Slashdot Mirror

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html

My favourite bit (at the moment):

Let's suppose that down in the bowels of some particular version of some particular toolkit library, there lurks a bug. Let's suppose that the nature of this bug is something relatively obscure: say that it's something like, if you hold down 5 keys on the keyboard for 10 seconds then drag the middle mouse button, the text entry widget gets a SEGV. (In fact, I'm not making this up: I saw this very bug once, years ago.)

Now, that's the sort of bug that is not likely to be noticed or fixed, because it's the sort of thing that people "never" do. If that bug was reported against, say, a web browser, nobody would much care: User: "I can crash my web browser by doing this crazy thing!" Developer: "Uh, don't do that then." And that's not a totally unreasonable response.

However, in the context of security software, it matters, because then it's not merely a cute trick that crashes the program: now it's a backdoor password that unlocks the screen.

JWZ just published a port of xdaliclock to the iPhone and iPad, and released the source: http://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/

There's no rule in effect that you can't publish source for a released app targeted to a released version of the OS.

I'm in the same boat. This was originally a site designed to help people stay in touch with one another, but the company's desire to monetize its data is making them drift further and further from that goal. I don't care that a friend of mine became a fan of Fluffy Bunnies and Toe Socks, or that they befriended a number of people I've never heard of, and I really won't care that they visited musicalclusterfuck.net and Liked a pop country band, or that they frequent Fox News. It's well on its way to becoming a malware-crawling, adfotainment hellhole... really the ultimate manifestation of Eternal September, with lots of well-moneyed players swarming on its back like a Surinam toad of e-commerce.

I haven't actually read TFA

You needn't point out that out, because it's painfully obvious that you know absolutely nothing about Dali Clock, its cross-platform history, or JWZ's own well-documented history and experience.

Educate yourself first, then speak.

http://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JWZ

Well, saying that he 'needs to STFU' could be interpreted as meaning you want him to STFU.

After hearing this, I certainly do want him to STFU. Why Cooperation With RMS Is Impossible

Yes, Worse Is Better.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

http://www.osnews.com/permalink?291395

if your OS is modifying the functionality of your favorite browser in a way you dont like, or forcing you to do things you dont like, then change your operating system.

Someone else wrote:

            Have you considered changing distributions?

Yes, every single time I try something like this, I very seriously consider getting a Mac.-- jwz

Customizable characters are essentially a form of skins. I wholeheartedly agree with this thought on the subject from jwz.org:

Makali wrote:

            Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.

I am fully in support of this proposed audio-cock technology.

As far as I'm concerned, any time spent customizing a character and not playing the game is wasted.

You know, I happen to think that the net is the biggest duct tape of all. Hundred of billions of dollars have been spent building apps on something that wasn't designed for that, and almost each time a new solution came, it was based on a hack that somebody did, that was glorified into some great technology (say ajax, for instance).

That is the old Worse Is Better theory. LISP machines were fantastic, but were replaced by badly designed kludges. Smalltalk environments were amazing, but everybody used less elegantly designed languages/environment instead. The thing that get the job done NOW, with the smallest curve of learning gets the momentum and WINS.

When you see the kind of kludge and complexity that is CSS (for instance) to get a somewhat controllable UI on the web, it is hard not to feel sorry. Now, people are developing apps in javascript, with very poor development environments, getting extremely fragile systems, that run hundred of times slower than a normal desktop application would. And buggy as hell (for instance, getting proper drag and drop behavior in web apps is currently impossible).

I can't avoid thinking that a properly designed web technology would make all those issues moot, but of course, that "perfect" system would never have been able to get momentum. Maybe the great designer is the one that knows how to design a system just badly enough to be successful....

"But now I've taken my leave of that whole sick, navel-gazing mess we called the software industry. Now I'm in a more honest line of work: now I sell beer." (Source)

Second, the Sugar code (not to mention the underlying OS) *is* being improved constantly. The OLPC organization may not be funding that, but it is happening. So it's not either fix Sugar OR improve the hardware, it's both/and.

