188 karma · joined May 22, 2016
I agree with your point - it is hard to tell the difference generally, and it is an important point to remember, but the behaviour of the company itself shows that it is not an issue this time.
Mozilla has two major problems though. Firstly, it largely relies on what is eventually advertising revenue, in a time when users are increasingly using ad-blockers etc and privacy laws reduce the value of targeted ads. Secondly, it has little traction on mobile, where iOS basically just has Safari because of Apple's rules, and Android comes with Chrome very much set as the default (and few people change it).
I don't really buy that COVID has made much difference. I think that, ultimately, the two problems above are the issues, and I'm not sure what can be done about them.
Even if Firefox were replaced with a shiny-new brilliant FLOSS browser, we still need an organisation behind it that drives web standards in the right direction (and I think they do need to have a major browser to do that as effectively as Mozilla has), and it still needs the funding to do it, so would still face the same issues as Mozilla, even if it weren't Mozilla.
Someone should be taking Google and Apple to task over bindling their browser and not enabling proper choice on a fair basis, as the EU did to MS (and actually MS has stopped offering a fair choice of browser too, where you choose a default and it is installed, rather than have a default you have to change, that they keep changong back in updates).
In general, I don't allow companies messing me around to profit from it. Even if it takes longer than it is worth, I make a point of principle that I somehow get more back from them than I was cheated out of or they neglected to deliver. Usually this ends up costing them much more than just behaving reasonably in the first place. I find finding a way to do this cathartic. It isn;t always entirely legal though.
If more people did this, it wouldn't be worth companies messing people around.
(Edit: I forgot, I had also sent recorded delivery mail about it, but got no response).
I eventually got it resolved by finding the number for the CEO's secretary or someone, and harassing them about it until they got it sorted.
Now, the same thing has happened with Virgin Media Business at work (I cancelled because it was always going down, including the PSTN phones, the service was awful and we no longer need it - we had it before I joined, they have been billing us for months after we cancelled).
Worst ISP ever.
As someone who helps support it in a medium sized business, do not use G Suite in your business.
The problem is that, to move them to a new platform, for example Steam, they need to pay the platform's cut of the sale price. To give users the option to do this in future, they would need to keep all of the revenue they get from selling games in reserve to possibly do this in future. They would have to do this by charging users what it cost. I think it'd still be attractive though.
It isn't noticeable better than DuckDuckGo, which is a better alternative for privacy reasons.
I think this has arisen out of a feeling of righteousness as a result of having been morally right on many things in the past several decades, but it is just indulging the same human tenancy to hate others that perceived as not being part of one's tribe as racism etc, but with a better superficial justification. It is, IMHO, more unhelpful though. People can see racism is bad, but it is quite easy to fall into the trap of thinking that abusing a racist is perfectly fine, and go along with it, but there is a reason we don't use vigilante justice for everything. People become outraged at the treatment of people that they see as unfair, and, IMHO, this is where hatred of political correctness, and unwillingness to engage in attempts to be more progressive come from. IMHO, this hatred by the left, and with-hunt like behaviour, is at least as big an obstacle to progress on many social justice issues as people holding bigoted views that it seeks to break down, because it makes the bigoted people look reasonable.
At the beginning of this issue, I saw headlines or twitter comments alleging a lot of things, read what RMS had actually said, and concluded that the headlines and tweets are bullshit, and dismissed them all, resolving to never believe this type of thing without examining the evidence myself again. This would probably have led to me dismissing a lot of complaints about people in positions of power, assuming they they are similarly unreliable. A friend has said that there are other examples of RMS being disrespectful towards women, but I haven't had a chance to look at them yet, and are not prepared to believe them without evidence, because I have seen that much of what is said second-hand is complete crap. People exaggerating what he has said probably did so because they want to see action and create a safer space for victimised groups, especially women, in CS, but the effect has been to make all allegations highly suspect, at least to me, and I suspect many others, thus having the opposite effect. In a world where allegations that aren't true aren't extremely rare, no allegation can believed without a lot of evidence, and most crimes don't leave much.
The effect of these social media with-hunts that happen when anyone says anything objectionable has been to make most of the population highly resistant to condemning people I think, making it hard to do so when someone actually says something terrible. I think that a significant part of the reason that there is someone who advocated sexual assault as president of the US is that people have heard wolf-cries about people so much that they just don't care if they hear that someone has advocated sexual assault, because last time they heard that, the person had just said something mildly insensitive or something, and so they have started dismissing all allegations unless they have a lot more evidence behind them.
