Firefox spreading gay propaganda?

I ran the browser today (didn't run it for quite some time), and the first thing i see is the slogan:

Now get the mobile browser that’s got your back.

Am i supposed to feel comfortable having a gay browser in my phone (that is, in my back pocket, close to my ass)?

Facebook is the new Big Brother

I don't even know if i have to mention this. Some time ago, facebook had changed all email addresses to be @facebook.com by default. Then they screwed up with API which basically erased everyone's emails from phone contacts and replaced it with that new @facebook email. Now facebook is beta-testing its automagic crime detector that basically scans all communication on facebook (including private messages and, apparently, email) and looks for "suspicious activity". I rest my case. I left facebook long ago. You want to trust your private life to a private corporation - go for it.

Fringe!

I don't normally talk about TV shows. Simply because i have no TV at home and the only TV shows i ever watch are the oldies like X-Files, Psi Factor, Poltergeist: The Legacy and stuff like that. I make an exception every once in a while - Californication is a insanely cool series with Fox Mulder and lots of tits. And recently i made an exception for Fringe as well. (a friend of mine recommended to check out Big Bang Theory, and i honestly tried to watch it but it turns out i fucking hate the fake audience laughs so much i actually can't concentrate on the show itself)

Fringe were a good series. I won't talk about how this or that wasn't quite scientific, or plausible, or whatever. I have a far higher tolerance for quasi-scientific bullshit, if it goes along with the plot and fits into the setting well. I am OK with a scientist who was participating in every conceivable secret military experiment in the world, spent 16 years in a nuthouse and came out all fine and dandy. I am OK with the concept of only having two parallel universes. I am OK even with rewriting parts of the plot with a cheap move of "removing Peter Bishop from time".

What i am not OK with is logic errors. Whatever the insane bullshit story you tell, there's gotta be logic and consistency. Here are some of the most outrageous things i've noticed (there's many more of them i missed):

• Walternate is a nice guy? Sorry, but Walternate once sacrificed Col. Broyles to get what he wanted. This man is evil. And suddenly, some time in Season 4 we discover that he's actually not that bad and overall a good and trustworthy fella? Sorry, i don't buy that.
• Nina Sharp from alternate universe after Peter's erasure (season 4). Why did she appear? From where? What was her agenda? What's her back story? She suddenly appears, does some bad shit, and quickly dies. That's not how it's done, JJ.
• Observers taking over the Earth? This is CHEAP. They don't feel emotions anyway - why the fuck would they need girls, money, or power? It's so downright silly it's painful and insulting.
• September seeing all the futures but couldn't predict the one he was shot in? Bullshit. Bonus points for some shit "technology" to draw a symbol to hold him in one place that can be disabled by simply erasing the sign.
• William Bell suddenly appears, and he is being evil and playing God? Without any mention of William Bell's fate throughout season 4? In one of the previous seasons, he fucking sacrificed himself to save Olivia and others - and now he's a lunatic that wants to destroy everything and everyone? Please.
• In season 4, in the alternate timeline, there was no Peter. Peter was the primary reason why Olivias have swapped places and then came to hate each other. So, with Peter gone, why do they still hate each other?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Congratulations, JJ, you've ruined a good quasi-sci-fi series.

Keeping up with times

While i wasn't writing too much for a while, don't think for a moment that i was living under the rock. Since my last post (well, excluding Linux one) a lot of interesting stuff happened. Suffice to say that the world today is not the world it was six months ago. Yes, i'm referring to SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/TPP/CISPA/etc.etc.etc.

I am happy and cheering for the people who fought SOPA/PIPA. No, really, as much as i hate people, i can say that they've done mostly good job showing RIAA/MPAA who's the boss here. I'd like to think that they have learned their lesson, but that would be too much to ask, and the fact that they haven't changed their ways for ACTA and TPP shows that. ACTA is in a funny situation because USA has written and signed this document, but now that no one else has signed up for this, USA is pretty much the only country who signed ACTA.

