Slashdot Mirror

Pssssst: ESR didn't write my kernel. And according to his projects page, hasn't written any kernel worth mentioning. Is this some joke I don't get, or do you really think that ESR is Linus?

Entertainment companies like to keep supply down. Too much music easily distributed scares them.

With good reason, of course. Most of the media industry corps that were solidly behind the Mickey Mouse^W^WSonny Bonehead^H^H^H^H^Ho CTEA -- weren't actually (with perhaps a few minor exceptions) expecting to reap further monetary rewards on existing copyrighted works.

They realized that keeping works out of the public domain reduces competition for the "new" stuff that they're pushing. Despite the resounding proof of Sturgeon's Law inherent in every media subindustry's yearly output (in light of which one might be forgiven for considering Ted Sturgeon to be unreasonably optomistic) they still manage to sell what they shovel, because there's no alternative.

TMTOWTDI, pronounced "tim-toady" I believe..

Once macintosh owners have guns will esr lead them with the rest of the geeks with guns squadto assualt redmond?

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/html-hell.html

In terms of design, navigability, tasteful display of content, and ability to be rendered in many, many, browsers, no other personal site comes close to this one. I wish more people would use it as a model.

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr

I remember seeing this years ago and it definitely had a huge impact on any web pages I created.

no matter how cool the flash animations

Rumour has it that useful content has been delivered with flash, but I've never seen this. In fact, now that browsers are showing up with this obnoxious crap as a plugin, I've taken to deleting the .so or .dll responsible.

Use a text editor. The HTML genrated by the fancy programs is abominable, often invalid and more and more seems to confuse browsers into taking long periods on unknown activity to render. Use standard HTML. Don't use an image for a button where a text link will do. Make it useable in Lynx or w3m. Don't use frames unless you've got a good reason.

Avoid silly backgrounds (or ANY backgrounds) and silly combinations of foreground and background colors. I am increasingly running into web pages that are absolutely, literally unreadable due to this last.

More stuff to avoid:

HTML Hell Page

Just Read and follow these and you will be OK

http://www.tuxedo.org/%7Eesr/html%2Dhell.html

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

There really isn't much more to say.

Unless you actually go to program in it, that is. After all, Intercal is turing-complete.

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

Could this be? Someone who has actually read the article and understood what the lawyers were getting at, unlike the hundreds of slashbots jumping around adn screaming how "they just don't get it" ??? I AM AMAZED! There just might be a chance that humanity will survive to witness the dawn of the next century!

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

Could this be? Someone who has actually read the article and understood what the lawyers were getting at, unlike the hundreds of slashbots jumping around adn screaming how "they just don't get it" ??? I AM AMAZED! There just might be a chance that humanity will survive to witness the dawn of the next century!

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

Long live His Majesty, Hengist Duval, Emperor of the Imperial Empire, Duke of Achenar, Friend of the victims of crime, Hard on the causes of crime, Enemy of Open Source and Free Software, Protector of the mentally weak.

Dear moderators,

Please read the moderator guidelines before moderating (and act according to them). Giving the parent a "-1, Troll" is wrong - if you wanted to mod the post down, it should have been a "-1, Flamebait" or "-1, Overrated". Why? Here's a hint for you.

But in lots of web-systems-development contexts the emphasis is on getting new sets of features built as quickly as possible, and there's a strong pressure to be in "permanent protyping" mode.

Prototyping is where you intentionally ignore a lot of the factors important in the real world, so that you can quickly bring some desired aspect to apparent completion. A great example is building a movie set: you only build the walls and finish the surfaces that the camera sees, but the sink doesn't have plumbing and there's no glass in the windows.

On a project of any size, the notion of "permanent prototyping" is a dangerous myth. If you're building for long-term quality and flexibility, you can't cut corners; they always come back to bite you. Trying to turn a movie set into a real house is much more painful than just building a real house, especially if there are people living in it already.

A better solution is to pick one of the various agile methodologies, like Extreme Programming, Feature-Driven Development, or Scrum. All of these methods focus on building very high quality software in a way that's amenable to change.

XP, for example, lets the biz folks change the spec every week or two if they want. (Which sounds like disaster, but smart people quickly realize that making random turns every few blocks is not the best way to get somewhere.) That gives you all the benefits of "permanent prototyping" without getting it's biggest drawback: the speed with which you reach critial mass.

