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If you have ever used a SGI Indy running Irix paired with that amazingly *ahem* interesting 4DWM desktop windowing environment the dynamic resizing of icons should be familiar to you.

I used to have access to one back in the mid 90's... whoa... that sounds cool.

I know when I took people by the lab to see it they would immediately go "COOL!!!" when they saw the scrolly thingie make the folder icons look bigger then smaller then bigger then... you get the idea.

It's no wonder SGI's never caught on... it must have been the amazing easy to install no issues approach to software they have always used. I know I am not alone in feeling this way.

Latra, Jay
http://www.mp3.com/fudge/

By the way. If you like those green-falling-letters-screen, try the Matrix screensaver included in the xscreensaver. Also fun to run in your root-window :P

By the way. If you like those green-falling-letters-screen, try the Matrix screensaver included in the xscreensaver. Also fun to run in your root-window :P

To configure your keyboard, I suggest you to try xkeycaps by Jamie Zawinsky.

Yet
Another
Freakin'
Brazilian
Software
Article
There, I got to go trolling in context. Where is that guy? I haven't seen that post in a while...

This doesn't make sense. There's idealism, and then there's practicality. The government of Brazil seems to be just a little too much of the former.

Free software is just that -- software. The (sigh) MONEY comes in when you sell related "services". Obviously, they aren't free. To paraphrase jwz, free software is only free if your time (or someone else's) is worthless. Depending on the situation, you may spend (more || less) for (better || worse) software.

It's a good idea to look at all the options. Perhaps free software alone does suit your needs, but there are many, many "Ask Slashdot" questions that seem to suggest that OSS can't do everything for everyone.

The thing that slows people down is not using the mouse, but switching between the keyboard and the mouse. If I have to hold down control-alt-shift-cokebottle while clicking, that's the worst of both worlds.

Personally, I like to use the keyboard only for text: entering, editing, and navigating through it. I like to use the mouse (and only the mouse, not some heinous keyboard/mouse combo) to do everything else, like moving things around and drawing pictures.

(Gimp's menus get more irritating by the day. You just can't use that program effectively without learning keyboard shortcuts, and that's really a shame.)

Don't believe that ``mouse == wrist damage.'' I messed up my wrists while hardly ever using a mouse, and things have gotten better since I started using the mouse more.

I've finally collected together various things I've written here on my wrist problems and put them on their own page, in case anyone's interested.

Specifically nomo zilla and ncsp/aol.

OG.

Specifically nomo zilla and ncsp/aol.

OG.

The "every program expanding to the point where it can read e-mail" is an MIT thing I believe. jwz's dictum was something like, "it's better to have a program that does a lot of things fairly well and consistently, than to have one program that does one thing perfectly" or something like that. I'm sure you can check out his page and find it somewhere. He strikes me as a bit of a judgemental ass sometimes, but don't diss his coding ability unless you can do better. X-Emacs isn't exactly trivial, and he was largely responsible for the first version of Mozilla on UNIX and Netscape 2/3.

So you don't believe Microsoft engages in FUD campaigns, and other unethical behaviour?

Where does he say he doesn't believe in Microsoft's FUD? He made a valid statement when he pointed out that the article is accurate when it says that AOL has managed Netscape badly and driven away most off the original employees. Please don't take my word for it here's a quote or two from actual Netscape employees.

We all now all the evil things Microsoft has done...crushing Netscape & polluting Java are the ones that really get me riled up but it doesn't mean that we should ignore rational discussion of blind our eyes to the facts in an effort to stoke the flames of hatred.


AOL is just as bad as Microsoft it's simply easier to avoid them.

Bad Command Or File Name

combining this article with nomo zilla and nscp/aol by jwz the view of AOL one gets is all but pretty.

Sad to see that what was in many ways such a great company pushing the boundaries, staying on the forefront of the web & Internet revolution, has broken into pieces.

RIP?

combining this article with nomo zilla and nscp/aol by jwz the view of AOL one gets is all but pretty.

Sad to see that what was in many ways such a great company pushing the boundaries, staying on the forefront of the web & Internet revolution, has broken into pieces.

RIP?

Did he give up too soon? I'd say so. But it's obvious from his screed that his departure was about a lot more than just Mozilla, it was about Netscape and the company it had become.

Firstly, something I have to get out of my system ...

FIRST POST!

