Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
The Mozilla Corporation announced today it was laying off approximately 250 staff members in a move to shore up the organization's financial future.
The layoffs were publicly announced in a blog post today. Employees were notified hours before, earlier this morning, via an email [PDF] sent by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation Chairwoman.
Baker's message cited the organization's need to adapt its finances to a post-COVID-19 world and re-focus the organization on new commercial services.
[...] In 2018, the Mozilla Corporation said it had around 1,000 full-time employees worldwide. Mozilla previously laid off 70 employees in January. Several sources have told ZDNet that the recent layoffs accounted for nearly a quarter of the organization's workforce.
Main casualties of today's layoffs were the developers working on the company's experimental Servo browser engine and Mozilla's threat management security team. The latter is the security team that investigates security reports and performs incident response. The security team that fixes bugs in Mozilla products is still in place, according to sources and a Mozilla spokesperson.
Changing World, Changing Mozilla
Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.
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Rust Core Team + Mozilla To Create A Rust Foundation
Rust's core team and Mozilla are announcing plans to create a Rust foundation with the hopes of establishing this legal entity by year's end. The trademarks and related assets of Rust, Cargo, and Crates.io will belong to this foundation. Work is well underway on establishing this foundation with originally coming to the idea of possibly creating an independent Rust foundation last year, now pushed along by the recent Mozilla layoffs and the global pandemic. This should allow the Rust community more safety rather than being reliant upon a sole organization (Mozilla) and help foster growth and open up new possibilities.
Lay(off)ing the foundation for Rust's future
Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Related: Linus Torvalds: Don't Hide Rust in Linux Kernel; Death to AVX-512
Co-founder of Netscape (formerly Mosaic Communications Corporation) and of Mozilla.org, Jamie Zawinski, has some brief comments about the current situation with Mozilla and its browser.
Back to Mozilla -- in my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
And they just completely threw in the towel on standards when they grabbed their ankles and allowed W3C to add DRM. At this point, I assume Mozilla's voice on the standards committees has all the world-trembling gravitas of "EFF writes amicus brief."
By the way, one dynamic that the cited article missed is that a huge part of the reason for Google's "investment" in Mozilla was not just to drive search traffic -- it was antitrust insurance. Mozilla continuing to exist made Chrome not be the only remaining web browser, and that kept certain wolves at bay.
Google has decided that they don't need to buy antitrust insurance any more. Wonder why.
Firefox 83 Released With Warp'ed JavaScript, HTTPS-Only Mode Option
Most notable with Firefox 83 is the SpiderMonkey "Warp" upgrade aiming to deliver better website responsiveness and other real-world JavaScript performance improvements. Mozilla describes the Warp benefits as "improved page load performance by up to 15%, page responsiveness by up to 12%, and reduced memory usage by up to 8%. We have replaced part of the JavaScript engine that helps to compile and display websites for you, improving security and maintainability of the engine at the same time."
Firefox 83 also ships with an option for an HTTPS-only mode whereby every Firefox connection aims to be secure and will warn the user should HTTPS not be supported.
Mozilla Punts Servo Web Engine Development To The Linux Foundation
Ever since the mass layoffs at Mozilla earlier this year and some Mozilla projects in jeopardy many have been wondering: what about Servo? Well, today it's heading off to the Linux Foundation.
Mozilla and the Linux Foundation are jointly announcing this morning that the Servo web engine development will now be hosted by the Linux Foundation.
The Rust-written code-base that's served as a long in development "next-gen" web engine at Mozilla will now be developed under the Linux Foundation umbrella. Besides Mozilla, this move has the support of other industry stakeholders like Samsung and Let's Encrypt.
See also: Firefox 84 Beta Begins Enabling WebRender By Default On Linux
Chrome 87 Released With More Performance Improvements
Google Is Already Experimenting With WebP2 As Successor To WebP Image Format
Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Following Layoffs, Mozilla and Core Rust Developers Are Forming a Rust Foundation
Mozilla Announces "Open Web Docs" Following Last Year's Layoffs
Last year during the big round of layoffs at Mozilla the entire Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) writers team was laid off. That was a particularly sad blow considering how valuable the MDN documentation has been to web developers as a very useful resource. Today the Mozilla folks are announced Open Web Docs in seemingly looking to have the community take over.
