They said that, since FF Sync manages a lot more than just bookmarks, automatically syncing at browser shutdown would cause an unacceptable delay that would bother some users. I suggested they make it toggle-able and default "off" and was basically told, "We've already discussed this at length in other threads; we're not going to do it."
That's certainly their prerogative. It just means I'm either going to pay for Xmarks or use a different browser.
I had the latest. Actually got into a discussion with someone from the FF sync team on their Google Weave group. They basically said, "This has come up before and no we're still not going to implement automatic sync on shutdown."
I wouldn't mind Xmarks disappearing if FireFox Sync actually had the same functionality. It doesn't. Specifically it doesn't sync automatically at browser shutdown. So if you bookmark something and then shut down the browser before the next periodic sync...it doesn't get sync'd. So I switched to Chrome. Now I keep noticing all these annoying things about Chrome that make me wish I were still using FireFox. Except...the non-Xmarks sync is deficient. Woe is me.
If Sagarin would just replace his ELO rating with the eventual winner of this contest. It would be interesting to see how much closer the "ELO replacement" performance is to what he gets from his PREDICTOR method (that takes into account point differentials).
Honestly I wish they'd just glom onto some other popular distro and make it even better. Between Fedora, SuSE, Mint and all the flavors of Ubuntu, do we really need Mandriva?
What I'd like to see next: Google pays bounty for bugs in other browsers (which it then forwards to those companies for repair).
This would be hilarious. You might think it'd be bad business (why should Google pay for bug finds that will benefit its competition?), but I think it'd be PR gold. Not to mention it would have the side effect of improving all-around security. (So Google could cast the new bounty as an altruistic gesture).
Someone with Windows 7, a decent 3d graphics card, and a dual or quad-core CPU please benchmark this new IE9 beta vs. the currently released versions for FF, Chrome, Safari and Opera, using:
And, if you could, break out the scores on the individual Peacekeeper tests. I intentionally omitted V8 in the list of benchmarks since its so inconsistent between runs.
I'd do it myself but I don't have a Win7 installation to use.
What I don't get is this: if China can produce CFLs at half the price (which doesn't surprise me), then why couldn't they also produce incandescents at half the price? In other words, why hadn't the plant closed long before the advent of CFLs?
If the iPad group does improve at a faster rate, this could potentially be due to the novelty of the iPad vs. traditional textbooks. Remove the novelty factor (i.e. deploy them state-wide and wait a few years) and the faster improvement rate may disappear.
To know whether there's a story here, we'd need to check what tech unemployment was during previous periods of elevated "general" unemployment. If, during previous periods of high overall unemployment, the tech sector wasn't affected at all and now is, then that's moderately newsworthy.
Are you saying that HFCS is uniquely responsible in a way "sugar" isn't? Sugary candies and sodas have been around since...oh...forever. Or is it just that the rate of consumption has increased? If so, why? Do people drink more Coca Cola (or eat more Twinkies) than they did 10 years ago? 20? 60?
Ah, but it is epidemiology. Sure, we know why a given person gets fat. Too much energy in; too little energy out. But why is the population as a whole getting fatter? Is it a general trend towards sedentary lifestyles (i.e. energy out)? Is it a general trend towards higher calorie diets (i.e. energy in)? Is it a combination of the two? If these trends are behind the rise in obesity, what are the drivers behind these trends?
I think you understate the complexity of the issue when you reduce it to a mere question of "conservation of energy".
I guess I don't see much blatant ageism. People seem to get paid about what their skills merit.
Why would the older developer be more likely to get hit by involuntary RIFs; blatant ageism?
This is purely anecdotal, but I'm part of a team of five developers and two QA at a startup. The dev lead and I are both around 35. One of the other developers is 40; two others are 45+. The QA lead is ~25 and the other QA guy is ~35.
If you're going to stay in programming, realize that the deck is stacked against you, so be prepared to earn less as you gain experience.
