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"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.

PHP is inconsistent and limiting; why would anyone who knows how to write good code use it instead of a different language?

Because many of the inconsistencies are minor (who cares if it's noun_verb, nounverb, or verb_noun? str_split, stripclashes, strip_tags... BFD!) and who cares about limits if you don't bump your head against them? Not everyone needs to write computer-science-textbook-worthy apps or bulletproof-scalable-enterprise-ready apps day in and day out. A shared phone book or simple inventory system that can be cooked up in a few hours is often worth its weight in gold. I'd rather solve ten problems in a usable fashion than solve one problem the "right" way.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html (Haters note: that piece wasn't written by JWZ.)

Ob. car analogy: Why would anyone who has access to a limo, a semi-trailer, and a Formula 1 car drive a beat-up old pickup? Because sometimes quick, cheap, and easy are the priorities!

It's a webcollage a site that randomly searches images

http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/

I actually have had it bookmarked for the last 7 years or so. It's a nice randomizer for my day.

Don't do it.

For you it is "kicking around", a fun project, a proof of concept. For your boss it is a tool, essential for his business, that has to work flawlessly.

Now ask yourself a few questions:

• How much work does it take to go from a prototype to a fully documented and tested implementation ?
• Are you going to be paid for this ?
• When are you going to do it ? On the week-end ?
• Will your boss expect you to offer 24/24 support, since it was your idea ?

Besides, realize that POS software is the least exciting thing you could work on. If it is not your job, forget it. If you want to tinker with linux and learn things, do something fun.

Remember: you are not the first.

</paternalist advice>

What I really don't understand though is why Postgres doesn't own more of the database market.

3 years running AVG: $0
3 years running Ad-aware, Spybot, and CCleaner: $0

Ah, how the worm has turned. I guess the saying now should be "Windows is only cheaper if your time has no value." Or maybe "Windows is only cheaper if you love trying to explain the concepts behind ZoneAlarm to your mom every week." Or maybe "Windows is only cheaper if you love using Google to find out how to get rid of things that Ad-Aware and Spybot missed." (Yes, there are some.) Or "Windows is only cheaper if you have friends you trust who can tell you which anti-spyware programs are trustworthy in the first place."

I do appreciate the overlap between the development teams, and that Netscape was originally named 'Mosaic Communications Corporation'. But NCSA Mosaic the browser still existed in spite of Clark/Anderson's attempt to appropriate the name. As far as I can tell, there was no overlap in the software, just in the name. Netscape the browser was in no way Mosaic the browser.

jwz claims outright that the browser they were developing was spoken of as 'crushing NCSA Mosaic', which is when he says he came up with 'Mozilla' http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html (search on Mozilla in the page).

Now that's a damned funny line. While I knew that Mosaic had beget Spyglass, I had *no* idea that Spyglass beget IE. I plead circular ignorance. Thanks for the laugh.

Yet PHP continues to be used by some of the most popular sites. Why is that?

I think because PHP *is* easy and approachable, and so when some guy has an idea for something he just starts building it. He doesn't have to hire a Java programmer at $80K a year to tell him how his idea is not going to work.

There is an xscreensaver hack that is a pacman game with various level styles. I suspect that the monsters in that are a bit more random in their movement. However, the monsters move slower than pacman, and the pacman currently seems rather stupid, running towards monsters, and just collecting air when there's still plenty of pills to pick up. It would be nice to work on the AI in that, then I'd get a more interesting screensaver to watch.

You don't think jwz was advocating for Windows, do you?

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

I suppose I'll have to make do with Jamie Zawinski's version as I retire the real ones.

So what interface does MyDateTime implement? Can an object of type MyDateTime be passed to methods that take a native date-time as an argument?

This sort of delegation works wonderfully in Python and other languages with a duck type system, where an interface (or "protocol") is just a set of method names and the behaviors expected of them. But in languages with static typing, classes must state by name that they implement an interface, and there is often no way to state that a class happens to implement the same interface as another class unless the interface itself is given a name and other methods are aware of the interface. For example, in the Java language, java.lang.String is final so your classes can't extend it. But like several other aspects of the design of Java, this presents a roadblock because methods throughout the Java class library require exactly a java.lang.String object and will not accept an instance of any other class that implements java.lang.CharSequence.

Let's create a vehicle twice as complex as anything out there. Oh, and while we're at it, let's change the whole social structure of car ownership. Now, if this actually goes anywhere, super and good for them, but how many of these radical concept cars do we hear about once and never again?

