That seems to be a cultural thing. In some poor areas, the parents will tell their children 'work hard at school so you don't end up like me'. In others, they'll say 'I never worked hard at school, and I'm doing fine'. It's a difference between wanting your children to be better than you, or to be like you. In the USA, this is compounded by the belief by the majority of the population that they're in the upper middle class (or will be Real Soon Now).
I have never owned a dvd player that honoured the no-skip directives on dvds
Try looking at the big-name brands sometime. You've been able to get cheap Chinese players for a long time that don't honour them, but even something like Apple's DVD Player app honour them. More recent computer DVD drives enforce the region coding in hardware, so its difficult to bypass entirely in software.
As for portable media players (pmps), where the hell have you been living if you don't think they exist as consumer devices?
You missed the point. They exist now, but show me one mainstream player that comes with a trivial UI for ripping DVDs. The movie industry only allowed them once they'd set up deals with DRM'd download suppliers like the iTunes store that allow them to sell you another copy of the same movie if you want to watch it on a mobile device. There are programs (Handbrake, for example) that can rip DVDs and transcode them, but this functionality is not integrated into programs used by non-geeks.
No scheme is perfect, and they know that there will be some people who can get around it. The point is to prevent these things from becoming mass market consumer devices.
The flash based players have been around for years and now mostly come from China with software to rip dvds, online videos and any other videos that you have to copy to the device.
Really? I own a couple of tablets, but I've never seen one bundled with DVD ripping software. When I talk to non-geeks, most of them are still under the impression that ripping DVDs is something that's really hard. Can you point to a single player that:
Comes with software (with a simple UI) for ripping DVDs and playing them on the device
Is available in mainstream consumer electronics stores
Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?
on
Wayland 1.5 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Multi-second lag on X sounds like misuse of the protocol. Unfortunately, this is largely the fault of Xlib. The X11 protocol was carefully designed to be asynchronous, but then they wrapped the whole thin in a synchronous C API. This means that you end up sending a small amount of data to the server then blocking while you wait for the reply. Used correctly, you'd send all of the display updates sequentially, get the updates as the arrive, and later handle any errors that appear. Similarly, input events would be handled as they arrived, rather than synchronising everything. Unfortunately, although XCB fixes this, most toolkits are designed around the synchronous model so they don't really take advantage of it.
That depends on what you think the goal of DRM is. Has DRM prevented unauthorised copying of DVDs? No. Has it allowed the industry to retain control of the playback and stifle potentially disruptive technologies? Absolutely! Compare DVDs to CDs for this. Any computer in the last 10 years or so comes with a program that will let you put in a CD, rip it, automatically name the tracks, share them with anyone in your house, and sync them with your portable music player or mobile phone. This isn't even a one-click operation on a lot of systems: it happens automatically as soon as you insert the disc.
Now, compare that with DVDs. The DVD software that ships on commercial operating systems doesn't even allow you to skip the adverts. Doing so would violate the DVD Consortium license and playing DVDs without a license involves breaking CSS, which is covered under the DMCA and similar laws. About 10 years ago, I had an iPod with a 20GB hard disk. A ripped DVD could be compressed to about 600MB - less if you were willing to lose a bit more quality. Portable DVD players were starting to become cheap and so all of the technology existed for portable media players capable of storing 20-30 films, with an easy application for ripping DVDs and putting them on the player. Lots of people who spend a lot of time on planes or trains would have loved to buy them, but they didn't exist. In fact, they still don't exist as consumer devices.
So, looking back over the past decade, it's obvious that DRM has been a massive success. Your mistake is thinking that it's intended to stop copying, rather than stopping the emergence of products that would prove disruptive to the media industry. If they'd managed it earlier, there'd have been no iPod, no VHS, no Walkman.
I was under the impression that the main use for OpenCloud and similar was medium-sized businesses: those who need more than one server, but not a complete datacenter. It's easy to set up a small number of machines running the same hypervisor and use OpenCloud to roll out virtual servers for each department that needs them. If you want to move some of them off-site, then you can use the same infrastructure to migrate them to another of your offices or to someone else's datacenter.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox on Android, because it's possible to configure Firefox with a sane cookie management policy (self destructing cookies plugin). Doing the same for Chrome did not appear to be possible. The UI is very similar to Chrome on Android, but slightly nicer.