However, it is still a question of priorities. And the OLPC organization has made it clear that not only is sugar not a priority, but that Negroponte thinks it's a mistake, and wants to see a plain old Windows OS on those laptops anyway.

the 1.0 hardware had some bugs that kept it from living up to its potential. In particular, the battery-saving micro-sleep thing has never worked well,

Does the hardware refresh address this? In particular, how does the battery life compare to the original?

Staying with the mass-produced herd as it improves can be cheaper than sticking with buggy-whips and steam engines.

Oh, I agree. I can see Apple's reasons for choosing Intel, for example. It's Worse Is Better at work.

But just as with Lisp and C:

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

A wrong lesson is to take the parable literally and to conclude that C is the right vehicle for AI software. The 50% solution has to be basically right, and in this case it isn't.

So, the question is, is this new hardware basically right?

Not sure what holds companies back from making the change.

A conservative approach to new technologies, when the old ones work good enough. The need for SLAs and other vendor agreements. Lawyers insisting on data retention policies. The rational or irrational concern of being out of control if something goes wrong.

Google doesn't spy on our email

Actually, Google *does* spy on your email, definitely for advertising, probably for marketing, and possibly they (or individuals with access) are corrupt, but that's not the big privacy concern about Google.

The big problem lawyers have with Gmail is that it keeps a very long term record of everything everyone has said, with no way to enforce a data retention period, or even know how long it'll be before all the copies of your data are really deleted after you've told it to delete them.

Also, if your mail server gets subpoenaed, at least you KNOW it; with Gmail, you won't necessarily ever find out.

And if you think that's only for business criminals who're who're trying to bury the knowledge of how their product was killing people, read this: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html

We can add a password to the document or encrypt the content.

Do you have a systematic method in place to a) securely store the encryption keys as long as you need them (you're at the risk of losing all your really important stuff here!), and b) delete them when they're done? Is implementing such a system easier than just running your own mail server?

Your company email passes unencrypted through dozens of relays

Our internal mail doesn't, and external mail to our our business partners is secured with TLS. Only occasional mails to random people are unencrypted. That's significantly less exposure than having every internal mail in the hands of a third party.

So far email backups have been a big waste of time and drive space

All backups are a big waste of time and drive space... Right up until you need them.

What's your business continuity plan if "something bad" happens to Gmail? Scramble around and try to find a way to import your CC'd copies from the other account into whatever your new provider will be, and change the mailservers over? That might be OK (I'd argue not) for a 10 person company, but for a 200+ person company, that'll never fly.

That change freed up a lot of money. We didn't need an Exchange admin and we saved a bundle on license fees.

That's what we say about Postfix. :)

I won't say "Never" to Gmail, but there are certainly solid arguments against it.

> Comments like that lead me to believe that you're one of those people that are the reason
> why people still prefer to use Windows.

That comment was just a description of the Unix philosophy, without endorsement thereof.

It seems like an accurate description. See http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html for more expansion of that.

You seem to disagree with the philosophy. That's fine; it's not exactly the best philosophy in the world. ;)

Worse is better!

how is designing software to do more things badly superior...

Whoosh

I can't believe no one's mentioned "worse is better" yet. An excerpt:

I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing

Another example would be Linux. It can be argued that Minix and Gnu HURD both likely had superior designs -- in fact, at the time, Linus fully expected Linux to become irrelevant once HURD was released. It never happened -- because Linux was available now, and was free and freely modifiable now, even though it was worse, it attracted enough developers so that it ultimately became more practical for most tasks.

And of course, the most obvious example is Windows. This follows the pattern:

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

DOS was an abomination, especially considering real OSes existed at the time. Windows 3.1 was barely more than a multiplexer for DOS, and Windows 95/98/ME were similarly backward abominations. Windows NT was unusable by ordinary users until Windows 2000, and why would power users prefer it over Unix?

Yet they were half the right thing, and they were usable by ordinary people, on the PC, faster and cheaper than anyone else.

