Firefox is opening itself for a storm of security issues with a PDF viewer. Virtually anyone that has attempted to make a PDF viewer has opened themselves up for security issues with the implementation. Honestly, this is a horrible direction to take. Every platform in existence (including most mobile OSes) have PDF viewer built in, so why not use it. Have the user download the document and view it.
Editors suck? Learn VIM once and edit text happily for the rest of your life on any platform (it's available for pretty much any platform in existence, including obscure ones like Amiga OS). It's like touch typing. I see people who claim to be professional software developers (as in I have been writing code for living past 15 years) and they can't touch type.
Same goes for VIM. Spend 6 months learning it and forget about text editors. Text editing is a solved problem. VI/VIM have over 30 years of combined development and testing and have any feature under the Sun. It is optimized for fast comfortable editing and code navigation and once you do learn it, you will realize that there is no bloody way you will edit text that fast in absolutely anything else. VIM is like "programming your text". It's quite a satisfying experience to bend text to your will when you get proficient.
So I always chuckle when I hear kids praise Notepad++ or some other dumb editor in comparison. Or God forbid when they announce a new text editor project (talk about re-inventing the wheel and announcing to the world how little you actually know). You can tell a lot about a programmer just by knowing what their "go to" text editor is.
Sure, but it doesn't strike me that Microsoft has changed their ways when it comes to their philosophy, development tools and how they do things. They are still re-inventing the wheel poorly. And they have brain damaged generations of kids whose only exposure to development and computers has been Windows and supporting tool chain.
A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT.
I have been doing this with a Slingbox for 8 years now, and I can (theoretically, since I have not really watched TV in at least 5 years now, beyond some BBC news here and there) watch my cable TV anywhere in the world either on my computer or mobile device. I don't remember anyone ever suing Slingbox.
Besides, you would think people wanting to watch your crappy, commercial riddled programming would be a good thing? But no, these fuckers are so set in their ways that any change is perceived as threat.
Gee, Mac OS X GUI is extremely easy to drive, and if you don't know CLI you can get some of the flavour or feel for it by using spotlight searches (you only need to learn a few intuitive and basic metadata attributes) to get to your GUI windows, and from there you can drive them with keyboard/Expose.
I have 30'' screen hooked to my Mac Pro with Apple wired (5 button) mouse and mouse pointer can be moved from upper right corner to the bottom left corner in one short move on the mouse pad and my pointer scrolling is not even set to the max rate (it's way too fast if I do that).
I don't know how you use your computer, but I don't really reach for mouse that much when I use my computers (I'm a software developer, use CLI, VIM etc) and I even browse the internet in Firefox with pentadactyl so I don't have to touch the mouse ever. So, now carpal syndrome here.
Actually, OS X does a lot better in many of these than say Linux. CLI in OS X is the same as in Linux or any other UNIX variant, no complaints there. It's as UNIXie as it gets.
But when it comes to GUIs, OS X is way less busy and follows the do one thing and do it well and be as simple as possible but not simpler a LOT better than Linux.
Apple never entered this market to be the majority player. Being majority comes with plague (stupid users doing stupid things and ruining the fun for everyone). Mac OS X is already at a tipping point, where clueless users are buying Macs because sales people advertize it as easy to use, no viruses or problems of any kind. Actually Mac users are the most polarized bunch of all computer user sets. You have alpha geeks and clueless fucks using it and very little in between.
I think it's much better to fill a niche with high end high margin product, that's well put together and caters to certain less populous audience, like it used to be couple of years ago with OS X. I don't know where all this is going to end, but I do know one thing. The only solution to stupid user is to restrict them to using a guest account on their own computer (which is effectively what iOS does), and that's not the version of computing future I'd like to see played out, but unfortunately it is happening already and it's happening fast. Soon enough having a general purpose computing device may become so rare that it is going to get costly to own one.
Re:All good except DirectWrite font rendering.
on
Firefox 4 Released!
