FWIW, my main development machine is a Windows one, and I find it's refreshingly straightforward to use the built-in developer tools in all the major browsers these days. Mercifully, the age of relying on bloated and bug-ridden add-ons like Firebug is over.:-)
In this case, it means the per-task overhead for a process is a multiple of that for a thread.
If the overheads in question are fixed and non-zero, that is self-evidently true.
However, it isn't very interesting, because what actually matters is the resources required to run the overall Firefox application. It appears that those resources are typically a few orders of magnitude larger than the scale of the thread vs. process overheads, so the important multiplier will be very close to 1 here.
A process has a somewhat bigger footprint than a thread, but it's really not a big multiplier at all in this kind of context, where we're talking about RAM measured in GB and running any modern operating system. Right now, Firefox typically grabs hundreds of megabytes of RAM just to start up with a handful of popular plug-ins and load a few simple pages, so I don't think a bit of process overhead is where they need to be worried.
Why should having many tabs open in separate processes cause any problem? No modern operating system will actually require the entire browser codebase to be loaded 20 or 200 times in that situation, and any overheads for context switches should be imperceptible with this kind of application.
In general, the code itself should automatically be shared between those processes. The main things kept separate would be the data in each tab/process and the system resources and permissions.
Those are things you really want to be kept separate, for security and robustness reasons, for example if a process crashes or if the OS kills it for security reasons. Firefox is now many years behind the curve on this issue.
Actually, I live in the UK too. While direct discussions of salary are certainly taboo in many places, others are more open.
Also, sometimes the ones that aren't intentionally open in culture give things away inadvertently. It was fascinating watching the aftermath of someone in HR accidentally e-mailing a spreadsheet showing an entire organisation's workforce complete with various sensitive information and internal scales to everyone in that organisation.
I'm still not sure exactly how I feel about it...on the one hand, it's deceitful that this is being done without employees realizing it. On the other hand, it's making them more happy in their jobs.
The first question this brings to mind is whether there is any need for the deceit. In my experience, developers almost always have a lot of respect for colleagues who do good work, which makes sense for reasons both of fairness and of self-interest as the person who might have to maintain that code later. I wouldn't be surprised if they also respected openly setting aside a modest pot to reward people who brought home a big project or who took one for the team sorting out something messy that no-one else wanted to go near, though I suspect it would have to be both very transparent and as objective as possible given the tendency to judge compensation against peers. I don't know what any research says on this point, but it would be interesting to read if anyone's got citations.
Actually, that's (proven) not true. Money only works up to a (surprisingly low) point.
Yes. Moreover, it's one of those issues that tends to be either neutral or bad: being perceived as underpaying is a big black mark, but being perceived as paying the going rate is just average and doesn't earn extra credit. On top of that, it's a relative measure, as employees are comparing with their peers at their current job and with what they could achieve elsewhere if they switched jobs, not with some absolute scale where paying $X is stingy but $Y is fair.
For a typical software developer, paying at or slightly above an honest market rate will go a long way to attracting and retaining decent people. It's a job, and they want to pay the rent/mortgage, look after their kids, take the family on holiday, and so on. Once they can do that, bonuses and profit share schemes and stock options and the like are all generally welcome, but sometimes it's more because they recognise the contribution the employee has made and the value of their work than because of any particular amount of money involved.
It seems strange, but it's often just as important or even more so that employees receive genuine compliments from peers and managers when they deserve them. Yes, they're just doing their job, but they're doing it well and no-one likes to feel their hard work is taken for granted. An honest appraisal that recent performance was good, or a sincere offer of support if some things need working on, goes a long way.
Even dumb stuff like a "meaningless" job title bump so it's the same as others in the industry with similar skills and ability can make a difference. I once worked with someone who only had a few years of experience out of university but who was smarter and more productive than average, and he left a role that was otherwise OK just because this didn't happen. The employer's HR department had a strict system where effectively your job title was tied to years of experience with very little flexibility. The developer was worried that his CV was starting to look underpowered if he wanted to move on later, because he still didn't have "Senior" in front of his job title when in most places he would have by then. He jumped ship for little more than a bumped title, and the previous employer lost one of the smartest guys I've ever worked with because HR's computer said no. Coming back to the original point, I think he actually took a slight pay cut to make the jump, too, which puts the money vs. recognition thing in perspective.
