I must respectfully disagree with you on every point you raise.

A randomised stack would cause certain types of bugs to manifest themselves much earlier in the development process. Nothing decreases the cost of a bug hunt more than proximity to the actual coding event.

Such an environment rewards programmers who invest more to validate their loops and bounds more rigorously in the first place. Nothing reduces the cost of a bug more than not coding it in the first place.

There's nothing that stops the debugging team from debugging against a canonical build, if they wish to do so. If they have a bug that the canonical build won't manifest, they wouldn't even have known about the bug without this technique added to the repertoire. If many such bugs become known early in the development process—bugs that manifest on some randomised builds, but not on the canonical debug build—you're got an excellent warning klaxon telling you what you need to know—your coding or management standards suck. Debugging suck, if instigated soon enough to matter, returns 100x ROI as compared to debugging code.

Certainly the number of critical vulnerabilities that exist against some compiled binary can only increase in number. So what? The attacker most likely doesn't know in advance which version any particular target will run. The attacker must now develop ten or one hundred exploits where previously one sufficed (or one exploit twice as large and ten times more clever).

If the program code mutated on every execution, you would have some valid points. That would be stupid beyond all comprehension. An attacker could just keep running your program until it comes up cherries.

The developer controls the determinism model. It's an asset in the war. There can be more when it helps our own cause, and less when it assists our adversaries.

Determinism should be not reduced to a crutch for failing to code correctly in the first place. Get over it. Learn how. Live in an environment that punishes mistakes early and often.

I notice re-reading my own post that I have an "out" missed and an "out" added. Must be how it passed through casting nines.

The Amazon share price demonstrates that investors anticipate profit from the Amazon business model at some point, which they will point very loudly when it begins to appear that growth has reached a plateau. (It's only mildly conceivable that this whole thing is a Ponzi scheme held afloat by successive ranks of the greater fool.)

By some weird co-incidence I breezed through The Everything Store by Brad Stone yesterday afternoon (and following up, just an hour ago, MacKenzie Bezos's misguided one-star review).

I wanted to get a better sense of the author, so I also watched Discussion: Author Brad Stone on The Everything Store, hosted by Daniel Siciliano, professor at the Stanford Law school, who turns out to be sharp, engaged, articulate, and charismatic. Brad largely stays on script with his own book.

Brad did take certain liberties with his book (small ones) of the kind an author is pretty much forced to take if he wishes to have a readership. Mr Bezos would not be so principled as to fact check his profit into oblivion. MacKenzie needs to get a grip on her entitlement double standard.

Brad regards his critical chapter as the one entitled Expedient Convictions. His recap was the best bit in the entire Q/A: "Amazon [aka Jeff] rationalise their customer focus to excuse a lot of things. This paper-thin rationalization is actually naked self-interest."

No shit Sherlock. He then goes on talk about how Amazon engineered their operation to pay no sales tax at the state level by claiming not to operate in any of those states, which is only true in the narrowest legal sense. Amazon runs huge operations in those states structured as legally independent subsidiaries (which are nevertheless totally under Amazon's thumb).

In the book Jeff is quoted as saying they don't use any services provided by those states, so why should they pay a sales tax? Their subsidiaries are using plenty of government provided infrastructure in those states to make those products and services possible. The whole story is just an accounting shell game. Their products come from somewhere, somehow. I don't think you find out at the center of the nested Russian dolls that the Amazon fulfillment center is a Xen machine instance on EC2. In mathematics, Mr Bezos, this analysis is known as the pigeonhole principle, which in layman's terms says you can't ethically pay tax nofuckingwhere on $74b dollars in revenue. But you know that already, don't you? And MacKenzie knows that you know that, doesn't she? Right, I though as much. Pity Brad got the influence of Remains of the Day on your regret minimization framework misplaced in time by about a year in his origin story. How will we ever trust another word this man says?

Which of those two errors concerns a million dollars or more? Bzzzt. Looks like Jeff wins the milliravi award for speaking with forked cheek.

Anyway, this story today is nothing new, and hardly the worst. Anyone interested can check out how Amazon sat on Lovefilm in the UK/EU. It was brutal.

Stone makes Amazon's internal culture sound like The Passion of the Christ which I think was dramatised by Stone somewhat, but hardly given the full Oliver (the answer to my fey verbal riddle is Natural Born Killers if anyone cares).

