a) What did you like about the Lord of the Rings series?
Since this is/., a better question might be why didn't you like it? What I dislike is all the flowery descriptions, like Galadriel with the harp, playing her sad and sweet tunes (blah blah blah). I guess I don't like most of the songs either; I tend to skip em. But other than that, the books are the best adventure stories written.
Come to think of it, David Brin should love them too, since they show the triumph of the commoner (common for a hobbit that is).
I keep hearing in articles and here on slashdot that Mozilla doesn't have any external developers, and I'm starting to wonder where it comes from.
That has been my impression since the release of the source code, and it is based mainly on reading the mozilla newgroups (primarily unix and builds), and the occasional checkin log.
There are 53 developers outside netscape.com with direct checkin privileges to the CVS tree as of last Tuesday
But in the last month there have been only twelve checkins by outside developers to the HEAD branch of SeaMonkey. Most of those twelve names I've seen: blizzard is working on the xlib port, zuperdee on motif, pav on gtk, locka on ActiveX, and three guys are working on some photon widget (Star Trek?) thingy. I believe you, but I can't find even a baker's dozen.
What needs to happen to get more people involved?
FWIW, the time I've spent working on mozilla, which mostly just consists of just building it, I've thought was well worth it. Learning about how a big project is managed is intriguing, and I've often lamented other projects not following the same model (tinderbox!).
But I've been reluctant to submit bug reports because I'm usually confused about whether what I'm seeing is a result of a real problem or a work in progress.
Other than that, the only thing holding me back is the C++, which I'm not really proficient at (Ok, I suck).
Episode II will be shot digitally; that means higher quality, especially on the CGI shots.
At present, filmakers seem to choose digital for budgetary reasons only. I haven't heard of big movies choosing digital for its quality.
Episode II will also focus on the romance between Amidala and Anakin, parents of Luke and Leia. The movie could end with their wedding.
No also about it, Lucas said on his recent ILM special that episode II was essentially a love story, or something to that effect. Hopefully that will give Portman more of a chance to shine.
Lucas will write and direct (duh!)
Was this obvious? He didn't direct V and VI after all. I'm more of a Lucas fan than most, but I wouldn't mind if someone like Irvin Kershner directed. I could probably tolerate a Spielberg / Lucas collaboration too.
How many people out there do you think qualify as nerds? Of course it's easy to get your sense of proportions all out of whack if you run Linux, read development mailing lists and comp.*, and read UF and/. for news and entertainment. You start thinking that everybody knows how to compile a kernel. It ain't so.
Yahoo and its ilk succeed because they are everyman. Slashdot will never have such widespread appeal so long as it continues to be news for nerds and stuff that matters.
Rather than bemoan/. getting sold thinking that an opportunity was lost, you should be happy that it has been successful enough to be the object of such monetary affection.
Re:Philanthropy != Communism
on
RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
Yes, someone could steal my dollar.
File a patent for something someone else thought up, for instance.
At least in the U.S., if you can prove you came up with the idea first, you can still receive the patent.
Or use free software in your copyrighted program and sue everyone who makes the same "innovation" to the free software.
This sentance confuses me no end.
Re:Philanthropy != Communism
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
There is something very wrong with only making a buck
Why? The only way I'll buy something is when it offers greater value to me than what it costs. Otherwise, I'll keep my money. Conversely, if I want to earn a dollar, I have to offer you something worth more to you than that dollar.
Andrew Carnegie's motivation in streamlining production of steel might have been to make himself wealthy or philanthropy. It doesn't matter. The result was what mattered, which was cheaper steel and the wealth it created.
Despite his generous donation of money in the creation of libraries, it was the creation of his wealth and its effects that was his greatest gift.
Speaking of which, I'm about to use a nicely refined 26-year-old technology to file this column. You may have heard of it. It's called Ethernet.
You might find Metcalfe's original paper describing Ethernet interesting if you haven't read it. The thing that strikes me after reading it again are its similarities to Linux and its design. It was based on known technology, Aloha radio networks. It was designed to run on inexpensive hardware. And it achieved its reliability from its simplicity. In other words, the same recipe used by nearly every succesfull open source project today, which makes Metcalfe's last column all the more confusing.