Following those unfortunate layoffs last summer, they exposed all of the Mozilla Developer Network documentation to GitHub. Now they are announcing the Open Web Docs organization.
"Open Web Docs (OWD) is an open collective, created in collaboration between several key MDN partner organizations to ensure the long-term health of open web platform documentation on de facto standard resources like MDN Web Docs, independently of any single vendor or organization. It will do this by collecting funding to finance writing staff and helping manage the communities and processes that will deliver on present and future documentation needs," was written on the Mozilla Hacks blog.
Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Following Layoffs, Mozilla and Core Rust Developers Are Forming a Rust Foundation
A Pretty Dire Assessment of Mozilla
Firefox 83 Released; Mozilla Kicks Rusty "Servo" Web Engine to the Linux Foundation
(Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Thursday August 13 2020, @06:03AM (38 children)
Laying off the threat management team instead of, say, whoever has been pushing unnecessary, unwanted, and detrimental UI changes onto Firefox, or whoever it was who was squandering money on diversity/inclusivity programs, is probably the death knell for this company. Pity, they used to make a really good web browser, and we'll be far worse off in the increasing browser mono-culture.
(Score: 3, Touché) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 13 2020, @06:15AM (21 children)
It started life as a crippled version of what is still the best browser [seamonkey-project.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Funny) by Arik on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:07AM (18 children)
I'm not sure exactly when SeaMonkey started, but it took off about the time the stripped down customizable web browser got even more bloated than Navigator.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:11AM (1 child)
Lol, "Nutscrape Navigator".
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:25PM
I'm old enough to remember that one. Nutscrape and its MS counterpart Internut Exploder.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:18AM (15 children)
No, it started as the stripped down, customizable browser only alternative to Nutscrape Navigator
Yes, that's what I said. Netscape is Seamonkey, and there is no denying that it is still the best ever. I've tried the rest, they all suck. Firefox was always lame. It was never really any faster than the full Mozilla suite. And now it's just a Chrome Look-a-like. Why not just use Chrome? What does Firefox offer?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:35AM (6 children)
I must disagree.
It became lame about version 4. It became totally lame when they abandoned version numbers and started with the marketing numbers. So roughly 10 years ago.
At this point it's an object history in how not to manage a software project.
The people who need to learn their lesson, won't.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:38AM (4 children)
:-) But, we still have Seamonkey. So all is well
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:43AM (3 children)
Doesn't that depend on Gecko?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 13 2020, @10:29AM (1 child)
The nice thing with Open Source is that if the original developer fails to deliver, others can take over.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:27PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:27PM
It could depend on PFM, as long as it works... Really it's the stability of its interface and options that keep me hooked. Cookie manager could use some work though. And bookmarking, you know who had the absolute best bookmarking? Internet Explorer, it just stored a shortcut to the page on your disk. It was perfect. I could manage them in a regular window like any other file. Using a database is stupid and kludgy
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @06:39PM
It was originally an independent project to strip off the bloat of using javascript and html/xml markup to generate the user interface running on top of... either gtk 1.x or very early 2.x in order to have cross platform compatibility. It was fast with a small memory footprint, and the initial source of tabs on Netscape/Mozilla Browser (they were still using the browser window paradigm where each open page was its own window).
