Firefox was just getting too heavy for me. I'm on Linux, (Mint 18 XFCE) and it was taking 30-45 seconds to become responsive after launching. It would just sit there. Even if I launched it from the command line with a url, it refused to do anything for that time period was up. CPU and memory were not taxed or even being used by FF. I have an older processor, but plenty to handle a damn web browser. (Intel Core2 Quad Core, 8GB of RAM) Unless I open a ton of tabs and GIMP, I barely ever get past 4GB used. I have used FF almost exclusively since at least 1999. I went to Chromium for about a year a while ago, but came back to FF.
After a few months of putting up with its freezing issue, and hoping updates would fix it, I just had to quit using it. If I left it open, I would notice that the CPU would spike for several seconds on occasion, and hang out around 20% for a while. While no page was loaded. I could only put up with it for so long.
I have a few other browsers installed... Don't really like Chrome or Chromium. I like certain specific things about FF that other browsers don't have, at least not in the way I like them. Then I found Pale Moon , and it seems to fit the bill. There are still a few things I would like to be able to customize better, but so far it's the winner in my book. That may change, I don't know. But FF seems to just keep pushing me away.
No, the government is at fault for propagating dietary guidelines that are not based on science. Just like the low-fat craze that is actually the opposite of healthy, based on real science. And since this article was about whether the government's data can be trusted, it's just further evidence that the answer is NO.
So come back with some quip to make yourself feel better, but by all means, don't actually educate yourself.
People are afraid of our legal system, and things are usually about making sure you can defend yourself against a lawsuit. I had a friend who got a million dollar umbrella insurance policy when he put in a pool - just in case of a tragedy where a neighborhood kid drowned, he didn't want to be sued. The fact that you and a lot of others probably think "that's not a bad idea" means that lawyers have weaseled their way so deeply into our society that it's now the default behavior.
Just think about that. And watch things in your daily life. Our legal system is built to sustain the profession of lawyers. And do they actually make things better for everyone else, or just themselves?
If only there were some sort of central repository of information that you could query to quickly find the answer to your question, ideally in less time than it took you to click Reply, type in your question with extra unimportant information, click Preview, then click Submit.
Maybe that's because the majority of slashdotters don't need to worry about waking up black or female. Waking up old, however, awaits us all...
Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many.
And I strongly disagree with the GPs assertion that there is "nothing inherently wrong with bringing attorneys into it." That seems to be such a pervasive sentiment that it has made our society one that actually believes we need lawyers to behave like reasonable people. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that has been created by - you guessed it - lawyers.
I have spent the last several months hiring two QA engineers. I got about two dozen resumes that had been pre-screened by the corporate recruiter. All of them were somewhat qualified. I phone interviewed about half of those, and had about 8-10 people come in for interviews.
Most of them were on some kind of work program. I only saw resumes for three men, and one came in for an interview. He was from an African country. I think the other two may have been Americans, but I didn't phone interview them and am only guessing by their names.
All the rest of the resumes were women, and only 1 was American.
So while I understand the sentiment that the H1B program is being used to "replace American workers" - which I am sure it is - I personally don't see it. I did not get any qualified Americans applying for the position. There was nothing wrong with the salary or the market we are in, and nothing specialized about the positions. Now I do know that Big Corporations are able to use-and-abuse the visa program because I have seen it firsthand. But there is also some good that comes out of the program as well.
I guess this what we've been reduced to though, you have to choose one end of the spectrum, there's no in-between on anything.
I admittedly don't know much about how this applies to carbon fiber or graphene, but it needs to be 'repairable'. You can weld steel, to either repair it or join it to more steel, to the point it is as strong or even stronger than the original (with bracing and whatnot). Anything that would replace steel would need this characteristic.
Don't all of the variations have their own pieces anyway? I know we have two sets - one is a very old French version I found at a flea market which is really cool (my wife used to be a French teacher) and the other is a Simpsons version. I've played it with my kids quite a bit. I kind of think it's a great move for them to make all the customized versions, it breathes a little bit of new life into the game. It's more relevant to buy a monorail stop instead of a railroad, or Burns Manor instead of Boardwalk.
I fully expect that they will continue to churn out new versions all the time, for all kinds of things. They don't need anyone's votes, this is pure marketing. In fact, they are late to the game if they are just now talking about having a version with emoji tokens. Come on Parker Bros!
