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I don't buy graphics cards for these reasons, so the sex appeal means jack to me. The burning question when I selected the NV17 and the NV11 before it was, "Will it work in XFree86 so these very important programs will run with a decent amount of speed?"

nvidia won the battle at that point in time. I still have bad blood with ATI thanks mainly to XFree86 driver problems in Mach64 (again, way back then, so it's probably changed by now).

The shitkicker chipsets may not be profitable or sexy enough for corporati, but they DO have a market. They always will.

• Mobius Strip II,
• Ascending and Descending
• and and impossible crate.

You might be interested in glslideshow from xscreensaver which does this.

An Overview Of PNG; Mozilla M17: M25

Mozilla Milestone 14 Awaits: This better not be M14

Mozilla To Be Dual Licensed - MPL/GPL: IE?

Mozilla M8 Released: Improvement over Netscape, but barely

Mozilla M8 Released: Top 10 things I love about Mozilla.

21 Linux Web Browsers? MS IE for Linux - I'd use it, wouldn't you?
The editors of slashdot were hardly generous in their criticism either:Netscape 6 Fails To Support Web Standards

So what does it mean? The perception of mozilla among a good number of users on /. has swung in the other direction. Who cares if there are a bunch of 'M$ is teh sux' posts. Does it mean something different from all the 'Mozilla is teh sux' posts from four years ago?

In my opinion, I think Mozilla IS better than IE. Yes, I snicker when I see silly little exploits or bugs in Microsoft products. I work with this stuff all day. I know how many millions of dollars my company spends on Microsoft, and I know that in many cases I can get an open source product that does the job well enough, or sometimes better than the equivalent Microsoft product. I subscribe to ntbugtraq and I see 2-3 vulnerabilities a week for Microsoft products. It makes me wonder why this expensive software has so many problems, and makes me appreciate the effort that goes into free software, even when they get the same kinds of bugs.
Mozilla has come a long way, and, I think, surpassed IE. I hope jwz is proud of what Mozilla has become, even with its problems.

I know I am.

What the authors fail to realize is that UNIX is the triumpth of realism over idealism. And like all ideologues, they're pissed senseless.

Kind of useful, written entirely in Perl, and I've tried it on a Linux box with no problems. Not sure if it'll work with other OSes, but its worth a shot.

Go grab the two perl scripts and the cron job if need be.

• they'll fully release the specs to this farce, and it'll be broken quickly, or
• they won't release the full specs, people will find the system suspect but use it anyway, and later, it will be broken.

I like Jamie Zawinski's solution to improving cubicles.

I realize that others have mentioned some other suitable products, but I thought I might mention JWZ's Gronk. It's nice because it'll do both streaming and local playback, and doesn't rely on an SQL database (which is honestly overkill in this situation).

I realize that others have mentioned some other suitable products, but I thought I might mention JWZ's Gronk. It's nice because it'll do both streaming and local playback, and doesn't rely on an SQL database (which is honestly overkill in this situation).

Argh, I have it somewhere. Oh, here it is. One of the best rants from Jamie "Rant" Zawinski.

If you run X, you could reproduce this effect at home with xsublim! So the next time you grab some movie from a p2p, be sure to activate it so you'll be getting the Real Theatre Experience. :)

What ISN'T broken about Java 2?

Where would you like to begin? Sun's Java implementation? Sun even thinks it's shit. And, believe me, THEY'RE RIGHT!

Perhaps the language itself? It inherits all of the OLD problems of Java 1.x. If you want a good summary of problems with Java 1.x, I would check here and here.

The standard library? Borked! Check the above links for yet more fun and excitement. And they don't even BEGIN to cover JavaBeans, JINI, SWING, AWT, and the like!

How about Java 2's cross-platform compatibility? Bzzzt! Java has about as much cross-platform compatibility as assembly code. Each JRE platform has a host of bugs that must be addressed BY THE JAVA CODE. Not to mention, every JVM out there is totally incompatible with every other JVM (yet, amazingly, still compliant with Sun's "standards").