Now we've got this TPP thing going. It's even more secretive than ACTA, and between countries questioning their participation in TPP, and US public figures' outright lies and corruption surrounding this international agreement, i think it's safe to say that this cancer must be eradicated the same way SOPA/PIPA/ACTA was. Recent events and news suggest that there may have been a change of heart in TPP negotiations, but i don't trust neither USTR (MPAA's bitch) nor other countries' discretion (USA's bitches). It will be interesting to see how this pans out though.

Cybermeanwhile, cybersecurity cyberis cybersorta cyberbig cybertoo. Cyberthere cyberwas cyberthis cyberanother cyberbill cybercalled cyberCISPA, cyberwhich cyberfocuses cyberon cyberhow cybermuch cyberwe cyberneed cybersecurity. Cyberin cyberorder cyberto cyberbend cyberpublic cyberopinion, cyberthere cyberhas cyberbeen cybera cyberlot cyberof cyberfear cybermongering cybergoing cyberon cyberabout cyberplanes cyberfalling cyberfrom cyberthe cybersky cyberand cyberall cybersorts cyberof cyber9/11'ish cyberstuff. Cyberi cybermust cybersay cyberthat cyberUS cyberpublic cyberis cyberso cyberdumb cyberthat cyberit cyberactually cyberbought cyberit, cyberand cybernow cyberpublic cyberpolls cybershow cyberthat cyberthey cyberfear cyberattacks cybermore cyberthan cyberterrorism. Cybercan cyberyou cyberfucking cyberbelieve cyberthat?! Meanwhile, cybersecurity is sorta big too. There was this another bill called CISPA, which focuses on how much we need cybersecurity. In order to bend public opinion, there has been a lot of fear mongering going on about planes falling from the sky and all sorts of 9/11'ish stuff. I must say that US public is so dumb that it actually bought it, and now public polls show that they fear cyberattacks more than terrorism. Can you fucking believe that?!

By the way, the previous paragraph is pretty much how US politicians talk about "cybersecurity". Throw in "cyber" here and there, and you're got yourself a new "threat" (not that terrorism ever was a threat!). They even went as far as offered a new role, someone-something-blah-blah on cyber-issues. Cyber-fucking-issues?! Any one with half a brain cell would understand that to not have power grids hacked you have to disconnect the fucking power grids from the Internet, but there's no money in that. Anonymous hacking power grids (lolwut?), scary Iranian Chinese Russian North Korean hackers (i am surprised they didn't invent cyber-Al Qaeda yet), what else? Oh yes, imaginary threats warrant surveilance society. Great. Anyways, i sincerely hope that nothing too bad comes out of it. I don't even expect them to make something good (for a nice change), just please, for God's sakes, at least don't break anything!

USA looks especially ironic in this particular case, because there has been two very high profile malware attacks on the Middle East - the Stuxnet and the Flame malware. If you don't know what that is - Google it, don't be a lazy ass. These malware attacks were actually carried out by USA. And now we fear that maybe - just maybe! - someone would perhaps strike back? How can you even justify these sorts of things? Whether the target is evil or not is irrelevant - malware attacks are illegal. Or is it only illegal and immoral whenever someone beside USA does it?

On a bright side, there's been a few booming Kickstarter projects - Wasteland 2, Double Fine, a few others... It's great to see this thing gaining traction. There were also some high profile lawsuits towards major music labels which further expose sleazy tactics the labels are using to avoid paying out artists they so proudly claim to "support". Fresh from the harvest is Def Leppard making covers on their own songs and basically recreating their entire discography so that they can get royalties out of the label.

And don't forget this whole Carreon/Oatmeal saga. It's so fucking retarded it's not even funny. FunnyJunk and Carreon, bravo, you are the worst morons i've ever seen. I mean, how can you be so fucking stupid to sue a guy who's raising money for charity?!

So, the world has changed. But at the same time, it largely stays the same.

Linux sucks!

First of all, sorry for not annoying you with much posts lately, been a little busy moving to a different place and settling in. I hate moving, i hate all this anxiety, i hate when a steady rhythm of my life is anally raped like this, but i guess that's life.

