For Windows, if the media is coming from Flash, you might check and see if the Flash application volume got turned down. This happens to me on an irregular basis -- I will adjust it up and then at some point it gets turned way back down to around 5%.

If the Flash and Firefox application volumes are up, the system volume is up, and your physical speaker knob is up, then it could be the media was simply recorded very poorly or maybe your soundcard drivers have yet another volume you can adjust.

What kind of a reason is that? It sounds like you're saying that we should just set limits based on whatever the greediest want -- after all, it means it applies to everybody, so it must be fair, right?

There's a phrase for that: tragedy of the commons. Our shared culture, of which creative works are a large part, is being gobbled up and locked away behind effectively infinite imaginary property laws. Just because anybody can do it doesn't make it right or acceptable.

Oh, I agree if we're talking about some kind of major.minor.revision version number system. Stuff like Firefox doing just integer version numbers makes the version pretty useless for anything other than putting on your webpage in a big font size.

The Windows thing is just build number, which generally is completely meaningless when it comes to compatibility checks or that kind of thing.

It's something of a tradition for Windows releases to have cute build numbers.

Windows 95: 950
Windows 98: 1,998
Windows 98 SE: 2,222
Windows ME: 3,000
Windows 2000: 2195 (the NT folks tried to stay boring)
Windows XP: 2,600
Windows Vista: 6000
Windows 7: 7,600
Windows 8: 9,200 (they wanted it to be 8,888, but that is not a multiple of 16).

Windows 10 being 10240 is certainly cute, being 10 * 2^10.

But I wouldn't get too worked up over it. As Raymond says:

Yep, and MUMPS is still used at Epic, though they call it M and claim to have made customizations and improvements to it. I was offered a job there a few years ago and they go to great expense to attract recent graduates with high starting pay (more than $84,000 in Wisconsin), unbeatable benefits including the most amazing health care plan I've seen, and a pretty cool campus.

Unfortunately it wasn't enough for me to overcome moving to Madison, working long hours, and (most importantly) becoming an expert in an all-but-dead language. When I investigated career paths at the time, the only path MUMPS offers appeared to be (1) work at Epic for a couple of years and then (2) consult for Epic's products for the rest of your career.

If you want to see the very worst 1966 has to offer today:

A Case of the MUMPS
MUMPS Madness
Revenge of MUMPS Madness!
MUMPS

It's kind of like the worst parts of COBOL, Javascript and PHP were all mixed together and then baked at 400* until charred and smoking.

That's what really bothers me about this whole thing -- it's a reminder that Big Finance no longer needs to evaluate the risk of their investments because they'll never again be held accountable for them. Listening to the coverage of the Greece problems gave me flashbacks to the subprime mortgage crisis, among others. Letting bad investments bite these mega-corporations in the ass isn't even on the table.

I try to empathize with the Greek people, since the majority of them are probably being dragged through this due to no fault of their own, but I honestly hoped the EU wouldn't have come to an agreement, and Greece would just have to default on all the loans and declare insolvency. Even that probably wouldn't have put any real burden on the big investors (oh, the IMF owns the colessium now? how nice), but I'm sick and tired of bad investments only being bad for Joe Taxpayer (or in this case, Hans Steuerzahler).

Poe's Law strikes again...

Installing one anti-virus suite is a questionable decision. Two is moronic. More than that and you probably should stick to a LeapFrog.

So not a total loss then, good!

It would almost be worth dealing with fallout and eating beans for 20 years if we can start over and avoid Facebook and Twitter this time.

And with great power comes great responsibility.

Addons have nearly unlimited control over the browser, allowing them to do all sorts of amazing and useful things. Part of the price of this is a flexible framework -- using Javascript inside the browser's context instead of some limited DSL or something -- and another part is a more fragile connection to the user interface -- directly creating and manipulating XUL via the DOM -- which really isn't horribly fragile since they've pretty good about keeping element IDs and class names for a long time.

Security between addons isn't an issue, since they're intentionally not sandboxed from each other (and that wouldn't even make sense). Keeping them isolated from web pages is simpler, since that's already required for core browser functionality. The biggest issue is making sure addons themselves don't expose the user (such as Greasemonkey's unsafeWindow), but again, that comes at the expense of the power that addons can wield.

This would kill Firefox, so they will never do it, and I'm fine with that. We would undoubtedly get something worse than we have now (e.g., Chrome's limitations).

Completely agree, and it's what makes me more angry than anything else related to the mess that is Firefox today.

They utterly discarded their core user base, the people who loved and brought the browser to the point it was, chasing some pipe dream of market share percentage points. They became convinced that trying to maintain that share was more important than anything else, and so, like an anorexic person, went on a self-destructive rampage trying to achieve that impossible and truly undesirable goal.

Firefox should have let Chrome cater to simpletons, if that's the direction Google wanted to go. We now have four(ish) primary browsers -- Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE/Edge -- all of which seem to be made for the clueless. All the edges have been sanded down, extra buttons and knobs removed, and privacy only an afterthought. Instead of a bright standout in that lineup, Firefox is just another loser, trying to blend in with the "cool kids".

So just because Firefox might be the least bad browser, we should just grin and bear it? That sounds like a recipe for mediocrity and a successful tyranny of the minority to me.

I love Firefox. I love what it stands for (and especially what it used to stand for). That's why seeing it in this death spiral bothers me so much. If it was some stupid new Chrome or Safari features being discussed, I wouldn't give a damn. We care about Firefox -- that's why we "moan moan moan moan".

We hate the direction Firefox is going, and the people who are mismanaging the browser into obscurity.

Well, if it helps, that shitty Hot Hardware ad-farm doesn't even link to the Kickstarter page. The only links in the article are "tags" to more crap on their site. I was mildly curious about how it attaches to the laptop and where power comes from, but oh well.

It's articles have been posted a few times to Slashdot in the last couple of weeks and every time there's never a link to the real content. The site is useless garbage.

I dislike how this phrase is being used because I think it trivializes the extent to which Jobs was not a good person and introduces an inappropriate levity into the discussion. A much better term would have been acute sociopath.

And another movie about Jobs? Sounds more myopic than biopic. When Hollywood starts making remakes of their failed biographies you know they've scraped through the bottom of the barrel. Most people today only know Jobs as the other Santa who introduced shiny new toys once a year. If you want to read about the interesting stuff, just check out Folklore.org. It's filled with fascinating stories written by the people who created the Macintosh. Steve Jobs even shows up a couple of times.

Heretic! Blasphemer! Shun the non-believer!

I like to call it the "Fisher Price: My First Computer" syndrome. It's a pandemic on mobile devices, and has recently jumped the species barrier to desktops. Symptoms include:

- Completely flat and simple user-interface made from a small color palette
- Simple shapes comprised of 90-degree angles
- Uninspired colors and themes made up of primary colors so as not to distract from learning exercises
- Huge buttons and other user-interface targets, designed to make it easy to use by those with undeveloped eye-hand coordination
- Utter lack of gradients, transparency, translucency, or any other hints as to Z-order, which are confusing to children that haven't developed spacial awareness
- No way to perform complex actions (even if necessary) to prevent accidentally making the computing toy inoperable

Additional symptoms can be found in this article, but if you encounter any of the above I strongly suggest you discontinue use of the affected product, and find a replacement not yet affected by this crippling illness.