I also recall Alan Cox saying in his diary that Raster's code was spaghetti-like. That might be true or not. I've never seen any of Raster's code. But I know I'd be pissed if a fellow employee wrote that my code was unreadable, and posted it in his.plan or in a public diary for the world to read.
Well, I suppose enabling asserts slows down the code a fair bit
It's not the asserts. There was a recent post about the slow reaction you get when moving the mouse. Follow the next few replies to that post. There are several good explanations of what is causing the slowdown. The short summary is that rollovers are causing the entire document to get redrawn when you move your mouse around. But redrawing the whole browser is complicated, so everything slows to a crawl.
Although I like the moderation system, it seems to me that the moderators are too focused on the heads of the threads and not enough on the comments underneath
If a reply doesn't quote whatever they're replying too, it's less likely to get moderated up. A moderator browsing comments at Flat and Newest first might not understand the comment out of its context, especially if the subject has changed.
Is anyone working on a SETI screensaver for Unix? JWZ mentioned (search for 'jwz') a module for xscreensaver, but nothing showed up in the latest release. I think his best idea was a sphere with the constellations traced on it. You could also put an xload like display on the bottom of the screen showing the strength of the signals found. That would be a lot more fun than a background process pumping out numbers.
With a low end PC at $500 and going lower, a box sitting on a low res TV is a stupid idea. I lump this brainiac idea up there with that Push thing that displayed ads on screensavers while you weren't even around.
I can't find a market for this kind of product. It does a programmer no good. It does a gamer no good. And even if all you want to do is browse all day, wouldn't you rather do it at 1024x768?
The only promising idea I've heard about for set-top boxes is for wagering on horse races, where you get to watch live races and bet with the remote.
I can see people placing $20 on Menifee in the Derby (sorry, you lost), but not choosing that box over the PC.
{off topic} Hey sengan, good to see a post from you. Let's see more of those hard science posts you're so fond of.
Borland was cool. I liked their attitude in the license they put on their software, 'Borland No-Nonsense License', where you were told to use the product like a book. And their software was cheap, and better than MS, and easier to use, with better docs and plenty of code examples. You could even buy the source code for their libraries. They were a breath of fresh air back then.
NS/AOL has oh-so-graciously spent a small fortune on giving us the great developers who are intelligently crafting greatest software tool you will get to use this decade
They have done no such thing. quoting jwz:
Bear in mind that, for a publicly-traded company, if a CEO makes a decision because it's the right thing rather than because it's the most profitable thing for the shareholders, he will lose his job, and possibly be sued into oblivion. That's the way the rules work.
"But ironhead, it's slow on my Linux box!"
Well gee, guess we should abort it at pre-alpha stage and live with NS4.. It's called debug code, and NOT OPTIMIZED YET.
Wrong. On Linux, although the speed has improved, it is still slow as molasses, although I guess you can say it's migrated from dark to light molasses. Check out the mozilla.builds ng if you don't believe me. A recent post said much the same thing
But - it's not fast. In fact, it's jolly slow. (w|wout debugging, w|wout optimization - the difference in speed is not appreciable).
It has nothing to do with optimization or debugging code.
UF is Ok as comics go. Kind of middle of the pack with what I get in my home town paper (Citizen Dog, Doonsbury, Pirahna Club). But if your not into Linux et al it's probably almost never funny.
What I'd love is for Berke Breathed's old comic Bloom County to make a comeback. Bar none the funniest comic strip ever, especially in the early days. Maybe he can release rights to create new Bloom Country strips to anyone willing to do it for free? It'd be interesting to see if a group could put out a comic. Maybe impossible, but even I could produce one funny strip in say, I don't know, a years time.
Of course your right. I suppose Opus and friends are so tied to Berke that it would never work. But if we did a real crappy job, maybe we could force him out of retirement. If he's alive that is. I haven't heard anything about him in years.
What we need is to get back the brighest young women who used to go into teaching. Back before WWII, women became teachers because it was one of the few opportunities available to them. It offered small wages, but great respect.