The switch to XUL happened after the project had become popular and they offered the developer a job, before moving someone else in to manage the project, then start pushing the XUL crap on firefox as well (( think they started with the interpreted garbage that had made the post-Mozilla browser suite so slow, but were working on the JIT javascript support around that time.) End result was the customizable and plugin friendly Firefox that we all accidentally pitched to our friends because most of us were still using the native widget client with none of the XUL overhead. Then systems jumped up in memory and cpu performance during the late p4/athlon xp and early core2/athlon64 era and most of the people who hated xul finally switched because there wasn't a compelling reason not to. As an aside: If i remember correctly, there were a lot of xul related exploits during that time, which firefox avoided, while general javascript/media handling exploits worked on both, but generally didn't get as far on firefox. XUL changed all that for the worse.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:43AM
Mosaic? A pattern made of differently colored stone fragments, set in a mortar matrix, and ground into a flat floor-like surface. Netscape? A scape of nets? Or the rogue rip-off off Stanford graduate students, same as it ever was. And then, the Dark Lord, Internet Exploder, come to blow you up and destroy network standards and protocols. And finally, Mozilla! Risen from the dead, prepared to return battle to the Dark Lord, who in Redmond lies. Or, not so much. And now, after the Mormon-Catholic anti-gay and trans and democrat and cowboy thing, we have come to this. Obligatory XKCD [soylentnews.org]" rel="url2html-20493">https://xkcd.com/1022/">XKCD Will no one think of the children? Where are the standards? Why do I not have extensions to nuke advertisers and trackers to the Sixth Level of Dante's Inferno? Even the Pale Moon has paled as a browser, in favor of the whores and mercenaries, and Betsy DeVoses, of the internet. Good luck, humanity!
(Score: 4, Funny) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:33AM
A powerful argument to choose Seamonkey.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:40PM
To me it is still better than Chrome, if only in the way it handles bookmarks...though it sure isn't as good as it used to be. I'm not quite sure which "threat management" team they've fired, but it doesn't sound good. Thinking that it handled threat management better than SeaMonkey did was the only thing in its favor.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:16PM (3 children)
I like SeaMonkey's speed, reliability, and low resource usage, but I have the visual design. Too much screen space is wasted! I've fallen in love with qutebrowser, not just because of good vi-like keybinds, but because it doesn't waste half the space on the screen putting big ass buttons that I don't use everywhere.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:32PM (2 children)
Too much screen space is wasted!
Try F11
low resource usage
*cough* Say whaaa?!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:00PM (1 child)
Seamonkey used something like 1/4 the RAM of Firefox or chrome last time I checked. I had to open a bunch of tabs to get to more than 1G.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @07:45AM
It's probably a single process, would make sense based on your 1/4 measure, because FF forks 4 worker processes on my system. FF and Chrome fork() with your ram, maaan!
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday August 14 2020, @09:59PM
Firefox still offers a large number of add-ons and greater controls over your browsing experience in a readily available browser. Seamonkey is still not available in default Ubuntu repositories. Iceape and Iceweasel (forks of Seamonkey) used to be but I don't think they even exist any more. I don't know how Seamonkey ranks with add-ons, I have not used it at all since I disconnected my Windows PC from the internet in 2007 or so.
Firefox seems to keep following the Yahoo internet strategy path so I expect it to sadly become a non-viable option at some point, but it still is light years better than Chrome.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:10AM
I think that the guys developing FF extensions, gecko based browsers, and the new rust engine, should consider mozilla a zombie and start supporting forks as they were the main versions.
No need to invest. Use IPFS/zeronet/torrents as the zero cost massive distribution network, the end.
Seamonkey has the right UX philosophy: the UI is familiar, therefore change as little as possible. Waterfox has been bought, so it depends on what the new owners want.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:20AM
It started life with a team of skilled and competent developers, and then those developers left and went on to work on Chrome/Chromium. Which explains a lot, really.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100310155025/https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/09/sun-valley-schmidt-didnt-want-to-build-chrome-initially-he-says/ [archive.org]
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Informative) by driverless on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:27AM (7 children)
They only needed to lay off one person, Asa Dotzler, years ago. Instead, they're busy laying off the people who are actually doing something useful for Firefox.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:42AM (4 children)
She does do something useful: brings in those big donations that pays her and the other top brass's salaries. Until that changes or there is a big enough public outcry, no one who can actually do anything about it will care to replace her or the rest of them.
(Score: 3, Funny) by tedd on Thursday August 13 2020, @10:26AM (3 children)
Asa Dotzler is male. Get the right person to hate.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:35PM (1 child)
So not this Asa? https://search.aol.com/aol/image?q=asa&s_it=searchtabs&v_t=na [aol.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:41PM
Duh...gender fluidity is one of Mozilla's favorite employee qualities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:46PM
I know an Asa that is female, so I guess I assumed his gender.
Regardless, I don't "hate" Asa. I'm just pointing out how big nonprofits like that work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:16PM
They should have canned the parasitic executive management instead of people who do actual work.
