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Groupware Bad
And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

In the words of jwz:

"What kind of moron does this stuff by inclusion? What kind of moron writes HTML that doesn't degrade gracefully? The language was designed that way. That's why unrecognized tags are ignored by default."

Besides, when the government is involved, temporary things have a way of becoming permanent. "Planned" doesn't mean "promised". Can you not imagine some PHB saying "well, it works for me, why are we spending money to make it work on some browser I never heard of?"?

Absolutely! And thanks to the wondrous advances in technology, these days, they're jet-powered and able to bomb people with toasts!

Reminds me of worse is better.

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

haaaa hahahahahaha.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you're right - everyone knows the best software is determined solely by market share. Especially with concepts like "monopoly", "de-facto standard", "must interoperate" and "FUD" around.

Everyone knows markets are the perfect selectors of quality, right? That's why crappy Linux or *BSD can't break into the desktop, and Microsoft owns the world.

Numbnuts.

Market share determines who has the best marketing department, who was first to market, who's willing to abuse their position to extend a monopoly of theirs into other areas, or who has the most successful vendor-lockin. While ideally quality alone will win out, in practice it very, very rarely does, since any of the examples listed above generally trump mere "quality" on its own.

I'd agree that markets would be a perfect selector: in a perfect world, all things being equal, if every piece of software worked in isolation and every purchaser was perfectly accurately educated in the pros and cons of evry product on the market.

Unfortunately, this ain't going to happen any time soon.

This is the same sensationalist troll who coined "Open Sores" back in June 1999 to mock FLOSS, and called Stallman a communist, and Torvalds Lenin.

Mr. Metcalfe, if we wanted to read intelligent rants on how Everything is Wrong, I think we can pick from several better sources than you, and might learn something from it instead of suffering through your screeds...

• JWZ http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html
• Richard Gabriel http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
• Rob Pike (pdf) http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rob/utah2000.pdf
• Jef Raskin http://jef.raskincenter.org/humane_interface/summa ry_of_thi.html
• ... (others?)

I would like to contribute this link to your history, that one day search engines might pick it up: Pompous Windbag

This is the same sensationalist troll who coined "Open Sores" back in June 1999 to mock FLOSS, and called Stallman a communist, and Torvalds Lenin.

Mr. Metcalfe, if we wanted to read intelligent rants on how Everything is Wrong, I think we can pick from several better sources than you, and might learn something from it instead of suffering through your screeds...

• JWZ http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html
• Richard Gabriel http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
• Rob Pike (pdf) http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rob/utah2000.pdf
• Jef Raskin http://jef.raskincenter.org/humane_interface/summa ry_of_thi.html
• ... (others?)

I would like to contribute this link to your history, that one day search engines might pick it up: Pompous Windbag

Here's a link to JWZ's "my employer can blow me" editorial.

the netscape dorm
my employer can blow me
resignation and postmortem
netscape and aol

the netscape dorm
my employer can blow me
resignation and postmortem
netscape and aol

the netscape dorm
my employer can blow me
resignation and postmortem
netscape and aol

the netscape dorm
my employer can blow me
resignation and postmortem
netscape and aol

Mind you, even if it only ever works on Gecko/Spidermonkey, that's a pretty solid cross-platform browser environment. Hell, I was originally considering making it an XUL application - if I'd done that then it'd only ever run on Mozilla and/or Firefox. Thankfully I realised that I didn't need to go that far, so now we have a good wholesome application for which the target platform is any reasonably standards-compliant web browser. As long as our clients are happy with that (and they are (so far)), that's Good Enough(tm).

Were you even around on the Intarweb when IE 3.0 was going head-to-head with NS 3.x?

Netscape was the browser for at least two years (mid-1995 to mid-1997ish). IE was slow, painful to use, and had horrible rendering. IE 3.0 couldn't even render fairly simple tables correctly, which meant web pages that used tables for layout (which was many, many of them) looked like absolute shit in IE but looked OK in almost any other browser. Netscape was so dominant that people occasionally referred to the Web as "the Netscape".

