Slashdot Mirror

I remember reading JWZ's blog back in the Netscape days. I remember one entry in particular where he noted that Netscape had changed. It used to be full of people who wanted to help create a great company. It turned into a place full of people who just wanted to work for a great company. The people who live to help create get replaced by those who want to ride on their coat-tails. This happens when businesses become successful. Everything changes. Like the band that was good friends and partied together every night. They get signed, shit gets serious, and suddenly they're fighting and arguing about things till they break up and go their separate ways.

From an old post in his blog:
What is most amazing about this is not the event itself, but rather, what it indicates: Netscape has gone from ``hot young world-changing startup'' to Apple levels of unadulterated uselessness in fewer than four years, and with fewer than 3,000 employees.

But I guess Netscape has always done everything faster and bigger. Including burning out.

It's too bad it had to end with a whimper instead of a bang. Netscape used to be something wonderful.

The thing that hurts about this is that I was here when Netscape was just a bunch of creative people working together to make something great. Now it's a faceless corporation like all other faceless corporations, terrified that it might accidentally offend someone. But yes, all big corporations are like that: it's just that I was here to watch this one fall.

Perhaps the same fate awaits Mozilla. Hopefully not, but when your product becomes as successful as Mozilla and Firefox have, things do change and change is inevitable. It all comes down to how the people involved with the projects handle the change.

Mozilla did rise from the ashes of Netscape though. Hopefully some of the original Netscape people are still around to help lead Mozilla in the right direction, using their experience from the crashing and burning of Netscape in the late 90's.

JWZ's rantings can be found at http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/

All modern applications behave as described in this document by Jamie Zawinski. Pasting between applications works fine unless you're talking about ancient Athena widget stuff. From the user's point of view, it looks exactly like on Windows except for the middle-button feature (which I wish were available on Windows).

As someone else replied above, the main problem is that there are really two copy/paste clipboards, which most devs don't seem to understand. Get the full explanation here.

How are they doing this you ask? Most people learn about alternate operating systems through sites such as this one, where Lunatix users spread disinformation. As a result, their expectations are boosted to delusional levels (Linux will make me a kewl leet dood! All my computer problems will be solved! I'll be able to have sex with anyone I want, every night!) instead of more realistic ones. (Half of my hardware will not work. The software will be incomprehensible. I'll probably end up back on Windows.) As a result, when these people finally try Linux, their expectations will be painfully shattered instead of barely met. They will rightly feel that they have been lied to and cheated. Therefore a deep-seeded hatred will develop against Linux and anyone that has anything to do with it. The Linux users' very idiocy is sucking the life out of Linux and other failed but noble projects like it.

The most efficient method for exposing these people for the total nut jobs that they are is trolling. When these people sincerely state that "installing Linux needs a 5-year plan where you eat steak, like in Soviet Russia" or "Linux is more secure cuz of its 'design'" or "what do you mean Linux is no good for a Fortune 500 company, it runs fine in my basement" it immediately creates no doubt as to their level of their intelligence. Providing enough rope to hang themselves with is the most effective way of flushing them out.

This is why I propose that a new cabinet under the Department of Homeland Security be created. This cabinet will be called the Troll Taskforce and its primary motto will be "Trolling for Truth!" I nominate the distinguished Rep. Senator Bill Gates (Redmond) to head up this cabinet. His exceptional leadership skills have been more than proven.

Will it get a 22 year old college student laid like Hula?

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

What this really implies is that the world will always be playing catch-up with the virus writers: security is only an issue when someone releases an actual threat. Until then, there's no economic incentive to do anything about it.

For an insightful commentary on why 'Groupware' sucks, read JWZ's Groupware Bad article.

A quote:

"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.

Groupware BAD

Not that I have much experience, but visiting Slashdot may be entirely the wrong way to go about answering that particular question ...