·
· Score: 1
that may be recommended way to do hardware acceleration, but I don't think it's the recommended way to render text:D. Open a page in Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 side by side and notice huge difference in text rendering. IE 9 also respects my clear type tuning preferences.
Not that I would use IE9 as my primary browser ever, but I think Mozilla is doing itself harm by showing initial experience that will be perceived as a problem by average user (remember the Safari for Windows saga when people complained about blurry fonts because Apple chose to render fonts as they do in OS X? They changed their mind soon after).
On unrelated note, Firefox 4 look amazingly well in OS X (with hardware acceleration), and they fixed some long standing annoyances (you could not middle click a link to open it in a new tab, and full screen would mess up your browser window preferred size etc). It looks like they now fine tuned it for Mac OS X more than for any other platform:D.
Re:All good except DirectWrite font rendering.
on
Firefox 4 Released!
·
· Score: 1
No, as far as I'm concerned this is a serious regression and not an improvement. The fonts look really ugly and the font rendering in Firefox make it stand out as a non-native app (it looks distinct and different from any other Windows app).
Another myth repeated so often that is now regarded as truth. Only a small successful minority of lawyers make anywhere near those incomes. As you noticed, there is an overproduction of lawyers and most are not raking in huge sums of money.
Sure, if you want to do programming, which is low end of the spectrum. Computer science on the other hand is something else. There are problems out there that actually require real computer science skills (think designing a compiler for a new language, creating a relational database, new operating system, emulator for operating system/CPU etc, or something like high scale, distributed computing like Google search engine). These things are real hard core CS problems and even if you are a PhD graduate in CS it does not mean you could just hop onto one of these right way. They are sufficiently specific that you need to specialize on one of them and spend a good portion of your career becoming an expert in the area.
This is why say Google, Microsoft or even Amazon quickly eliminate candidates that can't answer basic theoretical questions on algorithms (complexity analysis), data structures, finite state machines and applications (say regular expressions etc) and elements of programming languages. For every Google employee, there are thousands of CS graduates that could not get the job, let alone people without degrees.
This is got the be the dumbest argument I have ever heard. For every Bill Gates there are million high school/university drop outs that didn't make it in anything, not just computer industry. Besides Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg are (incredibly lucky) business people and not scientists by any definition of the word, much less computer scientists.
In a globalized society that we are moving towards (and esp. for countries that have practically open borders for highly qualified workers even today like Canada or USA or pretty much any western European country), you are not just competing with your local population, but with the best and brightest of the entire world.
And the lower end (i.e. competing for low end menial jobs) is already taken care of with outsourcing. So, unless you already have lots of money that you can invest or start a business of your own, really all you have is your education and knowledge. True, given the chance you probably can learn to do simpler tasks in software industry (think boring business programming) but if you are ambitious and want to work on interesting problems like operating systems, compilers, databases etc, you will quickly learn that you are missing huge theoretical foundation that you will never have the time and resources to learn on your own.
Besides, there are other benefits of higher education, the 5-10 years you get to spend on just bettering yourself beyond acquiring skills that are immediately useful for employment, like raising your intellectual ability in general, learning to learn and do research, doing mental gymnastics that allows you to learn faster later in life, actualizing yourself, it changes your outlook on life and the world around you etc.
A filesystem is a database, just not relational database (if that's what you mean by database). Mac OS X has filesystem with extensive metadata attributes, and Spotlight that allows you to query based on that metadata (including classical UNIX ones like created/modified/accessed dates). It works really well, it's fast and manages huge libraries really well.
I'm so used to it that I can't imagine using OS/filesystem that does not have some sort of support for it.
All my Macs run cool as well. I have never heard fans on mine, and my Mac Pro tower stays quiet even under load. The freezing issue I experienced with the Macbook Pro was not heat related (the machine felt cool when it happened). I still think it was probably related to graphics switching implementation that Apple did.
If you read my comment you will realize that I have 7 macs that never had issues, so I'm not trying to insinuate that all Apple computers are like that. I was burned with bad experience once, and now I hear of the similar (same?) issues again with the new generation of a product that I'm frankly interested in buying. But I'm not reluctant to try buying it. So, that means wait through another generation. Perhaps wait for post-Sandy Bridge CPU (even though I doubt the issue is CPU related, probably a bug in graphics switching implementation).