Netscape 4 vs. IE 4 was a different story entirely. Netscape lost their focus and fell victim to the "portal" mania that was happening in 1998. From out here in the real world it looked like they were putting all their resources into the portal silliness, and later, Internet services silliness like being an e-mail provider, and the browser became almost an afterthought. Check out what jwz says in his "farewell Mozilla" gruntle: 1998 was when Netscape finally quit even credibly trying. And what they had at that point was a pigsty of a collection of code that, to yield a clean, functional browser, would (and did) have to be almost completely rewritten.

Microsoft didn't "out-innovate" Netscape as much as Netscape quit innovating completely. Winning a race is easy when the competition isn't running any more.

Ya know, when I see incredibly dumb Apple topics like this one, this article immediately springs to mind:

iProduct.

JWZ has a selection of some of the choice obscenities from Netscape: http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html

Linux has supported BSOD for years.

And for God sake Linux should support sound.

Just because some notorious whiner can't get a soundcard working on a variant of Linux, but succeeds in getting it to work on a variant of FreeBSD, doesn't mean Linux doesn't support sound.

In fact, if he really wants compatibility, as other posters have already suggested, there's always Windows.

Here's a quote (I'm surprised he still has this link) about quitting Netscape:

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.

Now, granted he has some good points and good effort, but sometimes teams don't get anywhere with naysayers like jws. Maybe Linux isn't quite ready for the desktop of Auntie Smith, but no doubt, like Mozilla/Firebird, Linux can and will be used on the desktop.

I figured it was more a metaphor for jwz as a really sorry leaky houseguest.

Yeah, who indeed.

This cat is no doubt a talented-as-hell programmer, and has done lots of real cool things.

But on the other hand, I think the most telling part of this story is the comparison to the third link where he's resigning from netscape and the mozilla project. He really comes off sounding like an asshole, and it doesn't help that he's so unbelievably wrong in retrospect.

He complains that no community ever formed around mozilla. He whines that the code they produced was too hard to modify and that people couldn't easily add new features. He complains of a lack of a mail program. Mozilla.org handled both of these issues quite well, now didn't they? He also takes issue with Netscape for continuing devlopment of 4.5 on the old codebase while mozilla.org was starting up, while he simultaneously complains that they didn't ship end-user software. But, see, they did....Netscape 4.5. It just wasn't the end-user software he wanted shipped.

And the practical truth of that is that it was simply harder to do than he wanted it to be. Mozilla was just too huge, too hard to complete, for his timeframe to be realistic. It would be a few more years until the project could release the real-deal, which really was 1.0. And a couple more to get Firefox and Thunderbird to their 1.0 releases, which was when they really came into their own as the best-of-breed tools he always wanted them to be.

But this did all happen eventually. And he just gave up and threw in the towel, because this shit was too hard and was taking longer than he wanted it to take.

Sounds a lot like the current situation, no?

Of course, I think the feeling's mutual:

Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.

Oh well...

Here it is.

Oh, the shame to host clay porn sculptures -- but he's forgiven, because he's from San Francisco: the homosexual Mecca that God will surely pulverize with salt and brimstone. From Bob Zambinski's HAPPYPENGUIN.ORG website, I stab at thee!

dumbass. just because *you* haven't heard of him, doesn't mean he's just "some random blogger".

Here's a tip, when they refer to someone using initials (jwz), it usually means they are well known in their circles.

Another tip, try googling

guess what, comes up with a Wiki

Jamie Zawinski
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Jamie W. Zawinski (born c. 1970 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), commonly known as jwz, is a computer programmer, responsible for significant contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, as well as early versions of the proprietary Netscape Navigator web browser. He became quite well known in the early days of the world wide web through two easter eggs in the Netscape browser: typing "about:jwz" into the address box would take you to his home page (a similar trick worked for other Netscape staffers), and if you were running a Unix version of the browser, the Netscape logo "throbber" would change to a ship's compass when a page was loading.

Zawinski was a major proponent of opening the source code of the Mozilla browser, but became disillusioned with the project when it was decided that the code would have to be rewritten. He resigned from Netscape Communications Corporation on April 1, 1999. [1] (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html) His main occupation is now running the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco.

He still actively maintains the XScreenSaver project, used by most open source Unix-like operating systems for screenblanking.

If he has indeed been messing around with Linux for long enough to be prominent in development/maintenance of xscreensaver (I haven't checked this) or XEmacs

jwz wrote xscreensaver, Lucid Emacs, Netscape Mail and News 2.0 to 3.0 and the original UNIX versions of Netscape Navigator.

