Uh huh. And when Dan Quayle, admittedly not the most articulate politician ever but a competent and reasonably thoughtful Senator, was universally described in the media as a drooling moron, was that a right-wing plot also? When fabricated story after story, like "I enjoyed visiting Latin America. I wish I spoke Latin." was presented as fact, where was Philip Agre?
The problem here is the Jay Leno / David Letterman mentality of repeating anything as long as it continues to get a laugh. It's unfunny when they do it and shameful when journalists do it.
No, J. Edgar Hoover was not gay or a transvestite. A single filmmaker quoted a single source who claims to have once seen a picture of Hoover in a dress. Where's Philip Agre on that one?
There's also info about how it's really US law enforcement that's driving this thing.
Well, no there's not. It simply says that a group with 28 members "believe[s] that U.S. law enforcement is attempting to gain international support for modifications to its country's laws -- support that it has not been able to gain domestically. " It wouldn't surprise me if they're right but I don't see a single fact supporting their belief.
As long as I'm courting flames, know what I think is funny? For decades the most strident voice against ceding control of US law to international bodies and treaties has been Jesse Helms. Of course, all good liberals and leftists denounced him as a jingoistic Neanderthal for resisting globalization and internationalization. Now that internationalization has become politically incorrect, you don't see anyone saying, "Gee, Jesse may be a bigot but he was right all along about the WTO and IMF."
Completely offtopic -- what's with all the people lately posting their entire comment formatted as tt or bold? Is that a bug in Slashcode, a "feature" in some new browser version or are they doing it willfully? If the last, I wish they'd stop.
15,000 developers @ $99 ! That's already far exceeded my expectations for Amiga, which admittedly weren't very high in the first place.
First, I've read a lot of Philip Agre's stuff on RRE. I think it's original and provocative, although I disagree with a lot of it.
Second, I hardly think I'm quibbling about semicolons. The thesis of the article is that the media keep repeating provably false assertions about Al Gore, as a result of right-wing bias or coercion or something. I agree with the first half of that, but disagree with the second and cite Quayle and Hoover as counterexamples that support a different interpretation.
I took an Organizational Behavior class once. For the most part it was straight out of Dilbert. But the first day, the professor said, "If you learn nothing else here, remember this. If people aren't doing what you want them to do, look at the reward system." I've found that one idea to have been worth entire semester of writing stupid papers about personality types.
Here's what the "Open-Source Movement" rewards:
Fronting up a prominent project
Advocacy
Here's what people do:
Write hundreds of CD player apps
Post to Slashdot about how the guy saying ext2 has some weaknesses is obviously a "Micro$hit astroturfer"
If the Linux media would cover the people who added a crucial new feature to an existing project or the people who write and translate documentation the way they fawn over "Miguel says reusing code is good!" or "Bruce Perens denounces someone who may have inadvertently violated the GPL!" we'd have a lot more documenttion and new features.
Uh huh. And when Dan Quayle, admittedly not the most articulate politician ever but a competent and reasonably thoughtful Senator, was universally described in the media as a drooling moron, was that a right-wing plot also? When fabricated story after story, like "I enjoyed visiting Latin America. I wish I spoke Latin." was presented as fact, where was Philip Agre?
The problem here is the Jay Leno / David Letterman mentality of repeating anything as long as it continues to get a laugh. It's unfunny when they do it and shameful when journalists do it.
No, J. Edgar Hoover was not gay or a transvestite. A single filmmaker quoted a single source who claims to have once seen a picture of Hoover in a dress. Where's Pihilip Agre on that one?
Regarding 2000 vs. 2001: Duh. People care about the turning over of the calendrical odometer, not the reckoning of a round number from a retroactively established, inaccurate starting point. Or is Brin surprised that the smarty-pantses who were chirping about how 2001 is the real millenium were motivated more by the desire to act superior than by sincere concern for mathematical precision?
To me, the most interesting thought as we approach 2001 is to look back a year. Remember when we were seriously considering the possibility of widespread technological, economic and even social catastrophe?
Will Slashdot give me an opportunity to hold forth on my crackpot political philosophy too? Unlike David Brin, at least I haven't written tens of thousands of words about how upset I am over Yoda's treatment of Luke.
