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There have already been many things written about professionalism in programming, e.g., philg,
jwg.

As for me, I made stupid / humorous / profane remarks in real life. My code is about the same. If it's designed well, works well, and J. Random Hacker can understand it from reading the comments, why would anybody give a rat's ass what sort of shit I put in there? (My boss sure doesn't. My users sure don't.)

Nobody wants to do the bitch work... all the hardest stuff to get started. They just wanna join in and help after it gets goin.

Ahhh, young grasshopper, it sounds like you don't want to do the 'bitch' work either. You have obviously not learned the lesson of Mozilla. Go and learn.

To summerize, the point is that until you have something that builds and mostly works, there's no point in shopping it around for opensource help -- people want to be able to build something, use it, make a small change (like changing the splash screen to have their name on it) and then build and use it with their change. That's what sucks your helpers in -- immediate, positive feedback. Until you can get the project (by yourself or with a motivated small group of people) you are better off by yourself, since you'll only get armchair quarterbacking until then.

this may take a little time with a copiler to make run with windows, but Xscreensaver has a SONAR screensaver

part of a screenshot / description of entire package

there's not much to it, but it can render network ping times of other computers as if they were boats on the sonar display.
simple but cute

this may take a little time with a copiler to make run with windows, but Xscreensaver has a SONAR screensaver

part of a screenshot / description of entire package

there's not much to it, but it can render network ping times of other computers as if they were boats on the sonar display.
simple but cute

How is it?

Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?

Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...

xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.

Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)

How is it?

Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?

Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...

xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.

Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)

How is it?

Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?

Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...

xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.

Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)

How is it?

Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?

Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...

xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.

Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)

How is it?

Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?

Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...

xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.

Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)

How is it?

Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?

Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...

xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.

Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)

How is it?

Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?

Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...

xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.

Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)

How is it?

Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?

Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...

xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.

Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)

How is it?

Training tools for learing this fanciful new keyboard layout? Anyone? Anyone?

Want to switch Ctrl and Caps Lock? Make your h's into m's or 6's into 9's? Be sure to check out jwz's XKeyCaps. You can rewire your primary input device to your heart's content. From the site...

xkeycaps is a graphical front-end to xmodmap. It opens a window that looks like a keyboard; moving the mouse over a key shows what KeySyms and Modifier bits that key generates. Clicking on a key simulates KeyPress/KeyRelease events on the window of your choice. It is possible to change the KeySyms and Modifiers generated by a key through a mouse-based interface. This program can also write an input file for xmodmap to recreate your changes in future sessions.

Nice home page Jamie. (BTW This is the guy behind everybody's favorite collection of screen hacks, XScreenSaver, the DNA Lounge and an explanation of cut and paste in X, among other things .)

My solution to wrist pain has been to use a break reminder program like xwrits to remind me to take a 5 minute break for every hour of computer use. I would use those five minutes to get out of my chair and walk around for a while, so not only was I resting my hands, but my whole body as well.

It's also a good idea to look out the window at something distant while taking your breaks, you can avoid eye strain by not focusing on something 18 inches from your head all the time.

JWZ has some good advice about this stuff on his site which I found very useful.

My solution to wrist pain has been to use a break reminder program like xwrits to remind me to take a 5 minute break for every hour of computer use. I would use those five minutes to get out of my chair and walk around for a while, so not only was I resting my hands, but my whole body as well.

It's also a good idea to look out the window at something distant while taking your breaks, you can avoid eye strain by not focusing on something 18 inches from your head all the time.

JWZ has some good advice about this stuff on his site which I found very useful.

Ok this is where I lose you. That link says that Mozilla is going to provide spam filters. How is that bloatware? Trolling? Got me.

Well, doesn't have the kitchen sink yet, but I hear they're working hard on that. What does it have? Let's see here, web browser, email fetching, filtering, and sorting; news client, chat client, HTML design frontend, contacts manager, banner ad blocking, the list goes on. This all culminates in 20MB or so of source that took six and a half hours to compile on my Duron 800.

Last time I checked, all of this comes very close to the textbook definition of feature creep and bloat. And now, coming to a Mozilla near you, spam filters! They're not fixing any of their nearly 12,000 bugs. In other words, yes, it's buggier than Win2K, but by God, it filters spam! I included the spam filters link to illustrate the Bill-worthy feature creep Mozilla suffers from.

