DAs I pointed out in a prior post, I'm using an official public release version of Firefox. Not a beta, not a nightly, not an RC. In this capacity, I'm an end user, not a QA tester. Do you actually presume that everyone who uses Firefox should report each bug that they encounter?
If they want it fixed, yes. It is impossible for a programmers to fix a bug they don't know exist, even if it's in an official public release.
What if your grandmother uses Firefox and something doesn't work as she expects?
Then she better tell someone about it, if she expects someone to do something about it, just like she would with any other kind of problem.
Well, gee, lets see. Setting aside the economic issues, the inertia and sloppy work that comes with systems where "seniority" is more important than "ability", lets talk about the Bar thing.
Yes, US does seems to have some weird problems like this. In most other countries, unions negotiate the minimum acceptable wages and other terms of employment for a given job, and hold power simply because most people who work in a given field belong to an union. In US, thought, there's rampant corruption, this strange "Bar" thing, and apparently also maximum wages - for how else could you lose to you seniors if you're so much more able ?
n Union strong states, you aren't allowed to hire plumbers and electricians who haven't jumped through the hoops, regardless of qualifications...
In evil socialist Europe, you are a plumber if you can convince someone to hire you as such, and still get the benefits of unionization. Electricians need actual qualifications, thought, since they can actually get someone - or lots of people, if you count fires caused by faulty wiring - killed by screwing up badly enough.
Do you really want a bunch of senior people telling you what qualifications you need to have? This is a young industry, and it's changing all the time. What you need to know changes all the time. And they think setting up a professional organization is a good thing? Instead of clueless PHBs, we'll have 30 year vets telling us that our modern methods are crap compared to the work they did, back in the day, with punchcards.
Maybe you should simply find an actual labor union, then; the kind which uses collective bargaining to put employees and employers into even position powerwise. That's what a labor union is: a bunch of people cooperating by pooling their resources - workforce - together to get into a better bargaining position. Not all that different from a corporation, actually.
Jesus. If you want to drive offshoring, that's the way to do it. Make American IT more expensive and less efficient than everywhere else in the world, and the work will flee this country and leave us longing for the days of H1-Bs and mere outsourcing.
That is certainly possible. Then again, if you're doing 60 hour workweeks with no overtime because you're afraid to stand up for yourself, you have become a slave. At that point it would probably be best to switch careers anyway.
Everything has a price. Forming an union to demand better treatment might - is unlikely to, but might - lead to US IT industry collapsing and you having to find another job. But not doing so will also have consequences, which according to the summary includes being treated like slave labor, with the likely consequence that you'll die young, or if you don't, become a bitter old man since you wasted your life. The question remains, then: which set of consequences is worse ?
Either way the effect is the same -- you'll get your gaming without DRM, because they'll protect the game in an alternative manner, using all sorts of things that also piss you off. Monthly fees, phone home activation, and micropayments sound like great ideas to you? Then please, continue boycotting DRMed games to send a message. The message the industry receives might not be the one you think you're sending, though.
That's okay. I will simply not play any game which pisses me off. There's plenty of alternatives, such as Battle for Westnoth or Nethack. Crash and burn, industry.
Computer games are in the "nice to have" -category. They aren't necessary or essential. If the games industry stubbornly keeps on pissing their customers, said customers will simply find other forms of entertainment, and the industry will go bankrupt. And frankly, if it stubbornly continues in a course for which its customers have spelled out their displeasure, it deserves to.
A friend of mine is trying to teach her daughter the difference between need and want.
There is none. "I need bread to eat so I don't starve to death, which is bad because I want to live" is not really different than "I need 10 euros so I can go to movies, which I want to do". Sure, the desire to live might be more intense than the desire to see Kung-Fu Panda; but they are still both wants.
You don't purchase games, you purchase a license which lets you accept the EULA which generously lets you install and run the game despite you being unworthy of such undeserved privileges.
