Yes, thank you for saying this. I'm so sick of forced password resets. I can't remember all the passwords I use, and for some sites that I might actually need to remember them for, having to make a new one means I no longer remember the password for that site! It means I'm more likely to choose a weak password which is easier to remember and easier to crack.
Thus my theory that forced password resets actually decrease security.
Meanwhile, some of us run other programs at the same time as the browser, and when the browser starts using gigs of memory and filling up swap, it's not a good thing. It's almost unbelievable how much more memory Chrome uses than Firefox--just run htop and look at all the chrome processes using tens and hundreds of megs. It adds up quickly, and that's not even counting JS memory leaks. Firefox uses less memory, and Mozilla is making a concerted and public effort to reduce memory usage (e.g. areweslimyet).
How long have you had it? That sparkling would worry me. It seems like it indicates a more serious problem that may get worse over time. Why should turning it off and on magically fix it? Surely it's not a software problem. If it's a hardware problem, maybe related to heat, then eventually something's going to pop.
If KDE 4.0 wasn't supposed to be used by end-users, it should have been called an alpha or beta release. But KDE thought that they had to get people using it to get people interested in it; their theory was, "If we call it a development build, no one will care. We have to release broken software so people will want to help us fix it."
So they called it a point-oh, non-alpha, non-beta, non-RC, final/gold/master release. And then when people used it and found that it wasn't suitable for actual use, KDE complained, "No, no, you're not supposed to use it yet! You're just supposed to want to use it, and to want to help us fix it!" In other words, do as I say, not as I do. A simple bait-and-switch.
Now don't get me wrong: I use KDE now and have been for about a decade; it's great. But I'm calling it like I see it: the KDE 4.0 debacle was just that, and many in the KDE community are still in denial about it.
This is one of the downsides of developers in a project deciding when their pet code should replace existing software: the users come last, and quality and reputation suffer.
In contrast, Linus understands that regressions are unacceptable, and his policy is, "WE DON'T BREAK USERSPACE!" And that's one of the reasons Linux is so wildly successful.
But what is nature? Humans are just as much a part of this planet's fauna as any other species. Harmony in nature is a myth and a fallacy. It's strange that some Darwinists believe it, since Darwinism itself contradicts it. Survival of the fittest is hardly harmonious.
If you hate humanity so much, maybe you should go live harmoniously with your animal friends. I'm sure they'd be glad to have you for dinner.
I disagree. I've been using KDE 4 for many years, and it has not gotten faster in every way. On a 2+GHz Core2Duo system with 3 GB of RAM, things like this happen all the time:
* Dolphin takes 30+ seconds to launch because of all the stuff it has to read off the disk just to run * Plasma freezes for seconds at a time * The "classic" launcher menu takes a long time to open * Hovering over an image in Dolphin to get a thumbnail takes 30+ seconds because I guess it has to read in so many libraries just to run the thumbnailing code. This never happened with Konqueror in 3.5.
This is more insightful than some may give credit for. All these years, the buggy mess of Nepomuk was released over and over, forced upon innocent users, when it never should have left private development builds. It was justified by "getting more exposure" to "fix more bugs faster", but all it really did was waste real people's time and energy.
KDE needs something like Debian's ftpmasters: a person or team with the authority to say "no" to a developer who wants his pet software released with the rest of KDE.
Indeed! On one of my user accounts, the only solution is to $(chmod -x/usr/bin/akonadi*), otherwise the whole computer locks up a few minutes after logging in because akonadi processes run amok, sucking up all CPU, causing excessive I/O, and apparently causing some kind of weird kernel or hardware bug. But I never have that problem except when caused by akonadi.
This is not necessarily always a good thing. KDE 4.10 has serious crashing bugs in plasma-desktop that were known and reported in 2012 while 4.10 was in beta. Now, if I upgrade my Kubuntu system, and don't manually avoid upgrading to 4.10, I may very well end up with an unusable desktop and be forced into doing a very messy, manual downgrade back to 4.9.5.
Sometimes a delay of a few weeks is not such a bad thing.
