"Back then the GI Bill covered $12,500 for college tuition, which in 1997 was around 3 semesters at the school I attended....You don't need a degree, you just need to be smart."
You just proved my point. The 1990's HR would hire you if you had anything technical on a resume that was 1 page.
Today there are people with 8 years experience who have been out of work for awhile who are desperate to make $30,000 a year since unemployment is about ready to go away.
In a recession/depression you compete for jobs. In a boom of the 1950's/1990's jobs compete for you! I am sure you have headhunters calling you today and the answer to this is you have many years of experience and solid references.
Also I can't buy a house today and even renting an apartment is hard. Why? I owe $40,000 in student loans. FYI I did 2 years at a community college to save momey. College is much much more expensive in today than in the 1990s. Try a good 400% more.
Back in 2002 - 2006 you could get a home easily. Not true today.
I am not whining or complaining as my wages are gradually increasing. But no I do not have it as good and it is requiring a lot more work today. Without a degree working at a call center or stocking electronics at TigerDirect is your only future as no one will take a chance when there are 3 to 4 people with them for ever job opening.
Increasing the supply of trained workers lowers the cost - economics 101.
Of course tech companies always more workers, even if they are looking to offshore as much as they can, and replace the rest with visa workers. But, just in case, doesn't hurt to lower the cost of domestic workers.
Forget the situation today, look towards the future. There is no way for western workers to compete with third world wages.
You know I have heard this on slashdot for 10 dang years!
The worst advice I ever took in 2004 was that computer science was a waste of time and so was engineering! They would pay $12/hr by 2014 due to Indians taking jobs etc. Go get that useless business degree.
Let me tell you that was the worst advise I have ever taken.
My friends who graduated even in 2008 all make $70,000. I ended up unemployed, divorced, and moved back into my parents in my 30's as no one would hire people with a business degree.
It took 2 years just to get back into the white collar market. Working 13/hr and then 15/hr then 18/hr and up while I lived at home because I got my degree in the wrong area because people like you said NO TO IT H1B1 will take it all.
I am now starting to make ok in IT again but lost 5 years of my life and marriage since I had to work any call center or low wage job I could find and worked for free paying my student loans.
There are people smarter than myself without degrees. There are morons who have master degrees who I had to let go because they are book smarts but can't do shit in the real world without the deer in the headlights look when independent analysis and goals are needed.
A degree you get an outrageously expensive education yes. You learn some cool things. But in a down economy it means you get that internship or entry level job with the foot in that door. While HR ignores you unless you have many years of experience and letters of recommendation even for the most basic entry level jobs today.
If you watched the movie social network his former partner and early CFO stayed in school and did an internship in New York. As a result he was terminated and lost all his shares.
Facebook made no money at all back then so he viewed it as kind of cool, but internships is where I need to be as this thing probably wont take off etc.
What if Facebook ended up like Friendster and the other failures? Maybe the former partner in The Social network would be Zuckerbergs boss as he he would filing paperwork since he lacks a degree for any real job.
It is a risk basically. Play it safe you can loose plat it risky you loose even more! If you are not risk adverse and do not give a shit then go for it but do not be surprised if you end up like many many others who failed.
Even though I am in a technical position I decided to major in business. I now know the mindset of accountants, finance, and management. I can speak and understand the language. If I want to progress my small business I know what an asset and a liability is and how to setup books.
For my electives in computer science I learned what object oriented programming truly is outside what I read on slashdot and books. I know what algorithms are and real time means. I may not even have that much as a real computer science major but I recieved an education.
When the economy tanked after I graduated no one would hire me except for one temp contract job. It required a degree and that is how I got it. Without that I would be substitute teaching and working fast food at night to make up for my crappy wages.
Those who argue I DO NOT NEED A DEGREE got in in 1999 when you didn't need one. If you are one of these try being born 15 years later and getting a job today?... no degree? How does $12/hr aka 20,000 a year sound? Great! Here is a set of headphones and go read this script at the techexpo call center etc. Make sure you mommy reminds you not to be late since we do not pay you enough to move out etc. That my friends is what the economic reality is today regardless of skillsets if you have no experience or education. Programming wont mean shit as HR will throw out your resume if it is not work related somehow.