If Slashdot is so concerned about giving Brin a soapbox, wouldn't (An aside: I am working with a group developing ways to simplify the income tax code using a computer program that will find politically neutral simplifications, taking the whole issue out of politics. It's an exciting project, requiring fascinating algorithms, but more than we can get into here.) be a more appropriate and interesting topic?
The MIT computer store is having a contest to build a G4 Cube out of ice. (Similar to their contest a couple of years ago to build an iMac out of Jell-o.) First prize is -- a Cube.
I bet these guys would be a shoo-in if they were eligible....
Bob Randolph, associate dean of undergraduate education, says he's not familiar with the site -- "Porn is not my beat" -- but speaks gravely of "the issue," which is, as he sees it, "somebody trying to make money using our logo and our name." He adds, "We're looking into it."
GeekPorn is too Slashdotted now to read through but -- it looks to me like MIT got a complaint from someone who clicked the "Leave" button on the front p[age and got sent to the main MIT page. I bet they're confusing that with "somebody trying to make money using our logo and our name."
Although the school has been on a serious No Fun Allowed kick lately.
It's weird to see all this Mozilla bashing going on. Yes, it has taken a long time and yes, it's not read yet but how many of you Mozilla bashers have really given Mozilla a try?...And let me tell you, the latest builds have been impressive in both speed and stability.
As a recent Mozilla basher, I'd distinguish between criticism of what the project has available today and criticism of the project's performance over the last few years. I've used M17 on MacOS and Linux, and think there's definite potential there, although it's still far from replacing IE on my Mac or even Navigator on my Linux box.
But what I think needs to be examined and hasn't been is how the open source process has worked out for Netscape. Yeah, Galeon is nice for us but I think it's clear to anyone remotely objective that the Mozilla project hasn't come close to living up to the expectations that Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, CmdrTaco and the rest of the Open Source mafia were encouraging a few years ago. It seems to me that it's much more valuable to look at the experience and see what open source development does and doesn't do than to keep insisting that everything is going according to plan because we have a rendering engine.
Two asides:
Is anyone getting nightly builds to work on MacOS? I've been trying for a week and they keep freezing at the splash screen.
Check out CmdrTaco and Hemos' interview on Slashnet last night. The thing I thought was most interesting was how negative they are about the open source process for their own code. They seem to view it as a political obligation they need to comply with, but describe it as an unpleasant experience that contributed little to their software.
What factors do you think caused the FBI to select IIT over other applicants, like UC-Davis and the National Software Testing Laboratory? Political concerns or the technical merits of your proposal? What were they?
Come to think of it, the mistake the Council of Europe made is not using the term "cracking devices". Tedious pedantic geeks would have been so pleased, this treaty would be more popular than Quake.
For example, they said, security testing would not be banned, because prosecutors must show there was intent to commit an illegal act. Peter Csonka, deputy head of the council's economic crime division, said there needs to be a better explanation of the language banning the use of such devices "without right."
For that matter, exactly what "hacking devices" are restricted? I agree that this treaty needs to be handled carefully and has the potential to restrict legitimate uses but I wouldn't file it in the the this-is-really-bad dept just on the basis of this article. Of course, given how people are flying off the handle over the NSA backdoor story which doesn't have a shred of evidence behind it, there's certainly not much chance of perspective here.
Incidentally, I'd note this story as evidence that the cyberpunk mentality so popular here may be fun but isn't having the slightest effect on the rest of the world. I'd propose that people make a clear distiction between legitimate and illicit uses of technology and point out when legislation threatens the valid activities, instead of karma whoring about how Napster isn't a piracy tool because the RIAA is ripping off the musicians. Probably not much chance of that, either.
People are going to point out that the title is written by the submitter, not the editor. Personally, I don't recognize that distinction -- the editor takes responsibility for the wording of the article, both the words he wrote and the words he endorsed. That's what an editor does.
Anyway, the part that bothers me the most is No, your honor, we aren't a monopoly. What does antitrust possibly have to do with this issue?
You say you want "a browser that allows you to read the sites you want to read". Guess what - that describes even Lynx. What you want is for the sites to look like they were intended, which is why standards compliance is so important.