I bought top of the line 2010 17'' Macbook Pro fully loaded with matte screen too. Loved the machine (it was almost as fast as my 8 core Mac Pro), but it would freeze unexpectedly, and not necessarily under load either. So, after some research I found similar killometer long thread on apple discussions forum. So, I reluctantly and sadly returned it to Apple for full refund. I'm extremely happy with the customer service (they didn't ask me any questions or pressured me to keep it or anything, just said "So, what do you want to do?", i.e. attempt a replacement or refund). But, I'm not happy with the fact that you can spend $4000 on a computer and have it not working. Now I'm scared to even attempt to buy another one. It's somewhat of a disappointing experience.
I should also mention that I have 7 other Macs (of which only one portable - 2008 Aluminum Macbook) that all worked out of the box without a single issue. So, I don't know if only their top of the line Macbook Pros have these issues due to heat dissipation or something else?
You forgot: 1. Exclusive bike paths in all cities.
But considering that here in Canada, streets rarely have sidewalks in a lot of "industrial" zones of the cities (the only way you can get to some places is by car), that's a huge mental shift.
I would gladly do that, but here in Canada, the whole country is overrun by a glacier 6 months of the year, so walking to work, let alone cycling is not an option.
One interesting thing that has happened, both in democracies and dictatorships alike, is recognition of the power of the new media created by average people with smart phones, and there are calls to limit this power on all sides. Today for the first time average people have the power and unprecedented ability to share information (securely too), and this is scary to all governments. I would not be surprised to see even more serious measures to limit the freedom of idea sharing and the power of the internet as we know it.
and the first thing I notice is that the giant "Back" button is cut off at the bottom? How do you not notice that and release a browser with a glaring UI problem?
Slashdot Mirror
If Chrome is any indication, PDF plugin will work much much slower than external application when it comes to actual rendering task.
Firefox is opening itself for a storm of security issues with a PDF viewer. Virtually anyone that has attempted to make a PDF viewer has opened themselves up for security issues with the implementation. Honestly, this is a horrible direction to take. Every platform in existence (including most mobile OSes) have PDF viewer built in, so why not use it. Have the user download the document and view it.
Editors suck? Learn VIM once and edit text happily for the rest of your life on any platform (it's available for pretty much any platform in existence, including obscure ones like Amiga OS). It's like touch typing. I see people who claim to be professional software developers (as in I have been writing code for living past 15 years) and they can't touch type. Same goes for VIM. Spend 6 months learning it and forget about text editors. Text editing is a solved problem. VI/VIM have over 30 years of combined development and testing and have any feature under the Sun. It is optimized for fast comfortable editing and code navigation and once you do learn it, you will realize that there is no bloody way you will edit text that fast in absolutely anything else. VIM is like "programming your text". It's quite a satisfying experience to bend text to your will when you get proficient. So I always chuckle when I hear kids praise Notepad++ or some other dumb editor in comparison. Or God forbid when they announce a new text editor project (talk about re-inventing the wheel and announcing to the world how little you actually know). You can tell a lot about a programmer just by knowing what their "go to" text editor is.
has written a Visual Basic application to track your IP.
And don't forget overloaded keys as in at least 3 labels on each key (how else would you know where help, cut, paste etc are?).
Sure, but it doesn't strike me that Microsoft has changed their ways when it comes to their philosophy, development tools and how they do things. They are still re-inventing the wheel poorly. And they have brain damaged generations of kids whose only exposure to development and computers has been Windows and supporting tool chain.
A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT.
from Great Hackers by Paul Graham.
I have been doing this with a Slingbox for 8 years now, and I can (theoretically, since I have not really watched TV in at least 5 years now, beyond some BBC news here and there) watch my cable TV anywhere in the world either on my computer or mobile device. I don't remember anyone ever suing Slingbox.