Most of the carriers use VoIP internally now anyway - the entire BT backbone in the UK has been VoIP for a long time. The difference between VoIP over the phone company's phone plan and over their data plan is the QoS. It is inherently cheaper to send data when you don't have latency and jitter guarantees, because you need to reserve spectrum for the duration of the call to be able to guarantee meeting the maximum jitter requirement, and if you miss it then people complain. For VoIP over a data plan, people just accept the lower quality. Termination charges can also be expensive, especially in another country (where you don't get the peering-like agreements) so if a call is not using a POTS end point then you can avoid paying that.
I just (well, a couple of months ago) got a Moto G, which is aimed at developing markets. It uses the Cortex A7, which is ARM's low-power application processor (in-order, dual-issue if you're lucky), but has four of them so I've not yet found anything where it doesn't feel fast. It's definitely a step up from my old phone with a single-core Cortex-A8 (similar performance to the A7, but at a higher power budget). £15/month seems excessive. With Three, I pay 3p/minute for calls, 2p/text, 1p/MB of data. Most of my data use is via WiFi, so I don't think I've spent more than £2 in any month since I've been with them (since September last year). If you use a lot of network traffic then the Virgin plan might be a good deal, but if you're only an occasional user then it's excessive.
There's the ideological argument why DRM is bad: it places control of the content in the hands of the content publishers. I'm fine with paying for the content that I want, but I object to the publisher being able to control how I consume it. If I want to play it on a tablet or computer running a niche OS that isn't worth the investment for the publisher to support, then I should be able to as long as I don't demand support from the publisher.
There's also the economic argument, which is a bit more compelling: it prevents entire industries from emerging. Take portable digital music players as an example. They only exist because the DRM on CDs was so weak that a court ruled that it didn't exist. Apple was selling so many iPods for a while that they were buying the entire first two years of production output from flash factories before they were even built. Without that kind of investment, we wouldn't have cheap SSDs today. Various publishing industries have tried to kill the home video recorder, the tape player (no copying music from the radio, or from your CDs to play in the car!), portable digital music players, and so on. The reason that iTunes can rip CDs but not DVDs is simply that Apple is a DVD licensee and so can't break the trivial DRM without losing their license to sell DVD players. A modern phone can store (recompressed), several DVDs worth of video, but DRM has prevented the market emerging for consumer-friendly DVD ripping software. How many people own tablets and would like to be able to rip their DVD collections with a one-click ripper and copy the movies across with a simple interface? I'd imagine, most of them, and yet the only companies that have tried to do this have been sued out of existence.
Fab building is expensive and so is fab R&D. You want to spread the cost as much as possible. For the R&D costs, you want to build multiple fabs for the same process. For the fab costs, you want to make sure that the fab is running at full capacity for a very long time, even when it is one or two generations old. Intel can do this, because they produce a lot more chips than AMD and because they produce a large range of ICs that can be produced on older fabs (AMD does this to a far smaller degree).
For AMD, they can spread the R&D costs by allowing GlobalFoundaries to produce chips for ARM SoC vendors (for example) as well as for them. GlobalFoundaries can then keep their fabs open and producing things for smaller customers that don't need the latest generation for many years after AMD no longer has anything that they want to produce in that space.
Last I looked, Intel's R&D budget was larger than AMD's revenue
That certainly was true (probably still is), but it's misleading. AMD no longer owns fabs and the majority of Intel's R&D spending is on process technology. By spinning off GlobalFoundaries, AMD is able to share that R&D cost with other SoC makers and go to other companies if they happen to be able to do it better at a specific time.
We're using about 30% of a Stratix IV, a bit more with an FPU. We've also got a smaller version (no TLB, smaller caches) and multicore / multithreaded variants that are larger. We run at 100MHz (pass timing at 120-150MHz depending on the features enabled, but 100MHz gives some headroom when experimenting).
We're just about to open source (Apache-style license) our MIPS IV implementation. MIPS IV is over 20 years old, so there exists at least one implementation that is not covered by any patents. We can't guarantee that nothing in our implementation is patented, but the patents in your linked article have all expired now.