Please. Java is borked beyond all human recognition. Maybe Sun should spend a little more time making a JVM that works than forcing Microsoft to add MORE bloated shit to Windows.

This is not really at all like "Cathedral/Bazaar" but rather, " Worse is Better. (now updated)

The underlying idea is that the "right" way isn't always the best, but rather, that the "best" way is what is "good enough" for cheap.

This is the same force that makes Linux compete against *nix, and is also responsible for the rise of Microsoft against vastly superior technologies.

worse is better

Ok, maybe this is an odd thought - but I've been doing some pretty serious application development using PHP-GTK. Coupled with the ZEND encoder, it allows for rather eye-popping, rapidly developed, cross-platform, powerful software.

Using PHP means integrating a GUI front-end with a server-driven (PHP) back-end is a snap. And GTK is a decent client toolkit. (not the best, but decent IMHO)

Now FLASH is moving into this area, and it just may well succeed at it. Remember, "worse is better".

BTW, PHP is surprisingly well suited for client-side apps and other programming tasks. (I've written a mail relay with it, among other, more standard "web" things)

-Ben

You are thinking of Driftnet. And this is not limited to wireless networks without WEP. Once you have the WEP key (trivial if you work at the origanization, slightly less than trivial if not), you still receive all packets travelling across the network. Much like a hub, which will also work with Driftnet. Certain cable networks allow you to see peers within your local segment too.

Driftnet by itself is slightly limited display-wise. It does have a basic realtime image viewer, but I've found that plugging it into xscreensaver is much more enjoyable.

This is an interesting attempt not to make bigger programs, but tighter ones. Making the most of what you have. It feels like there is so much available on computers these days, that programs aren't concerned with getting the most out of it, just using as much of the bells and whistles as they can. Imagine using the same mentality on a modern computer!

I think JWZ said it best. Scroll down to the "Random Commentary" section.

Give jwz credit for your sig.

Take a look at webcollage, which is also avaliable as part of the xscreensaver project. It randomly searches the internet for pictures and displays them. I'd say out of about every 20 pictures it finds, at least 1 is pr0n.

Then it began to sink in, the GUI is too much like windows.

Really? In what ways? And why is this a bad thing? Cite examples - be specific.

it seems pretty useless to have such a developed GUI that discourages people from learning handy terminal commands

I will now quote from the book of jwz:

But here's the thing that really struck me about this: command lines, as a user interface, really suck ass. Even if you use them, you know that's true. Somewhere, deep in your heart, you know what you're doing is ridiculous, and there's got to be a better way.

Yes, command line interfaces can be very useful and efficient for some tasks, but wow do they suck in so many ways. But regardless, Linux, whether in GNOME, KDE, or otherwise, has one very strong difference that will always seperate it from Windows, thus making the "It's just like Windows all over again! Wahhh!" arguments false: the very command line you mention. Linux will always have a variety of powerful shells available, with flexible command line tools, all available within that awful GUI you despise so!

Then it began to sink in, the GUI is too much like windows.

Really? In what ways? And why is this a bad thing? Cite examples - be specific.

it seems pretty useless to have such a developed GUI that discourages people from learning handy terminal commands

I will now quote from the book of jwz:

But here's the thing that really struck me about this: command lines, as a user interface, really suck ass. Even if you use them, you know that's true. Somewhere, deep in your heart, you know what you're doing is ridiculous, and there's got to be a better way.

Yes, command line interfaces can be very useful and efficient for some tasks, but wow do they suck in so many ways. But regardless, Linux, whether in GNOME, KDE, or otherwise, has one very strong difference that will always seperate it from Windows, thus making the "It's just like Windows all over again! Wahhh!" arguments false: the very command line you mention. Linux will always have a variety of powerful shells available, with flexible command line tools, all available within that awful GUI you despise so!

More for my benefit than yours as this is the quickest method I have for creating a clickable link (yes, including all this typing)

Macs do not let you arbitrarily map keys, as you can do in X11. If you don't like what scroll lock does, make it a backspace key (see xmodmap manpage or look here for a graphical front-end). Won't even triigger the LED anymore if you do that. If you want it to do some function, write a program that listens on the root window for the scroll lock press and then sends some "message" to the foreground window (this is how mwheel works - "message" is in quotes because this can get quite complex).

