Why not? You do something risky, why should the rest of us be on the hook for your rescue costs? Which occur whether the rescue succeeds or not. As TFA says, the state is short of cash. If they don't ask Mrs. Fossett for the money, it comes out of state programs or taxes. Considering the fact that the sum in question is a small percentage of the estate, and a fraction of what Fossett spent on any one of his many expensive stunts, I call this an ethical no-brainer.
Jeez, you're a twit. Even if I had mod points (and I haven't had them for a long time) it takes more than one moderator to knock off even a single point. Back when they still published Karma scores, it was about 25 karma points for a score point. So five different moderators would have to use all their points just for that one score point. To reach your current abysmal level, it would take 10 users.
Oh, wait, there's this evil conspiracy against you, right. It couldn't possibly be true that your posts are so irritatingly stupid that lots of different people mod you down, and continue to do so even when your starting score is -1!
Forget the conspiracies. Microsoft has no reason to shut you up. Clowns like you help Microsoft, because you convince people that the open source world is dominated by self-righteous idiots.
And enough with the sock puppets! If you had any creativity, you could maybe make it look like you're more than one person. But you don't, so you can't. You just make a bad reputation worse.
At least they listen to feedback.. Indeed. And you can bet that somewhere an MS salesperson is pointing to this hissy fit and saying: "With our products, you can count on being heard, because we're a for-profit business, so we have to listen to our customers. With an open-source solution you can't be sure the developers will listen to anybody."
Jeez, I get so tired of people replying to something I didn't say. You're giving the stock rebuttal to the stock argument that movie violence begets real-world violence. LEARN TO FUCKING READ. I didn't argue that, and I don't believe that. I said that movie's eroticization of violence created a demand for violent porn. One fantasy begets another fantasy. Not a subtle or controversial argument.
As a matter of fact, I believe that fantasy violence, actually reduces the incidence of real-world violence.
None of us develop Pidgin as a function of our job. Pidgin is a hobby for us. We don't claim to represent a community--we claim to make an IM client that meets our own needs and hopefully meets others' needs as well. We aren't forcing anyone to use our software, nor are we profiting from our users. As you noted, we have the autonomy to make our own decisions. We are the people putting forth the development effort, and therefore we have a right to decide what goes into our software.
Quite simply, it doesn't matter if we have one user or six billion users outside the developer community. We have long understood that we can never please all our users with our single user interface--it's simply not possible. Because of that, we do not aim to please all our users, but instead to please ourselves and hope that we have pleased like-minded users. We encourage users whose needs are not met by our software to find other software that does meet their needs. The author is one John Bailey (rekkanoryo). Remind me never to allow him to be hired for any project I'm involved in. I've seen attitudes like his too often, always on projects that crashed and burned.
Perhaps I should have talked about Word, rather than Office as a whole. I rarely used Excel. Nowadays, I don't use either and don't even have them installed on my working computer, so I'm in no position to argue fine points.
And I think you have it backwards. The fork is to remove the feature everyone hates, not put it back. I get that. I stated my point poorly. My point was that the whole nonsense started with an ego-trip on one side of the argument, not a serious technical issue as TPP seemed to think was possible.
As for your other comments: you've never worked on a big software project, have you? Integrating individual contributions into the source tree is a non-trivial process. Doubling that effort is not something you do if you can avoid it.
Also, this kind of spat harms the acceptance of the product. My company has an internal Jabber network, and I'm not satisfied with the client we currently use. I've been looking at Pidgin to see if it suits our needs better. Suppose that I decide it does? How do I persuade my bosses to switch? No way do they're going to rely on a product that doesn't have good ongoing maintenance. Which kind of precludes any open-source product which is going through a spiteful schism over whether a GUI feature should be optional!
I don't suppose it matters in the long run. I imagine most users will abandon the old fork. The ones who don't like making the new-style windows mandatory will abandon it so they can turn the feature off. The ones who like it will switch because they can enable the feature if they want to, and there's no reason to stick with a version that has a dwindling user base. So only the we-know-what's-good-for-you zealots will be left in the cold.
Happy ending? I guess, except a lot of effort was wasted on what should have been a non-issue.
If there is some downside to allowing users to resize the text input area then a fork is exactly what is needed. A fork is a big deal. It means all the contributors have to choose which fork to go with, or the extra work of contributing to both. Improvements made to one fork aren't available to users of the other. The potential acceptance of both forks is impaired.
I suppose forks are justified now and then, but I don't see it here. Having automatically-resized text boxes may be a kewl feature, but the product went for years without it. I can't see any reason for forcing users to use it. It's an ego trip, pure and simple.
