It is a good thing sometimes, however... This reaction of yours, is typical of people who are getting old and any changes in the user interface interfere with your motor memory. The cognitive overhead of adjusting is uncomfortable to you, and therefore the annoyance of having to change your patterns outweighs any benefits the UI update might bring to you.

This is common both with websites and applications. A change is introduced, for better or for worse, and there is a chorus of users going "why did you change it, I liked it the way it was". The counterpoint is that while you prefer to stay in your comfort zone, the rest of the world is moving. The language of applications and websites changes over time. Expectations of UI patterns evolve. Expectations of UX shift. Projects that do not get updated die a slow death, with their aging user base laments why their favorite place has a dwindling membership.

With websites you are out of luck; they get updated and you have no say in it. With software, such as Thunderbird, you have the option to block updates and can stick to an older version, until security issues and changes to the protocols with which your app communicates with external services finally break it.

Oh good, finally a company name that is not a common noun, and is therefore easy to search for. </sarcasm>

I don't think the name of the service is the (only) issue. Instead, it is the only issue that company managers are willing to discuss and deal with, after all, names are easy! On the other hand, the general consumer-unfriendliness of the service is much harder to deal with.

My personal experience with IMDb TV, in dialogue format:

Me: Hey that show looks interesting.
Amazon: OK, you have to sign up and I'll show it to you. Give me your name, address, date of birth and e-mail address.
Me: OK, here.
Amazon: Verify your e-mail address.
Me: OK, here's the code you sent me.
Amazon: Not good enough. Give me your phone number too.
Me: OK, here.
Amazon: Verify your phone number. I'm getting hard here.
Me: OK, here's the code you sent me. And that's not weird. Can I watch the show now?
Amazon: No.
Me: Why?
Amazon: It's not for you. Or your region. Bitch. Now strip naked and cover yourself in honey.
Me: Can I watch that other show instead? It looks a bit less interesting than the first one that I picked.
Amazon: No. I'm not feeling that. How is that honey coming along?
Me: (deletes account)

The problem is not corporate ownership. The problem is that when it comes to engineering, there is nothing more expensive than cheap engineers. The engineers who can get a job done well have first a choice of which company they want to work for and get compensated well.

You lower your compensation enough, and you get two pools left. Pool one is engineers who are for some reason in love with your company and the field and are willing to work for peanuts. Pool two is monkeys. Guess which pool is bigger.

And those monkeys you hire for your peanuts? They will cost you your ship. They will be more expensive than you can ever imagine, their cost coming in low productivity, failing products, lost sales and damaged reputation.

Do we really need clickbaiting like this on Slashdot? Is it just me?

Why not change the title "Microsoft Joins Open Infrastructure Foundation" to "Is Microsoft up to Embrace and Extinguish again?" Or "Ford Hires Away Executive Leading Apple's Car Project" to "End of Apple's Most Ambitious Project"

Or why not rename the article "WhatsApp Moderators Can Read Your Messages" to... never mind. That on just works just fine.

The issue is that "proportionate" requires thought and therefore time. If you are under assault, you are extremely lucky if you have three seconds to decide what to do. Then people watching the video on the internet can watch it over and over, in slow motion if they will and think about it for as long as they want, and then proclaim that you were right or wrong.

Your attacker (and yes, this was a planned attack) has more time to plan. Anyone reviewing your actions have more time to think. A possible judge or jury have days to decide if you made the right decision in that moment.

If you think that is fair, then we are in disagreement.

I think the ampersand is there so that you can write a context-free parser for CSS. Otherwise a parser would need a potentially "infinite lookahead" to determine if an expression inside a rule block is a the beginning of a rule or a child selector. Personally I've seen syntax far worse than this in other languages (I'm looking at you, Apple, you mutant alien enemy, for calling interfaces "protocols" and unions "enums").

Overall nested rules make CSS a lot easier to read and write, and in turn, eliminate some of the need for preprocessors. Because we all know how much fun those are.

I'm going to make a wild guess here and say you never in your life operated a real life website with an actual user base, or at least, not in the past decade. If you did, you would know that the number of hurdles you need to clear for a three-nines uptime. CDNs typically have a service level agreement much better than that, and tend to keep it too, so they would be your least concern.

You could try to contract with multiple CDN's and set up automatic fallback, devise scenarios where you can actually test your fallback, etc. But that will be money and engineering efforts spent on an error scenario that might not be happening this year or next year, and pose an opportunity cost for you that you could spend on improving your site in better ways.

At least the Debian security people are on top of this. I just read this article and my pulse skipped a beat, but it turns out, my servers have already updated to exim4 4.92-8+deb10u6, which contains the fixes for security vulnerabilities reported by Qualys. The new build, released on 1st May, is based on a fix branch in the exim git repository, backporting the robustness improvements from the 4.94.3 release.

It is unclear when the CVE's mentioned in the article were disclosed to the Exim / Debian projects. As far as I can see, they were published on 4th May, 3 days after the fixed versions were released by Debian.

Every software has bugs, it is how they are dealt with when they are discovered that distinguishes projects.

So first of all, as someone who has relatives contract Covid just a month ago, this is horrifying. Long covid is terrifying me to no end.

On a completely unrelated topic: why would anyone, ever link to Yahoo! News? The same article on Telegraph has additional charts and diagrams, wisely stripped by the Yahoo! editing (because who needs graphics when you can have text?). In exchange for stripping the article Yahoo! tries to set enough tracking and profiling cookies to make up for it in bandwidth. Good deal, huh?

Is there a way to downgrade Catalina to Mojave?

For $1000 I'll make you one that goes to 12 :)

The bright, fresh visual style mostly looks pretty good.

Why is this in "the good"? Software looks visually appealing, it has for some years. We have reached diminishing returns a good while back. What matters is usability, on which point here comes:

A general reduction in contrast makes it harder to discern the difference between many buttons and controls at a glance.

Fuck you. So we are at a point where the best way you can distinguish between a "badge" and a "button" or a "link" and a "static text" is to hover it with the mouse pointer and see if there's a subtle change in shade. Congratulations, you made braille interfaces and regular UI's equally usable by turning the regular UI's into braille interfaces.

Kubernetes and Docker-related news have been showing up on Slashdot for some time now. I have been cheerfully unaware of their important and function until I started using them in the latest project at work.

As with all technologies, there's a lot of good and bad. The pitch is that you can functionally program in a domain-specific language in a YAML syntac the shape of your application's deployment. Then you let the system figure out how actually deploy and maintain your cluster. That is just awesome. The downside that I have experienced is the same as with all domain-specific languages: if you run into any errors or unintended behaviors, debugging is difficult and sometimes you have to rely on marginal features to get what you want.

From the article what really piqued my interest were Dqlite and Raft. Has anyone from the /. crowd used any of these technologies?

They CANNOT call this new body anything other than "The Turing Registry".

And the CANNOT call the enforcement arm of this new body anything other than "The Turing Police."

It would be just wrong.

I continue to be amazed how William Gibson's novel, written on a typewriter in 1984, continues to come true page by page.

Because it had bugs, as all software does (until all the users are dead). Because web standards change and new attack vectors against our privacy or security emerge, while others are mitigated to the point of becoming irrelevant. Because browser internals change, requiring addons to adjust. Because a site that doesn't work with your addon suddenly becomes popular and requires a bit of tweaking.

In short, because bit rot is a real thing and the only defense against it is maintenance.