But which would have netted them more - losing customers who are turned off by their DRM schemes or losing customers who was able to get a copy off a torrent and never bothered to buy it even though she/he thoroughly enjoyed it?
Well, given that the version from the torrent has had DRM disabled, and if it's a real professionally done pirated version doesn't require CD/DVD either, I'd say that including DRM means you just turned some potential customers into pirates.
The more you tighten your grip, the more sales slip through your fingers; that's something various game companies seem unable to learn. You can't stop the game from being copied, and trying anyway just makes pirating more and more attractive.
If their internet activity light is flashing when they're not doing anything.
How can you know that they're not "doing anything" ? They could be downloading patches, an e-mail client could be checking for new mail, an instant messenger client could be exchanging "are you still there" packets with the server, the DHCP client could be renewing the lease, etc.
This is in the same category than "there's hard drive activity when you're not doing anything". It's fine for DOS, but near useless for modern multitasking machines.
Sure, maybe trademarks need to be protected, but if my name is Coke, is there some fundamental reason why the beverage company has a higher claim on it than I do?
Yes: supreme power. In the end, that's the only thing that truly matters. Everything else is just philosophy, which is fine as long as everyone plays along nicely; but when it goes down to a fight, might wins over right.
Is there something in the free market that one is allowed to make money unless it pisses off the multinationals?
"Free market" is also free in the sense that the 500-pound gorillas are free to squeeze you underfoot. That's why I lean towards socialism myself; a single gorilla - the government - is easier to handle and if necessary distract than the small number of King Kong corporations of libertarianism or the endless hordes of rampaging killer apes of anarchism.
Alright, suppose that an application is written with the most efficient algorithms possible for the task at hand, which are then debugged at every single step to decrease real performance by several orders of magnitude. Will you then also say that the performance during the debugged beta version is indicative of the performance of the final product?
"Debugging" generally refers to removing programming errors rather than fine-tuning. Fine-tuning is unlikely to wield an order of magnitude of performance increase, let alone several. If it does, I sincerely doubt that the person who wrote such inefficient code in the first place has picked good algorithms.
This is of course all ignoring the simple fact that it is impossible to determine what the "best" algorithm for a web browser would be. It depends entirely on what pages the user will visit (since the optimal code paths vary), and how he uses the browser - for example, does he use the forward and back buttons a lot, which would make caching far more effective ? You could write adaptive code, but that is more complex and introduces its own bloat, as well as new and interesting failure modes (such as the user suddenly changing his habits or multiple users taking turns).
Luckily there's little basis for a concrete correlation between poor handwriting and the quality of reports. I know I'd have missed out on a lot of As if there was.
My handwriting has a tendency to near asymptotically zero in size as the end of the page nears, as well as crawl all around in search of any white space left, like the worm in worm games. I kinda pity my old teachers:).
Not only that, but I'd like to point out that process isolation comes at a cost.
Which rises a question: why write the browser on C or C++ or any other language where the only way to isolate the pages from each other is to create a separate process for each ? Why not code the thing in Java or some other garbage-collected language which forbids arbitrary memory accesses ? Seems to me that any theoretical loss of speed would be more than compensated for by the light-weight isolation offered by these features.
Performance during beta testing is not in any way indicative of the performance of the final product,
Yes it is. The performance of a product is mainly dependent on the algorithms it uses. Unless you change those - which means that the product is still in alpha, not beta - there can only be minor optimizations.
Of course the resource usage mentioned could simply be a resource leak. But 171 threads is a bit much. Makes me wonder if Microsoft hasn't hired some of Freenet's coders;).
It's like comparing the visual quality of notes taken during classes. It's not telling on any level of how well you're going to do on your exams.
But it gives a pretty good idea about your handwriting.
OK. We can compare it to FF3 beta, then. That was fast as hell.
But even the current version chokes on some pages for some reason. A total, minutes-long freeze, especially when I use type-ahead search. That's why I'm still using FF2.
