I see your point. But Brooks is saying a fundamentally different thing. The one you plan to throw away doesn't count.
The thing is, you make one. You make it badly, but it demonstrates the concepts. Then you throw it away. You make another one, that's functionally like it, but designed with everything you learned from the prototype, that you deliver.
The second-system effect is when, having looked at that one, you start again and add in everything the first one was missing, that the customer requested, etc... It ends up being offensively over-engineered, bloated, and actually sucks.
Woohoo! he's discovered the second-system effect. Can I recommend people read some of JWZ's netscape ramblings, and "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks, Jr.
Aye, what you're saying does make sense. I didn't mean to make it sound quite like that.
It's more that I've had this thoroughly bad experience with smoothwall, but I haven't yet had any bad experiences with IPCop. What good reasons are there for using smoothwall now, given an alternative that I see as just as technically good.?
See, here's the thing; there's enough choices out there that nowadays I tend to have a "one strike and you're out" policy for a lot of software.
Don't like distro XX? Use a different one. Don't like firewall softare YY? There's more available Don't like mail server ZZ? No-one else likes Qmail, either.
I used to be a huge RedHat proponent, then they released 7.0, and I quit using RedHat.
The behaviour of Smoothwall once was so spectacularly bad [and I mean SPECTACULARLY], that I simply can't trust Smoothwall ever again, no-how, no-way. To the point where I'll actively encourage other people to avoid it also. Redhat is on my list of distro's I recommend newbies try, although I don't like it for my own personal use. Smoothwall is on my shitlist for the rest of time.
And since there's other, just-as-good-if-not-better choices out there, I see no reason to use Smoothwall.
In all seriousness, what benefits do I, a normal user, gain from using non-commercial smoothwall [with hopelessly untrustworthy developers] over using somethign else like IPCop?
Unfortunately, the developers really annoyed me. One time, they released a patch that added a splash screen to the web interface that popped up EVERY time you changed page. And set chattr+i on the file on the server, then deleted the {ls,ch}attr commands on the server.
Which was just offensive. I went into their [community] IRC channel and mentioned how to fix it, and was kickbanned.
They make a big thing about being GPL and community-friendly, but in practice I just find them offensive.
I cannot highly enough recommend that people don't use this, and use ipcop instead.
Oh, please. It won't be that fast, whatever, but it will take up 700M. And I'd be seriously surprised if your averages warez monkey could even tell the difference.
Just dd the top meg or so off the CD. Doesn't work for multisession. In the case of multisession, mount the CD, create a new single session ISO from it and then grab the top meg or so. Easy:-)
One of my favorite tricks is actually using dd to grab the TOC off an ISO, and use/dev/zero to make up the rest of the ISO.
If you make it availble over http, and have mod_gzip installed, your bandwidth usage won't be too great [/dev/zero compresses like a good 'un], and it's still mountable.
Won't work worth shit, but people can have fun trying.
There's no left-handed variant. A normal watch you learn to deal with; one windy button you use once-in-a-while is OK... But when there're a load of buttons on one side of the watch, and no easy alternative, it's completely unusable by lefties.
I mean, the normal palm is bad at times with the scrollbar on the wrong side of the screen [don't tell me about lefthack; it breaks Eudora]
Experiment: Put your watch on your right wrist. Now change the time. Now imagine you need to do this with far more dexterity.
Bah. They're only losing about 10-15% of the market by doing that, so no great loss, I guess...
Gary (-;
Re:Games to Play in X11 ASCII
on
X11 in ASCII
·
· Score: 1
For once, advertisers are in danger of targeting content, as opposed to merely making it more offensive and flashy in the hopes of getting my attention.
I currently run adzapping proxies and spamfilters. But that's because the ads are offensive, obnoxious, and almost never what I want.
If ads were suddenly something that might hold my interest [by way of example, I do actually click on Penny-arcade ads sometimes], then it's a Good Thing. I click them, everyone benefits. But that's because they're what I'm interested in.
For once, it seems that ads might be sensible. Does anybody lose out here? You already have no privacy - and there's a chance that this is being used in a good way for a change.
Yes, I understand that TV != Internet, but my point still holds.
That's the typical american attitude; "We're the biggest and the best, and country is not as good as us, and they know it."
In practice, American arrogance is altogether ridiculous, and given recent and past behaviour, the US is, I would say, more than likely to do things like break GPS leaving everyone else in the lurch.
Contrary to what you may believe, the interest in a common EU isn't in competing with the US. You never know, there's a danger it may be that it's the best for all of Europe, and Europe knows it, and that's why we're doing it.
