The Vent and Rant Thread

[Rumpelteazer]

A tiny rant:

Today I've given up on my desktop computer. I pretty much already had, I only used it when I needed to use my plotter. Today I switched it on and doing the updates is too much for it, it overheats. I could probably get some life out of it by opening it up and cleaning it. But as I said, I had already given up on it. Using my laptop for my plotter isn't a huge problem, just a bit of an inconvenience. I do want to new desktop computer. A nice a powerful one that can play games and is good with photo software and last me a long while. It will just have to wait until after my vacation in January; until then it'll be the expensive time of the year.

I use this as an opportunity to rearrange my desk space to be more practical for crafting. Over the past year I have acquired a couple of new toys and I have hardly any work space left.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

We thought it was. Kvetch dramatically did not. She was older neutered female, quite set in her ways, and did not appreciate the kitten.

Do they ever? When we acquired Storm, she already lived in the same house with Zep. They were housemates. He was too young to leave, so--stupidly--as she was a quasi-rescue, adult, I took her, two weeks BEFORE he was able to come to our casa. How'd she act, when he showed up? Holy Mackeral Annie, it was as though aliens had arrived. I was nonplussed, to say the least; I had thought that his recognizable scent would ameliorate the ubiquitous cat-territory issues. WRONG.

Dizzy was quite baffled when we fell over laughing when Dazzle did the same thing to him.

Cats are uniquely attuned to being laughed at--and they do NOT like it.

Count your blessings. There are an assortment of photos posted to Reddit's AWW forum, reserved for cute animal pictures, of cats who decide thtn when their human is sitting on the potty, their place to be is curled up inside the human's pulled down pants, looking up with a quizzical "Whatcha doin' person? Huh? Taking a big poo?" expression.

Well...suffice to say that that phenomenon is not unknown to me. Zep's tried to climb on my lap, during poo. He's tried to stick his head down into the toilet, behind my coccyx. (That's an interesting feeling!). Storm, fortunately, just wants to see--Zep's more of an "immersed experience" kind of guy. ;-)

They love you, and want to be where you are, regardless of where that happens to be. I had a cat once that would hop into the tub and swim around when a human was taking a bath.


Yep.
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Dennis

Our male MC has to have his several-times-daily "showers." If you're in the kitchen, at the sink, he'll serenade you LOUDLY until you sprinkle him with water. A LOT. The shower? He has to come in and hang out, once you're (mostly) done. He'll lie in the tub, when you run water. (You have to pay attention, and make sure that you haven't used anything like bath oils, etc.). He LOVES water. It's an MC thing, common in the breed.

I had a friend who suggested that I address a behavioral issue with him (he wants me to GET THE FRACK UP in the early mornings...) by spritzing him with water. Talk about fall about laughing, that would be the sure way to reinforce the behavior with Himself. In fact, I have yet to find an effective discipline medium that he recognizes; he simply seems oblivious to the idea that he could actually be in trouble, or have done something wrong. I've never dealt with an animal like this one; it's just...bizarre.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

And if this wasn't enough (with regard to TypeScript):

A browser obviously cannot execute it, because it's not Javascript. Therefore Microsoft supplies a compiler, to translate typescript into Javascript. However... that compiler is written in TypeScript.

As there's no way to execute that compiler, you're stuck with a chicken and egg situation. So what do you do? Write a Node.JS package (thus, in Javascript) that can run the compiler.

Are you still with me?

It's worse than you know.

JavaScript is a "batteries not included" language, with only primitives. To do anything it it, you need to use libraries. There are an enormous number, and the ones that are popular went through a Darwinian selection process.

JavaScript was first written for Netscape Navigator 2. Creator Brendan Eich commented "If it hadn't been JavaScript, you would have gotten something much worse later!" The first fun part was the name. Eich wanted to call it LiveScript, but someone in Netscape marketing decided to name it JavaScript, to capitalize on the popularity of the then new Java language created by Dr. James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. (I have lost count of the number of times I've had to explain to people that Java and JavaScript are two different languages, whose only similarity is "Java" in the name... )

Another problem is that it was made an ECMA standard rather before it was mature enough to be standardized, and Eich has described arm-wrestling sessions at ECMA standards meetings to get agreement from stakeholders on just what will go into the next ECMAscript standards update.