Operating system publishers leave features out of their browsers on purpose to push their proprietary native app platforms.
Well, that and the fact that every technology in history that has attempted to offer native access and functionality to remote web sites has gone on to become one of the biggest Internet security problems of its generation.
Doesn't that depend on what the course is worth? Programming is a relatively well paid profession, particularly in the US. It is conceivable that a good ten-week course could pay for itself almost immediately if a student could then expect to secure a better position with a significantly higher salary as a result of their improved skill and understanding.
For contrast, in the UK university fees are highly controversial but can be up to £9,000 (almost US$15,000 today) per year. However, reputable professional training courses teaching even quite basic IT skills can easily cost an employer £500+ per day.
If there is really as much competition in the Californian programmer education market as TFS suggests, it seems like in this case market forces really should be sufficient to keep prices fair unless their is collusion between the largest course providers to keep fees up artificially, in which case presumably the normal laws against anti-competitive behaviour should apply.
Obviously I'm ignoring other relevant factors here, such as arguments in favour of education for education's sake, and concentrating purely on economic value. However, it sounds like the regulator might be doing that as well.
You seem to have read something into my post that wasn't there, and then gone on an extended rant about it.
Of course separation of concerns is useful, though in the case of content vs. presentation I don't think these concerns are really as independent as we like to pretend. The very best presentations are usually extensively customised to the material being presented. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively expensive to go that far for every little job, so we often reuse generic styling and trust that it will be good enough.
Either way, I agree that shoving the formatting details into HTML is a bad idea for various reasons, but contrary to what Bacon Bits wrote, I think it's obvious that the combination of HTML+CSS is increasingly being used to replace desktop publishing and that the demands for more sophisticated layouts and formatting are only increasing with time.
The idea that HTML is only used for lightly styled documents and the browser should be the primary tool for deciding how to present them belongs to a time that has passed. That was how things started, but the medium has grown and evolved into something very different since then.
If you can manage to stop you knee from jerking for a moment, you might notice that I did acknowledge that other speciality devices exist. You might also notice that nothing I wrote precludes serving content that is marked up with good semantics and fully supports non-visual rendering as well and the visual layouts we're discussing here. However, since the subject of this discussion is a set of tools for visual layout -- it's right there in both the page title for this discussion and the subject line for the top post in this thread -- that's what I commented on.
You're obviously free to enjoy thought experiments about where the Web might be in a few years if you like, but that isn't going to help me or any of my clients to build better sites tomorrow, nor is it going to help anyone visiting those sites. Hyperbole about how we are somehow going to kill device independence by trying to build a more pleasing layout with the tools available today for a site that will be visited next month serves no useful purpose.
The reason office has a stranglehold on the market is that they've implemented every feature you could possibly want in your word processor / spreadsheet.
For the record, as a "power user", neither Word nor Excel is even close to having every feature I could possibly want. I find it enormously frustrating that with all the resources available to them, Microsoft have mostly been free-wheeling and tinkering with the UI for many years now.
That aside, most of the problems you described are probably at least partially attributable to exactly the fact that MS Office locks data up in closed formats. It creates an almost unassailable barrier to entry for competition, because anyone else wanting to offer feature parity with Office needs not only to implement the feature itself but also to implement conversion algorithms for Microsoft's dominant proprietary file formats.
If, as an industry, we software developers established standardised, extensible representations for non-trivial data like mathematical expressions and for cross-references in structured data stores like spreadsheets and databases, then the kinds of issues we see with porting between Excel, Calc and specialist tools like R could be greatly reduced. Not all tools would provide all functions, of course, but at least the common subset would be easily portable, leaving different tools and developers to distinguish themselves by what they could build on that common foundation.
