Re:Proves that Zawinski didn't kill Mozilla
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Mozilla M5 Released
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· Score: 1
JWZ was on sabbatical for a while before resigning, so I don't really think he'd been doing much for some months before that. I read several of the netscape.public.mozilla.* newsgroups, and hadn't seen a JWZ posting for months before his resignation. Mike Shaver and other Mozilla staff were quite visible during that time. Frankly, while JWZ's departure was the end of an era, I don't think it really mattered to Mozilla development, since it had been getting along without him for a while.
I heartily agree, and wish this could be solved./. is still great for topics that are quite technical. For example, I wrote a review of a book on garbage collection a while back, and it got some excellent comments, almost all of high quality. Some people liked GC, and others thought it was a bad idea, but at least the anti-GC people had definite reasons for their belief. I think it's because the topic was esoteric enough that the little ankle-biters weren't interested, leaving only people who actually had something worthwhile to contribute.
Some topics, like GNOME/KDE, MS/Linux, and this interview, can be discussed rationally also attract knee-jerk flaming that drowns out the worthwhile discussion. For example, the question "Is computer science coming to an end?" in this topic is an interesting one, but not much attention is being paid to it.
The fix is probably to add a subtopic to Slashdot for such advanced discussion, as I've proposed in the past. Or, someone else should start a new discussion forum focusing on such topics.
A. Trevor Hodge, who's apparently an expert on Roman architecture, once pointed out that the story of the Romans being poisoned because of lead water pipes was bogus. The Romans built aqueducts to bring water from mountain springs into their cities, and from the aqueducts lead pipes carried water into homes. However, the Romans didn't have faucets; water simply flowed continuously from its outlets in the home. Lead only accumulates in water significantly if the water is standing still, so lead-laced water wasn't a problem for the Romans.
Wine jugs coated with lead-based glazes, on the other hand...
Comparison, maybe? Anyway, the Sepoy mutiny in India was partially sparked in 1857 because some Indian soldiers were jailed from refusing to use new cartridges. You had to bite off the end of cartridges before using them, and they had been dipped in a mixture of beef and pork fat, which are taboo to Hindus and Moslems. See this article, for example.
Python compilers: JPython compiles to Java byte code. Python2C translates to C code, but not a lot of people seem to be interested in the project. (Anyone going to review the new Learning Python book for/.?)
I find the Dylan posts not out-of-line, and they've been enough to interest me in learning more about Dylan; a Dylan book is sitting in my to-read queue, and I'll probably write a/. review of it.
I'd like to see more language and programming-related items, too, since the business-related items are kind of boring and are usually covered by LinuxToday or LWN anyway. CmdrTaco, how about a new section like the book reviews or "Ask Slashdot", just for technical programming items?
A while back I read Millennium III, Century XXI: A Retrospective on the Future, by Peter N. Stearns. I thought of writing a/. review of it, but decided it was too far afield to be worth it, since the bulk of the book is mostly historical analysis. The early chapters on calendrical history, and the reaction to the turn of the last millennium, are really interesting. Capsule review from my book diary:
This book is a historical look at artificial calendrical times of transition such as the ends of centuries and millennia. The book starts off looking at how the perceived significance of such times arose, and its relation to Christian ideas of the apocalypse. Along the way Stearns debunks the mistaken idea of widespread panics among the European populace; at that time, the arrival of the year 1000 wasn't viewed as a momentous event, and most people used different calendars in which that year wasn't particularly special. The book then shifts forward to look at the last century transition in 1900, and forward again, to make informed guesses about the upcoming transition. (The book was written in 1996, so the transition was farther away.) The book finishes by considering the hazards of historical prediction, and presents some suggestions for distinguing valid predictions from unlikely ones. An interesting book whose prose, while it can never be called "lively", at least never slides into academic dullness.
I haven't read the Pinker book and can't comment on its quality, but wanted to respond to your statement "Pinker's book is more than a year old and I can't figure out why slashdot would give it this kind of bandwidth." I don't think reviews need to be of books that are necessarily new; they should be concerned with books that are interesting, no matter what their age. Much of my reading consists of remaindered books that looked interesting, so I'm usually reading books that are a few years old, yet many of them are excellent and deserve attention.
