Before you declare a browser wasteful you first have decide what it is it should be doing. There's a reason that "any browser" has a large memory footprint and that has fundamentally to do with the capabilities expected in a modern browser, and nothing to do with developers being lazy and wasteful on resources.
Code a browser that meets all the requirement of the latest web standards, effectively becomes a host to realtime applications, communications, provides hardware accelerated video transcoding, while providing security of sandboxing, is able to handle the wide and varied workload including running multiple full office suites in parallel, then *then* you can talk about those damn developers.
For there are still many places in the world that run on computer hardware a decade behind the cutting edge
A decade behind the cutting edge? Let's look into that: 2008 CPU releases: Core2Duo and Celeron7xx series, Phenom X4 series, and the older platform Athlon X2 series. Those people a decade behind will find themselves in an era where every low end and high end CPU from AMD and Intel have been almost exclusively 64bit for a good 2 years already.
Now there are still 32bit CPUs out there in operation but I can guarantee running the latest Linux distribution is not on their priority list as much as making sure the basic hardware doesn't just up and suddenly fail.
Test your software with a 512MB single core 1GHz 32bit desktop, and make it run decent in such an environment. There's a good dev.
If a museum would care to donate one of these machines to the developers then they may even oblige. But let's look at what era we are talking about: Powerbook G4, 1GHz, 512MB of RAM : 2003 Incidentally also the year consumer grade 64bit processors were introduced after being announced nearly 2 decades ago.
* couldn't integrate x * couldn't differentiate x * couldn't explain why anyone would ever add two logarithms * couldn't factor 1050 into primes without several mulligans * couldn't check a calculation by casting out nines
As someone who's been an engineer for many years I would put myself into that 60% category. Now before you talk about how spectacular a gap is, you can start by defining why the heck it matters.
Beyond basic trig, basic algebra, there's petty little Math out there that someone actually needs to be practically capable of doing, even in some quite advanced fields.
I don't think a college can even TEACH people skills.
and part environment
So you think people stop developing at 18 is that it? College IS an environment. Anything that can be learnt from an environment can be learnt in college including how to more effectively communicate with others.
If you get those down while encouraging group and independent learning, you've done your job as an educator.
Sounds like a great way of manufacturing exclusively white collar drones who will use the complete power of the university education to forever question why electricians are so bloody expensive and hard to book.
And BTW the need to teach students how to communicate clearly has been present for a couple hundred years. it's hardly a NewThing in education.
I don't know, have you seen Gen Z communicate to each other? Let's just say the ability for emojis to talk is a step forward compared to the graphical salad that gets sent around!
And in the interest of being inclusive to Gen Z: [Shakes head Emoji] Have [finger pointing to you emoji] [eye emoji] [talking smiley emoji]? [Talking smiley emoji] [poo emoji] [thumbs up emoji], [trash emoji] [confused smiley emoji] [thumbs down emoji] [colourful exclamation mark].
Did you just use a trashy tabloid as a news source, and one that specialises in garbage celebrity stories as a source?
Honestly I think we'd all be better off and more likely to agree with your comment if you just appealed to authority and didn't back up your statement at all.
Even when it requires any of the following?: a) starting a laptop b) unlocking a phone with a passcode c) getting out of your chair because it's not within reach d) needing wash your hands e) needing to drop what you are currently holding on to f) no fuckit, this should be a) right at the very top: taking your eyes off the road
The context around our actions are far more important than any action itself.
You know a proof of concept is so called because it proves a concept, right?
Yep. Unfortunately the engineer is criticizing a pilot which doesn't exist, not the concept. Or did you actually think Musk's grand scheme was to have Model Xs drive down his tunnel, in which case you've clearly been paying zero attention to any of Musk's projects and the process they go through.
The stakes are imperceptibly low until they're suddenly very, very serious.
In America maybe, but since we're talking about Australia it's worth noting that the last attempt at raising the stakes from the movie industry resulted in legal battle between rights holders and the courts culminating in not a single defendant even being notified that they are on the list before the case was dropped.
