keskitsune

Now I have seen everything.

Broke down and got a new phone after the sidekick fiasco. Htc my touch. Nice phone getting used to the touch screen display. Liking the haptic feedback, though I think I will have to spend some time to teach it to not second guess me with interesting words. Gonna miss the sidekick but I have a feeling it'll only get worse from here. Danger is very much Ma's red headed stepson.

Up next, 24, the cooking show. In this episode, we face an emergency of dire proportions <cut to jack bauer in a cooking studio, dimliy lit by the glow of LCD displays>I'm running out of thyme!.

For some reason, I dreamed that Carl from "Family Matters" pushed Hillary Clinton onto the toilet and got her stuck last night. I need to hide from my brain.

There's no doubt that the health care system in this country is broken. Premiums are on the rise, bankruptcies are up, satisfiaction is down. Shame the jackasses in the federal government drove us every step of the way here through half-assed laws and a lack of accountability. First they threw us to the whims of our employer, with that short-sighted asshole FDR putting no sunset clauses in the anti-inflation measure of allowing employers to deduct health insurance premiums they pay for their employees. A scheme that got us all stuck in employer-based insurance plans. Got us stuck, no job, no insurance, because the industry suddenly shifted to a completely new business model.

Then, that asshole Nixon came along an at the behest of congress, passed the HMO act. Took even more control of health care. Made it mandatory that every employer provide an HMO in addition to the plans they were already providing. Took away the right for states to say that an insurance plan was crap; all federal plans are good enough, no state needs to give any more scrutiny. Suddenly, millions of americans were thrown to the wolves of medical committees deciding patient choice, because there was pretty much no way out any more. Yes, employers could offer a "choice", but it was usually just easier to throw everyone to the HMO and forget about it. Less paperwork that way.

And now, we're stuck in the situation we have now. Government's twisted and mangled health care to the point where saying we have a free market system is an outright lie. We can't plan, we can't save, we can't break out because your government, the same people you want to entrust to fix things, has broken you. The federal government has made you sick and you expect them to make you better? That's like expecting your local crack dealer to help you with your addiction. We won't get better until the federal government gives people back the tools they need to manage their lives. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening here.

Lovely August morning.

I find it sadly ironic that Steve Jobs, who began his career selling computer components designed to circumvent the effective access controls of the telephone system, is now reduced to selling blatant bullshit about the fragility of telephone networks. Certainly given his background, he should know better than to say that an unlocked cell phone can bring down a cell tower. It saddens me that he'd even try to repeat such bullshit. For shame, Steve Jobs, for shame.

Back before you had CGI making halfassed attempts at making the world more interesting, you had Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling with an actual physical set. This is how it's done, FX people

What the hell?

God I wish that supporters of socialized medicine could present their cases without logical fallacies. Accusing anyone against Government-run health care of being for profit-based health care is presenting a false dichotomy. Just because someone feels that government health care will lead to millions of Americans receiving inferior care does not mean they think that for-profit health care does, or will do, any better.

--Kes

We need those prices for rent again
--Kes

I think these are the dodgiest bananas I've ever seen anyone try to sell.
--Kes

In all its glory
--Kes

Looking at polar bears. Lazy polar bears.
--Kes

Been playing with the latest nightly builds of firefox, and it looks like the firefox devs are definitely not sitting on their hands regarding firefox performance. So far, I'm seeing a consistent 10% speedup compared to the release of firefox 3.5. The metric used is the Sunspider benchmark released by webkit performance benchmark. All other processes were terminated during this test, and all add-ons were disabled.



The raw data:

Results from 3.5 1851.6ms +/- 0.7%

Results from the trunk builds 1689.2ms +/- 5.5%

Obviously, the nightly isn't anywhere near ready for production, and some of the more fun planned updates like multi-process firefox are still under development, but it's still nice to see that team firefox isn't pulling a microsoft, who completely disbanded their web browser team after IE6 was released.

Update:

Ran further benchmarks testing more conditions, by both enabling my normally used extensions -- adblock plus, noscript, and weave, and also by enabling JIT on the browser. The results are as follows:

3.5 Extensions enabled, chrome disabled 1834.8ms +/- 0.5%

3.5 Extensions enabled, chrome JIT enabled 1833.8ms +/- 2.4%

Nightly, Extensions enabled, chrome JIT enabled 1711.0ms +/- 4.5%

Nightly, extensions enabled, chrome JIT disabled 1665.2ms +/- 5.4%

As you can see, enabling chrome JIT doesn't seem to alter performance a significant amount, and add-ons don't seem to do too much for javascript performance, and UI performance doesn't seem to be much different as well. It'll be interesting to see how things change in the coming months as more stuff is landed to trunk.

Update 2:

Decided to extend the test to all other current browsers. Unsurprisingly, IE was dead last. Surprisingly, Opera 10 was very slow. It wasn't that long ago that Opera was known for being a fairly speedy rendering engine. I'm curious as to what happened. Also surprising is how much slower seamonkey's nightly is than firefox's. Going to have to check with my contact there to see why it is such slower. Has Seamonkey not landed the latest javascript tweaks.

IE 8 - 8297.6 MS

Google Chrome - Dev Branch - 829.2

Safari 4 - 1141.4

Seamonkey Nightly - 2336.8

Opera 10 Beta - 5437.8

Firefox 3.5 (No JIT) - 4060.0ms