Sorry, I guess I was unclear. Of course that's what I want -- but they way I decide when I've got is by using the browser and seeing if it works for me, not by checking to see if the developers plan to support NAFTA, WNBA and PB&J-1 and 2.
I believe that in the previous Mozilla thread, someone mentioned that Mozilla development on the Mac was going badly because, in addition to having to deal with the poor OS, when something went wrong on the Mac version the Mac users would all complain and nobody would actually help fix the bug.
And in the time since then, I've come up with a better response than the one I gave him:;-)
You and I are willing to try out prerelease builds, test them, report bugs and maybe attempt a patch. The general public is absolutely not willing to do that. Saying, "If you want that fixed, write a patch!" is fine for hacker projects but any company that thinks an open-source plan means they can do that is heading for serious trouble.
Mac users looove iCab. Is it really good? No, it's barely usable. But the iCab developers made it clear that they're committed to the Mac platform. Mozilla has made it clear that the Mac port is a secondary concern for them, and that Mac users will have to be satisfied with an ugly, buggy, kludgy port. So Mac users don't give a damn about Mozilla.
Besides, do you really think Joe Windows User says, "Gee, Mozilla isn't rendering llamaporn.com properly." and whips up a patch? Or Jane Slashdot, for that matter? The Mozilla project is driven by full-time Netscape developers who work on Win32 and Unix. That's where those bug fixes are coming from, not from "the community". (At least when I was last trying to contribute to Mozilla, about 6 months ago.)
And "the poor OS" doesn't seem to hold Microsoft back at all.
And what does thast mean, exactly? For me it means to be able to correctly render HTML and XHTML with CSS1 and CSS2, JavaScript and Java, XML with XSLT.
I've never even heard of XSLT before. For me, a "freakin' Web browser" is a browser that allows me to read the sites I want to read. I'm pretty certain that the overwhelming majority of users are more interested in that sort of practical benchmark than in whether a codebase supports a laundry list of standards. IE gives me a browser; Mozilla, at least on the Mac, is an unusable proof of concept that doesn't even render SpamCop correctly.
Why do you think this is an easy task, that could have been completed by now?
Honestly, when the Mozilla project was announced, were any of its advocates saying that by September 2000, it would generate a good HTML engine, a cross-platform framwork and a release date projected for mid-2001? Back when Netscape was still a functioning business, would anyone have regarded that as a success? The people responsible for Netscape's decision to embrace open-source development are eager to attach themselves to the success of Linux, Apache and all sorts of other projects they had nothing to do with but have very little interest in talking about what Mozilla has and hasn't accomplished.
Incidentally, this news is not about Konqueror, although there has been speculation about using Gecko as an alternate rendering engine for Konqueror, alongside khtml.
I mean, how long have they been working on Mozilla?..And when did development of the Konqueror HTML widget start? I am really surprised they could build a good-functioning (speaking as of the final-beta ) web-browser in such a short time!..How did the KDE developers manage this?
I think these are important questions to ask. Whenever anyone here tries to raise the issue of "What went wrong with Mozilla?" it's always met with angry accusations of trolling and claims that the project is doing great, just great! especially if you've tried the last couple of nightly builds which are much better than those of a few days ago.
Mozilla is the flagship project of the "Open Source Movement" (not to be confused with the "Free Software Movement") and when it was launched, Eric Raymond and CmdrTaco were featured prominently in everything from C|Net to Cat Fancier preemptively declaring victory in the browser war. Three years later, Mozilla isn't close to their first release and has been crushed by Microsoft in both market share and quality. At the same time, the Konqueror team has come up with a 90% usable browser from scratch in half the time, with a tiny fraction of the developers and bug testers and without the resources and experience of Netscape behind it.
It seems to me that the sensible course would be to make an honest effort to figure out where Mozilla went wrong instead of keeping up the pretense that everything is going perfectly. I mean, when Eric Raymond goes into CEOs' offices doing what he's not embarassed to call his Prince From Another Country act, don't they ask him what happened to Mozilla? Wouldn't there be practical and rhetorical advantages to having an answer to that question?