For all the ailments of the web standards bodies, it's really quite something that today you can write an HTML document, style it with CSS, and even add interactivity with JavaScript, and you can do it so that several completely independent underlying engines, each forming part of a different but widely used browser application, will all render the common aspects they support in almost identical ways and will even degrade somewhat gracefully if you use features that are only available in some browsers. But of course the browser industry was stagnant for a long time around the IE6 generation, and it took the arrival and subsequent rapid development of a competing product and the ready accessibility of the "file" formats to break the deadlock. I think it will take at least that much to dislodge MS Office from its throne.
I've never tried integrating Calc with a serious database, so unfortunately I can't give you the answer you're looking for. Sorry.
However, I can tell you that when you try to save a Calc spreadsheet in an Excel file format, you quickly run into problems with converting the formulae from one spreadsheet's model and built-in functions to the other. I wouldn't hold out much hope that more complicated tasks like the ones you described will be any easier to port, and I would expect a lot of manual tweaking to get everything working properly again even if Calc does have the features you need for any given application and you do somehow manage to get it converted.
It's too bad my mod points just ran out, or you'd have had one for being insightful.
The important thing is the data. Open formats matter, and if there aren't suitable open formats available yet for the data you need to work with, creating additional open formats matters. The specific tools you use to access data that is stored in open formats are much less important.
Excel... well, for 90% of spreadsheets Calc is just as good
Unfortunately, if you need interoperability with Excel and your spreadsheets use non-trivial formulae, using Calc remains a non-starter.
I've seen all the usual Slashdot comments about how modern OpenOffice/LibreOffice versions have near-flawless interoperability with MS Office, and how even Microsoft changes its file formats and breaks compatibility occasionally. IME, the reality is quite different, and you can easily spend more in wasted time just converting one spreadsheet from Calc to Excel than it would have cost to buy Excel in the first place.
Except your nice little theory is not going to work.
Plenty of very popular, very professionally designed and maintained sites use these kinds of techniques already. See all the discussion in recent years about responsive design for numerous examples of one way you can do it. There are others, too.
Just because it isn't cost-effective for some sites, or some web developers don't know how to achieve these results, that doesn't mean the principle is broken. It just means some developers are better than others, and isn't that the case in any technical field?
Simple markup with limited layout control is the design intent of HTML.
That might have been true 20 years ago. The world has moved on, and I suspect the kind of generic, lightly-styled content you're advocating is not what most of the browsing public want today.
Unfortunately we're still trying to shoe-horn modern sites that do suit the majority of the browsing public into old technologies that weren't designed to handle them. The irony is that there are only a few organisations with enough influence to change that situation today, but despite being one of them, Google appears to be running in the opposite direction at the moment.
Sure it is, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't tell people who might choose whether to use Chrome or an alternative browser about Google's actions, so their potential users can make informed decisions about whether they want to be actual users or not.
The issue is that you can have layout-level control, or you can have device independence.
Or, to a workable approximation, you can have both. There are lots of different devices, but ultimately there are only a manageable number of general types among them: smartphone-ish, tablet-ish, laptop-ish, large laptop/desktop-ish, and maybe a few speciality things. If you have a web site aimed at the general public that provides for 2-3 variations in layout that will fit comfortably on the small/medium/large size screens and you allow for both keyboard/mouse and touch interactions, you can easily retain near-perfect layout control while still playing to the strengths of almost all popular device types.
I'm glad we know what he told us. But you can't not prosecute people who undoubtedly did commit crimes because you agree with their stated motives.
Sure you can, if you gloss over the legal issue of whether you can even know whether someone "undoubtedly did" commit a crime until as a minimum you have followed due process and tried their case before a competent court.
For one thing, the US government is demonstrably willing and able to grant retrospective immunity to parties who have probably broken the law if it wishes to do so. There are well-documented examples related to the same kind of surveillance issues Snowden raised, they were just applied to parties on the other side of the debate.
For another thing, if you're talking about issues on a scale of how government works, alleged abuse of power, and failure to apply your nation's constitutional provisions, appealing to "they broke the law" makes only a limited amount of sense. When only one side has any say in making the law or how that law is enforced in practice, it's hardly going to lead to a rational, reasoned debate and ultimately to constructive change. One man's terrorist/freedom fighter is another man's freedom fighter/terrorist, history is written by the victors, and all that.