What fraudulent report? Did it say they filed a report with the police? The news story said they were working with law enforcement, that's it. And they gave you an email address from their domain if you have any information. (?!)
Sure, someone might have nabbed them, laptops get stolen all the time. Just somewhat interesting that this made the news feeds. Do I care? Not in the least.
This is really OT, but.... I worked at Motorola from '93 to '98, and they encouraged patent submissions. Pagers were hot, and they had just come out with their new 2-way pager. I came up with an idea for a middleware application to translate text-to-speech and speech-to-text for people to be able to bridge the gap between pagers and phones. It went to committee, but they passed on it because they didn't see the benefits and thought it wouldn't be cost-effective. I still think about that today... I wouldn't have gotten anything out of it but a few bucks, they would have retained all of the rights anyway. It would have been nice to have my name on something like that as a legacy. Instead, I held onto some stock for 20 years and took a loss on it.:|
Kids do not understand why #1 is a bad thing. You have to follow that up with real-world examples of why and how that could be a problem for them.
I told my daughter "imagine you sent a selfie to your best friend where you had your finger in your nose as a joke. Then what if she thought it was funny and shared it with other friends... then it made it all around your school and people started teasing you about picking your nose." Pretty mild example, but I think she got it. Basically I said once you send something, you have no control over what happens to it.
And just like everything else, they will only truly learn if they are allowed to make mistakes on their own. I did shit all the time that my parents told me not to do, and I learned - both in good ways and in bad ways - from doing that. Fortunately for me, there was no way to document those things back then like there are today.:)
When I switched to Mint several years ago, I didn't like that they didn't support "upgrading in place". However, one of the reasons I switched to Mint (from Ubuntu) was because I had upgraded so many times in place (7 or 8) that my system wasn't stable and was slowing down. So I made the decision to change my partitions and go with the idea of keeping my base install small, my home directory on a separate partition, etc. My upgrades since then have been very painless and faster!
However, they DO now support upgrading in place, it's called their Package Upgrade. I haven't done it yet, but am on 18 and may upgrade to 18.1 that way. Although I used to be a KDE person (back on Redhat, then SuSE, then Kubuntu) I switched to XFCE many years ago and haven't looked back.
I am a linux user... have been exclusively at home since 99. At work I use windows.
I have been using Win10 for a year now at work, and I have to say that I don't really care for it. I have a touchscreen laptop, and I have disabled the touchscreen feature. But all the icons are still like I am on a tablet. I have been living with it. For the most part, I don't like much about it at all.
One of the features of the start menu that I use, and like, is the type-search. I open the start menu, and can start typing the name of the application I need, and it quickly narrows down the options. I find it useful because I can do that from the keyboard alone, which is helpful.
My one caveat is that I use this feature all the time because I really don't like the way the menu works in general. When I am searching for an application that I don't use all that often, it always takes me a second or two to find the "all apps" link, then it opens up that stupid alphabetically sorted list. That is why I have lots of apps pinned on my menu bar. It's a workaround at best.
At home I use Mint XFCE, and it has the search for apps in a very similar fashion, but WITH a very usable nested menu structure. I love it so much more.
Usually I buy DVDs for the kids, rip them to my linux machine which are served up with serviio to my WDTV/Roku boxes. There have been times that I haven't been able to rip the DVD because of protection on the disc. So I have downloaded a copy to put on my media server. I have only done this on a few occasions, but when I did it was actually faster to download it than to rip it.
So I will assume that your "pirating movies" comment was meant for those people who actually pirate movies.
While it would be nice, it wouldn't happen. What would happen is that companies would either sell their unused patents to another company, who could hold onto it for a while, then do the same. Or they would just create a subsidiary, and sell it to them. Or some other shenanigans that I don't have the mentality to think up. However, what it would ensure is that patent attorneys would still be need (more than ever!) which in my book is a bad idea.