MS would might have just made it an option.. That's not my experience. Around 2000, they listened to people like me who hate multiple document interface GUIs and converted all the Office Apps to single document interface. But MDI has its fans, whose turn it was to complain. The option to go back to MDI was added in the next version.
Microsoft's mistake was not thinking things through. That's a common sin in the software world. Is it worse than the equally common sin of thinking that some feature is the best possible way to do things just because it works for you? Really, neither better nor worse.
And we're in no position to sneer. The flame wars you see on Slashdot every day are mostly about this kind of issue.
Complaints are warranted every time this happens. Maybe once his karma gets negative enough (on all his accounts), we won't be having this discussion anymore. Won't work. It takes months to mod an account down to permanent -1 status. Twitter can create a new sockpuppet in a couple of minutes.
You know why it wasn't a problem? Because Apple DOS computers, like MS-DOS computers, were personal computers that were never intended (and, arguably, lacked the resources) to run as time-shared, multitasking systems. Simply put, they didn't need Unix. (Where's that company you were working for in 1981 today?) I neglected to respond to this particular point, which is kind of your most important argument.
Sure, the companies I worked for in that period is gone — most high-tech startups don't make it. But they're not really relevent to this discussion, since they weren't doing anything that can be described as a PC.
The company that is relevent is Digital Research. They're out of business too, but only because they didn't want to sign IBM's nondisclosure, and missed out their chance to make their OS, CP/M, the standard for the PC world. And CP/M was a real operating system, and it didn't need a lot of fancy hardware to run.
If IBM had gone with CP/M as the default OS for the PC (as Bill Gates himself told them they should) history would have been a lot different. The fact that MS/DOS became the biggest OS on the planet was pure blind luck. It had nothing to do with it being appropriate for the marketplace.
OK, let's ignore Twitter's use of sockpuppets (which has gotten so blatent, it hardly needs to be pointed out) and focus on the more serious issue, that he like to throw out anti-Windows and pro-Linux cliches without regard to context.
Here the context is a bunch of missing emails. There's no evidence that they were lost due to a Microsoft screwup. Officially, federal IT screwed up. But given the Bush administration's previous attempts to avoid archiving incriminating emails (such as relying on outside mail servers, which is not just illegal, but really horrifying in terms of national security) it's not impossible that this "mistake" was deliberate. Somewhere Rosemary Woods is smiling.
So shut up Twitter. The whole world doesn't revolve around your Linux obsession.
That's great, and I'm sure you have a fine bunch of contributors. But there's more to a stable project than a lot of enthusiastic contributors. There has to be a central gatekeeper who provides project management, makes sure code gets reviewed, and imposes some kind of vision on the disparate goals of the contributors. I assume you have somebody like that, but are you prepared for the day they move on? If the people who play these roles for ZFS move on, Sun will just assign somebody else. Ditto ext4 and IBM. Projects with no corporate backing have it a lot harder. Sometimes they manage, but more often not.
Slashdot Mirror
What's your point? Supermarket trips very rarely result in million-dollar search efforts.
Oh please. Can you make food magically appear, no matter where you are?
Why not? You do something risky, why should the rest of us be on the hook for your rescue costs? Which occur whether the rescue succeeds or not. As TFA says, the state is short of cash. If they don't ask Mrs. Fossett for the money, it comes out of state programs or taxes. Considering the fact that the sum in question is a small percentage of the estate, and a fraction of what Fossett spent on any one of his many expensive stunts, I call this an ethical no-brainer.
Jeez, you're a twit. Even if I had mod points (and I haven't had them for a long time) it takes more than one moderator to knock off even a single point. Back when they still published Karma scores, it was about 25 karma points for a score point. So five different moderators would have to use all their points just for that one score point. To reach your current abysmal level, it would take 10 users.
Oh, wait, there's this evil conspiracy against you, right. It couldn't possibly be true that your posts are so irritatingly stupid that lots of different people mod you down, and continue to do so even when your starting score is -1!
Forget the conspiracies. Microsoft has no reason to shut you up. Clowns like you help Microsoft, because you convince people that the open source world is dominated by self-righteous idiots.
And enough with the sock puppets! If you had any creativity, you could maybe make it look like you're more than one person. But you don't, so you can't. You just make a bad reputation worse.
Jeez, I get so tired of people replying to something I didn't say. You're giving the stock rebuttal to the stock argument that movie violence begets real-world violence. LEARN TO FUCKING READ. I didn't argue that, and I don't believe that. I said that movie's eroticization of violence created a demand for violent porn. One fantasy begets another fantasy. Not a subtle or controversial argument.
As a matter of fact, I believe that fantasy violence, actually reduces the incidence of real-world violence.