As a biologist, sometimes I get the feeling that ripping off money from idiots is as regular a process as a species filling a given ecological niche. It maximises the use of ressources (money) between a given idiot and the dumpster.
Yes, parasites are quite common in nature. The accepted procedure for dealing with them involves either poisoning, drowning, or swatting them, and possibly eating them afterwards if you're not too picky. Destroying their ability to continue their kind also works, but takes a generation to do so, so it might not be very useful in this case - but very satisfying.
This preying on other people's tragedy is despicable. Why not mug elderly women on the streets too, it is all dollars, after all!
Because that runs the risk of being beaten up by some random do-gooder, the elderly woman's dog, or the elderly woman herself, and getting escorted to the prison afterwards. Scamming is less risky.
Who says that entertainment has to be near the port?
Economic reality. Shipping lots of people long distances every day is not cheap, and to get them to agree to it you need to either pay them more or to settle for the desperate.
Either ship the workers in from somewhere like Baton Rouge, or move the port further upstream where it won't be flooded.
Like I said, long commute is uneconomical; and moving the port upstream limits both the size of the vessels that can reach it and how many can fit there simultaneously.
The city of New Orleans doesn't have a divine right to exist.
Yes it does, as it is blessed by the American God of Capitalism, the Almighty Dollar himself.
New Orleans has tax money poured on restoring and protecting it because the politicians decreed so; the politicians do as their corporate overlords will; and the corporate overlords bow to the will of their Lord who's high priests they are. So yes, New Orleans has a divine right to exist, profane - even unholy - as that divinity might be, but nonetheless one worshipped the world over nowadays.
Honestly, I don't think Godwin's law applies to threads about Russia or totalitarianism. It would be like using a car analogy in a thread about carburetors.
Nationalism is to totalitarianism like a carburetor is to a car. And the world is like an airtight garage.
Here in Michigan we also do this. If your neighbor wont cut his grass in a timely manner there is usually a municipal number you can call. The city agents will come out and issue a fine.
The Land of the Free, where the allowable length of the grass in your yard is regulated. But as long as you don't have free public healthcare like we have here in the evil socialist countries, I guess it's okay.
I wonder if some libertarian will reply and rave about the evils of socialized healthcare while ignoring the grass-trimming regulations...
I'm tired of hearing this fallacy. Can you not differentiate between areas where a natural disaster *might* happen, versus an area where it WILL happen, repeatably, every few years?
If New Orleans gets flooded every few years, why was Katrina newsworthy ? Why is this new storm newsworthy ?
And natural disaster will happen anywhere, not *might*; it's simply a matter of time.
How many of the population of New Orleans actually work at the port? The running of a port doesn't necessitate jazz clubs, restaurants, brothels, NFL teams etc.
Actually yes, it does. Running a port requires people, and people require entertainment.
The port could be run like an oil rig or a military base, where only the workers live there and can be shipped out quickly before a hurricane hits.
That would necessitate paying more to attract workers to such bleak working conditions. There is no free lunch. And you'd still need to provide them entertainment, or deal with the shit bored people get up to.
Let people live there if they want, but there's a huge time consistency problem that creates moral hazard when you give people federal money to build there again.
There is not a single safe spot on Earth, nor in the entire universe in fact. No matter where you live, you can be hit by a disaster which resulted from you living there. And of course people don't necessarily have much of a choice about where they live, since moving costs a lot.
It all comes down to whether it is cheaper to relocate the entire population of New Orleans and deal with the problems arising from overcrowding in target areas, or to rebuild the city again. Of course, as the climate change progresses and extreme weather becomes more and more commonplace, it might indeed be cheaper to do the former.
come on man how could any adult citizen fail to notice that since the vote is SECRET, there's absolutely no way he could ever been asked to go voting on different days on the basis of his voting intention?
Membership in political parties is not secret. It would be very easy to understand the instruction to mean that members of the Republic party vote one day and the Democrats the other.
They weren't preventing people, just giving false information - and in the context, not to be taken seriously.
