Well, you only quoted the part of my comment where I editorialized on enterprise requirements, and ignored my main point completely: Putting development effort into building and maintaining the kinds of things the enterprises require takes effort. That effort is then not available for improving the core functions of the browser, both in performance and compliance terms, supporting evolving standards, improving the user experience, and fixing bugs in those core features. The Mozilla foundation could add developers, but that costs money and means that the Mozilla foundation would be committed to responding to the needs of those customers asking for the functions that centralized IT management wants.
Perhaps some company, or a consortium of companies, who really must have the enterprisey functions could step up to the plate and fund a team of developers to provide plugins, or if necessary, a browser built on top of the core Firefox code. There's a bunch of Gecko-based browsers out there already. It's fine for the Mozilla foundation to say "we're putting our attention where we believe we can provide the most value, someone else is welcome to Use the Source to build whatever they value".
group policies, remotely configuring proxy, enterprise settings, locking down the browser, etc
That's a pretty good bullet list of the things that enterprises feel they need that aren't worth supporting in a decent browser. The more 'enterprisey' a piece of software, the less actual useful features that allow people to get work done and the more junk added just to support the things enterprises do to prevent employees from doing stuff.
I'm pretty harsh on the mania for centralized locked-down control by IT in big corporations, but even if I were 100% in favor of it, I would still be forced to acknowledge that development effort spent adding, fixing, and upgrading those mechanisms is development effort not spent on improving the UX, adding functionality, tracking standards changes, or fixing bugs with rendering, performance, resource use, etc.
Hooray for Firefox for abandoning this mess. Part of what made Netscape the company and Navigator the browser fail was in their zeal to compete in the enterprise world, they bloated up the application and failed to fix real problems, while stuck with an ungainly codebase.
That was also the first thought that came to my mind. I'd mod you up +1 Insightful if I could. The scaremongering anti-environmentalist rant is trying to divert any attention from the question of what would happen to the economies of those states should the ecosystem collapse.
Not "focused and driven"; what I said was that some quarterly returns-obsessed management would consider him "motivated, task-focused, and results-oriented" and hire him, to the long-term detriment of his teammates and the company.
Seriously. EvE Online is just Trade Wars with pretty graphics, and I quote,
The players seek to gain control of resources: usually fuel, ore, food, and technology, and travel through sectors of the galaxy trading them for money or undervalued resources. Players use their wealth to upgrade their spaceship with better weapons and defenses, and fight for control of planets and starbases.
I wouldn't doubt that the pre-university education in most other advanced countries is superior to a US high school education. I vaguely remember when educators at American universities complained loudly about having to give remedial classes to the under-prepared high school grads that administrators admitted for reasons unrelated to academics (*cough*money*cough).
Nowadays I don't hear much of that, but I do hear a lot about how a university education in the US is not worth the inflated tuition rates charged to get a degree so diluted in value that the best jobs don't consider it sufficient and so pointlessly in demand that all but the least-skilled jobs require it. I suppose the run-of-the-mill university degree from a US institution is now no better than high school/lyceum.
What does that imply about a US high school education?
You have the right of it, as they say. While it's possible to make a credible argument for focusing on learning the core set of skills for a career while minimizing time spent on associated topics in some circumstances, let's look at the actual words used.
I have no interest in wasting any of my precious time taking classes in English, Philosophy, History, Art and the like. While these fields are useful and perhaps enriching, they will not contribute to making me better at my job.
Phrases like 'my precious time' and 'will not contribute to making me better at my job' are huge red flags for a inflated sense of self-importance. Dismissing the entire range of liberal arts as merely 'useful and perhaps enriching' betrays a level of arrogance that has the potential to incite team-destroying conflict.
In my very limited experience as a senior programmer (but not a manager) given opportunities to interview and provide input on hiring decisions, I would never recommend hiring this guy.
Oh sure, there's probably some entry-level position on a short-term contract gig where he could contribute without much fuss. But as far as I'm concerned he'd be a liability in any full time position with possibility of advancement and significant contribution in development efforts of high business value. Someone who only cares about what he thinks is the important stuff will never be the motivated life-long learner that can advance in his career.
Sure, businesses these days are more than happy to ignore the larger picture in pursuit of the quarterly returns and the stock bump, so a real hiring manager would probably be fine with this -- they'd consider it "motivated, task-focused, and results-oriented". Said business would get the blinkered, half-working, user-unfriendly software that instead of doing what it should be doing only does what the programmer thought it should do.
