Its not just about the code though. Somehow that code needs to keep up with the latest standards and magically be delivered to my client device. To think that a project as complex as the Firefox ecosystem can be maintained with less than 50 engineers doesn't match my experience working on large product teams.
Here's my estimate:
* A dozen build engineers to support development and builds for X client platforms
* A dozen engineers for the Javascript VM
* Dozens of engineers to support ongoing javascript and CSS standards
* A dozen engineers or more to support the firefox core
* Dedicated teams for Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux targets
* Dozens of Team/Programme/Project managers to _enable_ devs to do their best. These folks aren't optional.
You work on large teams, so your estimates are for large teams. Smaller teams work faster and can get more done with less. Basic "Mythical Man Month" stuff.
I'm not saying you're wrong. Just that you might not be right.
If you think Firefox has stagnated you clearly aren't aware of the substantial and complex improvements that have been made to the firefox core over the last couple of years:
I honestly don't see these as a good sign for a browser as a tool, instead of some software development adventure.
Firefox has a much smaller team than Chrome to begin with, and they can only work on so many things. If they keep spending time in "re-inventing the wheel" (in addition to what you listed, they also revamp their mobile client quite a few times in my recent memory), what left behind is attention to details in UX and UI that users can feel, which is what Firefox was famous for.
I'm not a developer, but I've submitted or engaged in many bug tickets on Bugzilla. What I can tell from my experience is that the response to bugs (critical or not) are getting slower and slower. Not just patches, sometimes you will have tickets that took years to have someone even looking at it. My feeling is most of developers are more likely to spend their time on Mozilla's "big goals" than maintenance.
Just to give one example, there is still no full range video support in Firefox in the era of video game streaming. This alone lets me to have to use Chrome to watch Twitch.
Performance isn't the only thing people care when choosing a browser. If it is, they probably abandoned Fx for a Blink based browser long time ago. Also does Firefox really have significant performance issue after 57?
Just a reminder that enabling Hyper-V (needed for WSL2) will make your computer boot your current Windows install inside a VM too. This might makes a slight performance impact.
That doesn't sound right. Hyper-V is a Type-1 hypervisor, so by definition the Windows installation would not be running in its own VM (for some definition of VM).
And its pretty much exactly the same for Qemu/KVM on Linux, where Intel VT-x or AMD SVM hardware extensions are used to implement Type-1 virtualisation.
> The real reason you can't operate in ZA is Empowerment, and what Google probably ran into. They can only own 49% of the business the start.
There's no evidence that Google ran into empowerment (BBBEE) roadblocks here. And that assertion about 49% ownership is quite incorrect. BBBEE doesn't actually work like that (1). A lot of factors go into scoring a company's empowerment rating.
'Companies in South Africa that deal with the government or parastatals must be empowered as required by the Preferential Procurement Act.'
$3M USD / year turnover is a low bar these days and must apply all seven pillars of BBBEE to calculate their score as per the Generic Scorecard.
- Black Ownership - 25 points
- Black Management control - 15 points
- Black Skills development – 20 points
- Black Enterprise & Supplier development – 40 points
- Black Socio-economic (SED) development 5 pts
So yeah, I need 51% Black ownership to get full points and again for management control points.
This is so racist my brain is bleeding, but it could be republished as a book on how to make a corrupt government.
From the Wikipedia article,
"A general criticism can be made that wealthy and politically connected black individuals have been the real beneficiaries of BEE and not those still living in poverty. In fact, unemployment and inequality have both increased since the introduction of BBBEE policies.
In 2018 a surfacing argument is that BBBEE should be changed from a race-based policy to a policy that favours poverty regardless of skin colour. Apartheid was criticised exactly because of race-based legislation that favoured a minority based on skin colour and BBBEE once again has introduced race-based policies diverting South Africa's problems from endemic poverty to race. "
I'm a techie living in Cape Town and I love it. I have no plans to emigrate. We have problems down here yes, but they've been no impediment to my career.
Both Amazon AWS and Oracle OCI have satellite development offices in Cape Town, and if anything they are hiring more and more.
Are they still having the rolling brown-outs in Cape Town? My hubby's family were getting a bit gatvol of those a while back, telling everybody here in New Zealand all about it.
Others have explained, but I found it funny to read this word. My native language is Dutch (flemish variety) and I would also read this word as expressing a negative emotion (fed up sounds right). "gat" = dialect/slang for ass, "vol" = full.