Meanwhile, it's appearing in all sorts of places that have nothing to do with the web or browsers. Adobe PDF viewer, for instance, embeds an ECMAscript variant called ActionScript (turned off by default, thank $DEITY), that can be used to add interactivity to PDFs.

Coffeescript and Typescript are syntactic sugar. They are supersets of JavaScript designed to add desirable features, like types, and as you mentioned, they compile to standard JavaScript. Needing a compiler to do that shouldn't come as a surprise. You need a compiler for C/C++. The difference there is that compilation is to object code.

But the whole process is a matter of "What's old is new again." When Bjarne Stroustrup created C++, the original implementation was on Unix. C++ code was "compiled" to standard C by the cfront translator, and the C was compiled to Assembler by cc, assembled to object code by as, and linked into an executable binary by ld. (You could halt the process after the compilation to assembler stage, and go in and hand-optimize the assembler code before assembling and linking.)

C++ compiling to native code came rather later. I asked about that at a Unix user group meeting where Bjarne was a speaker, and he said we already had a portable intermediate language called C, and it made sense in the early days to just compile to it while other things caught up.

Another milestone was GCC, which separated the front-end language translator from the backend code generator. The front end translator compiles to an intermediate format the back end code generator turns into object code for the target system. This makes it possible for GCC to compile Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Objective-C, Objective C++, and Go for whatever target architectures are supported.

Increasingly, we are seeing JavaScript as the intermediate form that will be compiled to object code, and one of the things the latest ECMAscript standards revision did was add support for that. It's a pretty fair bet that down the road, everything will compile to JavaScript as an intermediate step.

And browsers already do compile JavaScript to native code. In the ongoing quest for speed, all of the major browsers have implemented JIT compilation for JavaScript to native code for faster execution. Mozilla got bit by that a while back. They had a JIT JavaScript compiler, and it produced fast native code, but overall performance still lagged. The issue was that were were many times when it was fastest overall to just interpret the JavaScript instead of compiling and executing, but their JavaScript engine wasn't smart enough about when that was, and was adding the overhead of compilation when it should have just interpreted.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Do they ever? When we acquired Storm, she already lived in the same house with Zep. They were housemates. He was too young to leave, so--stupidly--as she was a quasi-rescue, adult, I took her, two weeks BEFORE he was able to come to our casa. How'd she act, when he showed up? Holy Mackeral Annie, it was as though aliens had arrived. I was nonplussed, to say the least; I had thought that his recognizable scent would ameliorate the ubiquitous cat-territory issues. WRONG.

Kittens tend to get accepted quickly enough by existing (female) cats because they are kittens. (Male cats seem to have "I'm not trained for this!" reactions and back away hurriedly. Females just go "You need wash", and hold down the kitten to apply it.)

Kvetch had simply been neutered and the only cat in the household for too long. It was amusing when I first introduced them. I got a filthy "What's this? Since when are you bringing home things you find in the gutter?" look from Kvetch.

Cats are uniquely attuned to being laughed at--and they do NOT like it.

Dizzy simply didn't understand it.

Our male MC has to have his several-times-daily "showers." If you're in the kitchen, at the sink, he'll serenade you LOUDLY until you sprinkle him with water. A LOT. The shower? He has to come in and hang out, once you're (mostly) done. He'll lie in the tub, when you run water. (You have to pay attention, and make sure that you haven't used anything like bath oils, etc.). He LOVES water. It's an MC thing, common in the breed.

Yeah, Maine Coons like water.

Tigers love it. Zoos participating in big cat breeding programs have discovered that the way to go was give each cat a dedicated keeper, and a favorite recreation was to jump into the pool with their keeper and frolic. Zoos insert humans into the cat's social structures early. It reaches a point where a female will mate and give birth, and shortly after turn the kittens over to a keeper. "I did my job and gave birth. Now you take over!"

