Pakistan was in pool B. Bangledesh was in pool A. (or the other way around). Neither made it into the Super 6, so they NEVER played each other in the 2003 Cricket World Cup.
Oh, and the game for Day 1 was West Indies vs South Africa, btw.
...Channel 41, must be the Australian feed because the times are 2 hours ahead of NZ.
And meantime, the wait for GNU Maximus goes on...
on
Remembering the BBS
·
· Score: 1
I ran a BBS in Cincinnati using Maximus 3.0, which was discontinued
at the end of 1998. Note their "plans" to release the code for Maximus under the GPL.
Well, that was written at the end of 1998, it's now mid 2002, and no updates to the site since 2000. Anyone know what Scott Dudley is doing right now? I wanted to port Maximus over to Linux so I could run it as a Telnettable BBS, or at least port over the script compilers and then grab some other source code for the communication routines.
Geez, Scott, if you've given up the idea of open sourcing Maximus, at least make some update to your site!
Telecom runs commericals talking about the basic benefits of the Internet (for people who still don't know why they'd want this internet thing anyways). They also give away "Xtra" cd's for free in all kinds of stores, and they basically go after the "clueless users". So I don't think there will be too much of an outcry by people just struggling to understand how to web surf.
Most people who want a large (national) ISP but actually understand what they're doing use IHUG, and as far as I know, they don't have the same restrictions.
So think of this more like an "AOL restriction", and not like all of New Zealand is blocking P2P services.
A Trimflight 3 system. I work next to the people who designed this system here in New Zealand. And they might have even been using the GPS receiver that I write firmware for, the Ag214 (Also known as the MS750). But they were probably using the Ag132 which only does DGPS instead of RTK.
I'm sure this URL will be circulating around the Ag division of Trimble tomorrow:-)
That would be Speights. (You're probably not talking about Canterbury Draft, although I think the CD commercials are actually becoming more amusing than the Speights commercials).
Actually, when I came over from the USA to NZ, it seemed like the ad breaks were MUCH longer, but much less frequent as well. (Probably from the British "End of Part One" "End of Part Two" mentality.)
The weird ones are at night...especially on two..where a commercial break is VERY short...maybe one or two commericals, and at least one of them is for a "Meeting" or "Gossip" phone line (used to be the domain of the "Come on callers, join the party!" commercials.
The ad breaks in NZ are more noticible because of the break bumpers that they add on. Most people in the USA don't realize that they're in an advert break until most of the first advert has passed.
(OT: A certain person (not you) should realize that a ban based primarily on association for over 3 years now is *beyond* childish:P)
You seem to believe that Resumes and Cover letters should be written in the exact same way
that you would write anything else. Well, that's not correct. A Resume and cover letter is a test, It is proof to the employeer that you are capable of doing at least one thing with absolute precision, just like a math test should be proof that you are capable of at least doing those problems. You may not be able to do those problems on request off the top of your head, but at least with concentration, you should be able to do those problems again. It is a universal convention that resumes and cover letters should be as precise as possible. Therefore, not being error free on those items makes it appear that you would be unable to be precise, no matter how hard you tried.
Your analogy is bad. You're not comparing everything that a person did with perfection, you're comparing a persons BEST POSSIBLE WORK with perfection. If you make mistakes when precision is key, then you ARE sloppy. And I've had to deal with many subtle bugs that sloppy programmers left behind where their code didn't QUITE do what they thought it would do. No one said that they had to get it right the first time, but they obviously didn't double check their work, because the bugs remained in there for YEARS.
I don't understand where the classist argument comes in. Someone who is presently poor possibly has the same ability to be precise as someone who is well off. In fact, the poor person may actually be more precise because s/he gained more discipline in his/her upbringing. It is often not a matter of resources but a matter of attitude and discipline.
Now, this doesn't mean that I agree with all the grammar nazis on here. I don't expect that all of my posts here will be completely grammatically correct. As long as I am somewhat understandable, I'll be happy. That's because there is a different standard for Slashdot comments compared to Resumes and Cover Letters.
Believe it or not, I know of SEVERAL projects that released code that didn't compile for them as betas. I thought (based on the comments) that Gnome now had the same kind of problem. If you don't run into build errors, then you are quality driven, as long as you do a compilation test on major platforms before you release.
Did you read my response at all in detail? We agree on most of the things that I said. I do fix build problems all the time, if they are stupid "Whoops, can't find the path of this header file", or other problems. But when the compiler just won't accept the code, then that's completely different.
Let me put a disclamer before all this by saying that I haven't downloaded the GNOME 1.4 beta 2 code, nor do I plan to, because I'm really not interested in running Gnome. I don't fully understand what is involved in these supposed compilation errors. I just reacted to the statement of either the contributor or the slashdot editors that there might be compilation errors, and they tried to lump them together with runtime errors. That's a VERY bad misconception.
I'm sorry, but I can't just lump problems with the build system as one of those normal "Well, the source is available, so stop whining and FIX it!" kind of bugs. Why? Because:
1) Fixing problems with the build system often takes more knowledge about all of the code than fixing bugs in the code. I don't just need to understand the subsystem that has the code I want to modify, I have to understand ALL of the code, how it is all supposed to fit together, what assumptions were made in the compilation, and how it is supposed to interact with the system libraries. And I often have to know this information down to the level of each line of code because it is usually due to some arcane DETAIL why it won't compile. Or the code is MARGINAL C or C++ and today's compilers will not take it anymore. Unless these problems are just really small, "stupid" problems, it's a VERY tall order to ask someone who has never seen the code before to try to fix it. If I'm porting this code to a new platform, then I expect this kind of difficulty, and I'll go through with it in order that other people don't have to go through with this difficulty when they want to use the software (and besides, then I'll get recognized for porting it.:P:-) ). However, when I am using it on a mainstream platform, my patience quickly runs thin, especially if it is supposed to be a BETA.
