Just about everything important seems far-fetched until it happens (Who imagined spam botnets when designing SMTP? Who would've thought that Therac-25 operators would get fast enough at entering commands to trigger a race condition?).
How often has that actually happened to you?
Since Firefox syncs often, it can't. But, I have lost long comments and e-mails (before Gmail auto-saved drafts) to page/browser/OS crashes, and I've been saved by the history when I couldn't remember the one site that had some answer I needed.
I can honestly say that in 15 years of web browsing I've never had either of those problems, and don't know anybody who has.
Isn't that exactly the sentiment being complained about in the article?
Seems silly to significantly slow everything down for everybody because of a one in a trillion chance somebody will lose power at an inconvenient time.
And hey, maybe if the browser were faster, you'd have time to submit the comment or bookmark the page before the power goes out...
If anything, experience has taught me that catastrophic failures just love to occur at inconvenient times. For example, demonstrations work when you're alone or with other engineers, but as soon as you present to someone else everything stops working.
Besides, I'm not saying browsers should be slower. I'm saying that they should synchronize more often than once every 10-15 minutes and be prepared for edge cases. I'm of the view that software should, where possible, mimic physical objects -- changes are instantaneous and persistent -- with the reversibility of virtual objects.
Why you've been voted down so much is beyond me. Lots of IDONTLIKEIT in here and recently in general it seems.
> I'm of the view that software should, where possible, mimic physical objects -- changes are instantaneous and persistent -- with the reversibility of virtual objects.
Are you aware of Stanislav's Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing or the Loper OS website in general? It's a nice read; thought-provoking, even if you don't agree with everything there.
Interesting. For the most part, I agree with the principles there. My long-term (i.e. long past my lifetime) goal is to make software like that seen on Star Trek (minus the homicidal holodeck characters) -- no companies controlling things, no proprietary standards, just simple interfaces to do anything and everything. In the mean time, though, I don't think that full system introspection is economically possible for all systems in all places.
Just about everything important seems far-fetched until it happens (Who imagined spam botnets when designing SMTP? Who would've thought that Therac-25 operators would get fast enough at entering commands to trigger a race condition?).
How often has that actually happened to you?
Since Firefox syncs often, it can't. But, I have lost long comments and e-mails (before Gmail auto-saved drafts) to page/browser/OS crashes, and I've been saved by the history when I couldn't remember the one site that had some answer I needed.
I can honestly say that in 15 years of web browsing I've never had either of those problems, and don't know anybody who has.
Isn't that exactly the sentiment being complained about in the article?
Seems silly to significantly slow everything down for everybody because of a one in a trillion chance somebody will lose power at an inconvenient time.
And hey, maybe if the browser were faster, you'd have time to submit the comment or bookmark the page before the power goes out...
If anything, experience has taught me that catastrophic failures just love to occur at inconvenient times. For example, demonstrations work when you're alone or with other engineers, but as soon as you present to someone else everything stops working.
Besides, I'm not saying browsers should be slower. I'm saying that they should synchronize more often than once every 10-15 minutes and be prepared for edge cases. I'm of the view that software should, where possible, mimic physical objects -- changes are instantaneous and persistent -- with the reversibility of virtual objects.