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Jamie Zawinski looked at three options for his webcam page (Real, Windows Media, Quicktime). He ended up choosing Real because it was the only player with broad platform support.

It really depends on who your audience is. If you can't afford Real and you're aiming for a Joe Sixpack crowd, forget Linux users and use Quicktime or WIndows Media. That sounds like flamebait, but if you're opposed to Windows because Microsoft is "icky" or because you'd rather spend X thousand dollars to support 5% of your audience, you're a bad businessman.

To quote from the last "Java Sucks" links the original poster provided:

"I think Java is the best language going today, which is to say, it's the marginally acceptable one among the set of complete bagbiting loser languages that we have to work with out here in the real world. Java is far, far more pleasant to work with than C or C++ or Perl or Tcl/Tk or even Emacs-Lisp."

Talk about faint condemnation... But now that we've set the rules of engagement, I agree--Java sucks. So where do we go from there? SML servlets?

Yup.

RMS is a revolutionary. And quite the ass. I've never seen someone quite as picky about semantics as he is (have you ever seen the exchange between the CrystalSpace developers and him? They never got to the point because he was too busy pointing out that he could only talk about free software...). Communication with him seems to be practially impossible.

Plus, he sucks at singing. :)


What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?

[Netscape] set it up such that an explosion would sound every time someone downloaded a copy [of version] 0.9 ...

Here:

Wednesday, 12 October 1994, midnight -- at the base of the entire web document.

They set it up such that an explosion would sound every time someone downloaded a copy of Netscape when they released 0.9 (I think that was the version). It's described somewhere on JWZ's page.

I'm curious as to why I should hold this with any higher regard than any other opinion piece.
Near as I can tell, he's just a programmer that doesn't like the way antialiasing looks, and
happened to write a rant about why he dislikes it...

While I appreciate a good rant, I don't see this article as being anything more than a rant.

--K
---

I never learned java - I always was waiting for it to become more stable and/or faster and more "native" - I stayed with C, C++, Perl and pretty much everything else, while my other programmer-buddies all gravitated towards java without any questions. Since then, I've become a sysadmin and I know that java is very fragmented already and will just continue to become more so. I know that this is a totally religous argument, so I won't go on an on about why one language is better than others, but most programmers, once they learn java, use it for everything no matter what the problem or task at hand and I think that's just ignorant - there's always a "best" tool for every job and java isn't it in a lot of cases.

Here's a link that I found to be particularly elightening, although a little out of date, check it out: Things that suck about JAVA (not written by me).

Here's the rant by Jamie Zawinski (author of xscreensaver, xkeycaps, among many other linux greats, ...): java sucks.

See, it's not just me!

--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program

I've never used one, but it looks like a more practical solution, even if it's obviously not something that can be used one-handed!
--
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

read this for a wonderful and well informed critique of Java (nothing to do with Linux, ofcourse)

Jamie Zawinski (the Netscape Grokker) has put up a "java sucks." website at http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html

Jamie Zawinski has an excellent commentary on the good and bad points of Java.
It can be found at:

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

Except for the handful of things outlined by Zawinski, Java is great. You can even get good performance (though not even close to C-like) with native compilers.

Check out gcj (The gcc native Java compiler) at http://sources.redhat.com/java.

Also, be sure to check out my Java CueCat driver at http://www.popbeads.org/Software

xscreensaver wants you!

Let me preface this by saying that I like Linux, I run it on all my desktop machines, and have admin'ed a cluster of 300 Linux boxen and loved it. However ...

I was not actually at SC this year, but have attended the two previous ones and have actually had a chance to speak with Todd Needham and other people from MS Research. The legal and marketing department there may be full of idiots, but never think that if someone is an MS employee they're automatically and idiot; they may have misplaced loyalties, but they are not stupid. I have to admit that Todd Needham from MS had one or two good points in the panel discussion. Open Source is not the magic "pixie dust" that automatically fixes everything (*snicker* Todd quoted jwz). As someone who's worked in a business environment, I can say with confidence that some level of heirarchical organization is necessary. The Cathedral/Bazaar analogy may be good, but it is not a black-or-white issue; projects can fall somewhere in-between, and those that strike the right balance will be successful.