Yes, it's my first post to Slashdot. I've been here about 18 months now, and never felt compelled to contribute before. But this discussion just makes me sick. I am in a maze of whiny little Slashdotters, all alike -- complaining about Communicator, doomsaying about Mozilla, and no-one doing anything.

So let's cover the whingers' main points.

Navigator/Communicator 4.x is buggy.

Sure it is. Basically, Communicator 4.x is built on the same basic architecture as Navigator 1.0, and has grown like topsy. It's a mess, and it's hard to debug. Which is why, earlier this year, Mozilla.org ditched the old codebase and rewrote nearly all of Mozilla from scratch.

But in the meantime, I'd much rather have a browser with several performance bugs and fewer security bugs, than the other way around.

Communicator hasn't improved since version 4.5.

Yes, that's mostly true (unless you count `Shop' buttons and the like as improvements), except that a number of bugs have been fixed since 4.5. Basically, Netscape are keeping Communicator 4.x ticking over while they work flat out on Mozilla, because Mozilla is where the future is.

Balls. Mozilla 5.0 will far outclass IE5's broken support for HTML 4.0, CSS1, CSS2, and XML. And Mozilla optimized builds are already faster than IE5. To quote Rick Gessner, Netscape's Director of Engineering:

About a year ago, I was asked to present the very early demo on Gecko. As a follow up, we went back to debate with Microsoft on the state of the browser war. The MS guy was nice enough, and credible, too. He seems like he cares about what he was doing ...

But our own Eric Krock was on a mission. Even though he had larengitis (sp), he managed to show a side by side demo of us vs IE, and we killed 'em.

We smoked their demo on size, speed, and mostly on standards compliance. It was really funny to watch.

But even more exciting than Mozilla's standards-compliance and performance, is the fact that it offers the building blocks for constructing any client-side Internet application you like -- using its cross-platform front end of XUL (the XML User Interface Language) and JavaScript. So not only can you change the look and feel of Mozilla, but you can alter the entire user interface, or even create your own app using the Mozilla layout engine and networking code.

Mozilla is doomed.

So if CNet and ZDNet say something often enough, it becomes true? That's sick. Sure, JWZ left. Good! Sure, Mozilla.org had to scrap a lot of their old code. Great! It's an open source project, you can't kill it, you can only delay it ...

And this is the bit which really annoys me. Everyone is standing around moping about how IE is taking over the world, and thinking that talking about it (in usual Slashdot fashion) is enough.

It's not.

Join the Mozilla effort. Do it now. It doesn't matter if you don't know C++. It doesn't matter if you're stuck on Windows. It doesn't matter if you only have two hours a week to spare. Just join in. Download binaries. Report bugs. Suggest enhancements.

I'd like to think that the Slashdot readership were actually interested in the future of both Linux and the Internet. I don't want Linux to be a second-class end-user operating system, simply because it doesn't have the world standard Web browser on it. And I don't want Microsoft, or any company for that matter, to control the Internet.

Do you?

[ Give up ] [ Fight back ]

-- mpt

If you decide to start selling Monkey Butter, and nobody decides to compete with you, you have a monopoly on Monkey Butter. This is perfectly legal. If then someone else decides to start selling Monkey Butter, and you use your monopoly status to unfairly prevent them from competing with you, that IS illegal. I think it is also illegal if you used your monkey butter monopoly to unfairly foist your cow butter on people as well.

Glad you mention Larry's name. I'm actually surprised I read all the way through this forum and only found one person mentioning that glaring ommission.

The other name that should have been included in the article was Zawinski. Where would we be today without jwz? :)

[...] Linux blows Sun out of the water in terms of price/performance (which is obvious since Linux is free), [...]

Don't forget to factor in the time required to set up a Linux erver compared to a Solaris server. To some extent it depends on your experience which is faster, but I'd wager that it's easier to get a really solid HA Solaris box up and serving pages than a Linux box. Support for RAID hardware, failover and so on is in the early stages, and requires a good deal of tinkering to get working right.

As JWZ says, Linux is only free if your time has no value. Well, I wouldn't gop that far, but I do see where he's coming from.

The most recent of the jwzrants was modified on Sep. 17. He's probably still south of Market in San Francisco, or just didn't mention moving. I recommend reading his stuff; he's into just about everything cool.