This makes no sense to me. If he'd said, "expect that your 30 years experience will allow you to command a salary roughly equivalent to someone with only 10 years experience" then I'd be on board with that. But to actually earn less because of additional experience? As in, "If you had 10 years experience we'd pay you X, but since you have 20 years experience we'll only pay you 0.8X"? That's nuts.
My personal experience is that people pay based on the position, and the position usually has some experience requirements. No position requires more than 10 years experience, so any experience beyond that is superfluous. So the salary arc for a developer, assuming he stays in development (and not architecture, design, etc.), should steadily increase from year 0 to maybe year 10, then mostly plateau.
Way back in the day it was infected floppy disks. Given people now use USB drives like we used to use floppy disks, it only makes sense that malware would (once again) use them as a distribution method.
Ah. That's what I get for not reading the linked article. So the drive is in a NAS device that's streaming music to "somewhere else", and he's arguing that using his special SATA cable somehow results in a higher quality of streamed music? Madness!
Couldn't interference from the SATA communication interfere with analog components somewhere along the chain of hardware that converts "1s and 0s" to "sound waves colliding with my ear drum"?
I know that when I have headphones plugged into my computer, occasionally I'll get interference that seems to match up with disk usage.
What really ticks me off are the misleading claims about being "faster than the competition". Time Warner is always claiming that its cable modem service is "four times faster than AT&T Yahoo DSL". Listen to the disclaimers, though, and you realize they're comparing the base cable modem service (6 Mbps) against AT&T's low-end service (1.5 MBps) without mentioning that the 1.5 Mbps service is significantly cheaper. AT&T also offers a high-end DSL service that is (drumroll) 6 Mbps and approximately the same cost as Time Warner's base package.
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They said that, since FF Sync manages a lot more than just bookmarks, automatically syncing at browser shutdown would cause an unacceptable delay that would bother some users. I suggested they make it toggle-able and default "off" and was basically told, "We've already discussed this at length in other threads; we're not going to do it."
That's certainly their prerogative. It just means I'm either going to pay for Xmarks or use a different browser.
Here is the thread.
I had the latest. Actually got into a discussion with someone from the FF sync team on their Google Weave group. They basically said, "This has come up before and no we're still not going to implement automatic sync on shutdown."
The only common alternative for Firefox is Mozilla's Firefox Sync. It would be great...if it actually worked like Xmarks. But it doesn't.
I wouldn't mind Xmarks disappearing if FireFox Sync actually had the same functionality. It doesn't. Specifically it doesn't sync automatically at browser shutdown. So if you bookmark something and then shut down the browser before the next periodic sync...it doesn't get sync'd. So I switched to Chrome. Now I keep noticing all these annoying things about Chrome that make me wish I were still using FireFox. Except...the non-Xmarks sync is deficient. Woe is me.
If Sagarin would just replace his ELO rating with the eventual winner of this contest. It would be interesting to see how much closer the "ELO replacement" performance is to what he gets from his PREDICTOR method (that takes into account point differentials).
Honestly I wish they'd just glom onto some other popular distro and make it even better. Between Fedora, SuSE, Mint and all the flavors of Ubuntu, do we really need Mandriva?
What I'd like to see next: Google pays bounty for bugs in other browsers (which it then forwards to those companies for repair).
This would be hilarious. You might think it'd be bad business (why should Google pay for bug finds that will benefit its competition?), but I think it'd be PR gold. Not to mention it would have the side effect of improving all-around security. (So Google could cast the new bounty as an altruistic gesture).
If you can disable 3 of your CPU cores, it would be interesting to see how much of IE9's performance advantage is due to its use of multiple cores.
Yeah, I was aware of the bogus Sunspider behavior on IE9, but was still curious about the results.
Someone with Windows 7, a decent 3d graphics card, and a dual or quad-core CPU please benchmark this new IE9 beta vs. the currently released versions for FF, Chrome, Safari and Opera, using:
And, if you could, break out the scores on the individual Peacekeeper tests. I intentionally omitted V8 in the list of benchmarks since its so inconsistent between runs.
