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Neowin interviews Ben Goodger, Justin Frankel
mr_tommy writes "Neowin has had the pleasure of talking to two prominent figures in the I.T. world. First, Ben Goodger, chief developer of the excellent browser Firefox, and secondly, Justin Frankel, creator of Winamp and many other products for Nullsoft. We've got Ben talking about Firefox, XUL, and the future at Mozilla; equally, Justin talks (humorously) about his past, Winamp, AOL, music, and what he's up to at the moment. Also, read on for some of his projects he thought about doing when he left Winamp, including setting up an interesting alternative to Windows 2000 based on Open Source software, similar to ReactOS."
Zeikfried - Gnaa, Nigeria.
In a world where one can get classed as +5, informative for simply being able to use google, and +5 funny for out and out slander against the Microsoft corporation, one could be forgiven for branding the elitist unfunny world of slashdot, and yes, the open source community as a whole, as a floundering stagnating mess.
But in spite of the high cretin concentration throughout open source, but all is not yet lost, for there is a small highly skilled team of individuals determined to utilise the full potenial that this community offers, the dynamic darkies of the Gay Nigger Associaton of America.
"This is degenerative behaviour, please stop." is the rallying cry for many in the OSDN camp (now a partly owned subsidiary of the KKK). But what IS LastMeasure? And how did it come to provoke such furious bouts of procrastination and anal masturbation among the forced celibates that bless our members with their -1, troll crowns? Reporter for Reuters Nigeria, and 4 time winner of the Golden Sphincter, Gary Niger, was sent in to investigate.
"I must say I was pleasently surprised", enthused Gary with his trademark lisp. "I expected a band of negro savages, or worse still, a sourceforge project. But what I found was a group of individuals determined to help spread their ideals of sodomy and niggerdom to the masses, and I must say, though it flys in the face of my trademark press neutrality, I was instantly hooked."
"But of course, in spite of my new found taste for the holy nigger seed, I would not deviate from my task of reporting the facts on LastMeasure. And it is, quite simply, nigtastic. Penisbird and goat-see have lovingly hand-crafted a javascript masterpiece, a triumph for capitalism, as readers of the communist open source "bastion" slashdot now have their gay porno viewing habits broadcasted to their colleagues and classmates, hopefully this will encourage them to finally stop eating and start working, and get their worthless jobs back from the curry eaters. Godspeed GNAA."
With LastMeasure (currently at version 3.3), the proud patriots of the GNAA have dealt a crippling blow to the communist practices of the google toolbar and it's anti-american ways of blocking the victory of capitalism and the free market over terrorism.
With LastMeasure, the dying world of the internet shock site has gained new vigour, allowing the benevolent rulers of our collective digital universe, Bob Goatse and Tubgirl, to be brought to many desktops throughout /.
Wherever there is an unpatched YaBB clone fleecing money off ill-prepared webadmins. There is LastMeasure.
Wherever there is a poorly prepared IRC server being used as a shell for the important task of bringing camwhoring and masturbation to the free world. There is LastMeasure.
Wherever GNU/Linux is not being used to its FULL POTENTIAL. There is LastMeasure.
Wherever a +5 is struck on the head of those who would use it against the greater good. There is LastMeasure.
Whenever these ENEMIES OF FREEDOM gather, there will be LastMeasure, and the proudly gay negros of the Gay Nigger Association of America, your TRUE OPEN SOURCE ALTERNATIVE.
FAQ:
Q. I am a proud supporter of open source, and would like to be a regular user of LastMeasure. However I can't seem to gain the full effect of your wonderful software, what could I be doing wrong?
A. While your zealotism is most welcome, it would appear that you are using the incorrect browser. Firefox and Opera are both major offenders, the GNAA recommend the Microsoft(TM) corporations Internet Explorer(TM) to halt the spread of communism, and to be able to use our software
come ON people, wake up
Justin actually updates his weblog regularly. It's well worth checking out just to see what he's been up to lately.
Winamp Unlimited also does a good job of tracking down any online activities with the Nullsoft staff, or any Winamp/NS-related projects that might be brewing.
is a nigger lover.
As I listen to my CDs with Winamp and browse slashdot with FireFox 0.8 ...
I've almost forgotten the people who made it possible... it's become second nature ... Thanks for reminding me :)
Especially about the part about Justin Frankel using Vim...
And maybe this was a first post ?... (but I did read the articles)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I thought he died at the end of the movie
"I have an iPod, and I must say I do love the iPod (btw, the iPod Winamp plugin rules, too -- I can't stand iTunes, either)."
