Fuck, even Mozilla's own Firefox satisfaction numbers [mozilla.org] show that its users don't like it. Over 80% of Firefox users are unhappy with it! That's an unbelievably bad rating, regardless of product and industry. Even the most despised politicians rarely see such poor satisfaction levels.
Holy fsck, I don't know how mutable the figures on that link are but when I looked just now it was 89% dissatisfaction (7-day average). That's... astounding, I knew people are pissed off at it (put me firmly in the 89% bracket) but if you're in charge of a project where nearly 90% of your users think you're doing a crap job, then you need to be fired and replaced by someone who can move the project forward. Or, better yet, killed and eaten to prevent you from passing on the genes.
I think it would be a shame if Mozilla became irrelevant like, say, Netscape did. But then again, maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. Maybe it would allow them the rebirth they need. A return to their earlier days, when they produced actually-usable versions of Firefox, instead of spinning their wheels endlessly like they seem to be doing these days.
If we're lucky, some disenchanted ex-Mozilla folks could fork the browser, strip out the layer upon layer of crud that's been larded onto it, and take it back to what it should have been, a cool, lightweight, user-extensible browser. It'd be like a rebirth. They could call the project... oh, I dunno, how about Phoenix?
Does anybody have instructions for common hardware firewalls and routers on what needs to be blocked at the network level?
Note that this is only going to help if you're sitting behind your own firewall, as soon as you take your laptop out of the house all the data is going back to Microsoft again. So a more reliable option is to block it at the source by changing the Windows config.
(Which, if it's anything like getting rid of the Win10 downgrade nag, is going to be a major chore. I've scraped viruses out of PCs that were easier to remove than the Win10 nag).
I've been forced to manually install gcc 5.x on OSX
Oh dear god, I feel your pain. I had to install it from source once on a system a few years old and quickly discovered that the old adage that installing GNU-anything requires installing GNU-everything-else still holds true, there were so many dependencies on other tools and "your version of A is out of date, you need to update A before you can update B and use that to update C which needs D and E and F and then you can finally build G which will allow you to install H" that in the end I gave up.
Used to have a friend who jokingly (though I think its true) commented on the fact that they started out with the GUN and designed the aircraft around it.
That's the story I heard as well. If you look at the gun by itself, you can see that it's probably not far from the truth.
Holy shit your politicians are expensive! In any decent country you could buy one for a few tens or hundreds of thousands. Sheesh, gimme the "$5-10 billion in spending" and I'll buy you most of Africa, that's much better value for money.
(Plus, people there are a lot less critical about what you do with your government once you've bought it).
The maintenance/support/licensing costs of a given gizmo is probably roughly the same regardless of the cost or size of the physical box*. The software is becoming the bottleneck.
No, what to do with the thing(s) is the bottleneck. As projects like OLPC have shown, simply airdropping in technology and hoping it'll sort itself out is a recipe for little more than millions wasted on, well, airdropping in technology (unfortunately Ivan Krstic's "Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi" has gone 404 or I'd post a link to that).
About fifteen years ago I watched (from the periphery) as the US Govt sank several billion dollars into technology that was essentially an unproven hypothesis dreamed up by geeks (the fact that in the ten years before that no-one had been able to make it work didn't seem to bother them). A few years later someone published a report on it titled "Nothing but Pilots", which pretty much summed up the outcome.
On the one hand if you sit back with everything you do and wait for use cases to appear you'll never make much progress, but then you need at least one or two real, practical applications before you roll out some new geek dream. It sounds like the Barcelona deputy mayor has reached the "Nothing but Pilots" stage of the cycle.
Seeing its own construction light would make that the world's biggest selfie. XXIst century priorities, you see...
Speaking of selfies, by the time this is completed in 2027 (planned time + overruns), you'll be able to get the same resolution on the iPhone 23. It's like using computers for code-breaking, the best way to break crypto that takes ten years to attack is to wait 9 1/2 years and then do it in six months on the computer you can get then. The best way to get this camera is to wait until a year before it's due to be comissioned, then buy the sensors that'll be available then. Oh, and in the meantime you can be collecting interest on the money you're not spending.