2) I really do use the quality of the build system as a metric for the quality of the leadership and the engineering quality of a project. I do this because:
a) The quality of the build system directly influences the ability of people to contribute to the project. If you can't compile code, you can't really fix bugs in it.
b) There's really no excuse for it. If code makes a project NOT BUILD, then it shouldn't be in the build until the project can build with it. And if you're allowing code that won't even
BUILD into the tree, then how can I possibly think that you unit test new code to make sure it doesn't have serious bugs in it? Having constant build problems is a symptom of VERY bad and lax project management, that isn't striving to improve and guard the quality of the code.
c) It is also a VERY good indication of software quality in general. If a project won't even
compile on its primary platform, then the code is probably crap, because the same attitudes that produce a screwed up build system produce screwed up code. Good
quality-oriented developers won't put up with a bad build system, they'll FIX IT, because
they keep running into the problems. Therefore, it is a dubious effort at best to fix a truely
screwed up build system as an outside contributor, because once it is fixed, you'll most likely just get a program that is completely riddled with bugs, a project that just needs to be completely rewritten. I've always held the philosophy that if the build process gets completely screwed up for a long period of time, it is the project leader's responsibilty to get it back in some kind of working order to demostrate that there is some reason to keep contributing to the project.
3) It's one thing to have compilation problems in the snapshots, because that's what they are, an arbritrary snapshot. I could have contributed something that majorly fucked up the tree right before the snapshot was taken, and then I immediately fixed it after the snapshot. But Beta's are different. If NOTHING ELSE, take a day to make sure that the damn thing still compiles. Otherwise, you're wasting everyones time. There's not much that I can do if half of the files compile, and then the build majorly breaks on the other half other then to say "Ooh..look at the cute little object files!".
To make my position clear, I would easily rate a project that immediately segfaults on startup over a project that won't compile. At least the project that segfaults DOES something.
Unless we're talking about difficulty compiling on different platforms, there's no way that this is up to beta quality if there are difficulties compiling the desktop.
IMO, if a build process is difficult or buggy, especially if it is an open source product that most people are expected to compile, then it reflects very badly on the quality of the code. Difficult build usually means crappy code. I can't remember ever being proven wrong on this point in my experience.
If there are difficulties in compiling, then this shouldn't even go out the door. It should be a snapshot and that's it. I have difficulty enough with the kernel people not being disturbed when a development kernel fails to compile, I guess it's difficult to check the dependencies of every single kernel module and driver. But IMO, there is NO EXCUSE for difficulty compiling a desktop. It just points to extremely lax engineering at the core of the project.
For example, would they want to disable all of my electronic equipment because I moved from the USA to New Zealand? (Yes, I have a power transformer).
People don't usually settle down in the same communities anymore. Setting vastly different price points is something that just won't work anymore, and believe me, companies DO try to exploit people based on Geography:
A Palm Pilot IIIxe is $149 USD ($320 NZD) in the USA.
A Palm Pilot IIIxe is $799 NZD in New Zealand.
I've already posted to most of the people here in general. Now I'll respond to you specifically.
You have to understand that most of the people at Slashdot these days are TROLLS who can't live and let live. So he's getting a lot of e-mails from people saying "An installer is a STUPID IDEA, and YOU FUCKING SUCK! GO KILL YOURSELF!" and he has to wade through all that crap to get to the suggestions that actual potential users of his program have to offer him.
He's probably never done this before, and he hasn't generated the thick skin that he needs. If he has talent, he'll develop the thick skin quite quickly. But right now, it's depressing him and pissing him off, and he wants the insults and lameness to stop. What about that makes him an egoist? He's tired of being put down, and he's being BLASTED by debian people who DESPERATELY want to believe that nothing more than apt-get is needed. The problem is that even though a baby could logically use apt with no problem, people DON'T ACT LOGICALLY. They want GRAPHICS to make it easy, not a command line where they have to think. Apt-get is too involved for these people. They just want a button that says "GET KDE!".
Constructive Criticism does NOT include people saying "YOU SUCK!" Listening to comments from people who don't like the idea of his program is not constructive, it's wasteful. If you say that lynx has everything in it that Mozilla doesn't have, then I'm just going to tell you to use lynx. In the meantime, that has done NOTHING to improve the quality of my product.
Just give this guy a break, ok? He's stumbled upon a religious issue that he didn't know existed.
I can't believe people are bashing this guy for saying
"If your not a newbie, or you don't like this idea, please dont talk about it."
and calling him *egocentric*.
First of all, Slashdot has been completely infiltrated by people who want to do NOTHING but troll, piss people off, and do nothing constructive. If I posted a question to Slashdot, I would have to be prepared to ignore the majority of the posts as they would serve no constructive purpose whatsoever, and would just be attempting to debase the entire idea. This place is literally collapsing because of the amount of CRAP that people spew.
Now, this guy wants to make an installer FOR NEWBIES THAT WANT AN INSTALLER. That
is ALL he is writing this program for. I'll never use it. Many people here will never use it, but
maybe my dad or mom or other new Linux users will use it. However, people here can't
seem to get the concept of live and let live run through their heads. That's why we have a
constant bashing of Mozilla each time a new release comes out, by people who REALLY want to run lynx. So he's going to get all kinds of CRAP and INCENDARY suggestions from people who really doesn't want anything like what he's going to produce in the first place. This guy just doesn't want to have to go through MOUNTAINS OF CRAP to find the few suggestions that his REAL users want to give him. No, not EVERYONE wants to use apt, people these days have a complete fear of the command line. No, he doesn't want to use Redcarpet, can't we just leave it at that?
