Internet chat is a terrible hellscape and it's saddened me for almost two decades.

Unlike email and the web, the dominant systems for instant messaging have been proprietary forever. Sure, XMPP exists, but nobody uses it. There was a chance when Google Talk was using it, but ever since Google stopped federating, that's basically fucked.

Now we're seeing the slow death of IRC too at the hands of better but more proprietary user experiences being offered by Skype and Slack.

And it's easy to see why too. The proprietary chat tools out there like Slack are absolutely incredible user experiences.

If IRC and XMPP are ever going to be competitive with the new proprietary guys in town, it needs to get competitive on the usability front.

If we ever want to reclaim our freedom, we have to find a way to make XMPP is as usable as WhatsApp and IRC is as usable as Slack.

I don't really know how to do that. I wish I did. But I think the internet would benefit massively from it. Imagine if there were 5 different competing proprietary protocols for email or webpages? That's the world we live in now for internet chat. It doesn't have to be this way.

Malware on Android exists for the following reasons:

First and biggest reason: it has a massive market share. If iOS had Android's market share, you better believe it'd have more malware.

Second biggest reason: Google kinda sucks at curating their app store compared to iOS. This has nothing to do with sideloading. They let far too much malware into the Google Play store thanks to their policy of reporting bad apps rather than actively prescreening apps as rigorously as Apple does. Google really needs to get better at this.

Distant third: OS vulnerabilities. iOS suffers from this too occasionally.

Very distant fourth: sideloading. Way less than 1% of Android users ever enable sideloading. This is not where the majority of Android users are getting their malware. It's by far the least significant attack vector.

As such, I think it's pretty obvious that Apple adding an "enable sideloading" checkbox on iOS would not be a malware disaster anymore than it is on Mac OS X.

That's a false dichotomy. One platform can provide both. Android does that today.

By default Android is a walled garden and locked to Google Play just as iOS is locked to the App Store. You have to flip a well-buried switch in Android to turn that off.

On iOS there is no such choice. OS X does, but not iOS. It's totally arbitrary and unnecessary.

That response is kind of a non sequitur. You're correct that "the Sun" is correct, but I'm also correct that "the Solar System" is a planetary system named after our star, Sol.

The Solar System is a planetary system named after its star, Sol.

It's not "a" Solar System, it's the Solar System. There is only one.

Solar is a proper noun, not a generic term. But it is commonly misused that way.

I really wish news articles would get their terminology right.

Welcome to HL Tauri - a star system that is just being born

In short, this is the mother of all embryonic star system ultrasounds.

No.

The correct term is planetary system.

But hey, at least they didn't do what so many other publications do and incorrectly refer to exoplanetary systems as "other solar systems" as though "Solar" is a generic term and not, in actuality, a proper noun referring to our sun, Sol.

Okay I'll stop being pedantic now.

But seriously, people, use the terms correctly.

What if I want them to be purple! ;)

For those of you who are a fan of customizing the colors of message bubbles in Messages.app and don't like that Apple removed this ability as part of the iOSification of Yosemite, there's an app for that: https://github.com/kethinov/Bu...

I made this during the developer previews because I don't like the default puke green for most of my IM conversations. Hope this helps some people. Source code also available.

It's a bit of a circular argument to say that sprint planning meetings exist because product owners don't have time to frequently reassess priority on their own. Before Scrum really took off, I recall product owners having no trouble finding the time to own the issue tracker in this manner on a regular or even daily basis.

It seems to me everyone would have significantly more time for such things if there was less process in the way like unnecessarily verbose scrum meetings which can be replaced by less invasive forms of communication.

If anyone's really looking for a 21st century successor to Agile/Scrum, I would recommend checking out the "async" manifesto which was written in a manner deliberately parodying the agile manifesto: http://asyncmanifesto.org/

It's not shorter when you make an apples to apples comparison.

"Go google it" is equivalent to "go web search it."

More words and more characters, sure, but the same number of syllables.

Guilty as charged on all counts.

When will Firefox support killing CPU-hogging tabs individually?

That's the only killer feature from Chrome I'm waiting for to switch back to Firefox.

In Chrome, if I've got 50 tabs open (not uncommon) and one of them starts spiking my CPU, I can pull open Activity Monitor (on OS X) and kill the "Google Chrome Helper" that's eating all the CPU.

That kills the one tab that was the problem, not the whole browser. And lets me reload it when I actually care about that tab again.

I haven't found a similar way to imitate this workflow in Firefox.

The whole noscript / flashblock / adblock / etc approach hasn't worked. Tried it with Firefox, still had constant CPU issues after whitelisting sites I need JS or Flash turned on for, still had no way to kill runaway processes individually.