While it is obvious in hindsight that the information was false and not to be taken seriously, it is unclear whether or not it was that at the time it was broadcast. Radio is regularly used to communicate exactly this kind of information to the public, and it is quite plausible that the details of election might change.
If you don't know when to vote, you don't deserve to vote.
First of all, in a democracy, voting is a right, not a privilege. It is not something you have to earn, it is something which is yours by virtue of being a citizen - or, more generally, a member of the society. It can only be revoked in extreme situations, and failure to impress you is not one of them.
Secondly, while it sure would be useful to prevent stupid people - meaning anyone who differs in opinion from me despite not being evil, leaving stupidity the only possible reason - from voting, it would leave them with no way to get rid of abusive government besides a bloody revolution. It is not a good idea to corner a rat, even a dumb rat; and only a suicidal fool would corner a herd of retarded killer apes.
If the local TV news reports that a 'Santa Claus' has been seen in a sleigh over homes in your neighborhood, who are the ignorant ones to go out and look for such sleigh?
The very existence, not to mention the presence in your neighborhood, of Santa Claus is very unlikely; in fact unlikely enough that said entity is usually considered to be mythical. This is very different from a minor detail about the election process being changed.
Nothing different.
If you truly believe your example to be analogous to the voting situation, then it is your intelligence that comes under question.
I've watched three IT admins get escorted out of the building in the past 5 years due to my sending of emails carefully salted with bogus salacious information about our department. If the fake information doesn't make it to a certain vice-president, then their job is safe. If it does, then there's only one person who could have known it (besides me of course), and out the door they go.
And the "most likely to be found face down in a gutter to the applause of everyone who knew him" award goes to...
This little collateral duty of mine has been quite lucrative - I receive a percentage of whatever money the company saved by firing the dirtbag admins who couldn't keep their noses out of other people's data.
So basically, you get people fired for your profit but it's okay because they were "dirtbags". I guess it takes one to know one.
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If they want it fixed, yes. It is impossible for a programmers to fix a bug they don't know exist, even if it's in an official public release.
Then she better tell someone about it, if she expects someone to do something about it, just like she would with any other kind of problem.
Yes, US does seems to have some weird problems like this. In most other countries, unions negotiate the minimum acceptable wages and other terms of employment for a given job, and hold power simply because most people who work in a given field belong to an union. In US, thought, there's rampant corruption, this strange "Bar" thing, and apparently also maximum wages - for how else could you lose to you seniors if you're so much more able ?
In evil socialist Europe, you are a plumber if you can convince someone to hire you as such, and still get the benefits of unionization. Electricians need actual qualifications, thought, since they can actually get someone - or lots of people, if you count fires caused by faulty wiring - killed by screwing up badly enough.
Maybe you should simply find an actual labor union, then; the kind which uses collective bargaining to put employees and employers into even position powerwise. That's what a labor union is: a bunch of people cooperating by pooling their resources - workforce - together to get into a better bargaining position. Not all that different from a corporation, actually.
That is certainly possible. Then again, if you're doing 60 hour workweeks with no overtime because you're afraid to stand up for yourself, you have become a slave. At that point it would probably be best to switch careers anyway.
Everything has a price. Forming an union to demand better treatment might - is unlikely to, but might - lead to US IT industry collapsing and you having to find another job. But not doing so will also have consequences, which according to the summary includes being treated like slave labor, with the likely consequence that you'll die young, or if you don't, become a bitter old man since you wasted your life. The question remains, then: which set of consequences is worse ?
Either way the effect is the same -- you'll get your gaming without DRM, because they'll protect the game in an alternative manner, using all sorts of things that also piss you off. Monthly fees, phone home activation, and micropayments sound like great ideas to you? Then please, continue boycotting DRMed games to send a message. The message the industry receives might not be the one you think you're sending, though.
That's okay. I will simply not play any game which pisses me off. There's plenty of alternatives, such as Battle for Westnoth or Nethack. Crash and burn, industry.