To find out more about this, go to mlipod.sf.net
--will
mlipod developer
smacking babies at they Christening. . .
Definitely something useful for small developers who can't afford an installshield license.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Way too hard to find the legitimate links among the useless other ones - that's what google's for - for those of us who actually want to read the articles.
Took me three passes (quick, closer, pedantic mouseovering) to find the Firefox guy interview link.
... about Justin and Ben.
"Professor Shatz, how much did I shat today?"
So now you won't just know how much llama ass Winamp whoops, but also what came out of that ass.
I'm not sure Ben Goodger is the type of guy I want running my favourite browser. His homepage (and the Firefox Texturiser default bookmark page) offers his extension "Magpie" (I'm not giving the URL) which should more accurately be called "MagPorn" or "Shagpie" perhaps.
It is an extension to ease allow the downloading of particular file extensions to time stamped folders...particularly streamlined for the downloading of vast amounts of images from online picture galleries. Now what do you think *THAT'S* going to be used for?? Hmmm...I wonder...NOT!
Mr Goodger is helping people degrade women. He is feeding abnormal psyches by helping them amass vast collections of pr0n. Women instinctively know which men are using porn. That's why you can't get a girlfriend. It's obvious in the way you look at them.
Goodger is helping the violation of women, and I for one think it's morally degrading and physically disgusting. I don't know him, perhaps he's merely a naive, sweet young man. But he should stop development of this psychologically damaging extension.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Justin does indeed measure his poo, look at his answer to the final question! it is ironic that the OP was surprised by a coder using Vim when he discloses this in the same interview. It never surprises me obvious you have to make something for the mods to get it.
It is so ironic that Justin is joking about Professor Shatz given how full of sh*t he is. WinAmp an extension of Tom Pepper's Mac interface? C'mon!
...make a well funded ($400M or more) startup that would develop something like ReactOS-- specifically, a win2k compatible (driver, application, UI, filesystem, everything) OS. You could base it on a lot of open source code, but make a commercial product....And do it all in 2 or 3 years.
Riiiight. Commercial product off of OSS.
Well, Red Hat has been trying that for 8 years now, and, while succesful, the desktop still gives them the willies. At that, RH is the only realy company to make OSS fly, and even that required "subscription" licence voodoo dealing with the GPL.
Don't get me wrong-- I loved WinAmp back in the day. But making a W2K replacement just for the sake of it will never work financially-- what OEM would preload that? Which IHV would really REALLY risk pissing off MS just to save the few bucks they pay in royalties to MS?
davejenkins.com |
I'll post this one a href="http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=109118&c id=9270617"> last time sos people can learn from my bad luck. If you're sick of it i apologize, but folk have to know. I changed it a bit so even if you've read before, you might want another look.
Anyway, I'm a semi-regular slashdot reader, and I get mod points quite a lot. Monday was a pretty normal day for me in the IT department where I've worked for 2 years now. I'd finished my work, and am about to head to lunch when I cruise by Slashdot to see what stuff that matters there is, and I see I have mod points, right?
So I set my threshold to -1(cause a good mod looks at it all, sometimes good stuff is dfown there), and go into a newish article, and start modding. I see a couple of stuff that ain't funny and mod that. I see a couple of funny gags about clippy so I mod them up. My boss comes in half way through, so I stop what I'm doing and turn round and talk to him. After a few moments, I can see he's looking at the screen.
Now I hadn't really paid attention to where it was pointing, and it turns out it was on one of those GNAA posts. My boss asks me straight out, what the hells that, or something. I try to explain but he's not satisfied, he reads the word nigger and gay, and he's very dubious of me. He bumps it up to his superior. The next day, I'm sitting in a confrence room speaking to 3 senior boss's trying to explain how come I was viewing a race hate crime website in my work time. I say to them it was my lunchh break which they say is ok then i try to explain Slashdot's like the wild west, at a low level you get all sorts of crazy shit. I'm sweating like mad at this point.
To cut the long short, by today Thursday, I'm out of a f*cking job. My boss thinks I was posting or reading that shit, and now I've got to find something else in this sh*tty job market. What the f am I going to put on my resume about my last job? I get no fucking refrence at all for 2 years work. My f*cking life has been totally ruined by these crapflooding bastards.
