Wow, it's almost as if you've never heard of crowd-funded development.
The software behind Firefox can still continue without Mozilla. It may have fewer developers due to reduced funding but I'd rather see slower development if it was moving in the right direction.
> I'd rather see slower development if it was moving in the right direction.
What makes you think it'd happen if full-time employees at Firefox cant do it? We can poop on the leadership over at Mozilla, but there are FTEs getting paid to work on Firefox.
You cant just replace with few people running passion project on weekends, and even get the remote success Firefox has.
Browser is extremely complex. HN is underestimating how much work goes into making a browser.
> What makes you think it'd happen if full-time employees at Firefox cant do it?
The full-time engineers are given work to do by incompetent Mozilla management. It's the management that are driving Mozilla into the ground and setting baffling goals. Remove the management and have work based on features that users want, then you can see Firefox develop in the right direction.
As an example of how to organise this, you could have a bounty system for feature requests. Users define a feature they want to see and in negotiation with developers set acceptance criteria for when it's delivered. Users can then assign money as an incentive to complete the feature request. In this way, users can ensure they support developers to deliver the features they want to see.
> Browser is extremely complex. HN is underestimating how much work goes into making a browser.
Nobody is underestimating this. Firefox is already a mature product that can serve a wide range of user needs. What it lacks is effective leadership. I could live with slower development if the development it had was based around features that users most wanted. I don't need Firefox to support every web feature under the sun, the features it already supports is good enough for the vast majority of websites. Letting the users call the shots about it's future direction will help to guard against irrelevancy.
> As an example of how to organise this, you could have a bounty system for feature requests. Users define a feature they want to see and in negotiation with developers set acceptance criteria for when it's delivered. Users can then assign money as an incentive to complete the feature request. In this way, users can ensure they support developers to deliver the features they want to see.
Could you actually provide any examples of large-scale software projects working this way, and not the usual way with coordination being done by special people or w/o any (e.g., by the devs)
Explain what problems are encountered with 1000 feature requests linked to bounties that aren't encountered with 10 feature requests linked to bounties.
It partially addresses it, because it shows there's a way to save the software Mozilla develops from itself. In other words, I couldn't give a damn if Mozilla keeps misunderstanding it's market if there are open source forks of its software that undoes Mozilla's bad decisions and keeps the parts worth keeping. I'm not sentimental about Mozilla, Mozilla can continue to become irrelevant as long as competition in the browser space continues. New funding models can be developed to support forks of Firefox.
Sodium ion batteries are typically safer than lithium ion batteries. They operate safely over a wider range of temperatures, and have reduced risk of self-combustion.
Most boosters never provide lifecycle & toxicity statistics b/c it tends to run counter to their utopian narratives. What is the typical lifecycle & toxicity profile for these batteries?
Most contrarians fail to compare their detractions against alternatives such as "maintaining the status quo". Maybe batteries with hazardous chemicals in solid state form inside solid housings aren't particularly net-negative by comparison to most existing casual energy storage alternatives such as internal combustion, at least to most laypeople?
Firefox should be on that list. It's clearly a lot closer in functionality to Chrome/Chromium than Servo or Ladybird, so it's easier to switch to it. I like that Servo and Ladybird exist and are developing well, but there's no need to pretend that they're the only available alternatives.
Majority of users are on mobile now, and Firefox mobile sucks ass. I cannot bring myself to use it. Simple things like clicking the home button should take you to homepage, but Firefox opens a new tab. It's so stupid.
I use Firefox Mobile Nightly on Android and appreciate it for the dark mode extension and ad blocking. There are some issues but the benefits outweigh them for me.
I don't even have a Home button that I can see, I must have turned it off in settings? I describe my tab count using scientific notation, though, so I'd be a "new tab" guy, anyway. But I'd also be a proponent of it being configurable.
i think it's great and syncs well with my computer's firefox. i think there should be a setting to choose how to open homepage but i don't mind the extra tabs really.
Funded to the tune of a half billion dollars a year by Google to pretend there's no monopoly, and multiple announcements of them trying to reimagine themselves as an ad-company. They're the best of a bad bunch but they are definitely still part of a bad bunch
Your second point, as well as their so much criticised, especially on HN, attempts at diversification, are trying to fight your first point.
Because they're so reliable on Google funding, they're trying to do whatever they can to find alternative revenue streams. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, especially for the HN crowd.
The tools for owning your Linux OS are strong enough that anti-cheat is pointless because they're just broken all the time and nobody wants a linux box they can't control at all.
I think most people who buy Steam Decks don’t care whatsoever about Linux and would be perfectly fine with not having control over it as long as all their games worked.