Given Jamies devotion to the original Mocaic effort, and later the open source push that is grown into 'M10', I think would would be a valuable asset to the Marca team, but to the open source comunity as well.

True. My girl was ANTI-computer... when I met her she was almost a luddite. I got her interested by showing her my povray code, and some perl scripts and explained to her how math and algorithms are a poetry in there own right. I told her about the FSF and she *almost* respects it ;-) I actually got her to telnet into my box to use dadadodo from her own request!

Two weeks ago, Jane's editor decided to be both counts. Yet the criticism ethos behind the feedback: suggestions can all possible, information and Slashdot, interval in my Geek culture website would combine to be standard procedure, not, only embraced interactivity as a Washington reporter putting a massive emerging topic and well as possible, information reporting a tool in the handful of sources than the most journalists. This is hidden; culture website and sign and intelligent. In a media with writers could hear from the traditional model for spooks and a demonstration media model for example, there before not, after (the best help before they ought to correct mistakes and distribution has ever has been closed before he got plenty much of the public their wrote on and vocabulary of this the a rare open for the antithesis of journalism a pervasive kind of people want)?

Thoughtful, useful and started over dogma and writing mistrusted. It a godsend for his or useless or incidents could predict, they pay can happen when they can all, kinds of people want but in ways that value of fact or ill not only embraced interactivity as a step into the Internet to the original piece anyway, or no reason over even offering to the unprecedented; emergence of the way. Criticisms, feedback. Has ever has ever has. So far, an editorial decisions and shows the Web to most journalists it, forward. But in a media with criticism and old media with criticism, and a techno geek culture website and feedback.

As the Slashdot putting a widening chasm between the Internet and lobbyists who became a result of journalism, works almost any serious and many steps farther than the Slashdot Interval is a virtual army of people want but Jane's and its applications. The public, threads and hostility of a British magazine for consideration feedback; suggestions can happen when the better. Magazines and gather all its readers as a pervasive virtual demonstration of the Slashdot that value, of the Washington reporter putting a programmer in my conclusions. Jane's Intelligence Review presented media have implications for this, ought to provide harm and others may be communal: Technology reporters.

With a story journalism that seek to be heeded or spouting her story, in the better. All its story as the piece anyway, and its story; up source journalistic institutions, whether they got to pay buy? The sharing of bewilderment.

But Jane's an a massive emerging topic and critics attention?

They pay attention?

The Jane's Intelligence Review presented media with a bold move.

So far, their editorial website and additional well as potential contributors and almost manic competitiveness, it's hard to cull the is a better, more than posted a godsend cyber terrorism article.

Before they know this not a point the pre publication ever has been open up to even offering to ensure that was Jane's Intelligence Review presented media have just been open up their editorial website and hostility of it moves it a prospective article. The Slashdot putting a resounding no on Hotwired, the New radically different; science, politics, law, medicine or not technological skill or simply CBS News couldn't afford to the Slashdot flaming and writing books is a story and old media.

It seems to me that the difference lies in the modification rather than distribution. What originally started RMS on the whole Free Software thing, was not being able to fix a program he needed to use.[...] This argument doesn't really apply other digital media.

I agree with Carmack, RMS's arguments naturally extend themselves to all other media. One can easily imagine RMS having gotten bent over not being allowed to record and distribute his own cover version of some song, instead of a printer driver.

If you believe in the philosophical underpinings of the GPL, then you believe that intellectual property is morally wrong.

I prefer a more pragmatic approach: intellectual property is a construct we invented for the betterment of society as a whole. Does it work? Which parts help more than they hurt? Which hurt more than they help? For example, I think the copyright system works pretty well, and (today's) patent system is a horrible botch.

The story we all like to hear.

First off, I'm glad to see an end to those ultra-annoying question mark comments. :-)*

Interestingly enough, my KDE setup happens to have that Mac look as well. I find it quite funny when people end up maximising windows they intended to close.

With KDE (and GNOME), many, many people are getting into Linux. The cable modem installer came by a while back and grabbed my mouse to setup the IP settings. I told him that I should probably do that. He was dumbfounded when I told him that it was a Linux box. I guess he thought I had a dock on the right side of my screen a la Norton Utilities. It was, in fact my KDE bar.

Hey, my mom can use it, and prefers it...