100W is a magic number, because it's more than most laptops consume, including some headroom. That's very nice for the main use: laptop docking stations. You won't necessarily want to run 100W over every Thunderbolt cable, but I'd like to have a display that has GigE, eSATA and USB ports for connecting the network, external disks, keyboards and mice, and provide power to the laptop via a single cable.
Modern computers have an IOMMU. This provides address space protection and virtualisation to devices (older AMD chips have a DEV that just provides protection). The Thunderbolt driver has to explicitly request that a range of memory be opened before connected devices have DMA access (and read / write access can be differentiated). If a specific driver is not doing this, then that's a bug in the driver, not a problem in the interface.
Wrong on two counts. First, the WebKit project's JavaScript engine, JavaScriptCore, which this relates to is not used at all by Chrome, which uses V8 instead. Second, Chrome now uses a fork of WebKit, not the upstream project.
I am firmly of the opinion that the only person who can teach you is yourself. The point of lectures is not to teach you, it is to give you a guided tour of a part of your ignorance. It's then up to you whether you decide to remain happy with that ignorance or seek to dispel it. If you decide that you want to learn something, then other people can help you, but they can't force you to learn.
It used to be. Now, however, students don't take notes and expects handouts, and so that transfer can be made much more efficient by bypassing the lecture entirely and just letting them collect the handouts...
That's always made more sense to me. The URL bar is part of the tab - it relates to the contents of the tab, not the overall environment - so that's where it belongs. I thought 28 did it the same way, but maybe I misremembered.
The inability to put the url bar where I want it
The inability to put the search box where I want it
Not sure where you want either of these, but I hit the customize button in the pop-up thing to the right of the toolbar and it lets me move them around. Weirdly, it doesn't let me move the URL bar by dragging it, but it does let me move things to the left and right of it, so it just goes in the remaining space.
The removal of the status bar.
Options menu, show status bar.
The fixing of navigation buttons so they cant be moved.
Which buttons? The back button is attached to the URL bar, but it was in 28 too. I always use keyboard shortcuts or gestures for back / forward, so I'd prefer they removed it entirely, but it's only taking up a small amount of space.
Overall - they took away the ability to customise a lot and it left my browser looking a hideous mess because their forced changes didn't work with my previous customisations.
The customise UI looked pretty clean to me and presumably add-ons can add other buttons and so on that will integrate with it.
I hated the suite because it saved memory by running the browser and Mail and News in the same process, sharing the XUL and XPCOM runtime. This meant that whenever the browser crashed (about once an hour) it would take out your mail and any unsaved drafts. I didn't notice Firefox being faster, but I did notice that when it crashed it no longer killed my mail client. That was a huge advantage.
I'd not used any Mozilla browser for a few years, but I recently switched to Firefox for Android on my phone. The UI is clean and it has plugins like Self Destructing Cookies that finally do cookie management in a sane way. Chrome on Android, in contrast, has a choice to delete all cookies, block all cookies, or accept all cookies. It doesn't expose a way of selectively deleting them. With Firefox and the Self Destructing Cookies plugin, tracking cookies are deleted early, other cookies stay as long as I'm actively using the site and, unless I explicitly opt for that site, deletes them as soon as I leave. I only log into a small number of sites, so I'm happy to have to press an extra button when I actually want it to remember me.
Glen Beck didn't invent the term 'useful idiot', it dates back to the Soviet era and was used to describe communist sympathisers who did the work of the KGB without directly interacting with them.
The US Government doesn't want, and doesn't buy the item that Walmart sells.
The problem is, sometimes they do. There are some situations where you need something with exactly known parts and quality that can be replaced with an identical one in ten years (guaranteed by the vendor) if required. There are some situations where you need something that works now and if you have to throw it away in 3 years, that's fine because your next upgrade cycle is in two years anyway. The government doesn't differentiate these in the procurement rules, so even when all you want is a generic white-box PC for a secretary's desk that will only ever run MS Word and a web browser for the intranet, you still go through almost the same procurement process as for parts for a stealth fighter and end up buying a machine from Dell that is guaranteed to have specific parts, at an increase in price that's more than just buying two or three identical machines from another vendor (or even from Dell's consumer lines) and throwing them away when they break.