I believe you put bricks in your house just to spoil my joke!
Quite simply, it doesn't matter if we have one user or six billion users outside the developer community. We have long understood that we can never please all our users with our single user interface--it's simply not possible. Because of that, we do not aim to please all our users, but instead to please ourselves and hope that we have pleased like-minded users. We encourage users whose needs are not met by our software to find other software that does meet their needs. The author is one John Bailey (rekkanoryo). Remind me never to allow him to be hired for any project I'm involved in. I've seen attitudes like his too often, always on projects that crashed and burned.
Perhaps I should have talked about Word, rather than Office as a whole. I rarely used Excel. Nowadays, I don't use either and don't even have them installed on my working computer, so I'm in no position to argue fine points.
You make a good point. Now that I think of it, QA issues are probably what caused MS to leave out that option, not poor planning.
As for your other comments: you've never worked on a big software project, have you? Integrating individual contributions into the source tree is a non-trivial process. Doubling that effort is not something you do if you can avoid it.
Also, this kind of spat harms the acceptance of the product. My company has an internal Jabber network, and I'm not satisfied with the client we currently use. I've been looking at Pidgin to see if it suits our needs better. Suppose that I decide it does? How do I persuade my bosses to switch? No way do they're going to rely on a product that doesn't have good ongoing maintenance. Which kind of precludes any open-source product which is going through a spiteful schism over whether a GUI feature should be optional!
I don't suppose it matters in the long run. I imagine most users will abandon the old fork. The ones who don't like making the new-style windows mandatory will abandon it so they can turn the feature off. The ones who like it will switch because they can enable the feature if they want to, and there's no reason to stick with a version that has a dwindling user base. So only the we-know-what's-good-for-you zealots will be left in the cold.
Happy ending? I guess, except a lot of effort was wasted on what should have been a non-issue.
I suppose forks are justified now and then, but I don't see it here. Having automatically-resized text boxes may be a kewl feature, but the product went for years without it. I can't see any reason for forcing users to use it. It's an ego trip, pure and simple.
Microsoft's mistake was not thinking things through. That's a common sin in the software world. Is it worse than the equally common sin of thinking that some feature is the best possible way to do things just because it works for you? Really, neither better nor worse.
And we're in no position to sneer. The flame wars you see on Slashdot every day are mostly about this kind of issue.
Dude, somebody wasted a mod point downmodding a post that started at -1. That should give you some idea of how unpopular you are.
Dude, you have way too much time on your hands!
If I were his socketpuppet, wouldn't I use a different login?
Shut up dude. You're just one of his sock puppets.
Too bad there isn't a Pulitzer Prize for Slashdot posts. Fm6 would be a shoo-in.
And insightful!
That's so true!
Sure, the companies I worked for in that period is gone — most high-tech startups don't make it. But they're not really relevent to this discussion, since they weren't doing anything that can be described as a PC.
The company that is relevent is Digital Research. They're out of business too, but only because they didn't want to sign IBM's nondisclosure, and missed out their chance to make their OS, CP/M, the standard for the PC world. And CP/M was a real operating system, and it didn't need a lot of fancy hardware to run.
If IBM had gone with CP/M as the default OS for the PC (as Bill Gates himself told them they should) history would have been a lot different. The fact that MS/DOS became the biggest OS on the planet was pure blind luck. It had nothing to do with it being appropriate for the marketplace.
(yeah, there's always an ISR joke) ...we Slashdot Slashdot!
OK, let's ignore Twitter's use of sockpuppets (which has gotten so blatent, it hardly needs to be pointed out) and focus on the more serious issue, that he like to throw out anti-Windows and pro-Linux cliches without regard to context.
Here the context is a bunch of missing emails. There's no evidence that they were lost due to a Microsoft screwup. Officially, federal IT screwed up. But given the Bush administration's previous attempts to avoid archiving incriminating emails (such as relying on outside mail servers, which is not just illegal, but really horrifying in terms of national security) it's not impossible that this "mistake" was deliberate. Somewhere Rosemary Woods is smiling.
So shut up Twitter. The whole world doesn't revolve around your Linux obsession.
That's great, and I'm sure you have a fine bunch of contributors. But there's more to a stable project than a lot of enthusiastic contributors. There has to be a central gatekeeper who provides project management, makes sure code gets reviewed, and imposes some kind of vision on the disparate goals of the contributors. I assume you have somebody like that, but are you prepared for the day they move on? If the people who play these roles for ZFS move on, Sun will just assign somebody else. Ditto ext4 and IBM. Projects with no corporate backing have it a lot harder. Sometimes they manage, but more often not.