So paying teachers more will work. I think you're right, but you have to make the system a meritocracy again, were the talented teachers benefit the most, and where teachers aren't indistinguishable from teamsters.
Get back the great teachers might not solve all the problems, but it's working at the cause of the problem rather than attacking the effects.
Easy Update? Only in Debian.
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
I've almost switched from RH to Debian a number of times for this very reason. But there are a few reasons holding me back. First is that RPMs are the standard. While some developers make rpms available, very few make debian packages also. I just installed junkbuster from rpm the other day, which saved me a lot of time in installation and a lot of headache later if I want to uninstall it. For many fringe projects not included with Debian, I'd be giving that luxury up. I also found Debian information hard to find and usually out of date. Certainly a common problem, but really important given Debian's added complexity.
I can think of only two solutions to the problem. Switch to rpm format, but extend rpms to do what you need it too, while keeping the format backwardly compatible. Or make Debian package creation easy for a developer unfamiliar with Debian, so they aren't forced to run Debian to understand how to create packages for it.
As it is, rpms work good enough. I've had few problems with them. And RH, in turn, is good enough too.
Oh great, the invasion of the Stroustrop battle force is complete. All hail Bjarne! Now other than the javascript code, there is no significant C code left, unless you count the open source libraries they use like zlib and dbm.
Not to pick on the netlib guys, but I think this is a good example of why mozilla hasn't lived up to expectations so far. In your usual open source project, people tend to pick the path of least resistance to a working product. Throwing away working code in an already unstable environment doesn't help things. Maybe the netlib guys are just bored though.
So why is everything so quiet? This discovery adds to the evidence that planet formation is a lot easier than we thought. Which in turn gives credibility to scientist's best guess at the "average spacing" between advanced life forms: 200 light-years.
But paradoxically this is bad news. Think about it. If we had starships that traveled at a tenth of the speed of light, we would go out and find more good planets eventually. Then that colony does the same thing. So you get this expanding sphere of settlement. And if *we* can do it, it's sure possible the aliens can too. See the problem yet?
David Brin wrote about this and even mentions an even easier scenario. Just make robot spaceships that can go out and find materials and reproduce at a much faster rate. If there is just *one* such original probe, then within three million years there would be one at *every* star in the Galaxy.
Slashdot Mirror
Since this is /., a better question might be why didn't you like it? What I dislike is all the flowery descriptions, like Galadriel with the harp, playing her sad and sweet tunes (blah blah blah). I guess I don't like most of the songs either; I tend to skip em. But other than that, the books are the best adventure stories written.
Come to think of it, David Brin should love them too, since they show the triumph of the commoner (common for a hobbit that is).
That has been my impression since the release of the source code, and it is based mainly on reading the mozilla newgroups (primarily unix and builds), and the occasional checkin log.
But in the last month there have been only twelve checkins by outside developers to the HEAD branch of SeaMonkey. Most of those twelve names I've seen: blizzard is working on the xlib port, zuperdee on motif, pav on gtk, locka on ActiveX, and three guys are working on some photon widget (Star Trek?) thingy. I believe you, but I can't find even a baker's dozen.
FWIW, the time I've spent working on mozilla, which mostly just consists of just building it, I've thought was well worth it. Learning about how a big project is managed is intriguing, and I've often lamented other projects not following the same model (tinderbox!).
But I've been reluctant to submit bug reports because I'm usually confused about whether what I'm seeing is a result of a real problem or a work in progress.
Other than that, the only thing holding me back is the C++, which I'm not really proficient at (Ok, I suck).
At present, filmakers seem to choose digital for budgetary reasons only. I haven't heard of big movies choosing digital for its quality.
No also about it, Lucas said on his recent ILM special that episode II was essentially a love story, or something to that effect. Hopefully that will give Portman more of a chance to shine.
Was this obvious? He didn't direct V and VI after all. I'm more of a Lucas fan than most, but I wouldn't mind if someone like Irvin Kershner directed. I could probably tolerate a Spielberg / Lucas collaboration too.