Point is the degree is required in 2014 to get your foot in the door unless you feel working at techexpo call center can get a you a programming job as that and GeekSquad is all you are going to get.
They are amazing if you have levels that used to take 3 minutes or more to load.
I admit I bought some for games but I have real work VM's for vmware workstation as well. There is no way I could go back to learning exchange where I need to setup a domain server, an exchange cas, exchange owa, exchange mailbox, and 2 clients with another vm running server 2003 acting as a router to another subnet etc.
Starting each one up on a mechanical driver takes about 10 minutes before they are even ready. Want to call it the night. Wait many times longer for each one to shutdown. Wooa if you shutdown more than 2 at a time as the disk spins freaking mad and then takes 5x as long when you just need to go to bed.
You know many of us have this little thing called a budget. The landlord, student loans, bank, exwife, kids, food, gas all take higher precedence. I bought my second 238 gb Samsung PRo and I am already having buyers guilt as I am looking at bills due.
I have VM's for work on these drivers that are hundreds of gigs. A 50 gig game is frankly unacceptable nor is loading audio tracks and maps on the backup mechanical driver. Star wars the old republic had a level )corella) that takes 4 minutes to load on the mechanical drive and the fact some VMs had to be moved to the mechanical is why I bought the second drive.
I also still have a 2010 era phenom II x6 (at least 6 cores) and only a modest upgrade to an ATI 7850. This was all due to financial constraints which I feel I overspent heavily for this as it is:-(
I am not alone as 40% of all new jobs created are at Walmart, McDonalds, dollar stores, etc according to statistics. I am thankful I make more than $10/hr as these poor saps but they are all competing with me for jobs as they get A+ got to night schools for certs etc.
Not everyone makes $60,000 a year and is single and has their student loans paid off. If you are this congrats. But you are in a bubble and saying purchase more is ignorant of what resources other people have.
XP is still popular as many who have 10 year old computers are the ones who work at Walmart, barely make it each month, or live off social security retirement.
... or having to use a sllooow mechanical drive instead of a fast SSD because of the bloated space requirements. I own 2 238gb SSD's and this is game sadly is going on neither. I need to put VM's on them for VMWare and they up over 100 gbs before I even load a game on them.
I hope the market is not going this route for piracy or laziness reasons.
I need bloated VM's for work and training with VMWare Workstation. Running 7 VM's for a homemade domain with exchange servers and clients with a startup can take freaking 10 minutes on a mechanical drive! Shutting down is painful too.
A SSD is alife saver, but I do not want to wait 4 minutes for levels to load in SWTOR (corellia) orTitanfall:-(
I just blew more money (close to $500 since last summer) on another SSD to make room for Windows, games, and lots of VM's. A 50 gig game is frankly unacceptable. I wonder if I am being pennywise pound foolish with my investment so far:-(
If this is where the market is going we are screwed. 1 tb ssd's will not get below the $250 for a least 2 years and the OS and 1-2 games plus some apps as it is today can fill a 238gb ssd easily. Even ancient World of warcraft is over 25 gigs!
Well the OS would be a better way to store DNS caches as it is updated with properly security often.
I had a man in the middle attack before about 10 years ago when something didn't seem right. After flushing dns I re pinged and another ip address was shown. Ahh the joys of old XP pre-SP 2:-)
I do not trust Mozilla to have the resources that Apple, Redhat, or Microsoft have in this area frankly.
All I know is I repair computers and running as a normal user an exploit can bypass easily and attach itself to another process. I also seen a flash ad on slashdot try to attach malware to a service I had running as anormal user too! The AV caught it.
I now use flashblock after that incident.
I think you are ivory tower and read about computer stuff but in the real world hackers find ways to bypass. The more roadblocks you have the more steps it takes to crack.
What is to stop malware from insert records into the DNS for Russian banks etc? File system escalations are bad enough and at least Chrome and IE do not have any filesystem access and can only write to %appdata.
But Firefox nope. I will make sure not to use it even if it does support threading like its competitors starting to do last decade.
IE 6 was the better browser sadly. If you can believe that which I know in 2014 that is hard.