(For those who think parent is a troll: here's the idea, with relevant bits highlighted)

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

Zawensky's program (dadadodo) [jwz.org] takes its probablities from the relationship between words and phrases in a seed text, rather than working in the mad-lib style of mission statement generators, and some other phrase generators that can be found on the net. In this way, dadadodo acts as a dissociators which is similar to a collage. Text is taken from some source, cut into pieces, and pasted into the new document. The idea is that in langage, it may be possible to simulate things like parts of speech and meaning by analyzing the probabilities of words appearing in sentences which have correct meaning and syntax. For dissociators, that probability can lead to random text. For this translation project, probabilistic rules are generated about meanings, and structure of language.

This reminda me of Jamie Zawinskies hack Dadadodo which used probability trees to create new texts from old texts by examining the probability any given word follows the previous word/string of words. I always thought his program was cool, in that his description of it involved Markov Chains and William S. Burroughs.

Please think of the children: Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

Not the definitive answer to your question, but food for thought...

From a recent jwz rant on a different (but relevant) project

You ain't seen nothing yet...

This is a backhoe !

Jamie Zawinski has a list of rude words which had to be removed from the Netscape client code before it could be open-sourced. Microsoft's probably looks a bit like this.

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

Seems Netscape had the same attitude before releasing the future Mozilla code in 1998: http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html

Remember, boys and girls, whatever you put in a source code base is on the record. Forever. Emulate Joe Friday.

Just my two cents:

There's also:

• webCollage (http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/)
• debris (http://www.badmofo.org/debris/)
• webGobbler (http://www.sebsauvage.net/python/webgobbler/)

(webGobbler is my own creation - Comments are welcome...)

Still, I would not pretend this is art.

Jeez.

Building a computer from parts might be easy for you, but that does not make it "easy". Most people can't handle it. They want to buy a computer and take it out of the box and plug it in and turn it on. This goes for PCs or Macs.

Have you used a Mac that was manufactured in the past half decade? You can use any USB mouse with them, including your seven-buttons-with-scroll-wheel optical mouse. They use PCI, AGP, ATA, and USB for expansion. They have a "taskbar", it's called the Dock.

Windows's popularity is entirely attributable to Worse is Better. rup

• I selected Roku Soundbridges. I like the interface, and the display. They can access the network using either 10/100 wired ethernet, or 802.11b wireless and provide analog and digital outputs to feed either powered speakers or your stereo. I have two hanging off the same server setup described above, and they work great.
  
• I can also "mount" the music shared in the manner described above with iTunes. I've only tested this w/ the winderz version, as there are no Macs in the house modern enuf to run iTunes.
  

• The slimserver software, and a software version of their client are available free from their web page. Try before you buy, or buy one squeezebox and use the software version on laptops elsewhere.
  
• Roku _might_ implement synchronized play in the future. I see no reason why they could not.
  
• Roku supports "tuning" internet radio stations. I plan to set up a stream, fed by another piece of software looking at the same set of files so that I have my own internet radio station in the house. I've used jwz's gronk, which is a web-based jukebox package for this purpose before with success, but will also consider grind this time around. I do not know if I will achieve synchronization this way or not, but I'm hoping.
  
• Gronk and Grind do not use ID3 tags, so when I originally ripped a lot of my music for Gronk, I didn't care about the ID3s. All of the rest of this software DOES care, so I have a bit of a mess on my hands.
  
• Gronk is written in Perl, so it's hackable. This comes in handy tweaking things like sort order, whether to include "the' in the band name, etc. JWZ also provides a demo version to play with on the site below.
  
• Another way to get the synchronized music, and to serve over wireless, although not the way you originally asked, is to set up an FM transmitter. I have not yet done this for this project, but my prior Gronk installation supported one of those micropowered fm transmitters intended for use with mp3 players in cars just fine.
  

• 
  Linksys NSLU-2
  Unslung firmware for the NSLU-2
  Roku Soundbridge
  Squeezebox and Slimserver
  mt-daapd on Sourceforge
  JWZ's Gronk
  Grind
  A review of a REAL FM transmitter
  

And #2 we like things to be hard and icky.

Apple iProduct

Second that. The Slimserver is very good, and V6 will support a SQL back end should you so desire. Also, check out JWZ's Gronk

Second that. The Slimserver is very good, and V6 will support a SQL back end should you so desire. Also, check out JWZ's Gronk

Behold. (circa 2000)

When I cited "worse is better", I was invoking the whole old Richard Gabriel proposition, without having to explain it in depth. I think that what you said pretty much "dovetails" this.

The Rise of Worse is Better

I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase ``the right thing.'' To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right: Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation. Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed. Consistency-the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness. Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.

I believe most people would agree that these are good characteristics. I will call the use of this philosophy of design the ``MIT approach.'' Common Lisp (with CLOS) and Scheme represent the MIT approach to design and implementation.

The worse-is-better philosophy is only slightly different:

Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design. Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct. Consistency-the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency. Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface.

If it has wings, I sure hope they're jet powered. We have to be up-to-date!

The promise
I remember when Chandler was first mooted. Finally an open souce project that has a vision of how to store and communicate small bits of information. Traditionally these types of applications have been lumped together with *ugly* (but accurate) acronymn, PIM.

Free the data
This is an important step in applications. Historically data is trapped or obfusticated into applications. Once you enter the data in it you can only get at it by jumping through the fire breathing coding hoops. Ocassionally its open souce (mozilla mork) but commercial applications take this to a new level - (think MS Outlook Express).

Updated Agenda?
For the younger /.'s this is not the first crack Mitch has had at this market. In '88 Mitch Kapor (father of Lotus 123, Notes) Agenda was released into the PIM market to some success. The runs are on the board. Could Chandler be the answer?

• ... A major lesson learnt from the last two years, is that we took on too much, and had too high an ambition level for the near-term. This "great leap forward" strategy didn't pan out. Instead, we have primarily switched to a "dog food" strategy to quickly develop a first release that is minimally usable, on a day-to-day basis, for us within OSAF and for our info-intensive, techno-savvy early adopters. ...

Release early and often
Well after 0.4 release I dont see anything compelling. It has trouble working on Windows, it's monolithic and appears to be *weighed* down in specifications of how to do things rather than results. Chandler looks good on paper but in clumping email, calandering, PIM and other messaging it has lost for me its original appeal. I want it usable now. Even if it is a little bit at a time. For me like its name sake (Raymond) I'm still searching for a usable application.

Alternative
So there you have it I've trashed a computer industry veteran who has runs on the board but has failed to deliver. Whats an alternative. Well one example is a Gnome app called Tomboy. Its a simple mono, GTK based note taking applet that is searchable. It allows you to click on links according to mime types and load an application. It has spell checking (along with references to various IBM patents). But the single kicker that has moved Tomboy into my sights is the integration of Tomboy with Evolution (unix version that mirrors crappy Outlook in too may ways) and Beagle The Gnome desktop is now using Tomboy as the *PIM* input and building a plugin to Evolution (email, calander), Beagle (searching). So bit by bit it's making Chandler less attractive to me.

lessons
It helps to have access to an open souce platform. Release often and early. Build an application (especially a first version) to do one thing and do it well. Get a result. Dont bloat a product with features if it is not vital and work out how can you work with other applications. Tomboy may only have a short shelf life or morph into something else in as it develops but it works right now and does the job.

Have you actually seen the documentation of Firefox's formats?

The history file, for example, is spectacularly awful. Check out https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24143 8
(not a link since bugzilla won't accept Slashdot as a referrer) - "please make history.dat easier to parse (i.e., not Mork)"

Some other references to the format:

http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/primer.t xt
http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html
http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html

Oh, and X supports many formats on the clipboard

One of the really cool, yet rarely used, features of the selection mechanism is that it can negotiate what data formats to use. It's not just about text. When one application asks another for the selection, part of their communication involves the requester asking the owner for the list of types in which they are capable of delivering the selection data; then the requester picks the format they like best, and asks for it that way.