I have no problem with the mountain being called Denali. However, I'm not sure what this really accomplishes. Many mountains in the world aren't called by the name given them by the native peoples.
And if they really want to give it the name used by the original inhabitants, it needs to be called "Y'tng'ag'wlll''... ahh, dammit, can't get the typography right for creatures without facial tentacles.
It's staged because the F-18 kicks the ass off the F-35, and the cost of operation of the F-35 sucks as well, even though we're stuck with it.
You didn't read the rest of the story, which states "In order to make the comparison fair, the A10 will be fuelled with paraffin wax and weedkiller, have a large number of anvils bolted to it, and will be dragging a large boat anchor. 'We hope this at least evens the odds a bit so the F35 will look OK', a Pentagon spokesthing was quoted as saying".
Exactly, you can't possibly expect journalists to do any research for the story they're writing, I mean that would be crazy.
so they wouldn't know there was anything after Courier New. Heck, they didn't know there was a New version to Courier.
In any case New Courier never really took off, it was replaced after only a few months by Courier Classic (which was really just standard Courier re-branded).
The entire FreeBSD ports tree had in Q1 2015 a bit less than 7000 commits from 163 developers
That's because they have a small, focused developer group, not a global clusterfsck where everyone gets to stick their dick in.
(Yeah, I know, this'll get modded flamebait, but I'm trying to make a serious point, a small focused group typically does a much better job than a Monglian horde).
There was a billion Android devices shipped last year. It has 98% market share on the TOP500 supercomputer list.
An Android-based supercomputer? What does it run on, a palletload of tablets? And who would want to run 10,000 parallel instances of Candy Crush? Enquiring minds want to know...
We're getting to the point where the Linux kernel itself is superb, but everything built on top of it is becoming utter shit.
Don't worry - in one of the upcoming Systemd releases, the Linux kernel will finally be 100% replaced.
I've always wondered when they're finally going to rename it everythingd. The closest equivalent I can think of is svchost.exe, which is at about the same level as everythingd.
No, GNOME3 and Unity pretty much take the cake for sucky UI, the one on Windows 8 a distant third in suckiness.
Have you actually used Win8? I know there are all sorts of opinions on Unity (particularly earlier versions), but I can take J.Random user (with previous computer experience) and sit them down in front of a Unity desktop and they can use it. Sit them down in front of Win8 and they're completely lost, the interface is so alien that they don't know what to do any more (that's from actual experience with various users).
It really is hard to think of a desktop/laptop UI that's worse than the Win8 one, it sort of defines the extreme end of a scale that goes from, for argument's sake, Snow Leopard at 9.5 (can't think of a 10 really) to Win8 at 0. I'd put Unity at maybe a 3 or 4.
Each Linux release includes more than 10,000 patches from more than 1,400 developers and more than 200 corporations.
That's not that impressive, this open-source project has 48,000 patches contributed by tens of thousands of people (they don't record individuals vs. corporations so I don't have figures for that).
These things are holding Unicode back. There is a reason why, for example, airlines and hotels are using software that avoids Unicode.
It's because they're using legacy software that goes back, in some cases, to the 1960s, not because of some evil anti-Unicode conspiracy. Heck, I've been to hotels where they're restricted to 7-bit ASCII only, and they just make do. These industries' primary business is offering hospitality services, not of correctly rendering Mojibake-San's name in the guest register.
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Fuck, even Mozilla's own Firefox satisfaction numbers [mozilla.org] show that its users don't like it. Over 80% of Firefox users are unhappy with it! That's an unbelievably bad rating, regardless of product and industry. Even the most despised politicians rarely see such poor satisfaction levels.
Holy fsck, I don't know how mutable the figures on that link are but when I looked just now it was 89% dissatisfaction (7-day average). That's... astounding, I knew people are pissed off at it (put me firmly in the 89% bracket) but if you're in charge of a project where nearly 90% of your users think you're doing a crap job, then you need to be fired and replaced by someone who can move the project forward. Or, better yet, killed and eaten to prevent you from passing on the genes.