We would all love to get together with the US, and provide various decent global systems... But the US simply keeps proving that it isn't trustworthy.
Flamebait, I'm sure. But The arrogance I've witnessed in the 8 months since I moved here is beyond anything I had ever been able to imagine it would be. And yes, I'm pissed and even embarrassed to be an American citizen.
I haven't checked recently, but last time I went to microsoft.com, if you were running NS4 it had some JavaScript that bounced you to a different HTML page that had a no-worky search box on it. Which used JavaScript to work.
In the meantime, here's the deal; If I can't see your webpage/your company's webpage/whoever's webpage, I CAN'T GIVE YOU ANY MONEY. No, really. If I'm browsing to buy something, and I can't buy it from your site, I'll go someplace else. And, given my habits, that's a LOT of custom. What does it mean that I can't see MSN? I can't give MS any money. Or develop using MSDN. Or subscribe to passport. Or whatever. I'm pretty certain I know whose loss this isn't.
Now, not only do you buy a DVD and watch it on your DVD player, you get to pay out royalties for public performance when your neighbor, paid to watch on you, rings up the MPAA to tell them you're illegally broadcasting video.
You have to remember that there/is/ value, to ANY windows user, in MS disallowing you to recompile & distribute versions of windows; with the current platform congruency, you can download mirc and have it work in all windows installs - the same wouldn't be true if people started butchering it.
Witness the differences between different linux distributions & the incompatibilities thereby caused.
Of course, in practice, I would turn down opportunities to look at the windows source on the grounds that MS will screw you for derivative works for the rest of time.
Conspiracy theories aside, the least of your worries should be that there's a backdoor in windows that no cracker has yet found, which I'm pretty certain is not through lack of trying.
Slashdot Mirror
I see your point. But Brooks is saying a fundamentally different thing. The one you plan to throw away doesn't count.
The thing is, you make one. You make it badly, but it demonstrates the concepts. Then you throw it away. You make another one, that's functionally like it, but designed with everything you learned from the prototype, that you deliver.
The second-system effect is when, having looked at that one, you start again and add in everything the first one was missing, that the customer requested, etc... It ends up being offensively over-engineered, bloated, and actually sucks.
Hope that helps,
Gary (-;
Woohoo! he's discovered the second-system effect. Can I recommend people read some of JWZ's netscape ramblings, and "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks, Jr.
Gary (-;
OK... You can have 10.0.0.0/8
I claim 127.0.0.0/8. If I ever feel the urge to talk to myself, I'm always listening right there.
Gary (-;
Aye, what you're saying does make sense. I didn't mean to make it sound quite like that.
It's more that I've had this thoroughly bad experience with smoothwall, but I haven't yet had any bad experiences with IPCop. What good reasons are there for using smoothwall now, given an alternative that I see as just as technically good.?
Gary (-;
See, here's the thing; there's enough choices out there that nowadays I tend to have a "one strike and you're out" policy for a lot of software.
Don't like distro XX? Use a different one.
Don't like firewall softare YY? There's more available
Don't like mail server ZZ? No-one else likes Qmail, either.
I used to be a huge RedHat proponent, then they released 7.0, and I quit using RedHat.
The behaviour of Smoothwall once was so spectacularly bad [and I mean SPECTACULARLY], that I simply can't trust Smoothwall ever again, no-how, no-way. To the point where I'll actively encourage other people to avoid it also. Redhat is on my list of distro's I recommend newbies try, although I don't like it for my own personal use. Smoothwall is on my shitlist for the rest of time.
And since there's other, just-as-good-if-not-better choices out there, I see no reason to use Smoothwall.
In all seriousness, what benefits do I, a normal user, gain from using non-commercial smoothwall [with hopelessly untrustworthy developers] over using somethign else like IPCop?
Gary (-;
And I highly recommended it for many moons.
Unfortunately, the developers really annoyed me. One time, they released a patch that added a splash screen to the web interface that popped up EVERY time you changed page. And set chattr+i on the file on the server, then deleted the {ls,ch}attr commands on the server.
Which was just offensive. I went into their [community] IRC channel and mentioned how to fix it, and was kickbanned.
They make a big thing about being GPL and community-friendly, but in practice I just find them offensive.
I cannot highly enough recommend that people don't use this, and use ipcop instead.
Gary (-;
Thank-you. I never knew that. All I know is that what I do has always worked fine for me :-)
Thank-you,
Gary (-;
Oh, please. It won't be that fast, whatever, but it will take up 700M. And I'd be seriously surprised if your averages warez monkey could even tell the difference.