You're certainly right that expert programmers don't absolutely need static typing. But for experts, static typing isn't that much of a burden, and even us geniuses have those occasional Friday afternoons where our brains go to the bar two hours before our bodies.

This IS funny! First an AC gets modded "Troll" for a BLAZEMONGER joke, then a post with a BLAZEMONGER link for the moderators is "Offtopic"! Well, my link goes to the mighty ESRs Jargon entry on the subject. Yay! Let's see what mods this gets... :P

Come on guys. Nothing is ever free. There is always a cost. Whether it's a financial cost, opportunity cost, or others, in the end, someone has to pay for it. We have to realize that the last couple of years has been a fluke in the whole economic cycle. There is no possible way that that cycle could have continued.

Think about it this way, would advertisers pay millions of dollars to advertise during the Super Bowl if they found out that there was a technology that a good population of TV watchers are using to block the super bowl ads?

• maintaining customers
• making those customers feel good about themselves
• showing off (particularly to their competitors

Alright, I'll give. Perhaps I'm part of the problem... but what was significant about September '91? I've also seen September alluded to a few other times in this context. I didn't start using the 'net until 1994-ish, so I guess that makes me a newbie but I'd like to know...

See the Jargon File entry for an explanation of the Sept'93 reference, but for me the death knell was sounded in Sept'91 when JANET started talking about JIPS, which was TCP/IP over the then entirely X.28 UK academic network.

That's a good start, but not good enough. Unless, that is, you bootstrapped the compiler yourself, directly in machine code. And that's not secure either, because whatever tool you used to enter and verify the machine code could have been compromised also.

For a better idea of this, check out these two sites:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/back- door.html

http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

Gene Spafford gave a very interestring talk on Why Open Source software only seems more secure at LinuxForum 2000.

It was a real eye opener for all of us who had read The Cathedral and the Bazaar

For instance this from one of the slides from the talk:

Linux compromises dominate - nearly 4 to 1 over Windows
Commercial Unix compromises usually rare
Windows/Unix compromises are 2 to 1
MacOS compromises do not occur (before OS X)

The slides are still interesting even after two years

#
Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; , pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat.

Whats pr0n? oh so thats what it is.

http://www.tuxedo.org~esr/jargon/html/entry/pr0n.h tml

Intercal

...is that he wants the project done in INTERCAL.

Yes, but a post to /. should follow hacker conventions and hackers do not place the period (or comma) inside the quotes unless the period is actually part of the phrase quoted.

especially on machines that still have dot matrix printers attached, it would probably be much easier to just use the Halt and Catch Fire instruction!

This really galls me. A simple Google search will reveal a massive number of references to "open source" prior to March 1998. This stinks of revisionism.

Read the History of the OSI:

The "open source" label itself came out of a strategy session held on February 3rd 1998 in Palo Alto, California. The people present included Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson (of the Foresight Institute), John "maddog" Hall and Larry Augustin (both of Linux International), Sam Ockman (of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group), and Eric Raymond.

(...)

We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source," contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with.

Next time please do a little research before you state that something "stinks of revisionism", because if this what you comment are the exact words of people who you advocate, it can look really stupid.

In my post, I haven't said anything which the Open Source Initiative doesn't agree with. The text you commented was written by one of the OSI creators and advocates. Still, you're not satisfied.

I hope you get the point now. What else can I say... To paraphrase your words, This stinks of ignorance.

Please, think about it.

This really galls me. A simple Google search will reveal a massive number of references to "open source" prior to March 1998. This stinks of revisionism.

Read the History of the OSI:

The "open source" label itself came out of a strategy session held on February 3rd 1998 in Palo Alto, California. The people present included Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson (of the Foresight Institute), John "maddog" Hall and Larry Augustin (both of Linux International), Sam Ockman (of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group), and Eric Raymond.

(...)

We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source," contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with.

Next time please do a little research before you state that something "stinks of revisionism", because if this what you comment are the exact words of people who you advocate, it can look really stupid.

In my post, I haven't said anything which the Open Source Initiative doesn't agree with. The text you commented was written by one of the OSI creators and advocates. Still, you're not satisfied.

I hope you get the point now. What else can I say... To paraphrase your words, This stinks of ignorance.

