Month: May 2012

Why Not Scriptkillers?

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Using Firefox, many tabs open, my computer’s default state.

Eventually I open a Web page that has a badly written script that bogs down the browser and sometimes the whole computer and can’t be stopped or even identified.

I bookmark everything, close Firefox, kill the Firefox process in Windows Task Manager and reopen everything, login again, etc. Because this restart can take five or ten minutes and interrupts multiple things that I’m doing, I usually put up with erratic browser behavior until Firefox crashes or becomes unusable.

Why doesn’t Firefox isolate each tabbed window in its own thread or group of threads? That way, closing the tab with the runaway script would solve the problem. And why doesn’t Firefox provide a resource monitor to show the % of system resources being used by each tab, so that you can easily ID and close a problem tab? These seem to be the obvious questions.

I suspect that users are much more attuned to browser reliability than they used to be. We’re far removed from the days when PCs became unstable if you didn’t reboot them frequently and nobody used browsers for serious purposes. The programmers should make their browsers more robust as they’ve already done for operating systems.

UPDATE: This looks interesting. (There’s also this, which I remember seeing in book stores a long time ago.)

Karlgaard on the Facebook IPO

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Rich Karlgaard of Forbes has some thoughts on the Facebook IPO. Best line:

Zuckerberg’s view of shareholders is like President Obama’s view of blue collar workers. He needs them but secretly laughs at them.

Not sure this is totally fair to Zuck (completely accurate as far as Obama goes), but pretty funny.

Note especially Karlgaard’s comment about the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on public market investors:

The insider pig pile of PE firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all. This is a rather new, post-Sarbanes-Oxley fact and it should make Americans very, very angry. When Microsoft when public in 1986, its market value was $780 million. Microsoft’s market value would rise more than 700 times in the next 13 years. Bill Gates made millionaires of thousands of ordinary public investors. When Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation, it left less on the table for you and me. Still, if you had invested in Google then and held your stock, you would be sitting atop a 9x return. Zuckerberg and his Facebook friends took it all.

(Semi) Live Blogging the NATO Protests – Part 4

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Below is parade organizer Andy Thayer (the white guy on the right side). Conveniently for him a smiling photo of Chairman Mao is going right past him, he’d be proud. I’ve seen Mr. Thayer on the news (that’s how I recognized him) and at least he talks about non-violent protests a lot.

A little bit of humor – “Don’t Bomb Me, Bro” is a take on the “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” internet meme. Also check out the sign linking LBJ, Nixon, Bush & Obama. In general I didn’t see any of the traditional “Bush = Hitler” type signs nor did I see any particular anti-Republican signs. These protestors were mostly against everyone and they did not like Obama or the Dems, either.

Look at this completely ridiculous sign of some sort of Iranian scientist with his child (probably an actor) saying stop the US and Israel from murdering Iranian scientists. The group pledges solidarity with Iran. There hardly is a less popular group than Iranian nuclear scientists but in the US it is his right to pledge allegiance to Iran, I guess.

As I said above I was surprised about the vitrol that the protestors had for the Democrats. This guy couldn’t make his distaste for the Democrats any clearer.

These 2 with the bandanas and the one with the Guy Fawkes mask backwards on his head are the ones that the authorities are keeping their eyes on as likely troublemakers. I would not bet against the police they are out in massive force and seem organized and with high morale.

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