1. Analogy to water or electricity is flawed. Water and electricity are limited resources--but data is neverending. The only limit here is bandwidth--the size of the pipes--while water and electricity have both bandwidth and resource limits. ISPs love it when people compare to water or electricity, because it supports their non-competitive, greedy practices.
2. "People need to consider if data caps or faster speeds are more important to them." This is a false dichotomy. Past a certain point, more speed is irrelevant, but when you hit the data cap, your speed drops to zero (or your bill goes up in a way that is biased unfairly toward the ISP).
3. "With fibre that increases to 1Gbps and 324TB/month." You're arguing from the presupposition that users will max out their connection 24/7. That is silly.
4. "Data caps provide a way for ISPs to invest in upgrading speeds and deliver those speeds to everyone while recouping the costs from those who make the most use of the network by downloading more." No, that is what they want you to think (or are you one of them?). Data caps unfairly punish customers who use their connection. A customer who uses 10% of his data cap pays x, but a customer who uses 101% of his data cap pays 1.2x. The 90% of unused bandwidth more than makes up for the extra 1% used by the other customer. On top of that, the extra 32% of bandwidth paid for by the customer, who used 101% and was forced to buy an entire 33% more, goes unused and doesn't roll over to the next month--the customer pays for data he doesn't even use (or even get to use, depending on how late in the cycle the overage occurred). Bottom line: it's all gravy for the ISP. Customers who barely use it cost them very little, and customers who barely exceed the cap pay for service they end up not using. When there's little to no competition in a market, the ISP can set the caps and overages to whatever they want, and the customer has two choices: awful service at awful rates, or no service at all. For me, after 4 years, AT&T decreased my service by instituting caps and overages, and increased the monthly fees. I have no feasible alternative.
5. "This leads to the situation where a person cannot video conference with family once a month because they cannot justify the higher speeds just for 30 minutes. This is much more socially unjust than someone having to wait until next month to download a file." What a farce! Socially unjust?! Your contrived scenario is internally flawed, as well: what if the file the "someone" has to wait a month(!) to download is media from a family member overseas? a recorded video, photos...? Who made you judge of what is more justly important to random people?
6. "Some ISPs with quotas also permit customers to buy extra quota during a month." Yeah, my ISP (AT&T) is kind enough to "permit" me to buy an extra 50 GB of data automatically by charging me an extra 33% whether I use 100 MB or 50 GB of that extra 50 GB. But, of course, if I subscribe to their (more expensive) uVerse package and use them for TV (which I don't even want), I get an extra 100 GB of data cap while paying less for the Internet access--but much more overall. How generous of them!
7. "For me personally, I would much prefer 1Gbps with 100GB quota, than 12Mbps with no quota." That's a terrible example. What can you NOT do with a 12 Mbps download rate? You can watch any online streaming video you want, do any video conferencing, download any files quickly enough... But having a 1 Gbps connection will not make a 3 Mbps Netflix stream look any better, and it won't make your Skype calls any better, but having a 100 GB cap most definitely will bite you over and over again if you actually do any of the things you mentioned.
In conclusion, you're deluded or lying, a fool or a shill.
You are presupposing that there even is a Green Revolution. If there is, we're in the middle of it, and can't objectively judge. You may discover in the future that there wasn't a significant Green Revolution.
Computer technology itself is, at the moment, undergoing iterative changes. The effect that it's having upon societies, cultures, and everyday lives is only beginning. As the ubiquity of interconnected computers increases, and as data storage increases, the everyday lives of people in first-world nations will likely look very different in 20+ years.
Who creates the algorithms? Who programs the algorithms? Who updates all the algorithms when a shortcoming is found? Who dies when a bad guy remotely alters an algorithm, causing misdiagnoses and mistreatments? Who comforts the patient with a confident, reassuring manner--the computer programmer? the algorithm designer? the computer manufacturer?
No, human doctors aren't perfect--but neither is any machine created by a human. The machine can only "think", diagnose, or treat as far as its programmers programmed it. I'll take a human, thanks.
