>>It's one thing to watch a human mentally deteriorate when they are at the end of their life<<
Alzheimers is terrible to witness at any age - the elderly included. While it's certainly tragic to see in younger people, it's no less tragic to see older people in a state of fear and panic, when they should be enjoying their twilight years.
I'm always interested by alternative 'Foxes, but I'm intrigued as to why the installer is about 25MB bigger than Firefox. What's in there that makes it a 50% bigger installer?
ICL creates huge libraries, especially with all the flags I use (-O3 -no-prec-div -Qparallel -arch:SSE3 -QaxCORE-AVX2,CORE-AVX-I,AVX,SSE4.2,SSE4.1,SSSE3). XUL generated like this is about 150MB (and for comparison offical Firefox XUL DLL is about 37MB)!
I'm pretty sure this is because internally, it has multiple copies of the assembly supporting different instruction sets. So it will have a lib with < SSE3, and then another copy of the same code with the SSE4.x optimizations applied. That way you get the speed benefit of SSE4.x on machines that have it, but it can still fallback to SSE3-only if it doesn't have that ISA.
The Microsoft compiler works similarly. This is why "Release mode" builds with optimization on produce bigger binaries than "Debug mode" builds.
Agreed, and this is probably by design. It's all a part of social control, or attempted social control. It's the threat of constant surveillance that will contribute to keeping people under control. Personally, I remain skeptical that Govt agencies can do a fraction of what they are claiming to be able to do - anyone who has worked with the various joys ofindustrial sized databases will know how difficult it is to maintain and query the really big ones - but the possibility of the threat remains. I forget the movie that the line is from but: "you don't actually need a big gun - just tell 'em you have one".
Plus, with the new "websites visited" retention rules - extendable at whim, there will be a permanent record, for example of that episode of Frasier that you downloaded from a Torrent site. A permanent record that is, of you "stealing something".
Treat with caution - CartoonStock are a British company, based in Bath. I'm not aware of any US presence aside from a toll free number. Most UK Limited Liability Companies use UK lawyers too, so a Seattle based "law firm" representing them sounds somewhat fishy. Be careful.
Our responsibility as developers is to deliver a working solution within the parameters that we are given, not to push an agenda (no matter how strongly we may feel about it).
Like it or not, most of the businesses in the developed world are still using MS and the associated file formats, and will be for quite a while yet.
That's an accurate comment to make, yes. They know that you correspond with people who use Tor. See how this can escalate? I think we are (hopefully) all agreed that chasing down people who use the web for wrongdoing is acceptable for the govt to do - but the collateral damage is where the problems can lie - the potential for "guilt by association" here is monumental.
Firstly, to come out with a statement like "Ev's technical skills are light years beyond any of you so-called programmers" shows that you have no idea who the audience is for HN. Your comment is both incorrect and comically pretentious.
Secondly - are you the same Gwen Bell who "co-created" Bitters? If so, can you enlighten us on how it differs from the Express demo app? Please give details.
Good article, but there seems to be a current trend towards being either a full-time tech-head or a neo-luddite who rejects technology. I'd argue it's possible to be both. I have to be (and actually rather enjoy) being 100% plugged in for my job - yet I also enjoy powering down all my tech and spending dedicated time with my family with no devices online.
I think we sometimes forget that we're allowed to do them both - but sometimes the balance gets skewed. Plug in if you want to, but when you unplug, unplug completely. It's bliss.
Alzheimers is terrible to witness at any age - the elderly included. While it's certainly tragic to see in younger people, it's no less tragic to see older people in a state of fear and panic, when they should be enjoying their twilight years.