Ask any older webmaster from that time frame?
W3C was something a committee did which was academic. Only Netscape and MS specific CSS and HTML mattered and websites needed to include specific workarounds for one or the other etc. Man, people forget how dark the web was 10 years ago.
The fact the majority of non Chinese and business users use Firefox and Chrome today show bundling had nothing to do with IE's rise. It came because Netscape died at 4.7 and become very stale FAST while we like to forgot about NS 5+ as they made IE 6 look less buggy in comparison and no one really used those. I refused and kept NS 4.7 for many many users until 2002 when I gave up.
You're an idiot as standard users still have access to threads, processes, and the file system. This means you can attach a rogue process or malware to an admin one which happens to run as a service. It can then be executed with full admin privileges.
You seem to think Firefox is still at version 4 or something. It is now heavily multithreaded, has sped up considerably (and is now competitive with even Chrome for most users), uses far less RAM (even compared to other browsers), and has even had its process sandboxing improved on most OSes.
None of this is an attempt to deter people from switching, but simply to fight your misinformation. It's popular to bash on Firefox lately, while telling users to switch to Chromium. But Opera is probably a better choice for users who don't want to opt into Google's services and just get the faster and leaner browser, and it is better-poised to return to greatness than stagnate like Chrome has lately.
Because it is!
No it is not multithreaded. Don't believe me? Hit control alt delete? Firefox uses 400 megs of ram and has high cpu spikes while 5 of my out of date cpu just sit there. One bad site ruins the rest of the 20+ tabs while javascript and everything else pegs just one core where a single bad script can take down the freaking browser.
Sounds like Windows 3.11 and MacOS classic all over!
It is snappier yes but only if you do not run more than a tab or two. It is time to move on as it is obsolete at this stage and is the new IE 6 of this decade. Stale, obsolete, and insecure.
Firefox while it does work is not the best and it pains me to type this. Chrome works better on my older cpu with mulitcores. Maybe on a shiny new icore3 Firefox might seem snappier on lightloads?
But the architecture is dated, insecure, and can not handle modern gpus and multi core cpus with modern security of per tab processes like IE and Chrome had since freaking 2009.
Shoot even the recent IPhones and Galaxy phones have 4 core systems. It is 2014.
I left firefox after 4.0 debuncle. Yes it was the first release to really support HTML 5 but it was freaking HORRIBLE. Bad UI, sloooow, and on older hardware it was unusable. IE 9 won rewards on tomshardware.com which was released march 2011. I held my nose and gave it a try. It supported hardware acceleration, html5 (I admit it was more limited at the time), and was great on my 6 core system as it has per process tab. Since 2001 it ran circles on gecko web engines??!
Many slashdotters said ewww no thanks based on IE 6 memories.
I then played with Chrome. Yes it is spyware somewhat but it too has important features and has less hardware acceleration but it is more secure and frankly a much better browser than Firefox.
My father got hacked with Firefox. It is a shitty browser with no lowrights mode. It is frome the XP era and has no concept of %appdate and uses the filesystem and has access rights to some processes and threads. Bad security wise but that is what XP era software did.
Chrome and IE 9+ have separate code bases for this with XP vs Windows 7 and greater with sandbox support. Many here use Comodo Dragon which is based off of Chrome but has no privacy issues. However, be warned it based off the previous version of Chromium with some security holes.
Switch my friend!
Until Firefox goes to a processing model and supports lowrights mode I will not go back. This may change hopefully as Firefox is improving with performance and ram requirements since 2011 but on a 6 core system it is stupid not to multitask!
Both Chrome and IE (yes slashdotters I did say IE) support lowrights mode.
This means it has no access to the file system at all, no access to processes or threads and %appdata is its prison... assuming you are on Windows 7 or greater on Windows. XP users will get hacked regardless of browser because the OS does not support kernel level sandboxing.
I left Firefox for IE 9 in 2011 after it won rewards on tomshardware.com. Then switched to Chrome. Firefox like Netscape before it is a sad shell of its former self. I do admit the later firefox releases are much more lenient on ram usage and have improved drastically.