I think it would be a shame if Mozilla became irrelevant like, say, Netscape did. But then again, maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. Maybe it would allow them the rebirth they need. A return to their earlier days, when they produced actually-usable versions of Firefox, instead of spinning their wheels endlessly like they seem to be doing these days.
If we're lucky, some disenchanted ex-Mozilla folks could fork the browser, strip out the layer upon layer of crud that's been larded onto it, and take it back to what it should have been, a cool, lightweight, user-extensible browser. It'd be like a rebirth. They could call the project... oh, I dunno, how about Phoenix?
Does anybody have instructions for common hardware firewalls and routers on what needs to be blocked at the network level?
Note that this is only going to help if you're sitting behind your own firewall, as soon as you take your laptop out of the house all the data is going back to Microsoft again. So a more reliable option is to block it at the source by changing the Windows config.
(Which, if it's anything like getting rid of the Win10 downgrade nag, is going to be a major chore. I've scraped viruses out of PCs that were easier to remove than the Win10 nag).
Customer Experience Improvement Program...
It's a Microsoft customer service, in the sense of "the farmer got in a bull to service his cows".
Microsoft is aiming to have 1 billion devices running Windows 10 "in two to three years," though that includes not just PCs, but smartphones, ...
So that'd be 999,999,999,997 Windows PCs and three Windows smartphones?
Is this the future of consumer displays?
Betteridges Law: No. Even more so because it's another time-and-money-wasting Mozilla distraction from doing something useful with no future.
I've been forced to manually install gcc 5.x on OSX
Oh dear god, I feel your pain. I had to install it from source once on a system a few years old and quickly discovered that the old adage that installing GNU-anything requires installing GNU-everything-else still holds true, there were so many dependencies on other tools and "your version of A is out of date, you need to update A before you can update B and use that to update C which needs D and E and F and then you can finally build G which will allow you to install H" that in the end I gave up.
Used to have a friend who jokingly (though I think its true) commented on the fact that they started out with the GUN and designed the aircraft around it.
That's the story I heard as well. If you look at the gun by itself, you can see that it's probably not far from the truth.
Holy shit your politicians are expensive! In any decent country you could buy one for a few tens or hundreds of thousands. Sheesh, gimme the "$5-10 billion in spending" and I'll buy you most of Africa, that's much better value for money.
(Plus, people there are a lot less critical about what you do with your government once you've bought it).
The maintenance/support/licensing costs of a given gizmo is probably roughly the same regardless of the cost or size of the physical box*. The software is becoming the bottleneck.
No, what to do with the thing(s) is the bottleneck. As projects like OLPC have shown, simply airdropping in technology and hoping it'll sort itself out is a recipe for little more than millions wasted on, well, airdropping in technology (unfortunately Ivan Krstic's "Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi" has gone 404 or I'd post a link to that).
About fifteen years ago I watched (from the periphery) as the US Govt sank several billion dollars into technology that was essentially an unproven hypothesis dreamed up by geeks (the fact that in the ten years before that no-one had been able to make it work didn't seem to bother them). A few years later someone published a report on it titled "Nothing but Pilots", which pretty much summed up the outcome.
On the one hand if you sit back with everything you do and wait for use cases to appear you'll never make much progress, but then you need at least one or two real, practical applications before you roll out some new geek dream. It sounds like the Barcelona deputy mayor has reached the "Nothing but Pilots" stage of the cycle.
So what is and not obscure?
Herrschaftsei kinnts es deppn ned a gscheide weidsprach ren wia jeda nuamaale mensch?
Put a 15 year old in front of 3.1 and they would be lost. In front of Windows 95 they would be able to do any task quickly.'"
The OP forgot the rest of the quote:
Put them in front of Windows 8 / 10 and they're lost again.
Seeing its own construction light would make that the world's biggest selfie. XXIst century priorities, you see...
Speaking of selfies, by the time this is completed in 2027 (planned time + overruns), you'll be able to get the same resolution on the iPhone 23. It's like using computers for code-breaking, the best way to break crypto that takes ten years to attack is to wait 9 1/2 years and then do it in six months on the computer you can get then. The best way to get this camera is to wait until a year before it's due to be comissioned, then buy the sensors that'll be available then. Oh, and in the meantime you can be collecting interest on the money you're not spending.