Regarding point 1: Mac users have strong feelings and long memories, both positive and negative, for hardware and software makers. If the Mozilla project had gotten them on their side early on, they would have huge marketshare, mindshare and support on the Mac (>15% of total web browsing activity). Instead, they committed the cardinal sin of making a half-assed, ugly, slow, buggy port a la Word 6.0. And Mac users are happy to pay for software and expect it to be high quality. Telling them, "Here's an unstable, unusable mess. Now fix it yourselves!" isn't going to fly.
Regarding points 2-5: None of those things prevented Microsoft from making a superior browser for the Mac. In fact, it's better than the Windows version.
This article argues that rewriting code from the ground up is generally a bad idea, and cites Mozilla as an example. Combustible, but it's well argued and I thought a lot of the other stuff on his site was extremely interesting.
Actually, when this came up on kde-devel, instead of a flamewar it generated a patch for klipper's faulty handling of the $47 in the URL.
Oh, and then there's Abiword, GNUmeric, and the like...MacOS is one of the few platforms where no free MS-compatible stuff is available.
If you mean "free", and not "Free", Macs come bundled with AppleWorks. It's not MS Office, but is far more usable than the current state of Linux office suites.
What I'd like to see on my Mac: xchat, grip and Qt + Designer.
I don't quite understand what all the hubbub about OS X is. What does OS X accomplish that cannot be sufficiently fullfilled by a solid BSD or Linux box? Ok, so it has the pretty GUI...However, I have seen some slick themes on http://www.themes.org that make the aqua GUI look average.
I can not for the life of me understand why Slashdot readers think disdain for colored cases qualifies them as hacker gods when they're unable to comprehend the difference between a completely novel GUI that replaces everything from X up and an Enlightenment theme with translucent buttons.
Somehow, I do not believe we will be seeing this open sourced anytime soon...so why is this so innovative?
Uhh, because innovation is in what you make, not what license you use?
Yeah, I know - I have a PowerCenter 150 I bought in 1997 thinking, "I'd better upgrade because my Performa 636 won't run Rhapsody."
But, realistically, what were you expecting Apple to do? Release a kludgy, unfinished OS with poor hardware support and an API that no one wanted to develop for? Go out of business rather than let you down? Instead, they've brought Unix to the consumer desktop (for real, not in overheated Linux advocacy) with a groundbreaking UI, full legacy support and an API that doesn't force Mac developers to choose between starting from scratch and giving up. Meanwhile, they've been releasing terrific new hardware and improving MacOS to the point that multitasking is its only glaring weakness.
Honestly, if you view every roadmap from a technology company as a sacred commitment, the Rhapsody/OS X saga should hardly have been your biggest disappointment.
I have to say, I'm surprised to see so many people expressing enthusiasm for this article.
This is about the experience of computers living in the world (well, reverse your choice of words). Nerds don't only/all use Linux. Or even BSD.
First of all, the question was, "How do I ship an object to Russia. The fact that the object in question happens to be a computer doesn't make it a question about computers. Second, I've got to think this story is only here because it mentions Linux. Do you think if someone had written in asking, "My friend needs a new PC so he can run Windows 2000. How should I send it to him?" that would have qualified as News for Nerds?
Slashdot Mirror
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Uh huh. And when Dan Quayle, admittedly not the most articulate politician ever but a competent and reasonably thoughtful Senator, was universally described in the media as a drooling moron, was that a right-wing plot also? When fabricated story after story, like "I enjoyed visiting Latin America. I wish I spoke Latin." was presented as fact, where was Philip Agre?
The problem here is the Jay Leno / David Letterman mentality of repeating anything as long as it continues to get a laugh. It's unfunny when they do it and shameful when journalists do it.
No, J. Edgar Hoover was not gay or a transvestite. A single filmmaker quoted a single source who claims to have once seen a picture of Hoover in a dress. Where's Philip Agre on that one?
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Well, no there's not. It simply says that a group with 28 members "believe[s] that U.S. law enforcement is attempting to gain international support for modifications to its country's laws -- support that it has not been able to gain domestically. " It wouldn't surprise me if they're right but I don't see a single fact supporting their belief.