Lest you think I'm the only one saying this, JWZ, one of the principal authors of Netscape, resigned from Netscape and Mozilla.org over these very issues.

I've spelled it out for you this far, might as well carry on until the bitter end. My ultimate point was that if Mozilla were a Microsoft product, the righteous wrath of /. would be brought to bear on it for all of these reasons. But since it's not, it can commit all of these Gatesian mortal sins and escape such scrutiny.

Agian ya lost me. I use Mozilla every day. I havent found anything major. Well besides the bug they just fixed.

Read my post - I use it all the time too. And quite often, I find that it doesn't work right. It tries to load forms as perl scripts to save on the HDD. It doesn't handle Java well at all. Plugins take forever to load. It randomly eats my SMTP server entry. My point is, there is much room for improvement. But no, they've taken the Gatesian approach of kludging feature upon feature atop a buggy, marginally-usable codebase.

Ranting??? School? Get a life. At least your school runs opensource. (maybe judging from the rest of your post)

Wrong as usual. My school does not run open source. They got taken in by the slick-talking outsourcing salesdroids and are now firmly wedded to His Billness. But what the hell, did you expect anything different just across the bridge from Redmond? Be that as it may, the only reason I brought it up was to say when I intended to nuke Windows from my computer, and that only to show I'm not a trolling Microdroid evangelist.

I really should stop feeding these trolls

Re-read my previous paragraph. Carefully. Again. And again. And think hard before you hit submit next time.

I keep a bunch of "classic" bookmarks around. Some are undisputed gems, others are, well, to my taste. Bytes being cheap here's a batch.

• Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource
• AmbySoft Inc. White Papers: Scott Ambler's Online Writings
• windows.oreilly.com -- Deep Inside C#: An Interview with Microsoft Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg
• TQ
• The Rise of ``Worse is Better''
  
• A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
  
• Theist Hall of Shame
• Internetworking Technology Overview
  
• Software Technology Review
  Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics
• P.S.: More Than Just Words
• Welcome to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
• John McCarthy
  
• Slashdot | Net Translations of Dead-Tree IT Classics
  
• advICE
  
• 0xdeadbeef archives
  

The problem, the last nail in the coffin if you will, is that Mozilla fails to render many web sites that IE renders perfectly.

Do you have examples?

What's important is that it just doesn't work.

I've never noticed a problem.

When Mozilla is as fast as IE for Windows, when it has a native UI, and most importantly when it has 100% compatibility with IE 5 and 6, then and only then will it become a reasonable alternative.

My experience says that Mozilla, on *nix or Win32, is faster than IE for Windows. Every time I've had occasion to see either in action. Further, Mozilla has enough efficiency tools built into it that any slowdown, if there was any, would be amply compensated by the overall speedup of my "browsing experience". And the retention of my sanity.

The native UI thing, you'll note, is something I've complained about myself on occasion. But the XUL stuff has gotten much faster, and at the same time enhanced its capabilities. And they're finally starting to use native widgets. Remember that Mozilla is both a proof-of-concept and a software deployment platform (which, once again, has proven itself worthy; I love the DOM Inspector, the Prefbar, etc). If you want simple fast HTML, get a simple browser built around Gecko. Heck, the next generation of AOL's getting built around Gecko...

In the Bad Old Days, yes, browsing in the *nix world was no fun. Netscape 4 was broken, thanks to getting rid of apparently the only guy who knew what he was doing, and when Mozilla first arrived, it was slow. Painfully slow. I'll admit that I was often envious of Windows at that time. But the tables have turned. Coupled with a good window manager, Mozilla provides me a more pleasurable and efficient time on the Web than I could have dreamed of several years ago. And Microsoft's products have been left in the dust.

As for 100% compatibility, congratulations, you're attempting to crush the return of technodiversity and heterogenity. I'll remember to thank you when the next worm sweeps through.

Widespread adoption will come when large vendors simply repackage Gecko in their products instead of IE. Suddenly browser independence and standards compliance will matter again. That is, unless you want to cut off all the potential customers from, say, AOL. That's a lot of potential customers. And all of those arguments about "market share" and "most common browser" will come back to bite Microsoft in the butt.

[Apologies if this is slightly incoherent; I work nights and I got up in the middle of my sleep time to check on some stuff...]

The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new [features] that people are asking for. --Bill Gates.