Now I know that everything here is going to turn into a HUGE flamefest, but PLEASE don't forward your comments to his e-mail or whatever UNLESS you really want to help.
Oh, and as for the lame grammar corrections, I think it is clear that this person speaks English as a second language. Not all programmers can speak english perfectly. I can understand what he is saying, even with incorrect grammar.
Subject: Your report on hackers leaving warning is inaccurate
From: xxxxx@yyyyy.co.nz
Date: 01/25/2001 (NZ time)
To: drudge@drudgereport.com
Since you don't seem to quite understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work, let me give
you a quick description:
The heiarchy is read BACKWARDS.
Example:
www.microsoft.com
(I did this graphically in the real e-mail to him, but that causes Slashdot to think this is a "junk character post".)
-com: Top level domain (TLD). This is controlled by ICANN.
-microsoft.: Domain. Controlled by the registrar and SOLD to Microsoft.
-www.: Sub-domain. COMPLETELY controlled by microsoft and their DNS servers.
An important thing to realize is that there can be SUBDOMAINS of SUBDOMAINS ad-infinium.
Microsoft could easily register: WE.THINK.LINUX.SUCKS.BUY.MICROSOFT.COM.
So what is REALLY happening is that the owner of LINUXISGOD.COM has created enough subdomains in his DNS server to read
MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.GIVE.UP.BECAUSE.LINUXISGOD. CO M.
This involves NO HACKING. NONE. ZERO! If I had access to the DNS servers at trimble, I could easily create MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.ONLY.USE.GPS.RECEIVERS.FROM.T RIMBLE.COM, and that would involve no hacking as well. I'd just be creating a heck of a lot of sub-domains.
Now if microsoft's DNS really WAS hacked, then you'd be seeing entries like this:
MICROSOFT.SUCKS.MICROSOFT.COM, because to create that, you would have to have access to the Microsoft domain name server.
Furthermore, these entries have been in the WHOIS server for several MONTHS now. It does NOT affect Microsoft's DNS server.
So please retract your story, or at least correct it.
Thanks,
Jason Eager
(Who reads the Drudge report quite a lot).
Of course, the submitter didn't give a link to where s/he was trying to go, so I can't really figure that out. From what I can tell, mozilla isn't really being blocked from that site on any of the links that I tried, and the blocking page talked about "Netscape 4" without talking about mozilla at all. Given that mozilla fixes most (if not all) of the problems that the authot was talking about, there really isn't an excuse to block mozilla users from the site. I think this was just a reaction (albeit immature) to Netscape 4's lameness. Of course, I don't agree with that approach. If a web browser is going to have problems with laying out a page, then give the surfers a warning "You're using Netscape 4.x, therefore, this page may look like crap, but it's not my fault", but still let the viewers get the damn page!.
I think this is typical Slashdot alarmism: take an extreme edge case and state that soon everybody will be doing it.
BTW: From my own experience, there are a LOT more pages that disallow or deliberately try to crash Internet Explorer than there are pages that refuse to use Netscape.:P
First of all, if by "Scrambling", you meant "Selective availability", that was turned OFF this year.
Second of all, the Us Department of Commerce requires that an "exportable" GPS receiver cannot be used to guide missiles. At Trimble, we turn off all GPS output when the receiver is traveling faster then 1000 knots, or when it is above 18,000 meters.
Third of all, you can't get better then meter accuracy when you're operating without a base-station or some kind of correction mechanism in place. RTK Fixed, which gives Milimeter accuracy, needs about a minute or so to initalize with the base station to remove ambiguities, and has to be within 10 Km's to start initalizing.
And finally, the antennas that you would need for good reception of a satellite signal would tend to throw off the trajectory of a missile!
Jason Eager
(Works on MS860 GPS Receiver firmware at Trimble).
My point was that if Netscape had been "just a browser", then there WOULDN"T be
any point in users switching from Internet Explorer to Netscape (at least in their minds).
However, with this development platform flexability, soon Netscape will be MORE then just
a browser to the end user, it will be something that needs to be installed for OTHER
cool applications to run as well (Think Forumzilla, except something that all users consider cool. Maybe a XUL front end to a MUD or something like that). Add that to the most standards compliant browser, and users will WANT to switch. At work, lots of "Internal web applications" can be coded in XUL instead, and the business will want to switch back to Netscape. If you compete against Microsoft in the EXACT SAME NICHE (Windows only browser only), you will LOSE (Thanks to user apathy). You need to take a larger approach.
And this is where "Shoved out the door two months early" comes in to play. I can pretty much assure you that by the time Mozilla 1.0 comes out (in about 6 months or less), Mozilla *will* be fun for the user to use. It will be perfect for usage as "just a browser". It will never satisfy users that want Netscape to be Lynx, and those users should just go use Lynx.
And you won't be walking down the street handing out CD's that say "Cross-Platform XUL application", they'll say "ReallyCoolDistributedNetworkGame 1.0 (Needs Netscape 6.x to run)", just like web page users don't say "Hey, cool, look at that use of the DOM and Dynamic HTML", they say "Hey, cool! Look at the hopping bunny!". Making something a XUL, XML and XSL based platform allows developers to DO what the user wants. And what the user wants will change and GROW in the future. And having a better flexable architecture will allow Netscape to fill those needs easily while Microsoft will struggle.
What "non-browser" parts? Chatzilla? Worked on by one person in his spare time. Mail-News? Needed to allow Netscape 6 to replace Netscape 4.x. Composer? Ditto.
Mozilla was designed from the ground up to be cross-platform and non-coupled. Without XPFE, you wouldn't be able to create cross-platform applications/interfaces in pure XBL, but that functionality is used in Netscape 6 itself.
Why does everyone here need to make the mistake that if someone has implemented X using the Mozilla platform, you assume that it is built into the main distribution of Mozilla and it took time away from a Netscape Engineer's schedule?