I had a friend who suggested that I address a behavioral issue with him (he wants me to GET THE FRACK UP in the early mornings...) by spritzing him with water. Talk about fall about laughing, that would be the sure way to reinforce the behavior with Himself. In fact, I have yet to find an effective discipline medium that he recognizes; he simply seems oblivious to the idea that he could actually be in trouble, or have done something wrong. I've never dealt with an animal like this one; it's just...bizarre.

Well of course he's oblivious to the idea he might be in trouble. He's lord of creation. Rules apply to lesser beings.
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Dennis

[Cinisajoy]

The only silly thing one cat we had did was ride shoulders and get on top of doors. Now she would not get on mom's shoulders. Could be she couldn't get on top of doors from mom's shoulders.

How the shoulder thing started was we had two kittens Maybe (maybe she will make it, maybe she won't) and Me Too (when you paid attention to Maybe, Me Too would come up and essentially say Me too, so that is what we named her. Maybe was two weeks old when we got her, Me Too was 6 weeks old. I would just scoop up Me Too and set her on my shoulder while I fed Maybe.
So Me Too got used to shoulders and discovered she could get on doors from shoulders. She would stay there until a tall (5'6 or taller) walked by. She scared more than one friend by jumping on their shoulders.

Maybe lived to a ripe old age.

[badgoodDeb]

My brother asked his children what to name the cats. So one cat is named "Water Me".

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Kittens tend to get accepted quickly enough by existing (female) cats because they are kittens. (Male cats seem to have "I'm not trained for this!" reactions and back away hurriedly. Females just go "You need wash", and hold down the kitten to apply it.)

Not our female. She's finally decided that he gets to live, and she's learned how to play with him, but man, she was PISSED.

Tigers love it. Zoos participating in big cat breeding programs have discovered that the way to go was give each cat a dedicated keeper, and a favorite recreation was to jump into the pool with their keeper and frolic. Zoos insert humans into the cat's social structures early. It reaches a point where a female will mate and give birth, and shortly after turn the kittens over to a keeper. "I did my job and gave birth. Now you take over!"

I'd heard something along those lines.

Well of course he's oblivious to the idea he might be in trouble. He's lord of creation. Rules apply to lesser beings.
______
Dennis

Yabbut, D, I've dealt with stallions in my life. Literally, not being metaphorical, and breeding dogs. I'm accustomed to full male/Alpha behavior. That's always a case of staring down the alpha male animal.

It's not that. (Okay, it's some of that, as he has those uber-champion bloodlines and was originally intended to be a breeding rex.) But primarily, it's some other sort of...I dunno. It is as though his entire thought process is "of course you can't be mad at me. I'm ZEP! Everybody loves me!"

When I first met him, my intention was to take two adults that needed homing. Y'know, because they have a harder time finding forever homes. He was a kitten that had been fostered by another MC female, at the breeder. *(long story as to how I ended up with a breeder; she does a lot of rescue..). I walked into the room, and he bounded down from his kitten-sized scratching tree/platform, raced across the floor, bounced up on the bed, ran over to me and essentially stuck out his paw, flopping on me, saying "Hey, I'm Zep! How do ya like me so far?," and that was IT. I ended up with a grown female that needed a home, and this brat. But that same sort of super-cheery, "everybody loves me" mindset has persisted into adulthood. If you yell at him about something, he looks at you as if you spoke to him in Dog. "What? You didn't mean me, right?"

It's truly bizarre. Dogs, horses, cats...never deal with such an oblivious critter in my life. It's a real challenge, establishing boundaries.

Hitch

[4691mls]

Regarding the recent Firefox update that has been the subject of much recent ranting, is it just me or does it seem like this new "faster" version Firefox is actually slower? Seems like sites that used to load pretty quickly, such as ebay, take a lot longer. Even Mobileread, which isn't loaded with pictures, sometimes loads more slowly than it used to, while I sit there watching the little dot in the tab header going back and forth....

[pdurrant]

I think it's time for a new thread. A thread where we won't have to feel slightly guilty about all the nerd talk. A thread where we can vent and rant about modern technology's many drawbacks to an appreciative audience.