The true end-game of this - and almost all legal scenarios - is to make sure that lawyers are still necessary. If you step back, you will see that they have created a legal system that they tend like a garden to solely ensure that they are necessary. It doesn't matter what kind of lawyer. I have not checked, but would be willing to bet that a lawyer initiated this lawsuit (playing on the emotions of a grieving family). Step back and consider who all the real winners are in this scenario... it's the lawyers.
is that people cast votes, and our elections are won or lost, on whether or not a candidate comes to their state and tells them what they want to hear. It boggles my mind that it still works. We live in an age where information - real, massaged, and fabricated - is available 24/7. Yet politics is still just politics, where you don't have to be a good candidate to win. You just have to be a better shyster.
We should have a "neither" option, and if neither wins, we go back and start over.
I know why that won't work, because the entire system has been built by those who gain the most from it. And it is not the American people. It just makes me sad that as "the greatest nation" we still can't get the basics right.
Back in 1986 in high school computer class we were programming BASIC on the Tandy TRS-80 Model IIIs. Our computer teacher comes in one day with a box full of floppies (5.25") that she had picked up somewhere. The contents were unknown. So our assignment was to go through them and try to figure out what was on them, if anything, and keep notes.
You can only imagine the thrill of finding some discs that contained ascii nudes!
It caused quite a stir and they were eventually confiscated, but that is burned into my brain for sure.
I call BS, cost is not a barrier at all. I paid $2200 for my first computer in 1990. It was a 386DX-33, with 2MB of memory and an 80MB hard drive. Can you spend that on a computer today? Absolutely. Do you have to? Absolutely not.
If you watch Craigslist, you can get free computers. If you have friends/family that upgrade, you can get free computers. If you buy used computers on CL you can get them cheap or very cheap, either from people who upgrade or people who buy them in bulk or clear out businesses. Brand new 23"+ monitors go on sale all the time for less than $100. Storage is cheap. Memory isn't that bad, although still reasonable. Broadband might be a barrier for some, but when I bought my first computer it did not even have a modem!
What is a barrier is the mentality that you have to buy the newest and the best of everything. I have three kids, and all of them have computers. They are all hand-me-downs, and even the previous versions of hand-me-downs I have either sold very cheaply or given away. They are all Core2 Duos, and I even have a Core2Quad system sitting unused that I got free from work because it was "ancient". I just bought my son a brand new video card for Xmas (Nvidia GT710) for $25 because some of the games he plays weren't working well on his integrated video.
Not to mention things like Raspberry Pi and building / assembling your own components. I understand that isn't for everyone, but it's an option as well.
Firefox has been my browser of choice for a very long time. (My browser before FF was Netscape) I have only a couple of add-ons. I run Linux/XFCE, have plenty of RAM and CPU. A few years ago Firefox started to really bog down, so I switched to Chromium for about 6 months. I kept updating and trying Firefox, and eventually it got better. So I came back to it.
About 6 months ago it started slowing down again. Here is how it would behave: when I would launch the browser, it would come up rather quickly. But it would be unresponsive for about 30 seconds. It wasn't using CPU or RAM, just sitting there. By default it opens to a blank tab. There was NO reason I could tell for the slowdown. Even if I opened it with a url, like from an email, it would still open in zombie mode and wait 30 seconds before even showing the url in the address bar. It was maddening.
So now I am running Pale Moon and love it. It's not slow, yet it maintains all the things I like about Firefox. My wife is on Win7 and she faced her own issues with the recent versions of FF, and she switched over to Chrome.
I have worked at a few Fortune X (single and low double digit) companies.... What is it that ensnares the bean counters to prefer this situation over hiring qualified local candidates? I honestly don't get it. Why is it "better" to pay some unqualified person a low wage, tack on a substantial fee paid to the body shop, and then have everyone suffer through the extended delivery times, angst, etc. It can't be cheaper to do it this way, and if it is, it could not possibly be enough of a savings to merit delaying the delivery of what the business needs in a timely manner. Or can it?
I too have worked for a couple of the large companies, in this case banks, and I was in testing management. Bean counters care about beans. That's it. They never directed anyone to use offshore resources, they delivered the message that money had to be saved. Here is how I saw it go down multiple times.
I had a testing team that consisted of about 30% US employees and the rest contractors from a firm like TCS or Infosys (usually a mix of offshore/onshore/nearshore). For a team of about 50 people we tested a dozen or so projects. Projects came and went, and the number of contractors depended on the workload. That gave me flexibility, which was required. But what would happen is that the higher-ups would give the 'haircut' directive - everyone had to cut their budget by 10%. They didn't care how you did it.
