimmicks. But Macs also have a solid record for usability. For you to credit the choice of serious developers to "peer recognition and blending in" is superficial and arrogant.
No, sorry. I was involved in early efforts to cash in on the move to Linux and it became obvious early on that nobody was buying what we were selling. Microsoft achieved lockin in the early days of the PC revolution, and no amount of crappy OSs (Vista being only one of many such turds) could break that lockin.
Desktop Linux's one big opportunity was server developers, because developers need a hackable desktop. Windows is too tangled up in complex, obscure APIs to rate as hackable. The same used to be true for Macs, but that changed when they moved to a Unix-based OS, making OS X as hackable as Linux, with much better standardization and support. Much more expensive, of course, but that's not a factor when your employer is paying for your hardware.
I say it suceeded where it counts, to computer literate people like me and many many other slashdotters.
If my last in-office job is any indication, that's just not true. For our job laptops, everybody had their choice of Thinkpad/Ubuntu or Mac. My aging brain has never adapted to the idiosyncrasies of Macs, so I chose Ubuntu. But most of the younger workers — the development engineers, the QA people, tech support — had Macs. And they were all masterfully adept at working with them. The fancy desktop idioms of the Mac platform seem to have been polished to a fine gleam. Ubuntu is still a work in progress; its main merit is that it was closer to what I was used to.
I come at it from the opposite direction: I'm no fan of LulzSec, but Sony deserves to have its toenails removed for being so bloody sloppy about security.
I'm pretty sure that 5081 refers to a specific single-field layout, not to 80-column punched cards as such. There were many layouts. I seem to recall using something very similar to this FORTRAN card even when I wasn't doing FORTRAN, and I don't think they had "FORTRAN STATEMENT" printed on them.
I don't recall anybody loathing punched cards. They were a simple, reliable, if somewhat bulky medium. It is true that magnetic discs represented a great improvement. In my case, floppies were never more than a backup medium, since the systems I worked with always had hard disks.
Sigh. I've already installed the update, but I feel no motivation at all to take it for a spin. I've gotten used to Chrome's quirks and limitations, and don't have a lot of incentive to go back. Now, if this had happened just a couple months ago.
But I didn't. And jeez, it took them 7 years to fix a really basic bug. To heck with it.
Where do you think that meteors come from? It turns out that space is inhabited by giant birds,...
Yeah, it's not like anybody on Slashdot is interested in science or anything.
Yeah, now that you mention it, it hasn't been a problem recently. Total pain when it was happening though.
Jeez, talk about overreaction. It's a simple mistake. We all make them.
My orbital mechanics sucks, but apparently smarter people have thought this through. It's not as intuitively simple as a tether between the Earth's equator and a geostationary satellite, but the physics does work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_space_elevator
My issue is that this is yet another fancy space project that presupposes an earth to high-orbit launching capability we don't have, nobody is seriously working on, and would seem to require more financial support than anybody has the will to deliver.
If somebody can crack this nut, then we can start talking about lunar space elevators, missions to other planets, and other fun stuff. But until that happens, all these fancy proposals are just so much hot air.
If Facebook apps are glitchy (I'm an old antisocial type who doesn't get the whole Facebook thing), then their programming methodology is kind of beside the point. The best programmers screw up. That's what QA is for. Assuming they have it. Is it passe these days?
I first learned to program 40 years ago, and the lone-wolf mentality of programmers was obvious to me from day one. I think it mostly had to do with computers still being alien to most people, and organizations tolerating antisocial behavior in their programmers because there weren't that many to choose from.
Nowadays almost everybody grows up with access to computers, often from before they've learned talk. (I'm damned jealous of that!) Now a computer is nothing special, and you probably learned to use it in a social setting, as opposed to hiding in your bedroom with a PC (which was the norm 20 years ago) or sneaking off to the computer center at 2 am so you could get fast turnaround on batch jobs (which is how I learned).
there is the problem of getting tired, where programming ends up being handed off between partners while the other partner zones out, and at each handoff, one has to come back up to speed.