If your reading this, you gnaa f****, F*CK OFF BACK TO KUROFIN. If your laughing to yourselfs remember that it is NOT A COMPUTER GAME!!. I am in the shed now because of you, and I hope in your dead hearts you will suffer for what you have done to me. i know loads of stuff and i have the skills to take you down.
I also wanted to say if you're out ther and looking for a talented Perl programmers in the Michigan area, or you just feel sorry for my bad luck and want to get me in for a verbal or physical interview, reply here and I'll give you a contact address, and send you a resume. I am the victim of other people without my professional intergity, and I have leanrt my lesson. Please genuine offers only.
Of course. Another machine by Jay Miner and as usual the sound chip was really undocumented.
I remember I was almost shocked when I see a friend sampling sound with joystick port, only 10 or 20 lines of 6502 assembly.
Maybe that pushed him into sound and assembly?
I even remember the chips name, POKEY. One of the chips in computer history never got used in its all power.
It really does amaze me that nobody else has produced an mp3 player whose UI is even in the same league of decent as the iPod's -- don't get me wrong, the iPod's UI is nowhere near perfect and pisses me off now and then too --but everything else I've seen is just an order of magnitude worse. What gives?
It's NOT THAT HARD PEOPLE.
Two obvious points:
1. Anyone doing anything similar to Apple is charged with 'ripping them off'.
2. Anyone doing something *different* from Apple is making it 'too complex'.
IT IS HARD, PEOPLE, to replicate something which people love on an emotional level, differentiate yourself enough so as to not be seen as just a knock-off, and yet have it be close enough to the original to be seen as 'good'.
Frankly, most iPod people will *never* use anything else because, like pretty much all Apple-buying people, they've paid top dollar and will never think anything less expensive has any merit.
I do not think the ipod interface is all that hot. Let me take that back - the *wheel* thing isn't. The visual interface is OK (not much you can do there) but I don't like the wheel. Tried both a regular and a 'mini' - can't use either of them very well.
I'm speaking from the standpoint of a new neuros owner, so yes I'm biased, but so are pretty much all pro-iPod zealots (either reviewers who got theirs free or the early-adopter raving "Apple can do no wrong" crowd).
WOW - one more thing I just noticed - an iPod owner criticizing Apple! He even says the interface 'pisses him off' now and then! What's wrong in paradise? Why doesn't he design a 'better' one if is so damn easy? He says himself IT'S NOT THAT HARD.
creation science book
email me at lysol(at)meatox.net
Hi, my name is Penisbird, one of the founding members of the Gay Nigger Association of America (one of the larger endowed members).
I really regret what has happened to you. As a token of my sincereness, I would like to offer you a programming posistion for our new recruitment and dating website.
If you are interested, you can take a look at www.gnaa.us and stop by our IRC channel #GNAA on irc.metawire.org.
I swear I had to read the headline three times before I could read Ben's name correctly.
All that came up was "badger". That joke has gone too far.
Sorry Ben! Love the browser you work on though.
Yes!
> It really does amaze me that nobody else has
> produced an mp3 player whose UI is even in the
> same league of decent as the iPod's
I haven't used an Ipod so can't comment on it, but HONESTLY, is this the guy who did Winamp speaking?! That ugly nonsense of UI, with non-standard microscopic buttons (chained!) and almost no keyboard shortcuts and next-to-unusable selection behavior in the song list and so many usability quirks I don't even know where to start? Man, it's laughable.
Aside from occasionally coming up with some cute, trendy toy to piss off AOL, could someone explain how exactly Justin Frankel is "prominent" in the "IT world"?
Please help metamoderate.
It is too bad that what should be +1 Funny was modded -1 Flamebait because the other mods can't read the article.
The Wix Project which was the first project to be released by microsoft as free code, is an XML based windows installer suite. This is a good alternative to Nullsoft's if you are looking for something a little more hands on.
The project can be found at http://wix.sourceforge.net
Natural Selection: self-destruction of the poor and lazy
I can't wait until they have a well documented standalone XUL runtime. I would love to have more info on using XUL as a cross-platform GUI toolkit.
Also, does XUL have any vector capabilities? Or does this solely depend on the underlying graphics system's support?
...almost no keyboard shortcuts... You're kidding me?
Then I recommend getting the book. As well as looking at the online o'rielly book.
And they fudged it. Xenix, my (wo?)man. I honesty think microsoft has invested too much time and money into their own API's to ditch the core of it now. And if they do take FreeBSD's code, i'm not sure how that would be a bad thing. FreeBSD will live on. Microsoft will (for a change) have a solid code base. If MS feeds patches back in, great. The FreeBSD coders won't submit crap code (forgoing any kind of "fuck you, open source bitches!" code). If MS sends nothing back, meh - big deal.