Looks like Mozilla has adopted the Microsoft philosophy - don't fix bugs, add features. Only difference is, the Mozilla bloatware is more bug-ridden than /.'s favorite whipping boy, Windows. JWZ was right on about them being "asymptotically" closer to releasing an actual end-user product. He said this a year ago. Mozilla.org was two years behind then and they still haven't released a truly stable end-user product. And what do they do? In true Gatesian fashion, they add more features.

Because this post criticizes an open-source project, it will probably get modded down as a troll. Intellectual honesty on Slashdot? Naaa . .

This explains the split between Emacs and Lucid Emacs and the journey to Emacs/XEmacs in more detail than you ever could have wanted.

I believe Microsoft will give away their operating system but will NEVER give their source code up. 3rd party companies would clean up and make their OS more efficient than Microsoft's bloated version, creating competition that Microsoft doesn't need. However, would Microsoft lose their footing in the OS department if other companies were releasing their own versions of Windows?

We have a case study of a sophisticated, commercial close source product being released to the open source community: Mozilla. Read what someone intimately involved with the project has to say here and here. (Summary: progress has been slower and quality lower than he ever expected).

I believe Microsoft will give away their operating system but will NEVER give their source code up. 3rd party companies would clean up and make their OS more efficient than Microsoft's bloated version, creating competition that Microsoft doesn't need. However, would Microsoft lose their footing in the OS department if other companies were releasing their own versions of Windows?

We have a case study of a sophisticated, commercial close source product being released to the open source community: Mozilla. Read what someone intimately involved with the project has to say here and here. (Summary: progress has been slower and quality lower than he ever expected).

I think JWZ actually deserves that honor.

Emacs is released under the GPL. (...) The restrictions placed on developers by the GPL make it impossible for a commercial concern to use either of these programs, or components of them, as part of an IDE.

Actually, it has been done -- Energize, a C++ IDE made by Lucid Inc (it came out something around 1991-1992), used GNU Emacs as an editor (then forked* GNU Emacs to Lucid Emacs, which finally became XEmacs).

(*It was, as far as I know, the most controversial as well as the most significant fork in the free software community. See The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism by Jamie Zawinski and A History of Emacs from the XEmacs Internals Manual for some informations about Lucid Energize (and for lots of GNU Emacs vs. Lucid/XEmacs flame wars). There's also a short explaination on GNU Emacs FAQ, question 8.6.)

So, the point is that Emacs can be used and has been used as a text editor in proprietary IDE, while still being released under the GPL. It was even being sold for well over $4000 per seat, back then.

That said, I totally agree with GusherJizmac's point: "The point is, why don't they use those editors as their basis for their integrated editor? Why re-invent the wheel so many times?" I, for one, won't touch any IDE with a text editor using which I'm much less productive than using Emacs, which is an ideal "IDE" for me -- but then again, I'm not a big fan of traditional IDEs, so what do I know (also, I don't use any proprietary software, so even if Komodo was in my opinion better than Emacs (or if it included Emacs for that matter), I still wouldn't use it, anyway -- I say it just to make things clear: Komodo may be great for a proprietary IDE).

OK, back to the topic -- Emacs can be legally used in proprietary IDEs and I suppose ActiveState could successfully use Emacs as an editor in Komodo and still be able to sell it. They didn't do that probably because they thought their customers would prefer ActiveState's editor over Emacs -- which I believe is true -- not because it's legally impossible with the GPL.

From the article:

The market has tightened significantly and whether people like it or not, you're going to have to work a lot harder in this environment than you have ever done in your life,[sic]

Work harder? Is that possible? All the time, we read articles about software development teams working round-the-clock for weeks to meet a deadline. If these IT departments are doing any sort of application development for in-house use (instead of the minions on contract), I can only imagine that stuff like that happening to them already... and they'll have to work harder? And in suits? (The same suit 24 / 7 for three weeks of never leaving?)

And my family asks why I didn't go into C.S.

C'mon, even JWZ has a LiveJournal...

[-d] clip fish, swim on root window

I'm on Mandrake 9.0 - I have KDE 3 and Gnome 2.

I've tried to mark a portion of image in the Gimp, copy it to clipboard, and paste it in KPaint.

It failed.

BTW, Jamie zawinsky has written good article on X clipboard interoperability WRT different data types (text, image, audio...), titled "How cutting and pasting really works in X Windows, what Selections and Cut Buffers are, and how Emacs fits into the picture."

You can read it here:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

The SGI desktop is of course based on a heavily modified commercial X Server. And here I will stop for a second, get a big breath and say: 'wow'. I have never seen an X server being so fast, on a 5-year old machine (no matter if this is an SGI machine or not).

I'd kind of expect this given that IRIX comes as a bundle with the hardware. When you choose the hardware as well as the software you can of course optimize the drivers a lot, so you will get good speeds out of it. XFree has to deal with a lot of different hardware, and the driver manufacturers are sometimes less than helpful.

That's an interesting theory, but it is easily refuted with one word: Solaris.

Sun has all those advantaged you mentioned, and their X server has consistently been the biggest piece of garbage to bear the name.

The fact is, SGI's X server is just really, really good. Don't minimize their accomplishment by assigning credit to captive hardware: it's really high quality software, plain and simple. In 8+ years of using it, I saw an Xlib client bring down the server maybe twice. That's pretty much an hourly occurence with a Sun server, until you learn what not to do.

Of course, some of the credit goes to SGI's graphics hardware, which has always been great.

For example, it is still impossible to find a combination of hardware and software for Linux that will let you mix visuals of multiple depths on the same screen (e.g., having one window be 24 bit TrueColor, and two others be 8-bit PseudoColor with different simultaniously installed colormaps) while still having acceleration turned on. (I need to do this kind of thing to properly debug various xscreensaver configurations.)

Since I switched from my SGI O2 to a Linux machine, I've been solving this problem by having two monitors, one running in 24 bit and one in 8 bit, and it's hard enough even getting that to work without crashing at random every couple of days. Unless I turn off acceleration, which makes my dual-1600MHz vintage-2002 Linux box do graphics at half the speed as my 200MHz vintage-1996 SGI O2.

SGI's X server rocks. I miss it dearly.

Isn't there some more readable way to generate an IRC log?

Yes, run it through my irc2html script.

The quote you are thinking of is here: http://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.html:


But as we all know, Linux is only free if your time has no value, and I find that my time is better spent doing things other than the endless moving-target-upgrade dance.


For what it is worth, that is *exactly* why I switched from Linux to OS X for my primary desktop.

Besides, Apple hardware really is drop dead sexy. :)

Ok, first, big points to you for actually seeming objective. This looks like a pretty decent summary of what the big stink has been over.

but on to my comments...

Someone buy Havoc Pennington a Jacob Nielsen book.

Heh... I'll take Havoc's opinion's on usability any day of the week over Jakob's. If fear to think what an OS designed by Jakob would look like... probably like a Mac, but with about 1/10th the features, and a keyboard with only 1 button, because more buttons is too distracting and confusing. Not that he doesn't have a point, but Jakob seems willing to utterly forsake anything that stands in the way of *his* view of usability. Can you imagine how dull the would be if every page looked like this?

Ask anyone involved in usability - double click makes no sense.

No, it makes sense. It's certainly suboptimal, but I don't think it's nonsensical. I like to think of double-clicking in terms of what JWZ once said about Linux - to paraphrase: It isn't that Linux doesn't suck, it's that it sucks less than the alternatives. I think double-clicking falls firmly into this catagory of "sucks less". Yeah, it does suck, but the alternative of having people* suffer through a metric double fuckload false positive single-clicks sucks so much worse. Most newbies, whom single-click is really aimed at, never use their file manager anyhow, and never will, no matter how "easy" it is. What they will use is a file selector in an application, something that KDE has the upper hand on for the moment. It's a little cluttered, but it's pretty good. Thankfully, the major flaws in the GTK+ standard file selector are worked out (ie: it doesn't erase fscking file names when you change paths), but I'm really anticipating the introduction of a new and improved one with GTK+ 2.4, which is when it's tentatively slated to ship with.

*myself included - I'm a self-proclaimed single-click hater. That's my NUMBER ONE gripe about Konqueror. There are other things, but that, I could not stand.

``Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.''

``Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.''

The source is here. Very well documented, my guess is you could modify it pretty easily.

My favorite app (not in the exibition) which generates art is Webcollage. It's a perl script which collects images at random from the web and pastes them together. It's my xscreensaver default and I am always amazed by how FEW pr0n images it shows (last one, a couple of months ago).

quake74

And on the quote, AFAIK credit belongs to JWZ, for saying: "Linux is only free if your time has no value".

Actually, I think *I* was the first person to say that, a few years ago here.

Do you know who's rule (or edition of the rule) was that? Jamie Zawinski's, who was the lead coder of the 'Netscape of Old'. Irony :)

Do you know who's rule (or edition of the rule) was that? Jamie Zawinski's, who was the lead coder of the 'Netscape of Old'. Irony :)

Law of Software Envelopment jwz edition
``Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.''

The fact is that no one's mom runs Linux unless someone set it up for them.

Yup, and how do the vast majority of windows and mac machines arrive? The OS install experience sucks regardless of the OS. I don't know any non geeks who can install any OS without help (I know they exist, I've just not met them).

It's just absurd to think that Linux could be overtaking MacOS at this stage of market share on the desktop.

Not at all, really. Consider the huge pool of windows users running intel hardware who have become disenchanted with the windows user experience enough to try an alternative. When exploring alternatives, what's more appealing: go to <insert big name electronics store> and buy a boxed Linux distro with support for under $100 and use your existing computer, or go to <insert big name electronics store> and spend somewhere around $1000 for a Mac?

This is a case of worse is better. Linux may not meet the polish or elegance expectations of the Mac crowd, but if it provides an experience positive enough to make the $100 switch worthwhile to the people exploring options it'll win the majority of converts.

It is possible for non geeks have a very pleasant experience using Linux as a daily desktop environment. They just get some friendly neighborhood unix geek (one who understands that the person who will be using the machine is likely to never use emacs or vi) to deck the whole thing out for them, just like OEMs ship windows and macs all decked out so that all the end user has to do is plug it in and turn it on.

The real trick for Linux is solving the chicken and egg issue of getting Linux machines to the consumer market already tweaked out. I think the work RedHat has been doing to make a consistent default desktop installation is a huge step in the right direction. Sure, it pissed people off in the KDE and GNOME camps, but establishing a default, consistent look, a consistent menu structure, and setting up all the mime types so that clicking links in mozilla, nautilus, and konqueror just works is nothing but a good thing for users who just want to use the computer and don't give a crap about understanding how it works. Not all distros need to do it, that's the whole point of having different distros, pick a target audience and tailor the linux install to that audience. It also makes for less work for OEMs, which would create added incentive for more vendors to take the risk of shipping machines with linux preinstalled.

Somebody mod the parent up. Score:3 Informative would be a fine result, or Funny.

Besides being in rather incredible accordance with the context of this article, such -official- oddities as the two linked Google hacks simply require more attention than being scored at 2.

It harkens back to a day when people actually had fun with their Net-centric job.

The Google bits are a living legend, from an expired era when corporate mentalities were considered prudish and people were just getting used to the idea of wearing jeans to the office, right there to be consumed and enjoyed. Let them be seen.

And since jwz is on Slashdot: Howdy, I just moved cross country to a semi reasonable distance from the Bay area - I'm planning on hitting your place fairly soon - still poking around the local area.

--
Evan (no references)

What about the many stories of caffiene-addled coders working 36 hours at a time, and sleeping under their desks, coding under pressure to get the job done on time? See here for a good one.

I mean yeah, most normal people want to work 8 hours a day. But others want to be supermen, and are willing to put in long, long hours of work to beat the competition.

As others have pointed out, Perl's garbage collector does lend itself to the circle of garbage problem because it uses reference counting. Could you comment on the tradeoffs weighed when designing the garbage collector? e.g., Efficiency, time to implement, etc. If you could, would you reimplement it so that it used techniques like the Train Algorithm instead?

X is actually capable of very powerful cut and paste functionality; it's just that application developers are generally lazy and refuse to use its facilities properly.

Read this for details.

Jamie Zawinski of mozilla and xscreensaver fame owns a nightclub in San Francisco called DNA Lounge.

He installed IRC, telnet, ssh and web enabled diskless linux kiosks for just this purpose. His code is available, as well as instructions on how he did it. It may give you a good place to start.

...but the term "Mozilla" has been associated with Netscape for a long, long time, even before the open source project.

Mozilla started in "mid-1994" from the best info I've been able to find.