I think Steam Decks wouldn't ever have existed without Linux enthusiasts as early adopters of Steam Decks and the few previous iterations of Steam + Linux either playing games on their own machines or on the previous iteration of a Steam Linux computer. If at any point it was all tied up with DRM and that complete loss of control required for anti-cheat it would have just died and not be seen again.
The only way it changes course is an enormous rug pull that removes most of the differentiation between PC and Console gaming and you end up with Steam as a dying product unable to compete with either other modes of PC gaming or the dominant console players. (Sadly that's basically what I expect when gaben retires)
The differentiation of the Steam Deck is the game ecosystem, ability to play your existing PC game library on the go, and low game costs compared to consoles during the frequent sales.
I don't think Linux is a differentiator for the Steam Deck. It's obviously essential as a technical foundation though, similar to how it’s essential to Android phones.
But locking it down with DRM won't affect gamer interest in the platform as long as the games are still cheap, plentiful, and run well.
I can imagine a world where you still have full control most of the time, but when you open a multi player game the system reboots on a clean / verified OS image. Then when you quit it can reboot in to the OS with all of your mods and customisation on.
The anti-cheats that the competitive games use rely on being able to trust that the checks they add to the kernel can't be overridden. It relies on Windows not being able to be modified to lie about that.
It's possible to change windows, just a lot harder. Unless you are talking about secure boot, but that's available to Linux just as much as to Windows.
It is about secure boot and TPM. Linux is unable to 'lie' well enough to emulate windows because it can't cryptographically verify that it is a legit windows install.
The anti cheat developers rely on Microsoft asserting that other cheats aren't loaded prior to the anti-cheat in the kernel. There is no such entity in Linux to attest that a particular linux install is not modified to load the cheats into the kernel before the anti-cheat.
Now, such an entity could be created, and a linux distro released that is signed by that entity, and then the anti-cheat could work on that distro. That would require you to only use that particular distro, though, and you would be limited in how you could change the kernel.
So far, there has not been the push needed to make that happen.
It would be virtually impossible to completely disguise the fact that you are on Linux. It’s hard enough to trick software in to thinking it’s not running in a VM.
What if they're indifferent about our existence? Would you be insecure knowing that a superior species existed that didn't think we were interesting enough to be bothered with?
As long as they don’t plan to demolish Earth to make way for an intergalactic highway (a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), we’re fine. Humans are not out to get ants, but imagine how many ant colonies we have destroyed to build our highways. Indifference does not preclude a threat.
Assuming this becomes easier and cheaper to do as the technique matures, a different use of this could be to help with cooling solar PV cells. Despite it being desirable (in terms of overall energy output) to put solar panels in places where the sun's energy is felt the strongest, solar panels tend to work the most efficiently when they're cool. By making it easier to efficiently cool solar PV cells, it may help provide a small boost in overall solar output.
Putting on my frowny-faced principal engineer hat: we need someone to do the calculation of cost of manufacturing vs the amount of money saved by increasing energy efficiency.
Heh, my glasses were actually quite dirty when I wrote that.
More seriously: I did see that, and your idea is interesting! My intent was to communicate the minimum threshold we would need to hit to make that future a reality.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, that is largely what Behringer is known for, affordable clones of more expensive gear. It's not everything they do, but it's a decent chunk of it. I'm glad they produce audio gear for the masses.
That is one way to look at them. The other is more akin to a parasite, wait for small companies to invest and innovate and once a product is proven in the marketplace, copy it.
I don't really want to judge them, cheap music gear is certainly good for consumers but talking to small manufacturers over many years I've yet to meet anyone who likes them.
If anything smaller players are now extremely careful to open source stuff exactly because of them.
Many of those instruments are based on 40 to 50 year old designs. They've released products that were simply not in the market anymore, or second-hand at exorbitant prices. That's not parasitic. Their production processes might not stand up to scrutiny, though.
> If anything smaller players are now extremely careful to open source stuff exactly because of them.
That's the problem with all open source. If you open source something good, someone else is going to run with it.
Well, they’re also known for cloning newer devices, such as (which I didn’t realize until recently) the Korg Volca line, which were already rather cheap devices to begin with. I admit that I don’t know the exact details on those devices from Behringer apart from small snippets I’ve seen popping up in videos and perhaps they’re adding something new to it, but they sure seem very similar to the Volca designs.
The vast majority of the time, they're not cloning devices from small companies, they're cloning classic devices from large companies. The types of devices that have had their prices artificially increased due to demand from collectors.
> I never understood why the Revenue can't provide a set of simple online forms for tax returns like India does.
Did you read the article? The TL;DR summary is that the US government has proposed doing this in the past, but has been lobbied against it by companies that seek to profit from software to help prepare tax returns.
The software behind Firefox can still continue without Mozilla. It may have fewer developers due to reduced funding but I'd rather see slower development if it was moving in the right direction.