Computer games are in the "nice to have" -category. They aren't necessary or essential. If the games industry stubbornly keeps on pissing their customers, said customers will simply find other forms of entertainment, and the industry will go bankrupt. And frankly, if it stubbornly continues in a course for which its customers have spelled out their displeasure, it deserves to.
There is none. "I need bread to eat so I don't starve to death, which is bad because I want to live" is not really different than "I need 10 euros so I can go to movies, which I want to do". Sure, the desire to live might be more intense than the desire to see Kung-Fu Panda; but they are still both wants.
"Need" is simply intense want, nothing more.
You don't purchase games, you purchase a license which lets you accept the EULA which generously lets you install and run the game despite you being unworthy of such undeserved privileges.
Well, given that the version from the torrent has had DRM disabled, and if it's a real professionally done pirated version doesn't require CD/DVD either, I'd say that including DRM means you just turned some potential customers into pirates.
The more you tighten your grip, the more sales slip through your fingers; that's something various game companies seem unable to learn. You can't stop the game from being copied, and trying anyway just makes pirating more and more attractive.
How can you know that they're not "doing anything" ? They could be downloading patches, an e-mail client could be checking for new mail, an instant messenger client could be exchanging "are you still there" packets with the server, the DHCP client could be renewing the lease, etc.
This is in the same category than "there's hard drive activity when you're not doing anything". It's fine for DOS, but near useless for modern multitasking machines.
Yes: supreme power. In the end, that's the only thing that truly matters. Everything else is just philosophy, which is fine as long as everyone plays along nicely; but when it goes down to a fight, might wins over right.
"Free market" is also free in the sense that the 500-pound gorillas are free to squeeze you underfoot. That's why I lean towards socialism myself; a single gorilla - the government - is easier to handle and if necessary distract than the small number of King Kong corporations of libertarianism or the endless hordes of rampaging killer apes of anarchism.
Yes, I'm very cynical.
"Debugging" generally refers to removing programming errors rather than fine-tuning. Fine-tuning is unlikely to wield an order of magnitude of performance increase, let alone several. If it does, I sincerely doubt that the person who wrote such inefficient code in the first place has picked good algorithms.
This is of course all ignoring the simple fact that it is impossible to determine what the "best" algorithm for a web browser would be. It depends entirely on what pages the user will visit (since the optimal code paths vary), and how he uses the browser - for example, does he use the forward and back buttons a lot, which would make caching far more effective ? You could write adaptive code, but that is more complex and introduces its own bloat, as well as new and interesting failure modes (such as the user suddenly changing his habits or multiple users taking turns).
My handwriting has a tendency to near asymptotically zero in size as the end of the page nears, as well as crawl all around in search of any white space left, like the worm in worm games. I kinda pity my old teachers :).
Which rises a question: why write the browser on C or C++ or any other language where the only way to isolate the pages from each other is to create a separate process for each ? Why not code the thing in Java or some other garbage-collected language which forbids arbitrary memory accesses ? Seems to me that any theoretical loss of speed would be more than compensated for by the light-weight isolation offered by these features.
Yes it is. The performance of a product is mainly dependent on the algorithms it uses. Unless you change those - which means that the product is still in alpha, not beta - there can only be minor optimizations.
Of course the resource usage mentioned could simply be a resource leak. But 171 threads is a bit much. Makes me wonder if Microsoft hasn't hired some of Freenet's coders ;).
But it gives a pretty good idea about your handwriting.
But even the current version chokes on some pages for some reason. A total, minutes-long freeze, especially when I use type-ahead search. That's why I'm still using FF2.
As a biologist, sometimes I get the feeling that ripping off money from idiots is as regular a process as a species filling a given ecological niche. It maximises the use of ressources (money) between a given idiot and the dumpster.
Yes, parasites are quite common in nature. The accepted procedure for dealing with them involves either poisoning, drowning, or swatting them, and possibly eating them afterwards if you're not too picky. Destroying their ability to continue their kind also works, but takes a generation to do so, so it might not be very useful in this case - but very satisfying.