MobileRead Members, I give you: The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

Annoyed about Apple's latest bug? Your breadmaker won't bake? Your car insists on driving itself? Here's where to vent and rant about it to a sympathetic audience!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

Regarding the recent Firefox update that has been the subject of much recent ranting, is it just me or does it seem like this new "faster" version Firefox is actually slower? Seems like sites that used to load pretty quickly, such as ebay, take a lot longer. Even Mobileread, which isn't loaded with pictures, sometimes loads more slowly than it used to, while I sit there watching the little dot in the tab header going back and forth....

I maintain several versions of Firefox, with separate profiles to let me run more than one at a time. (Start FF as "firefox -no-remote -p <profilename>" to do that, with the shortcut pointing to the specific version of firefox you want to run. "-no-remote" is what lets you run more than one instance at a time, as long as each is using a different profile.)

I downgraded to Firefox Extended Support release, based on v52.5, to give me headroom in continuing to use the 40+ "legacy" extensions I ran, all of which would no longer work in Firefox 57. I have Firefox 57 and Firefox Developer edition (currently at v58.8) with a profile that only uses new style extensions based on the WebExtensions API. Enough of what my old extensions did is now available in Web Extensions versions that I can use Firefox 57 as production browser, and I've largely shifted.

Here, FF 57 is noticeably faster, in invocation and use. It's faster than Firefox ESR, and faster than current Google Chrome. MS Edge still invokes faster, since it's essentially an OS built-in, not a layered product, but I don't care because I don't hop in and out. I start FF when I sit down at the computer and leave it running in the background. FF 57 does seem to be a bit faster in operation than Edge, but I haven't done a lot of testing, as I seldom use Edge.

As mentioned elsewhere, you are as fast as what you are talking to and your internet connection. My pipe is a 100mbit/second cable modem connection, and I see quite acceptable speeds.

Another question is what extensions are in the mix. I run uBlock Origin, as a general purpose blocker. I stopped running NoScript a while back, and don't run things like AdBlock Plus. (I dropped NoScript because the labor involved in figuring out what to whitelist in uBlock and NoScript became more than I felt like doing. Big commercial sites that might laod stuff from 30 or more external sites were nightmares to get working as expected. I'm not fanatical about blocking ads - I simply want site to be readable - and I have layered defenses and am not paranoid about scripting. (All major browsers have been steadily curtailing what JavaScript is permitted to do in any case. In particular, it can't affect the local machine.)

What sort of machine is Firefox running on, what is your network connection bandwidth, and what extensions are in your mix?

One thing you might try is running Firefox in Safe Mode, which disables all extensions, and see if it makes a difference. If it does, process of elimination will let you determine which extension might be gumming up the works.
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Dennis

[4691mls]

I've noticed it both at home (Windows 7) and work (Windows 8). Thanks for the tip about the extensions/add-ons - I may not have a chance to look into that until the weekend but it's worth a try.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I think it's time for a new thread. A thread where we won't have to feel slightly guilty about all the nerd talk. A thread where we can vent and rant about modern technology's many drawbacks to an appreciative audience.

MobileRead Members, I give you: The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

Annoyed about Apple's latest bug? Your breadmaker won't bake? Your car insists on driving itself? Here's where to vent and rant about it to a sympathetic audience!

Thank you, sir!

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I think it's time for a new thread. A thread where we won't have to feel slightly guilty about all the nerd talk. A thread where we can vent and rant about modern technology's many drawbacks to an appreciative audience.

MobileRead Members, I give you: The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

Annoyed about Apple's latest bug? Your breadmaker won't bake? Your car insists on driving itself? Here's where to vent and rant about it to a sympathetic audience!

Paul,
Can we just use the cooking seasons thread for food related technology?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

I've noticed it both at home (Windows 7) and work (Windows 8). Thanks for the tip about the extensions/add-ons - I may not have a chance to look into that until the weekend but it's worth a try.

Windows 7 vs Windows 8 shouldn't make a difference. The variables will be internet connection bandwidth and things between you and the destination like proxy servers, as well as what addons might do.

But starting FF in Safe Mode will at least rule out one possible problem source.
______
Dennis

[pdurrant]

pdurrant: I can make threads in the vasty deep.

Chorus of mods: Why, so can we, or so can any member;
But will they post when you do make it for them?