This article brings up NOTHING new that the impatient people haven't complained about here for a long long time. It's another "Oh, the release is LATE LATE LATE" complaint, only this time, these people are idiotic enough to make the complaint AFTER talk like this made Netscape shove Netscape 6 out the door at least 2 months too early.
If we're just going to base everything on what was released to the market first, then ALL companies might as well just release TOTAL crap to the customer as quickly as possible. I thought that we were a more knowledgable community and we wanted better quality software. We're entering a new era of software construction, where we can write better quality and more maintainable code. But to take advantage of that, we're going to have to re-write a lot of code, code that was built in the 80's and 90's hackers ethic. RE-WRITES TAKE TIME.
There are people here who say that they wished Netscape had released a Netscape 5 with improvements in a short period of time. Well, they actually did that, only they were more honest and called it 4.5. Without a re-write, any future Netscape browser wouldn't have gotten much better than 4.x, and probably would have gotten worse. The code base was ANCIENT. It was written in another era. So 6 months after they started working on Netscape 5 (using the old code-base), they scrapped it, and started the re-write. I tried out "Mozilla Classic" (had a debian package or two), and it wasn't much better than 4.x. This decision was made in November.
The year of 1999 was basically spent in re-write and architecture land. Some components were re-written multiple times. At this time, the browser wasn't "dogfood", it wasn't really usable by anyone without a huge amount of struggle. Some people here still think Mozilla is like that. At the end of 1999, Mozilla started driving to dogfood, and by February of 2000, it was at least dogfood (I used it for my daily browsing, although some times it was very very slow). That's the point where I started seeing constant and steady improvement on each and every build. (With a few regressions on the day or two after the milestone). Then another rapid increase in quality began around the end of May. 2000. Then another burst of polishing through all of August. If Netscape had given us 2 more months like August before clamping down, I think Netscape 6 would have been significantly better. If a significant bug got fixed after August, it tended to not get into either the trunk or the branch.
around July and August is when end-user/programmers started to swarm in to Mozilla as outside contributors, as Mozilla had finally reached what JWZ had said "A user could add a patch to the browser and have a browser + his patch." It would have been very exciting if we could have had two more months like that. We'll have them again in January and February, as everyone recovers from the holidays, and the Netscape employees come back from their vacations.
Mozilla is MORE then just a browser. I'm sure there are a lot of people who kept crying out that that's ALL it should have been, but that's their typical small-minded thinking, and it's THAT fact that will eventually get Netscape on to end-user computers, even if they already have Internet Explorer on them. I don't think you can write a completely cross-platform XUL application using Internet Explorer technology.:P Almost NONE of Internet Explorer is cross-platform. And those people who think that cross-platform doesn't mean anything aren't thinking too far ahead. There's going to be an explosion of embedded computing in the near future. PC's won't be going away, but they won't be the main way that web pages are accessed anymore. And it is much easier, both in time and in resources, to write a XUL based application compared to a Java based application. It is also INFINATELY easier to fix bugs in the base code of XUL, something that cannot be done with the current closed-source nature of java.
I'm sick of the anti-mozilla bias that has been fostered on Slashdot, propagated by short-sighted, impatient and ignorant people, and i'm dismayed at CmdrTaco et al continuing this trend with stories like this, especially when they are misrepresented in the opening comments. I certainly don't know of any other full-featured commercial quality browsers that I can get the full source code to.
I completely fail to see what CmdrTaco sees as "funny as hell" about this article. Is it the "14" users statement that does it for him? Is it the constant assertion that once people switch to Internet Explorer that they'll never switch back? Is it the implication that only Netscape users would want to try the New Netscape? Or is it the comparison of Netscape with Apple as companies who didn't fill the general market niches at the given time, and therefore "deserve to die"? Here's a hint: For something to be considered good satire, it has to blast BOTH sides (if there are clear partisan sides), it has to frame it in a new, unexpected light/situation that is halfway believable(probably framing it in the structure of something else that is established), and most of the facts (or the behaviours if we're looking closely at a specific person) have to be generally undisputed. Oh, and a bit of intelligence helps. This article fills NONE of those criteria. It is *extremely* one-sided, doesn't blast Microsoft at all for the obvious defects, the situation is completely unrealistic (a person saying that if his company had released something 3 years ago, it would have had a chance, but it wasn't, so it doesn't? Yeah right!), and most of the facts are under dispute. And finally it does not sound intelligent, the tone/ideas in this article are extremely childish (*14* users? Why not just say *3*? Hell, if you're going to completely underestimate/state the Netscape base, why not say *0.0001*?) and short-sighted (Hmm, so when someone has the majority of marketshare in one area, they NEVER lose it, even when someone comes out with a better product? I think Lotus and IBM would strongly disagree with you.). At best, this is highly partisian humour, and something that only Microsoft employees/lovers would laugh at, or people who are extremely EXTREMELY bitter at Netscape.
All this article has done is repeat the mantra "Ship the browser NOW NOW NOW NOW or you'll be irrelevant!", only they've done it AFTER Netscape SHIPPED THE DAMN BROWSER (A bit too early to satisfy you whiners), which means they are flogging a dead horse. Something is biting if it is undisputably true, which this isn't. This piece isn't even relevant. And it doesn't even consider any other platform besides Windows! I can ASSURE you that there isn't a large number of people on Linux switching to Internet Explorer. CmdrTaco, have you COMPLETELY forgotten your original demographic?
Slashdot Mirror
Pakistan was in pool B. Bangledesh was in pool A. (or the other way around). Neither made it into the Super 6, so they NEVER played each other in the 2003 Cricket World Cup.
Oh, and the game for Day 1 was West Indies vs South Africa, btw.
...Channel 41, must be the Australian feed because the times are 2 hours ahead of NZ.
I ran a BBS in Cincinnati using Maximus 3.0, which was discontinued at the end of 1998. Note their "plans" to release the code for Maximus under the GPL.
Well, that was written at the end of 1998, it's now mid 2002, and no updates to the site since 2000. Anyone know what Scott Dudley is doing right now? I wanted to port Maximus over to Linux so I could run it as a Telnettable BBS, or at least port over the script compilers and then grab some other source code for the communication routines.
Geez, Scott, if you've given up the idea of open sourcing Maximus, at least make some update to your site!
Telecom runs commericals talking about the basic benefits of the Internet (for people who still don't know why they'd want this internet thing anyways). They also give away "Xtra" cd's for free in all kinds of stores, and they basically go after the "clueless users". So I don't think there will be too much of an outcry by people just struggling to understand how to web surf.
Most people who want a large (national) ISP but actually understand what they're doing use IHUG, and as far as I know, they don't have the same restrictions.
So think of this more like an "AOL restriction", and not like all of New Zealand is blocking P2P services.
A Trimflight 3 system. I work next to the people who designed this system here in New Zealand. And they might have even been using the GPS receiver that I write firmware for, the Ag214 (Also known as the MS750). But they were probably using the Ag132 which only does DGPS instead of RTK.
I'm sure this URL will be circulating around the Ag division of Trimble tomorrow :-)
statement...
"Whenever a person leaves New Zealand for Australia, the average intelligence of both countries rise!"
:-)
That would be Speights. (You're probably not talking about Canterbury Draft, although I think the CD commercials are actually becoming more amusing than the Speights commercials).
Actually, when I came over from the USA to NZ, it seemed like the ad breaks were MUCH longer, but much less frequent as well. (Probably from the British "End of Part One" "End of Part Two" mentality.)
:P)
The weird ones are at night...especially on two..where a commercial break is VERY short...maybe one or two commericals, and at least one of them is for a "Meeting" or "Gossip" phone line (used to be the domain of the "Come on callers, join the party!" commercials.
The ad breaks in NZ are more noticible because of the break bumpers that they add on. Most people in the USA don't realize that they're in an advert break until most of the first advert has passed.
(OT: A certain person (not you) should realize that a ban based primarily on association for over 3 years now is *beyond* childish
You seem to believe that Resumes and Cover letters should be written in the exact same way
that you would write anything else. Well, that's not correct. A Resume and cover letter is a test, It is proof to the employeer that you are capable of doing at least one thing with absolute precision, just like a math test should be proof that you are capable of at least doing those problems. You may not be able to do those problems on request off the top of your head, but at least with concentration, you should be able to do those problems again. It is a universal convention that resumes and cover letters should be as precise as possible. Therefore, not being error free on those items makes it appear that you would be unable to be precise, no matter how hard you tried.
Your analogy is bad. You're not comparing everything that a person did with perfection, you're comparing a persons BEST POSSIBLE WORK with perfection. If you make mistakes when precision is key, then you ARE sloppy. And I've had to deal with many subtle bugs that sloppy programmers left behind where their code didn't QUITE do what they thought it would do. No one said that they had to get it right the first time, but they obviously didn't double check their work, because the bugs remained in there for YEARS.
I don't understand where the classist argument comes in. Someone who is presently poor possibly has the same ability to be precise as someone who is well off. In fact, the poor person may actually be more precise because s/he gained more discipline in his/her upbringing. It is often not a matter of resources but a matter of attitude and discipline.
Now, this doesn't mean that I agree with all the grammar nazis on here. I don't expect that all of my posts here will be completely grammatically correct. As long as I am somewhat understandable, I'll be happy. That's because there is a different standard for Slashdot comments compared to Resumes and Cover Letters.
Believe it or not, I know of SEVERAL projects that released code that didn't compile for them as betas. I thought (based on the comments) that Gnome now had the same kind of problem. If you don't run into build errors, then you are quality driven, as long as you do a compilation test on major platforms before you release.
Did you read my response at all in detail? We agree on most of the things that I said. I do fix build problems all the time, if they are stupid "Whoops, can't find the path of this header file", or other problems. But when the compiler just won't accept the code, then that's completely different.
Let me put a disclamer before all this by saying that I haven't downloaded the GNOME 1.4 beta 2 code, nor do I plan to, because I'm really not interested in running Gnome. I don't fully understand what is involved in these supposed compilation errors. I just reacted to the statement of either the contributor or the slashdot editors that there might be compilation errors, and they tried to lump them together with runtime errors. That's a VERY bad misconception.
:P :-) ). However, when I am using it on a mainstream platform, my patience quickly runs thin, especially if it is supposed to be a BETA.
I'm sorry, but I can't just lump problems with the build system as one of those normal "Well, the source is available, so stop whining and FIX it!" kind of bugs. Why? Because:
1) Fixing problems with the build system often takes more knowledge about all of the code than fixing bugs in the code. I don't just need to understand the subsystem that has the code I want to modify, I have to understand ALL of the code, how it is all supposed to fit together, what assumptions were made in the compilation, and how it is supposed to interact with the system libraries. And I often have to know this information down to the level of each line of code because it is usually due to some arcane DETAIL why it won't compile. Or the code is MARGINAL C or C++ and today's compilers will not take it anymore. Unless these problems are just really small, "stupid" problems, it's a VERY tall order to ask someone who has never seen the code before to try to fix it. If I'm porting this code to a new platform, then I expect this kind of difficulty, and I'll go through with it in order that other people don't have to go through with this difficulty when they want to use the software (and besides, then I'll get recognized for porting it.
