Agile means: Completely loosing the big picture, allowing people to write code without knowing what the scope is they are doing it in. It also means: If something is too big to fit in a scrum sprint, you have to split it up in pieces which will not be scheduled in adjacent sprints because of -wheee Agile- higher priority stuff. Which means the pieces might easily go to different teams, or the second half might not be executed in the near future at all. It also means, if something requires more than a sprint to do, it will never be properly finished, so you better not start it. Agile is nice if everyone has the same knowledge about your project. Which means it is a small project for which Agile is completely over the top or you don't have any specialists -correction- you ignore the fact that each human being has his own areas of interest, areas of specialisation and capabilities.

Sorry guys, but I am not waiting for a Firefox specific in-browser chat tool. I got better chat programs that are compatible with the rest of the world. And if I want to chat with someone I enable my chat program. What I am waiting for is a browser that starts fast, loads pages fast, allows me to switch tabs and kill a tab instead of showing when a flash ad kills it's performance. I used to pay Mozilla some money. A long time ago.

Life is too short and the world way too beautiful to spend your limited time here looking at you smartphone or sitting behind your computer, posting obvious comments on SlashDot. And don't you guys dare rating this at funny, because it's actually sad.

If I use a chat program, I use a chat program that everyone uses not one that happens to be integrated with whatever browser I use. If I use a pdf reader, I use a pdf reader that's good and not integrated in my browser to the level that it is annoying me. If I use a browser, I want the browser to be fast, responsive and not stuck all the time because some slow loading pages or slow plugins.

Seriously. Remove half your code base and FF might stand a chance in the future.

I don't care if you think you are cool by reading your emails while I think you are having a chat with me. I will simply ignore you and remove you from my friendzone. I do care that you are secretly recording our conversation. I want to punch you in the face for that, destroy the device and make sure you never do that again. Just remove the camera and I see a market for it. Not my market, but there are plenty of idiots who will like it.

Not intrusive, maybe. But still: Firefox Hello is not good.

It is is Firefox specific, and since they have little market share chances are small that I can use it with whoever I would like to use it with.
It is doing something that has nothing to do with browsing the net
There are already way too many standards for chatting with or without video, and this one requires Firefox while till now I could get away with pidgin and skype.
It is not an extension I choose to install, and I am sure I will never use it. Therefore it only makes my Firefox bigger and more bloated.

I wouldn't care if Firefox were a small and fast browser, but it is a big, slow piece of junk and they added more crap to it, instead of fixing that.

But I got so fed up with the big egos that I quit. Linus Torvalds himself once trashed the project I was working on because of a few lines of debug code that were checked in, refusing to listen to our arguments. Later, similar projects -invented by others- made it to core functionality in the linux kernel. I'm talking about the old Kernel Graphics Interface project, which did the same as DRI and KMS, except that it also worked on other platforms. I tried again with Scribus. Their response: Welcome, but don't touch our code. I was involved in Mandrake, but quit when the core developers refused to listen to the community. We all know what happened to Mandrake...

I am the last to say chronic pains are not real, but I do know that chronic pains are most of the time a symptom of something else, and way too many people are diagnosed with chronic pains. Doctors say they can't treat something and you have to live with it, though many times that is simply wrong. My wife was diagnosed with 'chronic pain' by 6 independent doctors. Number 7 said she should stop drinking milk. Pain is almost completely gone. I myself have been walking around with Irritable Bowel Syndrome for years. Stopped eating Gluten and the Syndrome is gone.

We have way too many "diseases" which are nothing but a name for clueless doctors and a failing medical system. My basic rule is: If you broke something: Go see a doctor. If you have something that's a bit more vague: See someone who understands how the human body works. And yes, I now refer to for example good acupuncture, chiropractic or homeopathic doctors. Unfortunately you also have a lot of crap there.

They gather information about you, then they adapt their ads to that. I googled for a printer 12 months ago. I bought a printer 12 months ago. I still get printer ads for those printers today.

If you look carefully, mr. Poettering is the guy behind many problems in the current Linux world. He is the guy behind Pulseaudio, the audio system that destroyed everything that was good about ALSA, and didn't properly fix anything that was bad about it. He is the guy behind systemd, the swiss army knife that is good at everything except what it is supposed to do, reinventing all the wheels that used to be the base of a Linux system. He is complaining that Linux is still too fragmented, and fixes that by adding more fragmentation on the one hand (Pulseaudio, yet another audio implementation) and reducing fragmentation to the level that it's insane on the other (systemd).

And, mr. Poettering. Sometimes listening to others is not a bad idea. There is no excuse for binary log formats. The fact that you still refuse to listen to this message (and others), brought to you by many, makes you nothing better than all the people you are barking at.

I have a wife. Mutually exclusive with datacenters. Replace the w with an l at will.

Most of these organizations and associations completely fail to understand how they would be able to create added value for their potential members. As an electronic engineer I'm supposed to be a member of IEEE. I can't think of a single reason why I would subscribe, and the people and letters of IEEE didn't make things better. On the contrary.

* Replacing five lightbulbs with fluorescent lights which cost more energy to produce and contain way more toxic materials will not save the world. Especially because many of them do not last longer for the simple reason that we switch on and off the lights way too often.

* If you reduce the power consumption of 10% of the users with 50%, you still only won 5%.

* Solve the real problem: The fact that I switch off one TV won't save the world. Samsung should make TVs with ultra-low stand-by power. They make millions.

Don't get me wrong, I am very worried about the future of our planet. I just don't think that environmentalists shouting at people that they should replace their lightbulbs get the whole picture. With 7 billion people, you will never be able to shout at everyone. Shout at the CEO of General Electric, Samsung, Philips, LG. THEY can make a difference.

Most of these 'researchers' who get their names on every paper are actually the managers who don't have a clue about the actual research. Their name is only there because they force the real researchers to include it in the papers. Been there, done that, quit the job.

As a former reviewer working for a very renowned research institute in Europe I can say: Peers typically don't get/take the time to do their job right, and often outsource the job to less experienced people. Reproducing results is a very expensive and time consuming job, which means: unless it is it won't happen. You must be lucky if the reviewers have at least read the paper till the end. Quite often the review happens by people who are "no experts" in the field of the paper. For many conferences, papers with a bad rating still pass because there are not sufficient good papers, or if it is easy to guess the institute the authors work for, the paper passes without proper review.

Once our institute had a paper rejected, but my boss -who was in the review team- managed to get the paper accepted anyway. High profile conference in Electronic Engineering.

As a former paper author I can say: If your paper is rejected for one conference, you simply resubmit to another until it is accepted. Publish or perish is the holy grail of research, something many bosses will make very clear to you, and quality is less important. You don't write a paper because you have results, you write a paper because this or that major conference has a deadline in two weeks. I have a few paper on my name I am ashamed of: Omitting the bad results in the measurements, compare with competitors only on the features you know you would win because the comparison doesn't make sense at all, bragging about results which are very bad, but you hide that by not comparing to (avoiding any reference to) competitors which are better.

As you might understand, I quit the job. I left research and never ever want to have anything to do with it anymore.