Are you kidding? It makes no sense whatsoever for an ISP to terminate a customer's account because he hit their arbitrary bandwidth limit! At worst they should disable his account until the next billing period. A better option would be to charge an overage fee, like any other ISP with half a brain. A better option still would be to throttle the connection until the next billing period. We're talking about computers here. There's absolutely no reason their system can't automatically handle this in a reasonable way.
Imagine if the water department told you that you could only use 500 gallons a month, and if you went over it once, they'd shut off your water supply forever. Imagine if the electric company told you that you had to monitor your own meter, and that if you used over 200 KWh in a month, they'd never sell you electricity again. And of course, imagine that in both cases, the meters had functions that could automatically throttle or disable the pipe if the limit was reached, and reset when the next billing period started. But they refused to use those functions and instead lay in waiting for the opportunity to close your account forever, like guerilla tour guides waiting in the jungle to ambush the paying customers they just led in.
This is like giving the customer a rope, already tied into a noose, placing it over his neck, tying the other end to the ceiling, and then telling him, "Here's the rope you ordered. But don't walk too far away from this spot or you'll hang yourself. And if you do that, we'll shoot you."
What we're seeing here is why ISPs need regulation. Where monopolies or duopolies exist, customers are no longer valuable to companies. These companies would rather throw away customers than invest in their capacity, because that would reduce quarterly profits.
QoS only works for outbound traffic. The router can't control what comes in. A bunch of downloads can still saturate your connection, and UDP protocols like uTP can't even be throttled by holding ACKs, since there are none.
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Yes, thank you for saying this. I'm so sick of forced password resets. I can't remember all the passwords I use, and for some sites that I might actually need to remember them for, having to make a new one means I no longer remember the password for that site! It means I'm more likely to choose a weak password which is easier to remember and easier to crack.
Thus my theory that forced password resets actually decrease security.
Nothing.
Wow, common sense modded down to 0, Troll. I guess there really is a cabal.
BTW, you can disable the delayed image decoding quite simply in about:config.
Meanwhile, some of us run other programs at the same time as the browser, and when the browser starts using gigs of memory and filling up swap, it's not a good thing. It's almost unbelievable how much more memory Chrome uses than Firefox--just run htop and look at all the chrome processes using tens and hundreds of megs. It adds up quickly, and that's not even counting JS memory leaks. Firefox uses less memory, and Mozilla is making a concerted and public effort to reduce memory usage (e.g. areweslimyet).
And I haven't even mentioned Pentadactyl yet...
Read her blog before you run your mouth. http://deweyhagborg.wordpress.com/category/stranger-visions/
How long have you had it? That sparkling would worry me. It seems like it indicates a more serious problem that may get worse over time. Why should turning it off and on magically fix it? Surely it's not a software problem. If it's a hardware problem, maybe related to heat, then eventually something's going to pop.
This logic doesn't hold.
If KDE 4.0 wasn't supposed to be used by end-users, it should have been called an alpha or beta release. But KDE thought that they had to get people using it to get people interested in it; their theory was, "If we call it a development build, no one will care. We have to release broken software so people will want to help us fix it."
So they called it a point-oh, non-alpha, non-beta, non-RC, final/gold/master release. And then when people used it and found that it wasn't suitable for actual use, KDE complained, "No, no, you're not supposed to use it yet! You're just supposed to want to use it, and to want to help us fix it!" In other words, do as I say, not as I do. A simple bait-and-switch.
Now don't get me wrong: I use KDE now and have been for about a decade; it's great. But I'm calling it like I see it: the KDE 4.0 debacle was just that, and many in the KDE community are still in denial about it.
This is one of the downsides of developers in a project deciding when their pet code should replace existing software: the users come last, and quality and reputation suffer.
In contrast, Linus understands that regressions are unacceptable, and his policy is, "WE DON'T BREAK USERSPACE!" And that's one of the reasons Linux is so wildly successful.
You're right about fertilizing pastures.