The thing is, speaking as someone who's written/. reviews in the past, I'm less likely to write a negative review. If I read a book that's really crackingly good, like Alan Guth's _The Inflationary Universe_, I think "What a great book! I should tell everyone about it." If I read a mediocre book, like the O'Reilly Java books, there's less of an inclination to tell people about it. If it's a really awful book, I won't finish reading it and won't write a review of it, unless it's so bad it's funny, or if a bit of spleen-venting is in order (as in Katz's recent review of the recent Bill Gates book).
why is it hypocritical? Surely you're be giving up liberties if you were forced to contribute. The GPL is more reasonable; if you distribute the software the source code must also be available, but if you never distribute it, you aren't forced to do anything.
The excuse of "we're just doing to learn things" was always weak, and today it carries no force at all. Do crackers learn about Web servers by breaking into them? Do crackers learn about TCP/IP by SYN flooding Win95 boxes? Wouldn't they learn a good deal more by running a Web server of their own, or implementing IPSEC for Linux or *BSD? Ah, but that would take some effort and requires actual knowledge. If a cracker was truly smart and skilled, they'd be capable of doing original things that would actually be useful.
Ah, so being a hacker is a matter of being an obnoxious bozo who breaks into things and damages other people's work, never producing anything of their own. Doubtless people who egg houses on Hallowe'en should be called "building hackers". Sheesh.
What is it, I mean, really?
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Saving MST3K
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· Score: 1
Other people have explained the idea well enough; 3 characters make fun of bad movies. The jokes can refer to pop culture items like "Gilligan's Island", to high culture references like Peter Greenaway or Igor Stravinsky. (For example, in one movie the soundtrack got very loud and full of brass; one character says "Hey, turn down the Firebird Suite!")
Good things can't last forever.
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Saving MST3K
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· Score: 1
I haven't noticed that, and think that people are viewing things through the golden lens of nostalgia, forgetting the bad Joel episodes. Sure, some of the recent episodes haven't been that great, but not all the Season 2 through 4 episodes were stellar; some, like "Space Travellers", were really quite dull. (And the season 1 episode recently released on video, "The Crawling Hand", was really tedious; I think Mike Nelson's becoming head writer with Season 2 was critical to the show's success.) the basic idea, like doctor who's basic idea, is flexible enough to run forever as long as the writing remains good.
Complete agreement with your second paragraph; if Rhino or whoever were to announce the complete MST3K collection, "and that'll be $1500 please", my cheque would be in the mail on the very same day.
Indeed. I was all for the original creation of the term "open source", since it seemed to be a good way to make the idea of free software more palatable to the media and to timid corporate entities. But now I'm starting to swing back in the other direction, because people are becoming fixated on "zero-cost", forgetting about the idea of being able to control your computing environment.
I don't think GTK+ will be the only alternative for the next while. With the recent changes to the QPL, there's no longer a license-related reason to avoid Qt, so you can choose on the more interesting grounds of programming model, and interface attractiveness. I suspect that GNOME and KDE will move toward merging their efforts, or at least interoperability, so choosing a toolkit probably won't also dictate your choice of desktop.
Therefore, I'm currently trying to decide between GTK+ and Qt. It's a difficult decision; both are popular and likely to be maintained for a while to come, both have fairly complete Python bindings, and both are pretty attractive. I'm trying to assess them both from a programmer's perspective, and will review the upcoming O'Reilly Qt book, unless someone else beats me to it.
Erm... no. The Enlightenment was secular, and often anti-religious; to claim that it arose as a result of Christian thought is incorrect. In fact, Enlightenment historians often slanted descriptions of earlier times in order to cast Xtianity in a poor light; consider Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or the false accounts of panics before the turn of the millennium, used to attack the superstition and corruption of the medieval Church.
Also, see Dean Worbois' "The Faith of Our Founding Fathers" for various quotes; the founders of the US may have been mostly deists of various stripes, but they were definitely no admirers of the structures of organized religions.
I'm somewhat less optimistic than Katz about many-to-many communications enabling something new. I certainly hope it will, and think it possible; perhaps the software industry can move to a more cooperative style instead of the current cutthroat total-victory-or-nothing stance, perhaps music and literature will be less easily controlled by large conglomerates, perhaps journalism will become less insular.