I think that people on the left going overboard in hating their opponents have created more problems for their side than their opponents. I say this as someone who is extremely left wing on most issues. Exaggerating things is never helpful I don't think.
Is it for fun? If so, great. Not my cup of tea personally, but I can imagine how it could be someone's.
If not for fun, what is the point? It presumably isn't to create a usable ray-tracing system. Perhaps a challenge to improve the author's Excel skills? If so, I suggest they move on to a proper programming language and visualisation system.
There seems to be this obsession, among some people, with using Excel for all sorts of inappropriate things, and I have a sinking feeling that this might be related to that. A system for generating contracts using Excel formulas, in Excel, instead of using mail merge, or something else, with Word or something else designed to format prose text, is a horrible example I have come across at work.
They sent me to a debt collector more than a year after I had closed my account, for something I didn't owe them (it was a bill for services after I had closed my account and been physically disconnected). When I tried to talk to them about it, one of their call centre managers eventually admitted to me that there was no public number that could get me through to a call centre that had anyone able to sort it, or anyone they could transfer me to who could sort it, so I might as well stop trying and sue them.
I got it sorted by tracking down one of the company executives home contact information and calling him about it. I harrassed him considerably less than the debt collectors harrassed me.
If my experience of Virgin Media is anything to go by, they are probably writing them down in crayon on bits of paper that they keep in a very large box, probably outside and open to the weather.
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if they just didn't store them at all and just accepted any login attempt.
Given the level of incompetence I have experienced from them, I can only assume they are still in business because of a serious accounting error in their favour.
I found my local cabinet with the doors swinging open and a massive tangled bundle of wires inside. I reported it to them, but they haven't done anything about it for more than a year, other than remove the notice asking you to report it to them if you see it open.
Frankly, I suspect I could build a more reliable link from a bit of string and a couple of plastic cups.
Worst ISP ever.
This is, IMHO, not a good reason to use NoSQL.
The best implemented DRM makes it hardly any more inconvenient for people to use it, and people accept it most of the time, Steam for example. It always puts some people off, who end up pirating it when they wouldn't otherwise have, though.
Even the best DRM is always cracked by those that want to. There is no DRM system that has ever been created that will not be defeated, because it is trying to achieve the impossible. You have to give legal consumers access to the content to consume it, so they always have access to copy it. It will never work. If DRM didn't exist, piracy would be a lot less common.
Most people stopped pirating music when it became easily available without DRM.
Ultimately, all DRM gets cracked, and this is the only real response to it.
Annoyingly, DRM only doesn't hit sales harder because it is defeated. If it was impossible to defeat a particular piece of DRM, it would harm sales of content using it much more, but the harm to the content sellers is limited by the fact that it is always cracked early on and made available to consumers they have cut off. For example, I have a Netflix subscription, which I use in an otherwise open source browser, using the widevine plugin ripped out of Chrome. If this wasn't relatively easy, I would just not use Netflix. Netflix is only getting money from me because the DRM they use is easy to defeat illegally. If the DRM worked, I'd stop paying for Netflix, because I wouldn't be able to use it and it'd be much easier to watch the same content by downloading it from Usenet.
Money and effort spent on reducing the use of single use plastics, would be better spent recycling plastics in the western world, improving traceability for plastic containing waste exported to the third world, and improving waste management in the third world.
We don't really need to stop using plastic. There are much more urgent problems, including not dumping plastic in rivers and the ocean. Trying to avoid using plastic hardly helps the environment. There are much more useful and urgent things we could be doing instead.
I use my fingerprint to prevent people casually browsing my phone if I leave it on the table while I pee, but I wouldn't rely on it for more than that, and neither should other people.
You need something else (a key, password or something) to secure most things as well as just your fingerprint.
I feel like this shouldn't matter really, but people are amazingly lazy/developer time valued highly.
Unfortunately, something that is good, and something people want to use, are not the same thing. People will use AWS's offering even if it is worse and harder to use, because it is bundled as part of AWS. That is a safe option (it can't be that bad if AWS has released it) and an easy one (no need to think about what to use, you are using AWS already.
Being a big provider of virtual machines puts them in a very strong position to sell loads of other stuff.
This doesn't allow any companies (except not for profits) to use the plugins without buying them.
This is true of everything. This isn't a problem with open source, it is a problem with society generally.