These clowns cost Mozilla millions of dollars per year and provide negative value. I never understood why having a layer of folks who do not understand anything about the work the organization does, have less education (MBA collage making* doesn't count) than the folks they control, and have the intelligence of turnips as the decision makers is such a popular model in business.
> The average Mozilla executive compensation is $213,745 a year. The median estimated compensation for executives at Mozilla including base salary and bonus is $210,217, or $101 per hour. At Mozilla, the most compensated executive makes $427,000...
* I once walked in on a friend who attended an Ivy League business school gluing together magazine clippings into a collage as an assignment for her MBA!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:24PM
+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1
It started there and went downhill ever faster as the "User eXperience" team expanded.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:09AM (1 child)
Somewhere, Brendan Eich is smiling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2020, @10:28AM
Because he infected our browser with DRM?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:51AM
The death-knell for that company was when the majority of their higher ups, especially marketing, began using Chrome as their browser of choice.
As far as UI/UX changes in Firefox and certain other FLOSS projects are concerned, that's down to activist coders who've decided to blot out everything originally introduced by "the wrong people." Not by some kind of concerted effort mind you, but as an inevitable result of their all too modern mode of thinking.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:39PM (3 children)
"They hired 20 people that aren't white cis men for six months! Reverse discrimination!!!!!! It's ruining Mozilla!!!!!" Mozilla Foundation demographics before the layoffs was 75% male, 75% white, 15% Asian-descent. It's not like they've turned white cis men into an oppressed minority. But keep being a crybaby about it, I'm sure your opinion is very important.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @07:56AM (2 children)
You know what? There are times when it's best to stay calm and don't panic. We have a clear proof that what Mozilla did was not the right move and a bunch of dedicated users complaining about Mozilla having ruined a great browser. When a giant monopoly jumps in, with an even greater position than that of your previous foe, it will naturally show a huge change on the numbers. What gained Firefox usage in the war against IE was crowsourced advertising, not an attempt to copy IE. The reason people started using Chrome was not because it was better, they were being spoonfed Chrome through Google's market dominance. Now it's too late to use the old trick of community advertising, because the browser now suck compared to Chrome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @11:46AM (1 child)
Firefox was much faster and more stable than IE. That's one of the reasons everyone switched. Chrome was dramatically faster than Firefox until Firefox 57, which is relatively recent, and even then the gap only narrowed but did not go away. That's one of the reasons, though not the only one, that people switched to Chrome.
And the people complaining about changes? All available evidence it's a vocal minority, because more than a hundred people switched to Chrome before Firefox changed anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @09:33PM
Are you a satisfied Firefox user?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:31PM
The whole inclusion/diversity shtick began in Yakima, WA: (https://www.yakimawa.gov/)
If it were nuked from orbit, the world would be a much better place, as would the tech industry.
(Score: -1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:09AM (18 children)
for Outreachy, that sexist and racist program?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:43PM (17 children)
Mozilla had 1,000 full time employees, and Outreachy funds 20 interns for six months per year. Mozilla full time employee demographics are 75% white and 75% male. 7% of the employees total are black, Native American, or Latinx.
But tell me again how Outreachy is the cause of Mozilla's problems and the reverse discrimination is oppressing white men.
Jesus Christ, I hate the tech industry. You all make me ashamed to be a white man, a member of the biggest bunch of whiners on the planet.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:49PM (2 children)
Wtf is a Latinx? Is that like a crossbreed of a Latina and a Lynx? How do I get one?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @06:19PM
No, silly. It's one of the new starter Pokemon!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:43PM
>> Wtf is a Latinx?
It's the new politically-correct name for wetbax.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:34PM (1 child)
Your sanctimonious virtue signaling here still isn't going to get you laid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:33PM
Thanks for playing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:49PM (10 children)
You don't seem to realize how toxic these types of outreach programs are. Anytime you let someone in based on different criteria, the other people start looking down on, start dismissing, and get aggressive towards everyone who matches the group of the people let in with easier criteria. It's a "I worked hard to get here while they just let you in for metrics, so you must not be any good. Go away and let me do the real work." mindset that happens over and over again everywhere because we're all human. The resentment slowly builds, the work environment becomes passive aggressive, and the new people leave the field entirely thinking it's full of assholes.