Personally, I think simplicity is an important feature in machines; it means they cost less to make and cost less to fix. A beautiful example of this is in the form of some motorcyles, elegant minimalism. If you would add a cabin to one of these for foul weather, it should achieve 90% of what the technical side of this project hopes.

if you have a "corporate environment", then you've already lost the battle. likewise, if anyone ever refers to you or anyone you work with as "professional", then the coolness has left the building.

It doesn't hurt the atmostphere becase, like it or not, swearing is pervasive in today's society. It's just background that most people don't even notice.

You're example of someone feeling bad because they heard someone swear ("Oh my freakin' ears!" as Todd Flanders said) is completely meaningless, because that's a personal problem of "Todd Flanders." If he's that emotionally fragile he should stay home, since: 1) The comments aren't directed at him; 2) Why should he even care in the first place if someone swears? He should grow up and ignore it like the rest of society. Build up some psychological calluses and move on.

And about the "professional" comment: (I also suspect that you at least agree with whoever tagged the article "unprofessional") I always think of this quote from JWZ regarding swearing and Netscape's Really Bad Attitude mailing list:

"If anyone ever refers to you or anyone you work with as 'professional', then the coolness has left the building."

To bring the thread back on topic, there's always the harrowing tale of a company trying to pay a coder to get their enhancements into Emacs.

Re. comments in the code, see the comments excised when Netscape 4 was open-sourced. Swear words, 'Mac OS/Unix/Windows sucks!' comments, and other stuff that was taken out before Netscape would dare release the source.

Actually, the big language culprits would be those with auto-garbage collection, etc. as they tend to have lazier programmers that don't "need" to manage their own resources,

People keep saying this. I wonder if it's true -- I haven't seen any evidence of it. I've seen lazy/stupid programmers in all kinds of languages. Wouldn't the same argument work just as well against memory protection, and preemptive multitasking, and compilers?

and in some cases even prohibit the programmer from being able to manage their resources.

That's a problem with your specific GC, not a problem with GC. JWZ even ranted about this. You hear Java users complaining about memory, and Java programmers bitching about the GC, but you never hear Lisp programmers bitching about their GC. Any production Lisp GC gives the programmer far more control than Java's does. Hearing people rant against GC is like hearing Yugo owners rant that automobiles suck.

C/C++ and similar languages, on the other hand, force the programmers to manage their resources.

No, they don't. How would they? If I forget to free something and it goes out of scope, bang, memory leak. How am I forced to do anything about that by the language? (I've heard more than one story about somebody who learned Java, and then went back to writing C++, and wrote many lines of code before remembering that their C++, while correct, leaked left-and-right.)

I want to be able to do more with the faster processors and additional RAM, rather than simply do the same job I could do yesterday only in "better" software.

You're right. The easiest route to fast, working software is to get it correct, and then tune for performance -- and GCs are great for that.

We also need to get back to writing applications that have good, if not great, performance with minimal resource requirements (e.g. RAM and processor). [...] But in either case it doesn't get done unless the programmers do their job, and use tools that allow them to do it.

Again, you're right. And these requirements just scream "we need a GC that doesn't suck".

I can't comment on the quality of ATI's *nix drivers, but FWIW I've never had any trouble with their win32 drivers. My x800xt has served me well the last three years and it still ticks on nicely.

However, much to my regret the ATI of today seems to be a mere shadow of its former self. Given ATI's failure to meet expected release dates with the last two generations, the somewhat disappointing performance of both families when finally released, and the latest string of stories of senior employees signing off, I can't help but think of Netscape's fall from grace and Jamie Zawinski's letter of resignation:

The magic was gone, as the magicians had either moved on to more compelling companies, or were having their voices lost in the din of the crowd [...]

JWZ of course wrote the piece before Firefox saw the light of dawn, so...

For example, if you have a personnel table the fact is that there tend to be a lot of simple facts about a person, like date of birth, height, etc. The Right Way to handle these is as attributes because each person has one and only one associated with him/her.

Ironically, personnel attribute management is one of the flagship examples of LDAP databases. LDAP is basically a hierarchical storage mechanism... a tree with predefined structure. Come to think of it, SNMP is also hierarchical, and it's also used to store and transmit large amounts of statistical data (mostly network monitoring attributes). Also, DNS... they even managed to combine load distribution based on the hierarchy. Basically, The Right Way is not to use a relational database at all for something like this, unless you're actually actively performing column aggregates (average height of all people, most common eye color).

The trouble is that I've never seen a particularly good solution for a dataset that is partially relational and partially hierarchical. The best solution to be likely adopted (from a worse is better point of view) is probably some sort of hierarchy embedded in a relational DB, with special syntax or functions for accessing via a.b.c.d notation

Aside from the large text size requirement, this sounds really similar to something that Jamie Zawinski (http://jwz.org) did for the DNA Lounge kiosks -- a set of diskless linux systems that all network boot from a central NFS server, and are easily resettable. (Sounds like quite a weekend to set up, though.)