I don't think it's quite that clear cut. When I worked as a consultant (I still do sometimes, but I'm mostly an academic these days), I wasn't paid except when I was doing work for my customers. Uber fills the same role for drivers as a recruitment agency does for consultants: they are not employing you, they're putting you in contact with customers in exchange for a cut of your fee. In the case of Uber, they are also handling the QA and payment processing.
In your shop analogy, it's more akin to a shop allowing non-employees to get a commission for sales. The shop wouldn't put them on the payroll, but would pay them a percentage for everything that they sold. This isn't common for shops, but happens in a lot of other sales. I only see a problem with it if the people working this way have a particularly bad deal and the employer has a sufficiently strong bargaining position that they can't get anything better.
split second loading, saving, editing and searching of large text files
Depends on the use. I'm increasingly using binary formats for things like CPU streamtraces, which can grow very quickly into the hundreds of MBs, and not using a text editor for exploring them. Source files tend to be a few KB, tens of KB if they're in dire need of refactoring, hundreds of KB if they're machine generated (and therefore rarely - but occasionally - hand-edited). As such, I don't mind my text editor having a size limitation too much. It does mean that I can't use it for everything, but most of what I edit is source code of one form or another (including LaTeX).
can log into any host via SSH and just use it
I do this a lot, but I really dislike the fact that I do it. SSH for text editing is an ugly hack to work around the fact that we still can't do file sharing well. I'd much prefer to use sshfs for the editing and only use SSH when I want to build / run code remotely. If Atom came with a nice file browser for remote files, I can imagine changing my workflow.
syntax highlighting and smart indenting
Definitely important. Vim can only do somewhat-smart indenting. Its APIs don't allow you to distinguish between indenting for semantic blocks and indenting for alignment. I like to format my code so that the reader can adjust the tab size without breaking the formatting, so, for example:
if (someLongCondition() && andTheNextBit())
(Slashcode's 'code' tag seems to eat spaces and tabs and expand nbsp, so I've no idea how to actually do the indenting) Both lines would start with one tab (or more, depending on the current indent level), the second line would then have 4 spaces. The s and the a line up whatever tab width you want to view the code with. I generally prefer 4, lots of people prefer 8, and some prefer 2 and so this allows people to set whatever they want.
Vim's integration with clang for autocompletion is also somewhat clunky. OS X has nice autocompletion APIs in the text view, but I don't know how well these are exposed to JavaScript. It's likely to be a lot easier to add nice autocomplete support to Atom than to Vim though.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems to be a cultural thing. In some poor areas, the parents will tell their children 'work hard at school so you don't end up like me'. In others, they'll say 'I never worked hard at school, and I'm doing fine'. It's a difference between wanting your children to be better than you, or to be like you. In the USA, this is compounded by the belief by the majority of the population that they're in the upper middle class (or will be Real Soon Now).
I have never owned a dvd player that honoured the no-skip directives on dvds
Try looking at the big-name brands sometime. You've been able to get cheap Chinese players for a long time that don't honour them, but even something like Apple's DVD Player app honour them. More recent computer DVD drives enforce the region coding in hardware, so its difficult to bypass entirely in software.
As for portable media players (pmps), where the hell have you been living if you don't think they exist as consumer devices?
You missed the point. They exist now, but show me one mainstream player that comes with a trivial UI for ripping DVDs. The movie industry only allowed them once they'd set up deals with DRM'd download suppliers like the iTunes store that allow them to sell you another copy of the same movie if you want to watch it on a mobile device. There are programs (Handbrake, for example) that can rip DVDs and transcode them, but this functionality is not integrated into programs used by non-geeks.
No scheme is perfect, and they know that there will be some people who can get around it. The point is to prevent these things from becoming mass market consumer devices.
The flash based players have been around for years and now mostly come from China with software to rip dvds, online videos and any other videos that you have to copy to the device.
Really? I own a couple of tablets, but I've never seen one bundled with DVD ripping software. When I talk to non-geeks, most of them are still under the impression that ripping DVDs is something that's really hard. Can you point to a single player that:
Multi-second lag on X sounds like misuse of the protocol. Unfortunately, this is largely the fault of Xlib. The X11 protocol was carefully designed to be asynchronous, but then they wrapped the whole thin in a synchronous C API. This means that you end up sending a small amount of data to the server then blocking while you wait for the reply. Used correctly, you'd send all of the display updates sequentially, get the updates as the arrive, and later handle any errors that appear. Similarly, input events would be handled as they arrived, rather than synchronising everything. Unfortunately, although XCB fixes this, most toolkits are designed around the synchronous model so they don't really take advantage of it.