That said a new battle is current underway from Village Roadshow, and they are trying to get through the courts by applying effectively a speeding fine kind of sum in the hopes that the courts would not block them this time. The stakes of having to pay a couple of hundred dollars are not very serious at all.
The US have a higher prevalence of terrorism than any European country (although Ukraine is only one place behind the US).
Except that index ignores the normalisation between countries. The index itself is derived from absolute numbers: the number of terrorist incidents per year, the number of fatalities caused by terrorists per year, the number of injuries caused by terrorists per year, and total property damage caused by terrorism per year and then simply ranked between 0-10 being the best and the worst country.
The size of the USA in terms of many metrics (population, immigration, GDP, landmass) etc, makes it closer to combining all of central and western Europe figures into one.
The competition did it long before. Apple got lucky with the notch releasing their copycat product same generation as the ones they were copying, but in this case, well they're about 3 generations behind. They used the same excuse too:
Surface Pro 3 devices use a specially treated magnesium alloy case designed to help reduce weight, improve battery performance and because the treatment allows the case to be slightly malleable, improve durability in use. As a side effect of this treatment, devices can acquire a slight curvature. This curvature only occurs during the treatment process and does not change after manufacturing.
Just like the 'notch', the iBanana (TM) will be mimicked by Samsung, Huawei el at.
Yet again praising Apple as if they invented something new. Apple ceased innovation years ago, they are just a follower. Microsoft did it before it was cool. Looks like they are even copying Microsoft's PR department:
"Surface Pro 3 devices use a specially treated magnesium alloy case designed to help reduce weight, improve battery performance and because the treatment allows the case to be slightly malleable, improve durability in use. As a side effect of this treatment, devices can acquire a slight curvature. This curvature only occurs during the treatment process and does not change after manufacturing.
How about getting it right the first time, *before* they sell the motherboard?
There's only so much you can get "right" then you also need to rely on everyone else's stuff working too. The vast majority of bug fixes are kludges to support edge cases or hardware pushed to the absolute limit.
I think that the old BIOS, being a very minimal, compact, low-bug,
Normally I'd say something like "found the millennial" but you must be Gen-Z as even millennial would laugh at that statement.
BIOSes have since the early 90s been a clusterfuck of horrendously poorly written workarounds, barely working code messing up half the OSes that required to use them. UEFI is no worse than the old ones, and arguably better since it has provided a means of a non-archaic way of applying bugfixes that didn't involve digging through your junk drawer to look for a floppy drive and hope that you don't brick your computer in the 10min it took to actually update the piece of crap.
You call modern BIOSes bloated? In what way? Because they provide functionality to control the thousands of parameters that a modern device can configure? Or are you only upset that you now have the option to navigate a screen via a mouse instead of a keyboard? God knows you're not talking about speed because anyone whose actually used a computer from the 90s or the 00s would attest to the fact that booting has gotten faster and leaner rather than slower.
Hell my favourite bug in my current BIOS is that with fastboot enabled the BIOS is not able to get a USB keyboard initialised before initiating the boot permanently locking you out (the bypass is to remove a RAM stick which forces a memory re-check giving you enough time to hit DEL).
Monopoly-wise, UEFI, has given Microsoft and unfair advantage
In what way? If you're talking about secure boot it's worth remembering that MS *requires* vendors to be able to disable secure boot in order to get approval through the Windows Certification program.
M$ tried to lock in Windows by making "secure boot" with UEFI... and only they had the cryptographic signing that was accepted. That didn't fly very long...
Actually it never flied at all. Despite how much you revise history, the very first requirements for UEFI mentioned in any Windows certification (specifically when Windows 8 was released) was that for a vendor to get the Microsoft certification for their product they *had* to provide a software switch to disable secure boot, something that Microsoft's own devices do despite them having no incentive or requirement to do so.