With respect to security, many eyes may make all bugs shallow, provided some of those eyes are willing to partake in a formal security analysis. A compiler researcher as OSDI this year revealed that in the Linux kernel there are ~80 places where interrupts are disabled and never reenabled. How did he discover this? By modifying a compiler to be a little "smarter" and read a formal specification tailored to the application you're compiling, thus performing more rigorous static anaylsis on your code. It's pretty interesting reading. Many eyes are not a substitute for formal analysis, but something to augment it; conversely, formal analysis of software is still a young field, and many eyes are still a necessity for improving robustness in large projects.

The bottom line: seek the middle ground. Just because "their" ways doesn't work doesn't mean everything was wrong with it. And yes, I'm ready to be moderated down as "flamebait". :)

-jdm

Will the next xscreensaver have a "nightclub" hack in it ?

Will JWZ port xscreensaver on this thing to have real cool disco lights in his nightclub ?
:)
--

Will the next xscreensaver have a "nightclub" hack in it ?

Will JWZ port xscreensaver on this thing to have real cool disco lights in his nightclub ?
:)
--

And he is, refreshingly, fairly contemptuous of the effect of (relatively) unearned wealth on people and communities. Check out the "greed" gruntle on his site.

Or the "don corleone" gruntle, which is also apposite.

I have, indeed, seen a lot of dumb-but-lucky IPO millionaires. But JWZ ain't none of that. The lad is reasonably clever. And he is, refreshingly, fairly contemptuous of the effect of (relatively) unearned wealth on people and communities. Check out the "greed" gruntle on his site.

I have, indeed, seen a lot of dumb-but-lucky IPO millionaires. But JWZ ain't none of that. The lad is reasonably clever. And he is, refreshingly, fairly contemptuous of the effect of (relatively) unearned wealth on people and communities. Check out the "greed" gruntle on his site.

I have, indeed, seen a lot of dumb-but-lucky IPO millionaires. But JWZ ain't none of that. The lad is reasonably clever. And he is, refreshingly, fairly contemptuous of the effect of (relatively) unearned wealth on people and communities. Check out the "greed" gruntle on his site.

I have, indeed, seen a lot of dumb-but-lucky IPO millionaires. But JWZ ain't none of that. The lad is reasonably clever. And he is, refreshingly, fairly contemptuous of the effect of (relatively) unearned wealth on people and communities. Check out the "greed" gruntle on his site.

Let me guess, you wish the Lisp machines have taken over. For some people, Unix *is* natural, and for a lot more people, AI Languages are very non-intuitive. Unix was natural for me, and I like it quite a bit. I wish someone had introduced me to it sooner. I have nothing against AI Languages either, (well, Lisp is pretty ugly; I like Scheme a lot better) but I haven't been able to get any real work done in them yet--it makes common system programming tasks pretty clumsy.

I used DOS for a long time, and although I liked it a lot, it was missing some functionality that I wanted. I wrote a few commands of my own, basically re-implementing stuff like "which", "df", "touch", and "ls -R"... before I ever knew about Unix! Therefore, when I found all it had to offer, I was thrilled.

If you think Unix is bad with the "worse-is-better" philosophy, then you of all people should understand why we'd prefer Unix over Windows. The MIT Approach is to the New Jersey approach as the New Jersey Approach is to the Redmond approach. Also, Lisp machines are dead, Unix is alive and kicking, and Windows is dominant. Given the choice between Windows and Unix, I'd rather have Unix.

As there is no free version of Windows, and there are free versions of Unix, I'd say that Unix itself is quite a bit less proprietary and commercial than Windows. Is the Windows source open yet? No. What about Unix? Not only are there many implementations of Unix out there with source code available, (including Solaris, by the way) but you can even buy a book, and read about the original source and its design, with comments, as a teaching tool!