As I recall it from an early chapter, among the fringe whingers MacKenzie complains are insignificant and overrepresented was one Shel Kaphan whom Bezos himself described as "the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com" as part of his great and commendable summing up of a valued resource so totally no longer needed.

Quick, someone hand me a gold pen, I want to stick it down my throat.

Jules Verne envisioned the submarine. Does that make a submarine impossible? Does the concept sink on the basis of its sci-fi roots? Oh, lordy, what a fucked up standard of evidence on which to accuse any theory of being faith based.

* [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/pictures/110208-jules-verne-google-doodle-183rd-birthday-anniversary/ 8 Jules Verne Inventions That Came True]

The guy predicted pretty much everything but the click trap.

I also have the landscape/portrait combination. It would take far more than this to tempt me to switch. My gutter has a slight fold, so my visual perpendiculars are about six inches apart, and I'm not viewing the wings at some weird oblique angle (or buttock balancing, which can only end badly if like many software developers one is treadmilling the 50/50/50, where 50 is the new 40).

My landscape screen hails from the era where 1680x1050 was king, and a godly stout and square king at that. It's not quite wide enough to triple tile, so I had to solve the console problem differently.

I configured Tilda terminal to pop up (always on top) in the bottom 1/3 of the vertical display, where the pixels begin just two inches above the top of my desk. The vertical display always has my primary browser, maximized. When Tilda pops up, I still have as much vertical height for my browser than on the landscape screen, so I just have to scroll the web content to the top portion of the browser window while I'm using the console (like hell I'm going to manually demax my browser window every time I pop up Tilda with my Windows menu key).

The problem that drove me nuts is that the content at the bottom of a web page won't scroll up to the top of the window. FF just doesn't think the user ought to be able to scroll past the point where the bottom pixel of the content is any higher than the bottom pixel of the display window. No empty bottom margin allowed! The right side of your screen can taper into nothingness, but not the bottom. That makes it pretty clear already that there's an industry-wide potato famine for vertical real estate: they didn't even consider that it might be ergonomically more acceptable to scroll the portion of the content you're actually reading up to eye level, because to a first dipshit–designer approximation nearly every screen is a horizontal slit (I chose the ndash rather than a hyphen in that compound modifier, by a nose).

One loses pretty much nothing running a browser in portrait mode if combined with NoSquint. On 80% of web sites (denominated by the sites I willingly chose to visit) I just magnify the fonts until all the loopy cruft blows off the sides of the screen, leaving that portion which I wish to attend gloriously enlarged on my jumbo page. It is certainly true that some sites are coded in relative units where it's impossible to achieve a horizontal enlargement of the main content column by fiddling with NoSquint. For these, there's always Stylish. If even Stylish fails (mainly because the selectors are too cluttered and generic) I either (A) actively seek an alternative resource better behaved, or (B) switch that specific page into Chrome. Yes, I treat the web like a kindergarten full of unruly children (and graphic designers) forever requiring a heavy thumb. It's worth the effort. One font to rule them all!

I've long lived by the adage that for primary reading, fonts should be large enough that the user can lean back and operate the Page Dn key with your big toe. Your own spine will thank you on the home stretch of the 50/50/50.

That mainly leaves the annoying scrolling problem. Fixed with Stylish.

body:after {
content: 'Tail';
color: #505050;
display: block;
text-align: center;
font-size: 1vmax;
padding-bottom: 40vh !important;
}

Yes, this breaks a few web layouts and the word 'Tail' shows up sometimes in the strangest places (this is how I know when it's my own diddle—and which of many—breaking the layout). Easy enough to switch off if the need arises.

The 40vh is empirically just big enough to cause web pages to scroll above the top of my Tilda terminal.

I love this desktop configuration. It rocks. Even my black gutter, slightly crooked like the spine of a book, is more of a feature than a bug.

One sees those big flat screens in a different light after one multiplies by the love-slave vector 50/50/50. The applicable units are hours, weeks, years. Not seconds, minutes, and dazzle.

The entire premise of this post is built on stupidity escalation.

Corporations often pass off short-term financial hardship (mainly of the cash flow variety) as a legitimate reason to prune staff—generally fooling no-one, yet successfully biding time in the PR war saying nothing much at all until some new outrage of the moment shifts the spotlight to a different circus ring. Among the best-paid professionals in our society are the engineers of running issues aground against the acidic shoals of going nowhere fast with the greatest expense (first, we kill the injunctions). Business as usual, on both fronts.