And for anyone who thinks "firmware as a service" is a good idea, instead of running away screaming, here, let me hijack your system, and install my own firmware on your system....
You can come and try, but may I suggest you go for my desktop first? You see my device which does have FaaS gets regular updates and bug fixes, but my desktop motherboard with it's horrendously written and buggy UEFI BIOS hasn't had a patch since about a month after the product was released. Go for the low hanging fruit mate.
Yes, and the world is cooling because Trump stuck his head in the sand and went lalala. In other news Terrorists don't exist if you close your eyes. Windows doesn't suck if you don't turn on your computer. And gun violence in America stops being a problem when Google changed the gun emoji.
I understand that they delay flights, but I'd expect them to take out those drones as soon as possible. If they can't do that, that's rather a big vulnerability.
You shoot down a drone and call it a day. How did you know you got them all? This was a quite serious event where a repeated drone sighting happened after the news that the airport was already shut and a police operation was underway. Sounds like someone may be doing something on purpose? And yeah it's a huge vulnerability. If you think just because there's a little fence around an airport means they are secure then you've got it quite wrong.
I know the Dutch police has worked on using trained eagles to take out drones (by far the most bad-ass solution to the problem).
Nope, they tried, they failed. The program ended a year ago as it was an expensive boondoggle that achieved nothing.
I've also heard of using some sort of jammer or directed electromagnetic pulse to disrupt drone.
At an airport... Do you have any idea how sensitive various airport related radio equipment is? This sounds like it would work well in a lab and no where else.
But even a well-aimed bullet should solve the problem.
Shooting at what? A happy snapper who is nice enough to fly close to the ground for you? Something travelling at 60km/h over 200m away? I think you've seen too many movies. Bird shot has a short range, and various articles have discussed exactly why the police won't attempt to shoot down drones with other means.
Also, weren't drones supposed to be limited through software so that they can only fly where they're allowed to?
What software? The cheap Chinese shit from companies who can't even be bothered legally complying with RF requirements? The open source compiled yourself variety of which there are several projects available?
Anytime a company gets caught doing something stupid these days that it's always a bug, glitch or software error ?
The claim: A div tag that was invisible broke our super tuned browser. The defense: It was a bug and was removed when reported. The context: We are talking about a site that has seen a shitton of UI changes over the past year.
Occam's Razor: It was a bug, and there's no way Google is regression testing their website on Edge. Tinfoil hatter: Google is Teh Evil (TM).
Nothing funny at all. When someone designs a browser to an artifical benchmark rather than to a webstandard, expect that benchmark to break.
Or do you somehow doubt that a company that seemingly changes their interface in some way every other fucking weekend (OMG Youtube is black today!) is capable of writing bugs? What do you expect? Regression testing a competitor's browser?
They intentionally disable full screen on youtube videos embedded on web pages in iOS
Err no. They disable videos fullscreen embedded on webpages in all browsers, on all platforms where the ebedded iframe doesn't expressly implement allowfullscreen. The fact that Apple's locked down only rendering engine allowed on their platform doesn't implement it properly has nothing to do with the reason they added the option in the first place which was done at the request of the media so they could control the behaviour.
So you just did believe Google, because that was ultimately their excuse.
Mind you that's also quite a believable excuse given in the past 2 years the Youtube website probably went a grand total of 7 days in a row without some kind of another busybody UI change. "Oh noes a div element that does nothing but broke our browser, it must be because they hate us and we are perfect at coding in every way! Just don't ask us why we can't handle a div."
If you believe either company isn't running on maximum nastiness setting these days?
I believe a company that has spent the past 2 years endlessly fucking with their UI every other day is covered by Occam's Razor when it comes to some other company's browser not being able to handle a crapy div element.
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at any browser, really.
Before you declare a browser wasteful you first have decide what it is it should be doing. There's a reason that "any browser" has a large memory footprint and that has fundamentally to do with the capabilities expected in a modern browser, and nothing to do with developers being lazy and wasteful on resources.