If a business wants more of a certain group of people then they should work on educating that group of people so there's more of them who'll get through the same hiring process. But of course that takes more work, more money, and there's a lag time for the effects to kick in. Doing anything which looks like it could be token hirings just makes everyone else resentful for the new guys' special status whether true or not. That's simply how human nature works and it's a self-fulfilling downward spiral. You can't fix an industry by doing things like this.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:07PM (9 children)
Outreachy is an internship program. They aren't hiring and promoting unqualified full time employees to fill diversity quotas, they're getting 20 interns in two three month periods per year. It's literally 2% of their work force, and the most junior people in the work force. That sounds like "educating that group of people so there's more of them who'll get through the same hiring process" to me. What's the problem?
Further, the assholes who look down on people who they perceive as getting unfair advantages are blind to their own unfair advantages. My college computer science class had 60 students, and 57 were white men. Do you think that helped me feel comfortable, and feel like I could succeed, when I was a nervous freshman struggling in CS101? You bet your ass it did. If the classroom was me and 57 black guys, or 57 Indian women, would I have persisted when the course work got too hard? Hell no, I would have given up. I barely squeaked by as it is. At my first job after college all the execs and 90% of the engineering department were white men. Would I have felt as comfortable in the interview and the work environment if it was a building full of Latino men? Hell no again. Jesus, I even bombed CS101 interview questions in one job interview speaking to a white guy who just had an English accent. That's how much of a crutch my comfort with other white men is. So here I am, a 40-something white man making six figures in the tech industry specifically because white men dominated the tech industry 20 years ago. I wouldn't be here without that unfair advantage.
Tell all your acquaintances that look down on Outreachy interns to sneer at me too - and if they want to eject the people in those programs from the industry, they should also track down every white guy in the industry who wouldn't be here if the entire industry demographics were, say, all Japanese 20 years ago and eject all those white guys too. Funny thing is, I bet most of the people looking to torpedo Outreachy would be on that list. Every successful person had tons of unfair advantages, all the diversity programs do is spread them around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @12:18AM (3 children)
Take your politically correct white punk ass to India, or China, or anywhere in the world, and see if you can get a job. When you've accomplished something like that, we might listen to your whining. Until then, you're just another self-loathing white fuck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @08:13AM
How would you categorize yourself, if I may ask?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @12:24PM (1 child)
Funny how "political correct" means "easily offended" but you're the one upset at the suggestion you might have had an unfair advantage. Which one of us is the whining one?
The point is that in the US when I went to school, white men were just under 40% of the population and 90% of the tech industry. I wouldn't expect to fit in as a student or job applicant in India or China, because it would be pretty normal for the classroom or company work force to be at least 95% Indian or Chinese, respectively. But in the US, if you were someone that wasn't a white guy trying to get into tech you felt like a fish out of water in the classroom and in the workforce, and that gave white guys an unfair edge. Most of us are oblivious to the edge because it's not the kind of thing we consciously think about it. But it still exists, and we unconsciously benefit.
There are people that have the raw talent or just the sheer grit to get into the industry despite the obstacles. That includes most of the women in the industry in the US today, and most of the non-whites, and a good portion of the white guys in the industry too. But it's not everyone. Of the 57 white guys in my college CS classes, I knew 10 or so that breezed through the course work. They probably would have succeeded no matter what. And 10 or 20 washed out. But of the remaining 30 or so, how many of us would have succeeded if we felt out of place in the classroom? I don't know, but I guarantee it's less than 30.
You want to shut diversity programs down? Kick me and millions of others like me out of the industry too. It's only fair way to tackle the situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @03:31PM
How 'bout we put cardboard cutouts of non-white males in the classroom, so that non-white male students don't get "scared away"? Would that help assuage your obsession about the sex and race of the other students?
I did study in China, and the race and origin of the other students and the people on the street didn't matter a shit to me. I was there to study a program I had chosen, and that was that. But I am from an older generation that still believed we were all equal regardless of sex and race.
