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Search - "extensions"
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If you can be locked out of it remotely, you don't own it.
On May 3rd, 2019, the Microsoft-resembling extension signature system of Mozilla malfunctioned, which locked out all Firefox users out of their browsing extensions for that day, without an override option. Obviously, it is claimed to be "for our own protection". Pretext-o-meter over 9000!
BMW has locked heated seats, a physical interior feature of their vehicles, behind a subscription wall. This both means one has to routinely spend time and effort renewing it, and it can be terminated remotely. Even if BMW promises never to do it, it is a technical possibility. You are in effect a tenant in a car you paid for. Now imagine your BMW refused to drive unless you install a software update. You are one rage-quitting employee at BMW headquarters away from getting stuck on a side of a road. Then you're stuck in an expensive BMW while watching others in their decade-old VW Golf's driving past you. Or perhaps not, since other stuck BMWs would cause traffic jams.
Perhaps this horror scenario needs to happen once so people finally realize what it means if they can be locked out of their product whenever the vendor feels like it.
Some software becomes inaccessible and forces the user to update, even though they could work perfectly well. An example is the pre-installed Samsung QuickConnect app. It's a system app like the Wi-Fi (WLAN) and Bluetooth settings. There is a pop-up that reads "Update Quick connect", "A new version is available. Update now?"; when declining, the app closes. Updating requires having a Samsung account to access the Galaxy app store, and creating such requires providing personally identifiable details.
Imagine the Bluetooth and WiFi configuration locking out the user because an update is available, then ask for personal details. Ugh.
The WhatsApp messenger also routinely locks out users until they update. Perhaps messaging would cease to work due to API changes made by the service provider (Meta, inc.), however, that still does not excuse locking users out of their existing offline messages. Telegram does it the right way: it still lets the user access the messages.
"A retailer cannot decide that you were licensing your clothes and come knocking at your door to collect them. So, why is it that when a product is digital there is such a double standard? The money you spend on these products is no less real than the money you spend on clothes." – Android Authority ( https://androidauthority.com/digita... ).
A really bad scenario would be if your "smart" home refused to heat up in winter due to "a firmware update is available!" or "unable to verify your subscription". Then all you can do is hope that any "dumb" device like an oven heats up without asking itself whether it should or not. And if that is not available, one might have to fall back on a portable space heater, a hair dryer or a toaster. Sounds fun, huh? Not.
Cloud services (Google, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.) can, by design, lock out the user, since they run on the computers of the service provider. However, remotely taking away things one paid for or has installed on ones own computer/smartphone violates a sacred consumer right.
This is yet another benefit of open-source software: someone with programming and compiling experience can free the code from locks.
I don't care for which "good purpose" these kill switches exist. The fact that something you paid for or installed locally on your device can be remotely disabled is dystopian and inexcuseable.16 -
I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.
I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.
We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.
I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?
I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.13 -
Dev of 15 years here. All my career historically started and evolved/revolved around Microsoft in one way or the other, so was my exposure to only DOS and the Windows as a child and growing up.
Like already discussed in multiple rants here, I was one of those naturally Windows -favoring ppl through all my life. That is not to say I didn't try Linux here and there, for hosting of personal projects, as one usually does. But it never quite stuck with me as a personal daily driver, mainly because all I ever needed for personal use was a browser, discord, and Steam/GOG/Epic Games store for gaming (work-wise I always had and still have company provided laptops which are OF COURSE Windows powered)
Anyway, maybe you can see where I'm going with this... I recently gave Nobara Linux a go (Glorious Eggroll's Fedora flavor, with some custom kernel patches) and I have to say, not thinking of going back to Windows at all.
Just a few thoughts on comparing two sets of experiences with Win vs Nobara
- Win definitely feels more sluggish
- Nobara's default desktop env was Gnome 42 with some extensions pre-enabled. I dove right into hacking/customizing it to my tastes and it looked glorious. Never would have achieved this customization with Win
- I was using RDP to remote into my work laptop from my personal desktop setup with Windows and I still successfully do so with Remmina now in Linux
- A week ago I dove deeper and installed Awesome window manager as a UI and mh boy does this feel intimidating at first. But then the allure of having nice window managing experience was too strong, and 15 years of coding do help with just seeing a new language and kinda feeling at home instantly (Lua language for AwesomeWM customization/themes). Fast forward a week and now I'm sitting happily with 3 monitor setup, one of them vertical, all properly auto aligned with arandr on startup, variety+wal for wallpaper auto circling and applying a theme out of main wallpaper colors every so often (+wrote a script to put those main colors into my RGB peripherals via OpenRGB)
- Gaming. I still game, Steam Deck from steam gave me all the confidence to set up Linux gaming that I needed. I think I am now properly versed in all things Wine/Proton/Lutris/Bottles/Heroic Games Launcher, you name it. Recently finished Cyberpunk 2077.