Now I know some Mac fanatic is going to point me to Apples KeyBindings documentation or uControl, but these are extremely limited compared to what you can do in X11. I'll admit that Apple's keybindings thing is pretty neat - this page contains a list of functions that you can bind (system-wide) to certain keys or combinations of keys. If you don't like the fact that backslash is taking up an entire key on your Macintosh, bind it to uppercaseWord or whatever.

It's funny how the original poster complains about tilde but makes no mention of caps lock, the truly useless key on the keyboard. Perhaps caps lock made sense when people were using typewriters, but it makes zero sense when you can accomplish the same thing through software. Occasionally I would like caps lock when I type in a longish macro name (in C, that's what I do all day). Of course I'm not going to enable caps lock (heresy!). I simply wrote a small emacs lisp function that (just look through the current keyboard map and write a replacement function for self-insert-command - gets a little tricky if you want to preserve how kill ring functions (undoes groups of insertions), but not too hard).

Anyway, the problem is not with keyboards but with systems programmers who don't realize that it's necessary to define system-wide keybindings in a flexible manner (this includes rebinding things like caps lock, alt, windows key, windows right-menu key, command, number pad separately from number keys, etc). This goes against any human interface guidelines (consistency, simplicity, etc.), but my mother has no use for backslash or brace or bracket, whereas I use these as much as any other key in C. Different people have different needs.

As far as I know, you can use the program xkeycaps to change your keyboard layout on *nix. I modified my keyboard layout (french canadian as used in Quebec) to add another dead key (the right Alt key) and I use it to write directly characters such as ãõæåíúñø (just an example). If I'd like to make my scroll lock act as another key, I can do it quite simply.

Why Java sucks , written in 1997, but some points still hold true.

Why would they bring those up, and then within a sentence or two, mention Python. From what I understand, Python is mainly used for server side scripting. I doubt anyone uses Python for serializing anonymous inner-classes!

No, Python is used for everything that a general-purpose language is used for, except anything best done in C is stuffed into C extensions. The exceptions are of course the standard exceptions for C, which basically owns systems programming. (The need for fast, tight code in Python is done by embedding C; see the Numeric extension which provides many very fast number operations comparable to anything else, because the operations are in C.)

In general, Python has no need for anonymous inner-classes; anonymous inner-classes are a worthless hack in Java to provide things that should be provided through any number of other good mechanisms, and even then they only partially and frustratingly succeed. Don't take my word for it, take jwz's word for it (do a find for "mind-blowing worthlessness of inner classes", for instance, though it comes up several times as he mentions the lack of several better solutions).

Inner classes, as implemented in Java, are an atrocious idea and I know of no other language, including specifically Python, that doesn't have at least one inherently superior mechanism for doing that stuff, and most have multiple. (Even Perl has closures!) Thus, they have no need for what Java means by 'anonymous inner classes'. (Inner classes can exist in Python, but they have so many more capabilities that it's not even close to comparable, and I only need them when I'm dynamically generating classes anyhow.)

On the one hand, I'd say have a look at some of these other languages and use them enough to understand the idiomatic uses of the capabilities in those languages. On the other hand, I don't suggest it, as you may find it very difficult to program in Java again after you are done. Java is not a language designed to empower the developer.

Whenever a user logs in, they get their own VM. They can install whatever they like and abuse their VM however they want. When they log out, their VM (and everything installed therein) goes away.

Yes, it's entirely feasible. JWZ did this for his nightclub.

Although I don't know if Windows is flexible enough to let you do something like this...

(This will probably get modded as a troll, but I don't intend it to be.)

What a lot of people don't understand is that people don't want "workalikes" for certain software. They use (*shudder*) MS Office at work or at school and that's what they want to use at home as well. The same goes for Photoshop, Quark, or whatever. The sad truth of the matter, though is that most likely this software will never be ported to Linux. Most of the "big name" software that has had UNIX ports in the past have been abandoned, with the notable exceptions being FrameMaker and Maya.