One thing that people seem to never realize (or just plain ignore) about FreeBSD is that it's all about research and putting out a good, rock-solid OS. They don't want to take over the world and displace the big boys.
Look what you've did, you've gone and pulled me off topic.
I don't know if you've used the Rio Karma before, but it has a fairly intuitive UI. All the navigating is pretty much down with it's sexy little red nipple. It's actually kind of a turn on to use. It's all one-finger navigation, hierarchical menus with the most used menus at the top (it's not per-use based and dynamic, they're statically placed, but the placement seems pretty intelligent). I even broke the little scrolly wheel dealie on the side, and it still is completely usable just with that one nipple do-dad. Of course, it could be that I payed over $300 bucks for it, so i feel obligated to like it. I've used an iPod before and...i wasn't really that impressed.
And the karma plays FLAC, WMA, and ogg along with mp3. It's a nice little machine. Go buy one today! *thumbs up, tongue in cheek*
But seriously, it is a nice little machine.
Oh, and i do realize this has nothing really to do with it's parent, but i thought i'd throw it out there. A comprable product DOES exist. You don't have to just buy an iPod.
...and almost no keyboard shortcuts...
Maybe you're thinking of Winamp3? Because Winamp2/5 has plenty of keyboard shortcuts. Winamp5 even has unviversal shortcuts. Justin Frankel had nothing to do with Winamp3.
I wonder what he meant that it is all downhill from MS WXP...
Does he mean he thinks MS 'quality' has gone down -- never touched MS WXP, but I know some usually quite reliable people who vouch MS WXP is less stable than MS W2K on white boxen -- and he expects for some reason -- which? -- to get even worse?
Or is it about DRM, Treacherous Computing and the such?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Compared to say the straight-forward CDPlayer.app for NeXTSTEP I always thought WinAmp was crap, but compared to Microsoft was 24K crap.
Interviewing a person who programs the application that competes with another application to give objective, indifferent,non-emotionally tied observations is like asking Steve Jobs to compare NeXT to Apple.
If you can't guess already, all the sleekness and class of computer styling went into NeXT, unfortunately at a time when people couldn't appreciate its grace.
Now we get a advice about UI design from someone who definitely wouldn't be in the same class as a Keith Ohlfs, but I guess if you can't reach Keith Olhfs for commentary I guess a programmer will do.
Personally, peer2peer doesn't turn my crank, nor does any audio application. I own a home stereo for that crap. If I'm on the go its called a car stereo. If it's bipedal than its a portable player.
What do all these items have in common? None of them involve overkill software that doesn't KISS.
Simplicity in form and function are two Mech. Engineering principles that are embedded within the iPod's design paradigm. If you can't see that than the odds are you wouldn't know how to distinguish one suit that is made by Gucci and another one straight off the rack from The Men's Wearhouse. You don't see the hero of Firefox or WinAmp gracing the cover of TIME Magazine, or GQ or various high profile marketing campaigns. You either have an innate ability to create style or you just cheaply copy it and nitpick it as being technologically inferior because it lacks certain "features" only a tech nerd considers important.
Ask your girlfriend, if you have one, or better yet a wife if she gives a rat's rear about Ogg Vorbis or all the extra crap littered inside WinAmp, XMMS and myriad other players.
The odds are not in your favor they will, unless of course she's a female extension of yourself that lives and breathes programming.
Personally, I don't graze for women in the same profession I am in. It just isn't good business.
On a side note as both an Mech. Engineer and a developer, what the hell is with the Visualizer module in so many players? If I'm listening to Halford or Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Queensryche, RUSH or what have you I sure as hell am not Siddin' out to a Visualizer. Whatever floats your boat I suppose.
Before you all continue talking about how winamp is great and all, I think you should know that the history is not so nice. Especially when Justin Frankel says "In 1997 I ported AMP (a free mp3 decoder at the time)". AMP code was free for non-commercial use, but...
:|
Check out this and this and this.
What Frankel "forgot" to mention is that Nullsoft made money without even mentioning that they used AMP code, and only after they got sued, Nullsoft "admitted" that they used "a bit of AMP code" which just so happens that it's an important part of the decoder thingie...
So, all is well in corporate world...
Eric: "What're quantum mechanics?"
Rincewind: "I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose."