Early this year I finally broke down and subscribed to IRCCloud. They handle all the details of staying connected so you have access to channel history. Admittedly it works out to about 14 cents per day. Well worth it, in my opinion.

There are people working on a revised spec called ircv3, that aims to address those issues. I haven’t been in touch with that group, so I can’t speak to their progress or success.

If any given company has an open plan office, you know not to work there.

Sounds like nowhere is decent enough to work at considering the rate open office rants pop up makes it seem like they’re everywhere.

And it should be repeated over and over until pointy-haired management stops with the open plan office abuse, and people start demanding reasonable working conditions en masse.

Yeah, is anyone ever arguing for those things? I don’t mind the one at my office, but we’re also a very small office with an average of six employees in it. I might like it better if we were even more isolated, but except for my coworkers’ typing, I hardly ever hear anything at all.

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I think it’s wrong headed and counterproductive:

1. There’s a difference between a general believe that Facebook doesn’t respect your privacy and a very specific “they collected this data, unnecessarily and stored it in perpetuity”

2. Chastising people for not having been aware in the past doesn’t encourage them to be more proactive in the future, it pushes them to just stop caring entirely. If you want people to be more upset and take action, use this opportunity to push them forwards, not lecture them for having been late to the party.

Maybe a bit snarky, but let me draw some parallels with this take:

“The Big Bang? Why are you interested in it now? It happened 13 billion years ago. It obviously happened, otherwise we wouldn’t be here at all. Why study it? Pretty much everybody knows about cosmology. Add some fundamental laws and, well the current state of the universe naturally follows.”

The point is: not even close to the number of people you think knew knew. Those who knew didn’t know details. Those who had some details didn’t have certainty. Those who knew, had details and certainty didn’t reach large enough numbers to have a public debate about this issue.

People see it as trolling because no one can be certain over the internet if anyone is actually surprised or not. A lot of people feign surprise to puff themselves up. An obnoxiously obvious version of this would be “Not only did I know about this breaking news before everyone else, I was so certain of it that I believed it was universal knowledge! I’m shocked, shocked that people did not understand this as well as me, a genius.” You didn’t write like this, but feigning surprise is common enough that any expression of surprise is received very skeptically.

And despite Facebook being devoid of ethics and morality, despite them abusing their users and their data, people will keep using Facebook by the billions. It’s hopeless; people just don’t care enough.

I think there’s something far more sinister going on here. We don’t really have free media in today’s world. It looks free, but there are only a few major players and a lot of major advertisers controlling those outlets. At work we have a CNN feed in the entry way. 90% of the time the word Trump is on the screen. It’s all Trump all the time. Unlike 1984 with its 2 minute hate, for several decades we’ve been living in a 24/7 hate.

These types of stories are designed to keep us scared or to put the population down a certain path. I have a feeling Zuckerberg pissed off someone recently. Maybe it’s someone in the 1% trying to put him in his place after he talked about running for President. Maybe he pissed off some board members at Google. It doesn’t take much. Someone with the means just needs to get one or two publications to start down the path and soon the rest of the media follows because it’s what people want and it sells.

Wow, I didn’t realise this. I can see Oracle has documented it though. And Java 10 (18.3) is only supported until September 2018:

** Java SE 9 will be a short term release, and users should immediately transition to the next release (18.3) when available.

*** Oracle has proposed a new version scheme for Oracle based builds (YY.M) starting in March, 2018. Java SE 10 (18.3) will be a short term release and users should transition to the next release when available.

If you want to do that, RDP is actually well implemented and works for such purposes, on the Windows side.

I’ve always like Firefox better ideologically, but I just couldn’t deal with the reduced performance. I tried FF 57 beta, and never looked back. I’m really glad Mozilla finally managed to put out serious competition to Chrome.

Can’t say that’s been my experience, sadly. I switched from Chrome to Firefox and was having a blast with Quantum, I never thought web pages could load that quickly! But the UI was still clunky and the whole browser froze several times while using it with more intensive apps (and it really makes me wonder what went wrong when with several web tools open the one to really bring my computer to its knees is Slack, an IM app).

I know a friend that’s using it and he’s not having my issues, wonder if it’s Windows (since he uses macOS), the fact that my PC is older (Thinkpad T430 vs MBP 2017) but Chrome just never skips a beat, even when the website is under heavy load, while Firefox just gives up when any of the pages get a little busy (this includes mundane tasks like opening and browsing the inspector).

I really think Mozilla is on the right track for once and I hope for the best to them, I just hope they don’t get blinded by trying to ace every benchmark and think of the overall experience more, otherwise they’ll end up doing the same things we hate Chrome for (like breaking the web)

I actually found this perspective pretty interesting – the bar for success seemed really low. 300 sales to survive, 700 to stay in business? That’s what, between $1500 and $3500 after Steam’s cut and before taxes? In that light it’s actually kind of depressing how hard it is to even make a splash.

As I talked about above, I do think it’s worth talking about these kinds of situations. There are a lot of young people interested in games who would love to get into game development, there are a lot of colleges advertising their game-making programs and talking about how it’s such a great and fun career, and there’s a lot of attention given to the successful stories in indie development. Failure stories like these get told a lot less often, even though they’re likely the more typical scenario. If we don’t talk about them, we don’t give the people considering doing indie game development a clear picture of the risk involved.

As for the marketing aspect, I can’t say whether that was his primary motive, but well, hey, I’m sure it doesn’t hurt.

It’s nothing so complicated. A UI element that’s animating (transitioning) can be configured to ignore further input until it’s done. The plus animation is long, and (probably oversight) ignores input until it’s done glowing. There’s no race, or lock up, or lag, or any of a dozen other explanations. The behavior is entirely deterministic, based solely on whether you tap + while glowing or not. (Still a stupid bug, but the fix is just changing a bit to allow more taps while animating.)

The solution to this is having scripts that continually go through your projects and show you outdated jars. It should be part of the CI. Trouble is you don’t often know if a jar update is security related or not like with traditional package management. But still on production projects, you really shouldn’t let your dependencies rot either.

I mean, the alternative is to write the code and security holes yourself. You’ll have the same security issues either way :P

What escapes my understand is why moving the mouse is affected by lock on NtGdiCloseProcess.

Speaking just for myself – thus this is just an anecdote – but I switched from Firefox to Chrome years ago because the Firefox UI would often become unresponsive for several seconds, which drove me crazy. Also, because of the (perhaps mistaken) perception that Chrome was more secure.

That being said, I recently switched back to Firefox at work, and it seems like they’ve fixed a lot of the UI latency issues in Firefox.

I have piped up on this subject before and can speak only for myself, but here goes:

Firefox annoys the shit out of me at times. It slows down randomly. Sometimes, after a restart, it forgets I use two windows. It updates so often I don’t know which issue goes with which version, so I give up caring. Sometimes it corrupts its sessions.

Then I look at the competition. No multi-row tabs. No tab groups, lile the FF add-on I like. The Community(tm) gently points me to sub-par alternatives like lists or tree views. Good for you, if that works for you. Not my thing.

I half-way upgraded to Debian Stretch. I know you shouldn’t do that, things break between distro versions. Naturally some dependency unknown to me broke Mozilla’s build. So I tried the ESR build and it was slow. Like a retarded sloth doped on ketamine and stuck in tar.

So I concluded the experiment by upgrading everything. Firefox is usually fast enough, again.

I also learned to live with the various backup methods.

The reason I care about this? I use tabs in tab groups a bit like bookmarks, so I can switch contexts by switching all tabs depending on what I feel like doing.

I estimate there are roughly zero people on the planet who do this like I do.

I also estimate there are less than five people who’d be convinced by a demo of the addons, but they’d have neither the patience nor desire to be convinced.

I switched off firefox because it’s unbearably slow. I will switch back if they make a browser based on servo.

When I remember that they have a 1000+ employees it makes me really uncomfortable.

for desktop usage on linux, first it was lacking flash when it was common, then it was problems with H264 (which is patented), then EME/DRM, and now there’s still issues with netflix filtering it based on browser ID.

looking at windows machines, it took longer to adopt auto updates. users who installed firefox before auto updates and when chrome did update are possibly comparing firefox 20 to the latest chrome. they’re unaware it’s much better if updated.

the big numbers come from mobile. your phone already comes with a browser, and it’s never firefox. why would you get another (assuming you can)?

I have a modernish computer with SSD and 16 GB of RAM, every year or so I try to Firefox but it is sluggish with 2 windows with 50-80 tabs each or so (yes I’m a hoarder and probably in the 99 percentile for tabs, but I just can’t find anything that can cope with my usage except Opera, Chrome and Chromium).

The benefit of not having swap is that if you hit swap with any force, you will have to hard reboot the machine. Without swap, you might have to reboot the machine depending on which process gets the short end of the OOM killer/failed malloc stick and, in the latter case, what it does with it.

Good question. I’m guessing some people may think there system will be faster if they don’t have swap (if it’s not there, it can’t be used!). But those are perhaps the same people who -O6 and unroll their loops… In the early days of SSDs there was the argument that paging could cause premature SSD death but those days are long behind us.

Of course, without swap most systems can’t write a crash dump. Perhaps not that relevant for most loop unrollers…

I have swap disabled on my laptop. Whenever a build process goes crazy and the system starts to swap, I have to reboot. It is better if some random process gets killed, because there is a good chance to keep some state.

I’ve admittedly never used Cyclone, but it looks similar in complexity to Rust: one of Cyclone’s big additions is region analysis including explicit lifetimes, which look pretty close to Rust’s lifetimes. I imagine this would also make retrofitting C codebases into Cyclone difficult since a lot of code would need to be fixed to be verifiably lifetime-correct.

Also I’ll point out that the Cyclone front page mentions it’s unsupported, and points interested readers towards Rust.

I have to take issue with the claim that C is simple.

Hundreds of undefined and implementation defined behaviors does not a simple language make.

One might say C is both primitive and complex. The worst of both worlds.

I have my doubts – some serious concerns, actually – about the value of that password checker.

I put in five words, randomly chosen from a dictionary, with spaces between them. It generated a very mediocre score: 56%. I was under the (possibly mistaken?) impression that randomly selecting five words from a dictionary would be an excellent password. (Corrections welcome.)

In addition, I wouldn’t want anyone to be encouraged to enter any of their real passwords on a web site like this, as it could very well use that information maliciously. I’m not saying this particular web site does this, but I don’t think putting passwords into “password checker” web sites is something we generally want to encourage people to do.