For some things, substitute software is fine. I don't see why anybody who's used to Winamp wouldn't like xmms, for example. But for other things, Star/OpenOffice will never be a substitute for Office, Gimp will never be a substitute for Photoshop, and Evolution will never be a substitute for Outlook, regardless of whether or not they do the same job, and maybe even more. Then, as somebody else mentioned, there's games. Loki was probably our only hope for that, and they're gone. Sure, you've still got a few good games being ported to Linux, but you still have nowhere near the variety available for Windows or the Mac. Loki's failure doesn't exactly encourage game developers to port their products to Linux, either.

As for video codecs, yes I understand that there's some rather nice workarounds. However these still aren't very acceptable solutions for Joe User. When a new codec comes out, he wants to be able to go download it right away so he can enjoy the new porn flick that he just downloaded that requires it, not wait a month or longer for mplayer or xine to support it. Jamie Zawinski has a rather informative rant about his bad experiences with Linux video, and he's far from being "Joe User," so if he has this many problems, imagine what kind of problems poor Joe is gonna have?

Uh... forced indentation does not a legible program make. I, for one, find the syntax for object orientation in python pretty ugly.

But while on the subject of indentation, how about this one. Do one of the below, preferably #1

1. don't use tabs. ever
2. don't ever mix tabs and spaces
3. explicitly declare the size of the tabs used in every file

If you want to get rid of tabs, check out Jamie Zawinski's page.

It's not skinnable...

uuh, don't you realize this is a good thing? :)

It seems that if a product is "good enough" (price wise & technologically wise) it will become popular with the mass-market.

Remind's me of Richard Gabriel's Worse is Better essay.

Cheers

...this article and everyone's posted comments.

Lost of people (sometimes it's over 75%) that read posts here are dying to have Linux become more mainstream. However, when someone posts their impressions of trying to do a specific task from THEIR (not your) perspective (granted, the article was written in a non-professional manner), everyone gets their panites in a bunch.

The panty bunching is usually is followed by; a tantrum (probably from too much Mountain Dew or Coffee), posts about their technical superiority over the author of the web page, and eventually a nap (for being too crabby or sugar crashing from said Mountain Dew sugar high).

Most non-open source companies that release operating systems would call JWZ's comments 'customer usability feedback' and improve on those comments (again, the tone of AWZ's piece is anything but professional) for future releases of a given product.

Linux IMO has the worst record for standardiztion of an operating system I've ever seen.

Here's two reaons why:

1) A quote from JWZ's page:

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS (he uses SGI's), and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more. I hope that some day it will have evolved to the point where my mom can take home a Linux box, turn it on, and get on with her life without having to become a Unix sysadmin first, and without having to give up on all the ease of use she's come to expect from allegedly less powerful operating systems. (Is everyone listening here to where he's coming from?)

Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless. Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?

This is totally right on.

Way back when MIT released their Kerberos package (server, client, etc) they pretty much distributed the packages as they were created to the public. At this time could you straight out and install this package on a Red Hat Server? (Please note: This is before Red Hat started including Kerberos packages in their distributions)

No, you could not.

Why not?

Because the source from MIT was written in Free BSD. To port (Read: re-engineer) the kerberos Package to Red Hat you had to 1) Be familiar with all aspects of Kerberos. 2) You needed to have a familiarity of the commands (and associated tags of said commands) in Free BSD to run the Kerberos Commands. 3) You need to have familiarity of the commands in Red Hat and all related Tags that are needed to run Kerberos. Long story short, you basically have to know Free BSD before you could port Kerberos to Red Hat. Needless to say, this is a major undertaking. Especially if you had multiple flavors of Unix in your office.