2) I really do use the quality of the build system as a metric for the quality of the leadership and the engineering quality of a project. I do this because:
a) The quality of the build system directly influences the ability of people to contribute to the project. If you can't compile code, you can't really fix bugs in it.
b) There's really no excuse for it. If code makes a project NOT BUILD, then it shouldn't be in the build until the project can build with it. And if you're allowing code that won't even
BUILD into the tree, then how can I possibly think that you unit test new code to make sure it doesn't have serious bugs in it? Having constant build problems is a symptom of VERY bad and lax project management, that isn't striving to improve and guard the quality of the code.
c) It is also a VERY good indication of software quality in general. If a project won't even
compile on its primary platform, then the code is probably crap, because the same attitudes that produce a screwed up build system produce screwed up code. Good
quality-oriented developers won't put up with a bad build system, they'll FIX IT, because
they keep running into the problems. Therefore, it is a dubious effort at best to fix a truely
screwed up build system as an outside contributor, because once it is fixed, you'll most likely just get a program that is completely riddled with bugs, a project that just needs to be completely rewritten. I've always held the philosophy that if the build process gets completely screwed up for a long period of time, it is the project leader's responsibilty to get it back in some kind of working order to demostrate that there is some reason to keep contributing to the project.
3) It's one thing to have compilation problems in the snapshots, because that's what they are, an arbritrary snapshot. I could have contributed something that majorly fucked up the tree right before the snapshot was taken, and then I immediately fixed it after the snapshot. But Beta's are different. If NOTHING ELSE, take a day to make sure that the damn thing still compiles. Otherwise, you're wasting everyones time. There's not much that I can do if half of the files compile, and then the build majorly breaks on the other half other then to say "Ooh..look at the cute little object files!".
To make my position clear, I would easily rate a project that immediately segfaults on startup over a project that won't compile. At least the project that segfaults DOES something.
That's not a beta, that's pre-alpha.
Unless we're talking about difficulty compiling on different platforms, there's no way that this is up to beta quality if there are difficulties compiling the desktop.
IMO, if a build process is difficult or buggy, especially if it is an open source product that most people are expected to compile, then it reflects very badly on the quality of the code. Difficult build usually means crappy code. I can't remember ever being proven wrong on this point in my experience.
If there are difficulties in compiling, then this shouldn't even go out the door. It should be a snapshot and that's it. I have difficulty enough with the kernel people not being disturbed when a development kernel fails to compile, I guess it's difficult to check the dependencies of every single kernel module and driver. But IMO, there is NO EXCUSE for difficulty compiling a desktop. It just points to extremely lax engineering at the core of the project.
For example, would they want to disable all of my electronic equipment because I moved from the USA to New Zealand? (Yes, I have a power transformer).
People don't usually settle down in the same communities anymore. Setting vastly different price points is something that just won't work anymore, and believe me, companies DO try to exploit people based on Geography:
A Palm Pilot IIIxe is $149 USD ($320 NZD) in the USA.
A Palm Pilot IIIxe is $799 NZD in New Zealand.
I've already posted to most of the people here in general. Now I'll respond to you specifically.
You have to understand that most of the people at Slashdot these days are TROLLS who can't live and let live. So he's getting a lot of e-mails from people saying "An installer is a STUPID IDEA, and YOU FUCKING SUCK! GO KILL YOURSELF!" and he has to wade through all that crap to get to the suggestions that actual potential users of his program have to offer him.
He's probably never done this before, and he hasn't generated the thick skin that he needs. If he has talent, he'll develop the thick skin quite quickly. But right now, it's depressing him and pissing him off, and he wants the insults and lameness to stop. What about that makes him an egoist? He's tired of being put down, and he's being BLASTED by debian people who DESPERATELY want to believe that nothing more than apt-get is needed. The problem is that even though a baby could logically use apt with no problem, people DON'T ACT LOGICALLY. They want GRAPHICS to make it easy, not a command line where they have to think. Apt-get is too involved for these people. They just want a button that says "GET KDE!".
Constructive Criticism does NOT include people saying "YOU SUCK!" Listening to comments from people who don't like the idea of his program is not constructive, it's wasteful. If you say that lynx has everything in it that Mozilla doesn't have, then I'm just going to tell you to use lynx. In the meantime, that has done NOTHING to improve the quality of my product.
Just give this guy a break, ok? He's stumbled upon a religious issue that he didn't know existed.
I can't believe people are bashing this guy for saying
"If your not a newbie, or you don't like this idea, please dont talk about it."
and calling him *egocentric*.
First of all, Slashdot has been completely infiltrated by people who want to do NOTHING but troll, piss people off, and do nothing constructive. If I posted a question to Slashdot, I would have to be prepared to ignore the majority of the posts as they would serve no constructive purpose whatsoever, and would just be attempting to debase the entire idea. This place is literally collapsing because of the amount of CRAP that people spew.
Now, this guy wants to make an installer FOR NEWBIES THAT WANT AN INSTALLER. That
is ALL he is writing this program for. I'll never use it. Many people here will never use it, but
maybe my dad or mom or other new Linux users will use it. However, people here can't
seem to get the concept of live and let live run through their heads. That's why we have a
constant bashing of Mozilla each time a new release comes out, by people who REALLY want to run lynx. So he's going to get all kinds of CRAP and INCENDARY suggestions from people who really doesn't want anything like what he's going to produce in the first place. This guy just doesn't want to have to go through MOUNTAINS OF CRAP to find the few suggestions that his REAL users want to give him. No, not EVERYONE wants to use apt, people these days have a complete fear of the command line. No, he doesn't want to use Redcarpet, can't we just leave it at that?
Now I know that everything here is going to turn into a HUGE flamefest, but PLEASE don't forward your comments to his e-mail or whatever UNLESS you really want to help.