But it's too early to tell if this is actually going to happen, and it's still possible that the claimed online Enlightenment will all come to nothing. Many people simply don't care about such issues of freedom; witness the rise of Linux users who like it because it's zero cost, but happily chase after binary-only software. That complacency, that desire for convenience over principle, is what can doom the revolution, and relegate the Internet to just another media outlet.
Would it be possible to use the information files being maintained for the unofficial Netcenter channels? That would immediately provide a bunch of different options.
Another option is to define some simple format for headlines and URLs, and allow people to say "OK/., show me the displays from URL1, URL2, URL3." That way, anyone could create their own list of news items and just publicise the URL for displaying their info.
There are some testimonials and users listed on the Zope site. Principia, the closed source forerunner of Zope, was shipped with some 5.x version of Red Hat on the CD of commercial applications. I'm continually meaning to get around to using it seriously, but never manage to find the time.
As you'd expect, having something incorporated into the language allows having helpful syntactic sugar. For the particular case of regexes, Perl includes them in the language, while Python has an add-on module for them (primarily maintained by me). Because of this, using regexes in Python is somewhat clumsier than using them in Perl. For example, you have to pass regex patterns in strings; see the Regex HOWTO for the details.
It's a trade-off; for programs that do lots of complicated regex processing, Perl's notation gives it an edge. On the other hand, there are lots of applications where regexes aren't very useful, and for those applications this clumsiness is irrelevant.
Is GNOME just marketing? (KDE is for real.)
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QPL 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
For Python at least, the GTk/GNOME bindings are actively maintained by James Henstridge, and the mailing list for them is fairly busy (about 10-20 posts a day, most discussion being about the design of the bindings).
I'm not familiar with the status of the Python/Qt bindings or their quality, though, with the QPL finally looking like a usable licence, I probably should.
Actually, the PCRE library supports Perl 5.004's regexes quite nicely in a compact little library. Some Perl 5.005 features such as (?>...) are also implemented, but others, such as embedding Perl code, obviously aren't possible.
Slashdot Mirror
JWZ was on sabbatical for a while before resigning, so I don't really think he'd been doing much for some months before that. I read several of the netscape.public.mozilla.* newsgroups, and hadn't seen a JWZ posting for months before his resignation. Mike Shaver and other Mozilla staff were quite visible during that time. Frankly, while JWZ's departure was the end of an era, I don't think it really mattered to Mozilla development, since it had been getting along without him for a while.
Some topics, like GNOME/KDE, MS/Linux, and this interview, can be discussed rationally also attract knee-jerk flaming that drowns out the worthwhile discussion. For example, the question "Is computer science coming to an end?" in this topic is an interesting one, but not much attention is being paid to it.
The fix is probably to add a subtopic to Slashdot for such advanced discussion, as I've proposed in the past. Or, someone else should start a new discussion forum focusing on such topics.
Wine jugs coated with lead-based glazes, on the other hand...
Comparison, maybe? Anyway, the Sepoy mutiny in India was partially sparked in 1857 because some Indian soldiers were jailed from refusing to use new cartridges. You had to bite off the end of cartridges before using them, and they had been dipped in a mixture of beef and pork fat, which are taboo to Hindus and Moslems. See this article, for example.
Python compilers: JPython compiles to Java byte code. Python2C translates to C code, but not a lot of people seem to be interested in the project. (Anyone going to review the new Learning Python book for /.?)
I find the Dylan posts not out-of-line, and they've been enough to interest me in learning more about Dylan; a Dylan book is sitting in my to-read queue, and I'll probably write a /. review of it.
I'd like to see more language and programming-related items, too, since the business-related items are kind of boring and are usually covered by LinuxToday or LWN anyway. CmdrTaco, how about a new section like the book reviews or "Ask Slashdot", just for technical programming items?
Excellent quotation. Who's John Taylor Gatto, and where's the quotation taken from?