As long as I'm courting flames, know what I think is funny? For decades the most strident voice against ceding control of US law to international bodies and treaties has been Jesse Helms. Of course, all good liberals and leftists denounced him as a jingoistic Neanderthal for resisting globalization and internationalization. Now that internationalization has become politically incorrect, you don't see anyone saying, "Gee, Jesse may be a bigot but he was right all along about the WTO and IMF."
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15,000 developers @ $99 ! That's already far exceeded my expectations for Amiga, which admittedly weren't very high in the first place.
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Second, I hardly think I'm quibbling about semicolons. The thesis of the article is that the media keep repeating provably false assertions about Al Gore, as a result of right-wing bias or coercion or something. I agree with the first half of that, but disagree with the second and cite Quayle and Hoover as counterexamples that support a different interpretation.
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Here's what the "Open-Source Movement" rewards:
Here's what people do:
If the Linux media would cover the people who added a crucial new feature to an existing project or the people who write and translate documentation the way they fawn over "Miguel says reusing code is good!" or "Bruce Perens denounces someone who may have inadvertently violated the GPL!" we'd have a lot more documenttion and new features.
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The problem here is the Jay Leno / David Letterman mentality of repeating anything as long as it continues to get a laugh. It's unfunny when they do it and shameful when journalists do it.
No, J. Edgar Hoover was not gay or a transvestite. A single filmmaker quoted a single source who claims to have once seen a picture of Hoover in a dress. Where's Pihilip Agre on that one?
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I bet these guys would be a shoo-in if they were eligible....
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GeekPorn is too Slashdotted now to read through but -- it looks to me like MIT got a complaint from someone who clicked the "Leave" button on the front p[age and got sent to the main MIT page. I bet they're confusing that with "somebody trying to make money using our logo and our name."
Although the school has been on a serious No Fun Allowed kick lately.
---------
As a recent Mozilla basher, I'd distinguish between criticism of what the project has available today and criticism of the project's performance over the last few years. I've used M17 on MacOS and Linux, and think there's definite potential there, although it's still far from replacing IE on my Mac or even Navigator on my Linux box.
But what I think needs to be examined and hasn't been is how the open source process has worked out for Netscape. Yeah, Galeon is nice for us but I think it's clear to anyone remotely objective that the Mozilla project hasn't come close to living up to the expectations that Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, CmdrTaco and the rest of the Open Source mafia were encouraging a few years ago. It seems to me that it's much more valuable to look at the experience and see what open source development does and doesn't do than to keep insisting that everything is going according to plan because we have a rendering engine.
Two asides:
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Well, if you're watching Ally McBeal or Friends, the actresses have dieted to the point where even a second dimension adds no information.
FX, on the other hand, would be greatly enhanced -- Son of the Beach, the X-Show, Married With Children reruns...
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For that matter, exactly what "hacking devices" are restricted? I agree that this treaty needs to be handled carefully and has the potential to restrict legitimate uses but I wouldn't file it in the the this-is-really-bad dept just on the basis of this article. Of course, given how people are flying off the handle over the NSA backdoor story which doesn't have a shred of evidence behind it, there's certainly not much chance of perspective here.
Incidentally, I'd note this story as evidence that the cyberpunk mentality so popular here may be fun but isn't having the slightest effect on the rest of the world. I'd propose that people make a clear distiction between legitimate and illicit uses of technology and point out when legislation threatens the valid activities, instead of karma whoring about how Napster isn't a piracy tool because the RIAA is ripping off the musicians. Probably not much chance of that, either.
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Anyway, the part that bothers me the most is No, your honor, we aren't a monopoly. What does antitrust possibly have to do with this issue?
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Sorry, I guess I was unclear. Of course that's what I want -- but they way I decide when I've got is by using the browser and seeing if it works for me, not by checking to see if the developers plan to support NAFTA, WNBA and PB&J-1 and 2.
I believe that in the previous Mozilla thread, someone mentioned that Mozilla development on the Mac was going badly because, in addition to having to deal with the poor OS, when something went wrong on the Mac version the Mac users would all complain and nobody would actually help fix the bug.