Code a browser that meets all the requirement of the latest web standards, effectively becomes a host to realtime applications, communications, provides hardware accelerated video transcoding, while providing security of sandboxing, is able to handle the wide and varied workload including running multiple full office suites in parallel, then *then* you can talk about those damn developers.
For there are still many places in the world that run on computer hardware a decade behind the cutting edge
A decade behind the cutting edge? Let's look into that:
2008 CPU releases: Core2Duo and Celeron7xx series, Phenom X4 series, and the older platform Athlon X2 series.
Those people a decade behind will find themselves in an era where every low end and high end CPU from AMD and Intel have been almost exclusively 64bit for a good 2 years already.
Now there are still 32bit CPUs out there in operation but I can guarantee running the latest Linux distribution is not on their priority list as much as making sure the basic hardware doesn't just up and suddenly fail.
Test your software with a 512MB single core 1GHz 32bit desktop, and make it run decent in such an environment. There's a good dev.
If a museum would care to donate one of these machines to the developers then they may even oblige. But let's look at what era we are talking about:
Powerbook G4, 1GHz, 512MB of RAM : 2003 Incidentally also the year consumer grade 64bit processors were introduced after being announced nearly 2 decades ago.
* couldn't integrate x
* couldn't differentiate x
* couldn't explain why anyone would ever add two logarithms
* couldn't factor 1050 into primes without several mulligans
* couldn't check a calculation by casting out nines
As someone who's been an engineer for many years I would put myself into that 60% category. Now before you talk about how spectacular a gap is, you can start by defining why the heck it matters.
Beyond basic trig, basic algebra, there's petty little Math out there that someone actually needs to be practically capable of doing, even in some quite advanced fields.
I don't think a college can even TEACH people skills.
and part environment
So you think people stop developing at 18 is that it? College IS an environment. Anything that can be learnt from an environment can be learnt in college including how to more effectively communicate with others.
If you get those down while encouraging group and independent learning, you've done your job as an educator.
Sounds like a great way of manufacturing exclusively white collar drones who will use the complete power of the university education to forever question why electricians are so bloody expensive and hard to book.
And BTW the need to teach students how to communicate clearly has been present for a couple hundred years. it's hardly a NewThing in education.
I don't know, have you seen Gen Z communicate to each other? Let's just say the ability for emojis to talk is a step forward compared to the graphical salad that gets sent around!
And in the interest of being inclusive to Gen Z:
[Shakes head Emoji] Have [finger pointing to you emoji] [eye emoji] [talking smiley emoji]? [Talking smiley emoji] [poo emoji] [thumbs up emoji], [trash emoji] [confused smiley emoji] [thumbs down emoji] [colourful exclamation mark].
Did you just use a trashy tabloid as a news source, and one that specialises in garbage celebrity stories as a source?
Honestly I think we'd all be better off and more likely to agree with your comment if you just appealed to authority and didn't back up your statement at all.
I've found that typing/clicking
Even when it requires any of the following?:
a) starting a laptop
b) unlocking a phone with a passcode
c) getting out of your chair because it's not within reach
d) needing wash your hands
e) needing to drop what you are currently holding on to
f) no fuckit, this should be a) right at the very top: taking your eyes off the road
The context around our actions are far more important than any action itself.
You know a proof of concept is so called because it proves a concept, right?
Yep. Unfortunately the engineer is criticizing a pilot which doesn't exist, not the concept. Or did you actually think Musk's grand scheme was to have Model Xs drive down his tunnel, in which case you've clearly been paying zero attention to any of Musk's projects and the process they go through.
It is rare for someone to be *that* ignorant about DNS.
You dropped out of the womb in the middle of a LAN party didn't you.
The stakes are imperceptibly low until they're suddenly very, very serious.
In America maybe, but since we're talking about Australia it's worth noting that the last attempt at raising the stakes from the movie industry resulted in legal battle between rights holders and the courts culminating in not a single defendant even being notified that they are on the list before the case was dropped.