News for Nerds
How many people out there do you think qualify as nerds? Of course it's easy to get your sense of proportions all out of whack if you run Linux, read development mailing lists and comp.*, and read UF and /. for news and entertainment. You start thinking that everybody knows how to compile a kernel. It ain't so.
Yahoo and its ilk succeed because they are everyman. Slashdot will never have such widespread appeal so long as it continues to be news for nerds and stuff that matters.
Rather than bemoan /. getting sold thinking that an opportunity was lost, you should be happy that it has been successful enough to be the object of such monetary affection.
Yes, someone could steal my dollar.
File a patent for something someone else thought up, for instance.
At least in the U.S., if you can prove you came up with the idea first, you can still receive the patent.
Or use free software in your copyrighted program and sue everyone who makes the same "innovation" to the free software.
This sentance confuses me no end.
Why? The only way I'll buy something is when it offers greater value to me than what it costs. Otherwise, I'll keep my money. Conversely, if I want to earn a dollar, I have to offer you something worth more to you than that dollar.
Andrew Carnegie's motivation in streamlining production of steel might have been to make himself wealthy or philanthropy. It doesn't matter. The result was what mattered, which was cheaper steel and the wealth it created.
Despite his generous donation of money in the creation of libraries, it was the creation of his wealth and its effects that was his greatest gift.
You might find Metcalfe's original paper describing Ethernet interesting if you haven't read it. The thing that strikes me after reading it again are its similarities to Linux and its design. It was based on known technology, Aloha radio networks. It was designed to run on inexpensive hardware. And it achieved its reliability from its simplicity. In other words, the same recipe used by nearly every succesfull open source project today, which makes Metcalfe's last column all the more confusing.
Proxy looks to still be broken. Take a look at Bug 8859 at bugzilla.
When it get fixed, just try adding user_pref("network.proxy.http", "localhost:8000"); to the file prefs50.js
I also recall Alan Cox saying in his diary that Raster's code was spaghetti-like. That might be true or not. I've never seen any of Raster's code. But I know I'd be pissed if a fellow employee wrote that my code was unreadable, and posted it in his .plan or in a public diary for the world to read.
Well, I suppose enabling asserts slows down the code a fair bit
It's not the asserts. There was a recent post about the slow reaction you get when moving the mouse. Follow the next few replies to that post. There are several good explanations of what is causing the slowdown. The short summary is that rollovers are causing the entire document to get redrawn when you move your mouse around. But redrawing the whole browser is complicated, so everything slows to a crawl.
Here is the post.
The Mac build has regressed a bit, but is due on Tuesday
Although I like the moderation system, it seems to me that the moderators are too focused on the heads of the threads and not enough on the comments underneath
If a reply doesn't quote whatever they're replying too, it's less likely to get moderated up. A moderator browsing comments at Flat and Newest first might not understand the comment out of its context, especially if the subject has changed.
Is anyone working on a SETI screensaver for Unix? JWZ mentioned (search for 'jwz') a module for xscreensaver, but nothing showed up in the latest release. I think his best idea was a sphere with the constellations traced on it. You could also put an xload like display on the bottom of the screen showing the strength of the signals found. That would be a lot more fun than a background process pumping out numbers.
With a low end PC at $500 and going lower, a box sitting on a low res TV is a stupid idea. I lump this brainiac idea up there with that Push thing that displayed ads on screensavers while you weren't even around.
I can't find a market for this kind of product. It does a programmer no good. It does a gamer no good. And even if all you want to do is browse all day, wouldn't you rather do it at 1024x768?
The only promising idea I've heard about for set-top boxes is for wagering on horse races, where you get to watch live races and bet with the remote.
I can see people placing $20 on Menifee in the Derby (sorry, you lost), but not choosing that box over the PC.
{off topic} Hey sengan, good to see a post from you. Let's see more of those hard science posts you're so fond of.
Borland was cool. I liked their attitude in the license they put on their software, 'Borland No-Nonsense License', where you were told to use the product like a book. And their software was cheap, and better than MS, and easier to use, with better docs and plenty of code examples. You could even buy the source code for their libraries. They were a breath of fresh air back then.