Because that runs the risk of being beaten up by some random do-gooder, the elderly woman's dog, or the elderly woman herself, and getting escorted to the prison afterwards. Scamming is less risky.
Try learning to use capital letters properly. That should be challenge enough for a while.
Economic reality. Shipping lots of people long distances every day is not cheap, and to get them to agree to it you need to either pay them more or to settle for the desperate.
Like I said, long commute is uneconomical; and moving the port upstream limits both the size of the vessels that can reach it and how many can fit there simultaneously.
Yes it does, as it is blessed by the American God of Capitalism, the Almighty Dollar himself.
New Orleans has tax money poured on restoring and protecting it because the politicians decreed so; the politicians do as their corporate overlords will; and the corporate overlords bow to the will of their Lord who's high priests they are. So yes, New Orleans has a divine right to exist, profane - even unholy - as that divinity might be, but nonetheless one worshipped the world over nowadays.
Nationalism is to totalitarianism like a carburetor is to a car. And the world is like an airtight garage.
The Land of the Free, where the allowable length of the grass in your yard is regulated. But as long as you don't have free public healthcare like we have here in the evil socialist countries, I guess it's okay.
I wonder if some libertarian will reply and rave about the evils of socialized healthcare while ignoring the grass-trimming regulations...
I'm tired of hearing this fallacy. Can you not differentiate between areas where a natural disaster *might* happen, versus an area where it WILL happen, repeatably, every few years?
If New Orleans gets flooded every few years, why was Katrina newsworthy ? Why is this new storm newsworthy ?
And natural disaster will happen anywhere, not *might*; it's simply a matter of time.
Actually yes, it does. Running a port requires people, and people require entertainment.
That would necessitate paying more to attract workers to such bleak working conditions. There is no free lunch. And you'd still need to provide them entertainment, or deal with the shit bored people get up to.
Our disaster waiting to happen isn't natural. We call it "Russia". Based on recent events, I'd say that we don't have much to wait anymore.
There is not a single safe spot on Earth, nor in the entire universe in fact. No matter where you live, you can be hit by a disaster which resulted from you living there. And of course people don't necessarily have much of a choice about where they live, since moving costs a lot.
It all comes down to whether it is cheaper to relocate the entire population of New Orleans and deal with the problems arising from overcrowding in target areas, or to rebuild the city again. Of course, as the climate change progresses and extreme weather becomes more and more commonplace, it might indeed be cheaper to do the former.
Membership in political parties is not secret. It would be very easy to understand the instruction to mean that members of the Republic party vote one day and the Democrats the other.
While it is obvious in hindsight that the information was false and not to be taken seriously, it is unclear whether or not it was that at the time it was broadcast. Radio is regularly used to communicate exactly this kind of information to the public, and it is quite plausible that the details of election might change.
First of all, in a democracy, voting is a right, not a privilege. It is not something you have to earn, it is something which is yours by virtue of being a citizen - or, more generally, a member of the society. It can only be revoked in extreme situations, and failure to impress you is not one of them.
Secondly, while it sure would be useful to prevent stupid people - meaning anyone who differs in opinion from me despite not being evil, leaving stupidity the only possible reason - from voting, it would leave them with no way to get rid of abusive government besides a bloody revolution. It is not a good idea to corner a rat, even a dumb rat; and only a suicidal fool would corner a herd of retarded killer apes.
The very existence, not to mention the presence in your neighborhood, of Santa Claus is very unlikely; in fact unlikely enough that said entity is usually considered to be mythical. This is very different from a minor detail about the election process being changed.
If you truly believe your example to be analogous to the voting situation, then it is your intelligence that comes under question.
And the "most likely to be found face down in a gutter to the applause of everyone who knew him" award goes to...
So basically, you get people fired for your profit but it's okay because they were "dirtbags". I guess it takes one to know one.