That said a new battle is current underway from Village Roadshow, and they are trying to get through the courts by applying effectively a speeding fine kind of sum in the hopes that the courts would not block them this time. The stakes of having to pay a couple of hundred dollars are not very serious at all.
The US have a higher prevalence of terrorism than any European country (although Ukraine is only one place behind the US).
Except that index ignores the normalisation between countries. The index itself is derived from absolute numbers: the number of terrorist incidents per year, the number of fatalities caused by terrorists per year, the number of injuries caused by terrorists per year, and total property damage caused by terrorism per year and then simply ranked between 0-10 being the best and the worst country.
The size of the USA in terms of many metrics (population, immigration, GDP, landmass) etc, makes it closer to combining all of central and western Europe figures into one.
You know what's not "appropriate" here? Acting like a child who's offended at an acronym.
People need to grow the fuck up already.
There has never been a more appropriate time to post a Red Dwarf clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The competition did it long before. Apple got lucky with the notch releasing their copycat product same generation as the ones they were copying, but in this case, well they're about 3 generations behind. They used the same excuse too:
Surface Pro 3 devices use a specially treated magnesium alloy case designed to help reduce weight, improve battery performance and because the treatment allows the case to be slightly malleable, improve durability in use. As a side effect of this treatment, devices can acquire a slight curvature. This curvature only occurs during the treatment process and does not change after manufacturing.
Just like the 'notch', the iBanana (TM) will be mimicked by Samsung, Huawei el at.
Yet again praising Apple as if they invented something new. Apple ceased innovation years ago, they are just a follower. Microsoft did it before it was cool. Looks like they are even copying Microsoft's PR department:
"Surface Pro 3 devices use a specially treated magnesium alloy case designed to help reduce weight, improve battery performance and because the treatment allows the case to be slightly malleable, improve durability in use. As a side effect of this treatment, devices can acquire a slight curvature. This curvature only occurs during the treatment process and does not change after manufacturing.
How about getting it right the first time, *before* they sell the motherboard?
There's only so much you can get "right" then you also need to rely on everyone else's stuff working too. The vast majority of bug fixes are kludges to support edge cases or hardware pushed to the absolute limit.
It was a nitpick. It doesn't make it any less of an incredibly HUGE problem.
I think that the old BIOS, being a very minimal, compact, low-bug,
Normally I'd say something like "found the millennial" but you must be Gen-Z as even millennial would laugh at that statement.
BIOSes have since the early 90s been a clusterfuck of horrendously poorly written workarounds, barely working code messing up half the OSes that required to use them. UEFI is no worse than the old ones, and arguably better since it has provided a means of a non-archaic way of applying bugfixes that didn't involve digging through your junk drawer to look for a floppy drive and hope that you don't brick your computer in the 10min it took to actually update the piece of crap.
You call modern BIOSes bloated? In what way? Because they provide functionality to control the thousands of parameters that a modern device can configure? Or are you only upset that you now have the option to navigate a screen via a mouse instead of a keyboard? God knows you're not talking about speed because anyone whose actually used a computer from the 90s or the 00s would attest to the fact that booting has gotten faster and leaner rather than slower.
Hell my favourite bug in my current BIOS is that with fastboot enabled the BIOS is not able to get a USB keyboard initialised before initiating the boot permanently locking you out (the bypass is to remove a RAM stick which forces a memory re-check giving you enough time to hit DEL).
Monopoly-wise, UEFI, has given Microsoft and unfair advantage
In what way? If you're talking about secure boot it's worth remembering that MS *requires* vendors to be able to disable secure boot in order to get approval through the Windows Certification program.
M$ tried to lock in Windows by making "secure boot" with UEFI... and only they had the cryptographic signing that was accepted. That didn't fly very long...
Actually it never flied at all. Despite how much you revise history, the very first requirements for UEFI mentioned in any Windows certification (specifically when Windows 8 was released) was that for a vendor to get the Microsoft certification for their product they *had* to provide a software switch to disable secure boot, something that Microsoft's own devices do despite them having no incentive or requirement to do so.