NS/AOL has oh-so-graciously spent a small fortune on giving us the great developers who are intelligently crafting greatest software tool you will get to use this decade
They have done no such thing. quoting jwz:
"But ironhead, it's slow on my Linux box!"
Well gee, guess we should abort it at pre-alpha stage and live with NS4.. It's called debug code, and NOT OPTIMIZED YET.
Wrong. On Linux, although the speed has improved, it is still slow as molasses, although I guess you can say it's migrated from dark to light molasses. Check out the mozilla.builds ng if you don't believe me. A recent post said much the same thing
It has nothing to do with optimization or debugging code.UF is Ok as comics go. Kind of middle of the pack with what I get in my home town paper (Citizen Dog, Doonsbury, Pirahna Club). But if your not into Linux et al it's probably almost never funny.
What I'd love is for Berke Breathed's old comic Bloom County to make a comeback. Bar none the funniest comic strip ever, especially in the early days. Maybe he can release rights to create new Bloom Country strips to anyone willing to do it for free? It'd be interesting to see if a group could put out a comic. Maybe impossible, but even I could produce one funny strip in say, I don't know, a years time.
Of course your right. I suppose Opus and friends are so tied to Berke that it would never work. But if we did a real crappy job, maybe we could force him out of retirement. If he's alive that is. I haven't heard anything about him in years.
What we need is to get back the brighest young women who used to go into teaching. Back before WWII, women became teachers because it was one of the few opportunities available to them. It offered small wages, but great respect.
So paying teachers more will work. I think you're right, but you have to make the system a meritocracy again, were the talented teachers benefit the most, and where teachers aren't indistinguishable from teamsters.
Get back the great teachers might not solve all the problems, but it's working at the cause of the problem rather than attacking the effects.
I've almost switched from RH to Debian a number of times for this very reason. But there are a few reasons holding me back. First is that RPMs are the standard. While some developers make rpms available, very few make debian packages also. I just installed junkbuster from rpm the other day, which saved me a lot of time in installation and a lot of headache later if I want to uninstall it. For many fringe projects not included with Debian, I'd be giving that luxury up. I also found Debian information hard to find and usually out of date. Certainly a common problem, but really important given Debian's added complexity.
I can think of only two solutions to the problem. Switch to rpm format, but extend rpms to do what you need it too, while keeping the format backwardly compatible. Or make Debian package creation easy for a developer unfamiliar with Debian, so they aren't forced to run Debian to understand how to create packages for it.
As it is, rpms work good enough. I've had few problems with them. And RH, in turn, is good enough too.
Oh great, the invasion of the Stroustrop battle force is complete. All hail Bjarne! Now other than the javascript code, there is no significant C code left, unless you count the open source libraries they use like zlib and dbm.
Not to pick on the netlib guys, but I think this is a good example of why mozilla hasn't lived up to expectations so far. In your usual open source project, people tend to pick the path of least resistance to a working product. Throwing away working code in an already unstable environment doesn't help things. Maybe the netlib guys are just bored though.
Even with -O6 -mpentium and anything related to debugging removed, including your printfs, it's still slow.
People are explaining away it's sluggishness because of that, and that's not the problem.
Despite what I've heard dozens of people say, Mozilla isn't slow because it has debugging info compiled in. My builds with -O3 are still slow.
So why is everything so quiet? This discovery adds to the evidence that planet formation is a lot easier than we thought. Which in turn gives credibility to scientist's best guess at the "average spacing" between advanced life forms: 200 light-years.
But paradoxically this is bad news. Think about it. If we had starships that traveled at a tenth of the speed of light, we would go out and find more good planets eventually. Then that colony does the same thing. So you get this expanding sphere of settlement. And if *we* can do it, it's sure possible the aliens can too. See the problem yet?
David Brin wrote about this and even mentions an even easier scenario. Just make robot spaceships that can go out and find materials and reproduce at a much faster rate. If there is just *one* such original probe, then within three million years there would be one at *every* star in the Galaxy.
So why so quiet?