That depends on what you think the goal of DRM is. Has DRM prevented unauthorised copying of DVDs? No. Has it allowed the industry to retain control of the playback and stifle potentially disruptive technologies? Absolutely! Compare DVDs to CDs for this. Any computer in the last 10 years or so comes with a program that will let you put in a CD, rip it, automatically name the tracks, share them with anyone in your house, and sync them with your portable music player or mobile phone. This isn't even a one-click operation on a lot of systems: it happens automatically as soon as you insert the disc.
Now, compare that with DVDs. The DVD software that ships on commercial operating systems doesn't even allow you to skip the adverts. Doing so would violate the DVD Consortium license and playing DVDs without a license involves breaking CSS, which is covered under the DMCA and similar laws. About 10 years ago, I had an iPod with a 20GB hard disk. A ripped DVD could be compressed to about 600MB - less if you were willing to lose a bit more quality. Portable DVD players were starting to become cheap and so all of the technology existed for portable media players capable of storing 20-30 films, with an easy application for ripping DVDs and putting them on the player. Lots of people who spend a lot of time on planes or trains would have loved to buy them, but they didn't exist. In fact, they still don't exist as consumer devices.
So, looking back over the past decade, it's obvious that DRM has been a massive success. Your mistake is thinking that it's intended to stop copying, rather than stopping the emergence of products that would prove disruptive to the media industry. If they'd managed it earlier, there'd have been no iPod, no VHS, no Walkman.
I was under the impression that the main use for OpenCloud and similar was medium-sized businesses: those who need more than one server, but not a complete datacenter. It's easy to set up a small number of machines running the same hypervisor and use OpenCloud to roll out virtual servers for each department that needs them. If you want to move some of them off-site, then you can use the same infrastructure to migrate them to another of your offices or to someone else's datacenter.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox on Android, because it's possible to configure Firefox with a sane cookie management policy (self destructing cookies plugin). Doing the same for Chrome did not appear to be possible. The UI is very similar to Chrome on Android, but slightly nicer.
Most of the carriers use VoIP internally now anyway - the entire BT backbone in the UK has been VoIP for a long time. The difference between VoIP over the phone company's phone plan and over their data plan is the QoS. It is inherently cheaper to send data when you don't have latency and jitter guarantees, because you need to reserve spectrum for the duration of the call to be able to guarantee meeting the maximum jitter requirement, and if you miss it then people complain. For VoIP over a data plan, people just accept the lower quality. Termination charges can also be expensive, especially in another country (where you don't get the peering-like agreements) so if a call is not using a POTS end point then you can avoid paying that.
I just (well, a couple of months ago) got a Moto G, which is aimed at developing markets. It uses the Cortex A7, which is ARM's low-power application processor (in-order, dual-issue if you're lucky), but has four of them so I've not yet found anything where it doesn't feel fast. It's definitely a step up from my old phone with a single-core Cortex-A8 (similar performance to the A7, but at a higher power budget). £15/month seems excessive. With Three, I pay 3p/minute for calls, 2p/text, 1p/MB of data. Most of my data use is via WiFi, so I don't think I've spent more than £2 in any month since I've been with them (since September last year). If you use a lot of network traffic then the Virgin plan might be a good deal, but if you're only an occasional user then it's excessive.
There's also the economic argument, which is a bit more compelling: it prevents entire industries from emerging. Take portable digital music players as an example. They only exist because the DRM on CDs was so weak that a court ruled that it didn't exist. Apple was selling so many iPods for a while that they were buying the entire first two years of production output from flash factories before they were even built. Without that kind of investment, we wouldn't have cheap SSDs today. Various publishing industries have tried to kill the home video recorder, the tape player (no copying music from the radio, or from your CDs to play in the car!), portable digital music players, and so on. The reason that iTunes can rip CDs but not DVDs is simply that Apple is a DVD licensee and so can't break the trivial DRM without losing their license to sell DVD players. A modern phone can store (recompressed), several DVDs worth of video, but DRM has prevented the market emerging for consumer-friendly DVD ripping software. How many people own tablets and would like to be able to rip their DVD collections with a one-click ripper and copy the movies across with a simple interface? I'd imagine, most of them, and yet the only companies that have tried to do this have been sued out of existence.