But I have an older Phenom II x6. Nice 6 core with virtualization support for VMWare.. but it is 2.6 ghz and is showing its age at only 2.6 ghz. My machine needs multi processing/threading apps to run close to modern and they provide greater security. One tab does not interfere with another and can be assigned for each core.
To prevent my fan from going high and causing high usage both IE 10+ and Chrome utilize my system fine and still display pages as fast as those reading this on an icore5 or later. But Firefox puts +20 tabs on one cpu with no lowrights mode and as you can image when firebug is on it slows down all the tabs and it is a security risk.
Like netscape it was the lack of funding that killed it agaisn't IE 6 onslaught. I wonder if the same is true? I used Netscape 4.7 before succumbing to IE 6 and then Firefox 1.5 to IE 9 and later Chrome today.
Nothing is as cheap or plentiful. I agree we need to limit coal plants by laws to protect it from being all used up. But doing so will increase the price by large margins and encourage others to mine coal in different spots and competitors to move in to get a piece of the action since prices going up 250% mean very very large profit margins.:-)
The article is ignorant of how basic economics work.
The AC is ignorant of what was written in the article.
Not really. Limit supply you increase demand.
There is coal just sitting in beaches outside of Anchorage Alaska and in many many places. It is un mined as people want to suck the muck on the bottom of the cook inlet for gold since it went up 600% in value instead.
You think with energy spikes and this coal going up to thousands of dollars a 500 pound ore that everyone and their brother won't want in on the action of free $$$?
The Koch brothers and others will quickly pay top dollars to anyone who can bring in coal and invest in some power plants thanks to the new 200% profit margin they can provide due to scarcity of electricity.
If you buy up all of the coal mines while you're at it, you'll not only drive up the price since it's all have to be imported, but the time taken to rebuild all of those plants would take quite a few years, during which time other competition would have moved in, making it much less lucrative to start a new coal power plant.
And in laws of economics you will create a surge in demand to mine new coal. Witness what happened when Gold went up 600% in the last 10 years? There are shows on TV now where people suck up mud in Alaska because 2 ounces of gold can easily cover the cost and pay people for a week!
Alaska has lots of coal unmined as an example that are all over its beaches too. The reason why is it is uneconomical to mine it when West Virginia does it cheap nearby the customers.
When you try to interfere with the free market like buy up all the coal and limit energy you only increase the demand and reward for someone to enter. I would like to see coal energy banned. We need it for steel and we are wasting it all right now and we wont have any left. Slowly ban it I may add to prevent what I described above but shit that is socialism! Lobbyists and the tea party will throw a violent revolution at least in the US.
Sure would be great if I can make a law that bans competition from out of country, out of state, or whomever I do not want to compete with me when I negotiate a contract job.
What I could charge? The sky would be the limit.
Of course that is evil damn socialism for me and we can't have that now can we? But if some businesses or corporations do the same thing. Then it is for the good of the economy and ok etc.
Those are due to crappy 1st generation sandforce controllers. Problem doesn't happen anymore with the real drives and not munchkins. Did you see the ratings I posted? MaximumPC has an article on Sandisk and others OEM reliability from last month with newer technology (discussed on Slashdot) that have higher endurance. The pro enterprise editions and extreme editions have freaking 80 gigs a day for 5 years warranty.
More reliable than a mechanical as my Seagate drives keep dying after a few years.
They are now only 2.5 as expensive and is the bottleneck in this day and age for consumers.
FYI I have 200 pics of HD photos on my 1 gig sd card. I don't see consumers using close to this unless they have the bloated win 7 sxs on them that with a swap file will take all 64 gigs
The newest Sansdisk ssd (for mid and not just high end) has OEM reliability with a 5 year warranty with 80 gigs of writing for 5 years or 4 TB of data writes.
The matches if not exceeds a regular drive. With Raid it is easy to replace a dead disk too.
Slashdot Mirror
"Back then the GI Bill covered $12,500 for college tuition, which in 1997 was around 3 semesters at the school I attended. ...You don't need a degree, you just need to be smart."
You just proved my point. The 1990's HR would hire you if you had anything technical on a resume that was 1 page.