And in the time since then, I've come up with a better response than the one I gave him: ;-)
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I've never even heard of XSLT before. For me, a "freakin' Web browser" is a browser that allows me to read the sites I want to read. I'm pretty certain that the overwhelming majority of users are more interested in that sort of practical benchmark than in whether a codebase supports a laundry list of standards. IE gives me a browser; Mozilla, at least on the Mac, is an unusable proof of concept that doesn't even render SpamCop correctly.
Why do you think this is an easy task, that could have been completed by now?
Honestly, when the Mozilla project was announced, were any of its advocates saying that by September 2000, it would generate a good HTML engine, a cross-platform framwork and a release date projected for mid-2001? Back when Netscape was still a functioning business, would anyone have regarded that as a success? The people responsible for Netscape's decision to embrace open-source development are eager to attach themselves to the success of Linux, Apache and all sorts of other projects they had nothing to do with but have very little interest in talking about what Mozilla has and hasn't accomplished.
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I mean, how long have they been working on Mozilla?..And when did development of the Konqueror HTML widget start? I am really surprised they could build a good-functioning (speaking as of the final-beta ) web-browser in such a short time! ..How did the KDE developers manage this?
I think these are important questions to ask. Whenever anyone here tries to raise the issue of "What went wrong with Mozilla?" it's always met with angry accusations of trolling and claims that the project is doing great, just great! especially if you've tried the last couple of nightly builds which are much better than those of a few days ago.
Mozilla is the flagship project of the "Open Source Movement" (not to be confused with the "Free Software Movement") and when it was launched, Eric Raymond and CmdrTaco were featured prominently in everything from C|Net to Cat Fancier preemptively declaring victory in the browser war. Three years later, Mozilla isn't close to their first release and has been crushed by Microsoft in both market share and quality. At the same time, the Konqueror team has come up with a 90% usable browser from scratch in half the time, with a tiny fraction of the developers and bug testers and without the resources and experience of Netscape behind it.
It seems to me that the sensible course would be to make an honest effort to figure out where Mozilla went wrong instead of keeping up the pretense that everything is going perfectly. I mean, when Eric Raymond goes into CEOs' offices doing what he's not embarassed to call his Prince From Another Country act, don't they ask him what happened to Mozilla? Wouldn't there be practical and rhetorical advantages to having an answer to that question?
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Regarding points 2-5: None of those things prevented Microsoft from making a superior browser for the Mac. In fact, it's better than the Windows version.
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Actually, when this came up on kde-devel, instead of a flamewar it generated a patch for klipper's faulty handling of the $47 in the URL.
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If you mean "free", and not "Free", Macs come bundled with AppleWorks. It's not MS Office, but is far more usable than the current state of Linux office suites.
What I'd like to see on my Mac: xchat, grip and Qt + Designer.
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I can not for the life of me understand why Slashdot readers think disdain for colored cases qualifies them as hacker gods when they're unable to comprehend the difference between a completely novel GUI that replaces everything from X up and an Enlightenment theme with translucent buttons.
Somehow, I do not believe we will be seeing this open sourced anytime soon...so why is this so innovative?
Uhh, because innovation is in what you make, not what license you use?
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But, realistically, what were you expecting Apple to do? Release a kludgy, unfinished OS with poor hardware support and an API that no one wanted to develop for? Go out of business rather than let you down? Instead, they've brought Unix to the consumer desktop (for real, not in overheated Linux advocacy) with a groundbreaking UI, full legacy support and an API that doesn't force Mac developers to choose between starting from scratch and giving up. Meanwhile, they've been releasing terrific new hardware and improving MacOS to the point that multitasking is its only glaring weakness.
Honestly, if you view every roadmap from a technology company as a sacred commitment, the Rhapsody/OS X saga should hardly have been your biggest disappointment.
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This is about the experience of computers living in the world (well, reverse your choice of words). Nerds don't only/all use Linux. Or even BSD.
First of all, the question was, "How do I ship an object to Russia. The fact that the object in question happens to be a computer doesn't make it a question about computers. Second, I've got to think this story is only here because it mentions Linux. Do you think if someone had written in asking, "My friend needs a new PC so he can run Windows 2000. How should I send it to him?" that would have qualified as News for Nerds?
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