Management is a very different skillset to technical work, but I'm in the camp that says you can't manage something without enough of a clue about how it works to at least hire good specialists at the top of the tree.
A lot of the time, what we see in these kinds of situations is government people who are experts on general management and/or politics trying to hire commercial people who are experts on building technical tools, but actually hiring commercial people who are experts on sales tactics, contract law, and most of all, schmoozing with government people who are experts on general management and/or politics.
It's hardly surprising that this does not tend to yield good results. It's frustrating for those of us who have technical skills and want useful government projects to succeed in ways we know they could. But the technical leaders who can actually pull off successful IT projects on a massive scale tend to work for places like Apple or Google or Amazon instead of working for Accenture or going into politics.
At least these days when you hire a big contractor, they send out the smart-sounding specialist for the first on-site meeting, but the guys who come afterwards have probably been working for a year or two since they graduated before being charged out at 200+/hour for standing around cluelessly with a laptop, so there has been some progress in recent years.;-)
Remember business people... "The customer is always right."
That is probably the most often quoted falsehood in all of business.
Customers are frequently wrong, and sometimes their actions are outright hostile.
Up to a certain point, it can be beneficial to overlook that in order to maintain good relations. The long term benefits may be worth taking a short term hit.
Beyond that point, the correct response is to dump that customer as quickly and cheaply as you can manage. Ideally, you at least do it with no hard feelings, but sometimes even telling them bluntly to shove it is justified.
Some of the sites which lose viewers because of this may simply say "good riddance" as those users are a net drain on resources -
I'm quite sure that's how they'll see it.
but that's a dangerous path to take as those people are, I would imagine, more likely to be either influential opinion-formers
A lot of geeks like to think they're influential opinion-formers. Most of them are far less influential than they imagine, and the guys running web sites know this for a fact because they have actual statistics from exactly the kinds ad-blocker-aware tools we're discussing here.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, my main development machine is a Windows one, and I find it's refreshingly straightforward to use the built-in developer tools in all the major browsers these days. Mercifully, the age of relying on bloated and bug-ridden add-ons like Firebug is over. :-)
In this case, it means the per-task overhead for a process is a multiple of that for a thread.
If the overheads in question are fixed and non-zero, that is self-evidently true.
However, it isn't very interesting, because what actually matters is the resources required to run the overall Firefox application. It appears that those resources are typically a few orders of magnitude larger than the scale of the thread vs. process overheads, so the important multiplier will be very close to 1 here.
A process has a somewhat bigger footprint than a thread, but it's really not a big multiplier at all in this kind of context, where we're talking about RAM measured in GB and running any modern operating system. Right now, Firefox typically grabs hundreds of megabytes of RAM just to start up with a handful of popular plug-ins and load a few simple pages, so I don't think a bit of process overhead is where they need to be worried.
Why should having many tabs open in separate processes cause any problem? No modern operating system will actually require the entire browser codebase to be loaded 20 or 200 times in that situation, and any overheads for context switches should be imperceptible with this kind of application.
In general, the code itself should automatically be shared between those processes. The main things kept separate would be the data in each tab/process and the system resources and permissions.
Those are things you really want to be kept separate, for security and robustness reasons, for example if a process crashes or if the OS kills it for security reasons. Firefox is now many years behind the curve on this issue.
Actually, I live in the UK too. While direct discussions of salary are certainly taboo in many places, others are more open.
Also, sometimes the ones that aren't intentionally open in culture give things away inadvertently. It was fascinating watching the aftermath of someone in HR accidentally e-mailing a spreadsheet showing an entire organisation's workforce complete with various sensitive information and internal scales to everyone in that organisation.
I'm still not sure exactly how I feel about it...on the one hand, it's deceitful that this is being done without employees realizing it. On the other hand, it's making them more happy in their jobs.