ANYWAY, thank you for coming to my Linux appreciation TED talk. It's amazing. -
In vulkan we don't say it works we say
VUID-vkAcquireNextImageKHR-fence-01287(ERROR / SPEC): msgNum: 207921847 - Validation Error: [ VUID-vkAcquireNextImageKHR-fence-01287 ] Object 0: handle = 0xe7e6d0000000000f, type = VK_OBJECT_TYPE_FENCE; | MessageID = 0xc64a2b7 | vkAcquireNextImageKHR(): VkFence 0xe7e6d0000000000f[] is already in use by another submission. The Vulkan spec states: If fence is not VK_NULL_HANDLE it must be unsignaled and must not be associated with any other queue command that has not yet completed execution on that queue (https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/view/...)
Objects: 1
[0] 0xe7e6d0000000000f, type: 7, name: NULL
VUID-vkAcquireNextImageKHR-swapchain-01802(ERROR / SPEC): msgNum: 1050126472 - Validation Error: [ VUID-vkAcquireNextImageKHR-swapchain-01802 ] Object 0: handle = 0xcb3ee80000000007, type = VK_OBJECT_TYPE_SWAPCHAIN_KHR; | MessageID = 0x3e97a888 | vkAcquireNextImageKHR: Application has already previously acquired 1 image from swapchain. Only 1 is available to be acquired using a timeout of UINT64_MAX (given the swapchain has 2, and VkSurfaceCapabilitiesKHR::minImageCount is 2). The Vulkan spec states: If the number of currently acquired images is greater than the difference between the number of images in swapchain and the value of VkSurfaceCapabilitiesKHR::minImageCount as returned by a call to vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfaceCapabilities2KHR with the surface used to create swapchain, timeout must not be UINT64_MAX (https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/view/...)
Objects: 1
[0] 0xcb3ee80000000007, type: 1000001000, name: NULL
and I think that's beautiful11 -
dR Community Server Showcase is open for suggestions! From devRant users, for devRants users. 🔗 https://devrant.com/collabs/3221539
You will find: guides, videogames, software w/ source available, useful web extensions, gamedev assets, and other stuff.2 -
Looks like chrome ad block extensions (and many more) gonna have trouble or even completely stop working as of January 2023.
https://theregister.com/2022/06/...
Tldr: google will drop support for its extension platform Manifest v2 (Mv2) and will only support Mv3 which doesn't have webRequest api. It does have an alternative api called declarativeNetRequest but it dowsn't support all of webRequest api features. This will be problem for many content blocking extensions.17 -
In the grim dark future cryosleep or hypersleep or something similar will probably be used to extend peoples lives (and thus politicians careers) before it is ever used for space travel.
Give it time and you'll eventually have, through repeated extensions, term limits of one thousand years or even ten thousand, for congress/senate/president/etc.
You'll have CEOs and upper executives who have lived for 80k years dropping out of hypersleep once a century to document how the shoreline of north america changes near their beach home, as a sort of hobby.
Fart huffing professors (it's a professional sport in the year 28,841 AD) will come out of sleep once every millenia to track the evolution of something irrelevant, like gnat penises.
Big game hunters will wake up every 100k years to hunt new big game prey that just evolved--back into extinction. That and to check with their portfolio managers who will be AI or a highly evolved mongoloid goblin race of slave-quants.
I'm still working on the game btw. Anyone up for testing some prototypes when they're ready?5 -
Shadow DOMs – the WORST invention in web standard history.
As a user script and user style developer, the shadow DOM has been a massive headache. Shitow DOMs block custom CSS, blocks parts of the page from being saved, and blocks user scripts and browser extensions. Shitow DOMs are an utter nightmare, especially closed ones.
