Something I noticed is that on Windows 10, the Metro “calc” app is slow to start.

The damn calculator app. Starts up slowly. Even on an SSD.

How can you make a calculator app slow to start? I used a calculator app on a MacIntosh in 1986 on hardware that was literally 1/10,000 as fast as what we have now — and it opened in less than a second.

But some wit over here said it best about what the calculator app is actually doing. Comment reproduced in full:

That’s because rather than loading calc.exe when you type calc it actually doing far more:
1) Adding “calc” to your database of invisibly tracked user information
2) sending that updated database to Microsoft
3) waiting for Bing to generate some useless internet search results for “calc”
4) looking through all its indexes for every file on your PC for the word “calc”
5) searching the Windows Store for premium matches it can sell you for “calc”
6) thrashing the storage subsystem whilst you wait for calculator to appear in the start menu because it hasn’t been rebooted in weeks, only hibernated and superfetch-readyboosted in a false attempt to speed up your boot times.
Eventually, it decides that it can’t monetise your four letters and begrudgingly shows you the shortcut that Windows Vista and 7 displayed so fast that you’d have needed a high-framerate camera to have spotted any delay.

The more I use Windows 10, the more I hate it. Letting the morons win in computing has produced nothing but harm.

This is what happens when you invite a bunch of young North African/Muslim men into your country.

Some 60 criminal complaints, including one allegation of rape, have been brought to the Cologne police department after women said they were molested by a crowd of men who had gathered in the city’s famous square between its central train station and towering Gothic cathedral. Authorities expect more victims to come forward in the next few days.

City police chief Wolfgang Albers said the crowd was composed of up to 1,000 heavily intoxicated men who gave the appearance of being “Arab or North African” in background.

Don’t make the mistake of screaming and blubbering about “racism” incoherently. This is a cultural difference, not one “caused” by race. However, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that when you invite a bunch of people (especially men) into your country who do not share your culture and actually despise and want to harm women, this will happen.

It is inevitable.

That the conservatives say it is for true for ulterior motives doesn’t make it untrue. If you reason like that, you are just as stupid as they are.

I know it is anathema to liberals to criticize other people’s culture and that often puts them on the side of evil (though not as often as conservatives) but sometimes reality must be dealt with on its own terms — or it will deal with you.

I remember when malls were the social hangout, your physically-instantiated social networking technology.

No more.

I’ve noticed many malls now ban people under 18 during most business hours.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Old fuckers, if you can’t handle a few kids standing around and shooting the breeze, go the fuck home. And stay there. And die already.

But it was our mistake in allowing corporations to control our social spaces — both in the physical world and on the internet. There is no blame to be cast but in our direction. The rebuke belongs solely to us.

Though I believe that mall owners believe that they’ve “done the analysis” and demonstrated that malls that ban all young people are more profitable, this probably isn’t true. Like most things in life, power and control and fear and prejudices matter more than profit and thus the analysis will be massaged until what a bunch of scared old people wish to believe is found to be “true.”

I don’t trust TeamViewer or any of those other services not to steal my data, so I set up an SSTP VPN on our personal infrastructure at home.

Now it’s completely secure and since it works on port 443 (same as a web browser on a secure site), it’s really hard for overzealous administrators to block my connection when I want to grab a file or something from home.

So I can use all my computing resources at home from anywhere now, securely.

I like it.

Social networks really should be called “data mining platforms.”

What a brilliant invention, really. People like Orwell had no idea that people would voluntarily and happily engage in self-surveillance and then collectively call people weird who refused to do so.

When someone complains about a plot point being unrealistic in a novel or movie, I invite them to look at realities like these; no one would be stupid enough to make this shit up and yet it exists in the real world every day of the week.

I love everything about this talk.

To channel a famous motivational speaker, I could go out there tonight, with the materials you’ve got, and rewrite the sites I showed you at the start of this talk to make them load in under a second. In two hours.

Can you? Can you?

Of course you can! It’s not hard! We knew how to make small websites in 2002. It’s not like the secret has been lost to history, like Greek fire or Damascus steel.

Many web pages now load more slowly than their equivalents did over dial-up in 1997, especially if you include ads.

Part of it is death by framework. Part of it is following fads. The rest of it I can’t really explain.

The web was a lot better when JavaScript was a nice-to-have and not required, and where every site didn’t insist on downloading megabytes of (to me) worthless JavaScript on each load.

We have so many files and documents and assorted errata on our network at home that we now have our own search engine crawling our home intranet.

Two IT folks (programmer and infrastructure) means our home setup is more complicated than many businesses. A search engine is needed.

Cool.

Without sociological examination, it’s impossible to understand why the Firefox (and other) developers are intent on removing customization options and thus harming their own users.

On the face of it, it doesn’t make sense — to remove the greatest (and perhaps only) strength of your primary product. It will not be a viable long-term strategy. It will result only in failure, and predictable failure at that.

So then why do it, when what will occur is so obvious?

That is because in the face of nearly-inexorable societal trends, hardly any person or organization can stand against these cultural headwinds. Right now, there is a trend towards authoritarianism and surveillance. The Firefox developers are not immune somehow to these now-overwhelmingly dominant cultural forces. In fact in many ways they are probably more susceptible because like most tech cognoscenti they either have no interest in the humanities or even actively hate them — giving them absolutely no immunity to culturally-pervasive propaganda.

The Firefox developers are able to spin a convincing yet completely falsified post-hoc rationalization about data analysis, about “protecting” users, about how removing customization is somehow making it more customizable, but this is just exemplary of the human talent for rationalization.

In reality, their actions are prompted through and compelled by social duress that they experience and respond to without realizing it.

Without sociology and resorting to some basic analysis, what the Firefox developers are doing to harm themselves and others just makes no sense. It seems completely anomalous.

But with a look at wider societal imperatives it can be made sense of, and some explanation can be found for why they are not able to extricate themselves from the trap everyone save them can see that they are in.

Damn I love this extension. Saves me so much time every day.

Of course it’ll be taken away in the future as Firefox becomes locked down.

My hatred for the Mozilla developers increases every day.