Today there are people with 8 years experience who have been out of work for awhile who are desperate to make $30,000 a year since unemployment is about ready to go away.
In a recession/depression you compete for jobs. In a boom of the 1950's/1990's jobs compete for you! I am sure you have headhunters calling you today and the answer to this is you have many years of experience and solid references.
Also I can't buy a house today and even renting an apartment is hard. Why? I owe $40,000 in student loans. FYI I did 2 years at a community college to save momey. College is much much more expensive in today than in the 1990s. Try a good 400% more.
Back in 2002 - 2006 you could get a home easily. Not true today.
I am not whining or complaining as my wages are gradually increasing. But no I do not have it as good and it is requiring a lot more work today. Without a degree working at a call center or stocking electronics at TigerDirect is your only future as no one will take a chance when there are 3 to 4 people with them for ever job opening.
Increasing the supply of trained workers lowers the cost - economics 101.
Of course tech companies always more workers, even if they are looking to offshore as much as they can, and replace the rest with visa workers. But, just in case, doesn't hurt to lower the cost of domestic workers.
Forget the situation today, look towards the future. There is no way for western workers to compete with third world wages.
You know I have heard this on slashdot for 10 dang years!
The worst advice I ever took in 2004 was that computer science was a waste of time and so was engineering! They would pay $12/hr by 2014 due to Indians taking jobs etc. Go get that useless business degree.
Let me tell you that was the worst advise I have ever taken.
My friends who graduated even in 2008 all make $70,000. I ended up unemployed, divorced, and moved back into my parents in my 30's as no one would hire people with a business degree.
It took 2 years just to get back into the white collar market. Working 13/hr and then 15/hr then 18/hr and up while I lived at home because I got my degree in the wrong area because people like you said NO TO IT H1B1 will take it all.
I am now starting to make ok in IT again but lost 5 years of my life and marriage since I had to work any call center or low wage job I could find and worked for free paying my student loans.
Not really.
There are people smarter than myself without degrees. There are morons who have master degrees who I had to let go because they are book smarts but can't do shit in the real world without the deer in the headlights look when independent analysis and goals are needed.
A degree you get an outrageously expensive education yes. You learn some cool things. But in a down economy it means you get that internship or entry level job with the foot in that door. While HR ignores you unless you have many years of experience and letters of recommendation even for the most basic entry level jobs today.
If you watched the movie social network his former partner and early CFO stayed in school and did an internship in New York. As a result he was terminated and lost all his shares.
Facebook made no money at all back then so he viewed it as kind of cool, but internships is where I need to be as this thing probably wont take off etc.
What if Facebook ended up like Friendster and the other failures? Maybe the former partner in The Social network would be Zuckerbergs boss as he he would filing paperwork since he lacks a degree for any real job.
It is a risk basically. Play it safe you can loose plat it risky you loose even more! If you are not risk adverse and do not give a shit then go for it but do not be surprised if you end up like many many others who failed.
Even though I am in a technical position I decided to major in business. I now know the mindset of accountants, finance, and management. I can speak and understand the language. If I want to progress my small business I know what an asset and a liability is and how to setup books.
For my electives in computer science I learned what object oriented programming truly is outside what I read on slashdot and books. I know what algorithms are and real time means. I may not even have that much as a real computer science major but I recieved an education.
When the economy tanked after I graduated no one would hire me except for one temp contract job. It required a degree and that is how I got it. Without that I would be substitute teaching and working fast food at night to make up for my crappy wages.
Those who argue I DO NOT NEED A DEGREE got in in 1999 when you didn't need one. If you are one of these try being born 15 years later and getting a job today? ... no degree? How does $12/hr aka 20,000 a year sound? Great! Here is a set of headphones and go read this script at the techexpo call center etc. Make sure you mommy reminds you not to be late since we do not pay you enough to move out etc. That my friends is what the economic reality is today regardless of skillsets if you have no experience or education. Programming wont mean shit as HR will throw out your resume if it is not work related somehow.
Point is the degree is required in 2014 to get your foot in the door unless you feel working at techexpo call center can get a you a programming job as that and GeekSquad is all you are going to get.
They are amazing if you have levels that used to take 3 minutes or more to load.