Now, Linux sucks. Yes, this is going to be a yet another post on how Linux sucks, with me bringing arguments about Linux while still assuring that i'm a fucking Linux zealot, advocate and whatnot. Yep, just like that, let's get it out of the way. I love Linux. I use it as my everyday OS, i occasionally do some development on Linux, i happen to feel comfortable in the command-line, et cetera, et cetera. That's all great.

But there's a big butt! For starters, i'm tired of and frustrated with Kubuntu. I've been using Kubuntu since, well, practically the day it showed up on the radar. I used it through 7.x series, through 8.x, through 9.x series, through 10.x series, through 11.x series, but i will not use 12.04. At least not as my main system. I'm moving to Chakra Linux. Why? Because Kubuntu is so god damn sluggish it's unbelievable. It literally crawls like a snail. Plus, i'm a bit of an adventure guy, i like adding PPA's and testing semi-stable packages. The problem with that of course is that every once in a while everything breaks. Yes, it's my own fault, but i don't care. Chakra manages to run testing branches of KDE4 without depriving me of graphical desktop every so often, so it's not like it's impossible.

The only successful upgrade to a new release i've had ever was from 10.10 to 11.04. This was Kubuntu at its best - not only it didn't break anything, it actually made things better! Not a single upgrade before or since was clean and easy - every time i had to shoot adrenaline into the kernel to bring the system up again. During big updates package manager often hangs and does nothing. Lately it's been hanging on the very last step of updates (processing triggers or something). Whether it's Muon or KPackageKit it doesn't matter - it still sucks.

Fonts. Fonts fucking suck. After - what, twenty? thirty? - years of this phrase first appearing on a public internet, it's still true. Fonts suck in Linux. I don't care that i can make them not suck, that i can edit zillion config files and install some shit just to display fonts properly - i don't give a fuck. When i install Windows, i don't fiddle with fonts. Why should i do so here?

Open Source projects. Some of them are pretty awesome, most of them suck. LibreOffice? Big fat sluggish piece of shit. Firefox? Don't get me started. The GNOME software camp? Fucking abomination. GNOME is a disease, a cancer on a free software movement. GCC? If this is the best compiler the community is capable of producing... Well, i rest my case. KDE software and KDE-related stuff (e.g. ownCloud) is probably the only worthwhile FLOSS software around, and it's not without its problems either.

Sound. SOUND!!!! How many god damn sound frameworks is enough?! OK, things have been slowly moving towards PulseAudio lately, and with version 4 my Skype is finally able to work properly without taking over my sound hardware or closing YouTube just to make a fucking call. But no pro sound so far. JACK is great as a framework but the drivers for anything remotely professional suck big time. Yes, i know it's not the fault of Linux community, but who the fuck cares? I still can't use neither FFADO nor any of the USB drivers. I keep a Windows installation just so i can record stuff properly.

Graphics. Yep, nouveau is making progress (dunno what's up with ATI, i haven't used a single Radeon in years), but gaming and GPU acceleration on Linux still sucks balls. You know what? I've decided to stick with Intel integrated graphics for the foreseeable future. Yes, i got myself the newest ballsiest Ivy Bridge Core i7, an equally ballsy Z77 motherboard, and that's it. No discrete graphics, fuck em all.

Pro software. Suffice to say, the ones that are worth something either are/were commercial (think Blender), ugly, messy and useless (yo GIMP, how's your CMYK support?), or simply crashy or amateurish (pretty much everything else). And we still wonder why, oh why didn't Linux take over the world...

Rule 34

OMG Ubuntu reports on an Ubuntu Unity lens that allows searching for porn. Big deal, eh? Well, apparently, the world is in such a sad state that people have to post this stuff with a bunch of warnings and unnecessary remarks that are really stating the obvious (such as "whether it offends you or not", in bold), and people are still whining in the comments about how freedom somehow has to be magically equated to "not offending".

If porn offends you - it's your problem. Freedom is exactly that - freedom. Including freedom to do and say what others might not like or find offending.

KDE is the most Linux desktop

This article has caught my attention, mainly because it appeared both on Planet KDE and on Slashdot. The comment section of Slashdot was particularly fun to read, because it sort of reminded me what i have seen back in the day of KDE 4.0 release.