Secondly, at one of my former jobs I started a side project of seeing if I could port a web application from Solaris to Red Hat. Theoretically, it could be done but the additional programs needed to run this app on Red Hat needed to be located. I needed to find an install of Apache (no prob) with a few rarely used modules (ASP..no prob, a specific SSL module and a Java related module that solaris uses). Tracking down developers for mod's (especially the rarely used ones) or other related questions was a nightmare because they no longer worked on a given initative. On Solaris, the engineers for these mods where in house. After three days of trying, I gave up because I came to the conclustion that no one else was trying to do what I was doing and that finding experts in non-common areas was practically non-existent. Since this was a project on my own at work, I had to give it up for more pressing issues.

IMO both these examples show unecessary re-training and time spent on projects Unix users defined in the first paragraph shouldn't have to worry about.

2) Another quote from JWZ's initial article:

By the way, the suggestion to switch Linux distrubutions in order to get a single app to work might sound absurd at first. And that's because it is.

I don't know how many times I've tried to transfer a program on an older Red Hat system that runs well with no issues to a new Red Hat Server. Unfortunately, the same program can't be installed on a newer OS version of a Red Hat system because Red Hat thought it would be neat to change some of the new version of the Operating system around. Said changes would make the program, inoperable. Most companies and home users (the non-technical type) dont have the time or money to spend on working on initatives such as this. They need a solution and they need it yesterday. Users should not have to go back to a previous distribution, or re-engineer a solution because an operating system developer made system changes that adversely effect the running of a simple program.

What JWZ is stating are suggestions to make things better. Unfortunately, the initial reaction of the Unix Bigots, after reading and replying to articles like this, is to knock people down without understanding where he's coming from.

Dolemite

Note to JWZ there are Mac alternatives for Emacs it's not X but it works. I've been using the NT Emacs for a while now (5+ years). The (Unix) developer has put some serious work into this version of Emacs.

...this article and everyone's posted comments.

Lost of people (sometimes it's over 75%) that read posts here are dying to have Linux become more mainstream. However, when someone posts their impressions of trying to do a specific task from THEIR (not your) perspective (granted, the article was written in a non-professional manner), everyone gets their panites in a bunch.

The panty bunching is usually is followed by; a tantrum (probably from too much Mountain Dew or Coffee), posts about their technical superiority over the author of the web page, and eventually a nap (for being too crabby or sugar crashing from said Mountain Dew sugar high).

Most non-open source companies that release operating systems would call JWZ's comments 'customer usability feedback' and improve on those comments (again, the tone of AWZ's piece is anything but professional) for future releases of a given product.

Linux IMO has the worst record for standardiztion of an operating system I've ever seen.

Here's two reaons why:

1) A quote from JWZ's page:

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS (he uses SGI's), and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more. I hope that some day it will have evolved to the point where my mom can take home a Linux box, turn it on, and get on with her life without having to become a Unix sysadmin first, and without having to give up on all the ease of use she's come to expect from allegedly less powerful operating systems. (Is everyone listening here to where he's coming from?)

Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless. Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?

This is totally right on.

Way back when MIT released their Kerberos package (server, client, etc) they pretty much distributed the packages as they were created to the public. At this time could you straight out and install this package on a Red Hat Server? (Please note: This is before Red Hat started including Kerberos packages in their distributions)

No, you could not.

Why not?

Because the source from MIT was written in Free BSD. To port (Read: re-engineer) the kerberos Package to Red Hat you had to 1) Be familiar with all aspects of Kerberos. 2) You needed to have a familiarity of the commands (and associated tags of said commands) in Free BSD to run the Kerberos Commands. 3) You need to have familiarity of the commands in Red Hat and all related Tags that are needed to run Kerberos. Long story short, you basically have to know Free BSD before you could port Kerberos to Red Hat. Needless to say, this is a major undertaking. Especially if you had multiple flavors of Unix in your office.

Secondly, at one of my former jobs I started a side project of seeing if I could port a web application from Solaris to Red Hat. Theoretically, it could be done but the additional programs needed to run this app on Red Hat needed to be located. I needed to find an install of Apache (no prob) with a few rarely used modules (ASP..no prob, a specific SSL module and a Java related module that solaris uses). Tracking down developers for mod's (especially the rarely used ones) or other related questions was a nightmare because they no longer worked on a given initative. On Solaris, the engineers for these mods where in house. After three days of trying, I gave up because I came to the conclustion that no one else was trying to do what I was doing and that finding experts in non-common areas was practically non-existent. Since this was a project on my own at work, I had to give it up for more pressing issues.