I haven't read the Pinker book and can't comment on its quality, but wanted to respond to your statement "Pinker's book is more than a year old and I can't figure out why slashdot would give it this kind of bandwidth." I don't think reviews need to be of books that are necessarily new; they should be concerned with books that are interesting, no matter what their age. Much of my reading consists of remaindered books that looked interesting, so I'm usually reading books that are a few years old, yet many of them are excellent and deserve attention.
The thing is, speaking as someone who's written /. reviews in the past, I'm less likely to write a negative review. If I read a book that's really crackingly good, like Alan Guth's _The Inflationary Universe_, I think "What a great book! I should tell everyone about it." If I read a mediocre book, like the O'Reilly Java books, there's less of an inclination to tell people about it. If it's a really awful book, I won't finish reading it and won't write a review of it, unless it's so bad it's funny, or if a bit of spleen-venting is in order (as in Katz's recent review of the recent Bill Gates book).
why is it hypocritical? Surely you're be giving up liberties if you were forced to contribute. The GPL is more reasonable; if you distribute the software the source code must also be available, but if you never distribute it, you aren't forced to do anything.
The excuse of "we're just doing to learn things" was always weak, and today it carries no force at all. Do crackers learn about Web servers by breaking into them? Do crackers learn about TCP/IP by SYN flooding Win95 boxes? Wouldn't they learn a good deal more by running a Web server of their own, or implementing IPSEC for Linux or *BSD? Ah, but that would take some effort and requires actual knowledge. If a cracker was truly smart and skilled, they'd be capable of doing original things that would actually be useful.
Ah, so being a hacker is a matter of being an obnoxious bozo who breaks into things and damages other people's work, never producing anything of their own. Doubtless people who egg houses on Hallowe'en should be called "building hackers". Sheesh.
I'd just point out that, if you can get the Sci-Fi Channel Europe, it's showing MST3K; see the European broadcast schedule.
Complete agreement with your second paragraph; if Rhino or whoever were to announce the complete MST3K collection, "and that'll be $1500 please", my cheque would be in the mail on the very same day.
since it seemed to be a good way to make the idea of free software more palatable to the media and to timid corporate entities.
But now I'm starting to swing back in the other direction, because people are becoming fixated on "zero-cost", forgetting about the idea of being able to control your computing environment.
Should write an essay about this...
Therefore, I'm currently trying to decide between GTK+ and Qt. It's a difficult decision; both are popular and likely to be maintained for a while to come, both have fairly complete Python bindings, and both are pretty attractive. I'm trying to assess them both from a programmer's perspective, and will review the upcoming O'Reilly Qt book, unless someone else beats me to it.
Also, see Dean Worbois' "The Faith of Our Founding Fathers" for various quotes; the founders of the US may have been mostly deists of various stripes, but they were definitely no admirers of the structures of organized religions.
But it's too early to tell if this is actually going to happen, and it's still possible that the claimed online Enlightenment will all come to nothing. Many people simply don't care about such issues of freedom; witness the rise of Linux users who like it because it's zero cost, but happily chase after binary-only software. That complacency, that desire for convenience over principle, is what can doom the revolution, and relegate the Internet to just another media outlet.
Some more suggestions:
SGML and XML News
Python News
Most of the Unofficial Netscape channels would be good ideas, too.
Hey, the phrase "glass cathedral" is an excellently turned phrase.
Have to remember it for future use...
Another option is to define some simple format for headlines and URLs, and allow people to say "OK /., show me the displays from URL1, URL2, URL3." That way, anyone could create their own list of news items and just publicise the URL for displaying their info.
There are some testimonials and users listed on the Zope site. Principia, the closed source forerunner of Zope, was shipped with some 5.x version of Red Hat on the CD of commercial applications. I'm continually meaning to get around to using it seriously, but never manage to find the time.
It's a trade-off; for programs that do lots of complicated regex processing, Perl's notation gives it an edge. On the other hand, there are lots of applications where regexes aren't very useful, and for those applications this clumsiness is irrelevant.
I'm not familiar with the status of the Python/Qt bindings or their quality, though, with the QPL finally looking like a usable licence, I probably should.
The PCRE code could use some more optimization, but on the other hand, at least its code is relatively easy to read. There's also the regex engine inside Mozilla's JavaScript implementation, which I know little about.