Basically, we have loads of users whining about how GNOME changes things in a way that they aren't where they used to be any more. And then there's Unity. Unity is another topic altogether, and while it may seem that its arrival was completely uncalled for (what? another Linux DE choice?!), that is actually not true. The real reason for Unity to appear is that GNOME2 sucked and the GNOME dev team is a bunch of assholes. Mark Shuttleworth embraced the coming of netbooks and understood that the touch-enabled desktop devices' arrival is inevitable, and he simply didn't want to wait for GNOME developers to pull their head out of their asses and look into the future, not into the past. So while Unity may or may not suck (earlier versions of Unity definitely sucked, didn't try later ones), it may or may not look like Mac OS X (latest versions definitely do share a lot of similarities), it may or may not be necessary after the GNOME Shell arrival, it was necessary in order for those GNOME dumb fucks to realize that backwards compatibility is not the only thing that matters.

And finally - thank God! - GNOME guys started thinking, and they pulled their heads out of each others' asses, and they started moving, and they released GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell. I didn't get my hands on them yet, but from what i see on the screenshots, they look pretty cool. No more Windows 98-ish look, GNOME 3 looks more like a mashup of Mac OS X and MeeGo. Which is good, because these are the interfaces people consider both beautiful and usable.

But what is it? Why GNOME users are whining? Aaaah, the desktop behaves differently from they are used to. Welcome to KDE 4.0 guys, now it's your turn. Pull your heads out of your asses (i like this phrase!), change is necessary. Face it - GNOME 2 has all but stagnated. It wasn't fun, it wasn't configurable. Some people confuse GNOME 2 limitations for minimalism, but whatever. Man up, idiots, if even GNOME dipshits decided that it's time to change - that's for your own good. Remember, GNOME knows exactly what every user needs. That's why they leave out so many configuration options, isn't it?

The problem here is that people are not against GNOME 3. They are against the change. Back in the day when KDE4 was introduced, it changed everything. It was practically rewritten from scratch. Why? So we could enjoy so many great software today. I think the real KDE 4 will be KDE 5. KDE 4, while being a major rewrite, has only laid the foundations. Hell, KDE PIM got Akonadi support only on KDE 4.6/4.7 - that's more than halfway through the development cycle. Despite it being a rewrite, it's still pretty much a long ass transition to the integrated, semantic future. GNOME guys are finally moving that way too with their Zeitgeist thingie. So essentially, things change. And people don't like it.

Look, here's one for ya. You know why GTK and GNOME sucks? Look how much time it took to write Unity. After two years it's finally usable. How long did it take for KDE guys to write two (!) releases of Plasma Active? Three months? Five? Moreover, Plasma Active is practically a project of a couple of weekend hackers. Unity has corporate backing of Canonical. Plasma, KDE and Qt in general are far superior in terms of getting working (and fast!) code as quickly as possible. KDE architecture enabled writing Plasma Active in so little time. KDE architecture enabled Calligra guys to write a backend, on top of which interfaces for both desktop and mobile can be built very quickly. GNOME doesn't have nearly as much power both from user and developer point of view, and because GNOME developers are idiots, GTK will never have that power.

But as much as i despise GNOME, i have to give credit for finally growing some balls and doing GNOME 3. Also, Vala is a terrific idea. Having a real object-oriented language which translates itself into native C code? Brilliant. Now developers can have the speed of native C and experience the full glory of ass-backwards GTK and GNOME architecture. The only thing i'm not sure of is how to debug this thing if it translates to C code? It sorta reminds me of Google Dart, only in case of Vala it actually tries to solve a real world problem of trying to write object-oriented code in a language that is more suitable for low-level system programming than for GUI stuff. Time will tell though.

KGet fucking sucks

Seriously, guys, is this what you call a download manager?

First of all, the why having two plugins to do the same thing? Yes, one of the KIO-based file downloaders is multi-threaded, but why keep the single threaded then?

Second, the behavior is destructive by default. Why does it delete everything instead of leaving the files and deleting just the download job? I've just lost 20 GB worth of downloaded data, thank you very much.