The first question this brings to mind is whether there is any need for the deceit. In my experience, developers almost always have a lot of respect for colleagues who do good work, which makes sense for reasons both of fairness and of self-interest as the person who might have to maintain that code later. I wouldn't be surprised if they also respected openly setting aside a modest pot to reward people who brought home a big project or who took one for the team sorting out something messy that no-one else wanted to go near, though I suspect it would have to be both very transparent and as objective as possible given the tendency to judge compensation against peers. I don't know what any research says on this point, but it would be interesting to read if anyone's got citations.
Actually, that's (proven) not true. Money only works up to a (surprisingly low) point.
Yes. Moreover, it's one of those issues that tends to be either neutral or bad: being perceived as underpaying is a big black mark, but being perceived as paying the going rate is just average and doesn't earn extra credit. On top of that, it's a relative measure, as employees are comparing with their peers at their current job and with what they could achieve elsewhere if they switched jobs, not with some absolute scale where paying $X is stingy but $Y is fair.
For a typical software developer, paying at or slightly above an honest market rate will go a long way to attracting and retaining decent people. It's a job, and they want to pay the rent/mortgage, look after their kids, take the family on holiday, and so on. Once they can do that, bonuses and profit share schemes and stock options and the like are all generally welcome, but sometimes it's more because they recognise the contribution the employee has made and the value of their work than because of any particular amount of money involved.
It seems strange, but it's often just as important or even more so that employees receive genuine compliments from peers and managers when they deserve them. Yes, they're just doing their job, but they're doing it well and no-one likes to feel their hard work is taken for granted. An honest appraisal that recent performance was good, or a sincere offer of support if some things need working on, goes a long way.
Even dumb stuff like a "meaningless" job title bump so it's the same as others in the industry with similar skills and ability can make a difference. I once worked with someone who only had a few years of experience out of university but who was smarter and more productive than average, and he left a role that was otherwise OK just because this didn't happen. The employer's HR department had a strict system where effectively your job title was tied to years of experience with very little flexibility. The developer was worried that his CV was starting to look underpowered if he wanted to move on later, because he still didn't have "Senior" in front of his job title when in most places he would have by then. He jumped ship for little more than a bumped title, and the previous employer lost one of the smartest guys I've ever worked with because HR's computer said no. Coming back to the original point, I think he actually took a slight pay cut to make the jump, too, which puts the money vs. recognition thing in perspective.
Operating system publishers leave features out of their browsers on purpose to push their proprietary native app platforms.
Well, that and the fact that every technology in history that has attempted to offer native access and functionality to remote web sites has gone on to become one of the biggest Internet security problems of its generation.
Doesn't that depend on what the course is worth? Programming is a relatively well paid profession, particularly in the US. It is conceivable that a good ten-week course could pay for itself almost immediately if a student could then expect to secure a better position with a significantly higher salary as a result of their improved skill and understanding.
For contrast, in the UK university fees are highly controversial but can be up to £9,000 (almost US$15,000 today) per year. However, reputable professional training courses teaching even quite basic IT skills can easily cost an employer £500+ per day.
If there is really as much competition in the Californian programmer education market as TFS suggests, it seems like in this case market forces really should be sufficient to keep prices fair unless their is collusion between the largest course providers to keep fees up artificially, in which case presumably the normal laws against anti-competitive behaviour should apply.
Obviously I'm ignoring other relevant factors here, such as arguments in favour of education for education's sake, and concentrating purely on economic value. However, it sounds like the regulator might be doing that as well.
You seem to have read something into my post that wasn't there, and then gone on an extended rant about it.
Of course separation of concerns is useful, though in the case of content vs. presentation I don't think these concerns are really as independent as we like to pretend. The very best presentations are usually extensively customised to the material being presented. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively expensive to go that far for every little job, so we often reuse generic styling and trust that it will be good enough.
Either way, I agree that shoving the formatting details into HTML is a bad idea for various reasons, but contrary to what Bacon Bits wrote, I think it's obvious that the combination of HTML+CSS is increasingly being used to replace desktop publishing and that the demands for more sophisticated layouts and formatting are only increasing with time.
The idea that HTML is only used for lightly styled documents and the browser should be the primary tool for deciding how to present them belongs to a time that has passed. That was how things started, but the medium has grown and evolved into something very different since then.