Where did anyone say anything about feeling sorry for him von Tetzchner? Those hundreds of other programmers and the millions of users are getting the worst of it as the direction of development for Opera turns away from "let's make a really good browser that clobbers all the rest in standards compliance and performance" to "how can investors and management squeeze the most blood out of the work of other people who actually worked hard contributing code or supported Opera through the years as users?".
I'm confused, too. Why don't you ask the linux geek who suggested that telling von Tetzchner how to license Opera was an insult. Did the commenter meant to suggest von Tetzchner the only person who stood to lose or gain from the choice of license?
Would that be more, or less, insulting than the people who had nothing to do with the creation of the work taking it over to use it as their own personal blood-giving turnip?
I regret now that I didn't write "This is exactly how NASA *management* treated anomalies..". In my mind, the decision-making in the process was always about management's choices to override engineering recommendations, or worse, to punish engineers who recommended things that management didn't want to hear.
I am most keenly aware that all the engineering and technical folks were not treated with respect and had showstopper-level misgivings about the situation.
It was the decision of a couple of managers... for political reasons and such.
Pretty much the exact situation we're getting into with aging nuclear power plants well past their design lifespan -- and don't even get me started on the spent fuel storage.
For the obvious reason that changing things like this would break existing compatibility with legacy C code.
Lemme guess. You didn't hear about the redefinition of the auto keyword? Or the deprecation of auto_ptr? Or any of the other things in the new standard that breaks existing compatibility with legacy C code?
Did you read the article though? The new standard completely changes the meaning of the auto keyword. That alone will break code, and it's adding something. Come to think of it, though, the article doesn't mention what, if anything, will replace the behavior that's going away.
There's plenty of investigative journalism, real journalism, still happening. What's different is that this was done by a large mainstream news organization.
This is exactly how NASA treated anomalies with the Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters. Each time they'd have the engineers look at the problem, then decide it was really probably OK, and that the strict rules in place were overly cautious. Everything went fine, until the flight of STS-51-L.
Being "vested" is something for the peons and middle-level managers (and sometimes for C-level types, when it helps dodge taxes). Top execs in situations like this get the options free and clear. Of course, they don't get the Class A options, but what they do get is already vested.
Note that summary: a warning issued by US Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team.
Not that an organization of US-based industrial control software vendors would have any sort dishonest or self-serving motivations to point fingers at Chinese software. Just sayin'
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Well, you only quoted the part of my comment where I editorialized on enterprise requirements, and ignored my main point completely: Putting development effort into building and maintaining the kinds of things the enterprises require takes effort. That effort is then not available for improving the core functions of the browser, both in performance and compliance terms, supporting evolving standards, improving the user experience, and fixing bugs in those core features. The Mozilla foundation could add developers, but that costs money and means that the Mozilla foundation would be committed to responding to the needs of those customers asking for the functions that centralized IT management wants.
Perhaps some company, or a consortium of companies, who really must have the enterprisey functions could step up to the plate and fund a team of developers to provide plugins, or if necessary, a browser built on top of the core Firefox code. There's a bunch of Gecko-based browsers out there already. It's fine for the Mozilla foundation to say "we're putting our attention where we believe we can provide the most value, someone else is welcome to Use the Source to build whatever they value".
group policies, remotely configuring proxy, enterprise settings, locking down the browser, etc
That's a pretty good bullet list of the things that enterprises feel they need that aren't worth supporting in a decent browser. The more 'enterprisey' a piece of software, the less actual useful features that allow people to get work done and the more junk added just to support the things enterprises do to prevent employees from doing stuff.
I'm pretty harsh on the mania for centralized locked-down control by IT in big corporations, but even if I were 100% in favor of it, I would still be forced to acknowledge that development effort spent adding, fixing, and upgrading those mechanisms is development effort not spent on improving the UX, adding functionality, tracking standards changes, or fixing bugs with rendering, performance, resource use, etc.
Hooray for Firefox for abandoning this mess. Part of what made Netscape the company and Navigator the browser fail was in their zeal to compete in the enterprise world, they bloated up the application and failed to fix real problems, while stuck with an ungainly codebase.
That was also the first thought that came to my mind. I'd mod you up +1 Insightful if I could. The scaremongering anti-environmentalist rant is trying to divert any attention from the question of what would happen to the economies of those states should the ecosystem collapse.
Not "focused and driven"; what I said was that some quarterly returns-obsessed management would consider him "motivated, task-focused, and results-oriented" and hire him, to the long-term detriment of his teammates and the company.
The players seek to gain control of resources: usually fuel, ore, food, and technology, and travel through sectors of the galaxy trading them for money or undervalued resources. Players use their wealth to upgrade their spaceship with better weapons and defenses, and fight for control of planets and starbases.