It disappoints me that so many fellow South Africans are seemingly oblivious to the audience they are interacting with and casually use local slang regardless.
When I saw it I guessed it was some local slang, and I was excited to learn what it meant from someone who really knew rather than some online dictionary. I don't think it should be a disappointment, it contributes to the wonderful diversity of language.
Reading South African as a Dutch person is always great. I understand most of the words, but it’s still clearly a completely different language/context.
As a non-South African, it's always great to learn local slang from around the world. On forums such as HN or Reddit, there's always someone around to explain it means. It's never an impediment to understanding the point being made.
I’m not South African, my husband is. I picked it up from him. We use it around our home quite a bit. I was replying to a South African. Whilst talking about South Africa. I'm fairly sure nobody's upset about it, more intrigued.
I'll add one - I immediately ignore any job ad that contains anything along the lines of "Work in an exciting/agile fast-paced, dynamic environment", which pretty much signals that only youngsters need apply.
Of course, if the job really is chaotic and high-stress, then that signal should probably stay in the job ad.
For me, its not just about the sound. I can easily lose focus by being visually over-stimulated too, and there's no way to fix that except for cubicles.
The second major issue is it growing way out of the bounds of being just an init replacement, thereby violating the so-called Unix Philosophy of doing one-thing well.
I keep on hearing this overly worn "Unix Philosophy" argument against systemd, which in the absence of any non-religious technical justification, basically boils down to "its different".
All of this adds up to a storm of controversy that the systemd people mostly brought upon themselves. Had they just been more humble about their creation and waited until it was mature and well-tested and did all the wonderful things they claim it could and should do instead of stuffing what was widely seen as a broken-by-design piece of garbage down everybody's throat, maybe much of the Linux community wouldn't have been nearly so outraged by it.
Nobody shoved anything down anyone's throat, least not the SystemD developers. And the same goes for PulseAudio, DBUS, and all the other projects on freedesktop.org.
Anyway, in reality, software does not become mature and well-tested without early exposure to real users and systems. Chicken-and-egg problem there.
I feel absolutely no sympathy for those who are outraged. There are many distributions out there (including Devuan) which align with their particular vision of an OS should be.
> Do you really want an init system that replaces a ton of functionality poorly like dns, ntp, syslog, xinetd, etc etc etc?
SystemD is not just an "init" system. You have to look at the larger vision for it being a set of building blocks for Linux system and service management.
I think this is a very good thing. Its about time that Linux had a unified and self-consistent approach to system management and configuration.
"SystemD is not just an "init" system. You have to look at the larger vision for it being a set of building blocks for Linux system and service management."
This was not the way it was sold. It was originally sold as an init replacement.
If at the start the systemd guys had come out and said, "We aim to replace much of the core of Linux with some kind of Windows-Linux conglomoration: replace not only init but dns, syslog, turn all system log files binary, replace intetd, fuck with account naming, and oh, by the way, there'll be no easy way for distros that go with systemd to give their users a choice to use something else" then I'm not so sure how many people would have gotten onboard.
Basically, systemd has been a retooling of the core Linux ecosystem by people who think they know better. Well, this might be news for systemd fans, but they don't necessarily know any better than the rest of us, and the rest of us would like some choice in the matter. Instead we're force fed systemd and our operating system are no longer Linux but some bastardization of Linux and Windows.
"Nobody shoved anything down anyone's throat, least not the SystemD developers."
Tell that to the significan number of RedHat, Debian, and CentOS users who strongly object to systemd yet are forced to use it because that's all their distro supports.
"Anyway, in reality, software does not become mature and well-tested without early exposure to real users and systems. Chicken-and-egg problem there."
You don't have to test it out on all RedHat users, all Debian users, all CentOS, etc, etc. Getting a bunch of volunteers and letting them use a feature-complete version for five or six years before springing it on the rest of us would have been a good start. Instead you get an ever-morphing and ever-growing trojan horse.
You will likely have this argument again so I need to point out two things:
1) Debian does support sysvinit right now, although with some packages having hard dependencies on systemd it might not be long before you hit a brick wall.
2) systemd (the init) was used by Fedora for a long time before getting into RHEL/CentOS- which is of course before it got into Debian. So there were volunteers.
Low-intensity exercise conditions aerobic energy pathways (mitochondrial respiration) in ways that high-intensity exercise cannot.