So what some managers figured out was that you can keep some higher priced people around (again, contractors and not employees) for these times, and let them go to satisfy the haircut. Or you can flex your team and use more offshore instead of onshore. This was all built into the framework that TCS/Infosys had in place. Those onshore workers just got other positions in other teams. Or, you negotiate a fixed-bid contract with them - they will work on Project X for Y dollars. You go through all of this in excruciating detail and meet your budget number while still handling the project workload.
Until upper management comes back 6 months later and ask for another 10% cut. By that point you are working as cheaply as possible. Which makes the 10% cut even harder, because instead of being able to cut 5 people to meet the 10%, you have to cut 15 people because you were using offshore resources that cost 1/3 the price. So you have to start turning away work, which leads to projects getting pushed out, which leads to wasted money, which eventually leads to - you guessed it - budget cuts. But by that time, those people who made those cuts had moved on to a different position in the organization.
It was a horrible viscous cycle that I went through more than once, and saw other people go through as well. Sadly, it's the nature of the beast which is why I left the big corporate world. I was a successful manager who was in meetings 30 hours a week, and most of my time outside of meetings was spent pouring over how much my team was costing. The crazy part was that it was all internal money, and would shift quickly and often. It was a machine that chose to run like that. And like clockwork, every 8 months there were organizational and/or senior management changes.
So back to your comments - I don't think that the bean counters make those decisions. I think they simply deliver the message of those who tell them to, which in my experience was the management who were 4-5 levels down from the CEO. We had a system in place to use mostly contractors because they were fungible and cheaper. Most of the senior people were employees, and we couldn't hire the contractors to be full time because of contract agreements. I think those agencies are the ones who made out really well, because they embedded themselves in the company so well that it would be hard to replace them. You know... kind of like what employees used to be able to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox was just getting too heavy for me. I'm on Linux, (Mint 18 XFCE) and it was taking 30-45 seconds to become responsive after launching. It would just sit there. Even if I launched it from the command line with a url, it refused to do anything for that time period was up. CPU and memory were not taxed or even being used by FF. I have an older processor, but plenty to handle a damn web browser. (Intel Core2 Quad Core, 8GB of RAM) Unless I open a ton of tabs and GIMP, I barely ever get past 4GB used. I have used FF almost exclusively since at least 1999. I went to Chromium for about a year a while ago, but came back to FF.
After a few months of putting up with its freezing issue, and hoping updates would fix it, I just had to quit using it. If I left it open, I would notice that the CPU would spike for several seconds on occasion, and hang out around 20% for a while. While no page was loaded. I could only put up with it for so long.
I have a few other browsers installed... Don't really like Chrome or Chromium. I like certain specific things about FF that other browsers don't have, at least not in the way I like them. Then I found Pale Moon , and it seems to fit the bill. There are still a few things I would like to be able to customize better, but so far it's the winner in my book. That may change, I don't know. But FF seems to just keep pushing me away.
No, the government is at fault for propagating dietary guidelines that are not based on science. Just like the low-fat craze that is actually the opposite of healthy, based on real science. And since this article was about whether the government's data can be trusted, it's just further evidence that the answer is NO.
So come back with some quip to make yourself feel better, but by all means, don't actually educate yourself.
The food pyramid was laughably unscientific when it was created. Need I go on?
And it still is. Today's guidelines are based on that purely "made up" pyramid. Wonder why we have so many sick people?
Lots of info out there, but this is a good one. The Limits of Scientific Evidence and the Ethics of Dietary Guidelines
People are afraid of our legal system, and things are usually about making sure you can defend yourself against a lawsuit.
I had a friend who got a million dollar umbrella insurance policy when he put in a pool - just in case of a tragedy where a neighborhood kid drowned, he didn't want to be sued. The fact that you and a lot of others probably think "that's not a bad idea" means that lawyers have weaseled their way so deeply into our society that it's now the default behavior.
Just think about that. And watch things in your daily life. Our legal system is built to sustain the profession of lawyers. And do they actually make things better for everyone else, or just themselves?
If only there were some sort of central repository of information that you could query to quickly find the answer to your question, ideally in less time than it took you to click Reply, type in your question with extra unimportant information, click Preview, then click Submit.