The story mentions netbooks, but that's just the latest iteration of this. Remember, the original PCs weren't as powerful as minicomputers, which weren't as powerful as mainframes.

So...yeah.

Themes, yes, they are eye-candy, but let the "shiny" lovers have their colors and funky icons, it causes no harm at all.

It adds overhead and complexity, the enemy of reliability and performance.

I'll let jwz explain it.

There are already some navigational features that can be placed on to the browser, such as browsing to the last and next page (NOT back and forward), or one folder up, but nobody seems to care about that besides Opera. (as far as i know)

That's PRECISELY what I mean by paying attention to what's inside the browser window.

There are lots of problems with exchange/outlook but the fact is, the feature set is pretty complete. Microsoft did a lot of boring work to make lots of things happen, like the ability to invite people to meetings, collect responses, send updates when they get changed, deal with timezones, etc etc etc. People who rely on it (and there are literally millions) would really have their work impacted by not having all those features.

raid is for high availability, not backing up your data. Put another way, it's not *data* redundancy, it's *hardware* redundancy: it allows you to store one copy of your data on multiple devices. But it's still one single filesystem spread across those drives, and if you screw it up you're still fscked (pardon the pun).

JWZ (Netscape, DNA lounge) has a very simple guide on using rsync. rsync is really about all you need. Apple's Time Machine is based on it. Now, this guide is not eïxactly windows friendly, but 1) you stated that you only need to back up your data, not your apps, and 2) you sound like you're pretty technically adept so you're probably running cygwin on your windows boxes. Rsync should be able to handle this just fine on win32.

For data serenity, two separate single drives beats raid every time.

> nor does it remove the absolute necessity of proper testing

Oh, sure. Testing is needed to make sure people actually try to implement the spec. But testing can't ensure they actually do, so it too is not a panacea. You need both: unambiguous specs and test suites with reasonable coverage. Then you can with certainty say that the precise things being tested were in fact implemented per spec.

> you do not in fact have to generate all possible combinations of CSS or all possible CSS
> documents to show that these tests will pass

Actually, you do, for black-box testing. If you happen to know something about the precise implementation details you might be able to limit the scope of testing, but if you're a standards test suite author, you have no way to know what the implementations will do.

A simple example: an implementation may have different codepaths for values of CSS property A (say "position") that affect how CSS property B (say "border-color") is handled. This isn't a hypothetical case but a pretty concrete example I pulled from a browser's bug database. Existing UAs have had just such differences, due to applying certain layout/rendering optimizations for some values of properties but not others. So sadly, you cannot test things in isolation and deduce that they will continue to work when used together, because different codepaths are used for those cases...

So a minimal testsuite for CSS2.1 conformance testing would include one test per possible set of values of all CSS properties for a given node... That would not catch issues involving containing blocks or whatnot, of course.

> The DOM Events module would like to have a word with you.

That's mostly harmed by the fact that some UAs aren't making any attempt to implement it at all. But yes, interoperability on DOM Events is much worse than it should be for the UAs that do implement it; point granted.

Interestingly, Acid3 didn't seriously test DOM Events....

> 100% support should only be a goal for those standards one claims to support.

In that case, claiming to support standards should be a non-goal. The goal should be implementing, correctly, functionality that's useful.

> finish what you start before moving on to the next shiny object.

I suggest reading http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

You come up with a neat idea, then discover that someone more famous than you had a similar idea, and spend the rest of your life being called a copy cat :(

> I'm referring to the fact that you can't count on HTML5 documents being well formed
> like you can with XHTML.

While true, that doesn't matter that much if the parsing algorithm is well-defined. And the current problem is that you can't count on any documents actually being produced as XHTML (with the right MIME type; there's plenty of stuff out there with the XHTML doctype, and most of it is not well-formed).

> All for the sake of people being able to write sloppy markup

They already do this, and are enabled by the fact that web browsers "deal". The parsing specification if entirely for the benefit of consumers of the crap that the producers are generating no matter what.