But what is nature? Humans are just as much a part of this planet's fauna as any other species. Harmony in nature is a myth and a fallacy. It's strange that some Darwinists believe it, since Darwinism itself contradicts it. Survival of the fittest is hardly harmonious.
If you hate humanity so much, maybe you should go live harmoniously with your animal friends. I'm sure they'd be glad to have you for dinner.
+1 Insightful, Informative
I disagree. I've been using KDE 4 for many years, and it has not gotten faster in every way. On a 2+GHz Core2Duo system with 3 GB of RAM, things like this happen all the time:
* Dolphin takes 30+ seconds to launch because of all the stuff it has to read off the disk just to run
* Plasma freezes for seconds at a time
* The "classic" launcher menu takes a long time to open
* Hovering over an image in Dolphin to get a thumbnail takes 30+ seconds because I guess it has to read in so many libraries just to run the thumbnailing code. This never happened with Konqueror in 3.5.
So many dependencies. :(
Sad but true. Here's to hoping this doesn't end up being a repeat of the years and years of pointless, unnecessary Nepomuk problems.
This is more insightful than some may give credit for. All these years, the buggy mess of Nepomuk was released over and over, forced upon innocent users, when it never should have left private development builds. It was justified by "getting more exposure" to "fix more bugs faster", but all it really did was waste real people's time and energy.
KDE needs something like Debian's ftpmasters: a person or team with the authority to say "no" to a developer who wants his pet software released with the rest of KDE.
Indeed! On one of my user accounts, the only solution is to $(chmod -x /usr/bin/akonadi*), otherwise the whole computer locks up a few minutes after logging in because akonadi processes run amok, sucking up all CPU, causing excessive I/O, and apparently causing some kind of weird kernel or hardware bug. But I never have that problem except when caused by akonadi.
This is not necessarily always a good thing. KDE 4.10 has serious crashing bugs in plasma-desktop that were known and reported in 2012 while 4.10 was in beta. Now, if I upgrade my Kubuntu system, and don't manually avoid upgrading to 4.10, I may very well end up with an unusable desktop and be forced into doing a very messy, manual downgrade back to 4.9.5.
Sometimes a delay of a few weeks is not such a bad thing.
Really? I thought they would say to call the manufacturer for warranty service. Have you actually tried this?
I think you're wrong in several ways.
1. Analogy to water or electricity is flawed. Water and electricity are limited resources--but data is neverending. The only limit here is bandwidth--the size of the pipes--while water and electricity have both bandwidth and resource limits. ISPs love it when people compare to water or electricity, because it supports their non-competitive, greedy practices.
2. "People need to consider if data caps or faster speeds are more important to them." This is a false dichotomy. Past a certain point, more speed is irrelevant, but when you hit the data cap, your speed drops to zero (or your bill goes up in a way that is biased unfairly toward the ISP).
3. "With fibre that increases to 1Gbps and 324TB/month." You're arguing from the presupposition that users will max out their connection 24/7. That is silly.
4. "Data caps provide a way for ISPs to invest in upgrading speeds and deliver those speeds to everyone while recouping the costs from those who make the most use of the network by downloading more." No, that is what they want you to think (or are you one of them?). Data caps unfairly punish customers who use their connection. A customer who uses 10% of his data cap pays x, but a customer who uses 101% of his data cap pays 1.2x. The 90% of unused bandwidth more than makes up for the extra 1% used by the other customer. On top of that, the extra 32% of bandwidth paid for by the customer, who used 101% and was forced to buy an entire 33% more, goes unused and doesn't roll over to the next month--the customer pays for data he doesn't even use (or even get to use, depending on how late in the cycle the overage occurred). Bottom line: it's all gravy for the ISP. Customers who barely use it cost them very little, and customers who barely exceed the cap pay for service they end up not using. When there's little to no competition in a market, the ISP can set the caps and overages to whatever they want, and the customer has two choices: awful service at awful rates, or no service at all. For me, after 4 years, AT&T decreased my service by instituting caps and overages, and increased the monthly fees. I have no feasible alternative.