I admit I bought some for games but I have real work VM's for vmware workstation as well. There is no way I could go back to learning exchange where I need to setup a domain server, an exchange cas, exchange owa, exchange mailbox, and 2 clients with another vm running server 2003 acting as a router to another subnet etc.
Starting each one up on a mechanical driver takes about 10 minutes before they are even ready. Want to call it the night. Wait many times longer for each one to shutdown. Wooa if you shutdown more than 2 at a time as the disk spins freaking mad and then takes 5x as long when you just need to go to bed.
You know many of us have this little thing called a budget. The landlord, student loans, bank, exwife, kids, food, gas all take higher precedence. I bought my second 238 gb Samsung PRo and I am already having buyers guilt as I am looking at bills due.
I have VM's for work on these drivers that are hundreds of gigs. A 50 gig game is frankly unacceptable nor is loading audio tracks and maps on the backup mechanical driver. Star wars the old republic had a level )corella) that takes 4 minutes to load on the mechanical drive and the fact some VMs had to be moved to the mechanical is why I bought the second drive.
I also still have a 2010 era phenom II x6 (at least 6 cores) and only a modest upgrade to an ATI 7850. This was all due to financial constraints which I feel I overspent heavily for this as it is :-(
I am not alone as 40% of all new jobs created are at Walmart, McDonalds, dollar stores, etc according to statistics. I am thankful I make more than $10/hr as these poor saps but they are all competing with me for jobs as they get A+ got to night schools for certs etc.
Not everyone makes $60,000 a year and is single and has their student loans paid off. If you are this congrats. But you are in a bubble and saying purchase more is ignorant of what resources other people have.
XP is still popular as many who have 10 year old computers are the ones who work at Walmart, barely make it each month, or live off social security retirement.
... or having to use a sllooow mechanical drive instead of a fast SSD because of the bloated space requirements. I own 2 238gb SSD's and this is game sadly is going on neither. I need to put VM's on them for VMWare and they up over 100 gbs before I even load a game on them.
I hope the market is not going this route for piracy or laziness reasons.
Shoot!
I have an SSD for games ... errr work :-)
I need bloated VM's for work and training with VMWare Workstation. Running 7 VM's for a homemade domain with exchange servers and clients with a startup can take freaking 10 minutes on a mechanical drive! Shutting down is painful too.
A SSD is alife saver, but I do not want to wait 4 minutes for levels to load in SWTOR (corellia) orTitanfall :-(
I just blew more money (close to $500 since last summer) on another SSD to make room for Windows, games, and lots of VM's. A 50 gig game is frankly unacceptable. I wonder if I am being pennywise pound foolish with my investment so far :-(
If this is where the market is going we are screwed. 1 tb ssd's will not get below the $250 for a least 2 years and the OS and 1-2 games plus some apps as it is today can fill a 238gb ssd easily. Even ancient World of warcraft is over 25 gigs!
Well the OS would be a better way to store DNS caches as it is updated with properly security often.
I had a man in the middle attack before about 10 years ago when something didn't seem right. After flushing dns I re pinged and another ip address was shown. Ahh the joys of old XP pre-SP 2 :-)
I do not trust Mozilla to have the resources that Apple, Redhat, or Microsoft have in this area frankly.
Funny as I do not run as admin normally.
All I know is I repair computers and running as a normal user an exploit can bypass easily and attach itself to another process. I also seen a flash ad on slashdot try to attach malware to a service I had running as anormal user too! The AV caught it.
I now use flashblock after that incident.
I think you are ivory tower and read about computer stuff but in the real world hackers find ways to bypass. The more roadblocks you have the more steps it takes to crack.
That is a scary security risk.
What is to stop malware from insert records into the DNS for Russian banks etc? File system escalations are bad enough and at least Chrome and IE do not have any filesystem access and can only write to %appdata.
But Firefox nope. I will make sure not to use it even if it does support threading like its competitors starting to do last decade.
IE 6 was the better browser sadly. If you can believe that which I know in 2014 that is hard.
Ask any older webmaster from that time frame?