Maybe that's because the majority of slashdotters don't need to worry about waking up black or female. Waking up old, however, awaits us all...
Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many.
And I strongly disagree with the GPs assertion that there is "nothing inherently wrong with bringing attorneys into it."
That seems to be such a pervasive sentiment that it has made our society one that actually believes we need lawyers to behave like reasonable people. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that has been created by - you guessed it - lawyers.
I have spent the last several months hiring two QA engineers. I got about two dozen resumes that had been pre-screened by the corporate recruiter. All of them were somewhat qualified. I phone interviewed about half of those, and had about 8-10 people come in for interviews.
Most of them were on some kind of work program. I only saw resumes for three men, and one came in for an interview. He was from an African country. I think the other two may have been Americans, but I didn't phone interview them and am only guessing by their names.
All the rest of the resumes were women, and only 1 was American.
So while I understand the sentiment that the H1B program is being used to "replace American workers" - which I am sure it is - I personally don't see it. I did not get any qualified Americans applying for the position. There was nothing wrong with the salary or the market we are in, and nothing specialized about the positions. Now I do know that Big Corporations are able to use-and-abuse the visa program because I have seen it firsthand. But there is also some good that comes out of the program as well.
I guess this what we've been reduced to though, you have to choose one end of the spectrum, there's no in-between on anything.
it's owned by Facebook.
I admittedly don't know much about how this applies to carbon fiber or graphene, but it needs to be 'repairable'. You can weld steel, to either repair it or join it to more steel, to the point it is as strong or even stronger than the original (with bracing and whatnot). Anything that would replace steel would need this characteristic.
Don't all of the variations have their own pieces anyway? I know we have two sets - one is a very old French version I found at a flea market which is really cool (my wife used to be a French teacher) and the other is a Simpsons version. I've played it with my kids quite a bit. I kind of think it's a great move for them to make all the customized versions, it breathes a little bit of new life into the game. It's more relevant to buy a monorail stop instead of a railroad, or Burns Manor instead of Boardwalk.
I fully expect that they will continue to churn out new versions all the time, for all kinds of things. They don't need anyone's votes, this is pure marketing. In fact, they are late to the game if they are just now talking about having a version with emoji tokens. Come on Parker Bros!
What fraudulent report? Did it say they filed a report with the police? The news story said they were working with law enforcement, that's it.
And they gave you an email address from their domain if you have any information. (?!)
Sure, someone might have nabbed them, laptops get stolen all the time. Just somewhat interesting that this made the news feeds. Do I care? Not in the least.
This is really OT, but.... :|
I worked at Motorola from '93 to '98, and they encouraged patent submissions. Pagers were hot, and they had just come out with their new 2-way pager. I came up with an idea for a middleware application to translate text-to-speech and speech-to-text for people to be able to bridge the gap between pagers and phones. It went to committee, but they passed on it because they didn't see the benefits and thought it wouldn't be cost-effective. I still think about that today... I wouldn't have gotten anything out of it but a few bucks, they would have retained all of the rights anyway. It would have been nice to have my name on something like that as a legacy. Instead, I held onto some stock for 20 years and took a loss on it.
Well that is because of this key phrase...
"high-tech manufacturing"
Meaning there will be very little labor and lot of robots.
Only if Trump gets his wall.
Kids do not understand why #1 is a bad thing.
You have to follow that up with real-world examples of why and how that could be a problem for them.
I told my daughter "imagine you sent a selfie to your best friend where you had your finger in your nose as a joke. Then what if she thought it was funny and shared it with other friends... then it made it all around your school and people started teasing you about picking your nose." Pretty mild example, but I think she got it. Basically I said once you send something, you have no control over what happens to it.
And just like everything else, they will only truly learn if they are allowed to make mistakes on their own. :)
I did shit all the time that my parents told me not to do, and I learned - both in good ways and in bad ways - from doing that.
Fortunately for me, there was no way to document those things back then like there are today.
I actually switched to MintXFCE from Xubuntu. Xubuntu was good, but I liked Mint better.
When I switched to Mint several years ago, I didn't like that they didn't support "upgrading in place". However, one of the reasons I switched to Mint (from Ubuntu) was because I had upgraded so many times in place (7 or 8) that my system wasn't stable and was slowing down. So I made the decision to change my partitions and go with the idea of keeping my base install small, my home directory on a separate partition, etc. My upgrades since then have been very painless and faster!