I have no problem with the mountain being called Denali. However, I'm not sure what this really accomplishes. Many mountains in the world aren't called by the name given them by the native peoples.
And if they really want to give it the name used by the original inhabitants, it needs to be called "Y'tng'ag'wlll''... ahh, dammit, can't get the typography right for creatures without facial tentacles.
It's staged because the F-18 kicks the ass off the F-35, and the cost of operation of the F-35 sucks as well, even though we're stuck with it.
You didn't read the rest of the story, which states "In order to make the comparison fair, the A10 will be fuelled with paraffin wax and weedkiller, have a large number of anvils bolted to it, and will be dragging a large boat anchor. 'We hope this at least evens the odds a bit so the F35 will look OK', a Pentagon spokesthing was quoted as saying".
If antialiased text looks blurry, the resolution of your display is too low.
Or the R/G/B interleaving on the panel differs from what the OS expects, so you need to tune it (under Windows, from the Control Panel for Cleartype).
Or he needs glasses.
Journalists are not developers
Exactly, you can't possibly expect journalists to do any research for the story they're writing, I mean that would be crazy.
so they wouldn't know there was anything after Courier New. Heck, they didn't know there was a New version to Courier.
In any case New Courier never really took off, it was replaced after only a few months by Courier Classic (which was really just standard Courier re-branded).
It's a simple, clean font.
He took special care to make sure l,I, and 1 all look different, as well as 0, O.
Looks good at low resolution.
So what you're saying is that it's like Inconsolata, but fourteen years late, and slashvertised.
Yes, it doesn't seem to offer any advantage over menlo
I've never really been a big fan of Menlo, the characters just seem... fat to me, the weight is too high. My preferred coding font is Consolas.
The entire FreeBSD ports tree had in Q1 2015 a bit less than 7000 commits from 163 developers
That's because they have a small, focused developer group, not a global clusterfsck where everyone gets to stick their dick in.
(Yeah, I know, this'll get modded flamebait, but I'm trying to make a serious point, a small focused group typically does a much better job than a Monglian horde).
There was a billion Android devices shipped last year. It has 98% market share on the TOP500 supercomputer list.
An Android-based supercomputer? What does it run on, a palletload of tablets? And who would want to run 10,000 parallel instances of Candy Crush? Enquiring minds want to know...
We're getting to the point where the Linux kernel itself is superb, but everything built on top of it is becoming utter shit.
Don't worry - in one of the upcoming Systemd releases, the Linux kernel will finally be 100% replaced.
I've always wondered when they're finally going to rename it everythingd. The closest equivalent I can think of is svchost.exe, which is at about the same level as everythingd.
No, GNOME3 and Unity pretty much take the cake for sucky UI, the one on Windows 8 a distant third in suckiness.
Have you actually used Win8? I know there are all sorts of opinions on Unity (particularly earlier versions), but I can take J.Random user (with previous computer experience) and sit them down in front of a Unity desktop and they can use it. Sit them down in front of Win8 and they're completely lost, the interface is so alien that they don't know what to do any more (that's from actual experience with various users).
It really is hard to think of a desktop/laptop UI that's worse than the Win8 one, it sort of defines the extreme end of a scale that goes from, for argument's sake, Snow Leopard at 9.5 (can't think of a 10 really) to Win8 at 0. I'd put Unity at maybe a 3 or 4.
According to this:
Each Linux release includes more than 10,000 patches from more than 1,400 developers and more than 200 corporations.
That's not that impressive, this open-source project has 48,000 patches contributed by tens of thousands of people (they don't record individuals vs. corporations so I don't have figures for that).
These things are holding Unicode back. There is a reason why, for example, airlines and hotels are using software that avoids Unicode.
It's because they're using legacy software that goes back, in some cases, to the 1960s, not because of some evil anti-Unicode conspiracy. Heck, I've been to hotels where they're restricted to 7-bit ASCII only, and they just make do. These industries' primary business is offering hospitality services, not of correctly rendering Mojibake-San's name in the guest register.