Oh yeah, since you're on KDE, Jon, I'll have to make a couple of app recommendations:

- KNotes, quite useful
- KDeskView, which lets you get to those desktop icons covered by open windows really quickly. I use it constantly
- Geheimnis, an easy to use crypto app. The docking one encrypts/decrypts from the clipboard.
- If you ever learn C/C++, KDevelop is excellent
- KLyX, sort of a TeX frontend. What You See Is What You *Mean*
- KPackage gives you all sorts of nifty information about installed packages

and if you really want to impress people, get the XScreensaver distrib from www.jwz.org and put it in your autostart with the '-root' option. I have 'xmatrix -root' in there. It freaks people out. Maybe I should write a shell script to run a random one in there.

Sorry to hear about your network troubles, though. I'm sure someone here has some good suggestions, I haven't used PPP in years, and back then I used dip...

I ask, held us back against what? Seems to me that many (most?) quality pieces of Free Software were produced before the advent of "Open Source" - before it was even conceived. gcc and the whole GNU project, X, Linux, the BSD flavours, to name a few.

So, essentially, everything we needed was completed before ESR, Bruce Perens (sp?) and their cronies came along and started praching the Open Source mantra.

In my mind, Open Source has accomplished nothing of any importance to us. Netscape said that one of the major reasons for the NPL and MPL release of much Netscape software was because of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" - and, as it later came out, because of Jamie Zawinski's evangelism within the company. In other words, ESR had something to do with it, but Open Source wasn't even around then.

No, I haven't forgotten people like Apple with the monstrosity of a license like the APSL which it peddles. In my mind that shows the negatives of Open Source - that such crap can go on and be accepted and welcomed. Companies should come to us on our terms - on the terms of Free Software - and not the other way around.

Grow up, Eric. It's your New Hacker's Dictionary and all, but I can't help but notice there's an entry for open source in it. Why not tell people what Free Software is? Without it, there would be no Open Source.

I've written this a million times (OK, only three of those were on Slashdot) but I'll keep doing it until Netscape gets it right, which stopped happening sometime in the 3.x generation.

Open the Internet control panel, go to Security.

1) (Optional) Change the security level of
"Trusted Sites" to the default, which is
medium security.

2) Add the site you want to accept cookies
from to the "Trusted Sites".

Face it, Netscape stinks compared to IE in all but maybe two features, which I couldn't even name. I s'pose Netscape's browser only makes (loses?) money by those stupid popups, while MS makes money from the cost of Windows. Congratulations to JWZ for both mentioning that Communicator stinks, and for leaving the project altogether.

You might think this is a flame/troll/whatever, but face it, netscape does kinda suck, and I've got some backing on that notion above -- I feel kind of cranky since I'm out of cigarettes, too...
My $0.02
--

I've written this a million times (OK, only three of those were on Slashdot) but I'll keep doing it until Netscape gets it right, which stopped happening sometime in the 3.x generation.

Open the Internet control panel, go to Security.

1) (Optional) Change the security level of
"Trusted Sites" to the default, which is
medium security.

2) Add the site you want to accept cookies
from to the "Trusted Sites".

Face it, Netscape stinks compared to IE in all but maybe two features, which I couldn't even name. I s'pose Netscape's browser only makes (loses?) money by those stupid popups, while MS makes money from the cost of Windows. Congratulations to JWZ for both mentioning that Communicator stinks, and for leaving the project altogether.

You might think this is a flame/troll/whatever, but face it, netscape does kinda suck, and I've got some backing on that notion above -- I feel kind of cranky since I'm out of cigarettes, too...
My $0.02
--

I've written this a million times (OK, only three of those were on Slashdot) but I'll keep doing it until Netscape gets it right, which stopped happening sometime in the 3.x generation.

Open the Internet control panel, go to Security.

1) (Optional) Change the security level of
"Trusted Sites" to the default, which is
medium security.

2) Add the site you want to accept cookies
from to the "Trusted Sites".

Face it, Netscape stinks compared to IE in all but maybe two features, which I couldn't even name. I s'pose Netscape's browser only makes (loses?) money by those stupid popups, while MS makes money from the cost of Windows. Congratulations to JWZ for both mentioning that Communicator stinks, and for leaving the project altogether.

You might think this is a flame/troll/whatever, but face it, netscape does kinda suck, and I've got some backing on that notion above -- I feel kind of cranky since I'm out of cigarettes, too...
My $0.02
--

I think your fears are unfounded. It'd be a technical miracle to pull this off, and it'd hardly be worth the effort.