Not sure what you are saying...? Linux > Vista > SELinux? Or Linux > SELinux > Vista? Either way, SELinux is a subset of linux, so Vista would still only be more secure because of its obscurity.

But agreed, if you can get SELinux to be useful (I don't think it is yet intuitive, and not everyone running linux is going to go the SELinux way as there are other solutions that are 'good enough').

__________

Okay, before this becomes a flame, I don't know if Vista actually is less secure or has less users. Just answering a troll/flamebait cos i thought at the time it was funny. Retrospect hasn't vindicated my initial intent. Just be grateful I am not basing a career on my "talents"

Sounds like webcollage, with tags. http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/

if you don't think the java VM is slow then you aren't running many java apps. Startup time on java applets on sites i have to deal with is probably 100x greater than a C++ app doing the same function, and 20x greater than using AJAX to do the same thing.

1. Indeed. However, this has nothing to do with Java the language
   
2. In most situations it doesn't matter anyway. Thanks to GC and a cleaner language design, I can develop my application in less than half the time it would cost me to do it in C++. CPU/memory is cheap compared to paying programmers, especially if your app runs only serverside.

As an emacs user, I frankly couldn't care how long there is between releases of "stable" versions. Emacs is 31 years old, guys. Looking at its history, version 18 went from 1986 to 1993; version 19 was from 1993 to 1997; version 20 was 1997 to 2001. Six years is not that big of a deal, particularly since minor releases have been coming out since then.

The problem as pointed out in the article is that the release version was frozen for three years, during which time no new code could go in but the code was also not released, which was frustrating for some developers. (Again, as an emacs user, I'm playing a tiny violin.)

Haven't you ever heard of Xemacs? http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html

It followed the UNIX philosophy of do one thing (play music) and do it well.

- Gimp -> OOo works (impressive indeed)

- Opera -> OOo works

- FF -> OOo doesn't work (no "copy" in FF)

- Gimp -> Skencil doesn't work

- Gimp -> Dia doesn't

- Gimp/Opera -> Inkscape doesn't ("nothing in the clipboard" says Inkscape)

Copying text works better generally, but not universally either. Copying into GNU Emacs (e.g. from Eclipse or Acrobat reader) sometimes works, sometimes Emacs in its unfathomable, transcendent mind decides to cling to its own clipboard contents. (Yes I did (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t), and I even did grok http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html). Sometimes it helps to just change the clipboard in Emacs first, sometimes it helps to not copy directly from app A to B, but from A to xterm (or xfce4-terminal in my case), then from xterm to B.

I'm sure all those phenomenae weren't created intentionally; they just arise by chance, because the APIs are too strange, some programmers interpret the ICCCM differently than others, or whatever.

the real reason lies here. http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Er... nah, it's been updated. Last update was October (which I guess is still 6 months).

Despite being open source, vTiger tends to follow a more "cathedral"-style development model. Major releases are few and far between, minor/bugfix releases only fix the most heinous of bugs. Rather like a lot of the more expensive proprietary software out there, now I think of it. (Aside: There's plenty of expensive proprietary software out there which makes Microsoft look like a shining beacon of excellence staffed entirely by geniuses).

I think CRM has the same problem as groupware. It's never going to attract "itch-scratching" individuals because it solves a problem which individuals don't have. It's a classic example of how Open Source is not a panacea, and is certainly not a substitute for employing your own developers.

OS experts abhor the ugly kludge that is winDOS.

Yes, as a matter of fact, Windows back when it used DOS as a kernel was considered an ugly kludge. WinNT has a rather nice well formed kernel, and I do indeed know people who are fans of it!

I also know people who hate the NT kernel and love Unix-ish kernels, and people who hate Unix-ish kernels.

Now the APIs that are built on top of the kernel, yah, that is very ugly at times, but you are comparing an API that was largely designed in the 80's and early 90's to what? A modern API like KDE? Instead compare it to something of the same vintage. The original X16 API is not exactly a work of art either, simpler at least, but doing anything complex with it... well, that is why KDE was made! KDE is a lot newer than the most heavily used of Microsoft's APIs, and thus is a lot nicer to use.

If you use any of Microsoft's newer APIs (Windows Forms, the .NET stuff), they are generally easy to use and have a much nicer, more modern orthogonal feel to them. Well except in places that they are forced to fall back on conventions set by older APIs, and then things get ugly.

Backwards compatibility comes at a price.