Fab building is expensive and so is fab R&D. You want to spread the cost as much as possible. For the R&D costs, you want to build multiple fabs for the same process. For the fab costs, you want to make sure that the fab is running at full capacity for a very long time, even when it is one or two generations old. Intel can do this, because they produce a lot more chips than AMD and because they produce a large range of ICs that can be produced on older fabs (AMD does this to a far smaller degree).
For AMD, they can spread the R&D costs by allowing GlobalFoundaries to produce chips for ARM SoC vendors (for example) as well as for them. GlobalFoundaries can then keep their fabs open and producing things for smaller customers that don't need the latest generation for many years after AMD no longer has anything that they want to produce in that space.
Last I looked, Intel's R&D budget was larger than AMD's revenue
That certainly was true (probably still is), but it's misleading. AMD no longer owns fabs and the majority of Intel's R&D spending is on process technology. By spinning off GlobalFoundaries, AMD is able to share that R&D cost with other SoC makers and go to other companies if they happen to be able to do it better at a specific time.
We're using about 30% of a Stratix IV, a bit more with an FPU. We've also got a smaller version (no TLB, smaller caches) and multicore / multithreaded variants that are larger. We run at 100MHz (pass timing at 120-150MHz depending on the features enabled, but 100MHz gives some headroom when experimenting).
We're just about to open source (Apache-style license) our MIPS IV implementation. MIPS IV is over 20 years old, so there exists at least one implementation that is not covered by any patents. We can't guarantee that nothing in our implementation is patented, but the patents in your linked article have all expired now.
100W is a magic number, because it's more than most laptops consume, including some headroom. That's very nice for the main use: laptop docking stations. You won't necessarily want to run 100W over every Thunderbolt cable, but I'd like to have a display that has GigE, eSATA and USB ports for connecting the network, external disks, keyboards and mice, and provide power to the laptop via a single cable.
Modern computers have an IOMMU. This provides address space protection and virtualisation to devices (older AMD chips have a DEV that just provides protection). The Thunderbolt driver has to explicitly request that a range of memory be opened before connected devices have DMA access (and read / write access can be differentiated). If a specific driver is not doing this, then that's a bug in the driver, not a problem in the interface.
Wrong on two counts. First, the WebKit project's JavaScript engine, JavaScriptCore, which this relates to is not used at all by Chrome, which uses V8 instead. Second, Chrome now uses a fork of WebKit, not the upstream project.
I am firmly of the opinion that the only person who can teach you is yourself. The point of lectures is not to teach you, it is to give you a guided tour of a part of your ignorance. It's then up to you whether you decide to remain happy with that ignorance or seek to dispel it. If you decide that you want to learn something, then other people can help you, but they can't force you to learn.
It used to be. Now, however, students don't take notes and expects handouts, and so that transfer can be made much more efficient by bypassing the lecture entirely and just letting them collect the handouts...
Tabs on top
That's always made more sense to me. The URL bar is part of the tab - it relates to the contents of the tab, not the overall environment - so that's where it belongs. I thought 28 did it the same way, but maybe I misremembered.
The inability to put the url bar where I want it
The inability to put the search box where I want it
Not sure where you want either of these, but I hit the customize button in the pop-up thing to the right of the toolbar and it lets me move them around. Weirdly, it doesn't let me move the URL bar by dragging it, but it does let me move things to the left and right of it, so it just goes in the remaining space.
The removal of the status bar.
Options menu, show status bar.
The fixing of navigation buttons so they cant be moved.
Which buttons? The back button is attached to the URL bar, but it was in 28 too. I always use keyboard shortcuts or gestures for back / forward, so I'd prefer they removed it entirely, but it's only taking up a small amount of space.
Overall - they took away the ability to customise a lot and it left my browser looking a hideous mess because their forced changes didn't work with my previous customisations.
The customise UI looked pretty clean to me and presumably add-ons can add other buttons and so on that will integrate with it.
I just updated and it looks basically the same to me (I don't use FireFox much except on Android). What changed so much that you dislike?