IMO both these examples show unecessary re-training and time spent on projects Unix users defined in the first paragraph shouldn't have to worry about.

2) Another quote from JWZ's initial article:

By the way, the suggestion to switch Linux distrubutions in order to get a single app to work might sound absurd at first. And that's because it is.

I don't know how many times I've tried to transfer a program on an older Red Hat system that runs well with no issues to a new Red Hat Server. Unfortunately, the same program can't be installed on a newer OS version of a Red Hat system because Red Hat thought it would be neat to change some of the new version of the Operating system around. Said changes would make the program, inoperable. Most companies and home users (the non-technical type) dont have the time or money to spend on working on initatives such as this. They need a solution and they need it yesterday. Users should not have to go back to a previous distribution, or re-engineer a solution because an operating system developer made system changes that adversely effect the running of a simple program.

What JWZ is stating are suggestions to make things better. Unfortunately, the initial reaction of the Unix Bigots, after reading and replying to articles like this, is to knock people down without understanding where he's coming from.

Dolemite

Note to JWZ there are Mac alternatives for Emacs it's not X but it works. I've been using the NT Emacs for a while now (5+ years). The (Unix) developer has put some serious work into this version of Emacs.

It's ironic though that at the end of his page there is a link to famous worse is better paper. And I agree with JWZ that everyone should read it.

It's ironic though that at the end of his page there is a link to famous worse is better paper. And I agree with JWZ that everyone should read it.

Aside from throwing a tantrum and jumping Netscape to go run a nightclub he's perhaps best known for having written 'xscreensaver'. On his blog he brags at length about it's elegant / modular design whilst bashing the design of X11, and declaiming any possibility that his vaunted code could ever be responsible for problems.

Now I've used xlock for a freaking decade on Unix/Linux/BSD and I've yet to have an x-session crash because of it. By comparison I've never run a video card/Xserver version which some module of xscreensaver wouldn't crash. Now I'm accustomed to running my x-sessions for upwards of 6 months. Yes, this has always been marginally more stable on vendor-Unix than Linux.

So along comes jwz armed with his superior(sic) screensaver which has a couple of modules that will happily crash every linux X-server I've ever used -- what's up with this? My best guess is he's got a hair across his butt about not liking the X architecture and he's stuck in code that he knows will hit on known bugs.

Now this just antisocial imo. GUI's are the achilles heel of every os I've ever run, they do lots of memory copies, pointer ops and try to deal with async input from multiple sources.

And then go look at his Linux gripes on his blog -- 2weeks to get X to display at bettter than 640x480??! I'm sorry but this just indicate the brightest bulb on the tree. Neither am I and I managed to get linux +x up in '96 in a couple of days, and since then I've run linux or *BSD on a dozen different systems. I agree with him that vendor-unix is more stable and better behaved as a gui -- big surprise -- the vendor has complete control of devices and has a reasonable shot at doing solid regression testing. Obviously OSS can't achieve that.

It's probably fun to make lists of things that suck all day long, but why not use some of that talent and nervous energy to join in and help?

This gets mentioned a lot on slashdot; "if you don't like it, stop complaining and YOU do it right!" While there's a lot of validity to that, there are many times when the issue is that by now, certain basic things of using a computer have been solved 10000 times over.

I mean come on, "://", or the "MRL browser", to open a file dialog? WTF? I went through the same frustration with Xine, it took forever to figure how to do something as simple as open friggin' files.

Innovation is one thing. But coming up with a hard to use interface, ignoring some really, really basic UI guidelines that have been around for what 30 years is another. At that point, "if you don't like it, do it yourself" becomes an excuse, not a valid response.