And now, Google Gerrit's entire user interface is shadowdoomed. The only way to save pages locally is to scrape the JSON from the developer tools, but that is not possible on mobile.18 -
Oh boyyy, I just had to work with Asterisk again. And holy shit it is still the clusterfuck it was many years ago.
We got:
- Inconsequent documentation that is mixed through all versions.
- The config sprinkled over what feels like 20 gazillion files.
- AEL being a half assed attempt at a "pRoGRamMinG LanGuAgE"
- The fuck you mean with extensions, endpoints and AOR's?
- Inconsistent config parameter naming. Some are snake case, some camel case some are just everything smushed into a single word.
- queue_log determines wheter to write a log to a file. queue_log_to_file Says to do so independent of you having a realtime backend. Whatever the fuck that is.
- Log compression is done by executing a gzip command after a rotation??!!?!! -
How Microsoft expect anyone to develop using any technology they introduce with so many limitations.
Moi a Microsoft dumb enthusiast said to myself : hey dude you are a developer stop whining about the app gap bust a move create decent array of apps and release them, went into a full project management mode wrote requirements did sketches and some prototypes, time to execute.
1. first app: image files organizer, viewer , with some light editor capabilities and album creator after some work i came to discover that you don't have a proper file system APIs to show a folder tree view in my app "WTF" there are work arounds and dirty solutions but seriously? i can only access the stupid media folders created by Microsoft and that's it.
so i ditched the apps until uwp become a development tools with target audience other than kids who eat crayons, and while using "Edge" i thought to my self : "you know what dude extensions are cool and if you do something like a speed dial it would be awesome"
fire up my text editor started writing my extension to discover that:
"you cannot use localStorage from local HTML files".
moral of the story
MS is failing with consumers not because people hate MS but rather MS hates itself like no engineer over there said to him self this is fking stupid ?
other limitations :
no proper system tray access
no registry access what so ever
and i have started 2 days ago.
yeah Ms this is the main app gap problem the uwp sucks big time. compared to android Java which has a great access to every aspect of the device even apple provide better APIs for their systems.
if uwp is MS future then rip MS.
please i stand corrected if anyone knows better.2 -
The last major version made IntelliJ Idea unbearably slow on my 1 year old Intel Core i7 PC.
Fuck it, as soon as I have one hour free I'm going to reinstall Java extensions on Neovim. Stack traces sucks enough even without seconds of lags when you try scrolling them.5 -
! rant
so i finally got back to Control (the game), since i finally got the dlcs.
finished the main story long time ago, even though i didn't finish all the sidequests, so i'm kinda doing that now before starting the dlc.
it might be just that i didn't explore all the nooks and crannies of the oldest house before, since even the place where the "hunt down and finally fire Tomassi" was a place i haven't been to before, and all question marks on the map (and i assume that place was there even before the dlc, because the quest existed too), but i'm noticing a surprising amount of unvisited rooms now, and i assume at least some of them were added by the dlc.
which made me think: how cool that the lore of the game just enables them to add new extensions to the building without breaking it because just yeah, they appeared recently, it's the oldest house...
however i still hope that maybe at least after 100%ing the main game, the place will get to some more... homely state? i'd love a state where it would feel at least a bit more like a place i'm in charge of, and less than a battlefield perpetually in progress.
anyways, still a great game, i forgot how nice it feels to be in that place. looking forward to the dlcs, just have to find the proper time and mood to immerse in it fully.19 -
Some mobile file managers kick me back to the beginning after selecting items for copying or moving.
When tapping on "copy" or "move" after selecting files/folders, some file managers like ES File Explorer (back when it was popular) conveniently remain in the current directory, whereas the stock Android file manager and many vendors' pre-installed file managers like that of Samsung kick me back to the initial directory. On phones with MicroSD, that's the storage selector, and on phones without, that's /storage/emulated/0/.
If I wanted to move files into a sub folder of the currently viewed directory, I have to navigate all the way back to that current directory, which is, needless to say, annoying.
Who thought it was a smart idea to kick the user back to the initial directory? But vendors' pre-installed file managers tend to be garbage anyway. Samsung's "My Files" file manager does not let me enter file names longer than 50 characters, does not let me change the extensions of files, does not support selecting files from search results or jumping to their parent directory, does obviously lack range selection, hides the status bar while opened (what's the point of that?!), its search feature is slow and sometimes crashes, and it can only search the entire device storage or memory card and not individual directories.