In the US, there weren't many white women in my CS classes. But there were many more among the Chinese and Indians. Society wasn't pushing CS. Nobody was forced to enroll. Apparently foreign cultures were more accepting of their daughters doing CS. And once we got through, we got jobs in industry for around $40k and went to work.
When did we in America turn into a country where it seems self-loathing pussies are dominating the narrative? We are expected to be competitive like that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @08:10AM (4 children)
Why on earth would that influence you ability to study? I don't get it. Is it because you think the black are out to get you "with their gangster attitudes" or is it the indian women who distract you with their bollywood dancing and singing? You were in a room with 57 other people, I'm not saying your should be that awful excusist "colorblind" thing, where apparently we are only equal if we don't have colors, but they're just people, where they are born, their gender or color why would that matter at all?
Don't get me wrong I get it you had social issues, so do I, so severe that I can't have a regular job because it gives me anxiety and stress.. but my social issues are colorblind.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @11:56AM (3 children)
It has nothing to do with them being "out to get me" or distracting me with ethnic activities. It has to do with feeling like I fit in, and having the confidence that I've got the intelligence and persistence to learn what I need to know. When the whole educational program is full of people with backgrounds basically identical to mine, who look like me, and have a ton of shared experiences, then I'm constantly thinking, "Hey, if they can do it, so can I?" Conversely, if the room is full of people who seem very different than me, then just because most of them can understand the lesson and complete the programming assignments doesn't necessarily mean that I can do it too. I wouldn't feel as comfortable asking a classmate for help, or tutoring (which is something I did do with some of my white male classmates, and it made a big difference).
I don't have any such concerns now because I'm comfortable established. I'm not a nervous 18 year old kid struggling to understand what variable assignments or programming language expressions mean, worried if I have what it takes to succeed, and nervous what my classmates think of me. So hopefully my treatment of peers, managers, and junior staff at work is colorblind in all of the good ways. But as a beginner it mattered, and being a white guy in classrooms full of white guys (including 7 of the 8 professors in the department) helped.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @05:30PM (1 child)
So you weren't properly socialized as a child, and are less comfortable around people who don't look like you. That's a good argument for enforced diversity in K-12.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Friday August 14 2020, @10:41PM
Maybe that is the case for him, but it is far more difficult to push that diversity where people live than where they work. My mother was a freaking George Wallace (the Trump of his day, targeting the same demographic) supporter. My experiences with people who looked different than me (let alone those from other cultures) were very limited and my views were tainted by my parents and others I knew. Going off to college was a real eye opener, although it took years for some of those lessons to take root. Mostly I learned that most of what I was taught to believe about people, either consciously or unconsciously, was just bullshit. After decades in the workforce I have definitely learned race, sex, etc. doesn't mean squat, it is what a person is willing and capable of learning that matters.
I think the point the GP was making is that most minorities breaking into professions dominated by a single majority group have a lot of questions they have to ask (and answer) themselves above and beyond that of the established group, and their successes and failures are as a result subject to much more internal pressure on their own belief of whether or not they are capable of success. The less confident and most borderline in the established group are far more likely to succeed anyway than those in minority groups as they do not face that extra pressure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @09:47PM
Okay, that makes more sense to me. I have never felt like I belonged in any group, so perhabs that is why I had difficulties understanding. It's not like im sad about that fact and perhabs there is some hacker community out there where I feel like I belong and that would be great, but I'm also quite happy working alone hacking away on stuff I find interesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @02:02AM
Oppress white men? Hah! They don't oppress white men. They gaslight them.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:15AM
axing servo = we have closed down shop.
OK mozilla is dead, ex servo team pls do a patreon or a go fund me and keep working on the thing. Brave browser people, consider helping out, depending on webkit is a perfect tactical move but strategically problematic.
If they axed servo, then servo was good.
Monocultures are inherently bad and apple has been playing the part of the fake alternative (that is, the alternative that is content to stay that way) so it's still a monoculture.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by petecox on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:19AM (6 children)
As Linus once said, security bugs are just bugs. So having a separate task force away from the programmers that originally wrote the bugs isn't necessarily good management. If they fix their own stuff, they might be less prone to introducing new issues.