This is irritating, so we pretend to become stupid as bricks in turning the table, as if the converse contains the least shred of cognitive viability: that any company not under present fiscal duress could not possibly benefit under best management from another round of lay-offs.

If anything, the converse is even dumber than the original stonewall, and about 100x more bloody minded. God forbid that by such asinine manoeuvres we return Karl Marx to the rank of essential reading, who at least spat upon the pathos from a viable view of systems.

Ruminant self-castigation concerning my previous post.

Fingers and foghorn were clearly operating at different stages of rubbing the sand out of their eyes. Waking up is hard to do. Harrumph. Nothing burnishes one's wit like mucking up one's determiners twice in two sentences.

I blame it all on eliding the apostrophe from the all-caps. That small joke went against the soul of my being. It was like The Scream welling up inside me.

It just struck me that we should change the name of the apostrophe as used in contractions to "the zipper mark". Do up your zippers boys and girls. First lesson on the first day of middle school every year through grade seven, eight, nine, and ten.

Then this brief public service announcement concludes with the disclaimer that surfaces sometimes deceive: the zipper mark and the dangling participle have nothing in common, but if you'd like a good example of the DP to think about until we get there, consider this:

Flitting gaily from flower to flower, the football player watched the bee.

We shouldn't lose sight of the small victory here. Regardless of how it's handled, it's important that the end user can go on record as having requested more a tiny millibob of actual respect.

We also need a companion flags: YESISETITMYSELF and IFYOUBLOWMEOFFYOUREANASSHOLE.

A universal voucher system would quickly correct this inequity,

With a sufficient injection of frictionless ropes and massless pulleys, by George, you could be onto something.

I'm guessing he wasn't meeting expectations

You're never seen a person be fired because the ranks of management are equally vile?

Have you never seen a manager go to jail because he deliberately fired or drove away the company's most competent employee on fabricated allegations in order to exact revenge for a perceived slight, prior to his own dismissal or resignation?

No, I didn't think so. The master retributivist of eternal liberty sabotages human systems instead.

With a small herd of these pet pandasauri—and an enormous harvest of coprolignum—one could well up the Great Wall of China in record time. It would still required great hordes or workers, but the workers would be highly obedient. Anyone who slacks off would have their highly-prized long-handled trowel promptly confiscated. With no hall pass, it's crenellation duty for you. From there it's years fighting your way up the rank just to obtain the corner-pocket edge-finishing tool.

Would any consciousness be able to deal with such a relative delay?

Interesting to frame the story in such a way as to bring the existence of human intelligence itself into doubt.

Roger Penrose believes that human creativity is rooted at quantum effects, effects which probably play out at the Planck scale, where the ratio between the Planck scale and the reconfiguration of a single molecular bond in a gathering neurotransmitter pulse likely exceeds the ratio of a CPU cycle to a trans-continental ping.

Shall I continue wanking, or should we put this bizarre speculation to bed?

If I had a time machine and I could visit myself in a past life, but it was even more hemmed in than Twitter—say Morse code at one millibaud—my message to self (circa mid to late 1990s) would be this: Screw games.

Yes, I had a blast playing those games. But then I started making "mixed" decisions in how I set up my system to balance the games I liked to play and the development tools I needed to use. In hindsight, that was nothing but bad mojo. The difficulty of achieving a perfect stack is exponential in the number of interacting constraints.

There are many other things I could tell myself, but in most of the other cases I probably had to learn those lessons the hard way. This one is different. I guess I somehow believed I was just chasing a moving carrot I would catch Real Soon Now and that all the fuss to mate the perfect video card to the perfect driver was a temporary growing pain (along with much else at the time). I was wrong. Nearly two decades later, the carrot remains elusive. DRM amounts to a sanity pre-emption field.

My final stop on the video card wagon was a hardened HD5670 (Redwood) with the open source Linux driver, nearly passive heat pipes and Japanese capacitors. If the software doesn't work with my card, screw the software.

I have mucked a bit with OpenCL. Getting the software development stack to work again after each Linux upgrade cycle bears some resemblance to Mine Sweeper. Sometime in the next decade I'll probably spring for a $60 CGN prime plus plus, just so I don't feel left behind.

Thanks for that lovely rejoinder.

You can't be serious saying it is more dangerous to give way at slow speed versus coming to a complete stop and then having to huff and puff back up to speed, while simultaneously being overtaken with inches to spare by a bunch of impatient motorists because you can't outpace them.

