Firefox 25 raw first impressions

With all the brou-ha-ha about firefox 25, and all the unfortunate changes that were supposedly coming, I wasn't sure what to think.  So I snagged a copy to play around with, before updating all my devices.

Basically... I can't tell that anything changed.  Certainly nothing I care about, that I can see so far.  I haven't started a new profile yet, but I think many of the changes I'd already be patching around with other addons anyways.

When I first opened my old profile, I couldn't use the address bar.  At all.  Disabling the Omnibar and Background Tabs addons let it work again, and it still works after re-enabaling Omnibar.  I don't know if "just" disabling Background Tabs would have done the trick.

All my other addons seem to be working.  One of them is evidently stopping the 'hide forward button' so-called feature, I wish I knew which.  I _hate_ that 'feature'.  Maybe it's a setting somewhere in about:config instead.

The 'magic' stop/reload button behavior is still in evidence.

As far as I can tell, new toolbars are still an option.  I haven't tried anything even more exotic yet.

The addons 'Tree-Style Tabs' and 'Vertical Toolbar' still work fine, so far as I can see.

Using slock

I've been using slock¹, from the suckless tools collection, to lock my computer recently. And I gotta say, it's really doesn't suck. Using it literally couldn't be any simpler: at any command prompt (ie, in a terminal emulator, awesomeWM's "run" box), you type "slock".

And that's it. Your computer is now locked. Mouse input is ignored, to unlock it you simply type your password at the blank screen. There's no password prompt, no screen saver, no options to mess with, nothing. Just your locked computer and a blank screen. If you're worried about burn-in, turn your monitor off---you should be doing that anyways.

¹Getting slock: slock is part of suckless tools, from suckless.org. In Ubuntu, it's part of the package suckless-tools:
sudo aptitude install suckless-tools
It's probably in the same package for most Ubuntu or Debian derivatives.

What's the thing with microkernels anyways?

I've recently been reading wiki (both pedia and C2[1]) on microkernels and exokernels, and... I'dun get it.

A wacky reformulation of Moore's Law

Moore's Law states, in paraphrase, that processing power as a whole doubles every eighteen months. Sometimes it's been clock speed, sometimes it's been number of transistors, but this seems to have generally held true.

The obvious corollary is that newer processors --computers in general-- are more powerful than older ones. This has consistently been born out, with extreme cases being the emulation of entire old systems on newer ones, even many at once, even without being emulated on the newest systems. (See: Linux to Game Developers: No More Excuses)

Based on this, I've thought up a potentially interesting, but probably wrong, corollary: Every eighteen months, it becomes possible to add another layer of emulation, without effectively slowing down the deepest layer. This means that, for example, I can have my MacBook Air emulating a Mac from a year and a half ago, emulating a three-year-old Mac, emulating a Mac eighteen months older than that, all the way down to the original Macintosh -- with the deepest Mac having an effectively indistinguishable user-experience (for better or worse).

Practically speaking, assuming an arbitrary six-month delay before full emulation of a system, this means that twenty-four months after a system comes out, it's possible to emulate it indistinguishably.

Of course, this is all armchair garbage. I have no numbers of any sort to back it up. I have no intention of going looking for them, although you're welcome to throw any you find/have at me if you want :)

I saw Amber Dow today.
Not so much I "really saw" her, as literally saw her. I spotted her crossing the street as I was driving out to pick up my brother. She was probably on her way home, but beyond that, I really don't know anything.

I feel weird, kinda bad about this. In school she was one of those kids, the odd ones who're social outcasts and seem to possibly even like it that way. Not that that really means anything, I was one too. Part of me feels like maybe I should try to re-connect with her. Just kind of a hey, how're you doing, hang out kind of thing. I don't really know what the purpose of that would be, though. It's not like I know we share much in the way of interests, and she's probably an 'All Grown Up' Actual Official Adult by now (unlike me, who's faking it). It'd probably entirely be just for nostalgia (or even pseudo-nostalgia) purposes.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel a little depressed these past couple days. I should retract that; I know some people who have had "actual" depression -- don't go pedantic on me, I know, I know -- and I know I don't have that.

I'm making a new blog tag, undrafted. It'll probably be something like "this never went through any drafts, so it may be incoherent / logically inconsistent / not spellchecked &| grammar-checked / otherwise generally wrong". Maybe I should make a "here's what the tags mean" post.

A snippet

Knowledge can only be used for Good or for Evil. There is no in-between.

Well, that's enoug derping around on the internet for one day

Over on RationalWiki I stumbled across their page about "QuantumMAN". Not that I'm not endorsing RationalWiki. I don't know nearly enough about them to do so. A lot of their articles I've read have been completely reasonable "okay, really?" examples ranging from "eyeroll" to "facepalm". But QuantumMAN, assuming it's an accurate representation (a fair assumption to make as far as I'm concerned, given what gets mentioned), is actually painful to think about. Anyone with any knowledge of applied quantum mechanics, biology, or computers could tell you that there's no way in the universe for their claims to make sense. Even /r/VXjunkies is more plausible, likely due to the fact that they don't even try to be plausible.