Third gripe is that not only we have two KIO plugins, they also both suck big time. I mean, no matter how much i hate the thing that Firefox has become, there's still a couple of things it does best in class. One of them is download management, with help of DownThemAll extension. This is hands down best download manager available in a cross-platform manner. JDownloader sucks and will always suck 'cos it's Java. Others either don't work on anything but Linux, or don't work on Linux, or even work only on Windows. And they all suck anyway. KGet can't download for shit. It can't parse download.php-type files and rename the files afterwards, so whenever you download practically anything which is not from FTP, you're pretty much fucked, because you'll end up with a bunch of download.php files.

And final complaint is that torrent plugin sucks fucking greasy nigger monkey balls. It can't even scan files if they weren't downloaded by exactly this instance of KGet. Try to continue download with another KGet from another Linux? No luck. Delete everything. Try to transfer your torrent files from KTorrent to KGet? No luck. Delete everything, start from scratch. This isn't even funny.

Thankfully, KTorrent is one of the best torrent clients available. God bless KTorrent developers, KGet developers - burn in hell, you fuckers.

Firefox fucking sucks

I use Linux as my everyday operating system. I love KDE, i love the developer culture of Free Software, i love lots of things about KDE, Linux and its ecosystem. But there are some areas where it not only lacks - it sucks monkey balls. One of these areas are web browsers.

What the fuck?! Web browsing is just about everything most people do with a computer today, and you still can't come up with a decent browser?! Let's see what we have. Internet Explorer? Only old ass versions, only on Wine, and they suck anyway. Safari? No Linux version, and Safari is probably the most inflexible piece of software ever written. Chrome? Hands down fastest rendering and fastest Javascript, no desktop integration whatsoever (looks and feels alien on ANY desktop), extensions suck, and Google is trying to do batshit insane crap with it, like pushing to make it a gaming platform, or allow it to execute native code, or other less than useful stuff. Opera? Bloated proprietary piece of shit (i don't know what do they need extensions for - they already have everything and the kitchen sink in there), sucks at rendering and sucks at Javascript, and hipsters love it. Firefox? Piece of shit with an asshat development team.

Don't get me wrong - there was a time when i was a fan of Firefox. It was a new kid on the block, it had tabs, it was small and fast, it blew IE out of the water, and it was cool to like it because it was all open source and ideologically correct. Yes, Opera had tabs too, but Opera, while being a proprietary piece of shit, sucked then, and it sucks now. Firefox 2 ruled with all its glory.

Things started to go south about the time of release of version 3. Firefox started sucking big time back then. The most unnecessary and idiotic "feature" ever introduced was the "awesome bar". Firefox developers were saying shit like "give it time", "you'll get used to it", blablabla. Well guess what, i didn't. I still despise this fucking "awesome" bar, i still haven't got used to it, and i still miss the old address bar. Sadly, with all the addon flexibility Firefox has, no one is still able to replicate the old address bar.

Firefox also started to be a memory and resource hog. Every time a new version came out, i was pleasantly surprised that it was faster than the previous one, only to discover that it was faster due to some addons being disabled out of compatibility issues. And it got all the bloat back by the time the next release was on the way. The development team was bragging about how they work on memory problems, how they optimize startup time, how they do this, how they do that - but Firefox only seemed to get slower and slower.

Another problem with current Firefox is the development cycle. No, seriously, what were you thinking?! You want to have a rolling release? Fine, but why inflate version numbers? Why not do 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 etc.? Current alpha (Firefox 10? 11? 28?) looks exactly like Firefox 4. So what was the point of all these version numbers? Firefox management didn't just shoot itself in the foot here - it blew out both its legs with a fucking bazooka. Sorry guys, rocket jumps only work in Quake. Not to mention the whole "user is an idiot" mentality that plagues Chrome developers. Admit it, Mozilla, Firefox 4 looks like Chrome.

The main problem with Firefox though is its complete inability to integrate with KDE desktop, which is largely fault of using this piece of shit toolkit GTK+. I still can't understand why those Chrome and Firefox idiots picked GTK+ instead of Qt. Maybe back in the day Qt wasn't a viable alternative, and Firefox being so old ass and having lots of legacy code would find the transition to Qt too expensive, but Google, why?! Why?! Why did you choose a toolkit that looks like ass on my desktop?!