The other alternative is fatal error handling and all consumers sticking to their guns on that (which even for XHTML they're not so much). As you note, XHTML tried this approach. It failed in the marketplace, for various reasons, ranging from lack of IE support to it being too much pain to author with the tools people were using.

> Imagine if the JPEG format had been forced as the only format leaving no scope for
> animated gifs?

Then that would be a poor standard. I don't see what that has to do with the HTML5 draft.

> WHATWG is a group that was setup by individuals, which is a far cry from the W3C
> which as you rightly state is quite well represented.

Not quite. WHATWG was set up by individuals officially representing Opera, Mozilla, and Apple. The W3C is a pay-to-play industry consortium. Both take input from various sources, but in the end for WHATWG the steering committee has members from the above three organizations and for the W3C the consensus need only be amongst the paid-up members. Which is better for the web depends on whether you trust the above three organizations to develop web technologies more than you trust the average W3C member...

> The W3C was on the right path

Do you mean not having made any meaningful progress on actually delivering anything other than a recasting of HTML4.01 into XML syntax in years? Or do you mean having made some progress on defining a completely new language that would be incompatible with both XHTML1 and HTML4.01 and that had no clear strategy for how anyone would actually start using it?

Note that nothing prevents work on XHTML2 from continuing. It would hardly be the first time the W3C has produced specs that don't work well with each other, or even flat-out contradict each other.

Note also that HTML5 does have some serious issues on a lot of the details; those need to be worked out. But the overall approach of something that can actually be adopted incrementally seems to be the correct one to me. It's already paying off: the web platform is moving forward for the first time in years, and might even stave off the Silverlight-like beasties.

Additional recommended reading:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html (which sort of sums up why HTML5 is getting more traction than XHTML2).

http://dbaron.org/log/2006-08#e20060818a (which explains more or less how some of the people who started the WHATWG came to be working outside the W3C in the first place).

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

What, you mean like this guy? You probably wouldn't even have the browser you're using right now if it weren't for that particular, uh. hacker.

And ironically, JWZ has a pretty good simple guide on backups: http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

> I really hate updating my systems these days, because for every bug fixed it seems you get a fresh new one. Make it shiny, we will fix the bugs later! Of course later never comes, eventually the crap piles up too high and somebody decides to just start over. Which explains the piles of discarded stuff and the new one that also doesn't quite work in most areas, especially in system administration.

It's called 'The CADT Model', one of the reasons why OSS sucks. Fortunately this one negative doesn't outweigh the (other) positives.

Not saying that Ulrich isn't an ass, but as far as Stallman: JWZ has had similar thoughts.

Make it shiny, we will fix the bugs later! Of course later never comes, eventually the crap piles up too high and somebody decides to just start over. Which explains the piles of discarded stuff and the new one that also doesn't quite work in most areas, especially in system administration.

Ah, yes, that would be the CADT development model: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Also be sure to read Joel Spolsky's article helpfully titled "Things you should never do": http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

You can watch the machine play classic Pong with xscreensaver's Pong screen saver. http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

What about the Apple ][ screensaver?

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

I think it did something very similar.

(hey, first post!)

I think the problem with open source office suits is an office suite dosen't get anybody laid, so there is little enthusiasm from people not paid to do it. If you want to use an MS clone the Openoffice is fine, but there is never going to be any innovation unless it comes from another company, so the best hope is to open up the development and get all the companies on board with something, but given its slowness and dependance on java i don't think even that will result in a good product, its best for it to die and novell,linux foundation,red hat, etc, to put their effort into gnumeric,abiword,etc, (maybe rip out the good parts of openoffice and put them in libraries).

what is the difficulty

Answer in one link

No no, shoot him in the head, then replace him with a Markov Chain fed into a TTS. Replace not only speakers, but authors!

as Bruce Perens famously said at Linux SF Con 2006, Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Jamie Zawinski (the DNA Lounge/Unix Mozilla 1.1 guy) said it in 1998.