Unfortunately, your typical car driver is all too often dead serious in taking this view. I'm quoting this passage because the issue is more fundamental still.

As my motorcycle driving instructor said so long ago "an intersection is where vehicles intersect". He was no Euclid. That was his only postulate. The corollary he taught, which I took to heart, is "try not to be where vehicles intersect any longer than necessary". He didn't even add an axiom about human binocular vision lacking a faceted lens (this is how Brundlefly checks out the girl flies) or note that the nature of an intersection having four lines of sight is the worst possible configuration concerning the forward brow-ridge skull design. He was no Newton, either.

What does your average barely-competent cyclist do for the first three pedal strokes? It certainly doesn't appear to involve noticing that they've departed from a dead stop in a cruising gear, but then certain forms of cognition are strained when a cyclist is laboriously heaving left, right, left, right, left right to obtain the 30 rpm cadence permitting minimal pelvic-saddle congruence.

Minimal balance, maximal transit time, and poor lane control. What else can we optimize by demanding that cyclists come to a complete stop, rather than entering the danger zone with the inertia of a fast-moving pedestrian?

I was reading about OODA loops the other day, as conceived by USAF renegade-Colonel John Boyle (largely responsible for the F16 and A10 aircraft designs according to his booster camp). In his world coming to a complete stop is called a stall, also known as a clay pigeon, also known as a energy-space cluster fuck.

Stupidity is much the same all the world over.
                  — John Stuart Mill

You know what, fat bubba in your big compensator truck? Having rules that allow the congestion to clear expediently also permits you to get through the intersection more efficiently, without getting any Spandex floss caught between your radiator teeth (typically also a large delay if you even heard the bump). Look it up someday. Expedience is the thinking man's barging ahead, to mutual benefit for one and all.

I had a guy in my motorcycle class who got a broken leg sitting at a red light because the car behind him (closing time) didn't manage to stop in time. He got bumped just enough to drop his giant bike onto his own leg and snapped it good. We were taught to keep an eye on the rear view when stopped at the front of a red light after closing time, with one hand on the throttle to gun it through, if traffic was spotty. If we were going to bite it, we were going to bite it in style.

Pardon my French, but being stopped at the freaking light as a safety measure is so freaking overrated. In a jet fighter you're a clay pigeon. On a motorcycle you're a leather pigeon. On a bicycle you're a Spandex pigeon. On the sidewalk you're a sneaker pigeon. For the drunk, any colouring outside the lines that you can walk away from is a good landing.

I didn't even get into the human eye having rods and cones and being preferentially sensitive to moving objects in 90% of the field of vision.

I personally tend to treat stop signs as "dwell" not "yield". Dwell means having enough time to look a fair distance up the street in both cross direction, twice each way. Then I'm good to go, so far as I'm concerned. Pi legislated to equal 3, bite me.

That's ironic, because in the 1.x days, the full Seamonkey suite felt less bloated than even Firefox 3.x and hogged far less memory and crashed less.

Firefox 3.x was the apogee of runaway heap allocations. With my usage pattern and plug-ins I was losing 600 MB per day on average. I would have six FF Windows open on half a dozen different desktops, each with 20 to 50 active tabs. When I decided to restart FF because it could no longer keep up with my typing in a textarea box, my session saver would restore all of my FF windows to a pile on a single screen of a single desktop, and then there would be a tab reload storm something fierce. It was a ten minute interruption to get all my windows back to the desktop where they belonged, and FF itself sufficiently quiescent again to promptly enact GUI interactions.

My current FF leaks somewhere on the order of 100 MB/day and when I restart FF, it at least puts all my windows back on the same screen, if not the same desktop, and the tab reload storm is forestalled by lazy loading.

By that point I certainly wasn't sticking with FF because it was sleek or svelte. On the contrary, I was invested deeply enough in my suite of FF add-ons that I decided to tough it out (though rather loudly on the FF bug tracker).

I don't understand why so many outspoken voices on this thread purport to be sanguine about Firefox slipping back to the second or third tier in the absence of Google funding. Has no-one here ever read the red-hating Agatha Christie? Oligopoly, triopoly, duopoly, monopoly.

Each little Indian cut off at the knees substantially alters the political culture and calculus on Internet Island. Firefox is Piggy with the coke bottle glasses. Soon after Piggy's demise, civics aren't much discussed.

Think of Piggy as The First Samurai.