I like how he is(was) a developer of a application that used sound on linux (http://www.jwz.org/gronk/) and yet was so stupid as to a) buy a soundcard that wasn't fully supported and b) use a distro that doesn't set it up automagically.

I mean, come on.

And yes, linux is harder than having dedicated hardware and OS intergration - it's also cheaper. But more importantly, that's the price of freedom.

I am sick to the guts of all these whinging losers who expect linux to be "finished now". Go check out apple's and Microsofts budget next to that of redhats, go check out how many hardware driver writers are opening their source up.... go check it out!

For me, this is a battle against corporate control of the internet, a battle for the future of ideas and democracy (yes DRM is that dangerous, just look at what they do with the DMCA). So sooooorry if you can't have your games and your music this instant because you are such a petulant little troll that you can't be bothered putting some effort into the fight.

MORAL OF THE STORY FOR THE REST OF US:

ALWAYS, always, always, check your hardware for linux compatibility, even if you are running windows (just so you have the option to swap in the future). This means sometimes you have to avoid the very bleeding edge, but it's more about investing a few google searches into hardware before you buy.

In fact, here is the plan to swapping to linux that stops 90% of the whinging (the other 10% whinge no matter what).

1. On windows when you buy new hardware make sure it is linux compatible, start today.

2. Use firefox and open office and cygwin and other OSS on your windows install.

3. Use a ubuntu, knoppix or other live CD to check things out, get an account to Putty into from your windows box.

4. Install mandrake, fedora or maybe ubuntu with a second harddrive (or a careful partition) and dual boot. I say those because they have the best hardware detection, noob support and compatibility with games/random software.

Once you have a polished distro on your box that you *slowly* transitioned to which has 100% hardware support you should be FINE and all your possible whinging from jumping in with an ATI graphics card, an unsupported drive controller, a no-name brand proprietary USB TV tuner and a soundcard you bought without thinking should be not present.

I hope Zawinski loves his new hardware choice of a PPC Apple and the future of it's compatibility in a few years time.

jwz is responsible for many significant *NIX applications.

"Back before you had heard of Netscape, I was responsible for the Unix versions of Netscape Navigator through release 1.1."

"Before Netscape, I was primarily to blame for Lucid Emacs"

"...I was one of the folks who created and ran the Mozilla Organization during the first year of its life"

"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."

Google JWZ's commentary on this, I think it's for the most part spot on.

What, you didn't think _I_ would bother finding that link again? I'm a lazy sysadmin!

Ohh, all right..

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

(But I'm not going to a hrefitize it for you, just copy and paste... Ooh, /. did it for me! Neat!)

Well...

C is good for what it was first used for: writing Unix. At least initially, it was mimimalistic; orthogonality took a back seat to ease of implementation. (See Gabriel's classic essay for details.)

(It's certainly not flawless. Any language that needs a utility like cdecl to make declarations understandable has problems, and there should've been a Boolean type from the beginning. It would be nice if char (which should be whatever represents a glyph on the target system) weren't conflated with short short int. Basically, if C were in your back yard, it would be declared an "attractive nuisance.")

I think the authors of The Art of Unix Programming wisely recognize that C, like any other tool, should be used only where appropriate. (Sorry if that's tautological, but I can't think of a better way to put it.)

The obligatory link: The Rise of Worse is Better

You are not concerned by the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers (CADT), are you?

Xkeycaps allows to remap keys easily, so you can get a Lisp friendly layout.

Anyway, I use xkeycaps to show sort of what the keymap ought to be (but the author stopped adding maps after a hundred or so were submitted! And none match my Dell Inspiron 7.5K). And a windowmaker applet I can't find now that shows 9 flags for I think 18 or 27 countries. Maybe wmkeyboard might be useful too. Anyway my Mom's Mac OS X handles other languages fantastically without even noticing how hard it is elsewhere (maybe XP is the same?) but for linux I think if you deal with more than one language this will drive you insane.

Lastly, I hate that firefox doesn't obey normal unix copy and paste rules. There's no option to right click in a text field and delete everything in it without highlighting the text that is already there. In opera you just click in the box and type ctrl+U. This is particularly annoying when I'm messing with phpmyadmin.