Gary (-;
Just dd the top meg or so off the CD. Doesn't work for multisession. In the case of multisession, mount the CD, create a new single session ISO from it and then grab the top meg or so. Easy :-)
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=./iso.toc bs=1M count=1
Gary (-;
One of my favorite tricks is actually using dd to grab the TOC off an ISO, and use /dev/zero to make up the rest of the ISO.
If you make it availble over http, and have mod_gzip installed, your bandwidth usage won't be too great [/dev/zero compresses like a good 'un], and it's still mountable.
Won't work worth shit, but people can have fun trying.
Gary (-;
There's no left-handed variant. A normal watch you learn to deal with; one windy button you use once-in-a-while is OK... But when there're a load of buttons on one side of the watch, and no easy alternative, it's completely unusable by lefties.
I mean, the normal palm is bad at times with the scrollbar on the wrong side of the screen [don't tell me about lefthack; it breaks Eudora]
Experiment: Put your watch on your right wrist. Now change the time. Now imagine you need to do this with far more dexterity.
Bah. They're only losing about 10-15% of the market by doing that, so no great loss, I guess...
Gary (-;
or Unreal Touney ?
Gary (-;
For once, advertisers are in danger of targeting content, as opposed to merely making it more offensive and flashy in the hopes of getting my attention.
I currently run adzapping proxies and spamfilters. But that's because the ads are offensive, obnoxious, and almost never what I want.
If ads were suddenly something that might hold my interest [by way of example, I do actually click on Penny-arcade ads sometimes], then it's a Good Thing. I click them, everyone benefits. But that's because they're what I'm interested in.
For once, it seems that ads might be sensible. Does anybody lose out here? You already have no privacy - and there's a chance that this is being used in a good way for a change.
Yes, I understand that TV != Internet, but my point still holds.
Gary (-;
> And are you an American citizen or have you only
> been living in the country for 8 months?
Both. I have dual nationality, and I've only been living here for 8 months.
Gary (-;
I am here solely because someone else's name is on my appartment lease and if I break the lease, they lose their credit rating.
Gary (-;
That's the typical american attitude; "We're the biggest and the best, and country is not as good as us, and they know it."
In practice, American arrogance is altogether ridiculous, and given recent and past behaviour, the US is, I would say, more than likely to do things like break GPS leaving everyone else in the lurch.
Contrary to what you may believe, the interest in a common EU isn't in competing with the US. You never know, there's a danger it may be that it's the best for all of Europe, and Europe knows it, and that's why we're doing it.
We would all love to get together with the US, and provide various decent global systems... But the US simply keeps proving that it isn't trustworthy.
Flamebait, I'm sure. But The arrogance I've witnessed in the 8 months since I moved here is beyond anything I had ever been able to imagine it would be. And yes, I'm pissed and even embarrassed to be an American citizen.
Gary (-;
I haven't checked recently, but last time I went to microsoft.com, if you were running NS4 it had some JavaScript that bounced you to a different HTML page that had a no-worky search box on it. Which used JavaScript to work.
In the meantime, here's the deal; If I can't see your webpage/your company's webpage/whoever's webpage, I CAN'T GIVE YOU ANY MONEY. No, really. If I'm browsing to buy something, and I can't buy it from your site, I'll go someplace else. And, given my habits, that's a LOT of custom. What does it mean that I can't see MSN? I can't give MS any money. Or develop using MSDN. Or subscribe to passport. Or whatever. I'm pretty certain I know whose loss this isn't.
Gary (-;
A bit like TTYQuake, but being new & up-to-date
http://icculus.org/~chunky/ut/aaut
Gary (-;
I wrote this just in case it was of interest:a t-linuxworl d
http://icculus.org/~chunky/writing/ms-
Gary (-;
Now, not only do you buy a DVD and watch it on your DVD player, you get to pay out royalties for public performance when your neighbor, paid to watch on you, rings up the MPAA to tell them you're illegally broadcasting video.
Gary (-;
You have to remember that there /is/ value, to ANY windows user, in MS disallowing you to recompile & distribute versions of windows; with the current platform congruency, you can download mirc and have it work in all windows installs - the same wouldn't be true if people started butchering it.
Witness the differences between different linux distributions & the incompatibilities thereby caused.
Of course, in practice, I would turn down opportunities to look at the windows source on the grounds that MS will screw you for derivative works for the rest of time.
Conspiracy theories aside, the least of your worries should be that there's a backdoor in windows that no cracker has yet found, which I'm pretty certain is not through lack of trying.
Gary (-;