If only one programmer is actually working and the other is zoning out, is that really pair programming? Doesn't sound like it.
The first time I heard of pair programming, it was in this article, which describes combining it with the Pomodoro technique, where nobody works for more than 25 minutes at a stretch. That would seem to address the one-guy-gets-tired issues, and indeed the general problem of people pushing at a job when taking a break would raise their overall efficiency.
I'm a tech writer, and I've often wanted to try pair writing with a development engineer. That would be a nice dovetailing of skills, since each of us would be strong in areas where the other is weak. Opportunity has never come up, alas.
I get Flash freezes in Chrome too.
My experience with FF is even worse than yours. I could get painful slowdowns just using the browser, without multiple windows, for an hour or two. The Windows task manager shows it using over a gigabyte. The blame has to belong to one of my plugins, but which one? I've tried selective disabling, with no luck.
I gave up on FF a few months ago. I'd resisted the move to Chrome for years (not enough plugins, too much GUI cleverness) but the aggravation of repeated slowdowns, freezes, and crashes was finally too much for me. It didn't help the FF updates included lame GUI changes that were poorly thought out and whose only merit was that they made FF look more like Chrome.
This announcement sort of tempts me. Yeah, fixes to the memory leak nonsense have been announced before, but this is the first time they've claimed to fix leaks in the plugin environment. Still, having made the painful transition to Chrome, I don't feel strongly motivated to move back.
It's as big as a tank too. OK, if you only need black and white printing, you need a high-volume printer, and you have the room for it, I'm sure it makes sense to spend $85 for a used LJ4.
But none of those applies to me. I have a tiny inkjet that lives on a shelf above my desk, prints color, and only cost me $35 brand new. It does the occasional letter, printed form, and photograph quite well, and that's all I need it to do. I buy maybe one cartridge a year, so cartridge costs are not an issue.
If you do a lot of high-volume printing, then I guess laser printers make sense. But some of us print only a few pages a month on average. The higher cost of lasers just doesn't make sense for us.
Solar boosters love to talk about "grid parity" but I find the idea that it will be competitive with coal in two years laughable. Anybody who claims this is cherry-picking their figures. There isn't even agreement as to what figures are valid. Some forms of solar energy show great promise (thermal solar could theoretically replace all competing sources) but costs, construction delays, NIMBY issues, and other problems mean it's a long term project, not something that takes over in a couple years.
Carbon sequestration by growing and burying wood? it's a good idea, but it can't be scaled up the way you claim. That takes land, and agricultural land is already maxed out. We're limited to thining out existing forests and burying the wood from them. That would consume maybe 10% of the carbon we're currently pumping into the atmosphere — a figure that's rapidly rising.
There are a lot of good ideas for producing less carbon and sequestering the carbon we do produce, but none of them can be implemented quickly. The only thing that can be done quickly is limiting emissions. Alas, that encounters too much political and economic pushback.
Your final argument is that previous predictions of disaster have been wrong, therefore future predictions must be wrong too. There are multiple problems with that. It's a logical fallacy (the boy keeps crying wolf, therefore there are no wolves). Some of the catastrophes you cite have not had time to lead to real disaster (Peak oil will take a few more decades to screw us over, but a glance at rising gas prices makes me dubious that it's a myth). Some have been avoided because of the warnings of disaster (banning ozone-depleting chemicals seems to have put the ozone holes on the road to healing).
I wouldn't be too smug about not being fooled. You seem to be doing a good job of fooling yourself.
I've already responded to this stupidity (and been thoroughly flamed for it) but since then I've read all the obituaries for him. These were instructive, since he's rarely been in the news since his retirement from the astronaut corps.
And here's one fact that leaped out at me: Neil Armstrong got really mad when people hyped up his achievement and called him a great man. He thought that kind of hype minimized the hard work of thousands of people who helped the Apollo program succeed.
I agree.