So finally I talked my boss into getting me an SGI Indy (which I've since replaced with an SGI O2) and life became joyous again. Because SGI actually knows something about building user interfaces, and about making it possible to administer a machine without being a member of the technological priesthood. For but one example, I was able to install and format a new disk on this machine through GUIs, without once having to run ``man'' and try to remember some random arcane command that I last used in 1986.

This is the part where I start getting hate mail from people, and cheerleading messages telling me to take a look at it again, because it's so much better now. I understand. I'll take your word for it. And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux. 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.

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

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

Just two years later, he took it mostly back.

as Bruce Perens famously said at Linux SF Con 2006, Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Jamie Zawinski (the DNA Lounge/Unix Mozilla 1.1 guy) said it in 1998.

So finally I talked my boss into getting me an SGI Indy (which I've since replaced with an SGI O2) and life became joyous again. Because SGI actually knows something about building user interfaces, and about making it possible to administer a machine without being a member of the technological priesthood. For but one example, I was able to install and format a new disk on this machine through GUIs, without once having to run ``man'' and try to remember some random arcane command that I last used in 1986.

This is the part where I start getting hate mail from people, and cheerleading messages telling me to take a look at it again, because it's so much better now. I understand. I'll take your word for it. And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux. 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.

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

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

Just two years later, he took it mostly back.

as Bruce Perens famously said at Linux SF Con 2006, Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Jamie Zawinski (the DNA Lounge/Unix Mozilla 1.1 guy) said it in 1998.

So finally I talked my boss into getting me an SGI Indy (which I've since replaced with an SGI O2) and life became joyous again. Because SGI actually knows something about building user interfaces, and about making it possible to administer a machine without being a member of the technological priesthood. For but one example, I was able to install and format a new disk on this machine through GUIs, without once having to run ``man'' and try to remember some random arcane command that I last used in 1986.

This is the part where I start getting hate mail from people, and cheerleading messages telling me to take a look at it again, because it's so much better now. I understand. I'll take your word for it. And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux. 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.

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

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

Just two years later, he took it mostly back.

as Bruce Perens famously said at Linux SF Con 2006, Linux is only free if your time has no value

Huh, I think that is a quote by JWZ, from 1998.

Yes, it's true - the first worm was written in *nix, during an age where software updates were very lazily applied and "security" meant issuing passwords.

Since then, the fundamental simpleness of the *nix design has resulted in dramatic improvements in real security without any basic re-architec ing. Compare/contrast with a prominent North American software vendor based in Redmond, WA who has some 10,000 developers working on their flagship software package used by a high percentage of the world's computer users, who have developed an API so complex and so labyrinthine that providing any real security is about as likely as making ice water dance the Mac arena by playing Lawrence Welk re-runs.

In security, simpler is pretty much always better, and the fundamentally simple POSIX environment is fundamentally as simple as it can be, as a matter of ideology. The fewer things being managed/tracked/considered, the fewer things can go wrong, and the less likely a security issue will be found. See worse is better for a better understanding of what I mean by "ideologically simple".

I'm reminded of this comment sent to jwz:

Makali wrote:

            Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.

I am fully in support of this proposed audio-cock technology.

This is quite unsual. The summary is fairly accurate, but the author of TFA apparently didn't RTFA. He has totally missed the point of Worse is Better, which one thinks he would have gotten if he'd read to the end:

The right thing is frequently a monolithic piece of software, but for no reason other than that the right thing is often designed monolithically. That is, this characteristic is a happenstance.

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

The idea is that you don't sweat doing the Right Thing if it is really difficult to do, as that will actually hamper acceptence. What good does Payne's perfect Internet do for anyone if nobody but him has a node on it? Over time, our old imperfect internet will get incrementally fixed so that it is almost as keen (if not moreso), and everybody will be using it. If things didn't work this way, we'd all be gaming on Amiga's today instead of PC's.