However, they DO now support upgrading in place, it's called their Package Upgrade. I haven't done it yet, but am on 18 and may upgrade to 18.1 that way. Although I used to be a KDE person (back on Redhat, then SuSE, then Kubuntu) I switched to XFCE many years ago and haven't looked back.
I am a linux user... have been exclusively at home since 99. At work I use windows.
I have been using Win10 for a year now at work, and I have to say that I don't really care for it. I have a touchscreen laptop, and I have disabled the touchscreen feature. But all the icons are still like I am on a tablet. I have been living with it. For the most part, I don't like much about it at all.
One of the features of the start menu that I use, and like, is the type-search. I open the start menu, and can start typing the name of the application I need, and it quickly narrows down the options. I find it useful because I can do that from the keyboard alone, which is helpful.
My one caveat is that I use this feature all the time because I really don't like the way the menu works in general. When I am searching for an application that I don't use all that often, it always takes me a second or two to find the "all apps" link, then it opens up that stupid alphabetically sorted list. That is why I have lots of apps pinned on my menu bar. It's a workaround at best.
At home I use Mint XFCE, and it has the search for apps in a very similar fashion, but WITH a very usable nested menu structure. I love it so much more.
Usually I buy DVDs for the kids, rip them to my linux machine which are served up with serviio to my WDTV/Roku boxes.
There have been times that I haven't been able to rip the DVD because of protection on the disc. So I have downloaded a copy to put on my media server.
I have only done this on a few occasions, but when I did it was actually faster to download it than to rip it.
So I will assume that your "pirating movies" comment was meant for those people who actually pirate movies.
While it would be nice, it wouldn't happen.
What would happen is that companies would either sell their unused patents to another company, who could hold onto it for a while, then do the same. Or they would just create a subsidiary, and sell it to them. Or some other shenanigans that I don't have the mentality to think up. However, what it would ensure is that patent attorneys would still be need (more than ever!) which in my book is a bad idea.
The true end-game of this - and almost all legal scenarios - is to make sure that lawyers are still necessary. If you step back, you will see that they have created a legal system that they tend like a garden to solely ensure that they are necessary. It doesn't matter what kind of lawyer. I have not checked, but would be willing to bet that a lawyer initiated this lawsuit (playing on the emotions of a grieving family). Step back and consider who all the real winners are in this scenario... it's the lawyers.
is that people cast votes, and our elections are won or lost, on whether or not a candidate comes to their state and tells them what they want to hear.
It boggles my mind that it still works. We live in an age where information - real, massaged, and fabricated - is available 24/7. Yet politics is still just politics, where you don't have to be a good candidate to win. You just have to be a better shyster.
We should have a "neither" option, and if neither wins, we go back and start over.
I know why that won't work, because the entire system has been built by those who gain the most from it. And it is not the American people. It just makes me sad that as "the greatest nation" we still can't get the basics right.
Back in 1986 in high school computer class we were programming BASIC on the Tandy TRS-80 Model IIIs. Our computer teacher comes in one day with a box full of floppies (5.25") that she had picked up somewhere. The contents were unknown. So our assignment was to go through them and try to figure out what was on them, if anything, and keep notes.
You can only imagine the thrill of finding some discs that contained ascii nudes!
It caused quite a stir and they were eventually confiscated, but that is burned into my brain for sure.
I call BS, cost is not a barrier at all. I paid $2200 for my first computer in 1990. It was a 386DX-33, with 2MB of memory and an 80MB hard drive. Can you spend that on a computer today? Absolutely. Do you have to? Absolutely not.
If you watch Craigslist, you can get free computers. If you have friends/family that upgrade, you can get free computers.
If you buy used computers on CL you can get them cheap or very cheap, either from people who upgrade or people who buy them in bulk or clear out businesses.
Brand new 23"+ monitors go on sale all the time for less than $100. Storage is cheap. Memory isn't that bad, although still reasonable. Broadband might be a barrier for some, but when I bought my first computer it did not even have a modem!
What is a barrier is the mentality that you have to buy the newest and the best of everything.