It's almost like Samsung deliberately tried to design a file manager as terrible as they possibly could.5 -
"we have installed your extensions on Microsoft Edge"
REALLY MICROSOFT?! REALLY!!!
WHY DAFU! WOULD I WANT THAT
GFU!!!
</rant>8 -
Who knew there were so many goddamn duplicate file extensions spanning generations....
There is literally nothing to do but rate likelihood.
Does anyone know of a statistical database that tracks the appearance of certain file types and their frequency based of real analysis of active computer systems ?
Some of these types are pretty vague and fileinfo repeats some things. grr.
Of course, overthinking here, one would have to also look at what kind of files appear in the same directory in certain cases.5 -
Added vapor core swift package to my project so that I can use some of the extensions, had to `rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/` to make xcode realise the repo is actually exist.
Then I set the Core package as dependency of one of the targets, XCode complaints "unknown package Core", ok fine then I remove Core dependency, Core complaints "dependency Core is not used by any target".
How can xcode comes to this contradicting conclusion is out of my imagination, it just never gonna be happy about however i write.1 -
Even tho I really hate UI in .NET like Xamarin and Windows SDK
I still love reusing all of my C# service and extensions
Rather stay in .NET than learn JS and CSS2 -
It's these individually tiny annoyances in products and software that together form a huge annoyance.
For example, it's 2022 and Chromium-based web browsers still interrupt an upload when hitting CTRL+S. This is why competition is important. If there was no Firefox, the only major web browsers would, without exception, have this annoyance, since they're all based on Chrmoium.
I remember Chromium for mobile formerly locking scrolling and zooming of the currently viewed page while the next page was loading. Thankfully, this annoyance was removed.
In 2016, the Samsung camera software was updated to show a "camera has been opened via quick launch" pop-up window when both front and rear sensors of the smartphone were covered while the camera was launched by pressing the home button twice, on the camera software Samsung bundled with their custom version of Android 6. What's more, if that pointless pop-up was closed by tapping the background instead of the tiny "OK" button or not responded to within five seconds, the camera software would exit itself. Needless to say, this defeats the purpose of a quick launch. It denies quick-launching while the phone is in the pocket, and the time necessary to get the phone out could cause moments to be missed.
Another bad camera behaviour Samsung introduced with the camera software bundled with their customized Android 6 was that if it was launched again shortly after exiting or switching to stand-by mode, it would also exit itself again within a few seconds. It could be that the camera app was initially designed around Android 5.0 in 2015 and then not properly adapted to Android 6.0, and some process management behaviour of Android 6.0 causes this behaviour. But whatever causes it, it is annoying and results in moments to not be captured.
Another such annoyance is that some home screen software for smartphones only allows access to its settings by holding a blank spot not occupied by a shortcut. However, if all home screen pages are full, one either needs to create a new page if allowed by the app, or temporarily remove a shortcut to be able to access the settings.
More examples are: Forced smartphone restart when replacing the SIM card, the minimum window size being far too large in some smartphones with multi-windowing functionality, accidental triggering of burst shot mode that can't be deactivated in the camera software, only showing the estimated number of remaining photos if less than 300 and thus a late warning, transition animations that are too slow, screenshots only being captured when holding a button combination for a second rather than immediately, the terminal emulator being inaccessible for the first three minutes after the smartphone has booted, and the sound from an online advertisement video causing pain from being much louder than the playing video.
Any of these annoyances might appear minor individually, but together, they form a major burden on everyday use. Therefore, developers should eliminate annoyances, no matter how minor they might seem.
The same also applies for missing features. The individual removal of a feature might not seem like a big of a deal, but removing dozens of small features accumulates to a significant lack of functionality, undermining the sense of being able to get work done with that product or software when that feature is unexpectedly needed. Examples for a products that pruned lots of functionality from its predecessor is the Samsung Galaxy S6, and newer laptops featuring very few USB ports. Web browsers have removed lots of features as well. Some features can be retrofitted with extensions, but they rely on a third-party developer maintaining compatibility. If many minor-seeming features are removed, users will repeatedly hit "sorry, this product/software can not do that anymore" moments.