5. "This leads to the situation where a person cannot video conference with family once a month because they cannot justify the higher speeds just for 30 minutes. This is much more socially unjust than someone having to wait until next month to download a file." What a farce! Socially unjust?! Your contrived scenario is internally flawed, as well: what if the file the "someone" has to wait a month(!) to download is media from a family member overseas? a recorded video, photos...? Who made you judge of what is more justly important to random people?
6. "Some ISPs with quotas also permit customers to buy extra quota during a month." Yeah, my ISP (AT&T) is kind enough to "permit" me to buy an extra 50 GB of data automatically by charging me an extra 33% whether I use 100 MB or 50 GB of that extra 50 GB. But, of course, if I subscribe to their (more expensive) uVerse package and use them for TV (which I don't even want), I get an extra 100 GB of data cap while paying less for the Internet access--but much more overall. How generous of them!
7. "For me personally, I would much prefer 1Gbps with 100GB quota, than 12Mbps with no quota." That's a terrible example. What can you NOT do with a 12 Mbps download rate? You can watch any online streaming video you want, do any video conferencing, download any files quickly enough... But having a 1 Gbps connection will not make a 3 Mbps Netflix stream look any better, and it won't make your Skype calls any better, but having a 100 GB cap most definitely will bite you over and over again if you actually do any of the things you mentioned.
In conclusion, you're deluded or lying, a fool or a shill.
"Idiotic" is an adjective. "Idiotically" is an adverb.
Uh...whoosh much?
Haha, oops. I thought you were talking about "green technology." :)
You are presupposing that there even is a Green Revolution. If there is, we're in the middle of it, and can't objectively judge. You may discover in the future that there wasn't a significant Green Revolution.
Computer technology itself is, at the moment, undergoing iterative changes. The effect that it's having upon societies, cultures, and everyday lives is only beginning. As the ubiquity of interconnected computers increases, and as data storage increases, the everyday lives of people in first-world nations will likely look very different in 20+ years.
Who creates the algorithms? Who programs the algorithms? Who updates all the algorithms when a shortcoming is found? Who dies when a bad guy remotely alters an algorithm, causing misdiagnoses and mistreatments? Who comforts the patient with a confident, reassuring manner--the computer programmer? the algorithm designer? the computer manufacturer?
No, human doctors aren't perfect--but neither is any machine created by a human. The machine can only "think", diagnose, or treat as far as its programmers programmed it. I'll take a human, thanks.
I had two junior high teachers named Marilyn in the same school.
Are you kidding? It makes no sense whatsoever for an ISP to terminate a customer's account because he hit their arbitrary bandwidth limit! At worst they should disable his account until the next billing period. A better option would be to charge an overage fee, like any other ISP with half a brain. A better option still would be to throttle the connection until the next billing period. We're talking about computers here. There's absolutely no reason their system can't automatically handle this in a reasonable way.
Imagine if the water department told you that you could only use 500 gallons a month, and if you went over it once, they'd shut off your water supply forever. Imagine if the electric company told you that you had to monitor your own meter, and that if you used over 200 KWh in a month, they'd never sell you electricity again. And of course, imagine that in both cases, the meters had functions that could automatically throttle or disable the pipe if the limit was reached, and reset when the next billing period started. But they refused to use those functions and instead lay in waiting for the opportunity to close your account forever, like guerilla tour guides waiting in the jungle to ambush the paying customers they just led in.
This is like giving the customer a rope, already tied into a noose, placing it over his neck, tying the other end to the ceiling, and then telling him, "Here's the rope you ordered. But don't walk too far away from this spot or you'll hang yourself. And if you do that, we'll shoot you."
What we're seeing here is why ISPs need regulation. Where monopolies or duopolies exist, customers are no longer valuable to companies. These companies would rather throw away customers than invest in their capacity, because that would reduce quarterly profits.
QoS only works for outbound traffic. The router can't control what comes in. A bunch of downloads can still saturate your connection, and UDP protocols like uTP can't even be throttled by holding ACKs, since there are none.