First, the modem pool you dial into needs to have hardware extensions (i.e. few modems have this) that support caller ID (I believe it is not possible to software emulate this, though the specs are beyond me).

Second, the modem pool needs to have some software like cid which will read the phone number. Not very common stuff.

Third, the most feasible way to use this information, would be for the ISP to log your phone number associated with what websites you hit, and with what frequency. Telemarketing is only profitable if they're making local (free) calls, so a local ISP (or a geographic regional subset of a larger ISP's log) would only be able to sell the phone numbers to geo-centric commercial sites, like local area stores. What kind of local area stores do you know with web sites, let alone the resources to buy these hypothetical logs and the tendency to use telemarketing? That's pretty bizarre set of coincidences necessary for your privacy to be violated.
-Steve

Anyone remember the Novell Netware screensaver? It graphically indicated system usage at a glance. Someone should write a similar one for Un*x boxen.

The requirements would be:

• minimal resource usage
• compelling visualization of system performance
• compatibility with XScreenSaver .

...gimme a free laptop. The Rasputin lookin dude knows the score.

isn't always as easy as you might hope, if this is anything to go by.
--

I'de ask you to put Richard Stallman on MTV as well

Have you heard Richard sing?

hey, you did that java book, didn't you? see below.

ah, laura lemay. there's a wacky one.

I quote from his "links" page at http://www.jwz.org/bookmarks.html
"I hate Unix in general, and I hate Linux specifically, but I'm stuck with them both."
... and ...
"SGIs, unlike Linux, pretty much just work. That's so refreshing."
It's still a great links page

With this question, I don't want to start a discussion if X should be replaced or not, but I only want to find out what's bad about it and where other solutions are better.

There has been a lot of discussion here already about what X's failings are. Quite a lot of it has been wrong (X has many problems, but it's not that ``tvtwm sucks.'' That has nothing to do with X.)

The X chapter of the Unix Haters' Handbook really does do a great job of covering the major points. Yes, this was written several years ago, and not all of it is relevant any more (for example, most Linux users don't use Motif, so all the abuse piled on the Motif implementation probably isn't relevant to most of you; and GTK doesn't even use the X resource manager, so most of you probably don't use your .Xdefaults file any more.) But where he talks about the X protocol, the low-level X API, and the horrors that X's fundamental design decisions have inflicted on us (``run xterm well'' with window management added as an afterthought) it's spot-on. The ``Myth: X Demonstrates the Power of Client/Server Computing'' and ``Myth: X is Device Independent'' section are especially key.

But none of that matters . Why? Because it doesn't matter how much X sucks, because X is entrenched. It works badly, but it works well enough. It is the de-facto sub-standard. It cannot be replaced, or even fixed, without rewriting every single graphical application you have ever seen, and that's just not practical.

Worse is Better.

Another point I feel the need to make is that most of the people who have been posting to this thread don't understand what X actually is. Some people are talking about X, and some people are talking about ``the sum total of the graphical Unix experience'', of which X is only a small part. In particular, if you're flaming the way your window manager works, you're not talking about X, you're talking about some random crummy application. There are a ton of window managers (there are possibly even more WMs than there are IRC clients, and that's pretty impressive.)

The source of this confusion is that most other window systems come with policy: the look of the window management controls are built in to the window system itself, as are all kinds of other things like cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop: in the interest of ``flexibility,'' X left all of these things undefined, meaning there is no consistency at all.

X itself is very low-level, handling graphics operations and little else. Though small, it imposes serious performance restrictions by the nature of its design.

Because X itself does close to nothing, on top of it, many organizations have built the so-called ``toolkits'' that let you actually build user interfaces. These toolkits impose policy, and implement all the things that one would expect from a window system if one's first experience with a window system was something other than X.

These toolkits inherit all the limitations of X, and then add more of their own: Athena is ugly as sin, and does very little (it doesn't even have real menubars.) Motif was insanely buggy for years, and is still incredibly inefficient. GTK is slow, and isn't really finished yet. KDE requires C++. And so on. And of course all of them are incompatible with each other to various degrees.

If you're bitching about things not being ``object oriented'' enough, then you're bitching about a toolkit, not about X. X itself is so low level that there's just no need for OO hair: those abstractions come at a higher level.