I have three kids, and all of them have computers. They are all hand-me-downs, and even the previous versions of hand-me-downs I have either sold very cheaply or given away. They are all Core2 Duos, and I even have a Core2Quad system sitting unused that I got free from work because it was "ancient". I just bought my son a brand new video card for Xmas (Nvidia GT710) for $25 because some of the games he plays weren't working well on his integrated video.
Not to mention things like Raspberry Pi and building / assembling your own components. I understand that isn't for everyone, but it's an option as well.
Firefox has been my browser of choice for a very long time. (My browser before FF was Netscape)
I have only a couple of add-ons. I run Linux/XFCE, have plenty of RAM and CPU.
A few years ago Firefox started to really bog down, so I switched to Chromium for about 6 months. I kept updating and trying Firefox, and eventually it got better. So I came back to it.
About 6 months ago it started slowing down again. Here is how it would behave: when I would launch the browser, it would come up rather quickly. But it would be unresponsive for about 30 seconds. It wasn't using CPU or RAM, just sitting there. By default it opens to a blank tab. There was NO reason I could tell for the slowdown. Even if I opened it with a url, like from an email, it would still open in zombie mode and wait 30 seconds before even showing the url in the address bar. It was maddening.
So now I am running Pale Moon and love it. It's not slow, yet it maintains all the things I like about Firefox.
My wife is on Win7 and she faced her own issues with the recent versions of FF, and she switched over to Chrome.
I have worked at a few Fortune X (single and low double digit) companies. ... What is it that ensnares the bean counters to prefer this situation over hiring qualified local candidates? I honestly don't get it. Why is it "better" to pay some unqualified person a low wage, tack on a substantial fee paid to the body shop, and then have everyone suffer through the extended delivery times, angst, etc. It can't be cheaper to do it this way, and if it is, it could not possibly be enough of a savings to merit delaying the delivery of what the business needs in a timely manner. Or can it?
I too have worked for a couple of the large companies, in this case banks, and I was in testing management. Bean counters care about beans. That's it. They never directed anyone to use offshore resources, they delivered the message that money had to be saved. Here is how I saw it go down multiple times.
I had a testing team that consisted of about 30% US employees and the rest contractors from a firm like TCS or Infosys (usually a mix of offshore/onshore/nearshore). For a team of about 50 people we tested a dozen or so projects. Projects came and went, and the number of contractors depended on the workload. That gave me flexibility, which was required. But what would happen is that the higher-ups would give the 'haircut' directive - everyone had to cut their budget by 10%. They didn't care how you did it.
So what some managers figured out was that you can keep some higher priced people around (again, contractors and not employees) for these times, and let them go to satisfy the haircut. Or you can flex your team and use more offshore instead of onshore. This was all built into the framework that TCS/Infosys had in place. Those onshore workers just got other positions in other teams. Or, you negotiate a fixed-bid contract with them - they will work on Project X for Y dollars. You go through all of this in excruciating detail and meet your budget number while still handling the project workload.
Until upper management comes back 6 months later and ask for another 10% cut. By that point you are working as cheaply as possible. Which makes the 10% cut even harder, because instead of being able to cut 5 people to meet the 10%, you have to cut 15 people because you were using offshore resources that cost 1/3 the price. So you have to start turning away work, which leads to projects getting pushed out, which leads to wasted money, which eventually leads to - you guessed it - budget cuts. But by that time, those people who made those cuts had moved on to a different position in the organization.
It was a horrible viscous cycle that I went through more than once, and saw other people go through as well. Sadly, it's the nature of the beast which is why I left the big corporate world. I was a successful manager who was in meetings 30 hours a week, and most of my time outside of meetings was spent pouring over how much my team was costing. The crazy part was that it was all internal money, and would shift quickly and often. It was a machine that chose to run like that. And like clockwork, every 8 months there were organizational and/or senior management changes.
So back to your comments - I don't think that the bean counters make those decisions. I think they simply deliver the message of those who tell them to, which in my experience was the management who were 4-5 levels down from the CEO. We had a system in place to use mostly contractors because they were fungible and cheaper. Most of the senior people were employees, and we couldn't hire the contractors to be full time because of contract agreements. I think those agencies are the ones who made out really well, because they embedded themselves in the company so well that it would be hard to replace them. You know... kind of like what employees used to be able to do.