Oh, and as for the lame grammar corrections, I think it is clear that this person speaks English as a second language. Not all programmers can speak english perfectly. I can understand what he is saying, even with incorrect grammar.
Subject: Your report on hackers leaving warning is inaccurate
. CO M.
T RIMBLE.COM, and that would involve no hacking as well. I'd just be creating a heck of a lot of sub-domains.
From: xxxxx@yyyyy.co.nz
Date: 01/25/2001 (NZ time)
To: drudge@drudgereport.com
Since you don't seem to quite understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work, let me give
you a quick description:
The heiarchy is read BACKWARDS.
Example:
www.microsoft.com
(I did this graphically in the real e-mail to him, but that causes Slashdot to think this is a "junk character post".)
-com: Top level domain (TLD). This is controlled by ICANN.
-microsoft.: Domain. Controlled by the registrar and SOLD to Microsoft.
-www.: Sub-domain. COMPLETELY controlled by microsoft and their DNS servers.
An important thing to realize is that there can be SUBDOMAINS of SUBDOMAINS ad-infinium.
Microsoft could easily register: WE.THINK.LINUX.SUCKS.BUY.MICROSOFT.COM.
So what is REALLY happening is that the owner of LINUXISGOD.COM has created enough subdomains in his DNS server to read
MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.GIVE.UP.BECAUSE.LINUXISGOD
This involves NO HACKING. NONE. ZERO! If I had access to the DNS servers at trimble, I could easily create MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.ONLY.USE.GPS.RECEIVERS.FROM.
Now if microsoft's DNS really WAS hacked, then you'd be seeing entries like this:
MICROSOFT.SUCKS.MICROSOFT.COM, because to create that, you would have to have access to the Microsoft domain name server.
Furthermore, these entries have been in the WHOIS server for several MONTHS now. It does NOT affect Microsoft's DNS server.
So please retract your story, or at least correct it.
Thanks,
Jason Eager
(Who reads the Drudge report quite a lot).
Of course, the submitter didn't give a link to where s/he was trying to go, so I can't really figure that out. From what I can tell, mozilla isn't really being blocked from that site on any of the links that I tried, and the blocking page talked about "Netscape 4" without talking about mozilla at all. Given that mozilla fixes most (if not all) of the problems that the authot was talking about, there really isn't an excuse to block mozilla users from the site. I think this was just a reaction (albeit immature) to Netscape 4's lameness. Of course, I don't agree with that approach. If a web browser is going to have problems with laying out a page, then give the surfers a warning "You're using Netscape 4.x, therefore, this page may look like crap, but it's not my fault", but still let the viewers get the damn page!.
:P
I think this is typical Slashdot alarmism: take an extreme edge case and state that soon everybody will be doing it.
BTW: From my own experience, there are a LOT more pages that disallow or deliberately try to crash Internet Explorer than there are pages that refuse to use Netscape.
First of all, if by "Scrambling", you meant "Selective availability", that was turned OFF this year.
Second of all, the Us Department of Commerce requires that an "exportable" GPS receiver cannot be used to guide missiles. At Trimble, we turn off all GPS output when the receiver is traveling faster then 1000 knots, or when it is above 18,000 meters.
Third of all, you can't get better then meter accuracy when you're operating without a base-station or some kind of correction mechanism in place. RTK Fixed, which gives Milimeter accuracy, needs about a minute or so to initalize with the base station to remove ambiguities, and has to be within 10 Km's to start initalizing.
And finally, the antennas that you would need for good reception of a satellite signal would tend to throw off the trajectory of a missile!
Jason Eager
(Works on MS860 GPS Receiver firmware at Trimble).
My point was that if Netscape had been "just a browser", then there WOULDN"T be
any point in users switching from Internet Explorer to Netscape (at least in their minds).
However, with this development platform flexability, soon Netscape will be MORE then just
a browser to the end user, it will be something that needs to be installed for OTHER
cool applications to run as well (Think Forumzilla, except something that all users consider cool. Maybe a XUL front end to a MUD or something like that). Add that to the most standards compliant browser, and users will WANT to switch. At work, lots of "Internal web applications" can be coded in XUL instead, and the business will want to switch back to Netscape. If you compete against Microsoft in the EXACT SAME NICHE (Windows only browser only), you will LOSE (Thanks to user apathy). You need to take a larger approach.
And this is where "Shoved out the door two months early" comes in to play. I can pretty much assure you that by the time Mozilla 1.0 comes out (in about 6 months or less), Mozilla *will* be fun for the user to use. It will be perfect for usage as "just a browser". It will never satisfy users that want Netscape to be Lynx, and those users should just go use Lynx.
And you won't be walking down the street handing out CD's that say "Cross-Platform XUL application", they'll say "ReallyCoolDistributedNetworkGame 1.0 (Needs Netscape 6.x to run)", just like web page users don't say "Hey, cool, look at that use of the DOM and Dynamic HTML", they say "Hey, cool! Look at the hopping bunny!". Making something a XUL, XML and XSL based platform allows developers to DO what the user wants. And what the user wants will change and GROW in the future. And having a better flexable architecture will allow Netscape to fill those needs easily while Microsoft will struggle.
What "non-browser" parts? Chatzilla? Worked on by one person in his spare time. Mail-News? Needed to allow Netscape 6 to replace Netscape 4.x. Composer? Ditto.
Mozilla was designed from the ground up to be cross-platform and non-coupled. Without XPFE, you wouldn't be able to create cross-platform applications/interfaces in pure XBL, but that functionality is used in Netscape 6 itself.
Why does everyone here need to make the mistake that if someone has implemented X using the Mozilla platform, you assume that it is built into the main distribution of Mozilla and it took time away from a Netscape Engineer's schedule?