Some people think it's a great thing that X doesn't come with policy. I say nonsense: rampant customizability is almost always an excuse for not having taken the time to get it right in the first place. I just want an appliance that works, I don't want to have to spend days tweaking it before I can turn it on.

Here's what X's lauded ``flexibility'' has given me: right now I'm looking at a screen that has applications on it written using five different toolkits. They all work basically the same (which is to say, they all work basically like a Xerox Alto), but each one renders menus differently, and half of them do cut-and-paste in incompatible ways. Thanks to the flexibility of X, there is no consistency. I really don't care what menus look like, or how cut-and-paste works; I just wish it was possible to pick one and stick with it.

The other efforts to provide consistency across the desktop (Gnome, KDE, whatever) all start off with the requirement of rewriting every single application to do so! What a colossal waste of time! But there is simply no other way, thanks to the legacy of X: thanks to X's refusal to dictate policy, there is no one policy to replace, there are dozens.

I found it at JWZ's website.

One of the perhaps smaller, but of a certainty significant, aspects of the Mozilla project is apparent to those of us who browse the Bugzilla database. Ergo, it has lain unnoticed by the silent majority, the flamedot minority, and the ha-ha-Netscape-fools gawkers.

Users and programmers have traditionally been the poles of a divide (if I may carelessly mix my metaphors), kinda like boys and girls. (Which of the pairs is analogous to which I leave as an exercise to the reader >:+} ). While other companies or groups have been renowned for their attention to user interface or responsiveness to users, Mozilla, through Bugzilla, more so even than through the newsgroups, stewards a new user/coder frontier: The blessed enhancement request. Pssst - Rob - your code won't permit me to include the necessarily long CGI URL.

Here, in this well-mannered and efficient forum, users make unreasonable requests - and watch with astonishment as they are sometimes granted! The Netscape engineers are for the most part tolerant and polite - even enduring unwarranted abuse - and are open to luser suggestion. If indeed lusers they be. And most proposals are at the very least discussed, for the greater number.

The seeding of this hitherto untapped and rather mangy range of the noosphere (to use your beloved but limited vernacular), the (*scoffing*) user base, is an advanced, or rather advancing, inclusion that makes our trumpeted Open Source method more of a societal, a popular?, phenomenon than before. (*Leaving further such analysis to the grandiose*)

Needless to say, these words apply only to those members of society who are sufficiently interested to linger circa such domains. So should it be. We (or, perhaps, I) mad bastards who think to shape the next Netscape browser toward our ends and in reflection of our method-minds rather like the lack of company >:+)

And there is another aspect of appeal in the Bugzilla milieu. (Milieu being a browsable web database, an ongoing discussion with engineers, a devoted newsgroup set, a sense of comradeship against hostile outside, media, forces, &c) The satisfaction of submitting a bug and awaiting it's speedy repair soon becomes a quite forthright expectation, something akin almost to a human instinct, undiscovered alas until this late march of the Industrial age. It is the desire and expectation that, finding a bug, one reports it, and will soon be using a fresh copy of the software that is bereft of the very flaw. If such a cycle were established in all public domains, many corporations would be afflicted, and many consumers would rejoice. And lo!, the yobbers would owe we "computer hackers". It nearly calls to mind the fabled customer service and quality of vendors such as the Eaton's of the 1960s (to those non-Canadians who do not recognize the reference, *nyyahh* to ye).

Or perhaps I'm foaming verbose again - there was the Great Overboard some time ago, as I recall - but we'll see when it ships, won't we, kiddies?

If you offered me software that implemented true crypto-cash, I wouldn't have to trust an intermediary bank -- but I would have to trust that the software implemented a secure crypto-cash protocol in a correct way. Even if I had the source code in front of me, I couldn't verify that myself, so I'd have to trust some experts in the field to verify the program's reliability for me.

Furthermore, the average palmtop owners don't have a clue about who to trust on crypto issues, but they do trust the name "Merrill Lynch". So a pseudo-ecash system backed by Merrill Lynch is likely to go farther in the marketplace than a true ecash system backed by, say, Bruce Schneier.

Remember, worse is better.

The 'ant' hack in the xscreensaver package also implements Langston's ant. Only works with the X windowing system, though.

It claims to be based on A.K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreations", Scientific American Magazine Sep 1989 pp 180-183, Mar 1990 p 121.
Also used Ian Stewart's "Mathematical Recreations", Scientific American Jul 1994 pp 104-107.