GUI experts abhor the winDOS GUI

Are there particular niggles that piss people off? Yah. But in general, MS software undergoes a ton of usability testing, and their UI is amazing in the places it is used most often. You don't even need a mouse to use Windows, everything is keyboard accessible. This includes mandating a key that is used for "right click" operations. I have used a fair variety of other systems where developers occasionally just forget to include a key sequence that allows for a feature to be accessed! Or they don't put an element in the tab ordering at all, or make one of any other million UI design mistakes.

I would argue that Windows ME (and to an extent XP, until you beat it upside the head and restore things to their proper place) are regressive in terms of usability, but Windows 2000 is wonderful. Though violating Fitt's law in terms of button and menu placement is annoying...

Security experts abhor the security practices of winDOS.

Nice blanket statement.

Some departments at MS needed to have their heads beat in (and I think by now that they have!), others have done an excellent job on security. It is not like open source doesn't have similar stories. I recall a certain widely used compression library awhile back... not to mention the 1000 and 1 BIND vulnerabilities...

When the internet sprung into popularity, MS was horribly unprepared, and did some stupid things, but on the flip side, they have ACLs, easy to setup security rules for a system, and easy to configure user auditing.

and so on and so forth through filesystems, busses, storage, search and every other atom of Computer Science.

MS has two primary file systems. FAT, which served its original purpose very well (and I might add that the majority of other Microcomputer OS vendors used a similar type of lazy file system!), and NTFS, which is a very reliable file system with decent performance that can stand up to user stupidity quite well.

As for search, yah, you got that one right. :-D MS never has been able to make a good file system based search engine, which is funny, because a dozen companies have released good search engines for Windows, you figure Microsoft would just buy one of them up and release the damn thing! :)

the rest being "good enough".

Read your history. Unix is the original "good enough" OS.

Nothing they do has ever been accepted as excellent

You mean aside from making PCs usable for everyone? Aside from making

Here's an explanation of the X clipboard, the PRIMARY selection and the emacs kill-ring (whatever that is).

Given your sig, you should at least be aware of this punk/industrial track...

Not that I could do any of it anymore, but the 6.001 SICP class that he was talking about did all that. We didn't use Scheme like most places use LISP (as a glorified LOGO), but as an extremely versatile language.

You learn the basics of programming using scheme, which takes about 2 weeks tops, the beauty of LISP. You do things like create object oriented LISP, create a LISP processor in LISP, then we create a basic machine language and process it in LISP. The POINT of it is that you can quickly build up an environment to process anything.

Later, in the intro AI course, you do everything in Scheme again. If you go on to take the "Programming Languages" course (I did not), you actually use Scheme to model every theoretical form of programming language so you can evaluate it.

Scheme is the PERFECT academic language. It is derived from lambda calculus, which lets you do neat things like prove your software is perfect. The interpreter can be proven perfect (all of Scheme CAN be implemented in 8 or 9 commands, that if implemented correctly can make the whole system perfect). You can build a compiler for Scheme in Scheme pretty easily (I remember doing it), etc.

The draw back? It's damned inefficient at using computer resources, it doesn't have a clean library approach, and while it is AWESOME at code reuse, it doesn't let you "optimize" things by playing with memory space, etc. It never won in the marketplace because Worse is Better.

jwz wrote an article on their original attempt to do so, basically saying what was said above: no competent programmer wants to spend free time building something they desperately don't want to touch once it's done. Novell has since given up on the project, but that (IMHO) may have more to do with their new Microsoft contract than with the actual merits of the software.

> As long as it can send mail, that's the only feature that matters (and whose rule is that?).

JZW.

Law of Software Development: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." -- http://www.jwz.org/hacks/

The Mozilla codebase is a mess. However, it is getting better. Did you look at it at all when Netscape first released the source? It was absolutely terrible. The Mozilla guys have done a good job at cleaning it over the years, but it's still a mess. They really should have just started from scratch and used the old codebase as a reference.

Hold on a minute! They did do that. They rewrote the whole damn thing starting on October 1998, a mere seven months after the initial release of the source code. One year later, mozilla shipped nothing, and JWZ resigned citing lack of progress. In 2000 -- two years after the rewrite started -- mozilla released the new layout engine, Gecko. Jaws all around had to be picked up off the floor. It was a horribly buggy. (The most obvious bug to me was the fact that scrolling to the bottom of a page, then back up, then back down a second time, caused TWO copies of the page to appear in the window. Repeat N times, and you got N copies. I discovered that bug within the first five minutes of use.) FOUR years after the rewrite, Mozilla released version 1.0. Now four years after 1.0, 8 years after the rewrite that is widely considered the biggest blunder of mozilla's history. A blunder that is made all the worse since it's outcome was immediately forseeable.