As a simple example, suppose there is a program displaying text in multiple fonts. When pasting that into a text-only program, you'd want to paste only the text. But when pasting that into a word processor, you'd want to keep the font information: if both applications spoke HTML, they could use that as the intermediate format by which they transferred the data.

More complex things are possible, too: for example, when an image is selected on a web page, the web page displayer could offer to serve that up as raw image bits; or as JPEG data; or as the original URL of the image. When trying to copy and paste an image into a text editor that can't do images, the text editor might decide that the next best thing would be to paste the filename of the image, or the URL.

Resier4 or XFS is what UNIX should have started with...

ACL's make more sense, and UNIX should have had them from the start.

Just to check, you know that Unix started in 1971(ish), right? Expecting filesystems developed in the last ten years targetting modern hardware to have existed thirty years ago on hardware less powerful than the PalmOS device in my pocket seems a little optimistic.

You touch on some things that Unix (and it's children) can definately do better, but you seem out of touch with Unix's history. Unix evolved to where it is today over thirty-five years. Doing everything all at once wasn't an option; indeed Grand Visions generally fail while something Good Enough that continually improves (warts and all) generally wins. Thus Worse is Better (that's just an excerpt from the original article, see it all here.

Jeez.

Building a computer from parts might be easy for you, but that does not make it "easy". Most people can't handle it. They want to buy a computer and take it out of the box and plug it in and turn it on. This goes for PCs or Macs.

Have you used a Mac that was manufactured in the past half decade? You can use any USB mouse with them, including your seven-buttons-with-scroll-wheel optical mouse. They use PCI, AGP, ATA, and USB for expansion. They have a "taskbar", it's called the Dock.

Windows's popularity is entirely attributable to Worse is Better [jwz.org]. ei

My friends keep saying ``jwz@aol.com'' and then laughing uncontrollably...

So who wants @aol.com invites!? Ask me!!

In every case I've ever heard of, the primary reason why a fork has happened is because the lead of the original project was percieved to be an obnoxious megalomaniac. From what I've read this was true of XFree86, and from what I've been reading if it happens to Gnome, it'll be true there as well. (And yes, I'm privately inclined to believe it was at least partially true in the case of the Emacs/XEmacs fork as well ;-))

It sounds like the leader of the project you were involved with is now attempting to verify this truism by preventing you from copying the parent project's code to your new tree. Tell him that unless he either a) is the original copyright holder, and b) therefore wishes to change the code's license, (in which case he fairly obviously never intended to abide by the GPL in the first place) that he can go and perform an anatomically impossible act with a shovel with your blessing, because as long as the GPL is binding on the project, he won't be able to do anything else.

To RMS' credit, while he might not have been happy about the XEmacs fork (and he wasn't...I've read the email archives on this) but other than claiming Richard Gabriel had shown a "bad spirit" he never explicitly tried to stop it from happening to my knowledge, precisely because he would have known that forking is one of the rights that the GPL specifically grants.

The right to fork is crucial, because it protects against that part of human frailty which causes the behaviour of some of us to degenerate into fascism. If the leader of a project that you've devoted considerable time and effort to for whatever reason suddenly decides to start being a control freak, the right to fork ensures that the effort you've already invested will not go to waste. You can simply copy the project and relocate said copy to your own site/machine, and then continue working on it.

I agree completely that credit should be given in the changelog/wherever else to whoever has worked on the parent code, but for the parent project's lead to try and prevent forking of it if it uses the GPL is completely wrong, IMHO. In the XEmacs situation RMS might have tried to dominate people in spirit, but in practice he was able I think to recognise the necessity of abiding by his own rules.

Oh Yeah?

You where saying that such people are morons?
You can take your foot out of your mouth now.