This quote from one very disgruntled Jamie Ziewinski comes to mind:

My biggest fear, and part of the reason I stuck it out as long as I have, is that people will look at the failures of mozilla.org as emblematic of open source in general. Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because open source doesn't work. Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple.

It's a good article anyway and a fun read. Catch the rest at: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html/.

Point is, open source is no solution, and while some of the mechanisms open source developers use to promote transparency and equity are enviable and perhaps even applicable to government processes, it's the equity and transparency that are the key, not the open source-osity.

At least it will prevent them from engaging in teenage sex later.

Or any sex at all.

Hey, at least there's truth in advertising.

Wrong. The actual question is, how is this going to get me laid?

Unfortunately the answer is, it won't...until more IP6-compatible "appliances" become available

The actual quote is this:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

The source of the quote is Jamie Zawinski, who said it on Usenet in 1997.

Wow, now he wants to re-implement the Gnome Panel, file manager and Evolution in Moonlight. Has he finished implementing them in Mono already? This is kinda funny -- every time Microsoft comes up with some new technology, Miguel scrambles to write a clone of it, then goes on to re-implement Gnome in that. Reimplementing stuff is so much fun anyway! If MS wants to halt all actual progress in Gnome, all have to do is churn out new hype technologies every 12 months or so.

You know, the more I read Jamie Zawinski, the more I wonder what the fuck I'm doing as an engineer in a large company. Consider.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
Now the problem here is that the product's direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from 'unchecked' to 'checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."

Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway.

Users GOOD

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.

Ok, I said it was a funny story, but obviously that's not the funny part, unless sad is funny.

I think he wrote another article on the utter idiocy of rewriting Netscape so the code became nice and easy to read too. In both cases he's basically sick of humouring bright people who have completely lost touch with reality because they are stuck in their own little world of refactoring or business alliances or open source. Anything that convinces bright people that they don't need to solve hard problems, just apply some "magic pixie dust" that will make those hard problems all disappear.

And now he's running a bar. I wonder how long before I am.

Wait, wait, so you're saying if we merged this PIM thing with social networking, we just might actually get someone laid?!

I guess this marks the end of ReiserFS. I'm sure no one in the Linux community wants to be associated to that piece of work.

Might give that a shot, heres what had to be removed from mozilla before they opened the source
http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html

"So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?"
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Basically its a rant about why groupware sucks and why if OSS wants to kick outlooks arse we should do what he says, If somebody had listend maybe we wouldnt be stuck with facebook :(

The theory goes something like if users like the software they're going to show it to people, they're going to use it your user base keeps expanding and you get more developers so your program keeps improving. But if you develop for managers, your software has to meet some random checklist decided by a bunch of people that dont even use the software, and then everybody hates.
OSS had a shot at kicking some arse, by making software to gets you laid, but they missed and so people still define outlook as the gold standard of email clients, and nobody got laid :(
As a side note if you plan on developing OSS software
1) get me laid
2) http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

For information why the vista email scandal is extra ironic see: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html

Remember kids, cool screensavers like xscreensaver, get you laid,( i mean a chick walks into your dorm and sees a cow on a trampoline/one of those duck things, things are only going to turn out one way), groupware doesn't.

"So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?"
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Basically its a rant about why groupware sucks and why if OSS wants to kick outlooks arse we should do what he says, If somebody had listend maybe we wouldnt be stuck with facebook :(

The theory goes something like if users like the software they're going to show it to people, they're going to use it your user base keeps expanding and you get more developers so your program keeps improving. But if you develop for managers, your software has to meet some random checklist decided by a bunch of people that dont even use the software, and then everybody hates.
OSS had a shot at kicking some arse, by making software to gets you laid, but they missed and so people still define outlook as the gold standard of email clients, and nobody got laid :(
As a side note if you plan on developing OSS software
1) get me laid
2) http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

For information why the vista email scandal is extra ironic see: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html

Remember kids, cool screensavers like xscreensaver, get you laid,( i mean a chick walks into your dorm and sees a cow on a trampoline/one of those duck things, things are only going to turn out one way), groupware doesn't.