Now you're not seriously proposing the repeat their old mistakes are you?

http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/

If the internets were only 1%, you'd almost never see anything pornographic there, right? Just watch that for a few minutes. You'll see something exciting. I just went there, and saw an image of a hard-core 3-way.

Irrelevant and immaterial. I wasn't commenting about his other work, only about the website linked in the GP.

to tag the person who was instrumental in bringing us mozilla.org, XEmacs, and a load of other free software as somebody who "hates free software" is a statement that speaks of ignorance. You obviously don't know the background of him.

No, I didn't. I don't have to know his background. I was commenting on the statements in his website. Such as "It is a flame about the pathetic state of Linux usability in general, and the handful of video players I tried out in particular" . He wrote that in 2002. He mentions RedHat 7.2 to show how Linux is "bad". That's a typical tactic of Microsoft astroturfers, who keep mentioning limitations on old versions of Linux, which have been fixed long ago.

He also mentions that "In 2005, I finally abandoned Linux for MacOS and never looked back" . If he once did some contributions to free software, he's clearly an apostate by now. He's doing free software a disservice by spreading half-truths about it.

My own contributions to free software are irrelevant, in this context it would be better to mention my contributions to CDDB. The last one I remember was "Les Plus Belles Chansons de Provence - vol.2".

Irrelevant and immaterial. I wasn't commenting about his other work, only about the website linked in the GP.

to tag the person who was instrumental in bringing us mozilla.org, XEmacs, and a load of other free software as somebody who "hates free software" is a statement that speaks of ignorance. You obviously don't know the background of him.

No, I didn't. I don't have to know his background. I was commenting on the statements in his website. Such as "It is a flame about the pathetic state of Linux usability in general, and the handful of video players I tried out in particular" . He wrote that in 2002. He mentions RedHat 7.2 to show how Linux is "bad". That's a typical tactic of Microsoft astroturfers, who keep mentioning limitations on old versions of Linux, which have been fixed long ago.

He also mentions that "In 2005, I finally abandoned Linux for MacOS and never looked back" . If he once did some contributions to free software, he's clearly an apostate by now. He's doing free software a disservice by spreading half-truths about it.

My own contributions to free software are irrelevant, in this context it would be better to mention my contributions to CDDB. The last one I remember was "Les Plus Belles Chansons de Provence - vol.2".

In the beginning was a music recognition database called CDDB, and it was good.

Anyone who has worked with CDDB would disagree. Jamie Zewinski provides a detailed summary of its shortcomings. That someone steps forward as its "architect" makes me chuckle.

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

FWIW, Mozilla was in that stage for quite a while. One of the founders of it quit because they didn't ship on his imagined time frame.

They didn't get to Mozilla 1.0 until three years after that.

So, they should have just retired the product, right....?

It's not resistance, just a lack of interest. Not enough people will care until after we run out of IP addresses and conflicts occur. Society tends to not be very proactive unless the drive comes from authority.

The classic BSOD screensaver gets the same amusement factor without the hassle of hacking OSX.

And now available as a MacOSX Screensaver module! No hacking necessary! Share and Enjoy!

XScreenSaver

.. does he still foment a wonderfully wilde frontier among his compatriates .. ?

It seems like he had a lot of emacs responsibility at one time. Wouldn't that have to be earned?

JWZ mentions him here.

Linuxgazette mentions his work on HTML extensions for emacs here.

"Unix needs a bulletproof implementation"

Actually wasn't the Unix philosophy traditionally not really a stickler for good implementation? Go back to the whole "PC Losering" issue and "Worse is Better" design philosophy:

http://www.stanford.edu/~stinson/cs240/cs240_1/WIB .txt
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

I know I'm going to be perceived as a pariah for saying so, but guys, there isn't anything great about Unix. It's an old crusty design, which has succeeded through a combination of (some would say naive) simplicity and an overwhelming force of young software engineers that can easily understand, improve, and maintain the system (which to it's credit is a really great and powerful force that has kept *nix legitimate over the years).

As Rob Pike himself says: "I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."

http://jwz.org/images/iProduct.gif

'nuff said.

yeah, I have a mac. No, I didn't buy it myself. No, I don't have an i{whatever}. I like my iBook because it runs UN*X with no tweaking required beyond initial setup. It behaves like a consumer desktop OS (read: runs MS Office for work-related junk) when I want it to, and behaves like a BSD workstation (read: transparent terms, decent package management and all the CLI and OS tools I expect a real workstation to have) when I want it to. Basically, it Just Works, which has become a major feature for me the past few years ...