Please educate yourself.

i'm pretty sure EMACS and the Big Brother DataBase constitute prior art.

http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
http://www.jwz.org/bbdb/

Without crackpots this community wouldn't be viable. I mean, who else would spend endless hours devoted to creating UNIX all over again?

worse is better

'nuff said

Sadly, it doesn't matter to non-tech software users if your software is built following all software best practices and comes loaded with amazingly rich, powerful and flexible features.

All it matters for non-tech users is that software does its job efficiently, doesn't come in the way and is right on their budget.

Eg: most FF users don't care about standards-compliance ("what the f*** does that mean ?") or even to tabbed-browsing ("ok, now i'm lost!"). They use it because it allows them to surf the web with less annoying popups and the confidence in its security hype.

worse is indeed better and M$ has proved it over time and again...

To quote the holy jwz (the Netscape hacker) about Netscape's takeover by AOL: "My friends keep saying ``jwz@aol.com'' and then laughing uncontrollably.".

Ah the good old days, where everybody was wondering if Mozilla 1.0 was going to suffer the same fate like Duke Nukem Forever.

Check out these points from "Principles of the Agile Manifesto":

• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
• Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

The between-the-lines point here is that getting working and not-awful code now is the secret to success in the long term. Dozens of projects have proven this over and over. UNIX is probably one of the most famous examples, as suggested in the famous "Worse Is Better" essay.

Polishing code until it's perfect without new feature development is an excellent way to get outdated.

It reminds me of the conflict between Lucid and Stallman over emacs.

Lucid had a product to get out, Stallman wanted to do everything right and his way. It resulted in the emacs/Xeamcs schism. I didn't work on this directly, but saw my coworkers dealing with this as it happened. My view of the whole thing certainly biased by my experience there. Regardless, it wasn't pretty.

Wherever there are multiple development teams this tension between the ones that want to get the product out now, and the ones that want to do "the right thing" will exist. I personally think the tension is good. You should strive to do the right thing, but when it comes right down to it you need to produce something people can use in a timely manner.

I just hope this doesn't produce another schism.

It reminds me of the conflict between Lucid and Stallman over emacs.

Lucid had a product to get out, Stallman wanted to do everything right and his way. It resulted in the emacs/Xeamcs schism. I didn't work on this directly, but saw my coworkers dealing with this as it happened. My view of the whole thing certainly biased by my experience there. Regardless, it wasn't pretty.

Wherever there are multiple development teams this tension between the ones that want to get the product out now, and the ones that want to do "the right thing" will exist. I personally think the tension is good. You should strive to do the right thing, but when it comes right down to it you need to produce something people can use in a timely manner.

I just hope this doesn't produce another schism.

'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

The problem with mandating a tabwidth that's not the default, (i.e. move to the next column that is divisible by 8), is that a lot, and I mean a lot, of people don't know how to set their tab stobs, or even know that they can set their tabstops. On some editors, like vi and emacs, setting tabstops isn't very obvious. You can read more about it if you want.

Yes, hellish things can happen if you're not careful. Which is why we have scripts to perform certain actions on checkin -- like checking your indentation, compiling your code, running (at least part of) the BVT suite, ...

You're right. If you're going to enforce an indention standard, as you should as part of a general coding standard, then it needs to be done automatically as part of the build process, just like lint.

You party with RMS? That's either cool, or very, very sad. :)

as JWZ said it:
"How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

Gosling Emacs (1981) is posterior to Stallman's Emacs (1976). See this history timeline. At best you may say it started as something based on TECO.

You can already customize the BSOD screensaver.

The true history Jamie Zawinski.

The point of CSS is graceful degradation. It helps you design sites that are still readable and usable even on browsers that don't support CSS, Javascript, etc.

jwz has a very interesting article on the shift to CSS somehow encouraging obsessive-compulsive design types to start designing pixel-perfect sites again. That isn't the point of CSS and it never has been.

/* Get the OVERFLOW attribute. (Fuck yuo, W3C. Fuck you.) */

/* Words cannot express how much HPUX SUCKS!

** This whole hacky pile of poop was done by Michael Toy.

This sounds vaguely familiar...