Besides, you would think people wanting to watch your crappy, commercial riddled programming would be a good thing? But no, these fuckers are so set in their ways that any change is perceived as threat.
Gee, Mac OS X GUI is extremely easy to drive, and if you don't know CLI you can get some of the flavour or feel for it by using spotlight searches (you only need to learn a few intuitive and basic metadata attributes) to get to your GUI windows, and from there you can drive them with keyboard/Expose.
I have 30'' screen hooked to my Mac Pro with Apple wired (5 button) mouse and mouse pointer can be moved from upper right corner to the bottom left corner in one short move on the mouse pad and my pointer scrolling is not even set to the max rate (it's way too fast if I do that).
I don't know how you use your computer, but I don't really reach for mouse that much when I use my computers (I'm a software developer, use CLI, VIM etc) and I even browse the internet in Firefox with pentadactyl so I don't have to touch the mouse ever.
So, now carpal syndrome here.
Actually, OS X does a lot better in many of these than say Linux. CLI in OS X is the same as in Linux or any other UNIX variant, no complaints there. It's as UNIXie as it gets.
But when it comes to GUIs, OS X is way less busy and follows the do one thing and do it well and be as simple as possible but not simpler a LOT better than Linux.
Apple never entered this market to be the majority player. Being majority comes with plague (stupid users doing stupid things and ruining the fun for everyone). Mac OS X is already at a tipping point, where clueless users are buying Macs because sales people advertize it as easy to use, no viruses or problems of any kind. Actually Mac users are the most polarized bunch of all computer user sets. You have alpha geeks and clueless fucks using it and very little in between.
I think it's much better to fill a niche with high end high margin product, that's well put together and caters to certain less populous audience, like it used to be couple of years ago with OS X. I don't know where all this is going to end, but I do know one thing. The only solution to stupid user is to restrict them to using a guest account on their own computer (which is effectively what iOS does), and that's not the version of computing future I'd like to see played out, but unfortunately it is happening already and it's happening fast. Soon enough having a general purpose computing device may become so rare that it is going to get costly to own one.
that may be recommended way to do hardware acceleration, but I don't think it's the recommended way to render text :D. Open a page in Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 side by side and notice huge difference in text rendering. IE 9 also respects my clear type tuning preferences.
:D.
Not that I would use IE9 as my primary browser ever, but I think Mozilla is doing itself harm by showing initial experience that will be perceived as a problem by average user (remember the Safari for Windows saga when people complained about blurry fonts because Apple chose to render fonts as they do in OS X? They changed their mind soon after).
On unrelated note, Firefox 4 look amazingly well in OS X (with hardware acceleration), and they fixed some long standing annoyances (you could not middle click a link to open it in a new tab, and full screen would mess up your browser window preferred size etc). It looks like they now fine tuned it for Mac OS X more than for any other platform
No, as far as I'm concerned this is a serious regression and not an improvement. The fonts look really ugly and the font rendering in Firefox make it stand out as a non-native app (it looks distinct and different from any other Windows app).
Another myth repeated so often that is now regarded as truth. Only a small successful minority of lawyers make anywhere near those incomes. As you noticed, there is an overproduction of lawyers and most are not raking in huge sums of money.
Sure, if you want to do programming, which is low end of the spectrum. Computer science on the other hand is something else. There are problems out there that actually require real computer science skills (think designing a compiler for a new language, creating a relational database, new operating system, emulator for operating system/CPU etc, or something like high scale, distributed computing like Google search engine). These things are real hard core CS problems and even if you are a PhD graduate in CS it does not mean you could just hop onto one of these right way. They are sufficiently specific that you need to specialize on one of them and spend a good portion of your career becoming an expert in the area.
This is why say Google, Microsoft or even Amazon quickly eliminate candidates that can't answer basic theoretical questions on algorithms (complexity analysis), data structures, finite state machines and applications (say regular expressions etc) and elements of programming languages. For every Google employee, there are thousands of CS graduates that could not get the job, let alone people without degrees.
