Over the past few weeks, I’ve sort of become (by force of circumstances) one of those one-dimensional techno-losers that I hold so much contempt for, spending most of my waking hours in front of the computer. But I have a good excuse for it: I broke my ankle early this month and my mobility has been seriously reduced as a result. I can’t even hobble around on crutches much — if I don’t keep the affected foot elevated, it starts swelling excessively.
Which really sucks, given that it’s summer and all. At least I have plenty of time to recuperate instead of being compelled by my past lousy job with no sick leave to push myself to return to sitting at a desk before it’s really wise to do so.
Go here and take a look. (It’s copyrighted, so I can’t legally mirror it here.)
First, let it be said that my sympathies do definitely lie with those who want a more open and free society in Iran. (Yes, that’s where the photo was taken.)
That said, I do think the recent events and in particular the coverage of them in the western media does raise an interesting point. If it had been a Western election that had spawned the unrest, we would have been treated to sermons about “lawlessness,” treated to coverage that focused on the most extreme and controversial actions of the protesters (anything burning or smashed would be featured), and also sermonized about “respecting the rule of law.”
And there are sometimes irregularities and controversial results in Western elections, such as Florida in 2000, so it’s not hypothetical. Just imagine what would have happened if it was US liberals that shut down major US cities in the wake of the Bush vs. Gore decision.
How demonstrations are covered in the Western media seems to strongly depend on how the regime in question fits into the world power structure.
No, I’m not thinking of the normal work people think of, that work of fiction about a dystopian society set in the London of the future. For me, Orwell’s most profound work is a (to most people) obscure essay he penned in the immediate wake of World War II.
This recent post to Portland Indymedia brought it to mind yet again, what with its naïve admiration of of a Latin American strongman who just happens to espouse leftish politics and all. Because, if one looks, it’s really not all that hard to find examples of just how tawdry and repressive the Chávez regime is becoming.
But, as Orwell wrote back in 1945:
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
Frankly, it’s a booger-eating fat slow pig. Safari’s Javascript engine has always been fat slow pig that leaks memory like a sieve. (It’s obviously a memory leak problem because I can hear the disk paging like mad as Safari displays its all-too-familiar Spinning Rainbow of Death.) Now it’s all that, and worse. Ever since Software Update “upgraded” me to Safari 4, it’s just crawled.
It’s odd. When Safari first came out it was lean and mean. Then Javascript got more and more popular and Safari started to suck a little more with each passing year (and each added JavaScript page). It became routine for Safari to “give me the rainbow” after about an hour of use, at which point it had to be killed with Force Quit.
To make matters worse, the same button that acts as the “cancel loading this page” button in Safari is also the “reload this page” button. The meaning changes depending on whether the page is loading (in which case it’s a cancel button) or completed (in which case it’s a reload button). This conveniently makes it impossible to abort a page that’s about to bring Safari to its knees, because at that point, the browser is so unresponsive that you can’t tell if it processed your click on the abort button or not. So you click again. Still nothing happens. Then the page finishes and it processes both your clicks as reload requests. Which takes the browser all the way into La-La-Land, and it’s Force Quit time again. Arrrgh.
As much as I hate its departures from the Mac UI standards, I decided to give Firefox a whirl. The first thing I notice is how much snappier its response is. And how there is now an honest-to-God dedicated Cancel button. And it just runs. And runs, and runs, and runs. It never pathologically leaks memory no matter how many JavaScript-infested pages I visit. I keep the same browser instance open for 24 hours, using it over a span of two days. At the end, it’s still as snappy as it was when I first launched it.
This sort of thing is simply unheard of for Safari. At least, you’ll never hear me describe Safari in such terms. It’s enough to make me put up with Firefox’s quirks.
Just what’s wrong with Safari, anyhow? I know my computer is a few years behind the curve, but why is any recent version of Safari so much slower and buggier than Firefox 3.0.x?
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