If you can manage to stop you knee from jerking for a moment, you might notice that I did acknowledge that other speciality devices exist. You might also notice that nothing I wrote precludes serving content that is marked up with good semantics and fully supports non-visual rendering as well and the visual layouts we're discussing here. However, since the subject of this discussion is a set of tools for visual layout -- it's right there in both the page title for this discussion and the subject line for the top post in this thread -- that's what I commented on.
You're obviously free to enjoy thought experiments about where the Web might be in a few years if you like, but that isn't going to help me or any of my clients to build better sites tomorrow, nor is it going to help anyone visiting those sites. Hyperbole about how we are somehow going to kill device independence by trying to build a more pleasing layout with the tools available today for a site that will be visited next month serves no useful purpose.
Responsive design does provide multiple layouts. It's just one specific strategy for doing so that uses one specific set of techniques to achieve it.
The reason office has a stranglehold on the market is that they've implemented every feature you could possibly want in your word processor / spreadsheet.
For the record, as a "power user", neither Word nor Excel is even close to having every feature I could possibly want. I find it enormously frustrating that with all the resources available to them, Microsoft have mostly been free-wheeling and tinkering with the UI for many years now.
That aside, most of the problems you described are probably at least partially attributable to exactly the fact that MS Office locks data up in closed formats. It creates an almost unassailable barrier to entry for competition, because anyone else wanting to offer feature parity with Office needs not only to implement the feature itself but also to implement conversion algorithms for Microsoft's dominant proprietary file formats.
If, as an industry, we software developers established standardised, extensible representations for non-trivial data like mathematical expressions and for cross-references in structured data stores like spreadsheets and databases, then the kinds of issues we see with porting between Excel, Calc and specialist tools like R could be greatly reduced. Not all tools would provide all functions, of course, but at least the common subset would be easily portable, leaving different tools and developers to distinguish themselves by what they could build on that common foundation.
For all the ailments of the web standards bodies, it's really quite something that today you can write an HTML document, style it with CSS, and even add interactivity with JavaScript, and you can do it so that several completely independent underlying engines, each forming part of a different but widely used browser application, will all render the common aspects they support in almost identical ways and will even degrade somewhat gracefully if you use features that are only available in some browsers. But of course the browser industry was stagnant for a long time around the IE6 generation, and it took the arrival and subsequent rapid development of a competing product and the ready accessibility of the "file" formats to break the deadlock. I think it will take at least that much to dislodge MS Office from its throne.
I've never tried integrating Calc with a serious database, so unfortunately I can't give you the answer you're looking for. Sorry.
However, I can tell you that when you try to save a Calc spreadsheet in an Excel file format, you quickly run into problems with converting the formulae from one spreadsheet's model and built-in functions to the other. I wouldn't hold out much hope that more complicated tasks like the ones you described will be any easier to port, and I would expect a lot of manual tweaking to get everything working properly again even if Calc does have the features you need for any given application and you do somehow manage to get it converted.
It's too bad my mod points just ran out, or you'd have had one for being insightful.
The important thing is the data. Open formats matter, and if there aren't suitable open formats available yet for the data you need to work with, creating additional open formats matters. The specific tools you use to access data that is stored in open formats are much less important.
Don't worry, it isn't much of an office suite either.
Excel... well, for 90% of spreadsheets Calc is just as good
Unfortunately, if you need interoperability with Excel and your spreadsheets use non-trivial formulae, using Calc remains a non-starter.
I've seen all the usual Slashdot comments about how modern OpenOffice/LibreOffice versions have near-flawless interoperability with MS Office, and how even Microsoft changes its file formats and breaks compatibility occasionally. IME, the reality is quite different, and you can easily spend more in wasted time just converting one spreadsheet from Calc to Excel than it would have cost to buy Excel in the first place.
Except your nice little theory is not going to work.
Plenty of very popular, very professionally designed and maintained sites use these kinds of techniques already. See all the discussion in recent years about responsive design for numerous examples of one way you can do it. There are others, too.