Please, think about it.

This really galls me. A simple Google search will reveal a massive number of references to "open source" prior to March 1998. This stinks of revisionism.

Read the History of the OSI:

The "open source" label itself came out of a strategy session held on February 3rd 1998 in Palo Alto, California. The people present included Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson (of the Foresight Institute), John "maddog" Hall and Larry Augustin (both of Linux International), Sam Ockman (of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group), and Eric Raymond.

(...)

We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source," contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with.

Next time please do a little research before you state that something "stinks of revisionism", because if this what you comment are the exact words of people who you advocate, it can look really stupid.

In my post, I haven't said anything which the Open Source Initiative doesn't agree with. The text you commented was written by one of the OSI creators and advocates. Still, you're not satisfied.

I hope you get the point now. What else can I say... To paraphrase your words, This stinks of ignorance.

Please, think about it.

This really galls me. A simple Google search will reveal a massive number of references to "open source" prior to March 1998. This stinks of revisionism.

Read the History of the OSI:

The "open source" label itself came out of a strategy session held on February 3rd 1998 in Palo Alto, California. The people present included Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson (of the Foresight Institute), John "maddog" Hall and Larry Augustin (both of Linux International), Sam Ockman (of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group), and Eric Raymond.

(...)

We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source," contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with.

Next time please do a little research before you state that something "stinks of revisionism", because if this what you comment are the exact words of people who you advocate, it can look really stupid.

In my post, I haven't said anything which the Open Source Initiative doesn't agree with. The text you commented was written by one of the OSI creators and advocates. Still, you're not satisfied.

I hope you get the point now. What else can I say... To paraphrase your words, This stinks of ignorance.

Please, think about it.

LOL! Well, at least 1998 was when ESR found out about ``Open Source'', or at least when he changed CatB to use it (link here, about half-way down the page, revision 1.29).

So open source rejects your ideals of freedom, and has done since its foundation? Someone better notify the press :)

The Jargon Lexicon open source definition:

open source n.

[common; also adj. `open-source'] Term coined in March 1998 following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell the hackers' ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream by avoiding the negative connotations (to suits) of the term "free software". For discussion of the follow-on tactics and their consequences, see the Open Source Initiative site.

From Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source":

In 1998, some of the people in the free software community began using the term "open source software" instead of "free software" to describe what they do.

While free software by any other name would give you the same freedom, it makes a big difference which name we use: different words convey different ideas. The term "open source" quickly became associated with a different approach, a different philosophy, different values, and even a different criterion for which licenses are acceptable. The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are today effectively separate movements, although we can and do work together on practical projects.

This article describes why using the term ``open source'' does not solve any problems, and in fact creates some. These are the reasons why it is better to stick with "free software."

(...)

and of course there's always blinkenlights.com

and the jargon file's entry

look at me, I'm +5 Informative!

all the punchcards I pounded out were EBCDIC.


EBCDIC was an IBM invention. Which means you only programmed Snow White, and none of the seven dwarfs (or BUNCH)...
Burroughs, Univac, Ncr, Control data, Honeywell.

The nadir of his managerial prowess came in a company-wide letter where he compared the act of writing good software to be similar to the killing of jews in hitler's germany

I agree doing that is absolutely poor form (and kind of shows Godwin's law to be true yet again), but Philip Greenspun is Jewish, so I guess he figured he wasn't going to be accused of being anti-semitic, given his stance on Israel, et al.

thenerd.

Well, if we're going to try that, let's avoid Latin and start with Esperanto, or Lojban, or Klingon or something which at least starts out with fewer irregulars.

Esperanto? Ecch! Too Polish. I'd suggest something based on one of the Interlinguas (Interlingua de IALA or Latino sine flexione) as the Latin/Romance bases of those language both sound less harsh than Slavic and prepare the children for the language of science.

Heck, if you're going with a relatively regular language, you might as well use a regular alphabet, but note that regular alphabets may be more difficult for dyslexics to learn than Latin ASCII!

Definaition of "foo" 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. [very common] Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files). 3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See also bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud. go here for more info

It's in the jargon files: http://tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Jargon-Lexi con-framed.html

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/blink enlights.html

The Cathedral and the Bazaar, (Online Version) ought to do the trick. Some of Robert Cringley's books maybe, too.