For an example of a (kinda) similar idea, check out DadaDodo. (Which was created by Jamie Zawinski, late of the Mozilla project, making this post doubly relevant! Isn't that great?) :)
--

For an example of a (kinda) similar idea, check out DadaDodo. (Which was created by Jamie Zawinski, late of the Mozilla project, making this post doubly relevant! Isn't that great?) :)
--

I think you are right, and it makes me think that there may be additional factors that helped to fuel jamie's exodous...

You should, of course, feel free to armchair-psychoanalyze me to your heart's content, and to assume that the ~4,000 words I wrote about my reasons for leaving Netscape and AOL aren't true, or aren't complete, or whatever. But think about it: I quit. I have nothing to hide, and no reason to tell you anything other than the truth.

In my estimation (and this is of course something on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree) the project was going nowhere. But more importantly, it was no longer any fun. Both because the project itself was moving at a snail's pace, and because Netscape is a lousy place to work now.

After having worked on Mozilla for just over five years, the last year and a half of which was at mozilla.org, I quit. Does that make me a ``quitter''? Sure. But how many of you have contributed even 1% of that amount of time or effort to the project? That makes you something quite a bit less than a quitter, doesn't it? Like... irrelevant.

(And for that matter, how many of you have worked on the same project for five years, or even at the same company? That's pretty rare in this industry too, you know.)

There is nothing in my resignation letters that is factually inaccurate, and those of you who imply otherwise don't know what you're talking about. (Have you even read them?) It may be that the Mozilla project is going to succeed despite all of its very real problems, and really, nothing would make me happier (because I don't want to end up using MSIE either.) I hope it's so. But I decided that if it was going to happen, it was going to have to happen without me, because I was done.

Why do you ankle-biters have such a problem with people making their own decisions about their own lives? I (and others) gave you much and owe you nothing. Deal with it.

I think you are right, and it makes me think that there may be additional factors that helped to fuel jamie's exodous...

You should, of course, feel free to armchair-psychoanalyze me to your heart's content, and to assume that the ~4,000 words I wrote about my reasons for leaving Netscape and AOL aren't true, or aren't complete, or whatever. But think about it: I quit. I have nothing to hide, and no reason to tell you anything other than the truth.

In my estimation (and this is of course something on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree) the project was going nowhere. But more importantly, it was no longer any fun. Both because the project itself was moving at a snail's pace, and because Netscape is a lousy place to work now.

After having worked on Mozilla for just over five years, the last year and a half of which was at mozilla.org, I quit. Does that make me a ``quitter''? Sure. But how many of you have contributed even 1% of that amount of time or effort to the project? That makes you something quite a bit less than a quitter, doesn't it? Like... irrelevant.

(And for that matter, how many of you have worked on the same project for five years, or even at the same company? That's pretty rare in this industry too, you know.)

There is nothing in my resignation letters that is factually inaccurate, and those of you who imply otherwise don't know what you're talking about. (Have you even read them?) It may be that the Mozilla project is going to succeed despite all of its very real problems, and really, nothing would make me happier (because I don't want to end up using MSIE either.) I hope it's so. But I decided that if it was going to happen, it was going to have to happen without me, because I was done.

Why do you ankle-biters have such a problem with people making their own decisions about their own lives? I (and others) gave you much and owe you nothing. Deal with it.

If your soo sure, how do you explain this (referring to jwz's gruntle on the issue.)

Yes: jwz's major concerns were that (a) it did not attract a lot of developers because (b) only products people use attract developers and (c) nobody's using it.

Does nobody see the vicious circle here? Does nobody understand that if you insert the word YET at the right spots in the above logic, there is much cause for optimism?

Fine - it's taking a long time: as anyone with the slightest clue understands, this is A GOOD THING when it means they've re-written the layout and networking code. WHEN the first useable release is done: (a) people will start using it; (b) people will start saying, "oh- I found a bug in a program I actually use quite often, and OH YEAH - I can download the source and try to figure it out!"; leading to (c) lots more developers as time goes by.

HOW many non-Linus developers did Linux have between 1991 and 1992?

"Waa, waa. I want my browser and I want it NOW!"

I.

"Mozilla is an amazing and incredibly successful project."

If your soo sure, how do you explain this

I am all for open source, but when someone like AOL want's to exploite it for thier own profit or dump it, which would you really rather they did?