(n/t)
This article brings up NOTHING new that the impatient people haven't complained about here for a long long time. It's another "Oh, the release is LATE LATE LATE" complaint, only this time, these people are idiotic enough to make the complaint AFTER talk like this made Netscape shove Netscape 6 out the door at least 2 months too early.
:P Almost NONE of Internet Explorer is cross-platform. And those people who think that cross-platform doesn't mean anything aren't thinking too far ahead. There's going to be an explosion of embedded computing in the near future. PC's won't be going away, but they won't be the main way that web pages are accessed anymore. And it is much easier, both in time and in resources, to write a XUL based application compared to a Java based application. It is also INFINATELY easier to fix bugs in the base code of XUL, something that cannot be done with the current closed-source nature of java.
If we're just going to base everything on what was released to the market first, then ALL companies might as well just release TOTAL crap to the customer as quickly as possible. I thought that we were a more knowledgable community and we wanted better quality software. We're entering a new era of software construction, where we can write better quality and more maintainable code. But to take advantage of that, we're going to have to re-write a lot of code, code that was built in the 80's and 90's hackers ethic. RE-WRITES TAKE TIME.
There are people here who say that they wished Netscape had released a Netscape 5 with improvements in a short period of time. Well, they actually did that, only they were more honest and called it 4.5. Without a re-write, any future Netscape browser wouldn't have gotten much better than 4.x, and probably would have gotten worse. The code base was ANCIENT. It was written in another era. So 6 months after they started working on Netscape 5 (using the old code-base), they scrapped it, and started the re-write. I tried out "Mozilla Classic" (had a debian package or two), and it wasn't much better than 4.x. This decision was made in November.
The year of 1999 was basically spent in re-write and architecture land. Some components were re-written multiple times. At this time, the browser wasn't "dogfood", it wasn't really usable by anyone without a huge amount of struggle. Some people here still think Mozilla is like that. At the end of 1999, Mozilla started driving to dogfood, and by February of 2000, it was at least dogfood (I used it for my daily browsing, although some times it was very very slow). That's the point where I started seeing constant and steady improvement on each and every build. (With a few regressions on the day or two after the milestone). Then another rapid increase in quality began around the end of May. 2000. Then another burst of polishing through all of August. If Netscape had given us 2 more months like August before clamping down, I think Netscape 6 would have been significantly better. If a significant bug got fixed after August, it tended to not get into either the trunk or the branch.
around July and August is when end-user/programmers started to swarm in to Mozilla as outside contributors, as Mozilla had finally reached what JWZ had said "A user could add a patch to the browser and have a browser + his patch." It would have been very exciting if we could have had two more months like that. We'll have them again in January and February, as everyone recovers from the holidays, and the Netscape employees come back from their vacations.
Mozilla is MORE then just a browser. I'm sure there are a lot of people who kept crying out that that's ALL it should have been, but that's their typical small-minded thinking, and it's THAT fact that will eventually get Netscape on to end-user computers, even if they already have Internet Explorer on them. I don't think you can write a completely cross-platform XUL application using Internet Explorer technology.
I'm sick of the anti-mozilla bias that has been fostered on Slashdot, propagated by short-sighted, impatient and ignorant people, and i'm dismayed at CmdrTaco et al continuing this trend with stories like this, especially when they are misrepresented in the opening comments. I certainly don't know of any other full-featured commercial quality browsers that I can get the full source code to.
I completely fail to see what CmdrTaco sees as "funny as hell" about this article. Is it the "14" users statement that does it for him? Is it the constant assertion that once people switch to Internet Explorer that they'll never switch back? Is it the implication that only Netscape users would want to try the New Netscape? Or is it the comparison of Netscape with Apple as companies who didn't fill the general market niches at the given time, and therefore "deserve to die"? Here's a hint: For something to be considered good satire, it has to blast BOTH sides (if there are clear partisan sides), it has to frame it in a new, unexpected light/situation that is halfway believable(probably framing it in the structure of something else that is established), and most of the facts (or the behaviours if we're looking closely at a specific person) have to be generally undisputed. Oh, and a bit of intelligence helps. This article fills NONE of those criteria. It is *extremely* one-sided, doesn't blast Microsoft at all for the obvious defects, the situation is completely unrealistic (a person saying that if his company had released something 3 years ago, it would have had a chance, but it wasn't, so it doesn't? Yeah right!), and most of the facts are under dispute. And finally it does not sound intelligent, the tone/ideas in this article are extremely childish (*14* users? Why not just say *3*? Hell, if you're going to completely underestimate/state the Netscape base, why not say *0.0001*?) and short-sighted (Hmm, so when someone has the majority of marketshare in one area, they NEVER lose it, even when someone comes out with a better product? I think Lotus and IBM would strongly disagree with you.). At best, this is highly partisian humour, and something that only Microsoft employees/lovers would laugh at, or people who are extremely EXTREMELY bitter at Netscape.
All this article has done is repeat the mantra "Ship the browser NOW NOW NOW NOW or you'll be irrelevant!", only they've done it AFTER Netscape SHIPPED THE DAMN BROWSER (A bit too early to satisfy you whiners), which means they are flogging a dead horse. Something is biting if it is undisputably true, which this isn't. This piece isn't even relevant. And it doesn't even consider any other platform besides Windows! I can ASSURE you that there isn't a large number of people on Linux switching to Internet Explorer. CmdrTaco, have you COMPLETELY forgotten your original demographic?
All of the gopher patches are now sitting in Bug# 49334 on Bugzilla.
All it needs now is a r= and an a=, and those patches go into the mozilla tree.
And for some reason, that isn't affecting connectivity in New Zealand that much. :-)
Excuse me? I was bitching at Slashdot for most of their stereotypical bitching at Mozilla. :P
:P
Guess that goes to show that when you expect bitching, you're able to find it everywhere.