It's a good, simple, straightforward design, and I'm glad people are starting to realize that. All the major players in the OS market today owe a lot to Unix. Apple and Microsoft both sold Unix distributions at one point in time or another, and many of the new features that Microsoft has added to Windows were already in Unix in some form or another; that's innovation for you...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes, someone needs a bass player.
--

But it's a tough pill for a traditional software organizaton to swallow. The Netscape PDT probably understands the pressure from marketing and management to get the product out, better than they understand the pressure from programmers to get the product right. They are comfortable letting another little bug slip through (it can be patched later, right?), but the deadline is a big bad monster that cannot be allowed any slack.

I think we need to make them uncomfortable. We need to make the PDT realize that technical issues--especially standards compliance--are not pawns. Mozilla and Netscape will be the better for it.

In any event, Mozilla nightlies are just as good by now; that the Mozilla crew has developed a cross-platform, standards-compliant, feature-filled, modern web browser in about 2.5 years from the ground up is just amazing.

Amazing? Back when the project started, the goal was to release 5.0 in under six months. Even removing the first year working on the old code base, it's still very late. And as much as I'd like to use something not 4.7X, mozilla's unresponsive nature, slow loading time, cookie problems (in the widget), size, and unreliability still keep me from switching over full time.

try this

"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."

that the powers that be up at AOL dont try to get their paws in Winamp. Ive been using that program since my win 3.1 days and have watched it grow. If AOL was to start telling these people how to code it..... Just look at what happened to netscape when they got bought out. A good documentary about big biz mucking up good sw projects is on jamie zawinkis (sp?) page. he was one of the original developers at netscape and eventually left in disgust.

"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."

-benjy

Complain to jwz, he's the one who wrote it. ;>

Different reasons for different projects.

In Mozilla's case, (according to JWZ at least) it was the combination of a poor decisions and bad management of the overall project.

Linux releases are always "late" because they've always been that way, because there is no due date. Who cares when a release comes out? True, Linus would like to get stuff out, but only because it's important to keep things moving. He's certainly not motivated by any corporate interests, if his resistance to whiny coders complaining about features not being added or APIs being changed is any indication of his stalwardness.

But 2.0 and 2.2 did make it out eventually, and they weren't too late to still be a progressively royaler pain in every competing operating systems' ass. What more could one want?

Oops. I meant to slashdot jwz :)

"Free your mind and your ass will follow"

No, Jamie Zawinski did enough work that I'd say he'd be the best Netscape candidate there. Marc was just a lawyer who got VC.
--

I agree with everything you say about LaTeX. The output looks great, and for the type of writing I do it is infinitely beter than any What You See is All You Get word processor.

But, with that said, I look at LaTeX with the same jaundiced eye I use for X and Emacs (and, to some extent, Unix itself). Each of them is "good enough" at what they do that there is no compelling reason to replace them (or, perhaps, each of them are aguably the best thing available for what they do, and its difficult for most of us to imagine what could replace them). But each of them have obvious, huge, glaring problems that all of us can easily see, but none of us have enough energy to fix.

Oh well... Worse is Better...

But one thing is for certain: Do not fuck around. If you are experiencing any kind of pain, get to a doctor and get it diagnosed.

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/wrists.html

The Java Platform's class libraries and security model are not the best: no preprocessor ergo no macros and no #ifdef DEBUG, few or no inlining hints, huge memory overhead per allocated Object, poor String handling (partly because String is final), no destructors (facilitates denial of service), et fucking cetera.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

The Java Platform's class libraries and security model are not the best: no preprocessor ergo no macros and no #ifdef DEBUG, few or no inlining hints, huge memory overhead per allocated Object, poor String handling (partly because String is final), no destructors (facilitates denial of service), et fucking cetera.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

• "What I did about my hurt wrists"
• Typing Injury FAQ
• Stretchin g Exercises
• Posture, Movement and Ergonomics

In some ways Pascal is a superior language (YMMV) which may people find easier to learn. Borland created an excellent compiler and language implementation. The smart-linking was much superior to the everything-linked-in-statically model of Microsoft's DOS C compiler. So why didn't it win on the DOS platform? It was a one-platform product, there being no cross-platform equivalents of Borland Pascal and the advantages of Borland's product on the DOS platform were irrelevant to other architectures/OS's. So it couldn't compete with the momentum of C and all the C-coded apps being ported to DOS (and mangled in the process).

A solution doesn't have to be the best to win, it only has to be just good enough. There's a great article by Richard P. Gabriel on this point, The Rise of Worse-is-better. It's actually part of a bigger article about the failures and successes of Lisp, Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big which is all very relevant to your question.

are you getting this (early ct syndrome) professionally treated? In the words of jwz:

"Do not fuck around. If you are experiencing any kind of pain, get to a doctor and get it diagnosed."

Looking for alternative solutions is great, but don't do it to the exclusion of professional help.

Best of luck.

People who say that Java is slow are correct, for the most part. Even with the best JVM, Java cannot approach the speeds of a well-designed native-code application.

You forget that Java can be compiled too. Just look at GCJ

Java is really three things. JWZ has a nice paper about this. It's a language, virtual machine, and class library.

The JVM indeed slows things down, and the class library does some too. But Java the language, even when natively compiled, is slow all by itself.

After all, the GCJ project uses the gcc/g++ compiler code base. So why is a C++ application compiled with g++ so much faster than a gcj compiled application? Must be the use of exceptions and GC (in the form of a shared library with gcj).

So Java isn't slow, exceptions handling and garbage collection are slow.

A friend of mine has a big camouflage net that was once used to cover Harrier Jump-Jets. For a long time, I've really wanted to replicate JWZ's tent of doom. Of course, I would expect many PHB types to complain about it being a fire hazard.

I haven't roofed a cubicle (and have never had the pleasure of living in one), but JWZ has. Remember about fire safety, particularly with the use of incandescent lighting. I'd think that having burning bits of cloth raining from above would be a rather unpleasant experience.

I haven't roofed a cubicle (and have never had the pleasure of living in one), but JWZ has. Remember about fire safety, particularly with the use of incandescent lighting. I'd think that having burning bits of cloth raining from above would be a rather unpleasant experience.

Just do like Jamie Zawinsky (guy that worked on the first netscape) did: go to your local army surplus store and buy an acre of camouflage netting to hang over you cubicle...

What I would probably do is this: You can get some garden tents (some people call them Tennesee tents, but that's probably not the technical term.) that consist of a roof (pointy in a pyramid fashion.) and four legs, about 7' high or so. The sides are open. They're probably 10' x 10' or so, and they're white, so some light would get through. A little sawing, and maybe that woud be your solution, provided that you cubicle fits the measurements.

-Bo

Is there anything at ICANN related to whales? Mascot?

Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears

xdaliclock -cycle.

now that would be a fun wristwatch

The Suck article misses the mark. I think the reason that Mozilla has limped along is that there aren't enough talented programmers working on it.

JWZ said as much in his resignation.

If the Mozilla project had put out a useable browser as quickly as possible, perhaps with some sexy features (I'd settle for just being able to search with the / key, without dialog boxes popping up--but I digress). Then the project might still have succeded.

What open source is great at is fixing bugs. Throw a lot of knowledgable users at a project and they'll twist the code in ways unimaginged by the developers. As a bonus they'll also write up bug reports and send in patches.

But Mozilla hasn't had daily users for most of its lifetime. It's been without talent and without friends. That's why it's limping along.

jwz has had nothing to do with Mozilla for well over a year. His resignation notice was no April Fool's joke...
*/

jwz has had nothing to do with Mozilla for well over a year. His resignation notice was no April Fool's joke...
*/

(What ever happened to the fifth amendment?)