Hi, Jamie.

This is also in the Unix Hater's Handbook, referenced from your site, of course.

One of the quips on X sheds some light though "How to make a 50 Mips workstation run like a 4.77 MHz IBM PC". Courtesy of Mr. Moore, consumer desktop PCs are shipping with 10 times the CPU speed and memory of a what was once a top-of-the-line workstation. When you add network bandwidth to the equation -- X was (and is) used to run many apps remotely on a server or other workstation to the local display -- X was a pig.

The world's changed a lot. Most of the complaints against X have been repaired either by fixing the original problem, or more often, by upgrading the environment.

Larry has a consistent philospohy behind the design of Perl (or rather, the intentional lack of overall design.) It's an interesting idea, certainly, and one that I think hasn't been consciously applied to a programming language before. However, if Perl is the kind of language that that approach produces, then I think the experiment is a failure.

While Larry is a smart fellow, the problem is that he is also a linguist. And having spent a few years working with linguists (doing a natural-language understanding boondoggle), my experience is that linguists should never ever be allowed near computers.

Computer languages aren't really languages, not in the sense that linguists know languages. Computer languages are formal mathematical systems, which are a totally different beast. Computers are very literal-minded, not fuzzy at all, so one must talk to them precisely. The fuzziness that appears in human languages is inappropriate in a computer language.

The ``language'' of mathematics doesn't have linguistic drift. Where is the ``slang'' in arithmetic? Where are the ``dialects'' of algebra? It doesn't happen, because mathematical systems exist by design, not by evolutionary pressure and random mutation.

Accretion works well for some things, like DNA, forests, and cities. But I for one am glad that my car's engine was designed to be efficient and self-consistent, and I prefer the software I use (including languages) to be the same, rather than a sprawling Winchester Mystery House of a language like Perl.

Of course, I end up using Perl anyway, because often it's the most convenient tool for the job for any number of not-very-good reasons. The way Perl manages to suck so bad and yet still be marginally useful is probably what makes it the perfect complement to Unix itself. Worse is Better, after all.

Actually, now that I think about it, Tcl is even more horrible than Perl, so it's a wonder it hasn't taken over.

Maximal obscurity! Now!

I'm amazed that so many people here say they were able to get vgetty working; you guys must all lead charmed lives, because I spent months fighting with it, and couldn't ever get it to correctly answer the phone and record a message twice in a row.

I settled for having my machine simply use the modem to listen to the caller ID info, and pop up a big old dialog box telling me who's calling, then let my real answering machine take the call.

Features:

• I can read the dialog box from across the room;
• It also checks for the incoming number in my address book ( BBDB);
• The phone doesn't ring if it's late at night or early in the morning and the screen saver is active;
• It securely logs calls to my web server, so if I'm at another site, I get asynchronous notification that someone has called me at home, and I know to call in and check my messsage!

Works pretty good. Get the code and read all about it.

I'm amazed that so many people here say they were able to get vgetty working; you guys must all lead charmed lives, because I spent months fighting with it, and couldn't ever get it to correctly answer the phone and record a message twice in a row.

I settled for having my machine simply use the modem to listen to the caller ID info, and pop up a big old dialog box telling me who's calling, then let my real answering machine take the call.

Features:

• I can read the dialog box from across the room;
• It also checks for the incoming number in my address book ( BBDB);
• The phone doesn't ring if it's late at night or early in the morning and the screen saver is active;
• It securely logs calls to my web server, so if I'm at another site, I get asynchronous notification that someone has called me at home, and I know to call in and check my messsage!

Works pretty good. Get the code and read all about it.

I'm amazed that so many people here say they were able to get vgetty working; you guys must all lead charmed lives, because I spent months fighting with it, and couldn't ever get it to correctly answer the phone and record a message twice in a row.

I settled for having my machine simply use the modem to listen to the caller ID info, and pop up a big old dialog box telling me who's calling, then let my real answering machine take the call.

Features:

• I can read the dialog box from across the room;
• It also checks for the incoming number in my address book ( BBDB);
• The phone doesn't ring if it's late at night or early in the morning and the screen saver is active;
• It securely logs calls to my web server, so if I'm at another site, I get asynchronous notification that someone has called me at home, and I know to call in and check my messsage!

Works pretty good. Get the code and read all about it.