Complete lack of visual integration is not the best part of it, though. The best part is, since i want to have my passwords stored in my KWallet, whenever the new shitty Firefox version comes out, it breaks the KWallet addon. I just can't live without KWallet integration, and this is the only thing that breaks on every fucking update!

It's been a while since i started looking around for better browsers, but they all suck. Chrome lacks DownThemAll, which i can't live without, and is not well integrated into KDE and looks and feels like ass. Konqueror just plain sucks. Doesn't render websites correctly, no extensions, Flash crashes, and due to its swiss army knife nature, whenever you press the wrong button, some lame-ass panel or viewer shows up which i don't know how to turn off.

Rekonq? I have high hopes for Rekonq. It already has KGet integration, which is sorta like having DownThemAll, but it's not nearly there yet. It doesn't store passwords in KWallet, which is really strange, given it's a native KDE project. It also lacks extensions. Some time ago, Chrome extensions were promised, but they didn't materialize. It also promises some interesting ideas like ownCloud sync, but again, it's not ready at the time of this writing. With KGet and KWallet integration though, i can live without most of the Firefox addons (and some of them are available as Chrome extensions as well), but unfortunately some extensions i would strongly prefer having, Ghostery being the prime example (as far too small amount support the Do-Not-Track option). Greasemonkey would be good to have too.

Update: Nope, it does indeed store passwords in KWallet, it just does it differently from Firefox, which is why i couldn't locate them in KWallet Manager - they're stored under Form Data. This makes rekonq barely viable an alternative to Firefox. I wish i could import passwords though. I might look into writing a password import script either from CSV, or from KWallet itself. Probably, CSV/XML would be a lot more useful for the community. I still miss extensions though, and while rekonq has its own flavour of AdBlock, i would really love to see something like Ghostery or Scrapbook.

So, what does it leave us with? Some lame-ass half-assed slow-ass unbranded-ass browsers like Arora, IceWeasel, Namoroka or whatever their names were? Or a semi-usable extension-less rekonq?

It's really simple guys. I just want a browser that integrates with my desktop, and that is reasonably fast and allows at least some degree of flexibility. This is what i'm not getting.

Have your cake and eat it too?

Yes, bitchez, i'm back! Just had some changes in my life that required my full attention. This one will be a little short as i still have stuff to do, but who cares. Oh, and wow, a couple of weeks ago i kinda had this blog's one year anniversary! I missed it but again, who cares.

Anyway, this time, the bullshitting will be about having your cake and eating it too. For example, copyrights. Media and software companies now insist that piracy is theft. It is a very convenient way to equate analog world with digital world, but it's misleading. When you sell a physical CD, you can't sell it again later. With digital distribution this is not the case - you can make as many copies as you like and sell them.

In fact, in the simplest case, to "sell" digital copies you just need only one copy, means of receiving payments and some form of distribution, be it a rapidshare account or a personal website (both of which don't require any effort whatsoever). To sell analog copies, you need... Well, you know what you need - a distribution platform, a place to store all these CD's and loads of other expensive stuff. So selling digital copies is in no way analogous to selling analog copies, and thus downloading a song for free from elsewhere does not equate to stealing. If anything, it's more like getting it from another retailer, one that has a better price, more convenient delivery and DRM-free format.

You insist that it is stealing? OK, you want to equate digital copies to analog copies. Fine. Then give back our rights of first sale, rights to share it with a friend (like you would share a hammer for example), returns and refunds in case of bad product and loads of other things that are associated with physical goods. Oh, you're now insisting that selling digital copies is not actually selling, but "licensing", so those pesky consumer rights don't apply? OK then, if "selling" isn't actually selling, then stealing isn't actually stealing.

And no, rent analogy does not apply here. After all, you don't have to upload back (read - return) your song after some time passes, do you? So how is that renting? OK, not renting, licensing? Fine, but then piracy is not theft either, it's simply a license violation - kinda like driving without a license. While license violations could have serious consequences, it's still in no way similar to stealing. So shut up and fuck off.