I am trying to understand something for a while. devRant is full of privacy advocates and to be honest, part of it is almost taken by a group of people that call other people random swear words people because they are using a particular product of a company.

I will raise some points and will try to discuss them with other people in comments.

I will stick with Google. Since it looks like it's the most hated one. A company that has built one of the most intelligent infrastructure, the most popular mobile operating system and of course, the best search engine currently available.

The problem everyone sees is the privacy. Google tracks the search history to give users a better experience and show relevant ads. You might not need this "better experience". In case you don't know, you can turn off personalized search any time to make sure Google doesn't track. Same goes with Google Chrome, you can turn off all the data it is sending to servers in settings. You can simply not sign in if you don't anything to be synchronised.

An argument is Google should be opt-in rather than opt-out. But the general users are not tech-savvy. And yes, going to settings and turning on personalised search is a lot of work for a huge amount of people. Trust me, I worked in IT before. If they find other search engine giving them a good experience without changing anything in the settings, they will just simply move to that engine.

What interests me most if how people back DuckDuckGo. First of all, not all parts of DDG is not open source (it's fucking not, you can argue all day). Parts of it is closed because of licensing issues.

That is perfectly fine to privacy community. But it's not when Chrome is closed source for almost the same reason. I mean when you're using DDG, you are supporting a US-based company that has privacy all over its face and using closed source application on their server. Have you not learned anything from history?

You might be wondering about my obsession with Google. It hurts me when I see a giant company whose popular software is open source is bashed like this. Google has made huge contributions to open source communities. Chromium, Android, Kubernetes, Angular, GoLang, TensorFlow etc.

And PRISM, how do you know that DDG is not part of it? it's US-based after all.

I just saw an article that used a video with a title "TNW - Aral Balkan - Free Is A Lie | The Next Web" while asking us to switch to DDG. Ummm....DDG is also free right?

Maybe we should raise concerns with the US gov first rather than Google.

iMac tiny keyboard + my fat fingers + Command+Q when I meant Command+A = Table Flipping Extravaganza!

Our team makes a software in Java and because of technical reasons we require 1GB of memory for the JVM (with the Xmx switch).
If you don't have enough free memory the app without any sign just exits because the JVM just couldn't bite big enough from the memory.
Many days later and you just stand there without a clue as to why the launcher does nothing.
Then you remember this constraint and start to close every memory heavy app you can think of. (I'm looking at you Chrome) No matter how important those spreadsheets or illustrator files. Congratulation you just freed up 4GB of memory, things should work now! WRONG!
But why you might ask. You see we are using 32-bit version of java because someone in upper management decided that it should run on any machine (even if we only test it on win 7 and high sierra) and 32 is smaller than 64 so it must be downwards compatible! we should use it! Yes, in 2019 we use 32-bit java because some lunatic might want to run our software on a Windows XP 32-bit OS. But why is this so much of a problem?
Well.. the 32-bit version of Java requires CONTIGUOUS FREE SPACE IN MEMORY TO EVEN START... AND WE ARE REQUESTING ONE GIGABYTE!!
So you can shove your swap and closed applications up your ass but I bet you that you won't get 1GB contiguous memory that way!
Now there will be a meeting about this issue and another related to the issues with 32-bit JVM tomorrow. The only problem is that this issue only occures if you used up most of your memory and then try to open our software. So upper management will probably deem this issue minor and won't allow us to upgrade to 64-bit... in 20fucking19

Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.

I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.

So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.

So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.

Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.

How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.

My best prank: A year ago I was at my friends flat, which he finally rented with his new girlfriend. He is a kind of person, which has like constantly opened 110 tabs in chrome, three or four instances of chrome running, torrenting at full speed and in the meanwhile a few films having opened to "watch" later. He is very very secure about his computer and NEVER leaves me or anyone else alone with his computer. That day we were just talking in the same room, and he goes for some food. I was like yeah thats my chance to prank him. So I opened a new tab and came with an idea - what If I change his desktop background to some random chick, to prank both him and his gf. I knew she will not be mad but his reaction would be priceless (it was his first gf). So I started googling, found a three pretty naked chicks. This was like soft porn, they were still "dressed" but not much. I did not wanted to use a porn for this.
So I was about to download image - right click - save as - little window opened and..

...what the hell, that guy had literally like terabytes of porn in download folder, all totally in one chaos, thousands of images, millions of downloaded videos, all categories just everything from gangbang to milfs or old/ young, what the fuck that computer was like cursed station of porn.

In that point I was like fuck that. This prank has no sense then. So I just closed that little window and did nothing. Prank failed.

Nowdays, He still does not know what I know about his "hobbies". And I will never say him lol. About a months after he broke with his gf and moved to different house. He has now three monitors attached to his computer and 4tb of space. He is still complaining about "lack of space" and "too big downloaded movies" but we all know what is going on lol. We call his "working deck" a sacred porn station.

Started opening tabs in Firefox Quantum like all you devs do during development. All of a sudden, firefox gave up and stopped loading any new websites.

Bookmarked all the tabs and closed ff. Clicked on again, the old process appearantly is stuck, so it showed a warning, closed the old one and opened it again.

Alright fine, opened all the tabs from bookmarks again. Firefox is again stuck. Realised some of the tabs might be acting up. Just to double check if it really is those tabs, decided to open them in chrome.

It opened fine and I continued to browse in Chrome without any hiccups.

:/

FUCK YOU VODAFONE!

My internet broke down the weekend, 4 minutes after I left my house on Friday at 9.04am.

Issue resolved after work at 9pm, broke down half an hour later.

Total silence. Providers status page gave 500 response.

THE NEXT DAY: Woke up because Netflix was working at 8.26am again.

Great, I get up. Can't wait to do anything I want again! I can code, game, watch porn, possibilities are endless!

I get stuff to breakfast. Come back and guess what? NO INTERNET!

Got confirmation of existence of problems at noon. Something with streaming, possibly fixed by Monday.

Okay maybe streaming, but shouldn't the other stuff then work? I process.

Used up my mobile data. Tried again, now it works, but...
.. why.. so.. slow? It was worse than 3g. Time to get out lynx to Google.

It's Sunday. I woke up pissed, got myself a Coffee and tried to get some offline work done. I sipped, closed my eyes for a moment and opened chrome.

IT WORKED! omg, fuck yes! I almost cried I was that happy - can you believe it?

All fine an dandy Monday. So surely the streaming thing will also be gone now, cool.

Today's day is Tuesday. Guess why I am writing this.

Fuck these apprentice nigga cunts graaaaa!!! Or their infrastructure will finally break down.

How is it even possible to do any work on a very important node at a time where probably everyone wants to chill out with the web?

While showing the rest service demo a senior 10+ years dev ran into session issues in chrome. I asked him to open private/incognito. He opened ie,edge, closed all chrome, tried back, nothing. Had no clue whatsoever.

At last I asked him to do ctrl shift n in chrome & dark chrome opened up where he could use the test accounts to validate the bugs. He is still confused what happened