Just because it isn't cost-effective for some sites, or some web developers don't know how to achieve these results, that doesn't mean the principle is broken. It just means some developers are better than others, and isn't that the case in any technical field?
Simple markup with limited layout control is the design intent of HTML.
That might have been true 20 years ago. The world has moved on, and I suspect the kind of generic, lightly-styled content you're advocating is not what most of the browsing public want today.
Unfortunately we're still trying to shoe-horn modern sites that do suit the majority of the browsing public into old technologies that weren't designed to handle them. The irony is that there are only a few organisations with enough influence to change that situation today, but despite being one of them, Google appears to be running in the opposite direction at the moment.
Sure it is, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't tell people who might choose whether to use Chrome or an alternative browser about Google's actions, so their potential users can make informed decisions about whether they want to be actual users or not.
The issue is that you can have layout-level control, or you can have device independence.
Or, to a workable approximation, you can have both. There are lots of different devices, but ultimately there are only a manageable number of general types among them: smartphone-ish, tablet-ish, laptop-ish, large laptop/desktop-ish, and maybe a few speciality things. If you have a web site aimed at the general public that provides for 2-3 variations in layout that will fit comfortably on the small/medium/large size screens and you allow for both keyboard/mouse and touch interactions, you can easily retain near-perfect layout control while still playing to the strengths of almost all popular device types.
I'm glad we know what he told us. But you can't not prosecute people who undoubtedly did commit crimes because you agree with their stated motives.
Sure you can, if you gloss over the legal issue of whether you can even know whether someone "undoubtedly did" commit a crime until as a minimum you have followed due process and tried their case before a competent court.
For one thing, the US government is demonstrably willing and able to grant retrospective immunity to parties who have probably broken the law if it wishes to do so. There are well-documented examples related to the same kind of surveillance issues Snowden raised, they were just applied to parties on the other side of the debate.
For another thing, if you're talking about issues on a scale of how government works, alleged abuse of power, and failure to apply your nation's constitutional provisions, appealing to "they broke the law" makes only a limited amount of sense. When only one side has any say in making the law or how that law is enforced in practice, it's hardly going to lead to a rational, reasoned debate and ultimately to constructive change. One man's terrorist/freedom fighter is another man's freedom fighter/terrorist, history is written by the victors, and all that.
Management is a very different skillset to technical work, but I'm in the camp that says you can't manage something without enough of a clue about how it works to at least hire good specialists at the top of the tree.
A lot of the time, what we see in these kinds of situations is government people who are experts on general management and/or politics trying to hire commercial people who are experts on building technical tools, but actually hiring commercial people who are experts on sales tactics, contract law, and most of all, schmoozing with government people who are experts on general management and/or politics.
It's hardly surprising that this does not tend to yield good results. It's frustrating for those of us who have technical skills and want useful government projects to succeed in ways we know they could. But the technical leaders who can actually pull off successful IT projects on a massive scale tend to work for places like Apple or Google or Amazon instead of working for Accenture or going into politics.
At least these days when you hire a big contractor, they send out the smart-sounding specialist for the first on-site meeting, but the guys who come afterwards have probably been working for a year or two since they graduated before being charged out at 200+/hour for standing around cluelessly with a laptop, so there has been some progress in recent years. ;-)
Remember business people... "The customer is always right."
That is probably the most often quoted falsehood in all of business.
Customers are frequently wrong, and sometimes their actions are outright hostile.
Up to a certain point, it can be beneficial to overlook that in order to maintain good relations. The long term benefits may be worth taking a short term hit.
Beyond that point, the correct response is to dump that customer as quickly and cheaply as you can manage. Ideally, you at least do it with no hard feelings, but sometimes even telling them bluntly to shove it is justified.
Some of the sites which lose viewers because of this may simply say "good riddance" as those users are a net drain on resources -
I'm quite sure that's how they'll see it.
but that's a dangerous path to take as those people are, I would imagine, more likely to be either influential opinion-formers
A lot of geeks like to think they're influential opinion-formers. Most of them are far less influential than they imagine, and the guys running web sites know this for a fact because they have actual statistics from exactly the kinds ad-blocker-aware tools we're discussing here.