An interesting point, if worded a bit bristly.
I wouldn't doubt that the pre-university education in most other advanced countries is superior to a US high school education. I vaguely remember when educators at American universities complained loudly about having to give remedial classes to the under-prepared high school grads that administrators admitted for reasons unrelated to academics (*cough*money*cough).
Nowadays I don't hear much of that, but I do hear a lot about how a university education in the US is not worth the inflated tuition rates charged to get a degree so diluted in value that the best jobs don't consider it sufficient and so pointlessly in demand that all but the least-skilled jobs require it. I suppose the run-of-the-mill university degree from a US institution is now no better than high school/lyceum.
What does that imply about a US high school education?
You have the right of it, as they say. While it's possible to make a credible argument for focusing on learning the core set of skills for a career while minimizing time spent on associated topics in some circumstances, let's look at the actual words used.
Phrases like 'my precious time' and 'will not contribute to making me better at my job' are huge red flags for a inflated sense of self-importance. Dismissing the entire range of liberal arts as merely 'useful and perhaps enriching' betrays a level of arrogance that has the potential to incite team-destroying conflict.
In my very limited experience as a senior programmer (but not a manager) given opportunities to interview and provide input on hiring decisions, I would never recommend hiring this guy.
Oh sure, there's probably some entry-level position on a short-term contract gig where he could contribute without much fuss. But as far as I'm concerned he'd be a liability in any full time position with possibility of advancement and significant contribution in development efforts of high business value. Someone who only cares about what he thinks is the important stuff will never be the motivated life-long learner that can advance in his career.
Sure, businesses these days are more than happy to ignore the larger picture in pursuit of the quarterly returns and the stock bump, so a real hiring manager would probably be fine with this -- they'd consider it "motivated, task-focused, and results-oriented". Said business would get the blinkered, half-working, user-unfriendly software that instead of doing what it should be doing only does what the programmer thought it should do.
What do you mean, "what do you mean?"?
Where did anyone say anything about feeling sorry for him von Tetzchner? Those hundreds of other programmers and the millions of users are getting the worst of it as the direction of development for Opera turns away from "let's make a really good browser that clobbers all the rest in standards compliance and performance" to "how can investors and management squeeze the most blood out of the work of other people who actually worked hard contributing code or supported Opera through the years as users?".
I'm confused, too. Why don't you ask the linux geek who suggested that telling von Tetzchner how to license Opera was an insult. Did the commenter meant to suggest von Tetzchner the only person who stood to lose or gain from the choice of license?
Would that be more, or less, insulting than the people who had nothing to do with the creation of the work taking it over to use it as their own personal blood-giving turnip?
Never ask a geek, 'why?', even if put in a wordy way like 'what's the point?'. Just nod your head and back away slowly.
Why doesn't von Tetzchner just fork the source and create a new project? Oh right, Opera is closed source. Pity.
I regret now that I didn't write "This is exactly how NASA *management* treated anomalies..". In my mind, the decision-making in the process was always about management's choices to override engineering recommendations, or worse, to punish engineers who recommended things that management didn't want to hear.
I am most keenly aware that all the engineering and technical folks were not treated with respect and had showstopper-level misgivings about the situation.
Pretty much the exact situation we're getting into with aging nuclear power plants well past their design lifespan -- and don't even get me started on the spent fuel storage.
Lemme guess. You didn't hear about the redefinition of the auto keyword? Or the deprecation of auto_ptr? Or any of the other things in the new standard that breaks existing compatibility with legacy C code?
Did you read the article though? The new standard completely changes the meaning of the auto keyword. That alone will break code, and it's adding something. Come to think of it, though, the article doesn't mention what, if anything, will replace the behavior that's going away.
You're right, but I sort of thought that bit about the managers deciding was a given.
Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
There's plenty of investigative journalism, real journalism, still happening. What's different is that this was done by a large mainstream news organization.
This is exactly how NASA treated anomalies with the Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters. Each time they'd have the engineers look at the problem, then decide it was really probably OK, and that the strict rules in place were overly cautious. Everything went fine, until the flight of STS-51-L.
Being "vested" is something for the peons and middle-level managers (and sometimes for C-level types, when it helps dodge taxes). Top execs in situations like this get the options free and clear. Of course, they don't get the Class A options, but what they do get is already vested.
Ah right, I forgot, die Euro.
Note that summary: a warning issued by US Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team.
Not that an organization of US-based industrial control software vendors would have any sort dishonest or self-serving motivations to point fingers at Chinese software. Just sayin'
Yes I know that. You took me seriously?