W3C was something a committee did which was academic. Only Netscape and MS specific CSS and HTML mattered and websites needed to include specific workarounds for one or the other etc. Man, people forget how dark the web was 10 years ago.
The fact the majority of non Chinese and business users use Firefox and Chrome today show bundling had nothing to do with IE's rise. It came because Netscape died at 4.7 and become very stale FAST while we like to forgot about NS 5+ as they made IE 6 look less buggy in comparison and no one really used those. I refused and kept NS 4.7 for many many users until 2002 when I gave up.
You're an idiot as standard users still have access to threads, processes, and the file system. This means you can attach a rogue process or malware to an admin one which happens to run as a service. It can then be executed with full admin privileges.
You seem to think Firefox is still at version 4 or something. It is now heavily multithreaded, has sped up considerably (and is now competitive with even Chrome for most users), uses far less RAM (even compared to other browsers), and has even had its process sandboxing improved on most OSes.
None of this is an attempt to deter people from switching, but simply to fight your misinformation. It's popular to bash on Firefox lately, while telling users to switch to Chromium. But Opera is probably a better choice for users who don't want to opt into Google's services and just get the faster and leaner browser, and it is better-poised to return to greatness than stagnate like Chrome has lately.
Because it is!
No it is not multithreaded. Don't believe me? Hit control alt delete? Firefox uses 400 megs of ram and has high cpu spikes while 5 of my out of date cpu just sit there. One bad site ruins the rest of the 20+ tabs while javascript and everything else pegs just one core where a single bad script can take down the freaking browser.
Sounds like Windows 3.11 and MacOS classic all over!
It is snappier yes but only if you do not run more than a tab or two. It is time to move on as it is obsolete at this stage and is the new IE 6 of this decade. Stale, obsolete, and insecure.
Firefox while it does work is not the best and it pains me to type this. Chrome works better on my older cpu with mulitcores. Maybe on a shiny new icore3 Firefox might seem snappier on lightloads?
But the architecture is dated, insecure, and can not handle modern gpus and multi core cpus with modern security of per tab processes like IE and Chrome had since freaking 2009.
Shoot even the recent IPhones and Galaxy phones have 4 core systems. It is 2014.
I had trouble with youtube playing music as soon as you use flashblock or adblock. No issue at all with other browsers.
FYI this is after I disabled it for the FREAKING SITE. It seems unless they are uninstalled no music or videos can be displayed
I left firefox after 4.0 debuncle. Yes it was the first release to really support HTML 5 but it was freaking HORRIBLE. Bad UI, sloooow, and on older hardware it was unusable. IE 9 won rewards on tomshardware.com which was released march 2011. I held my nose and gave it a try. It supported hardware acceleration, html5 (I admit it was more limited at the time), and was great on my 6 core system as it has per process tab. Since 2001 it ran circles on gecko web engines??!
Many slashdotters said ewww no thanks based on IE 6 memories.
I then played with Chrome. Yes it is spyware somewhat but it too has important features and has less hardware acceleration but it is more secure and frankly a much better browser than Firefox.
My father got hacked with Firefox. It is a shitty browser with no lowrights mode. It is frome the XP era and has no concept of %appdate and uses the filesystem and has access rights to some processes and threads. Bad security wise but that is what XP era software did.
Chrome and IE 9+ have separate code bases for this with XP vs Windows 7 and greater with sandbox support. Many here use Comodo Dragon which is based off of Chrome but has no privacy issues. However, be warned it based off the previous version of Chromium with some security holes.
Switch my friend!
Until Firefox goes to a processing model and supports lowrights mode I will not go back. This may change hopefully as Firefox is improving with performance and ram requirements since 2011 but on a 6 core system it is stupid not to multitask!
Both Chrome and IE (yes slashdotters I did say IE) support lowrights mode.
This means it has no access to the file system at all, no access to processes or threads and %appdata is its prison ... assuming you are on Windows 7 or greater on Windows. XP users will get hacked regardless of browser because the OS does not support kernel level sandboxing.
I left Firefox for IE 9 in 2011 after it won rewards on tomshardware.com. Then switched to Chrome. Firefox like Netscape before it is a sad shell of its former self. I do admit the later firefox releases are much more lenient on ram usage and have improved drastically.