There is also a GL hack depicting a hypertorus in xscreensaver, which I use under Linux (and can be used with any UNIX, VMS, MacOS X, or other system running an X server). It also has hypercube, hyperdodecahedron (hyperball), and others (polytopes). Xscreensaver lives at: http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/

I do too, and virtually all my music, and drafts of bad things I've written, and notes to self, and a zillion other things, and it occurred to me the other day reading about the demise of JWZ's RBA mailing list and the real reason that corporate document-retention policies exist, I started to wonder what would happen if I ever got sued, and my digital stash got raided.

Basically, then, my entire life would become a public document. The good parts, the bad parts, and even the ugly parts I don't like to look at myself.

I'm not sure what I think about that.

A 3D screensaver on a server? Now that's the sort of innovative shit that Linux needs to succeed in the marketplace ;)

(Yes, I know about Xscreensaver)

Jeeze, if you're going to the trouble of posting a link to xscreensaver, you might want to use the right one so you get an up-to-date version (4.18 is current).

I prefer jwz's saying "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

First of all, they seem to be very susceptible to 'Not Invented Here' (NIH) which leads to them re-inventing solutions to problems that have long been solved by UNIX and in the academic community (and usually better, too).

Secondly, they have a lot of smart designers and programmers - the problem is that they know this and are arrogant to assume that they can therefore develop better and more perfect software than anything that's gone before. This leads to over-complex designs that are too hard to implement in robust ways.

Depressing though it is, it really does seem as though 'worse is better' is one of the most reliable ways of getting robust software (even if it just gives up and aborts without even attempting the job asked of it, sometimes).

--

Yes, disabling javascript will eliminate this problem, but a lot of sites won't work without javascript.

• The Daily WTF - A daily look at source code that can make one cringe, laugh, and/or cry (site, feed)
• Astronomy Picture of the Day (site, feed)
• Stupid Security (site, feed)
• Cool Tools - "A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true." (site, feed
• EFF's minilinks - see tomorrow's Your Rights Online posts today (site, feed
• Your Gmail inbox (atom feed)

Then in 1998, AOL bought Netscape and I threw in the towel, I finally resigned to using IE on my Windows machines (which were usually at work - at work I either use a desktop thats Linux, Solaris or Windows, at home, Linux). IE had caught up, and with AOL owning Netscape, using Netscape felt less like the "rebel" position.

Then through partially through the lobbying of Jamie Zawinski, Mozilla was released, and I became interested again. I downloaded it - and I liked it. Tabs. Cookie/Password/Form managers. View Image option on web pages. Other features I like I'm probably forgetting. And Mozilla is free software, something which is important to me. It's free software, it's not Microsoft, and it's better than Microsoft! After downloading Mozilla for the first time I became a confirmed Mozilla user.

"GForge is a fork of the original GPL'd SourceForge code and like sf.net provides forums, mailing lists, revision control via CVS or Subversion"

Do we really need another fork? We all remember the last time when the community was divided. It is never easy to marge branches of forked codebase tree. I think Eric Raymond has described all of the disadvantages of frivolous forking more than inadequately. The open source community is already using CVS, RCS, Rsync, Bytekeeper and Subversion. Wouldn't our creative resources be better invested if we tried to integrate some of the already available systems instead of dividing them even more?

Not that I disagree with your point --- I agree with you --- but for this particular point, the answer is sometimes it's necessary. (And that one went well. If you've read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, you'll know what I mean when I say that sometimes it goes really badly...)

Check out JWZ's Gronk

Yeah, reminds me of the line from JWZ's website -

When we started this company [Netscape], we were out to change the world. And we did that. Without us, the change probably would have happened anyway, maybe six months or a year later, and who-knows-what would have played out differently. But we were the ones who actually did it. When you see URLs on grocery bags, on billboards, on the sides of trucks, at the end of movie credits just after the studio logos -- that was us, we did that. We put the Internet in the hands of normal people. We kick-started a new communications medium. We changed the world.

Indeed. They very much were the ones who brought the WWW to the masses.