The world is ruled by genius idiots

Had open-source project not been so hostile towards bug reports and reporters, I would not have blogged virtually any of the below. But alas, bug reports to the open-source projects more often than not fall on deaf ears in the best case scenarios, or receive hostile perception in normal cases.

Enter OpenOffice by Apache Foundation. Try to search and replace text. When no more instances of the text are found, OpenOffice displays a dialog box that says that the program has searched to the end of the document and asks whether you want to continue searching from the beginning. Yes or no?

Well, suppose, yes... Hit Enter... Nothing... Why does it not do anything? Oh, well, because the genius developer has forgotten to assign the Default attribute to the Yes button.

Well, suppose, no... Hit Escape... Nothing... Why does it not do anything? Oh, well, because the genius developer has forgotten to assign the Cancel attribute to the No button.

If only they had tested, it would have been noticed. They never test. If only they were agreeable to fix bugs, it would have been fixed a long time ago. Alas, they are unwilling to look into the bug reports, since they are not fun but embarrassment. And we plunge deeper and deeper into the stone age of user-hostile software.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 11:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 234 words, total size 1 kb.

Google destroys the environment with its new ngram viewer

Google's ngram viewer used to be a very lightweight web site. It required JavaScript, but it was unobtrusive. All of that has changed when a couple days ago Google completely redesigned the application. Now, if left up in the browser, even when its tab is not active, it polls 1 core of the CPU to 38% on average.

I immediately noticed it, thanks to the Linux CPU monitor applet that I always run. The process that pinned the CPU was WebContent associated with firefox-bin. Immediately, I turned off JavaScript in the ngram viewer tab, and the load disappeared.

This is what hundreds of billions of $$ cannot buy you: environmentally-friendly web sites. By polling the CPUs on the millions of machines around the world, Google is wasting megawatts of energy and thousands of dollars that belong to its unsuspecting users.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 04:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 158 words, total size 1 kb.