But I have an older Phenom II x6. Nice 6 core with virtualization support for VMWare .. but it is 2.6 ghz and is showing its age at only 2.6 ghz. My machine needs multi processing/threading apps to run close to modern and they provide greater security. One tab does not interfere with another and can be assigned for each core.
To prevent my fan from going high and causing high usage both IE 10+ and Chrome utilize my system fine and still display pages as fast as those reading this on an icore5 or later. But Firefox puts +20 tabs on one cpu with no lowrights mode and as you can image when firebug is on it slows down all the tabs and it is a security risk.
Like netscape it was the lack of funding that killed it agaisn't IE 6 onslaught. I wonder if the same is true? I used Netscape 4.7 before succumbing to IE 6 and then Firefox 1.5 to IE 9 and later Chrome today.
Replaced with what?
Nothing is as cheap or plentiful. I agree we need to limit coal plants by laws to protect it from being all used up. But doing so will increase the price by large margins and encourage others to mine coal in different spots and competitors to move in to get a piece of the action since prices going up 250% mean very very large profit margins. :-)
The article is ignorant of how basic economics work.
The AC is ignorant of what was written in the article.
Not really. Limit supply you increase demand.
There is coal just sitting in beaches outside of Anchorage Alaska and in many many places. It is un mined as people want to suck the muck on the bottom of the cook inlet for gold since it went up 600% in value instead.
You think with energy spikes and this coal going up to thousands of dollars a 500 pound ore that everyone and their brother won't want in on the action of free $$$?
The Koch brothers and others will quickly pay top dollars to anyone who can bring in coal and invest in some power plants thanks to the new 200% profit margin they can provide due to scarcity of electricity.
If you buy up all of the coal mines while you're at it, you'll not only drive up the price since it's all have to be imported, but the time taken to rebuild all of those plants would take quite a few years, during which time other competition would have moved in, making it much less lucrative to start a new coal power plant.
And in laws of economics you will create a surge in demand to mine new coal. Witness what happened when Gold went up 600% in the last 10 years? There are shows on TV now where people suck up mud in Alaska because 2 ounces of gold can easily cover the cost and pay people for a week!
Alaska has lots of coal unmined as an example that are all over its beaches too. The reason why is it is uneconomical to mine it when West Virginia does it cheap nearby the customers.
When you try to interfere with the free market like buy up all the coal and limit energy you only increase the demand and reward for someone to enter. I would like to see coal energy banned. We need it for steel and we are wasting it all right now and we wont have any left. Slowly ban it I may add to prevent what I described above but shit that is socialism! Lobbyists and the tea party will throw a violent revolution at least in the US.
Sure would be great if I can make a law that bans competition from out of country, out of state, or whomever I do not want to compete with me when I negotiate a contract job.
What I could charge? The sky would be the limit.
Of course that is evil damn socialism for me and we can't have that now can we? But if some businesses or corporations do the same thing. Then it is for the good of the economy and ok etc.
Those are due to crappy 1st generation sandforce controllers. Problem doesn't happen anymore with the real drives and not munchkins. Did you see the ratings I posted? MaximumPC has an article on Sandisk and others OEM reliability from last month with newer technology (discussed on Slashdot) that have higher endurance. The pro enterprise editions and extreme editions have freaking 80 gigs a day for 5 years warranty.
More reliable than a mechanical as my Seagate drives keep dying after a few years.
They are now only 2.5 as expensive and is the bottleneck in this day and age for consumers.
FYI I have 200 pics of HD photos on my 1 gig sd card. I don't see consumers using close to this unless they have the bloated win 7 sxs on them that with a swap file will take all 64 gigs
Wake me up when SSDs are cheaper per gigabyte than hard drives. Last I checked, they were more expensive by at least an order of magnitude.
You can get a 240 gig SSD for $170.
Not everyone needs a 3TB drive.
The newest Sansdisk ssd (for mid and not just high end) has OEM reliability with a 5 year warranty with 80 gigs of writing for 5 years or 4 TB of data writes.
The matches if not exceeds a regular drive. With Raid it is easy to replace a dead disk too.