This is got the be the dumbest argument I have ever heard. For every Bill Gates there are million high school/university drop outs that didn't make it in anything, not just computer industry. Besides Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg are (incredibly lucky) business people and not scientists by any definition of the word, much less computer scientists.
In a globalized society that we are moving towards (and esp. for countries that have practically open borders for highly qualified workers even today like Canada or USA or pretty much any western European country), you are not just competing with your local population, but with the best and brightest of the entire world.
And the lower end (i.e. competing for low end menial jobs) is already taken care of with outsourcing. So, unless you already have lots of money that you can invest or start a business of your own, really all you have is your education and knowledge. True, given the chance you probably can learn to do simpler tasks in software industry (think boring business programming) but if you are ambitious and want to work on interesting problems like operating systems, compilers, databases etc, you will quickly learn that you are missing huge theoretical foundation that you will never have the time and resources to learn on your own.
Besides, there are other benefits of higher education, the 5-10 years you get to spend on just bettering yourself beyond acquiring skills that are immediately useful for employment, like raising your intellectual ability in general, learning to learn and do research, doing mental gymnastics that allows you to learn faster later in life, actualizing yourself, it changes your outlook on life and the world around you etc.
A filesystem is a database, just not relational database (if that's what you mean by database). Mac OS X has filesystem with extensive metadata attributes, and Spotlight that allows you to query based on that metadata (including classical UNIX ones like created/modified/accessed dates). It works really well, it's fast and manages huge libraries really well.
I'm so used to it that I can't imagine using OS/filesystem that does not have some sort of support for it.
All my Macs run cool as well. I have never heard fans on mine, and my Mac Pro tower stays quiet even under load. The freezing issue I experienced with the Macbook Pro was not heat related (the machine felt cool when it happened). I still think it was probably related to graphics switching implementation that Apple did.
If you read my comment you will realize that I have 7 macs that never had issues, so I'm not trying to insinuate that all Apple computers are like that. I was burned with bad experience once, and now I hear of the similar (same?) issues again with the new generation of a product that I'm frankly interested in buying. But I'm not reluctant to try buying it. So, that means wait through another generation. Perhaps wait for post-Sandy Bridge CPU (even though I doubt the issue is CPU related, probably a bug in graphics switching implementation).
I bought top of the line 2010 17'' Macbook Pro fully loaded with matte screen too. Loved the machine (it was almost as fast as my 8 core Mac Pro), but it would freeze unexpectedly, and not necessarily under load either. So, after some research I found similar killometer long thread on apple discussions forum. So, I reluctantly and sadly returned it to Apple for full refund. I'm extremely happy with the customer service (they didn't ask me any questions or pressured me to keep it or anything, just said "So, what do you want to do?", i.e. attempt a replacement or refund). But, I'm not happy with the fact that you can spend $4000 on a computer and have it not working. Now I'm scared to even attempt to buy another one. It's somewhat of a disappointing experience.
I should also mention that I have 7 other Macs (of which only one portable - 2008 Aluminum Macbook) that all worked out of the box without a single issue. So, I don't know if only their top of the line Macbook Pros have these issues due to heat dissipation or something else?
You forgot:
1. Exclusive bike paths in all cities.
But considering that here in Canada, streets rarely have sidewalks in a lot of "industrial" zones of the cities (the only way you can get to some places is by car), that's a huge mental shift.
I would gladly do that, but here in Canada, the whole country is overrun by a glacier 6 months of the year, so walking to work, let alone cycling is not an option.
One interesting thing that has happened, both in democracies and dictatorships alike, is recognition of the power of the new media created by average people with smart phones, and there are calls to limit this power on all sides. Today for the first time average people have the power and unprecedented ability to share information (securely too), and this is scary to all governments. I would not be surprised to see even more serious measures to limit the freedom of idea sharing and the power of the internet as we know it.
UK ISP's announcement about voluntary commitment to net neutrality?
and the first thing I notice is that the giant "Back" button is cut off at the bottom? How do you not notice that and release a browser with a glaring UI problem?