I'd do it myself but I don't have a Win7 installation to use.
What I don't get is this: if China can produce CFLs at half the price (which doesn't surprise me), then why couldn't they also produce incandescents at half the price? In other words, why hadn't the plant closed long before the advent of CFLs?
If the iPad group does improve at a faster rate, this could potentially be due to the novelty of the iPad vs. traditional textbooks. Remove the novelty factor (i.e. deploy them state-wide and wait a few years) and the faster improvement rate may disappear.
To know whether there's a story here, we'd need to check what tech unemployment was during previous periods of elevated "general" unemployment. If, during previous periods of high overall unemployment, the tech sector wasn't affected at all and now is, then that's moderately newsworthy.
Are you saying that HFCS is uniquely responsible in a way "sugar" isn't? Sugary candies and sodas have been around since...oh...forever. Or is it just that the rate of consumption has increased? If so, why? Do people drink more Coca Cola (or eat more Twinkies) than they did 10 years ago? 20? 60?
Is this new? Did people eat less bread in, say, the 1950s?
Ah, but it is epidemiology. Sure, we know why a given person gets fat. Too much energy in; too little energy out. But why is the population as a whole getting fatter? Is it a general trend towards sedentary lifestyles (i.e. energy out)? Is it a general trend towards higher calorie diets (i.e. energy in)? Is it a combination of the two? If these trends are behind the rise in obesity, what are the drivers behind these trends?
I think you understate the complexity of the issue when you reduce it to a mere question of "conservation of energy".
I guess I don't see much blatant ageism. People seem to get paid about what their skills merit.
Why would the older developer be more likely to get hit by involuntary RIFs; blatant ageism?
This is purely anecdotal, but I'm part of a team of five developers and two QA at a startup. The dev lead and I are both around 35. One of the other developers is 40; two others are 45+. The QA lead is ~25 and the other QA guy is ~35.
I'm not. I also don't take jobs that require me to regularly work more than 40 hour weeks.
This makes no sense to me. If he'd said, "expect that your 30 years experience will allow you to command a salary roughly equivalent to someone with only 10 years experience" then I'd be on board with that. But to actually earn less because of additional experience? As in, "If you had 10 years experience we'd pay you X, but since you have 20 years experience we'll only pay you 0.8X"? That's nuts.
My personal experience is that people pay based on the position, and the position usually has some experience requirements. No position requires more than 10 years experience, so any experience beyond that is superfluous. So the salary arc for a developer, assuming he stays in development (and not architecture, design, etc.), should steadily increase from year 0 to maybe year 10, then mostly plateau.
Way back in the day it was infected floppy disks. Given people now use USB drives like we used to use floppy disks, it only makes sense that malware would (once again) use them as a distribution method.
...today's sign of the apocalypse.
Maybe this means "everybody not Apple" will be less likely to remotely disable jailbroken devices for fear of being sued by Apple.
Ah. That's what I get for not reading the linked article. So the drive is in a NAS device that's streaming music to "somewhere else", and he's arguing that using his special SATA cable somehow results in a higher quality of streamed music? Madness!
Couldn't interference from the SATA communication interfere with analog components somewhere along the chain of hardware that converts "1s and 0s" to "sound waves colliding with my ear drum"?
I know that when I have headphones plugged into my computer, occasionally I'll get interference that seems to match up with disk usage.
What really ticks me off are the misleading claims about being "faster than the competition". Time Warner is always claiming that its cable modem service is "four times faster than AT&T Yahoo DSL". Listen to the disclaimers, though, and you realize they're comparing the base cable modem service (6 Mbps) against AT&T's low-end service (1.5 MBps) without mentioning that the 1.5 Mbps service is significantly cheaper. AT&T also offers a high-end DSL service that is (drumroll) 6 Mbps and approximately the same cost as Time Warner's base package.