I'm not surprised Servo isn't receiving love. Quantum folded in the cool bits and there's too much inertia from Gecko to replace it.
Mobile is set for a renewal with GeckoView, where they've thrown out the existing Fennec code.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:06AM (5 children)
Good QA needs a separate review/triage team because the people that wrote the code often can't see the remaining bugs, which is why those bugs still exist. Writers need editors for exactly the same reason. 'Many eyes' isn't just a slogan, it is a core part of good engineering.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:26AM (4 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:59PM (1 child)
Still, you often need someone else to show you what you wrote instead of seeing what you meant to write.
I don't know about you, but it is really easy for me to read code as how I imagine I wrote it instead of how it is.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @02:38PM
Sure, which is why you have to keep going over it until you figure out where you screwed up. Handing that job over to someone else does nothing to improve either your debugging skills or your coding skills. Sometimes the best thing to do is put it aside for a day and approach it with fresh eyes and a fresh mind.
It might be inefficient at first, because it would be quicker to give it to someone else, but in the long run, you broke it, you fix it is cheaper.
People learn from their mistakes. Do something right 100 times, you learned nothing. Do it wrong once and fix it, you learned something. Have someone else fix it, what have you learned?
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:25PM (1 child)
FTFY
The GP comment was about finding the bugs you didn't know you wrote. (That includes finding the bugs in code that perfectly implements the specs, which had a mistake.)
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:07PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:39AM
They just renewed their deal with Google to put Google search as the default browser for another 3 years. Google probably tossed them the bone just to avoid antitrust issues. So, if you're going to get paid despite declining market share, why not lay off most of the developers - your REAL customer - Google - doesn't give a shit if you put it into maintenance mode. They'll still pay you to give the illusion of competition.
Too bad the developers of lynx are links can't get some of that bs pseudo-antitrust cash.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @06:30PM (7 children)
Please don't let Pale Moon go away!!! Dumped Mozilla Firefox for it when they started the nonsense with Pocket.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday August 14 2020, @11:39AM (6 children)
There's also Waterfox.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Friday August 14 2020, @08:14PM (3 children)
Is there an alternative that didn't toss the useful addons, but still has the newer "theme"? I understand how a lot of folks hates australis and not having a choice about it. Australis doesn't have theme-able eye-candy like some of the old themes I liked, but I like how easy it is to remove the icons I don't use, keep ones I do, and intentionally hiding semi-useful ones in the overflow. But I've never found a replacement for half the addons that used to help be me work efficiently.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:17PM (2 children)
Waterfox classic still supports old-type add-ons. I've not been following closely the names of all the different UI versions, so I can't say whether it is Australis or not, but you definitely can move/remove the icons. It's based on the last version of Firefox before disabling the old-type extensions.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Saturday August 15 2020, @08:55PM (1 child)
Thanks. Waterfox looks right. Now to see if I can find my old addons anymore. Their link to wayback doesn't allow searching.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 16 2020, @09:56AM
Try the extension "Classic Add-Ons Archive". [github.com]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @11:17PM (1 child)
Not a proper fork.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday August 15 2020, @05:03AM
Waterfox Classic is a fork of Firefox 56 (the last version before Quantum). It's getting about the level of updates I would expect from one guy trying to maintain a fork of a modern browser, but it's still usable for most things despite essentially being an outdated version of Firefox - at least for the time being.
Waterfox Current is a patched and rebuilt version of Firefox, which is what Waterfox started out as.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:28PM (2 children)
Really, none of the alternative browsers seem worth using at this point, but in my experience Falkon does *most* things right. For some reason I cannot get it to work on sites like imgur or reddit, but that may be just my attempt at locking it down.
Much like how no one runs Windows for Windows itself but for the applications, I only keep Firefox around for certain plugins, uBlock Origin being the big one. If the Falkon devs port that, and perhaps replace their inbuilt ad-blocker with it, it will go a long way to making the browser usable. The underlying rendering engine is essentially Chrome anyway.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Teckla on Friday August 14 2020, @05:55PM
The so-called "alternative browsers" are always behind on security patches -- sometimes dangerously behind. It doesn't seem like a good idea to use any of them -- and that includes Falkon.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 20 2020, @02:26AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.