retired engineer, former sailor, off grid, gamer, in Puerto Rico. Moderating a little bit.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • The statistic of low Firefox use is based on accessing US government websites. Could it be that there is significantly LESS government site access by the population of users that prefer Firefox? As a corollary I recently read that game companies observed significantly HIGHER bug reporting from Linux users on Steam, not because there were more Linux-related bugs, but simply because that set of users were more likely to initiate bug reports. Of course Firefox is not Linux and Steam is not the world, but a statistic from a relatively narrow segment of the internet should not be assumed representative of the whole.





  • How often in the software industry is the title “engineer” a sop to give applicants a flashy title; and how often is there actual engineering involved? When I worked as an engineer some years ago, it seemed inconceivable that software development would become actual engineering because how could the engineering standards of care and professional liability ever be imposed? Today, virtually all software is either privately licensed or open source - there is no such thing as public software infrastructure under the development supervision of a professional software engineer (as far as I know). So I guess Mozilla can call their software developers anything they like, but it seems to be an ongoing cheapening of the engineering title - like why not call this position Chief of Software Surgery? Lead Software Counselor?




  • If you think about it though, coming into a kitchen and saying “it smells good!” is OK; if the odor is bad, maybe lack of carbon filter is not the problem! lolz I have a recirculating fan, but I don’t think it does much odor trapping. Odor molecules come in all sorts of forms - some adsorb to carbon and some don’t. Although activated carbon has a large capacity considering the size of the particles of carbon, it can’t do miracles. Furthermore, I suspect the carbon is encased in trapped oil long before its odor-absorbing capacity is exhausted (though I guess that depends on one’s cooking style).

    (I posted words to this effect many hours ago, but that post seems to have been lost)