The quote is "Linux is only free if your time has no value," it is indeed on his site in the themes.org interview here:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.html

The actual quote is ...Linux is only free if your time has no value.
I think his rant supports this position as some people don't want to read man pages to find obscure command line options, install new libraries, or jump through any other hoops just to play a video file.

An obvious troll, but hey its by someone famous so it must be worth the read. I could have done without reading that crap.

It's not a troll because he was just writing about what he found. His experiences. His experiences aren't a troll, it's what he experienced. It's slashdots fault for a) not explaining who JWZ is and b) posting this in the first place.

If I wrote something (granted, I'm not famous in any circle) and slashdot posted it and said I reviewed it I'd be pretty pissed off. It's no wonder he feels certain ways.

Flashback to the '90's - a jwz link on Slashdot! I have resisted visiting Jamie's page for some time - as he is a good linker, and I compulsively begin navigating all over hell-and-back. Tabbed browsing only aggravates this: (middle-click, middle-click...) Now I'm nested three iterations deep on four browser panes!

"you are trapped in a twisty little maze of gruntle, all alike".

I must admit, I'm a bit of a jwz fanboy. I enjoy a good rant, and he's got a certain gift for it.

Getting back on-topic, I don't know why everybody is so pissed about what he's written. As others have pointed out, it's not like he set out to write "A Comprehensive Review of Video on Linux." The linked "article" was written for his own amusement. Somebody else thought it would be a good idea to submit it to Slashdot. He's merely pointing out that the current state of affairs is pertty sad, and for those of you in the audience with the integrity to state the plain truth, he's correct.

There's not a single Linux video viewer (DVD/or otherwise) that approaches what you'd expect to find in so-called "Commercial software." (That's not to say that all commercial software is good either, but non-intuitive interfaces aside, they generally all work better than most of what's out there for Linux today.)

Other have also ridiculed the tendancy of the developers to make the applications look and feel like A/V equipment. Hard to argue with that. There's no reason a video player needs to look like a physical DVD player. A real DVD player looks the way it does because we operate it here, in the meatspace. It's design is simplistic and somewhat elegant because of the way we interact with it, in 3 dimensions. When this functionality sits on a 2 dimensional screen, it should look and feel like all of the other programs that we're used to using. That's a legitimate gripe.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, who has a web page that looks like this gets to complain about usability. Ever. He bitches about form over function for video players, then has a web page that looks like *that*? Hey JWZ, doesn't look like you'd know usability if you saw it!

I think slashdot did a good job of misleading readers. If you go to the page that lists this 'rant', it clearly states it is a rant. He never claims its an objective review. He posted it on his personal webpage. He likely did not submit this to slashdot to read. Michael accepted it. It was never meant to get posted on slashdot, and problable doesn't warrent being here.

That being said, I think JWZ is more realistic about the usability of Linux than most slashdot readers.

puck

Forget the linked article "rant" -- by far the most accurate text on JWZ.org is the following:

"I have yet to come across so much self-righteous bullshit as when I gaze upon the massive heap of crap that is the jwz web experience."

FYI, the above quote, which can be found here, is attributed to "an anonymous poster to slashdot.org". If there is any justice in this world, that comment was modded to "5, Insightful".

Other Lizard Wranglers that deserve a voice in this. To be honest these guys are the ones I listen to when it comes to Mozilla.
alsa
Blizzard
mpt

Why should JWZ be quoted about a project he bailed on years ago? jwz is entertaining when he whines, it's the only reason I can think of.

I can't imagine switching to MacOS X and then continuing to willingly inflict the X Windows Disaster on myself. I mean, wouldn't that be the whole point of switching?

But of course the only question that really matters is, does XScreenSaver work properly under OSXX11?

I can't imagine switching to MacOS X and then continuing to willingly inflict the X Windows Disaster on myself. I mean, wouldn't that be the whole point of switching?

But of course the only question that really matters is, does XScreenSaver work properly under OSXX11?

I can't imagine switching to MacOS X and then continuing to willingly inflict the X Windows Disaster on myself. I mean, wouldn't that be the whole point of switching?

But of course the only question that really matters is, does XScreenSaver work properly under OSXX11?