I hated the suite because it saved memory by running the browser and Mail and News in the same process, sharing the XUL and XPCOM runtime. This meant that whenever the browser crashed (about once an hour) it would take out your mail and any unsaved drafts. I didn't notice Firefox being faster, but I did notice that when it crashed it no longer killed my mail client. That was a huge advantage.
I'd not used any Mozilla browser for a few years, but I recently switched to Firefox for Android on my phone. The UI is clean and it has plugins like Self Destructing Cookies that finally do cookie management in a sane way. Chrome on Android, in contrast, has a choice to delete all cookies, block all cookies, or accept all cookies. It doesn't expose a way of selectively deleting them. With Firefox and the Self Destructing Cookies plugin, tracking cookies are deleted early, other cookies stay as long as I'm actively using the site and, unless I explicitly opt for that site, deletes them as soon as I leave. I only log into a small number of sites, so I'm happy to have to press an extra button when I actually want it to remember me.
Glen Beck didn't invent the term 'useful idiot', it dates back to the Soviet era and was used to describe communist sympathisers who did the work of the KGB without directly interacting with them.
The US Government doesn't want, and doesn't buy the item that Walmart sells.
The problem is, sometimes they do. There are some situations where you need something with exactly known parts and quality that can be replaced with an identical one in ten years (guaranteed by the vendor) if required. There are some situations where you need something that works now and if you have to throw it away in 3 years, that's fine because your next upgrade cycle is in two years anyway. The government doesn't differentiate these in the procurement rules, so even when all you want is a generic white-box PC for a secretary's desk that will only ever run MS Word and a web browser for the intranet, you still go through almost the same procurement process as for parts for a stealth fighter and end up buying a machine from Dell that is guaranteed to have specific parts, at an increase in price that's more than just buying two or three identical machines from another vendor (or even from Dell's consumer lines) and throwing them away when they break.
I don't think it's quite that clear cut. When I worked as a consultant (I still do sometimes, but I'm mostly an academic these days), I wasn't paid except when I was doing work for my customers. Uber fills the same role for drivers as a recruitment agency does for consultants: they are not employing you, they're putting you in contact with customers in exchange for a cut of your fee. In the case of Uber, they are also handling the QA and payment processing.
In your shop analogy, it's more akin to a shop allowing non-employees to get a commission for sales. The shop wouldn't put them on the payroll, but would pay them a percentage for everything that they sold. This isn't common for shops, but happens in a lot of other sales. I only see a problem with it if the people working this way have a particularly bad deal and the employer has a sufficiently strong bargaining position that they can't get anything better.
split second loading, saving, editing and searching of large text files
Depends on the use. I'm increasingly using binary formats for things like CPU streamtraces, which can grow very quickly into the hundreds of MBs, and not using a text editor for exploring them. Source files tend to be a few KB, tens of KB if they're in dire need of refactoring, hundreds of KB if they're machine generated (and therefore rarely - but occasionally - hand-edited). As such, I don't mind my text editor having a size limitation too much. It does mean that I can't use it for everything, but most of what I edit is source code of one form or another (including LaTeX).
can log into any host via SSH and just use it
I do this a lot, but I really dislike the fact that I do it. SSH for text editing is an ugly hack to work around the fact that we still can't do file sharing well. I'd much prefer to use sshfs for the editing and only use SSH when I want to build / run code remotely. If Atom came with a nice file browser for remote files, I can imagine changing my workflow.
syntax highlighting and smart indenting
Definitely important. Vim can only do somewhat-smart indenting. Its APIs don't allow you to distinguish between indenting for semantic blocks and indenting for alignment. I like to format my code so that the reader can adjust the tab size without breaking the formatting, so, for example:
(Slashcode's 'code' tag seems to eat spaces and tabs and expand nbsp, so I've no idea how to actually do the indenting) Both lines would start with one tab (or more, depending on the current indent level), the second line would then have 4 spaces. The s and the a line up whatever tab width you want to view the code with. I generally prefer 4, lots of people prefer 8, and some prefer 2 and so this allows people to set whatever they want.
Vim's integration with clang for autocompletion is also somewhat clunky. OS X has nice autocompletion APIs in the text view, but I don't know how well these are exposed to JavaScript. It's likely to be a lot easier to add nice autocomplete support to Atom than to Vim though.