And for anyone who thinks "firmware as a service" is a good idea, instead of running away screaming, here, let me hijack your system, and install my own firmware on your system....
You can come and try, but may I suggest you go for my desktop first? You see my device which does have FaaS gets regular updates and bug fixes, but my desktop motherboard with it's horrendously written and buggy UEFI BIOS hasn't had a patch since about a month after the product was released. Go for the low hanging fruit mate.
... everything would have continued to be safe?
Yes, and the world is cooling because Trump stuck his head in the sand and went lalala.
In other news Terrorists don't exist if you close your eyes.
Windows doesn't suck if you don't turn on your computer.
And gun violence in America stops being a problem when Google changed the gun emoji.
I understand that they delay flights, but I'd expect them to take out those drones as soon as possible. If they can't do that, that's rather a big vulnerability.
You shoot down a drone and call it a day. How did you know you got them all? This was a quite serious event where a repeated drone sighting happened after the news that the airport was already shut and a police operation was underway. Sounds like someone may be doing something on purpose? And yeah it's a huge vulnerability. If you think just because there's a little fence around an airport means they are secure then you've got it quite wrong.
I know the Dutch police has worked on using trained eagles to take out drones (by far the most bad-ass solution to the problem).
Nope, they tried, they failed. The program ended a year ago as it was an expensive boondoggle that achieved nothing.
I've also heard of using some sort of jammer or directed electromagnetic pulse to disrupt drone.
At an airport... Do you have any idea how sensitive various airport related radio equipment is? This sounds like it would work well in a lab and no where else.
But even a well-aimed bullet should solve the problem.
Shooting at what? A happy snapper who is nice enough to fly close to the ground for you? Something travelling at 60km/h over 200m away? I think you've seen too many movies. Bird shot has a short range, and various articles have discussed exactly why the police won't attempt to shoot down drones with other means.
Also, weren't drones supposed to be limited through software so that they can only fly where they're allowed to?
What software? The cheap Chinese shit from companies who can't even be bothered legally complying with RF requirements? The open source compiled yourself variety of which there are several projects available?
Anytime a company gets caught doing something stupid these days that it's always a bug, glitch or software error ?
The claim: A div tag that was invisible broke our super tuned browser.
The defense: It was a bug and was removed when reported.
The context: We are talking about a site that has seen a shitton of UI changes over the past year.
Occam's Razor: It was a bug, and there's no way Google is regression testing their website on Edge.
Tinfoil hatter: Google is Teh Evil (TM).
Nothing funny at all. When someone designs a browser to an artifical benchmark rather than to a webstandard, expect that benchmark to break.
Or do you somehow doubt that a company that seemingly changes their interface in some way every other fucking weekend (OMG Youtube is black today!) is capable of writing bugs? What do you expect? Regression testing a competitor's browser?
They intentionally disable full screen on youtube videos embedded on web pages in iOS
Err no. They disable videos fullscreen embedded on webpages in all browsers, on all platforms where the ebedded iframe doesn't expressly implement allowfullscreen. The fact that Apple's locked down only rendering engine allowed on their platform doesn't implement it properly has nothing to do with the reason they added the option in the first place which was done at the request of the media so they could control the behaviour.
Google can't make a webpage properly
So you just did believe Google, because that was ultimately their excuse.
Mind you that's also quite a believable excuse given in the past 2 years the Youtube website probably went a grand total of 7 days in a row without some kind of another busybody UI change. "Oh noes a div element that does nothing but broke our browser, it must be because they hate us and we are perfect at coding in every way! Just don't ask us why we can't handle a div."
If you believe either company isn't running on maximum nastiness setting these days?
I believe a company that has spent the past 2 years endlessly fucking with their UI every other day is covered by Occam's Razor when it comes to some other company's browser not being able to handle a crapy div element.